The Indian films I’ve seen from this year, ranked. Part one of two. A clear first choice and some wins with asterisks. Some musical highlights in the links.
1. Kharij / The Case Is Closed (Mrinal Sen)
An urban working couple hire and house a boy from a small village as a servant; they are surprised by a tragedy.
Kharij is so straightforward and contained I started to worry it a social issues film, but its study of casual neglect and defensive human behavior is told with such calculated middle-class restraint that its accusations seep in and sprawl outward, produce perpetually applicable condemnation. The film is now as much about globalization as any particular domestic institution, but confining most of the action to one neighborhood community, and often one house, wrings tensions between moral outrage and sympathetic guilt to an unbearable degree.
A father’s biting and bitter words at a ceremony are devastating in the way they could also be plainly grateful and envious.
Having first encountered Sen through his formally playful
Bhuvan Shome (1969) and playfully furious
The Interview (1970), it’s a shock how classically shot and assembled
Kharij can feel. It serves the locked-down nature of the work (and apparently matches the style in the two movies with which it forms an unofficial thematic trilogy,
Ek Din Pratidin (1979) and
Ek Din Achanak (1989) – I’ve seen neither, yet); instead of bursts of emotional expression or the tangled tracking of
Akaler Shandhaney (1981), Sen focuses on triangulating layers of spectators and makes pronounced point of what he doesn’t include – the voices we do not hear, the places we’re reluctant to go.
Kharij won the Jury Prize
at Cannes.
2. Umbartha / The Doorstep (Jabbar Patel)
Sulabha (Smita Patil) is the wife of a lawyer and the mother of a young daughter, Rani. They live with his well-to-do family: His brother, a doctor, whose childless wife dotes on Rani to the point of monopolization. His mother, a hospital administrator, who is hoping Sulabha will come to work for her and put her recently acquired sociology degree to use. But Sulabha is paralyzed with restlessness. She does not belong.
She receives an offer to run a rural women’s reformatory hundreds of miles away. It is a place where they put women who do not belong.
Am surprised how much this Marathi drama stuck with me, because it takes forever to get started and for the longest time it feels plain. You can guess how things go when Sulabha arrives at her job. We’re given blunt, heartbreaking testimony from the women kept there, raising a litany of social issues. Sulabha uncovers corruption, steps on toes, seems to form bonds. A showy dream sequence is a desperate acknowledgment of how stiff and plain everything else has been, and also exactly the sort of formal outburst you expect.
But as Sulabha moves from instituting attitudes from the world outside –Compulsory prayer! She tells one woman to smile more! – to properly identifying with the women she oversees, as she sees the reformatory as a place that only serves the world that rejected them and sees the dynamics of the prejudices that put them there at work inside, she feels less involved and more alone. Her isolation resonates. One late surprise (bold for its inclusion, less than progressive in its prescription) reflects back on her in intriguing ways. The extended introduction at home feels like padding while it plays, pays off in a big way down the stretch.
There are some villains, and some easy rights/wrongs, but mostly Patel rejects tidiness. People have mixed feelings, differing opinions, different contexts for decisions made. And though those can often appear punishing, in the end they help make a case for messy personal freedoms. I wish the last shot wasn’t in the film, Patel leaves an expressive ambiguity behind. Patil is excellent, confidently resistant throughout; she’s featured in five films on this list, and at least three of them have her staring into camera, Monika-like. This is the one where that works.
3. Elippathayam / Rat-Trap (Adoor Gopalakrishnan)
Will no one consider the effects of feudalism on the feudal lords?
Unni is the last male heir in a landowning family that has seen their estate shrink and dilapidate as the modern world encroaches. He lives there alone with his two sisters. The eldest, about to advance past desirable marrying age, selflessly runs the house and cares for him; the youngest attends school with people she would once have served her. Workers who tend the estate do so out of tradition or for a chance to pilfer its meager crops. The house has grown rotten and rodent-infested, the estate’s pond is stagnant. Unni’s activity has shrunk to a routine that starts with reading a newspaper and ends at particulars of personal hygiene. He is self-obsessed, indolent, useless, and unable to change, abusing what petty power he still can until that too vanishes.
There is not much story, metaphors and political points aren’t subtle, but those things don’t matter.
Elippathayam is a deteriorating state of mind, a mood piece, a (Kat Ellinger voice) gothic horror for anyone who’s let their circle of concern constrict like a snare. A self-imposed
Repulsion. (It works as a lockdown movie, not that you need another one of those.) Paranoia and OCD have set in. Pieces go missing; information isn’t allowed to enter the frame, major events drop into ellipses. Darkness swallows the screen.
That darkness is beautiful. Deep pools of black, islands of light, bold primary color swatches. This is the first of two gorgeous Malayalam films featuring mental illness from this year, and I was surprised Gopalakrishnan and Govindan Aravindan have different DPs from different schools and different generations. (Ravi Varma, here.) So grateful Second Run has
this and Gopalakrishnan‘s
Man of the Story in their catalog. Proofed subtitles! What a luxury.
4. Gandhi (Richard Attenborough)
A UK-India co-production, directed by a bit-player from Satyajit Ray’s
The Chess Players. The longest film on this list, and to date the only feature to include both Daniel Day-Lewis and John Ratzenberger in its cast.
I struggle where to put this, a film I in many ways admire and enjoy, but an inherently flawed project that’s of a genre for which I don’t much care. It deftly, deceptively simplifies a man and a history; romanticizes aspects of a particular political movement into enlightenment; is made by an emissary from the ousted colonial power who lacks any strong cinematic viewpoint but is eager to soften self-criticism and find himself in the frame. There have been a litany of legitimate objections to
Gandhi’s form and the content made by people far more knowledgeable and connected to the world depicted than I; their criticisms have both been borne out and muted by the fact there has been no comparable film made since.
It's a movie that is aware of some of the things it cannot do and either makes use of its inadequacies or exhibits them as acknowledgment. It’s an epic march of stubbornness made of a series of visually stifling prison sentences and fasts. Unprepared to become a series of ongoing arguments, it stakes out a single position and cycles events as repeated fable. The built-in episodic choppiness of biopics and historical films becomes an expression of the passing of time under a single sustained effort. When the film feels so lost in its second half, after independence is achieved, it’s naked admission of its accumulated simplifications and biased diagnostic capabilities. (And when I read lists of objected omissions, I find that aspects of many of them are at least hinted, somewhere.) It is exasperating how Attenborough always searches for white faces in this, and the relay of Western audience surrogates (Ian Charleson, to Martin Sheen, to Candice Bergen) makes it seem like Mahatma Gandhi needed a series of handlers; but they are always shown in awe of him, and if that veers into a fascination with exoticism (the religious glow the camera gives Geraldine James’ Mirabehn is gross) that can be rationalized through gritted teeth as a recognition of two layers of marketing: Gandhi’s to the Western press, and Attenborough’s to his Western investors.
Sumita S. Chakravarty wryly points out that from the at the film’s start, which marches the man’s garlanded corpse to its pyre under the narration of an American news reporter, Gandhi is being packaged and explained for Western audiences. This is fundamentally a Western film dominated by imported actors.(*) (It’s hardly of the dominant Indian filmmaking idiom.) At its most objectionable that means drastic self-absolution, soft-peddling the cruelty of colonialism, and filing Attenborough’s
Gandhi within context of the Thatcher-era cinematic “Raj Revival” (
A Passage to Inda,
Jewel in the Crown, etc.) reinforces it as a work with a narrowed viewpoint in an ongoing story.
(*) There are many Indian-born actors in the cast. Here’s Om Puri, this year’s National Awards winner for Best Actor (for Shyam Benegal’s
Arohan, see below), giving a typically intense performance in an unfortunate late scene wherein the father of the country tries to reverse King Solomon his baby back together.
But getting that sliver told was no mean feat, and an audience-friendly, arms-length heroic portrait was the practical way to take it to the globe. Settling the difference between those who thought Mohandas Gandhi so saintly he should be played by a ball of light and those who wanted a warts-and-all biopic is impossible. (Salman Rushdie starts
his criticism, “Deification is an Indian disease,” then jokes the film incomplete without Gandhi’s more perverse experiments in abstinence.) Chakravarty notes Gandhi’s own persona was to be “all things to all people.” So you double-down on humility, get Ben Kingsley laughing at Martin Sheen’s jokes. Does Kingsley become Gandhi, or to the West is Gandhi now essentially Kingsley’s performance? People who argue that the movie is bad and/or wrong but Kingsley is amazing are missing that it is Kingsley’s movie.
Gandhi wins the same way it purports (Rushdie, again: “A fiction,” “Its message… worse than nonsense.”) India won its independence: Through a single charismatic leader and the imposing presence of a massed people. This has a humanity at its center and authentic support behind it. Unimaginable what this would have been had it starred John Hurt or Anthony Hopkins and cut/paste CGI crowds.
And
had it starred Naseeruddin Shah and Smita Patil?
The only other full-length feature devoted to Gandhi’s life is Shyam Benegal’s
The Making of the Mahatma, a 1996 Indian-South African co-production that (as per the title) focuses on Gandhi’s formative years; also filmed in English, it makes for interesting complement and comparison. Its slimmer scope allows it to make a more conflicted portrait of the man, include aspects of his character that would have been distractions to Attenborough’s epic. (Maybe you wondered during
Gandhi why his children weren’t marching with him? Maybe you should have?) But in restoring a lot of incidents that
Gandhi pragmatically shuffled into later events to their (presumably) proper places Benegal’s film becomes even choppier, creating new single-use scenes where Attenborough’s could multitask; and events depicted in both movies are inevitably weaker here. Benegal’s film is less well-funded, looks and sounds it. (It does not help that his usually effective composer, Vanraj Bhatia, here provides the sort of dispiriting chintzy synth orchestra score now common to History Channel reenactments.)
Mahatma also struggles to leave things out, and Mohandas’ multifaceted life can make him
Young Mr. Gandhi and Florence Nightingale and Benjamin Franklin, all on the way to becoming Siddhartha. He may also be in the booth, threading the projector.
Mahatma’s Gandhi, Rajit Kapoor, has no way to be all that. There’s no flow to it even as there is an arc. But he can bring an exciting edge to some of the material while never losing his congeniality. Kapoor never displaces Kingsley. But then Kingsley doesn’t really become
Gandhi (and vice versa) until he puts his glasses on.
But when you’re half a world away, safe and sheltered, considerations are simpler. I saw this in the theater as a child with my parents and have remained impressed by an epic film where every act of violence is seen as a failure
5. Prem Rog / Sickness of Love (Raj Kapoor)
“When she used to cry all night, the whole village was happy.”
She is the bratty, naïve daughter of a powerful landowning family in a small village. He is the orphaned nephew of the local priest, who often studied and tutored and played within the walls of the landowners’ compound. He has been sponsored by her parents to get a modern, urban education. He returns to the girl and finds their teasing and fooling has become flirting and dreaming.
Kapoor takes a traditional story and tells it in a traditional form to attack traditional values. Which may by now be the neotraditional purpose of the melodrama? It’s immediately clear how good Kapoor is at the old ways, and eventually feasible he’s too old to leave them behind.
But those first two hours! Sometimes there’s nothing more invigorating than a steady hand doing sure work;
Prem Rog is so certain and perfect the sheer craft of it had me randomly tearing up. I gasped at the obvious. I felt the fiddle. Impose your weird Christmassy red-green-white outdoor palette on me, you madman. A majority of the musical sequences resound: The
rousing crowd number in the village square. The
goofy fantasy extravagance with the abrupt belly dancing. (“What is this thing called love? How many musical notes does it have? Let me hear all of them.”) The
spectral doubt and longing in the hush of night. A buzz through the same tulip fields seen in Yash Chopra’s
Silsila (
“Just try laughing once. Millions of flowers will bloom and scatter.”), which ends with such a stirring whoosh that I’m tearing up again just thinking about it.
Maybe it’s the pollen. That last song boils down to “Smile More,” and though it’s hesitantly received, it points to the fault line that eventually makes the movie crack: He’s the hero, but it’s her story. The class difference that makes you sympathize and even identify with him is sly or dastardly manipulation that grants him misguided righteousness: If she’s not willing to reject social norms, the pauper can only marry the princess if she suffers tragedy and indignity; that the boy and perhaps the director cannot see past romantic love as the solution to their quest/film is a problem. The film has to punish her for choices she didn’t really get to make.
Kapoor spends the second half railing against an extreme and narrow custom – so narrow in such a big-looking film that when it’s seeded early, you’re liable to ignore it – to show women as perpetual prisoners of tradition. He tries to unite the boy’s and girl’s plights by decrying the authoritarian power of the male landowners as the source of all rules and as responsible for the prejudices of the townspeople. The climax is fiery and sloppy, with a weird overlap of affiliations violently measuring umbrages. Kapoor envisions apocalyptic implications from nudging at one odd cultural corollary, everything unravels if you tug a thread, but he can’t deliver the terrifying chaotic fury of something like Shyam Benegal’s
Nishant and finally slaps a Band-Aid on a boggling level of irrational entrenchment. The aftermath runs under the credits as if the film’s trying to get away with something.
There’s a tempting take that Kapoor consciously undermines his hero’s righteousness. Though he is older and educated, the boy and the girl are pitched as impulsive children – there’s no way to ignore how adolescent the two brides are in this film – and Kapoor never shies from suggesting that people and situations are more complex than bombastic drama demands. The authority that’s railed against is hardly monolithic and all-powerful, and the landowners’ compound is filled with women who have a variety of attitudes and wield influence in different ways. But it’s a man’s world and a man’s film and most of the powerful men in this are horny fetishists, untrustworthy and recklessly assertive. The point
Prem Rog starts its slide comes after the boy lectures a crowd on their biased categories of human relations; your fist is ready to pump, and then instead of embracing his own enlightened view he accepts a dare. The problem with this take is that the boy is played by Raj Kapoor’s son Rishi, and even if it makes for a better role you doubt the father wants to tarnish his boy’s shine. Literally bathes him in light at pronounced points, and though each time it’s ridiculous, it does not feel insincere.
It’s up to Padmini Kolhapure to shoulder objection to the film being made around her. She plays the girl like she’s unsure how to play a woman and it works, unsettlingly. She is awkward as an object of desire; she does not know what she herself wants and may never be allowed to find out. Events pile on confusion and trauma and she refuses to let those go as the movie moves on. She won the Filmfare Award for Best Actress, perhaps for being steadfastly unconvincing in her character’s happiness.
But those first two hours! Anyway. If a weird tradition renders someone friendless and you love them, be their friend.
6. Arohan / The Ascent (Shyam Benegal)
The exasperating story of a sharecropper’s attempt over
a dozen years to wrest land that rightfully belongs to his family from the feudal landlords that have lived off their labor for generations. It’s an underdog tale with easy sympathies and familiar elements and Benegal looks to frustrate simplicity from the start.
“Based on source material that is essentially true,” the opening title card reads. Om Puri then introduces himself to camera as the star of the film, says that the director said, “a close relationship should be established with the audience… As the audience expects something from the film, the director also wants… co-operation from the audience.” (According to
Sangeeta Datta, the government-funded film was never released to cinemas.) Before going into a backlot introduction of the cast and rattling off dense chunks of context, Puri says, “This film is about land.”
But events often keep us away from the piece of land in question (“Lot 144,” as we come to know it through innumerable courtroom scenes) and the camera generally hangs back from the action – the same way Puri’s protagonist stands on the sidelines of the various political factions marching to and fro. If the audience has any automatic populist sympathies, they may find those challenged early by a bloodthirsty Naxalite mob. Benegal even limits his usual attempts at community building, choosing to follow dead-end legal actions and stray elements that spin off into subroutines until this film about land doesn’t seem to be about land at all, anymore.
It’s tempting given its title and pathway to say
Arohan is a film about political involvement, and in a strange way, though it takes place in a different region and time, it covers much the same ground as Goutam Ghose’s recent first features,
Maa Bhoomi and
Dakhal. But Ghose’s techniques (Soviet-inspired agitprop, stylized theatricality) are a lot more distancing and pronounced than anything Benegal does after teasing that intro.
Arohan doesn’t always fit together smoothly, and its city-set pieces veer toward cautionary sensationalism, but by the end Benegal matches his best early works in capturing and expressing the deep ineffable entanglement of the personal, the communal, and the historical. Here that involves discovering a larger place than your lot, whether that’s through tragic rootless disconnect, the helpless feeling of getting lost in the sway of shifting political currents, or a sense of purposeful interconnection with people and systems and time and country.
7. Shakti / Power (Ramesh Sippy)
Sippy’s genre-defining
Sholay had everything, most everything worked. His follow-up
Shaan worked when it was a light con caper, and again later when it was also a James Bond goof, but its emotional backbone was mishmash rehash and bummed out the party.
Shakti is all bummer for the better. A basic story about a cop (Dilip Kumar) whose commitment to the law comes between him and his son (Amitabh Bachchan), its worst parts either fall away or blend to good effect, and somehow its three hours come off focused and spare. This was this year’s Filmfare Best Picture winner.
There are worst parts! The central relationship is launched by a clumsy contrivance. All the plotting feels like motions, gone through; the romance, perfunctory. I’d forgotten there were songs in this, and though
"Jane Kaise Kab Kahan" is a fine tune, until its smoldering end the footage under it is anonymous. That’s a numbing amount of time-fill, white noise into which Kumar buries his self-sabotage and regret and through which Bachchan’s aging angry young man seethes and wails. So many Bollywood films choreograph elaborate fractured family dynamics (orphans, separated brothers, etc.) in service of reveal and reunion, but Sippy restores the pared-down father/son schism its primal power.
Also refreshing: The evident care in Sippy’s craft(*). It cuts great. Fight scenes are coherent(!) and the director gets to bring his Leone love to an early showdown. (The showdown is silly, as is a scene of forklift-fu, but both come before fun is unwelcome.) He has enough visual control that you feel the color drain from the picture as it goes, enough confidence that he is unafraid to go silent. Each actor gets his devastating Shakespearean monologue, but then
Shakti goes wordless for almost five minutes. Sippy’ll give you a gushy emotional climax but is willing to end on a note of startling ambiguity.
(*) There is one chase through a difficult location that is completely out-of-focus. You feel the film’s pain and hope someone got fired for that.
Shakti is available for rent
on Amazon Prime.
8. Vidhaata / Creator (Subhash Ghai)
“I know what God’s will is. But I won’t let Him do as He pleases!”
Dilip Kumar, so affecting in
Shakti as he let his principles pry apart his family, here readily abandons his principles to pry apart his family. As train conductor Shamsher Singh he asserts that more than anything in life, a man loves his child. Then watches his son die in his arms, watches his daughter-in-law die in childbirth, gives his grandson away to a holy stranger. To repay an act of kindness and a hospital bill he devotes himself to becoming the biggest crime lord in the region.
The
top-grossing Bollywood film of 1982, a
Filmfare Best Picture nominee, and this can’t even get to five reviews on Letterboxd? Not even one that says, “This is cinema?”
This is cinema?
Vidhaata is a masala that makes a lot of unnecessary choices, many of them terrible, most of them welcome. It is a lot worse than some of the movies further down this list and is the better for that. It is ostensibly about the foolishness of fronting free will over destiny and occasionally remembers to pronounce a few things to that effect, but what it’s really about is getting from Point A to Point K without ever observing the alphabet. (Though one villain is forced at gunpoint to recite the entire English alphabet. His henchmen are very excited when he knows it.) The plot is a bull and logic its china shop. When it freezes frames, they are inevitably blurry.
The best way to describe its m.o. is with this .gif, which I’ve not sped or chopped up:
And these are its ideas of using frames within frames:
As slapdash as it is,
Vidhaata is reluctant to let go. Too willing to stop and let old men argue at length, often under the cover of terrible wigs. There comes a point where, as with some of these things, the action’s set to be handed off to its younger stars. But Shamsher Singh’s grandson is a drooling man-baby who resembles a sleepy-eyed Scott Baio; he is good at the Evel Knievelling and the punch-throwing but terminally bad at plan-making and shirt buttons. The movie lets him let loose this humdinger about his dead nanny…
“Uncle, I know that grandpa is the master of my fate. I also know that he’s the father of my father. But that poor man, Abu Baba, was my mother! Despite his poverty, he raised me like his own for 17 years! He was my mother! He was my mother in the real sense of the term! Whosoever has murdered my mother, I won’t spare him at any cost! Even if he happens to be my father!”
…and then throws him in a cage.
The best two musical numbers feature similar-sounding drastically catchy staccato disco goulash and are as flush with nonsense as the rest of the runtime:
"Udi Baba",
“Pyar Ka Imtihaan.” The latter clip includes blackface, but when your movie has everything it can’t have taste.
I have never seen a film by Subhash Ghai before so do not know if his work is typically this clumsy; I kind of needed this one, am filled with excitement and dread at the prospect of more. If you have 99 cents, 2½ hours, and too many brain cells,
Vidhaata is available for rent
on Amazon Prime.
9. Angoor / GrapeGulzar)
This adaptation of
The Comedy of Errors is technically a remake of a different-languaged film based on a novel based on
The Comedy of Errors. That lineage and a
fun credits sequence promise more complications than we get. Which is basically
The Comedy of Errors.
Gulzar is a poet who worked in the film industry as a lyricist before also screenwriting and directing. (He never stopped writing lyrics, has an Oscar for
Slumdog Millionaire’s “Jai Ho.”) Even though music doesn’t feature heavily into
Angoor, I suspect Hindi speakers are getting a lot more out of it than I am. I’ve only seen one other film directed by him so far, and while I appreciate that in both he leans away from melodrama, this can feel caszh where it should get giddy. The second set of twins here are a paranoiac and
his stoner servant and the film doesn’t favor either of their directions hard enough. Both leads are amiable and the film winds up a pleasant bit of confusion.
The best bit concerns the purchase of a rope, with the extracurricular chuckle that of course Indian cinema would make Shakespeare’s “rope’s end” full-lengthed.
To come: More strains of mental illness, both symbolic and sadly real. Squirm-inducing head trauma. Infidelities and shocking divorce rituals. The second-highest grossing film in the history of the Soviet Union. An unexpected tribute to Peter Sellers.
1978 -
1981
