On Georges Franju's Blood of the Beasts

Reading this news item about the possibilities of “laboratory-grown meat” got me thinking about the two or three times in my life I’ve flirted with vegetarianism. As a child, after seeing a struggling chicken being carried to its doom through a lane behind a butcher's shop, I stopped eating meat for around 10 days. As an adult I've resisted the temptation to convert, having accepted one of the key hypocrisies of my life: that my very strong feelings about cruelty to animals (“animals” in this case being mainly cats, dogs and caged birds) are thoroughly incompatible with my eating choices. If or when I do turn vegetarian for good, it’ll probably be for health reasons (and with a sense that I’ve been the victim of a terrible injustice).

There have been a few times when I lazily considered converting for ethical or visceral reasons. One was after I read Eric Schlosser's description of the beef-making process in “Cogs in the Great Machine” (a chapter excerpt from Fast Food Nation). More recently, while watching Georges Franju's 1949 documentary Le Sang des bêtes (Blood of the Beasts), an almost unbearably impassive look at what goes on inside the slaughterhouses of Paris.

The film was made in black-and-white, which was the only reason I could keep my eyes on the screen from beginning to end: as Franju himself said in an interview, it would have been repulsive if it had been shot in colour. But even so, the most hardened non-vegetarian will feel squeamish about the scenes showing calves and sheep being decapitated and strong, proud horses being reduced to twitching carcasses by stun-guns, then casually bled and flayed until the inanimate mass lying on the floor is unrecognisable from the cantering, head-tossing beast it had been a few minutes earlier.

The slaughterhouse scenes are intercut with benign, pleasant shots of life as it goes on in the other, more “visible”, more respectable parts of the city: children playing, lovers kissing by the Seine. Reading a shot-by-shot description of the film, one might think that Franju has set out to make a profound moral statement about “the barbarism and cruelty that lies just beneath the thin surface of what we call civilization” (or insert similar portentous phrase of your choice). But watching the film, one doesn’t at all get that impression. All he’s doing, really, is recording a series of incidents, without comment or judgement (this is what happens in Paris, but see, this also happens), and that in a way makes the whole thing more disturbing. (“I like recording truth,” he said in the interview, while also expressing the hope that viewers would find his film “aesthetic”.)

Blood of the Beasts features as an Extra on my Criterion DVD of Franju’s Les Yeux sans Visage (Eyes Without a Face), which is one of my favourite horror movies (and which, creepily, I was re-watching the night before Michael Jackson died). Eyes Without a Face is a beautifully shot, lyrical movie with a ghastly subject: a surgeon tries to restore his disfigured daughter’s face by kidnapping other young women and transplanting their faces on to hers. This is by no means the hysterical mad-doctor figure of genre tradition: he’s a composed, serious-looking, slightly melancholy man who does everything he can – using his professional skills – to help his daughter. Watching him use his scalpel to make incisions and peel away a mask of skin in the film’s most unsettling scene, I was reminded of Franju himself, making Blood of the Beasts, methodically examining how things work.

Anyone who badly wants to turn vegetarian but needs a final strong push, get hold of Blood of the Beasts. You'll thank me for it. There’s a version of it on Youtube, with the voiceover dubbed in English.

Reality and fantasy in Unfaithfully Yours

Just watched Preston Sturges’ 1948 film Unfaithfully Yours, about a famous symphony conductor who, believing he has been cuckolded, plots revenge on his wife and her lover. There’s so much to say about this brilliant black comedy that I don’t know where to begin. For anyone familiar with Sturges’ other films as a writer-director (The Lady Eve, Sullivan’s Travels and The Palm Beach Story among them), it won’t comes as a surprise that this one is full of sharp, witty dialogue. But I was unprepared for how dark some of it was. (“I thought of killing you, my dear,” the lead character tells his wife at one point, without losing anything of his elegant bearing, “I cut your throat with a razor. Your head nearly came off”.) I also thought it notable how the film manages to continually transcend genre, moving from screwball comedy to a shadowiness characteristic of film noir, with a bit of surrealism and slapstick thrown in. And oh, it’s also a frenzied musical that makes splendid use of classical music to reflect mood and comment on the action.

The story has Sir Alfred De Carter (played by Rex Harrison, more than 15 years before his best-known screen performance) coming to believe that his beautiful (and much younger) wife Daphne (Linda Darnell) is cheating on him with his secretary. De Carter has an important concert the same night, and his rage turns it into the performance of a lifetime. But his rapt audience has no idea what’s going on inside his head. Over the course of three symphonies, he imagines different ways of dealing with his situation: the first and third scenarios involve murder, while the second (set to a sombre, dignified score) involves a mere parting of ways (which gives him the opportunity to play the wounded yet stoical husband who is still concerned about his wife’s financial welfare).

Once the concert is over, he tries to put his ideas into action but real life isn’t as obliging as his fantasy world was; things don’t unfold quite as conveniently. In the imaginary world, when he writes out a 100,000-dollar cheque for his wife (whom he intends to divorce), he does it with a flourish that turns him into a grandly tragic figure, betraying both his deep hurt and his determination to conceal it. But when he sits down to replicate the gesture in the real world, it turns out his fountain pen is out of ink. In fantasy-land, a gramophone player conveniently transforms his recorded voice into his wife's when he adjusts the dial from 33 rpm to 78 rpm; in the real world, the thing becomes a monster machine that refuses to cooperate despite the words “so simple it operates itself” printed everywhere in the instruction manual.

I enjoyed the shifts in this film’s tone. It starts off as a lightweight comedy of manners – and the rapid-fire banter starts to get mildly tiresome after a while – but then the concert begins and we enter the fantasy segment in the film’s midsection. Sir Alfred strikes a pose to commence his conducting and there is a remarkably fluid camera movement that begins with a medium shot and draws towards him, taking us right into the depths of his left eye and – literally – into his mind. The next 30 minutes are intense and claustrophobic, but after the concert finishes the film comes out of its reverie and we’re headed for something resembling a happy ending.

Throughout these changes of mood, Sturges’ dialogue never loses its sting. Much of the pleasure of watching Unfaithfully Yours comes from listening to his rich dialogue, whether it’s in the form of lengthy exchanges or brief, tossed-off remarks. (“It sounds like a talking dog!” exclaims Daphne when she picks up the phone and can’t make sense of the sounds – her husband gasping and stifling a sneeze – on the other end.) But at a more serious level, I saw it as the story of an artist who appears self-assured, even arrogant and supercilious on the surface, but who turns out to be deeply insecure inside – and who must use his art as a form of catharsis, to help him deal with subconscious fears. On the surface, the “dream segment” of the film is the long symphony sequence containing Sir Alfred’s fantasies, but one also gets the impression that he's never more himself than when he loses himself in that world. He’s truly alive when he’s conducting (Harrison performs these scenes marvelously well), his arms making frenzied movements in the air. Like Walter Mitty he’s in control of his interior life - little wonder that reality doesn't quite measure up.

P.S. There was a remake in 1984 with Dudley Moore and Nastassja Kinski – both charismatic actors, but the film wasn’t anywhere near as gripping as the original.

P.P.S. Unrelated to anything: my DVD has a nice 12-minute video introduction to the film by Terry Jones, formerly of Monty Python - it was shot in Jones’s house and towards the end there’s a great impromptu moment where his black cat appears and sidles on to the sofa next to him. Very cosy little scene.

Stalag 17, and Billy Wilder’s understated cynicism

I used to think of Billy Wilder primarily as a very witty, literate screenwriter who made sophisticated, Lubitsch-like films. But re-watching Sunset Boulevard and Stalag 17 recently, I was reminded again of how hard-edged Wilder’s sense of humour is. Of course, there was never any denying that he made some very cynical movies (most notably Ace in the Hole, which anticipates the evils of today’s media in its story of a reporter exploiting the situation of a man trapped in a cave). But because Wilder is such a clever writer who constantly comes up with lines that make you smile, and because his dialogues are so layered and fast-paced, requiring full concentration, you can sometimes lose sight of how dark some of his material is.

Take Stalag 17, a film about American prisoners of war in a German camp (or stalag) a few months before the end of the Second World War. The main plot involves their realisation that there’s a stoolie in their midst who smuggles information to the camp commandant; the finger of suspicion points at the unsocial Sergeant Sefton (played by William Holden) who spends much of his time trading with the Germans for special privileges (a few dozen cigarettes in exchange for a precious egg, for example).

The effect of this film is different from that of the obviously absurdist anti-war comedies – movies like Altman’s M*A*S*H* and Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove. The deliberate, over-the-top lunacy of those movies paradoxically makes it easier for us to see how serious-intentioned they are. Army surgeons cracking jokes while digging about in the bleeding innards of their doomed patients? Mushroom clouds spreading gracefully across the earth’s surface while a gentle Vera Lynn song plays in the background? How can this not be ironical? But Stalag 17 is harder to figure out, because its tone is more realist and because, in a couple of scenes, it steers close to making POW life seem like one long buddy picnic. There are Christmas trees, there is much hurrahing to “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again”, there’s a bit of fooling about with a genial prison guard, a bit of volleyball, and some ogling of the Russian women prisoners across the barbed wire.

Consequently, you might think this film is a bit flippant or at least that it’s somewhat sanitised (which it probably is, but that has more to do with the fact that it was made in 1953 than anything else). After all, when we think of Nazis as captors we reflexively think about the horrors of the concentration camps: we don’t think about the fact that the Germans would probably treat white American POWs towards the war's end at least marginally better than they treated the Jews. (In this case, being too nuanced is a step away from being callous. There’s something distasteful about a film depicting a German prison guard as genial, even if a few such men might actually have existed.) [Note: for a clarification of what I'm trying - unsuccessfully - to say here, see Feanor's comment and my reply to it.]

But despite its few instances of soft-pedalling, Stalag 17 is a very thoughtful movie. It never really allows us to forget its opening moments, when two prisoners are coolly shot dead by German guards while trying to escape, their bodies left to lie in the slush the next day while the camp commandant smilingly explains that “fortunately your companions did not get very far – they had the good sense to rejoin us”. And there are, in fact, a couple of scenes that seem to point the way forward to M*A*S*H*, which was made 20 years later in a more permissive Hollywood. In one scene, after the prisoners are given copies of Mein Kampf to read, they stick Hitler moustaches on themselves and make faux-speeches in a pidgin language that combines random German words (or German-sounding words) with American slang. “Everything is Gesundheit, Kaputt and Verboten! Is all you indoctrinated? Is all you good little Adolfs?” (Hawkeye Pierce and Trapper John would have been proud.) In another scene, one of the men receives a thinly disguised Dear John letter from his wife, informing him that she found a baby on her doorstep, that it has her eyes and nose, and that he must believe her.

The execution of the two wannabe escapees is filmed matter-of-factly, much like the gangland massacre scene in Wilder’s Some Like it Hot - there’s no underlining the tragedy of the moment, no stretching it out or dolling it up with sad music; that’s not the Wilder way. And there’s an immediate cut to a shot of Sefton, collecting his winnings – a pile of cigarettes – because he’d bet the other prisoners that the two men wouldn’t make it out of the forest. Naturally this isn’t the sort of thing that would endear him to the others, but he’s only measuring the risks and being practical. As he tells the other prisoners, “Let’s say you DO escape this place and get back to the States. They’ll just ship you out to the Pacific, put you on another plane, you’ll get shot down again and end up in a Japanese prison camp this time. Well, I’m staying put and making myself as comfortable as I can.”

It’s an impressive anti-war speech, but in the context of the story it also indicates a selfishness in Sefton’s personality. Subsequent events allow him personal growth. When he finds out the identity of the real stoolie, he’s in a position to milk the knowledge for personal gain, but he makes another choice instead. And it’s typical of Wilder’s style that this is depicted as unsentimentally as possible, without turning Sefton into the Hollywood Hero who saves the day.

P.S. More on Wilder’s wry treatment of death. My Sunset Boulevard DVD has audio commentary by Ed Sikov, who wrote a book about Wilder, and from it I learnt that the original opening of the film was a scene set in a morgue, where the corpse of Joe Gillis (the movie’s leading man, also played by William Holden) engages in conversation with other dead bodies. But during a preview screening, audiences laughed so hard at this scene that Wilder had to come up with something different: hence the macabre yet beautiful shot taken from the bottom of the swimming pool in which Gillis’s body floats as policemen try to fish it out and newsmen take photographs.

In Bhima’s voice: M T Vasudevan Nair’s Randaamoozham and Prem Panicker’s Bhimsen

[I’ve written earlier on this blog about Prem Panicker’s Bhimsen series; here’s the text of a story I did for Business Standard Weekend]

The literal English translation of the Malayalam word Randaamoozham is “next in line”. Slightly extended, it might be used to describe someone who is perpetually second best, forever the bridesmaid, and this made it a particularly apt title for M T Vasudevan Nair’s acclaimed retelling of the Mahabharata in the voice of Bhima, the second of the five Pandava heroes. Next in the line of succession to his elder brother Yudhisthira (and usually in the shadow of his younger brother Arjuna when it comes to charisma and skill in warfare), Bhima comes across as a gluttonous, slightly oafish he-man figure – or a comic foil – in many mainstream renderings of the great epic. But Nair (popularly known as “MT”) turned him into a three-dimensional figure, more sensitive and thoughtful than he is usually given credit for. “He took familiar building blocks and created an entirely new, incredibly compelling construct from them,” says Prem Panicker, senior journalist, Rediff.com co-founder and a long-time admirer of MT’s work.

When Panicker first read Randaamoozham as a youngster, it helped him realise that “the stories that made up the warp and weft of my ‘heritage’ are open to interpretation”. Returning to the book years later, he was struck by the nuances a familiar tale could yield if you changed the perspective even fractionally – “like a kaleidoscope, where every time you gently flick your wrist, strange and wonderful patterns emerge from the same broken bits of glass”.

A little over a year ago, he embarked on a whimsical, experimental project that quietly grew into a robust literary work: an English transcreation of Randaamoozham, serialised under the title Bhimsen on his very popular blog Smoke Signals. The series is now complete – it runs to 72 episodes and 135,000 words – and available in PDF format on the website. It’s an outstanding work that deserves to be read by anyone interested in an intimate, earthy version of the Mahabharata – one that places us right amidst the characters.

“Perspective tellings” of this complex, multi-layered epic are not, of course, new things. Many notable books and plays in this vein have been written in all the major Indian languages – Shivaji Sawant’s Mrityunjay (Marathi), Pratibha Ray’s Yajnaseni (Oriya) and P K Balakrishnan’s Ini Nhan Urangatte (Malayalam) being just three among them – but unfortunately for the English-language reader, hardly any of these are available in high-quality translation. This makes Panicker’s Bhimsen an especially important work, one that remains deeply respectful of the original Randaamoozham while at the same time confidently building on it. It isn’t a straight translation. Using the blog-post format meant that Panicker had to carefully work out how to begin and end each chapter, which is a different process from flowing a story over the uninterrupted length of a book; each episode had to be relatively self-contained. He also drew on his own understanding of the Keralite martial arts tradition to embellish the descriptions of Bhima’s many hand-to-hand combats. And he expanded on the frequent tensions between the Pandava brothers, for Randaamoozham, as he points out, is at its heart the story of a family struggling to survive.

As a reader, if you come to Bhimsen having previously encountered only mainstream translations of the Mahabharata, there are two important things you have to deal with. First, this is not an omniscient-narrator telling: everything we read is filtered through the prism of Bhima’s personal experiences, his very particular biases and prejudices. This seems like an easy idea to process, but a reader who knows the Mahabharata well must keep reminding himself of it. It’s revealing to read the comments on Panicker’s original Bhimsen posts and note how frequently he got asked to add an extra sentence or two elaborating incidents that Bhima wouldn’t have had direct access to (“More details on the Abhimanyu killing please”) or justifying the behaviour of another character. A recurrent subject of such requests was Karna, who is presented here almost throughout as a negative figure, rather than the tragic anti-hero so many of us Mahabharata aficionados admire. But as Panicker shows us, when we are looking exclusively through Bhima’s eyes, it’s perfectly natural to view Karna as nothing more than an arrogant, mean-spirited low-caste man constantly trying to rise above his station in life by ingratiating himself with Duryodhana; an outsider meddling in family affairs and adding to the trouble. Other perspective tellings will, of course, present completely different pictures, which add up to create a fascinating tapestry, for these subjective renderings go a long way towards helping us grasp character motivations and appreciating the many moral complexities of the story.

The other thing to understand about Bhimsen is that there is no room in it for the supernatural or the divine; everything is explained in strictly realist terms. Thus, when the young Bhima is poisoned by Duryodhana, he doesn’t enter a magical snake kingdom at the bottom of the river and receive nectar that will grant him the strength of 8,000 elephants – instead he meets a tribe of Nagas, who heal and fortify him before sending him back home. Most of the “rakshasas”, such as Bhima’s wife Hidimbi and son Ghatotkacha, are similarly tribal-folk, people who exist on the fringes of the kingdoms that make up the narrative (and who are not particularly well-treated by the epic’s conventional heroes). Karna’s “Shakti”, the irresistible, one-use-only weapon supposedly gifted to him by Indra, is described with careful realism as an arrow that contains freshly extracted snake venom, therefore guaranteed to kill (and not replaceable because the warrior would have to carry a basket of live snakes around with him on his chariot!).

There are references to the Pandavas being the sons of Gods, but in his brusquely pragmatic way Bhima de-mythologises himself and everyone else, dismissing the bards’ songs as fanciful public relations exercises. (I could never listen to balladeers sing of my battle against Bakan without feeling the urge to laugh out loud. They called him an asura and invested him with all kinds of magical powers... but the battle itself was merely a matter of killing someone who needed it – a quick, clean kill with nothing to recommend it in terms of strategy and tactics.) Towards the end of the story, his mother Kunti even tells him about the human men who fathered her sons.

What this approach does is to flesh out the quotidian aspects of the great epic, making it more relevant to readers who don’t think of mythology as literal truth (and who aren’t very interested in its religious significance) but read it for what it tells us about human beings and their conflicts, about the everyday bustle of life. But it would be a mistake to think of Bhimsen as a radical, new-fangled attempt to “modernise” or “deconstruct” the Mahabharata. In fact, it draws on the earliest forms of the epic poem – notably the much shorter text called the “Jaya”, which we know about largely through references in other ancient literature, such as Bhasa’s plays, written around the 3rd century AD. In the afterword to Randaamoozham, Nair wrote that he stayed philosophically anchored to this “original version” throughout.

This is not to say that a minimalist Mahabharata is intrinsically more worthy or valid than the grander, more fantastical one that most readers are familiar with. Both have their uses and both have something to tell us about the long, fascinating process by which myths are generated and regenerated over time. But at a time when religious fundamentalism has become almost fashionable, when some people take chauvinistic pride in the idea that a sacred text has existed in exactly the same form for thousands of years, it’s important not to forget how old stories grow and change over time. After all, Randaamoozham is also a reminder that the particulars of myths vary as you travel from one part of this vast country to another. “MT brought to his narrative a Kerala-centric appreciation of interpersonal relationships within a rigidly hierarchical family structure, such as that of the Nair tharavad where the pre-eminence of the eldest male is the guiding rule,” says Panicker. This informs the relationship between Yudhisthira and the other Pandava brothers.

In her excellent book The Hindus: An Alternative History, the Sanskrit scholar Wendy Doniger explores the vitality of Hinduism and the fact that its major texts have been subject to reinterpretation over the centuries, not set in stone. There is no better example of this than the Mahabharata, and Bhimsen is a worthy addition to the ever-growing canon of this dynamic epic – as well as a fine tribute to a modern classic of regional literature.

The complete text of Bhimsen is available here.

[Will soon put up the text of an email conversation I had with Prem about Bhimsen. Meanwhile, on a related but much lighter note, some old posts about Ekta Kapoor’s delightfully muddle-headed Kahaani Hamaari Mahabharat Ki, which was telecast for a few months last year before it died with the channel it was on: The tattoo menace, The squabbling sutradhaars, More on Vyasa and Ganesha, Little princes with big pecs, Low comedy from the Dwapara Yuga]

Notes on Paul Theroux's A Dead Hand

Just finished Paul Theroux’s new novel A Dead Hand, which features a Theroux-like narrator-protagonist – Jerry Delfont, an itinerant travel writer currently living in Calcutta, looking for a story, and suffering from a bad case of writer’s block or inertia. He has an impressive opening paragraph (or what he thinks is an impressive opening paragraph) that compares the city’s atmosphere to a bulging vacuum-cleaner dirt-bag, but that’s about it. In other words, he has a “dead hand” – “it seemed a true description of what I was facing, a limpness akin to an amputation” – and being middle-aged, he worries that this might herald a permanent decline.

But there’s more than one kind of dead hand in this novel. The other, more literal manifestation emerges soon after Jerry is approached by an American philanthropist, Mrs Unger, who asks him to investigate an incident involving a little boy’s corpse in a dingy little hotel room. Initially unwilling to get involved, Jerry finds himself besotted – in ways that he can’t fully articulate – by the enigmatic, maternal yet sensuous Mrs Unger. He also discovers that there’s nothing in the least dead about her hand: an almost magically skilled masseuse, she soon has him under her thumb, in more than one sense.

Paul Theroux himself isn’t the sort of author who you’d think struggles much when it comes to filling a page with words: he’s remarkably prolific, having averaged around a book a year for the better part of four decades – this includes the travel writing for which he is best known, as well as fiction that frequently draws on his experiences of traveling and living in different lands. He’s a polished, fluent writer – the quality of his prose is better than one usually expects from genre fiction (and A Dead Hand is very much a genre thriller). As in previous books, notably The Elephanta Suite, he has a way of capturing little things about India that might make Indians bristle – and even lead to accusations of an outsider being patronising or promoting stereotypes – but which have the ring of uncomfortable truth about them. “As I was leaving,” says Jerry at one point, “I heard him shout – a bawling in Bengali, the sort of rage I’d heard before in India, uninhibited indignation, pure fury, always a man screaming at a woman.” And this, when referring to certain middle-class Indians whose English combines grammatical incorrectness with a florid over-formality that suggests the colonial legacy: “They had the language for every occasion. It was still possible to be subtle, even sinuous, in a conversation, probably as a result of the weirdly Victorian verbosity, using politeness and amplification and elaborate excuses and courtesies.” On yet another occasion, Jerry says that “India’s human features” frighten him, but then speculates that “I saw doomed people where [Mrs Unger] saw life and hope, because I was doing nothing and she was bringing help.”

Also present here is some of the exoticising that so raises the hackles of many of us Indian readers - references to Tantric sex and Kali worship, for instance (see on left the international cover I found on Amazon.com, a Kali with a stylishly skewed third eye!). Of course, one mustn't confuse narrator with author: Jerry is given to painting with much broader brush-strokes than Theroux himself would. But he can certainly be seen as a version of Theroux, perhaps a more callow version. Or perhaps a lazier, less ambitious version, the sort of man who would hide behind the façade of “writer’s block”. This parallel is underlined for us midway through the book – in a passage that doesn’t take the main narrative forward but is very intriguing on its own terms – when Jerry has a brief meeting with the travel writer “Paul Theroux”, who happens to be visiting Calcutta. During the course of their exchange, we get a vivid, cynical image of an inquisitive writer as someone who pokes a wary animal: “It was not only cruel, but the torment evoked an uncharacteristic and untrue reaction.”

Despite thoughtful passages like this, A Dead Hand has a peculiarly rushed and unfinished feel about it. The book’s target reader would seem to be someone who simply wants a cosy little Oriental mystery (the subtitle “A Crime in Calcutta” suggests as much), and in this sense it never quite satisfies. Early on, when we learn that Mrs Unger’s largesse extends to rescuing and caring for some of the city’s huge population of orphaned children, it isn’t too difficult to guess the general direction where the story is headed, and I kept waiting for a twist that would add a new, unanticipated dimension. However, this never quite happens; the book doesn’t seem to want to be a conventional whodunit (or whadhappened). But in that case, what is it? Is it more about slowly unwrapping the many veils that conceal the real Mrs Unger (something one can’t be sure Jerry has succeeded in doing by the end of the book)? Or is this inscrutable woman an elaborate symbol for Calcutta – and, by extension, for India? A Dead Hand raises these questions but leaves them dangling in the musty air of the dirt-bag.

Jules Dassin’s Brute Force (and a sidenote on homosexual Nazis in 1940s films)

Watched my DVD of Jules Dassin’s prison film Brute Force last week (and before you ask, I had no idea then that Madhur Bhandarkar’s latest exercise in social awareness, Jail, was about to be released). This is a very gripping movie, right up there with I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang and Cool Hand Luke in its genre. It’s widely seen as a commentary on the brutality of prison life and the need to make conditions more humane, but personally this wasn’t the aspect of the film I found most interesting. For starters, it’s difficult as an Indian viewer in 2009 to properly appreciate the reformist aspects of a 1947 movie set in Westgate Penitentiary, or to fully understand the context: there’s the disconnect that one frequently experiences while watching an old film about a social issue that has become either obsolete or changed in vital ways over time.

Secondly, I didn’t think the reformist stuff was the main strength of the film anyway; the characters are a little too simply drawn for that. There’s one all-out bad guy – the sadistic, upwardly mobile prison warden Captain Munsey, as smooth and repellent as a silkworm. He’s superbly played by Hume Cronyn, but the character is written as a caricature and a symbol: he’s so deplorable that the film pointedly associates him with both homosexuality (gasp!) and Nazism (he listens to Wagner records while beating up prisoners with a rubber truncheon that isn't just a rubber truncheon!).

In the opposite corner are six prisoners led by the handsome, brooding Joe Collins (Burt Lancaster). They share a cell and plan a breakout together, but they all seem more victims of circumstance than hardened criminals – ill-suited to any sort of jail, much less an overcrowded, unhygienic one supervised by Gay Hitler. The other authority figures are weak foils for the single-minded Munsey, who believes in ruling with an iron thumb, though there IS a benevolent doctor who briefly stands up to him and generally serves as a sutradhaar figure at the end.

For me, the strengths of Brute Force lay not in the message-mongering or the use of characters as symbols for ideologies but (clichéd though it sounds) in the sheer skilfulness of its storytelling: its low-key, mostly realist treatment of daily life in a claustrophobic, cut-off setting; the relationships amongst the prisoners (including the veteran Gallagher, who runs the in-house newspaper and who reminded me of Morgan Freeman’s stoical Red in The Shawshank Redemption); and the beautiful black-and-white photography with the many little nods to Expressionism (there’s a wonderful opening shot of the prison drawbridge in the rain, and a great silhouette of a suicide in his cell, his distinctive glasses dangling prominently from his nose). Other fine touches include the poster of a woman’s face in the cell where the break-out is planned; more a mask, an abstraction, than a real woman, this photograph is very different from the large Rita Hayworth poster that plays such a key role in The Shawshank Redemption. But it represents different things to each of the residents of Cell 17, reminding them of the girls waiting for them back home and of the circumstances that led them to prison.

In one of his first films, Burt Lancaster is a great physical presence – as he was throughout his career – but he also gives a surprisingly solid performance, many years before he started making conscious efforts to become a Serious Actor. In one of the many (slightly melodramatic) flashback scenes that give us background information on the prisoners, there’s a wonderfully performed moment where Joe’s girlfriend, an invalid, wonders aloud if people are good to her because they feel sorry for her. “I’m not 'people'. I’m Joe Collins, one guy” says Joe tersely, before quickly kissing her and getting up to leave. It’s the sort of tough-talk you expect from noir heroes of the time, but Lancaster brings a low-key realism to it, and that little moment tells us more about Joe than lines of exposition could: particularly his fierce individualism, which might end up hindering the getaway.

Jules Dassin is a director whom I always associate with the best qualities of film noir, though he worked in other genres too. My favourites among his films, Rififi and Night and the City, are taut, economical movies with hardly a superfluous shot in them. I’d place Brute Force just half a rung beneath them.

P.S. Another pleasing little connection I discovered between two very different types of movies: around the same time that Hume Cronyn was playing the fascist Munsey, he was co-writing the screenplay for Hitchcock’s Rope, the two young murderer-protagonists of which are also associated with both Nazism (through their espousal of Nietzsche’s Superman theory) and homosexuality. John Dall, who plays Brandon in Rope, strongly resembles Cronyn in this film - both physically and in his slightly effete way of talking. I had a vision of Cronyn (as screenwriter-cum-actor) performing scenes for the younger actor during rehearsals.

'Continents' revisited: meeting Ved Mehta

[Did a version of this profile for Tehelka]

“Most of us experience our parents as authority figures, we don’t think of them as human beings,” says Ved Mehta. We’re discussing his books Daddyji and Mamaji, now republished in graceful new editions by Roli, with Krishen Khanna paintings on the covers mirroring the quiet refinement of the prose within. “It’s hard to imagine one’s parents having hungers, fears, problems of their own. For me, this was a way of humanising them, and I hope readers will get something out of that.”

“Secretly,” adds the 75-year-old author, “I hope they’ll also get pleasure from their literary value.”

It would be very surprising if they didn’t. Daddyji and Mamaji, both written in the 1970s, are intimate personal histories of Mehta’s parents and their forebears, but they are also explorations of changing worlds and ways of living, from the provinciality of village life in mid-19th century Punjab (where a journey to Haridwar, lasting several days, could become the achievement of a lifetime – part of a family’s corpus of oral myths passed down over the generations) to “Daddyji” travelling to England to study in the early 20th century. These were the first two books in a large, initially unplanned cycle of autobiographical works that eventually became known as the “Continents of Exile” series. Most of them were published to acclaim in the US, where Mehta has spent much of his life, yet they continue to have a low profile in India; even immediately after the publication of The Red Letters in 2004, it was difficult to find copies of the earlier books in most stores.

This is a pity, for Mehta is among the most distinguished Indian writers of his generation. Over a career that stretches back to the 1950s, he worked as a staff writer for the New Yorker for three decades and wrote features and books on contemporary India, Mahatma Gandhi, philosophy and theology. He has also written with pragmatic clear-sightedness about being blind (the result of a bout with meningitis at age four): about how, “being a donkey in a world of horses, one would have to justify one’s existence and worth to the horses”; his journey to America at age 14 for the well-rounded education that wasn’t available to an unsighted adolescent in India; how loneliness gradually made way for self-reliance; and his use of “facial vision” (the ability to sense objects by the feel of the air and differences in sound) to navigate the world around him.

But his defining work remains “Continents of Exile”, which began with the simple, unassuming desire to record the story of his father’s life. “My father was a great storyteller – maybe that’s how I ended up becoming a writer – but with seven brothers and sisters clamoring for his attention, I rarely got him to myself,” he tells me. “Once that finally happened, in New York, I asked him to repeat the old stories he used to tell us. Initially it was mainly for my own edification. Then I started taking notes, and the book developed.”

“I had no real long-term agenda, but creative projects gather their own momentum,” he continues, “After Daddyji was published my sisters said I had to write a book about my mother next. She was very reticent at first but she finally agreed to be interviewed when my father wasn’t present!” The books grew to tell a vast cross-cultural tale involving India, England and America, revealing a great deal about a time when Indians first started moving to other countries in large numbers, breaking cultural strictures against crossing the oceans, tearing themselves away – or being torn away by circumstance – from family, friends and culture. One of the dominant themes of the last century, as Mehta points out, was the huge displacement of people around the world. Naturally, this shaped a literary landscape too. “The word ‘exile’ usually has negative connotations, but it has produced such great literature,” he observes, recounting the works of Nabokov and Conrad among others – and quickly adding “I’m not comparing myself to any of these names!”

Writing several books about one’s family history and one’s own personal development can sometimes be dismissed as navel-gazing – possibly one reason why Mehta’s place in the pantheon of leading Indian Anglophone writers doesn’t seem as secure as those of his contemporaries like V S Naipaul and Anita Desai – but he had the conviction that “if you write a very specific story and write it well, it will have a wide resonance”. He was so adept at using small stories to cast light on a big picture that his mentor, the legendary New Yorker editor William Shawn, developed a new rubric – “Personal History” – especially for his profiles. Mehta smiles as he recalls “how absurd it was, right in the middle of the Vietnam War, for a leading American magazine to publish a three-part profile of my mother, who no one in the world had ever heard of”.

The lucidity and precision of Mehta’s prose – Shawn once described it as “airy, elegant, marvellously clear” – may have been honed at the New Yorker, but Mehta himself believes “it originally came out of the impulse to tell people who I was, where I came from – I had a lot of explaining to do, and there was nothing more important to me than clarity. When I wrote Face to Face in my early twenties, I had very little English – I wrote it as a letter, I scarcely knew I was writing a book, it was more like recalling my background for myself”.

More intriguingly, his writing is very visual and descriptive. Determinedly avoiding any reference to his blindness except when it’s integral to the narrative, he writes as if he can see, and in a memoir this can be disorienting: what to make of a passage where Mehta “watches” as his father opens a large trunk and takes out “an empty Harrod's plastic shopping bag and a packet of letters in envelopes of many sizes and colours, loosely tied with a string”?

“Perhaps we shouldn’t compartmentalise fiction and non-fiction so strictly,” Mehta counters when I raise the subject, “Even in old histories there are passages – descriptions of soldiers in war, for instance – that are slightly heightened to make them more immediate.” He recalls that once, after interviewing a well-known historian who smoked throughout the duration of their talk, he wrote, “He smoked from the side of his mouth; there were times the cigarette seemed stuck to his lower lip.” The startled interviewee wrote asking how he had known this. “But I had simply interpreted what I heard – the patterns of his speech – and put it in visual terms,” says Mehta, “I could have written ‘His voice sounded muffled, which led me to conclude that the cigarette was dangling...’, but that would have been cumbersome and distracting. I don’t write for blind people, I write for the general public, and I don’t want to repeatedly draw attention to my blindness by explaining my impressions of thing.”

Making his own way around the world of reading and writing on a daily basis isn't an easy task, however. Since many of the books Mehta wants to read aren’t available in Braille or in talking-book format, he usually has to rely on readers, and this can be an expensive business (in his college days he would pay fellow students 75 cents an hour for their assistance; rates have risen considerably since then). He’s managed well enough – he finished Vikram Seth’s immense A Suitable Boy in just three to four days, less time than most sighted people would take – but it’s difficult for him to closely follow new literary developments as they happen. When he speaks of Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance (which he holds in very high regard) and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (“I liked it but it wasn’t an easy read at all, it was very convoluted”) almost as if they were recent publications, I realise that he has to be very selective in his reading, relying mainly on recommendations of “important books”. “I can’t always read books as soon as they are published,” he says in a resigned tone.

When I ask him to sign my copy of Daddyji, he scrawls a rough “V.M.” under the book’s title and lets his wife Linn write the short dedication. “As you can see, I’m functionally illiterate,” says the man who has filled thousands of pages with explorations of the interior lives of individuals as well as the shifting histories of continents.

[An old post on The Red Letters here. Also see Ved Mehta's website, which contains many of his essays and shorter pieces, as well as information on his books.

And some earlier author profiles/interviews here: Mohsin Hamid; Vikram Chandra; Amitav Ghosh; Anita Desai; Rajorshi Chakraborti; Kiran Desai; Manjula Padmanabhan; Manil Suri; Edward Luce; Amitava Kumar; Sudhir Kakar; Raj Kamal Jha; Kiran Nagarkar]

Millennium 3: The Girl who Kicked the Hornets' Nest

“It was reassuring. You could tell by holding the book in your hands that there were many pages to go, many adventures to share” – critic Roger Ebert on the comforting bulkiness of J R R Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings

And so the English translation of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest brings Stieg Larsson’s posthumously published Millennium trilogy to its close. I turned the last page of this book feeling deep satisfaction as well as melancholy, the latter emotion compounded by the knowledge that there will be no more sequels (Larsson died of a heart attack shortly after completing the three manuscripts, totaling nearly 2,000 pages) – unless, of course, it turns out that the publishers have been withholding information from us. (Doubtful but fingers crossed!)

An epic series usually follows a trajectory that leads from the small picture to the large; the first book tends to be relatively intimate, establishing the key characters and their immediate setting, and then, as the series proceeds, a fuller, grander canvas unfolds. (Which first-time reader, encountering Bilbo Baggins’ eleventy-first birthday celebrations in the cosy Shire, can possibly anticipate Sauron’s forbidding wasteland of Mordor, much less the vast mythological landscape of The Silmarillion?) This is how the Millennium trilogy played out. The first book, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, began as a standard-issue thriller, centering on the investigation of a 40-year-old murder, but soon journalist Mikael Blomkvist and his research-assistant Lisbeth Salander (a.k.a. the girl with the dragon tattoo) discovered that this was a fragment of a much larger puzzle involving ritualistic killings and a trend of violence towards helpless women immigrants. The darker undercurrents of life in contemporary Sweden stood to be uncovered, including corruption and sleaze in big corporations, and the limp-wristed collusion of financial journalists.

The sullen, anti-social but frighteningly efficient Salander was the most interesting character in this novel, but her back-story really took centrestage in the second book The Girl who Played With Fire, which was even more ambitious in its cast of characters and range of subjects – the story involved an extensive exposé of the Swedish sex-trafficking industry, the murder of the enterprising young writer who was to carry it out, and the revelation of a connection with Salander’s early life. The girl who played with fire was now officially in the eye of the storm.

The Girl who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest picks up at exactly the point where its predecessor dramatically ended, with Salander, a bullet lodged in her head, admitted in the critical care unit of a hospital. Though soon out of danger, she is still a suspect in three murders and a high-profile trial awaits. Meanwhile, Blomkvist – who isn’t allowed to meet her in hospital – must work against time to unearth the details of a three-decade-long cover-up by an organisation within the innermost circle of the Swedish secret police. (Hence the book’s clever title, which evokes the closed hives of secret agents.) Other parallel strands involve the activities of an aged former “spook” named Gullberg, the increasingly hectic professional life of Blomkvist’s best friend and former Millennium editor Erika Berger as she tries to cope with a new job as editor-in-chief at a daily newspaper, and the independent investigations conducted by authorities who are partly sympathetic to Salander.

Larsson’s novels are very detailed and full of information about the workings of, for example, magazine and newspaper journalism, the police force and big business (to this list, we can now add the morally ambiguous world of spies, their activities so shadowy that they are often hidden even from the upper echelons of government). In fact, it’s possible to offer the mild criticism that they are too detailed, sometimes to the extent of being flabby. Some of this probably has to do with the circumstances of their publication: if Larsson had lived to discuss them with his editor, I think some of the deadwood would have been eliminated. Much as I enjoyed the first two books, more than once I got the impression that he had written the manuscripts mainly for his own pleasure (the self-indulgence does work in places, such as the cameo appearance in the second book of the real-life Swedish boxer Paolo Roberto), not really worrying about tightening them for eventual publication; and that his publishers, excited by their potential, had rushed them into production and translation after his death. I thought the second book in particular could comfortably have lost eighty or so pages.

Happily, The Girl who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest is much more focused than its immediate predecessor, and a genuine page-turner all the way through. After establishing the background in the initial chapters, it kicks into maximum gear once Blomkvist (somewhat implausibly) manages to smuggle in a hand-held computer – along with Internet access – to the incarcerated Salander (who, as we already know, is an expert hacker with an army of anonymous online contacts). This is where the book really delivers: once Salander has that computer, she is as omnipotent as Salman Khan in Wanted. There’s nothing she can’t achieve, and a point arrives, around three-fourths of the way through this 600-page novel, when the reader realises with a warm flush of excitement that everything is going to turn out all right, that the bad guys are going to get their comeuppance and that we’ll have the satisfaction of watching them squirm.

You might think that such an epiphany would be detrimental to the effect of a thriller, but this isn’t the case here: the suspense in this book isn’t so much a matter of what will happen but how it will unfold. Besides, with a character as moody and anti-social as Salander, you can be sure that things will never be allowed to get too comfortable or happy. She remains an enormously compelling protagonist even when she spends much of the book physically immobile, and it’s a pity that we won’t get to see the further twists in her complex relationship with Blomkvist. On the other hand, perhaps the legacy of the Millennium books will lie in their not being extended into an endless, ultimately compromised series. Three novels usually aren't enough to secure an author's place in genre-fiction history, but this is what Larsson has achieved, years after his passing.

[An earlier post on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Swedish crime fiction here]

Coetzee channels Coetzee: Summertime

[Did a version of this review for The Hindu]

The central premise of J M Coetzee’s Summertime is that the South African writer John Coetzee – a Nobel laureate, author of such novels as Dusklands, Foe and Disgrace – has recently died in Australia and that a young Englishman named Vincent is trying to write a book about him. However, Vincent’s book is a limited, even whimsical undertaking: it will focus only on the mid-1970s – a time when Coetzee was living with his aged father in the suburbs of Cape Town – and it won’t be a comprehensive biography so much as a collection of impressions gleaned from five people who knew Coetzee to varying degrees during this period.

These people include a Brazilian dancer named Adriana who believes that Coetzee was attracted both to her and to her young daughter (whom he taught English), a married woman named Julia, with whom he had a liaison, and his cousin Margot. Summertime consists largely of their recollections – including a narrative rendering by Vincent of what Margot tells him – and the portrait that emerges of Coetzee is an unflattering one: a dull, asexual, socially awkward, self-absorbed man. One respondent describes him as a sphere, a glass ball, because "there was no way to connect to him...he wasn’t made for love, wasn’t constructed to fit into or be fitted into". "He was not a man of substance," says another, likening him to a block of wood that has neither rhythm nor soul. He is variously derided or pitied.

Inevitably, the discussions reveal at least as much about the interviewees themselves as they do about Coetzee. One woman insists, somewhat shrilly, that John was nothing more than a peripheral character in her grand life-story; another uncomfortably wonders why Vincent wants to know so much about her life when the book should really be about John. The question of why a celebrated author’s life should inherently be of more value or interest than the lives of “ordinary” people runs through Summertime, as does the question of whether one should even attempt to “understand” an author outside of what his work tells us about him.

Vincent has with him excerpts from notebooks maintained by “John Coetzee” in the 1970s, excerpts where the author (speaking of himself in the third person) hazily reflects on the troubles of his country and on his own lackadaisical attempts to achieve immortality through his writing. “Why does he persist in inscribing marks on paper, in the faint hope that people not yet born will take the trouble to decipher them?” At one point Vincent explains that he doesn’t want to rely on his subject’s diaries and letters, because “he was a fictioneer. In his letters he is making up a fiction of himself for his correspondents; in his diaries he is doing much the same for his own eyes, or perhaps for posterity...if you want the truth you have to hear from people who knew him directly, in the flesh”.

To which one of Vincent’s interviewees asks, “But what if we are all fictioneers, as you call Coetzee? What if we all continually make up the stories of our lives? Why should what I tell you about Coetzee be any worthier of credence than what he tells you himself?” As a reader, it's possible to get so involved with passages like this that you might briefly forget that Summertime is written by (the real-life) J M Coetzee, who is very much alive, and that Vincent and his respondents are the fictional creations. I found this happening on more than a few occasions.

So what is Summertime, really? It’s been widely described as a "fictionalised memoir”, and at times it reads like an exercise in masochism, a harsh self-examination that is dismissive not only of the man but also the writer. (“He had no special sensitivity, no original insight into the human condition,” says one of Coetzee’s colleagues, “Nowhere in his work do you get a feeling of a writer deforming his medium to say what has never been said before.”) The reticent Coetzee in this book could be a version of the real-life author (who is known to be reclusive and unsmiling), but some important details don’t match: the real Coetzee was married and had children at the time, for example. And there’s no particular reason to believe that the interviewees are based on real people.

For all these meta-complexities, this is best treated as a novel that eventually tells us as much (or as little) about Coetzee as his other, more obviously fictional books do, and with all the qualities that mark his best work. Coetzee has never been known for richly descriptive prose, yet his writing, through its interiority, vividly depicts a place, a time and a mood (in this case, the inertia of life in the African veldt). Despite its spare structure and conversation-driven narrative, Summertime is a book of ideas, full of reflections not only about the relationship between an artist’s life and his work, but also about the functions, possibilities – and limitations – of literature itself. It’s a reminder of how difficult (perhaps impossible) it is to satisfactorily transform the complexities of human experience into words on a page (“Something sounds wrong, but I can’t put my finger on it. All I can say is, your version doesn’t sound like what I told you,” one of “Coetzee’s women” tells Vincent). And it’s both ironical and entirely appropriate that this reminder comes from someone who does it better than most others.

Laughton as Rembrandt: notes

In his excellent 1944 book Film (a lucid, intelligent study of cinema - including popular film - at a time when there wasn't enough literature on the subject), Roger Manvell made the following observation about Charles Laughton:

“Men of the great acting quality of Laughton and [Leslie] Howard are often accused of being themselves at the expense of their parts...[but] a man is often chosen for his first lead because he has the right face and physique for the part: Laughton passed through a series of parts for all of which his physique and remarkable face were of great plastic value. He has great versatility within his own range – Henry VIII, Captain Bligh, Rembrandt, Quasimodo, Ginger Ted, Ruggles, all different and yet the same photogenic Laughton mannerisms in all.”

The first thing you notice when you watch Alexander Korda’s biopic Rembrandt is how closely Laughton – aided by basic makeup, including an untamed set of whiskers – resembles the great Dutch painter. But the resemblance becomes incidental after a while, as the focus shifts to the actor’s wonderfully subdued performance, several shades away from his scenery-chewing Henry VIII. But then this is a quiet film, different in tone from The Private Life of Henry VIII (also directed by Korda), which played almost like a parody by comparison. (And who could blame it, given its subject matter!)

In Rembrandt, apart from a short scene or two (such as the one where the painter, on a visit to his hometown, briefly regains some of his vigour and even gets into a brawl in a local tavern), the emphasis is on the character’s discontent: his melancholia after his wife’s death and his subsequent relationship, driven by loneliness, with a shrewish housekeeper; his difficulties in dealing with the demands made by the noblemen who commission his work; his struggle with the question of vanity and where it leads an artist ("it's no greater than and no less than when a shoemaker makes a pair of shoes" he says, responding to praise for one of his works); and his nostalgia for (but also inability to return to) his humble roots in a milling family.

This isn’t an exhaustive or well-rounded biography – it’s more like a series of snapshots (if that isn’t an inappropriate word to use in connection with a 17th century painter), starting at a point where Rembrandt, already a highly regarded artist, is in his late 30s. There aren’t many specific insights into his work, apart from an episode where he depicts members of the Civil Guard as posturing buffoons (and, when confronted, tells them “Vanity and stupidity are written all over your faces – the only distinguished things about you are your hats and breastplates”). However, there’s a key scene where he convinces a beggar to pose as King Saul. “You can’t be a good painter then,” the beggar says when approached, “Decent painters paint decent people.” But as he poses, Rembrandt tells him about Saul and David, and the beggar, now dressed as a king, is so moved (by the story of Saul being moved by David’s harp-playing) that he wipes a teardrop from his cheek with a corner of his robe. The shot powerfully connects with the real-life Rembrandt’s painting of Saul and David but it also shows a painter cleverly getting his subject “into character”. A short while later the roles will be reversed, as the beggar tries to playfully teach the artist the tricks of his own trade. (“Look miserable...but not too miserable, or they’ll think you’re past helping. When your right eye waters, let your left eye twinkle, so as they say ‘Look at that fellow, he may be starving but he’s got a merry air’.”)

Another couple of scenes like this, and Rembrandt could have been a really great film. As it stands, it’s a pretty good one. It has depth and feeling, and it’s elegantly shot in black and white; you’d think colour would be a better choice for a movie about a famous painter, but this doesn’t really make a difference, even when there are vivid references to colours, such as Rembrandt imagining what a ruby-red necklace would look like on his wife’s white neck. (Sidenote: watching the beggar-as-Saul scene, a whimsical question popped into my mind. Which is truer to life – a black-and-white photograph, or a realistically coloured painting?)

But dominating everything is the Laughton performance, his fluid face running the gamut of emotions from frustration to quiet pride to sorrow. Incidentally his real-life wife Elsa Lanchester plays Hendrickje, the woman with whom Rembrandt finds love. She’s a fine actress but I always feel a disconnect when I see her playing anything other than the Bride of Frankenstein!

Reflections on Tati’s Play Time, and what a movie camera lets us see

I had a talk once with a veteran art director, a man who handled the set design for many theatre productions at the NSD, and he spoke about the mental adjustments he had to make during a brief assignment on a movie. When doing up the interiors of a small room, he would be instructed not to bother about every square inch of space, or every shelf on every wall; the exact camera set-up had been decided beforehand and the film’s audience would only get to see a specific portion of the room. It took some time for our man to get used to this slapdash approach. After all, he had cut his teeth on lavish stage productions by Ebrahim Alkazi and others, where set design was not only of utmost importance but also had to be treated holistically: what if a viewer chanced to look at a prop placed at the edge of the set, instead of fixing his gaze on the centrestage action?

But of course, unlike the theatregoer, a movie viewer is at the mercy of what the camera chooses to show him. This is self-evidently true for films that have rapid-fire cuts or camera swooshes – but it can be equally true for sober productions like (for example) Hitchcock’s Rope, which was made up of only nine or ten long takes and set entirely in a three-room apartment. On a casual viewing, you might think Rope is like a filmed play, a “static” movie, and that as the viewer you’re in control, but this is far from the case: the camera movements are subtly orchestrated to enhance the suspense at key moments; the movement of characters from one room to another and the placement of props (notably the wooden chest that is the focal point of the action) are strategically planned. It’s really a very “cinematic” film (in the widely used and restrictive sense of the word “cinematic”, but more on that later).

Watching Jacques Tati’s Play Time reminded me of this chat about the freedom available to a theatre viewer vis-à-vis a movie viewer. Tati’s film is a work that demands multiple viewings if you want to appreciate it fully, for the simple reason that many sequences have several different bits of action going on within the same frame (and most people have only one pair of eyes). There are fixed long shots where the viewer is free to look at whatever he chooses, and this freedom is heightened by the fact that the film has no “story” as such; it’s made up entirely of tiny sub-plots. (Synopsis: a number of people, including many tourists, wander about a large airport, an office complex and a trade exhibition in a Paris that's all pristine glass-and-concrete buildings; as if intimidated by the architecture, they walk in straight lines and turn at right angles. The “old” Paris, with its sightseeing attractions such as the Eiffel Tower, is never seen directly, only reflected in glass windows as if it occupies a parallel universe. Eventually, most of these people and a few others go to a posh dinner party, where things get increasingly busy. That's pretty much it.)

There are no protagonists whose actions can serve as focal points for us – instead, several groups of people walk in and out of the frame, so that some of their faces gradually become familiar (though never too familiar) to the viewer. Tati himself does play his trademark role, the kindly, distracted Monsieur Hulot, bumbling about the place with his pipe and his umbrella, but even Hulot is just one of the many characters, not the centre of attention (apart from two early scenes). All this adds up to an unsettling, even distancing experience for the first-time viewer. Even in a film by Ozu, where a camera might unblinkingly record a whole sequence from a fixed position, there is at least a definite narrative: in a lengthy medium shot of a crowded room, we would know what to watch out for, whom to direct our eyes towards. But Play Time offers no such cues, especially in the superb 45-minute-long restaurant sequence that takes up most of the movie’s second half.

With its eye-popping accumulation of characters – diners, waiters, bouncers, musicians, a maître d’ – all busy doing different things, and a gradual transition from controlled order into chaos, this is one of the greatest movie setpieces I’ve seen; it's so intricate, the mind boggles at how difficult the whole thing must have been to conceptualise, rehearse and shoot. Light and good-natured though the sequence is, I also thought it had some of the dark, anarchic force of Luis Bunuel’s The Exterminating Angel, which begins with a group of sophisticates engaging in polite, superficial conversation and ends with the breakdown of civilisation. Tati’s vision is cheerier: when things spiral out of control in Play Time, the effect is liberating, as if the warmth of human nature has been allowed to break through a cold, sterile world. And there is plenty of liveliness in this long sequence: much of the joy of seeing it a second or third time comes from noticing little things – characters’ gestures, quirks of personality – that one hadn’t seen before.

A day before Play Time, I was watching another favourite film, Brian De Palma’s Sisters, an exuberant, full-blooded psychological thriller by a master of such techniques as the split-screen (used brilliantly in this film) – and a master also at the art of using camera movement to conceal things from the viewer (or, in some cases, to give us half-glimpses of things that we can’t be quite sure about). De Palma is one of the great visual storytellers, and I think he was once quoted as saying he had little patience with films that depended too much on words; films that were “basically just pictures of people talking”. I wonder what he thought of Play Time, a film that contains hardly any dialogue (and doesn’t at all rely on words to get its point across) but which is also, visually speaking, static and minimalist – at least when compared to De Palma’s own kinetic, highly stylised approach to moviemaking.

Personally speaking, I’m very grateful for both types of movies. And the many other types in between.

P.S. As you can see this is a rambling sort of post, but I'd appreciate any thoughts on the subject of the camera-viewer relationship, or tips about films that resemble Play Time in style or concept.

Not this, not this: Anjum Hasan's Neti, Neti

[Did a version of this review for Crest]

Anjum Hasan’s first novel Lunatic in my Head – one of the solidest, most assured debuts I've read in a long time – was about three people, unrelated to each other, living in Shillong and stifled in different ways by the pace of life in this misty northeastern city. One of those characters was an eight-year-old girl named Sophie Das, who spent much of her time in the world of her imagination. "Fat raindrops flecked her glasses and things turned blurry; car lights melted into streaks of gold, people were coloured blobs, bobbing on the surface of the world's dark sea."

In Hasan’s new novel Neti, Neti, Sophie has the floor to herself and her world is still in many ways a blur, though the setting has changed. She's 25 and has been in Bangalore for a year at the point the book opens, working for a US-based company that outsources the subtitling of DVDs (dialogue-transcribing, background sounds for the hearing-impaired) to India. This life is faster-paced than Sophie’s life in Shillong was – it’s a world of glitzy malls, late-night parties and office politics, a consumerist culture where people regularly spend beyond their means (an important subplot is about the repercussions of people defaulting on loans). Her boyfriend Swami – to whom she tries to introduce one of her favourite books, R K Narayan’s Swami and Friends - works in a call centre and keeps American time. Sophie has, in a sense, moved from one country to another; we are reminded that the north-east is frequently thought of as not being part of India at all. (At one point, beginning a journey from Bangalore to Shillong, she sleepily thinks to herself, “I’m not coming back to India”.)

This is a book with a dry, often dark sense of humour, especially in the sections where Sophie has to deal with a conservative landlord who frowns on a single woman coming home late at night (and who demands that she “remove her underwear” from the clothesline). Or the passage where she reluctantly attends a satsang - a spiritual meet held in honour of a new-age Guru – with freshly purchased beer bottles nestled in her bag. (It probably says something about me that I chuckled out loud at a passage that introduces the bereaved parents of a little boy who died in a mall, but the context, involving a clueless character who is trying too hard to enliven proceedings, really does make it funny.) It’s also a book of vignettes and moods, with chapter titles that often reflect Sophie’s state of mind, and in this it briefly reminded me of David Mitchell’s excellent, underrated novel Black Swan Green.

I thought Neti, Neti was an easier read than the introspective Lunatic in my Head, which was driven more by the interior lives of its three characters than by plot movement. This could partly be because the tones of the two books were dictated by their respective settings: the first was about feeling weighed down in a city where nothing seems to move, while this one is set in a world where too much seems to be going on at once. But this isn’t a facile tale about a young girl attaining personal freedom, escaping to a more liberal world and having the time of her life. Bangalore and Shillong, located 3,000 km apart, may represent two very different aspects of the Indian experience, but there are contradictions within each of these worlds as well, and Hasan’s precise, controlled prose does a fine job of portraying Sophie’s disaffection with both the places she has known. (The book’s lovely title is a Vedic chant that means “Not This, Not This”, but this literal translation doesn’t quite capture the deep sense of restlessness, the world-weariness, evoked by the phrase; the sense of never quite being satisfied by anything.)

There has been a debate in Indian literary circles recently around a magazine essay that claimed our fiction lacks ambition and a sense of the Larger Issues – that it’s more about navel-gazing than anything else. This is a simple-minded argument to begin with (and it deserved to be explored in a much larger space than the 900 or so words that were available to the article), but Hasan’s two books, taken together, are good examples of how the personal can give depth and shade to the bigger picture; how individual lives can be used to map the life of this vast, varied country and the many subcultures that coexist within it.