Kaaka Muttai/The Crow’s Egg (2015)

Here is the thing. With very few exceptions (ahem…The Usual Suspects), I hate explanatory voice-overs (VO) in films. More so if they come from cutesy dogs. I detest how a disembodied voice is used to underline the moral of the story in scenes. So as you’ve probably guessed by now, I wasn’t very keen on the recently released Dil Dhadakne Do, which suffers from voiceoveritis and a case of the ‘profounds’ the way I assume most of the Indian population now suffers from post-Maggi-lead-poisoning. My thumb rule is that if a film uses a VO to explain the inner workings of a character, it means that it’s trying too hard to be deep or at the very least, interesting. You know, a bit like that guy on Tinder who has a quote from Rumi in his description but only because he saw Imtiaz Ali’s Rockstar once.

Kaaka Muttai which released along with Zoya Akhtar’s aqua-mammoth is on the other hand, the real thing. It’s a profound film on the effects of globalisation on those living in poverty. But it’s not Terrence-Malick-profound. You will not be asked to make sense of seemingly random visuals of dinosaurs strung together by a genius. Director M. Manikandan pulls of an amazing feat by managing to be accessible without being predictable or dumb. It’s the kind of film you can literally take home to meet your mother. (Once it’s out on DVD.)

The story is simple. Two slum kids want to eat a pizza. Very badly. To buy one, they must make Rs. 300 on the sly. This is a bit of a task because right now they make Rs. 15 a day picking leftover coal from train tracks. They are also fond of stealing and devouring crow’s eggs. So much so that they’ve decided to call themselves Big Crow’s Egg and Little Crow’s Egg. They have a dog who thankfully remains mute throughout the film. The kids are cute, but without trying to be. Which is the best kind of cute. Dressed in dirty clothes and sporting the reddish brown hair that comes from being out in the sun and undernourished, senior and junior are authentically sprung from the loins of urban poverty. Manikandan, who also wrote and shot the film, follows the footsteps of Vittorio De Sica by casting kids who actually grew up in slums. The result is an authenticity that trained child actors would never be able to bring. Just imagining Darsheel Safry in one of the roles is enough to cause a shudder.

Vignesh and Ramesh who play the two boys in Kaaka Muttai, own their roles. They are both utterly irresistible and have street swag in dollops. To commemorate this, they even get their own slo-mo stride sequence. Swag aside, just watching Little Crow’s Egg breaks into a wide smile is worth the price of admission. A vein of humour runs through the film even as the characters live in the kind of poverty and circumstances that are hard to romanticise.

It’s the kind of abject squalor that has slowly disappeared from our screens and it’s worth thinking why. Probably because it would hurt our posh little brains to think about this stuff. Or because we would like to think it’s no longer the dominant truth of our society. Because what is Rs. 300 to us? 2 coffees? One drink? By the time interval came, I realised I had spent Rs. 600 to watch this film (popcorn and auto fare included). That was not a pleasant realisation at all.

I may be preaching (or ranting) but Kaaka Muttai does not, which is why it is so moving and effective. Watch it this week, while it’s still in theatres.

A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (2014)

A girl walks home alone at night. What happens next will shock you. You see, the girl is a vampire. She has no name. She is the bloodthirsty inheritor of Clint Eastwood’s ‘The Man With No Name’ legacy. The girl has retractable incisors, much like Wolverine’s adamantium claws. The girl lives in an industrial ghost town somewhere in Iran called ‘Bad City’. Shot in high contrast black and white which blunts the red and makes everything seem even more profound than it already is, Ana Lily Amirpour’s debut film is full of silences, coolth and slo-mo. Basically it will make you want to be a vampire, wear a modified chador (a kind of persian hijab) as a cape, throw meaningful glances and maybe, use a skateboard. I’m not going to say anything more about the film because it is best that it be discovered and not eulogised but A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night is the antidote to your Twilight ennui.

Film It Is Closest To: Let The Right One In

Film It Is Farthest From: The Twilight Series

Do Not Watch If: You hate subtitles or violent women.

A Short History of the Undercut Or How I Unwittingly Followed a Nazi Trend

There is an epidemic underway. Correction. There are multiple epidemics underway. As H1N1 plows through the population and dominates headlines, I have taken it upon myself to draw attention to the epidemic of the Undercut. It’s everywhere. It’s the hairstyle where you pretty much buzz the sides and keep the top long. It has many variations and has been around for a while but if you’re living in New Delhi or Mumbai, you would have seen the style percolate down to the unwashed (hipster) masses somewhere in the last year.

Then as further proof, yesterday Arjun Kapoor Instagrammed a photo of himself sporting it.

And I decided, now that Bollywood too has succumbed to its charms, I must trace the evolution of this trend.

It started in the 1930s. With Hitler.

To further his plans for world domination, Hitler set up an army of youthful Aryans called ‘Hitler Youth’ who followed the hairsteps of their idol and popularized the haircut, till it came to be known as ‘The Hitler Youth’.

So when Ralph Fiennes had to play Amon Goeth in Schindler’s List, which fascist trend did Spielberg turn to?

The trend spread to American soldiers. So Brad Pitt sported the Undercut while playing US Sgt Don “Wardaddy Collier in the World War II saga Fury.

Of course it’s not a legit trend till David Bowie has endorsed it. So in the 80s Mr Bowie spread the Undercut virus to UK where it also came to be known as ‘the synth’ owing to its popularity amongst major synthpop artists of the time.

From music, the Undercut now mutates and jumps to sports. Who is the most influential hair icon for this millennium? David Beckham. And Mr Beckham has been flirting with the Undercut for a while now.

Then it unleashed itself on famous Justins. Timberlake and Bieber.

And famous women could not resist its tentacles either.

Now because Bollywood is late to pretty much every party (except a success party), this is where we are at currently.

Rich Criminal: The Jinx (2015)

Criminals should only be hated. They have no right to be interesting. Or at least that’s what the opposition to India’s Daughter would have us believe. Flying in the face of such impeccable logic, HBO’s riveting-six part documentary series The Jinx directed by Andrew Jarecki is about a very interesting criminal- Robert Durst. Durst is the displaced heir to one of the biggest property tycoons in Manhattan. A multimillionaire with an estimated fortune of $100 million, he has has long been suspected of murdering three people (his first wife Kathleen, his best friend Susan and his neighbor Morris), but has never been convicted of a single one, thanks mostly due to the best lawyers that money can buy and some laughably shoddy investigation.

Jarecki has been researching Durst for over eight years. He directed the poorly received 2010 film, All Good Things starring Ryan Gosling as Robert Durst. In fact a lot of the material that is used in The Jinx comes from when Jarecki was laying the groundwork for the film. Even though the film itself was not at all memorable, it led to Durst calling Jarecki and saying he wanted to be interviewed to put rumors that have dogged him for three decades.The Jarecki-Durst Q&A starts with Durst’s childhood when he saw his mother committing suicide at age 7 and slowly builds into a chilling portrait of Durst as a charismatic, arrogant, eccentric and maybe mentally disturbed person.

Jarecki makes some questionable aesthetic choices like relying too heavily on over the top reconstructions of key events, but nothing can take away from the voyeuristic high of watching an intelligent criminal tease us with a glimpse into his mind. Jarecki uncovers fresh evidence that implicates Durst and the final episode is a triumph of suspense, the kind that only real life can throw.

The Jinx is a cannily crafted look at an incredible criminal. Binge watching is highly recommended.

OEDIPUS VEX: Mommy (2014)

Director:
Xavier Dolan
Writer:
Xavier Dolan
Stars:
Anne Dorval, Antoine-Olivier Pilon, Suzanne Clément

Language: French

Mommy is 25-year-old prodigy Xavier Dolan’s ode to moms, gift-wrapped in thorns. It’s the story of 46-year-old Diane ‘Die’ Després, a single mom struggling with her ‘problem child’ Steve who suffers from ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder). Diane’s husband passed away three years ago, which caused Steve’s condition to spiral out of control. The film begins with Diane being called in to the state-run detention center that Steve is currently a resident of. Turns out, he set fire to the canteen and caused third-degree burns to a student. So they hand him back to Diane who can now either home-school him, or give him up to the state under the (fictional) S-14 law which applies to juvenile delinquents. Steve played charismatically by Antoine Olivier Pilon, is a hard child to love. He is hyper, abusive, violent and constantly testing the boundaries of parental patience and propriety (at one point he fondles his mother’s breasts). If Steve is problematic, Diane also has her own issues. An alcoholic without a steady job, Diane hustles her way through problems, sometimes using her fading beauty as a weapon. The two of them are fiercely fused together. Their world is narrow. Which is probably why Dolan and his cinematographer Andre Turpin shot the film in a 1:1 aspect ratio that grows on you gradually. The metaphor hits home in a breathtaking moment in the film where Steve reached in into the screen to prise it open to the rectangular aspect ratio we are used to.

“Loving people doesn’t save them”, says the head of the detention center to Diane as she gives up on Steve and urges Diane to do the same. This is where Mommy differs from most representations of motherhood in movies. In being adamant that love exists in parallel and not just as a force of change.The only companion to Mommy that I can think of is Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin.

If you have grown up on a cinematic diet of Nirupa Roys and Jaya Bachchans doing aartis, having ESP and sacrificing everything for the apple of their eyes, this mother-son relationship will make you queasy. (A good indicator of how much you will enjoy this film is how you reacted to the scene in Haider where Tabu kisses Shahid Kapoor.)

Personally, I am a big believe in the power of quease. Especially when it comes to motherhood. <Rant Alert> We are a country obsessed with making everything a mother. Including cows. So a film like this is a wonderful slap in the face of those who insist on sugarcoating and deifying the complexity of raising a child. Most recently, we saw this flawed framing at work in the documentary India’s Daughter, where Jyoti Singh’s mother was presented as some sort of superhuman paragon of virtue. We do a great disservice to moms all over the world when we paste the label of ‘Saint’ on them because it’s only an excuse to not engage with the truth of giving birth and raising another human being. No, I have not raised a child. But I have been one, and I can strongly testify to the fact that it gets ugly.

Mommy is a roller coaster ride through the best and worst of being a mum and being a child. Get it here.

Why Bollywood is Turning to Kumar Sanu, Altaf Raja and Bappi Lahiri (Firstpost)

Is the resurgence we are witnessing of almost-vintage voices, a reaction to the anodyne singing that fills Bollywood today?

Why Bhumi Pednekar’s debut as the overweight Sandhya in Dum Laga Ke Haisha is a double blow to the patriarchy in Bollywood.

Mr. Turner: Mike Leigh’s Anti-Biopic

There are no surprises in biopics. We know what’s going to unfold. Yet we love watching actors go to great lengths to be the spitting image of someone famous. Why? Partly because, I suspect, we like the comfort of a tale foretold. Partly because of the immense shadenfreude we feel at knowing that the life of a genius too, is fraught and unhappy. When we watch a biopic, we become voyeurs and the film, a peephole that seduces us into thinking that we ‘know’ the subject at the centre of it. But most of all, the reason why we love watching biopics is because they are inspirational. Not just in the obvious way. Sure, ‘Bhaag Milkha Bhaag’ is an inspiring story, but what is even more inspirational is the (laughable, imho) bodily transformation of Farhan Akhtar. I bet BMB sent more people running to gym than to a deeper appreciation of Mr Singh. Similarly in better-made films like ‘Ray’ or ‘Walk the Line’, we are more inspired by the fact that Jamie Foxx and Joaquin Phoenix could transform into Ray Charles and Johnny Cash so convincingly that for the 2 hours of the film, we are willingly fooled. And the more fooled we are, the better we think it is. I love me some good biopics (most recently, ‘The Theory of Everything’) but it’s definitely a genre that’s stuck in a rut.

So it’s a good thing that Mike Leigh comes in with Mr Turner, a biopic on the famous 18th Century British painter J.M.W Turner whose ‘fuzzy’ paintings of nature helped lift the very concept of landscape painting into prominence when it was languishing and playing second fiddle to the more lucrative arena of portrait painting. Three decades after he died, his use of light would inspire the formation of the Impressionist movement. Played magnificently by Timothy Spall, Mr Turner is an intelligent ogre who can’t suffer fools and whose preferred mode of communication is a series of versatile grunts. Looking a bit like a gargoyle (his words, not mine), Spall plays Turner superbly as a man who had no patience for the fripperies of his time but whose sharp edges and general grumpiness hid a capacity for great emotion. I know next to nothing of art, and even I could sense why his landscapes are considered brilliant. They capture the enormity of nature and the insignificance of man which at that period would have been a very unfashionable thought to have.

The reason I can come to that conclusion about Turner’s work despite being a philistine is because Mike Leigh approaches Mr. Turner as an instrument to deepen our understanding of the art and not the man. Although these are connected, they are not the same. After watching Mr Turner, I didn’t want to read about J.M.W, I just wanted to stare at a painting by him.

This Divided Island- Stories From The Sri Lankan War By Samanth Subramanian

War as a process. Not an event. For over three decades, the island of Sri Lanka has been ripped apart by a government-led military campaign that sought to eliminate the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam). This government vs insurgents conflict was also one of regional and linguistic identity. Dominating the government are the Sinhalese who form the majority of the population and speak Sinhala. The LTTE consisted of Tamils, a minority that was consistently sidelined, oppressed and speak Tamil. The Sinhalese claim that they are the original occupants of the land and follow Buddhism. The Tamils on the other hand, contest this claim and largely follow Hinduism. The ‘Sinhala Only’ Act in 1956, which replaced English with Sinhala as the state’s official language further accelerated resentment against the Sinhalese and led to the rise of Velupila Prabhakaran. Prabhakaran formed the LTTE, a militant separatistic outfit that the government then tried to eliminate unsuccessfully for the coming three decades, finally succeeding in 2009 when it killed him. We Indians, of course know Prabhakaran best as the person responsible Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination.

I remember vividly seeing the image of a dead Prabhakaran splashed across papers and guiltily feeling a sense of victory. Guilty because it reminded me of our primeval nature. No matter how evolved the discourse around war or terrorism gets, we ultimately need a photo of a dead Prabhakar, Saddam or Kasab to feel ‘The End’ as a society. ‘This Divided Island’ reminds us that there is no such end.

How does a three-decade war erode the fabric of civil society? In ‘This Divided Island’ Samanth Subramanian weaves across a country gingerly recovering from the onslaught. Many civil liberties like freedom of the press, that we take for granted are not adhered to in Sri Lanka so it’s doubly admirable that Subramanian managed to slip through the cracks of a tight-fisted government that is working hard to obfuscate all allegations of war crimes. Cutting a swathe through a wide cross-section of the populace, Subramanian talks to former LTTE members who have now settled abroad, journalists, the next of kin of those who have ‘disappeared’ in the war, Sinhalese monks, and the general public who’ve been bombed, maimed and brutalized repeatedly.

‘This Divided Island’ is part memoir, part travelogue and part investigative reportage. It’s a format that allows us, the reader to trace the large arc of Sri Lanka’s violent history through the first-hand experiences of Subramanian and the people he talks to. His prose has a matter-of-fact quality to it that draws you in even when there is mountain of information and suffering to be absorbed. But when confronted with the mundane, like being on a bumpy bus ride, a vivid image jumps off the page and you cannot but encounter Subramanian’s skill with words. Here is an example: The bus transmitted each scar and lesion of the road as precisely as if somebody were pummeling in Morse code. I curled my body into a tense coil and waited for daybreak.

‘This Divided Island’ is a 360-degree look at a ravaged country next door that seldom opens itself up to outsiders. Read it.

Bangalore Days (2014) – Sepia Tinted Wish Fulfilment

Bangalore Days is a likeable new film by director Anjali Menon. To me it functions like a signpost flashing on the road to Malayalam cinema’s recovery which reads, “Great Things Are On Their Way. This Film is Not It. But We Are Halfway There.”

Three cousins- Divya, Arjun and Krishnan P.P are fast friends. Arjun is a thrill-seeking, nomadic racer who lends the film its cool quotient. Krishnan PP is the virginal nerd who is the sutradhar of the story, And Divya alternates somewhere in the middle. Rebellious when needed. Demure when needed. It’s basically a Freudian trifecta of id, ego and superego.

Marriage and jobs lead them from Kerala to Bangalore, where they are shaken out of their childhood and forced to grow up. Divya gets married to a sullen MBA zombie (played very well by Fahadh Faasil), Krishnan’s dad runs off to escape the suffocating clutches of domesticity. And Arjun falls in love with(*SPOILER ALERT*) a paraplegic RJ, an event which has somewhat of a steadying influence.

Bangalore Days is terribly sweet, well-intentioned and lifted by convincing performances by actors Nazriya Nazim, Nivin Pauly and Dulquer Salman. Unfortunately it’s also very plastic. It’s drenched in an Archie’s comic like idealized notion of the transition from adolescence to adulthood. If you fast forward the film, it looks too much like a TV ad for a university (probably Amity). After a while, I started dreading all of the montages that kept popping up. I split them into three categories: 1) Friendship Montages 2) Flashback Montages 3) Race Montages.
If someone took all my memories of being 20 years old and Photoshopped the dark shit till it became beige- it would look something like Bangalore Days (without the tacked on plot).

It’s not my cup of tea. But it could be yours. If you like yours very sweet.

Lady Middlebrow