indian popular cinema

[nrh]

i don't think kumbalangi nights is playing anywhere in the us at all, it's not even showing up in our normal edison spot. what's more depressing is that peranbu wasn't (and won't be) picked up by one of the more art house theaters here.

watched buddhadeb dasgupta's bagh bahadur last night, which i had kind of expected never to be able to see but recently showed up in a battered but watchable print on youtube. it's definitely the moment where he seems to be transitioning from his early work to the increasingly abstract later films; it actually reminds me of those 20 minute shorts he made based on tagore poetry early this decade. but the film benefits from the added length, with the flowering hope and natural beauty of the first half ebbing as the film reaches the inevitable conclusion.

also watched and liked ivan ayr's debut film soni on netflix, about two women working as police officers in delhi in very different places in the hierarchy of the police force. it might overplay its hand a little in the last two scenes, but it's one of the most confidently staged and acted films i've seen in a long time, and one of the most elegant uses of the 1 shot/1 scene conceit that i can think of...

[nrh]

also pathetic that kumbalangi nights (and peranbu a week before that) don't release anywhere near here

@augusto kumbalangi nights just got added to the jersey theaters, so seems like they've finally expanded it to the us? still might not be playing near you but at least it's worth a look.

[nrh]

dillagi, basu chatterjee 1978

dharmendra, on his way to becoming india's biggest action star by this point, asks basu chatterjee to write and direct a movie for him, and of course basu casts him in a delicate low key romance where he plays a slightly foppish, rose carrying sanskrit professor in love with the chemistry teacher (his real life wife hema malini) who teaches in the next classroom.

this is one of those odd movies where the things i love about it might be utterly annoying to some; it is so content to drift along on a lyrical, almost plotless course that it constantly threatens to evaporate into nothing. but there is a typical basu chatterjee core here, about a very bright and serious woman who has never allowed herself the things she wants in life quietly admitting that she can be happy.



is raat ki subah nahin, sudhir mishra 1996

there's a new print of this on p***e that crops image to 16x9 but is so much better in quality than the eros dvd and digital rip i have that it's worth it. cult classic bombay neo-noir thing - caddish, two timing advertising dude drunkenly slaps a mob boss while weeping on the phone to try and get his girlfriend back at a bar, and spends the rest of the film running from gangsters and trying to warn the people he loves that their lives are in danger; the whole thing is set across a single night, and the film's greatest pleasures are the night time city photography and renu saluja's crazy editing rhythms. mishra depicts the heroes as privileged cads and the gangsters as struggling career men, as much in over their head in a weird convoluted system as the wrong man at the wrong time dude they're trying to kill. film maybe ends up overlong but picks up a weird, poignant melancholy along the way.

and watched a mercedes for ashish by ruchir joshi on youtube; lovely 30-ish minute short, a lovely calcutta city film paired with densely written first person story of love, money and travel centered on driving in the city. well worth a look...

[augusto]

also pathetic that kumbalangi nights (and peranbu a week before that) don't release anywhere near here

@augusto kumbalangi nights just got added to the jersey theaters, so seems like they've finally expanded it to the us? still might not be playing near you but at least it's worth a look.

yes it's playing at a theater ~15 miles from me. seems to have gotten the pariyerum perumal treatment, only 4 screenings over 3 days. might go.

(love both dillagi and a mercedes for ashish!)

[roujin]

dillagi sounds great.

[nrh]

dillagi sounds great.

added it to resources folder

[thoxans]

does anyone have any top sugs based on the following list...? https://www.thecinemaholic.com/indian-m ... n-netflix/

(note: i've already seen or watchlisted kabhi haan kabhi naa, jab we met, baahubali, and andhadhun)

[thoxans]

just finished andhadhun in fact, and it was great! it's like brian de palma met asghar farhadi, and they had a baby together, who grew up to make a great (off)bollywood flick

(note: this post was written with serri in mind)

[nrh]

does anyone have any top sugs based on the following list...? https://www.thecinemaholic.com/indian-m ... n-netflix/

(note: i've already seen or watchlisted kabhi haan kabhi naa, jab we met, baahubali, and andhadhun)

that's not a particularly great list - some of the best indian stuff on netflix isn't there, and some dreadful movies are. but fandry, highway, masaan, guru, dev d, khakhee should be worth a look.

edit - should clarify i haven't seen highway out of these but all are of auteur interest and on my watch list

[augusto]

watched kumbalangi nights this past weekend. before all else, quite overwhelmed with how many gorgeous people there are in this film. anna ben, shane nigam, sreenath bhasi, jasmine metivier, sheela rajkumar, grace antony, etc. and fahadh faasil of course (except he's a monster in the film, more on it below). also when bobby (nigam) ribs a friend for being ugly, friend's lover's response is to make him don a pair of sunglasses and claim that he looks like vinayakan. great stuff.

https://youtu.be/ZKhOs_Pc_7s

really lovely film, in a somewhat similar vein to maheshinte prathikaram (which involved many of the same key people, soubin shahir in addition to fahadh, scriptwriter syam pushkaran, and director dileesh pothan who's one of the producers on kumbalangi...) in being in an outwardly familiar mode of poetic realism, given to intensely lyrical landscape shots, elements incorporating romance, coming-of-age and family melodrama, while recording the very particular character and quotidian detail of a place and subculture -- in this case a small fishing island village on the outskirts of kochi -- but equally with an inclination to tonally morph in disorienting ways, here a jarring yet largely effective shift to domestic horror in its concluding passages, materialized primarily through fahadh's eyes, a seemingly plastered grin and a revoltingly well-groomed mustache.

and while on the subject, @thoxans maheshinte prathikaram is on netflix (last time i checked), and is certainly worth checking out.

[thoxans]

maheshinte prathikaram

watchlisted! thx

[rischka]

greg tryin to make rowdy baby a thing on metafilter

https://www.metafilter.com/179712/Well- ... trend-baby

thanks for all the deva links greg!

[nrh]

expected to take the film seriously and be in on the joke at the same time.

Oh, is THAT how these are supposed to work? It's been @impossible for me to find the right affective headspace to approach these movies in; maybe that would do it.

Seems like an awfully sophisticated viewing strategy to expect of a mass audience numbering in the (millions?), though, just sayin'.

[nrh]

looks like something weird happened to last post?

the quote is from something i wrote and i didn't write the body of the post here?

[mesnalty]

Looks like Lencho's prose style!

[rischka]

wth -- i saw your previous post, it was definitely there earlier

[Lencho of the Apes]

Oh dear oh dear oh dear.

I was trying to quote you and respond to the quote and I hit the edit button instead of the quote one. Let me see if I can set things aright.

Nope, nothing I can do. If NRH wants to recreate his OP, I can splice it in there, but otherwise, no. My apologies...

[rischka]

CENSORSHIP

[Lencho of the Apes]

SHUP. Or I'll cancel all your flair.

[nrh]

SHUP. Or I'll cancel all your flair.

who would've guessed, that out of all the admins, it would be lencho who'd become drunk with power?

[brian d]

i'd have guessed it would have been me.

just finished watching srk in jab tak hai jaan. very unimpressed. movies need less amnesia, not more.

[Lencho of the Apes]

It wasn't me, guys! I was hacked by the Russians. I mean, that's obvious, right? No other explanation...

[augusto]

swapner din (buddhadeb dasgupta, 2004)



have to thank @nrh for putting dasgupta on my radar again. possibly had seen no more than one of his films (the one with rajit kapoor, charachar), though have little recollection of it and on this evidence, i shouldn't have slept on him for so long. cinematographer venu's elegantly moving camera, key to many great malayalam films -- bhoothakkannadi, thazhvaram, namukku parkkan munthiri thoppukal, also john abraham's amma ariyan, etc. -- and mani kaul's mati manas, among others, is crucial to dasgupta's abstract exploration of landscape. two men in a car, wandering the countryside showing anti-dowry, family planning educational films on a 16mm projector, a machine one of them is obsessed with and a pregnant widow dreaming of a return to bangladesh, the premise and themes echo at least a couple of ghatak's films (ajantrik and jukti...) and i'm never one to balk at that. but this is really very strong on its own terms -- a brief comic gag where the trio are repeatedly misled in their search for the stolen machine, for one -- and has made me want to check out more of his work very soon.

@brian d i think you might like this. (at any rate, you might like this more than jab tak hai jaan.)

[brian d]

of dasgupta's films i've only seen their story. i'll give this one a shot. it won't take much for me to like it more than jab tak hai jaan, which isn't saying much, but swapner din sounds good. i might check out some of his others while i'm at it (distance caught my eye, not sure if there are others worth a look).

[...]

thanks for all the deva links greg!

I'm kinda bummed it worked out that way since I'd been trying to make a Prabhu Deva post forever, but couldn't figure a way to do it while trying to get around the problematic sexual politics of a lot of it while also not making it too gigantic a post. I had links to everything he's worked on and was trying to work up a actual history around the movies and people he's worked with since I'm sure most people have no idea how big a star, say, Sridevi was or whatever. I mostly just regret not getting a chance to link to some of the numbers Deva directed or choreographed since that's some of his best stuff.

Like these two numbers from Singh is Bliing are knockouts:

http://youtu.be/V-CWDpbN9Fk

http://youtu.be/4Lzih-SfYDM

But what can you do? Anyway, many thanks to NRH for pointing the way and the investigation was worthwhile just for helping me get a better grasp of the subject, not just Prabhu Deva, but so much of the other work from that same time period. Maybe I'll look into Farah Khan next, but I'm not sure she will translate quite as well since her style seems more context based.

[nrh]

i might check out some of his others while i'm at it (distance caught my eye, not sure if there are others worth a look).

dooratwa is great, but quite different than his later films, though a lot of that is due to production constraints; it makes me think a little of adoor's first two films, which kind of suggest a totally different trajectory he could have taken.

buddhadeb's films up through phera are knotty and elliptical but still fairly grounded in a kind of psychological realism; he work after the documentary ganesh pyne: a painter of elegant silence become increasingly abstract, based as much on obsessively repeated images, motions and landscapes as anything else. the period in between seems a little muddled and transitional to me, but all the movies are at least interesting.

[nrh]

should've watched one of the genuine classics on my 1989 watch list, but decided instead to watch bhrashtachar, one of the films of ramesh sippy's usually dismissed later career. sippy (who made sholay, saagar, shakti) is an incredibly confident director, and he's got both kk mahenjan (who shot most of mrinal sen's best looking movies, and even in '89 managed to shoot ek din achanak and kumar shahani's kayal gatha) as cinematographer and a mithun/rekha/rajinkanth cast.

and the start is very promising, with rekha as a crusading reporter judo-throwing every man that comes in her way and mithun as a police officer driven to drink and disillusionment by his inability to operate honestly within the system. and the specific path taken by anupam kher's villain - from local real estate exploitation and displacement of the vulnerable (see bombay our city) to national political prominence - is disturbing and wonderfully thought out.

but for the plot to work our heroes need to be almost horrifically naive - first rekha who lets the slimy politician who killed her father convince him of her honesty, and then everyone as they attempt to use the legal system to defeat their enemies even as all evidence points to the fact that the system is rigged top to bottom against them.

such a strange film really, a very earnest relic from a moment where the masala tradition in hindi film was about to die in the '90s. the stylized dialogue and mythical trappings (destruction of the villain on dusshera, for example) work, but some of the older traditions, like the song where the heroes perform in front of the villains in disguise, fall flat in face of the late '80s heightened violence and sexual frankness. only rajini, in a too small role, really gets it...

https://twitter.com/i/status/1103297693257003009

post got deleted but wrote a little bit about apoorva sagodharargal yesterday, which i watched in its hindi version appu raja (weirdly hindi dialogues are written by manohar shyam joshi, who wrote bhrashtachar!).

this is the lost & found revenge movie where kamal haasan (also screenwriter) plays murdered father and both of his twin sons, one of whom is a dwarf, who leads the charge towards revenge through elaborate rube goldberg like contraptions and trained circus animals.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r881IIWMFtQ

the circus setting is the key here i think; the film manages to both be joyfully ludicrous and genuinely moving at the same time. the manmohan desai masala tradition might be dying (desai himself dies, heartbroken, only a year or two later), and the singeetam srinivasas rao/crazy mohan/kamal team consistently break the forth wall in asides and elaborate meta jokes on the tradition, but desai's masala already contains a lot of parody in it and somehow what makes those films extraordinary survives, even a little in this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-v-SuoO676U

edit - should say the next ss rao/kamal/crazy mohan film is a full on desai parody, and one of the great tamil comedies. the tamil masala tradition diverges almost completely from the hindi tradition and is still very healthy, whereas in hindi film it's all but gone...

[nrh]

two more films from '89 -



have seen kumar shahani's khayal gatha described as some kind of documentary about classical music, but nothing could be further from the case; this is shahani in mati manas mode, weaving myths and legends and landscape and history around the spine of a tradition. if anything the effect is even more disorienting here, as shahani uses just a handful of actors/figures whose identities seem to shift and erode within the context of the story or stories.

i've always struggled with shahani a little bit; for all of his brilliance i often feel like i understand what he's going for conceptually but can't quite understand how exactly that links with the (admittedly impressive) images on screen. this one feels more direct to me, maybe because i understand at least a little more of the background material, maybe because the music and dance and treatment of landscape is very beautiful on even the most surface level.

a very nice copy on youtube for anyone looking -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZjTf3hugdU&t=5s



indiran chandiran is kamal haasan and suresh krishna playing with the bare outline of moon over parador, although this film couldn't be further away from mazursky's outside the barest outline - corrupt government leader dies, hapless stand in has to play the part.

here kamal plays the mayor in full grotesque prosthetics (jutting fake teeth, weird gut, drooping chin, etc) and weird rasping voice; it's almost an odd meta joke how carefully the film outlines the double putting on the same prosthetics the actor needs to play the role, kamal walking his fans through his own process.

the physicality here is the real pleasure, moments where the film just breaks down into weird kind of onscreen dance without songs; i guess they were thinking of great dictator? and one wonderful action sequence, in which kamal fights off a ton of goons in an underground tunnel lit only by hanging bulbs, which can be both smashed to create darkness and to be used as a weapon.

also on youtube, in a not great print but with subs -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhU-O2Nlp3k&t=2580s

[Lencho of the Apes]

Somewhere recently there was a discussion of how to navigate einthusan effectively. I can't find that thread, but just tonight I discovered a work-around that solves all the problems I had that were driving me away from using that site. Probably even easier than anything you can do if you register as a member; if you plug the URL of your target movie into the thingum at

www.en.fetchfile.net

you'll get a download that includes even the cc.d subtitles.

[nrh]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEuyjXbW9D4

have been trying to find a way to write about ram's peranbu since we saw it a week or so ago. it's a tough, knotty movie that wears its complexity lightly.

basic set up - mammootty is one of a generation or two of south indians who left chronic unemployment in home country to work in the gulf. he comes back when his wife announces she is eloping with another man, and tells him he was never part of their family truly after he learned their child was born with severe cp. so he comes back to take care of a disabled girl on the verge of adolescence, and dealing with the scorn and bitterness of their family he makes the choice to leave the city to raise her in the most remote place he can find. the first half of the film is the two of them in the remote house, the second half when they need to return to chennai.

again, it's a hard film to describe. it's broken down into careful, constructed chapters. it both treats mammootty's father as a good man and as a (in director's own words) a selfish coward. vikram wrote about it here - https://letterboxd.com/j_vuvu/film/peranbu/ and very well but i think still misses something about why it's as extraordinary as it is. but then i can't get at it either yet.

anyway it's on prime and einthusan if anyone's interested...