The last time I was told about the genius of a film that will never come above ground was when a group of Delhi University seniors made fun of me for not having watched Paanch- “the greatest Indian film of the last twenty years”. It came to a bad end when I finally watched and thought what a messy, unpolished and even under-developed film Paanch was. The same kind of glow is gathering around Quashiq Mukherjee’s (Q) film Gandu. There is mainstream cinema, alternative independent cinema and, apparently, something known as an alternative to ‘so-called alternative cinema’. The example offered being the Slamdance Film Festival (where Gandu was screened) which aims to be a truer representation of independent filmmaking than Sundance, which is organized at the same time and at almost the same place.

The secretly acknowledged joy of attending film festivals is the sliver of hope that you’ll watch something so outrageously off-kilter that it will remain with you, irrespective of merit, and provide a shifty template for a dark underside that is breathing and alive when you sit down to watch the world TV premiere of Tees Maar Khan. Not so much with Paanch, in my opinion, which- I was led to believe- created a privileged community at its Osian Film Festival screening. Gandu’s merits are debatable too; but it definitely scores on the kookiness.

Gandu is part-chronicle and part-collage, attempting to expose the life of a freewheeling loser who aspires to cut his own rap album someday. The film wobbles around the songs and the songs are written in joyful abandon- exploring the deliciously dirty variety of empurpled Bangla. The reason I write ‘wobbles’ is because the film is often in danger of becoming a string of music videos held together by an ambiguous theme.

The title character- because he is called ‘gandu’ (played by Anubrata Basu) throughout the movie- is a loner who hopes to win the lottery. He spends his days listening to music, wandering aimlessly, listening in on the intimate conversations of an attractive older woman in a cyber café and masturbating. Gandu steals money from a man called Das babu while he has loud sex with his mother. He crashes into a Rickshaw puller and they become fast friends. They smoke crack and ruminate on the meaninglessness of their existence. The film then takes a quick turn- helped by a funny but perhaps a little childish attempt at postmodern high jinks- and it proceeds to unspool in a bizarre manner throwing a lot of our pre-conceptions in doubt. We wonder if the friendship with ‘Rishka’ is real, if the lottery does come through for Gandu at all or if the only colour sequence may have actually happened or not. The film could have been a boring document of Gandu’s priapic adventures- imagined or otherwise. But it tries to confound our expectations from a film of a similar genre in the west. Consummation, when it arrives, is staged very ostentatiously in a dreamy colour-drenched sci-fiesqe scene (think 2046) and we are left hanging with a scene that is explicitly executed, but mysteriously hewed off from the rest of the film.

It remains to be seen if Gandu’s attempt to merge a popular form like rap music and art-school aesthetics will succeed in drawing crowds outside the small film festival circuit. While studio films in India still seek to cultivate a distance between their films and their audience (which makes it impossible for them to operate without employing broad and often damaging cultural stereotypes), Gandu unabashedly forgets about a mass of audience and addresses the body of the viewer and sublimates its base desires to high art. It’s either the sensibility of a fine independent filmmaker, or a concept meaningfully explored with narrative. Although breaking down silly screen taboos is a fine achievement, it is a landmark that must be assessed in retrospect- some years from now. Q has attracted comparisons with Gaspar Noe for his extremism, but I wouldn’t rush into this comparison. Gandu is handling somewhat different issues, and its specific idea of artificial escape from a general cultural malaise is far from the contrived trash-extremities of someone like Noe or Harmony Korine. As was pointed out to me by a fellow-audience member, this film works excellently as a companion piece to P.K. Mehrotra’s wonderful collection of short stories, Eunuch Park. It should give you a good idea of the kind of approach that is adopted by Q.

Gandu may have been made on a shoestring budget, but the cinematography is delightful. The black and white frames tend to simmer with gandu’s impotent rage and sizzle with the hot, white sky as Gandu and Rishka cart out into the open fields. The film is shot around the dingy back alleys of Howrah and you know it’s the kind of film that will situate a story in Howrah and ignore to include a random shot of the popular bridge.

At the public screening of Gandu in Puri, for the Bring Your Own Film Festival (BYOFF), Q said he was trying to get Gandu a ‘proper’ release. I hope this film finds wide distribution and commercial release, although it does not seem likely. The soundtrack, though, you should definitely buy when it is out. Meanwhile, you could watch the trailers here:

Gandu trailer for Berlinale

Gandu Trailer

While it’s true that sometimes there can be nothing worse than a bad American independent film, it must be said that the good- and often great- ones almost invariably fill me up with a warm glow of cynicism, shiny-eyed pessimism and a strong desire to grow a mean beard and stare out in the distance over a churning sea. The stereotype also extends to the fershnickered character seeking what the director of Winter’s Bone, Debra Granik, in an interview, calls “capital R redemption”. Redemption in this movie is sought by the character played by John Hawkes, unforgettably named Teardrop, when he decides to help Ree search for her father and stick with her till the end even against his best instincts. This has earned him a Best Supporting Actor nomination and the Academy could have done a lot worse by not nominating him at all.

Instincts keep the characters afloat in the unforgiving world of Winter’s Bone. Set in the bleak and rugged Ozark mountains in southern Missouri, the film observes the quest of Ree, played with beautiful grit by Jennifer Lawrence, looking for her father when the sheriff announces that she’ll lose her house if he doesn’t show up for his court date. She lives with her incapacitated mother and two younger siblings. Not willing to give up, she works her way through the guarded and unfriendly social network of the local hillbillies who are all involved in the drug trade. During the journey, she has to constantly face the possibility that her father, known for cooking the best meth in the area, has been killed for snitching or made to disappear without any trace (which would still mean the loss of her house).

It’s a rare tale about a good person struggling against an uncertain future and all of us who know Latin will recognize it with the phrase: ‘rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cycno’ or, ‘a good person is as rare as a black swan’. Moreover, the race against time may or may not have lasted for a hundred and twenty seven hours, but it definitely ends in a wrenching climax with severed hands.

The film is refreshingly free of the terrible clichés of ‘southern people’ we are subjected to in American movies almost all the time and confronts the harsh nature of a small community that sustains itself by its own rules and moorings which are often buried deep into a complicated slush of patriarchy and sicilian codes of honour and silence. Ree is strong and responsible: a true fighter, but without the Oscarry trappings of delivering a slow-motion knock-out punch in a flood-lit boxing ring. She cooks for her brother and sister and in another frightening scene, teaches them to shoot with a rifle. Closely observed scenes situated in a landscape that seems to be a cross between gothic and post-apocalyptic wastelands make this a miniature gem about regular people and their desperate struggles. Parents and responsible authority figures are conspicuously absent and Teardrop’s attempt to fill this role makes him look like an exposed wound, struggling against his baser, louche self. In spite of all that, the film ends in a slightly hopeful note and we might think yet that the kids will be all right.

It’s quite clear by now that Winter’s Bone has played the strong Oscar card of evoking the titles of fellow-nominees in its own text. This could be a more useful marker for me than the usual ‘last ten years’ approach which did not, personally speaking, help me much with my ICSE either. But if we must, then we have precedents in the form of major Sundance Film Festival winners scoring big on Oscar night. Like Precious: Based on the novel Push by Sapphire. Additionally, most indie films that do make some noise at the Oscars are usually blessed with writing or supporting actor nods like Alan Arkin’s for Little Miss Sunshine. Precious, again, won for both. Jennifer Lawrence’s character is neither deranged nor afflicted, so no Oscar for her leading actress turn. John Hawkes, on the other hand, might be a surprise winner for Best Supporting Actor. It’s hard to imagine anyone snatching the Adapted Screenplay Oscar from Aaron Sorkin, who wrote the film about the guy who invented liking things. Small films like Hurt Locker do win the Best Picture award occasionally by trumping titanic favourites of the season, but it will be a steep and uphill journey for Winter’s Bone.

Following Mukul’s wonderful list published a month earlier, I decided to throw in ten more movies that, I think, deserve as much attention. This list is perhaps slightly uneven and I only wish I could have seen Tsui Hark’s Detective Dee and the mystery of the Phantom Flame before making it up. So much for range.

After enjoying his ‘The Little Lieutenant’ (Le Petit Lieutenant)I expected Xavier Beauvois’ new film ‘Of Gods and Men’ to be very good and it was. I left it out because it has already been reviewed by Subramanian under Philosophy, Religion and Culture. But the films that follow are not all that similar either. There’s an Italian pseudo-soap opera, a long and rewarding journey with an international terrorist and a strange little film about three children forced to grow up in an idyllic house, cut-off from any contact with the rest of the world. Language is distorted to conform to this exclusion and myths are created and then violently destroyed to maintain the stranglehold. Admirers of non-sequitur dialogue will love to repeat lines like ‘a ‘zombie’ is a little yellow flower’ or, ‘Soon your mother will give birth to two children and a dog’. All of this is in Greek.

Although I feel bad about ranking movies (the list is arranged alphabetically), I’m quite sure that Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s new film is the best I’ve seen all year.

Carlos

Dir. Olivier Assayas; Language(s): English, French, Spanish, Arabic and others.

I watched the three-part release with a running length of more than five and a half hours and it was easily one of the most entertaining set-piece action-thrillers of the year. The film is structured around two decades in the life of Carlos ‘the Jackal’ and flows smoothly from his early days as a committed urban guerilla fighter pushing to open up a space to effectively internationalize the communist struggle to being treated as a loose cannon in the matrices of cold war era middle-eastern politics and, finally, a washed up, overweight phantom hiding and teaching dialectics in a classroom in Sudan until his arrest by the French police in 1995. The film re-creates the energy of Carlos and paints him in several shades, giving us an insight into the world of Marxist-Leninist urban terror groups in Europe and their associations with the ‘Palestinian cause’ manipulated at various turns by ‘larger’ events off-screen, as it were, by even bigger players. The tone of the story doesn’t miss the usual sad irony employed by similar movies, like Uli Edel’s The Baader-Meinhof Komplex which travelled through a similar route of registering great enthusiasm for the terror outfit in its early days, followed by a steady wane that marked the decreasing relevance of their operations and eventual disappearance into the jaws of a new world order.

Dogtooth (Kynodontas)

Dir. Yorgos Lanthimos; Language: Greek

Dogtooth only mildly tweaks age-old critiques of the family being the first and most important ideological imposition on a person’s life. It does not try to exaggerate the cruelty of parents and, in fact, goes out of its way to show how the father (the author of the ‘experiment’) wants the best for his children. But this is hardly a departure; the fact still remains that the ‘experiment’ is cruel and perhaps irreparably damaging, if not for a sly “perhaps” inserted right at the end. Theory, even a half-original one as this, is fascinating dinner-table conversation; but it would fall flat in a movie if it was not supported with memorable images. Dogtooth is shot in an impeccable manner. The frames are pure and often deadpanned, but they’re always perversely hinting or hiding something else. When the elder sister discovers videotapes of two Hollywood blockbusters (Jaws and Rocky), the pristine innocence of her world is shattered and she gets a taste of the world outside. Jaws and Rocky. Avatar, on the other hand, might have just confused her further.

I am Love (Io sono l’amore)

Dir. Luca Guadagnino; Language: Italian

This sumptuous Tilda Swinton-starrer is a wonderful mixture of soppy soap operas and ambitious 19^th century family novels that dealt with unfulfilling marriages, infidelities and female protagonists discovering individual freedoms. It’s constructed slowly and lovingly, in a manner that is again reminiscent of detailed double-decker plots, with the flourish of a sensuous and decadent poet. Swinton plays Emma Recchi, a Russian woman married to an Italian businessman who is part of a large, Milanese family of industrialists. The tone is fin de siècle, and the affair with a young cook (involving foodporn), which is imminent, is delayed flirtatiously and then consummated very suddenly and explicitly. Melodramatic as I’ve made it out to be, Swinton’s act, however, is neither loud nor invisible and the film is not schmaltzy at all; it’s just about perfect.

Ishqiya

Dir. Abhishek Chaubey; Language: Hindi

Abhishek Chaubey’s chapatti western is my pitch for great campy fun at the movies last year. Ishqiya is often vulgar, crude and violent with two crooks who think they have different ideas about love and sex. Vidya Balan plays the rustic belle, embodying a drink-sodden hack-writer’s impression of a good symbol for the frisky and dangerous heartlands of UP. While Vishal Bharadwaj’s brilliant Omkara was locked in a fabulous space, this film breathes easily and manages to remain unpredictable and pulpy.

Moner Manush

Dir. Goutam Ghose; Language: Bengali

Ghose’s film on Lalan Fakir offers interesting possibilities on reading the myths surrounding the popular 19^th Century baul-fakir. Based on Sunil Gangopadhyay’s book, the first impression of Lalan- played by Prosenjit- in the film reminds one of Rabindranath Tagore. It is, I think, a deliberate provocation from the filmmaker to misread Lalan and insulate him from the rational-humanist interpretation that Jyotirindranath Tagore seems adamant to subject him to (but cannot, ultimately). Ironically, many years later, Rabindranath himself would be packaged in this image of a spiritual and mystic voice of the east and sold to the west. Lalan insists throughout the film that there is nothing byzantine about his philosophy and that he considers himself (and he is) completely illiterate and even ‘mad’. So, when he accumulates a bunch of rejects to set up his libertarian utopia in the beautiful and verdant landscapes of western Bengal it is not a calculated, political move to become a promiscuous rake who likes to quote from Proudhon. But we know that the act is undeniably political.

Shutter Island

Dir. Martin Scorsese; Language: English

This, along with Polanski’s The Ghost Writer, was a return to the purity of old formulaic thrillers that fed on paranoia with an equal emphasis on its tragic and ludicrous dimensions. I loved the way Scorsese built up the drama and tension, signposting stifling Hollywood noir-dramas, with top-notch acting performances from the lead actors and supporting actors like Patricia Clarkson, Max von Sydow and Jackie Earle Haley. Scorsese is quite clearly on top of his craft here and there aren’t many things that bode better for movie fans.

Somewhere

Dir. Sofia Coppola; Language: English

I’m surprised by all the flak directed at this movie. I loved all her other movies like everybody else and Marie Antoinette secretly, because I found it hilarious in a self-conscious manner. Somewhere is not Lost in Translation, and the central character of a Hollywood star played by Stephen Dorff here is not immediately likeable or even identifiable. I know Dorff has done a good job because he manages to be believable as a big movie star and also as a vacant, largely non-descript character in his ‘unscripted real life’ between movies. It couldn’t have been Tom Cruise doing this role, or Paul Giamatti. The film works perfectly because it is slow and dragging; a lesson in surface-is-the-depth cynicism. The images flow so naturally that dialogue, when it does crop up, grates a little bit. I consider it an outstanding achievement to have created a film that rides successfully on images and music alone, when there’s a tendency to explain too much and do too many things to appear smart and snazzy with unbearable shticks.

The Father of my children (Le père de mes enfants)

Dir. Mia Hansen-Løve; Language: French

This film could also be seen as a spiritual companion to Olivier Assayas’ Summer Hours (2008). They approach a similar kind of tragedy with the same subdued but restless and curious manner. The world of film and film production feeds easily into a reading of the house of France (perhaps even Europe) in the throes of economic depression. Louis-Do de Lencquesaing plays a busy film producer who is forced to take a hard look at his faltering company. There is a violent rupture in the middle and then several scenes of people trying to come to terms with a great loss. It’s simple, linear story-telling and the characters are not rounded or airbrushed- they stick out awkwardly and often confusingly here and there, with no answers forthcoming. And that is probably where it clinches it.

The kids are all right

Dir. Lisa Cholodenko; Language: English

Lisa Cholodenko’s wonderful film is shot through with moments of intense drama, brilliant humour, difficult home-truths and lesbians getting off to gay male porn. I found Cholodenko’s earlier film High Art (1998) overtly heavy-handed and obsessed with proving some vaguely theoretical point. There is still, to be fair, a discernible attitude of setting out to test a theoretical argument (one of them probably being Kevin Smith’s subtle proposition that all lesbians really need is some ‘serious deep dicking’), but this time the story fits so seamlessly into a clearly flowing narrative that it feels unfair to dock any points for being a well thought out film. Annette Bening and Julianne Moore play a couple with two kids who, in their late-teen years, are curious about their biological father. The sperm donor turns out to be a dashing Mark Ruffalo who is promiscuous, carefree and a new age farmer. The film also offers to provide a wry look at generational change through attitudes towards things like sexuality and music. The daughter (Mia Wasikowska) is named after Joni Mitchell and the soundtrack is a leap across time from her and David Bowie to Vampire Weekend and Uh Huh Her.

Uncle Boonmee who can recall his past lives (Loong Boonmee raleuk chat)

Dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul; Language: Thai

Weerasethakul’s new film arrives in the wake of two tantalizing short features that touched off on similar themes: Phantoms of Nabua and A Letter to Uncle Boonmee. The political relevance of preserving memory and local myths against repression and the sprawl of an impersonal global spirit is absorbed into a mesmerizing tale about a dying man, re-visiting past lives, envisioning future ones and meeting ghosts. He also meets his long-lost son who appears as a monkey ghost and sits at his dinner table, complaining about the bright lights. Boonmee lives in a farm in the middle of a jungle fraught with strange noises, sweet and sour honey, migrant workers from Laos, womb-like caves with aesthetically gnarled innards and beings both human and non-human. The overwhelming feeling that is conveyed by the film is a strong willingness to associate all of these as part of one mysterious and living being that has transcended the limits of time and space. This could have been a dense and unrelenting picture, but Weerasethekul (as in his previous films) handles it with humour and a pleasantly nagging nostalgia for children’s fables and lurid fairytales. The monkey suit is not only outrageous, but also a funny imitation of cheaply made suits from children’s TV shows, complete with gleaming red beads for eyes.

Sthaniya Sambad (Spring in the Colony), 2010

Dir. Arjun Gourisaria and Moinak Biswas, Language: Bengali (with bits of Hindi and English)

Sthaniya Sambad, which really translates to ‘Local news’, is an unobtrusive film about the intrusions of urban development schemes which add to the paradoxes of inclusive growth by creating newer displaced populaces. The idea which sits at the base of the film is the journey of people between displacements. The quiet, but often brutal, scenes and a stubborn elegance open up a space in Bengali cinema at least, which was largely abandoned in the early 1980s and especially after the death of Ritwik Ghatak. However, the brutality must be qualified here. It’s a polite re-creation that obeys the laws of old cinema giants like Robert Bresson and even Luis Bunuel who trusted in a quiet narration that appends a central, often disruptive, idea. It cannot and will not sully itself with transgressive images that can really ‘shock the audience out of its complacency’, as they say; instead, it chooses to prod somewhat pedantically and hopes that the uneasy grammar will provoke a discussion and debate. Watching the film is like being immersed in a flowing dream with vaguely dangerous shrapnel floating past the ears.

Divided into three chapters, the film flies across locations to juxtapose the growth and development of localities in Kolkata. It begins in Deshbandhu Colony, in the southern fringes, largely inhabited by East Pakistanis who had settled there over the years since 1947 and the late-60s. A bizarre, disruptive act of symbolic violence kicks the narrative into life when a couple of thieves cut a plait from a girl’s hair in a busy bazaar in the colony and run away. This seems to be a part of their odd scheme to learn computer-programming and impress a land developer, called Mr. Paul of Paul and Paul (“not Pal and Pal”). ‘Paul and Paul’ is engaged in reclaiming land, providing educational programmes and constructing a high-rise in the colony that fails to unite a coherent opposition. In another strand, a young poet wanders around the colony trying to discover what happened to the girl who was so strangely violated in the first scene. He is a figure of mild amusement, giving in to passionate and sonorous readings of his own poetry and generally looking lost. His mentor, Dipankar- played by Suman Mukhopadhyay- is someone who tries to understand the modern codes of love and belonging and accompanies the poet in his quest to find the girl, a parallel to the quest undertaken by the thieves too, to find Mr. Paul. Unfortunately, although Mukhopadhyay fits the part of the benign para-intellectual cum armchair activist, his lines often border on embarrassing clichés or mild non-sequiturs. In the second chapter, they go to Saheb-para (Park Street) in search of the girl and encounter a dreamy swarm, instead.

The third part is situated in the nascent New Town, Rajarhat, and features a bizarre and ominous Bratya Basu as the prophetic and prehensile Mr. Paul who talks into the distance- into the dark night, illuminated by electric flashes from construction joints- and mixes poetic elegance with commercial ruthlessness. He compares his position to that of Job Charnock who had columbused his way into the settlements to create a city, ‘one thousand years ago’. Three hundred and seventeen, he is quickly corrected. The effect is so odd that he comes across as a dark double of Mukhopadhyay; a lapsed intellectual searching for the right thing to say that will restore him to the eternal glories of creation and cancel the guilt engendered by a necessary greed.

For a film that attaches itself strongly to a controversial social issue, it provides very little in terms of a decisive answer or even a new channel of argument. It serves only to wrap the issue in a stream of images that highlight in fragments the tragedy, strangeness and comedy that underlines the stories we read on these issues in newspapers. The film chooses to stick to its theoretical base on encroachment and development and is therefore unable to fit the madness of North Kolkata into its scheme of things. The contradiction it flaunts as its signature of maturity- the irrepressible attractions of growing into a postmodern metropolis versus the sad shock of displacement- does work in fits and starts, and is perhaps the greatest reason to watch the film. The film was shot with the inexpensive RED camera, and it really looks beautiful. It only pushes the possibility of making cheap, independent movies. The silent scene towards the end, when a small strip adjacent to the plot that will be turned into an apartment complex is summarily razed in the middle of the night is one of the indicators of the politely uncomfortable violence of the movie. In order to understand the enormity of this violence, one cannot do without a thorough immersion into the stream of the film’s consciousness. If it proves to be too demanding, the effect is completely lost. However, the flabby verbosity at several points, something sub-standard Bangla cinema has always suffered from, could have been avoided.

It is unfortunate, however, to see what a slight impression this film is making in Kolkata itself. It’s not a major revelation, but not all movies can be expected to fit that role. It merely tries to engage the audience in a conversation. Relegated to two time-slots at Nandan, it is expected to slip away in a week.

Catfish (2010)

Dir. Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman

‘Facebook realism’ surely ought to be seriously considered as a sub-genre now, at least. It may have spiritual predecessors in cyberspace romance movies like You’ve got mail and, closer home, the clunky and hammy Mujhse Dosti Karoge (‘Will you add me as friend?’), but Catfish funnels all these genre movies through distinctly American forms like the mumblecore movies, informal home videos and amateur films. It’s a product of the carefully cultivated artlessness that determines the ambitions of a batch of filmmakers who are, nonetheless, extremely aware of the references they are invoking and the artifice they are constructing; a generation that has often been dubbed as a post-Cassavetes or ‘slackavetes’ generation. And these movies keep festivals like Sundance going. Catfish is also a Sundance movie and it is surfing additionally on the crest of the David Fincher movie on Facebook (The Social Network) that tries to uncover an emotional core to the person and the corporation that thrives on people wanting to befriend others over the internet. The reason I mention this is because Catfish claims to be a documentary. To me it seems a little too perfect and recherché as a finely written drama made by a couple of New York filmmakers with a strong emotional crunch that, paradoxically enough, in another format or context would’ve come across as tried and hackneyed. And there seems to be a debate about this too. Ultimately, it hardly matters if it’s true or not. If people identify with the narrative, get sufficiently sucked into it and are willing to suspend their disbelief half-way through, the job is done. Surely you didn’t fall for it when District 9 told you it was a documentary about aliens stranded in Johannesburg, did you?

For anybody who has had anything to do with social networking websites, the narrative of Catfish won’t come as a surprise at all. This film merely satisfies the demand of this club that includes more than 500 million people now, who want to watch and listen to weird stories about people getting foxed over the internet and also remind themselves of the dangers of emotional investment in the wildly anonymous prairies of the internet.

Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost begin to film the growing friendship between an 8 year-old girl called Abby and their flatmate and Ariel’s brother Yaniv, a photographer. Apparently impressed by Yaniv’s photograph that appeared in a popular magazine, Abby starts to correspond with Yaniv and sends her paintings that she claims were done by her in imitation of his photographs. The paintings are quite beautiful and it seems like Abby’s extremely gifted. Being too young, however, most of her mails are handled by her mom, Susanne, who is encouraging of this relationship. They add each other as friends on Facebook and then Yaniv adds other members of Abby’s family including her mom and an attractive 19-year old half-sister called Megan Faccio. He speaks to Susanne several times over the phone. The pictures of Megan tagged on Facebook give us glimpses of Susanne too; also very attractive. Yaniv soon builds up a relationship with Megan over eight months, although they’ve never met, and even exchange really steamy messages. Megan also happens to be a particularly talented singer and songwriter and she keeps mailing mp3s to Yaniv. Addresses are given out and they spend time hovering over each other’s streets and houses on google earth. Megan and her family live out somewhere in rural Michigan.

When the guys receive an assignment out of town, close to where Abby lives, they decide to ask her, Megan and Susanne to come out and meet them. When this does not transpire they grow suspicious and start checking up on some of their correspondences. Then they decide to visit their house.

About half-way through and even before, you can guess what the nature of the ‘twist’ is. But when the film makes a tantalising suspense drama out of it, it is not unpleasant to stay with it and see it through. Thankfully, the film does not rely on the exposition to be the kernel of the film. One of the things to notice is how the dramatic and emotional sequences make the cocksure-but-well-meaning filmmakers look severely out of their depth. Here is high-drama and tragedy, but all we can do is film them like we’d film a fat guy falling or an impromptu Grizzly Bear street-performance. Then it also reminds us that this film serves as a morality tale. Susanne’s husband tells us how catfishes are supposed to remind us about mysterious things that keep us on our toes. Faceboook and the internet have been called several things before, but never a catfish; and that’s something too. As Zuckerberg hopes to add a new friend by the end of The Social Network, signalling a kind of emotional upheaval and coming-to-terms, these filmmakers also come away having added a few new ones as well. But now they know exactly what’s involved.

An insightful and affecting behind-the-scenes documentary has surfaced on a film that has come to epitomize the cool, formally rigorous European high-art film since the Second World War. ‘The making of “Last Year at Marienbad”, is edited and narrated by Volker Schlöndorff from footage that was recorded by a member of the cast, Françoise Spira, on 8mm. Schlöndorff himself was the second-unit director of this film, helmed by Alain Renais in 1961. The film was lost for many years and after the death of Spira, it was passed on to the original screenwriter in 2008, who died later that year. It was eventually procured by Bernard-Henri Lévy who was one of the producers of the film. He wrote an article, briefly explaining the process- like Harrison Ford spelunking for the lost ark- and reminding us about the lasting importance of the film: “a masterpiece refracted in hallways and mirrors (with) hieratic and unwavering dialogues”.

With ‘L’année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad)’, Resnais touched the zenith of his Film-Literature mash-ups with the most important writers in France, pushing at the boundaries of language, literary expression and narrative filmmaking. The film was written by Alain Robbe-Grillet in a style that is immediately evocative of some of his most daringly form-busting novels; especially La Jalousie, which wanders lingeringly and repetitively around an indefinite act of violence and makes the narrative read more like a relentlessly macabre study of walls, doorways, shadows, shadow-gestures and banana trees than a regular crime d’amour. A similar structure is added to ‘Last Year at Marienbad’. The narrative keeps circling around an event, buried in the past, which may or may not have happened. In an ornate, palatial estate, populated by rich and bored haute bourgeoisies, a character X (played by Giorgio Albertazzi) tries to convince a married woman A (played by Delphine Seyrig) that they had met last year, fallen in love and had decided to elope. The people in the palace roam about aimlessly and play frivolous games. Sometimes they watch a play that seems to bleed into the performance of the main characters- if it can be called a performance. The characters seem to imitate not only the melodramatic play, but also the stiff, cold sculptures, the bright chandeliers and the general air of decadence. It’s like the crowd at Gatsby’s palace; and if that wasn’t decadent enough, add to it a further atmosphere of isolation and imminent doom, like in Agatha Christie’s And then there were none. Richard Brody, in his article on the documentary, observes how the setting represents a pre-war house of Germany, “before all hell broke loose”. Not only can one extend it to a general house of Europe in a purely political manner, it also confronts the nature and meaning of European art in the face of a disaster that affects a complete breakdown of memory and modes of relying on history and language. It’s not terribly hopeful that way. As X says at one point: “This story is already over. It will freeze like the cold, marble statues…”.

The people associated with the film have charted somewhat different territories since. Alain Resnais, usually bunched up with the nouvelle vague Cahiers group that included committed leftists like Godard, only made a heavy political statement in The War is Over (1966), perhaps. But his politics does allow for different readings of ‘Last year at Marienbad’. It’s been largely springtime for him, otherwise; his latest film, Les Herbes Folles (2009), is a flighty, breezy exploration of post-middle-aged amour fou with lots of sunshine and faintly disturbing ambiguities. A wildly different film from Jean-Luc Godard’s dark, cynical and cantankerous bogey this year, Filme Socialisme.

Volker Schlöndorff has established himself as one of the foremost directors of his generation in Germany. He has made films that also concentrate on war, love and memory, most memorably in his adaptation of Gunter Grass’ The Tin Drum (1979). His other well-known films also talk about the inextricability of personal relationships and political commitments: among the ones I’ve seen- Coup de Grace (1976) and his adaptation of Heinrich Boll’s The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975).

The real shocker, for me, was learning how Bernard-Henri Lévy was one of the producers- I never guessed- and was instrumental in bringing this documentary to the attention of film festival goers and, perhaps, the Criterion Collection. It was up on Lévy’s website ‘La Règle du jeu’.  Bernard-Henri Lévy has often been credited as a sort of Pied Piper of Paris, post 1968, leading a new generation of French philosophers away from the stranglehold of active Marxist influence (and Nietzche; and Sartre; and Heidegger; but not Foucault) with his book Barbarism with a human face and many others. He is married to a vague sense of opposing homogenous power structures but has rejected multiculturalism outright; coined alarming terms like Islamofascism and adopted truculent positions on Israel. He appeared to accept a part of Nietzche’s dictum though, when he announced: “God is dead but my hair is perfect”.

Where does this leave Marienbad and how does one pin individual politics, especially when they are so divergent and even contradictory perhaps, to a film or a place or a memory?

The American (2010); dir. Anton Corbijn

Machete (2010); dir. Ethan Maniquis and Robert Rodriguez

The Limits of Control (2009); dir. Jim Jarmusch

At the end of the world, surrounded by snow and frozen lakes, a couple is suddenly attacked by an anonymous sniper. The man quickly takes charge of the scene by pulling out a gun, shooting the sniper and the girl he was with. He discovers another armed man and shoots him too. The sudden violence bursts through the glacial stillness of the setting. He then decamps to Italy.

George Clooney, with the help of several names like Jack and Edward, plays an enigmatic American who is probably an assassin on a mission in Anton Corbijn’s The American. In picturesque Italian villages he drives around, befriends a priest, builds a rifle with the magazine-capacity of a submachine gun on commission from an equally mysterious woman, works up a vague relationship with a prostitute and hurtles towards a cool and violent climax. He is assigned by a man called Pavel who calls him up with directions, although we don’t really understand, and neither does Clooney, what he is meant to do. The frames are pure, static and always quietly observant of Clooney’s actions. The austerity is only built up by constant ruptures like the one in the beginning. In another scene, the prostitute walks into the frame, suddenly and completely, naked; a similar sort of rupture.

Holed up in the village, he has half-baked conversations with the priest who attempts to stereotype him. When he confesses that he doesn’t know much about the history of the place, the priest, Father Benedetto, tells him “Of course… You’re American. You think you can escape history. You live for the present.” It’s a bit of a pretentious stab; or you might guess that Clooney is supposed to represent a cool and collected system that thrives on deceit and violence. He is also an agent who does not belong to this setting and his motivations are not visible to the people close to him. The heavy-handed attempts to connect Clooney’s character to complex geo-politics take a little bit away from the set up of the film. As if the makers could not fully trust the relevance of the pure, classical, formal exercise that is the real basis of the film. The exercise to break away from perfectly stitched plots where a mysterious stranger will eventually have to kill a recognizable giant, like Charles de Gaulle in The Day of the Jackal.

About halfway through the film, when Clooney is testing out the gun, a beautiful and endangered butterfly is introduced to the plot. Clooney has a butterfly tattoo on his back. As the credits roll, an aria from Madame Butterfly plays out. The American is the kind of film that tries to be smart, but ends up slightly smug and lacking. The film’s attempt to play with the form of an assassin movie is reminiscent of Jim Jarmusch’s UFO of a film from last year, The Limits of Control. It pushes way beyond Jarmusch’s earlier assassin-movie attempt (the brilliant Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai). In Ghost Dog, we had a similar assassin in Forest Whitaker; unsocial, lonely but guided by a fixed code: the samurai text on living like a dead man, Hagakure. In Limits of Control we have nothing. And the film spins out of this nothing and circles it, so that by the end we have an idea of the structure of the film, the firm lines that define the film, but not about what really keeps the film in place; a center. The center is, instead, constantly deflected by a wealth of references to classical art, literature, music, popular culture and movies; especially assassin movies like Boorman’s Point Blank and the blissfully Zen ones by Jean-Pierre Melville. It is so wildly vague and perfectly complete at the same time that it seems to be a bizarre parody on the act of beginning to think of a movie-plot.

An epigraph from Arthur Rimbaud introduces us to a journey that is dark, strange and unavoidable. The Assassin- titled only in the credits as The Lone Man (Isaach De Bankolé )- starts by taking vague instructions that sound like truisms on life at large and includes advice like “Use your skill and imagination”. Towards the end of the film, when he reaches his target (Bill Murray) by getting through what appeared to be an impregnable fortress, he only explains that he used his imagination. For the rest of the film, he follows the same ritual of meeting several people over two cups of espresso, admitting that he doesn’t speak Spanish, exchanging matchboxes and listening to the strange things his contacts have to say. He dresses impeccably, works out diligently like a samurai and refuses to sleep with a nude woman who appears as suddenly and violently as the prostitute (Violante Placido) in The American. The nude (Paz de la Huerta) also appears in another scene in a completely transparent raincoat. She wears nice black-rimmed glasses though. Other characters appear- all played by established actors like Gael Garcia Bernal, Tilda Swinton as a blonde woman with her skin seemingly starved of the sun and John Hurt cradling a guitar-case. Christopher Doyle’s cinematography is so beautiful that it frames the scenes like the paintings the Lone Man observes in the museum; like Juan Gris’ exaggerations, sharp definitions and bizarre edges: “slow deliriums in shifting light”, as Rimbaud puts it in Le Bateau ivre. The film encourages a wild chase around the obscure references, but what it ultimately puts out- and it definitely puts out- is a movie with plot points and character sketches that must be coloured in by the audience. In order to arrive at any stable center at the heart of this carefully controlled chaos, one must, like the Lone Man, use his imagination.

The way The Limits of Control and The American use similar ideas- sometimes almost similar scenes- to strip down the assassin movie to its essential elements, tells us also about the difference between the approaches. Unlike the determined approach in the frames of The Limits of Control, The American adopts both- the warm glow of the sun and brooding, crepuscular shades of the evening. Maybe there’s still some hope that Clooney’s assassin might change his ways and render this entire exercise unnecessary. The American is an attempt to forge the skeleton of The Limits of Control to the flesh of an excessive spectacle like Machete. And it falls somewhere in between.

For Robert Rodriguez’s new grindhouse feature, expanded from the fake trailer that accompanied Planet Terror and Death Proof, is trashy, tasteless and falls completely to the other end of the spectrum. Although it is suited more to the tradition of a revenge film, it uses the protagonist, Machete, played by Danny Trejo whose face looks like a boulder that has been hacked and picked at by centuries of exposure to sun, wind and rain, as an assassin for hire that complicates the plot and hurtles the film, once again, to a viciously violent climax. Machete embraces every cliché of a film of its kind and has fun indulging in them, and if you’re not already tired of this knowing, gratuitously violent brand of trash-art filmmaking, you will enjoy scenes where heads are separated from the body in quick, clean machete slices and people jump through windows holding on to another man’s intestines. It also has a scene where Lindsay Lohan appears nude in a church, then dresses up like a nun and guns people down. The actions and images are so obviously transgressive that it comes as a fierce assault on any attempt to infer, interpret or speculate. It treads on politics; the issue of the status of illegal workers/immigrants from Mexico to the United States and injustices meted out to them, but I wonder what anybody can learn from this take except for the fact that it is a complicated situation and needs the underground support of all illegal immigrants. It’s fun, but it throws up little else in the way of a challenge that was initially promised by Tarantino and Rodriguez when they released their double-bill Grindhouse feature. The machete is crude and wild, unlike the gun that Clooney makes.

Released around the same time, while The American is a cool and measured film that tries to walk on the edge between classical restraint and brutal violence, Machete comes across as a truckload of campy high jinks. But Jim Jarmusch’s masterpiece is very heaven, the chef-d’oeuvre and the real Lee Marvin.

dir. Abbas Kiarostami

Languages: English, Italian and French

In Abbas Kiarostami’s Copie Conforme, a middle-aged English writer of art history and cultural heritage arrives in Tuscany to promote his book on ‘certified copies’. He talks about the concept of originality in art and the value of copies and reproductions: something that has been discussed and debated for centuries in Italy itself and elsewhere. Although he loves the appreciation shown to him by the ‘compatriots of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci’, he wishes he was also better-known in his native country. A woman walks into the gathering and sits in the front-row, ready to be absorbed by the discourse. Her son, however, is slightly impatient and hungry- so she has to leave midway after leaving her name and probably her phone number to the host and translator of the book. At a café afterwards, the son and the mother have a somewhat strange and charming conversation- prefiguring the tone of the entire film- where it appears that she has bought a lot of copies of the book on certified copies and the son thinks that she likes James, the writer, a lot and has decided to fall in love with him. When the boy wonders why she wouldn’t put his last name on the dedication for James to sign, she has had enough and leaves peremptorily for a cigarette.

The writer arrives the next day to the woman’s antiques shop. The shop perhaps explains her interest in the book. Finding the atmosphere somewhat musty compared to the wonderful weather outside, they decide to get out of the town and be back by 9 when he has a train to catch. They travel to a smaller town and talk meanderingly on the intriguing subject of his book. She takes him to a museum where a fragment from a larger, missing work had been declared a fake some years ago. It was believed otherwise for many centuries. Then they go to a café. When an old woman in the café mistakes him for her husband- spinning out grandmotherly theories about husbands- she does not correct her. Then the film almost turns on its head and it is suddenly revealed that they might be a married couple and have been so for fifteen years. Or they could just be pretending to be a married couple. What follows is a delightful ratespiel where the characters and their attitudes to art and copies become the only markers of what is real and what is imagined. The writer’s interpretation of a statue in a plaza is cold and distant, compared to the warm and affectionate one put forth by the woman. That should point perfectly to the motivations of the characters, you would think.

The tricky nature of this enterprise had been pointed out by the writer himself in the ‘prologue’, when he said that art is not at all an easy subject to write about; there are no fixed points of reference or immutable truths to fall back on. This determines the tone of the film that manages to be playful, but not superficial. We don’t really know what the nature of their relationship is, but the ‘play’ is performed with such sincerity and buried anguish, sadness and erotic power that we are left to wonder if the vagueness is more substantial than anything we see. The uncertainty and light absurdity of the film is similar to that of Harold Pinter’s The Lover and several films that made up the stereotype of European art house cinema in the vein of Michelangelo Antonioni and Luis Buñuel. The Buñuel reference is substantiated by a brief appearance made by Jean-Claude Carrière who was responsible for writing and adapting some of his most difficult texts and continues to write for European art house giants like Michael Haneke. To suppose, however, that Copie Conforme is Kiarostami’s unabashed self-evasive journey into European cinematic traditions is to miss the wonderful syncretic energy possessed by the film. The themes are old hat for Kiarostami and they are reminiscent especially of his early 90s films like Close Up(1990) and Through the Olive Trees(1994). Close up purports to be a documentary about a man who was brought to trial for impersonating Mohsen Makhmalbaf and promising acting roles to an unsuspecting family.  Based on real events, Kiarostami had the same conman and the same family act out their own characters in the film. In the end, Makhmalbaf appears and takes the conman on a motorcycle ride. In Through the Olive Trees, an actress has to withstand the persistent efforts of an actor who tries to propose marriage to her. This features as a secondary, slyly shot, behind-the-scenes account of a film where they play a married couple. Both the films are outrageously funny and sad in equal measure. With these extra-textual references, the easiest thing to note is Kiarostami’s indication- never explicit- that a serious and sustained narrative film in Iran is nearly impossible to make without impinging on the strong reductive forces that have so much power over spontaneous creative energies. To the world ‘outside’, an audience in the west, especially, the clear reference is to the regime in Iran that has been built up by contending myths in media like films and newspapers.

In Copie Conforme, the myth seems to be the free and liberal marriage- a sum (a marriage?) of various freedoms. None of the details that disturb the understanding of a traditional marriage are really that shocking (a husband who is perhaps frequently absent, a kid who is left without his father for large periods of time) to anybody watching the film during its premiere at Cannes. Art, in all of this, plays the role of the foundational myth- one that mediates and interferes in the relationships between the characters. Significantly, in the crucial scene where they debate different interpretations of a statue, the audience is barely given a glimpse of the statue itself. The situation seems to ease itself out when Carrière takes the writer aside and advises him on the effectiveness of simple gestures.

The recurring framing devices within the film- the car windows, hotel windows, doorways are also carried over from many of Kiarostami’s films. Here they achieve a playful alliance with similar tropes in the work of someone like Lee Friedlander.

The woman- credited as ‘she’- is played by Juliette Binoche, the queen of auteur champions from Kieslowski and Leos Carax to Hou-Hsiao Hsien and now, Kiarostami. Her performance is impeccable in her effort to traverse the rainbow of all human emotions and yet register that note of inscrutability that is at the heart of this film. James Miller, the handsome and articulate writer, is played by William Shimmel who is really an opera singer, apparently, and this is his first film role.  The cinematography is warm and full of feeling, mixing bright sunshine, approaching sunset and mystery. Although the film is perhaps lighter than most of Kiarostami’s other works, it still remains an intriguing and beautifully engaging film that should not have carried the lazy subtitle on the poster that calls it “An original love story”.

Harishchandrachi Factory (Harishchandra’s Factory)

Marathi, 2009

Paresh Mokashi’s film is not so much a sweeping biopic as a comic re-imagining of the two years that went into the making of the first Indian feature film, Raja Harishchandra by Dhundiraj G. Phalke. Although it steps heavily on the enormity of the event, it is mostly done through implications and title-cards. However, the director refuses to let this determine the tone of the film and chooses, instead, to highlight the attitudes of the people surrounding Phalke. The film aspires to be a comedy of manners, primarily, and then establishes the idea of cinema as another symbol of modernity that was assimilated in unique and interesting ways that still marks most Indian films to be ‘different’ from the processes of Hollywood or European cinema.

The story begins in the year 1911 with creditors hounding Phalke (played by Nandu Madhav) who makes a modest living out of performing magic tricks in Girgaum, Bombay. We learn that he has given up a job in a printing press following an argument with his partner and then does not wish to start his own press either. Running from his creditors, he chances upon a clutch of tents screening motion pictures for an English audience. Intrigued, he buys a ticket and watches a film called ‘The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ’.  Fascinated by the moving images on screen, he tries to learn about the process of making movies. He returns obsessively to the small tent to watch films, suffers temporary blindness and, in a memorable scene, sits with his back to the screen, staring at the beam of light from the projector. With the constant support of his wife and two children, he ends up selling most of his furnishings and travels to a film office in London to learn the craft. Back in Bombay, he manages to get a financer after pawning his wife’s jewellery and starts collecting a motley cast and crew with a priest for a cinematographer. “He was a chaste priest, but my still camera seduced him”, says Phalke. Unable to find any women willing to perform in front of a camera he convinces a prostitute to essay the role of Harishchandra’s wife only to have a client barge angrily into the set and denounce Phalke for teaching the girl ‘dirty things’ and drag her away. He is forced then to use men for the women characters in the film.

After an eccentric shoot, the film is released to a tepid response until Phalke hits upon the idea of a massive publicity campaign. The film then becomes a massive success as a completely new audience rushes in to watch a ‘moving picture with Indian mythological characters’. Dadasaheb Phalke is offered an opportunity to make films in London but he refuses to move stating that he wishes to establish it as an industry in India.

As a re-imagining, the director employs the conceit of allying his subject (Phalke) with the subject of the implied film-within-film Raja Harishchandra. Like the protagonist in his film, Phalke is dispossessed of almost everything he owns in order to secure financing and is playfully taunted by everyone for being a ‘Harishchandra’. The comedy also seeks to work against this pairing as Phalke discovers the correct subject for his film can only be the honest and suffering king, while also discovering that as a producer he “cannot always tell the truth”.

We are alerted to at least two important sources of inspiration for Phalke’s choice of subject. The film on Jesus Christ and the epic re-interpretations of Raja Ravi Varma canvases which form the template of Phalke’s film. Myth and melodrama in an unyielding mix. Just like it’s difficult to forego critical attitudes while evaluating pioneering efforts like D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) and its disturbing xenophobic politics, Mokashe seems to be saying, one must also take Phalke’s stabs at myth-making with a pinch of salt.

However, he does not pontificate and, instead, presents us with a faux early film himself with lots of speeded-up montages and quick, slapstick humour. Nandu Madhav plays ‘Dadabhai’ Phalke like Keaton or Chaplin with great effervescence reflecting the tireless spirit of Phalke himself. Vibhavari Deshpande, who plays Phalke’s wife and production assistant, developing prints, operating the camera and, of course, cooking food for the entire unit, also turns in an assured and strong performance.

The film explores the attitudes of Phalke’s neighbours and early audience who are convinced that he’s gone cuckoo and try to drug him and take him to a mental hospital. The issue of androgyny looks forward, perhaps, to the stereotyped men’s characters in Hindi films who are forced to balance between a ripped body, dainty dance routines and mother-issues. Responding to the complaints about the lack of respectability in their profession, Phalke asks his actors to tell everyone that they are working in a factory. Again, this could look playfully back at the origins of cinema itself when a group of men trudged out of a factory in a Lumière brothers short, or comment on the newfound symbols of respectability in an India transformed by modernity.

Although the film touches lightly on all the issues it invokes, it performs best at the level of a fine, farcical comedy addressing a new people exposed to what would come to be the most popular culture-industry by the end of the century.



Jahnu Barua’s Maine Gandhi Ko Nahin Mara and Rajkumar Hirani’s Lage Raho Munnabhai were released within a year of each other. While Hirani’s comedy went on to achieve great popularity and financial success at the box office, Barua’s film was frozen into fatal categories like ‘most critically acclaimed film of the year’ and soon disappeared or, worse, was replaced by the popular sibling. They were siblings because they were both trying to say somewhat similar things- about how Gandhian values are disappearing in contemporary India but not all hope is lost and we can still perhaps go Gandhian when the occasion permits.

Maine Gandhi Ko Nahin Mara(2005)tells the story of a retired Hindi professor, played by Anupam Kher, who spirals into the terrible throes of dementia and believes that he was responsible for the assassination of Gandhi. The film moves into the slot of a psychological drama and sets out to find a ‘cure’ for his condition, something that would communicate to Uttam Chaudhary, the professor, that he is mistaken and is confusing a childish game with the real assassination. The doctors achieve this by simulating a dramatic trial which would pretend to exonerate him from his imagined crime. The cure may have worked, but we are still harangued into depression by the good professor when he tells us, in essence, that we have all killed Gandhi by failing to adhere to his values. By pushing the film into this final bracket, however, Barua abandons a lot of interesting possibilities that he seemed to be developing over the first half.

The image of the professor’s family is perhaps the key to understanding the film’s position. Chaudhary has two sons and a daughter. He lives with his younger son and daughter while the eldest seeks his fortune abroad. The daughter Trisha (played by Urmila Matondkar) works for an NGO. We get snapshots of the family bonding over badly rolled chapattis and pretty poetry about being courageous and standing up for your beliefs. In many ways like this we are intimated with the idea that these modern, liberal, middle-class sensibilities which structure their lives and responses is now the shorthand for Gandhian values, whatever they were. It comes, therefore, as a real shock when the veneer of respectability is whisked away by his descent into Alzheimer’s and he ‘misreads’ an innocent, childhood memory for a violent event which may have altered the course of the entire nation’s history. The small, insignificant details of the daily routines of this nondescript family suddenly appear to mean much more than they did before. When an unsuspecting man puts a coffee cup on a newspaper-picture of Gandhi, Chaudhary is deeply agitated and denounces the man for his cavalier attitude. Inevitably, this extreme sensitivity brought on by his illness puts a strain on his relationships. Trisha’s boyfriend backs out of a marriage proposal and her brothers contemplate putting him in a mental asylum.

We are never told explicitly by the director if the film wants to be critical of the dilution of Gandhism from its many complicated social and political interpretations to one that involves framing him inside a pretty picture frame or pin a strictly conscientious reading to the Gandhi myth and capture it in stirring chants and phrases. But it doesn’t matter since Gandhi lends himself to this ambiguity perfectly. Not only was he the most imperfect Gandhian by his own admission, we cannot prove that he did not pose for the pictures at some point.

The idea of delusion features prominently in Lage Raho Munnabhai(2006) as well. Munnabhai (played by Sanjay Dutt) hallucinates and imagines Gandhi- a friendly, avuncular Gandhi- to come to his aid and help him in various ways. In a crucial scene, although one suspects it beforehand, we learn that it is not the ghost of Gandhi who is visiting him, but a Gandhi that has been created by him after hours of study at a library to impress a radio jockey. Therefore, the spectral Gandhi does not (and cannot) tell him anything he does not know. In other words, similar to Jahnu Barua’s interpretation, Gandhi is employed to play the role of conscience-keeper. The plot is then suitably tailored to bring into focus some of the salient features of Gandhism, like in a student guide-book, and coin a catchphrase or two. Non-violence is good only if you can afford to be a beefcake like Sanjay Dutt and knock someone out if you want to. You may turn the other cheek, but if the bad guy slaps that one too, Gandhi doesn’t tell us what to do.

In an early scene in Lage Raho Munnabhai, when Munna is trying to figure out a way to crack a quiz on Gandhi so that he can meet the radio jockey with the attractive voice (Vidya Balan), he asks his faithful sidekick (Circuit, played by Arshad Warsi) what happens on the 2^nd of October. Circuit can only remember it as being a ‘dry day’. It’s a funny joke and also a frank admission by the director that the bar today is set pretty low.