Paco de Lucia

…and the Indian director

Sudhir Mishra

After winding up a long and fascinating interview with singer Kailash Kher this weekend, just before he departed for Bombay, I asked if he wouldn’t mind a few pictures too. 

The seemingly always good-tempered man happily agreed, and this was the most amusing of the shots.

Here’s a wee bit of trivia: sure, we all immediately recognize his voice from such Hindi film songs as O Sikander and Mangal Pandey, but did you also know that he’s one of the vocalists on Rangu Rangamma from the 2008 Tamil film Bheema?

 

This is a story I did that appeared in the June 13, 2008 issue of India Abroad.  For the filmi connection, have a look at the postscript.

Consider this patch of humid land, sitting at the nation’s edge, packed with people of all income levels, trying to make a go of it while more arrive every day.  Real estate prices are ridiculous, the infrastructure crumbles regularly, the traffic is frequently thick and slow.  And yet, it’s the nation’s financial capital as well as home to actors, writers, publishers and filmmakers responsible for much of the country’s arts and entertainment. 

I’m referring to Mumbai -

…and also to New York. 

Nisha Sondhe, a photographer who calls both cities home, is busy pairing them up in a multi-year visual project she calls Bombay v New York.  At her online portfolio, visitors compare and contrast images of people, architecture and landscapes both here and there. 

A Lexington Avenue construction worker in a yellow hardhat and white tee-shirt, his back to the camera, is twinned with two smiling sari-clad women, metal containers of broken rocks balanced on their heads.  A picture of rows of Bombay duck on the beach precedes freshly hosed sides of beef in the Meatpacking District.  A Sikh man in a crisp turban gazes out a suburban train window; a young woman wearing tell-tale white iPod earbuds sits in a subway car.  And so she shoots, on an on, from Coney Island and Chelsea to Koliwada and Crawford Market.

The 38-year-old woman behind the lens, a Cleveland native who settled in New York ten years ago, received her first camera from her father when she was ten years old.  “I got into photography because there was nothing else to do as a kid in Ohio,” Sondhe says.

But unlike most, who would be content to snap pictures then drop the film off at the local drug store to be developed, Sondhe set her sights on an unfinished room in the house, asking her father if she put up drywall and painted it, would he let her convert the space into her own darkroom. 

He agreed.  “I’d go there in the evenings and sometimes next thing, my father would be banging on the door saying ‘It’s 6am, do you realize you’ve been there all night?’”  But her parents were pleased nonetheless, as Sondhe later got involved with the photography for her high school yearbook.  “I think Mom was relieved that I was staying out of trouble.”

Sondhe’s mother Dolly grew up in the Mumbai suburb of Khar.  Her father, Ratanjit, originally from Bikaner, studied at Akron University.  Her parents had come to Ohio from India at a time when there were few other Indians in the state.  The couple settled in Cleveland, raising their daughter in a suburb bearing a name that sounds right out of a David Lynch movie:  Chagrin Falls.  To this day, Ratanjit will say “I’m the original Cleveland Indian!”

Her father, a chemist, just recently sold the family business to Dow.  Over the years, he, together with his wife and only child, worked at the business with care and attention.  Nisha recalls what life was like growing up:  “It was just the three of us and we were sort of best friends.  We were Indians in Ohio, then Americans in India.  When I was young I’d help them clean the office.  We’re a very close family.  I talk to my Mom every single day, at least once.”

At Kent State University, Sondhe studied fashion design with a minor in photography, but at graduation she says a professor told her:  ‘Nisha, please do the world a favor and go into photography and leave fashion design behind.  That’s where your love is.  That’s where you’re most at home.  You’re cheating on fashion design with photography.  Be monogamous.’  Sondhe admits “He was right.”

She began work at the Columbus-based Limited Brands, the women’s apparel company that was parent to Victoria’s Secret and the men’s fashion chain, Structure.  She assisted a photographer there, and later shot promotional campaigns. 

As the 1990s drew to a close, Sondhe arrived in New York.  “Thinking,” she says “I’d start shooting right off the bat and get established.  I thought ‘How am I going to make this work?’  It was so daunting because every other person is a photographer.  There was so much equipment I didn’t know, lighting I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to be caught off guard and be someone who didn’t know what they were doing.  I stayed as a photographer’s assistant and lingered there for a while, with everything going digital.  I worked with some of the best people, shooting celebrities.  It was a lot of fun.”  Trips to Europe were frequent.  One assignment with a fashion photographer involved a month in Brazil.

The epiphany that led to the Bombay v New York project came about two years ago, at a time when Sondhe was feeling a bit dejected.  “I was taking around my portfolio,” she recalls, “and I remember leaving an art director’s office at this huge magazine, and as I was walking out she was saying ‘We see that you can shoot these exotic places and make them look beautiful but can you shoot here?’ and I was sort of upset about it.   So I was walking around New York and I was thinking ‘There are so many things here that are in Bombay.  I’m gonna do this as my portfolio.  As I started presenting these ideas to other people, they said ‘That’s awesome!’  And now it’s become my lifelong project.”

Sondhe is now ready to up the ante.  She says: “I’ve done a lot of the stuff that you see every day and what you’d see in Lonely Planet, but this summer I’m going to be doing all that goes on at night, after hours in both cities.  Start to delve in and see where that takes me.  I’d love to do both Mayors; it’s a dream of mine to do the mafia leaders.” 

The next phase is not without its challenges, Sondhe says: “I’m trying to do sort of X-rated subjects in a G-rated way, I want everyone to see it and I have baby cousins in India who keep an eye on me, so I have to keep everyone in mind.”

Sondhe hopes a show will come eventually, but not just yet.  “I would love to see the images big, see them up somewhere,” she says.  “I think these are things that people know already about the city, but there should be more that people don’t know - maybe another two years.  I just want to do things that are interesting to me.”  On her last trip to India, Sondhe says there were people ready to show it now, but “It’s not done yet, this is just the beginning.  There’s so many ideas that I still have.”

When in Mumbai, Sondhe lives with her mother’s brother, his wife and their children, and her recently widowed grandmother, all still residing in Khar.  When asked how her grandparents reacted to her career choice, Sondhe explains:  “My father is a very successful businessman and I think they assumed I would just follow along so I think they were very curious.  ‘Why are you taking on so much pain?’  They’re all very street smart and they know how competitive it is.  ‘Just keep it as a hobby’ was suggested.  My grandmother would see me get up at four in the morning and come back at three the next morning and she would wonder ‘Why would anyone want to do this to themselves?’” 

“Now they see it.  I’ve worked with a huge designer and I was doing a lot of family portraits of industrialists and they’re starting to see that it’s coming together.”  Earlier, Sondhe was traveling so much that family members had started nicknaming her “Jet.”

As with many single children, Sondhe’s parents discuss her finding a husband and marrying.  She says:  “They talk about it every minute of the day and if they don’t everybody else does!  I was in India for three months and I was in eight cities.  And they say ‘What is with you?  Can’t you just sit in one place?’”  Sondhe asks rhetorically “Who’s gonna have me if I’m flying all over the place?”

On her most recent trip home last year, Sondhe shot for Hello! magazine and took family portraits of Lalit Modi, the commissioner of India’s latest craze, the Indian Premier League, and of Pia Singh, the head of entertainment group DLF, the lead sponsors of the cricket league.

The designer Sondhe earlier worked with is Tarun Tahiliani, whom she met in a Bangalore club a few years ago.  The two became instant friends.  “He’s a wonderful, wonderful and generous person.  I was a huge fan of his and asked if I could take his portrait.  He said ‘I’d really love a picture of my kids.’  I sent him the pictures and he loved them, and we’ve just been in touch ever since, and one thing led to another.  He’s another person that I sort of see more like an older brother now.  He’s just so sweet.  Little angels like that that fly over my life and help me.”

In addition to roaming around the many corners of Mumbai for her project, the Tahiliani fashion shoot, and the industrialist family portraits, Sondhe also devoted some time to shooting for the William J. Clinton Foundation, something she had been trying to figure out how to do for a while, until an opportunity presented itself.

“Bill Clinton was on the Martha Stewart show,” she says, “and he said ‘You can donate however you want.  Do something that will make a difference.  Go to our website.  Anybody can do something.’”  Sondhe completed an online form offering her photography and she heard back within two weeks.  She says they told her “We have so many pictures of him in India, but we don’t have pictures of all that we’re doing.” 

Arrangements were made to fly Sondhe to Bangalore, Mangalore and Chennai.  Work with them was done in less than two weeks.  She was impressed by what she saw:  “Best word I can give is ‘muscle’.  They really get things done.  They get medicine to people.  There was a guy in intensive care, and two days later he was being discharged.  You see it on a one-by-one basis.  You see people being educated, getting medicine.  It’s so nice to be a part of something that is moving.  I feel like it was more of a gift to me than it was to them, to go and be with people who are real and kind and friendly.  It was lovely.”

One photograph from that time is particularly compelling.  A Chennai woman in a peach and mauve sari stands in the foreground of the shot, holding a portrait of her and her husband on their wedding day.  As you observe the surroundings in the room, you notice the garlanded photograph on the wall is of the same mustachioed man, her now deceased husband. 

Sondhe tells the woman’s story: “She was in Chennai, and he was in Mumbai for work.  He got AIDS from his travels and died.  She is HIV+ now.  She’s a link worker.  Basically, she’s studied about her disease and she’s getting medication and she’s working with the hospital.  She’s the person who can put her hands on other HIV+ people and tell them that she’s going through the same thing.” 

“She gets a little money from the hospital, maybe $7 a month, and she has to support her Mom and Dad and her son.  She was so happy and so content and she wanted to be photographed with that picture of her husband.  She had no malice and no regret.  He died four years ago.  She said ‘Look at how healthy I was then.  I had chubby cheeks and now I’m really skinny.’  She was so proud of that photograph.”

One complaint Sondhe has about some other photographers is how they portray the country. “People go there and they take pictures of India that are not complementary,” she says, “like Sebastiao Salgado.  That was one of the reasons that I originally started taking pictures of India.  My India is so beautiful and it’s so much fun.  Even this project of mine, even though it’s gonna be shady nightlife, it’s gonna be a portrait, it’s not gonna be them hacking someone to death.  I’m gonna try and be really positive because that’s how I feel.”

The long-haired photographer, who has an alligator biting his tail as a ring encircling a pinky finger, has a warm nature that must put her subjects at ease.  It is her primary goal, in fact.  “To get people with a big scary lens in front of them,” she says, “to get them to be natural and to capture when they’re naturally smiling or pensive.  That, to me, is going to be my lifelong quest.  And the feedback that I’ve gotten from the people I’ve shot is ‘That picture is me.  When I think of myself, that’s what I think of.’ And I like that.”

Sondhe seems entirely content to continue her pendulum trips back and forth between the two major cities, and has no plans to abandon New York, as she explains:  “I love it here.  It’s home to me.  There’s a lot of room here to do what you want to do.  There are a lot of people who are really dedicated and working and trying to get by.  Everybody’s trying to do something exciting and fascinating and everybody’s willing to help you along your way.  When you come up with an idea that’s a genuinely good idea, people will help you.   It’s like a huge sort of family.  New Yorkers really do help each other out.  I think they do in Mumbai also.  And it’s funny to me that both have such a reputation for being so and cold aloof because I think it’s exactly the opposite.”

If her own independent work ever encounters any bumps in the road, Sondhe has several photographers she can resume assisting in order to pay the rent.  But, she adds, her own parents, who long harbored hopes their daughter would choose the more stable career of lawyer, would always be there too. 

Dolly and Ratanjit Sondhe are as fond of Cleveland as their daughter is of New York, and they too show no signs of leaving, having lived there long enough to recall the days when they would drive four hours to Toronto once a month for Indian ingredients, and are now able to find haldi at Whole Foods.  Their daughter is a frequent visitor.

Sondhe tells of being on a photo shoot in the south of France once and calling her father, who has now lived in Cleveland longer than he has in India.  “Dad,” she said, “I’m in the most beautiful place in the world.” 

“Is it more beautiful than Cleveland?” her father asked.

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Nisha Sondhe’s Bombay v New York image collection can be viewed in full at www.nishasondhe.com

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Postscript:  Among a few things that didn’t make it into the article, Nisha’s mother was a childhood playmate of Hindi film music composer Anu Malik. 

In Ohio when Nisha was growing up, the family would watch Hindi movies on a VCR, and Nisha says she’s “a huge Shah Rukh fan.”

And what sort of equipment typically accompanies Sondhe on her travels?  An Apple PowerBook laptop, a digital camera, two lenses, and a film camera.  She uses a Canon system, so the lenses work on both cameras.  “Last trip, I was burning CDs on this computer on an autorickshaw.  God bless this machine!” she says.

Times and technology are changing for photographers, nudging even the most die-hard film fans into the digital world.  Sondhe observes: “The dark room thing that I had experienced is gone now.  Everything is digital, everything is Photoshop, everything is on the computer.  I really didn’t want to go digital.  I decided to keep all my black and white work on film, so that way I could still go to the darkroom for days on end.”

“A lot of those families in India that hired me for my black and white work, and everybody loves the idea of film, but then they say ‘Can you retouch that?’  So it has to be scanned and retouched.  It’s what they want, they want it to be perfect, they want to be able to email it.”

Last October, Sondhe recalls shooting young people dancing during Navatri: “There’s so much energy but it was in such tight space by the end of the night I was covered in everyone’s sweat.”  Unlike some photographers who will snap first and ask for forgiveness later, Sondhe says she usually asks permission first.  “It’s nicer than just stealing some moments.”

Being a woman can help, in some cases, Sondhe admits, such as when shooting children and requesting permission from their parents, as they are less wary than if she were a man.  But, Sondhe says, “It helps and it hurts.  I’ve been detained in customs for hours in India with a lot of photographic equipment because they say ‘But you’re a girl, why would you need all of this equipment?’”

She took the photograph of her uncle on train in the years after the 7/11 train blasts, complicated by the fact that now photography on trains is not allowed.  Sondhe had to hide her camera and endure family members urging ““Hurry, hurry take the picture!” when she extracted it from her bag.

* Nauheed Cyrusi as … FARHIYO AHMED i love the girl in this movie she is so hott i swear i die for her i don’t know if she have a man but i sill love you………. please if you see this messege please write me back i love you so mach..

Mozhi surprised me. 

I don’t know what exactly I was expecting, probably some sort of a love story, eventually the kalyanam at some wedding hall in Madras, women in saris and jasmine, and maybe a fight scene thrown in to keep the mens happy.  And honestly, the cover of the DVD was a little too family-friendly for me.

But I bought it anyway on my last shopping stockpiling expedition to Landmark for two reasons: first, I remembered there had been a lot of favorable buzz when it hit cinema screens last year, and second, it has Prakash Raj in a lead role.  Show me a film where he has more to do than play the older cop/buddy/Dad and I’m there.

So, the film starts with these two friends Karthik (Prithviraj) and Viji (Prakash Raj), and no, the lead actresses don’t have “Raj” in their names.  The guys are in the music side of the Tamil film biz and they get an apartment together.  The crabby building secretary finds out they’re singletons and declares they must move, ‘cos bachelors are too much trouble. (Don’t I know it; they’re almost as bad married men!)

Viji says to Karthik “Why don’t you get married?” and the ever-idealist, ever-romantic Karthik explains he has to first fall for the girl, complete with lightbulbs and bells going off. 

He’s out on the street and happens upon the modern, liberated Archana (Jyothika, wearing trousers and shirt with a messenger bag slung across her body) and sees her beating up a wee twig of a drunk man who’s been abusing his wife. 

Karthik thinks the wife of Surya is damn cool, plus she reminds him of his Mom (er, okay….).  Bulbs and bells go off and he’s in love.  Cue the dream sequence (Jyothika in a frothy purple gown, then as a cop, then a tough girl on a motorbike.)

And lucky Karthik, it turns out Archana lives in the same apartment complex.  He tries to chat her up and gets nowhere.  Finally, after rescuing her ailing grandmother, and still not getting a rise out of Tamil filmdom’s heroine, he says “What is your problem, girl?”  and just then, he learns, as we the viewers do, that she’s deaf and mute.

She’s also traumatized.  Archana’s father split when she was a kid and then her mother died, leaving the little girl in her grandmother’s care.

Archana and her best friend/translator, the widow Sheela, become friends with Karthik and Viji, and love grows as the quartet hang out.  Karthik learns sign language, and wants to marry Archana, who freaks out and tells him to go away.  The rest of the film is what happens afterward.

Now, when I say this film is different, please don’t take that to mean “dark”, because it’s not;  there are some exceedingly sweet moments in this film (I personally found the little soap carving of a violin that Archana gives Karthik rather corny).  But it is part of that current wave of Tamil films that show more of the day-to-day lives of people, without so much dishoom and no item number. 

Viji is that always cheerful guy you’d like to have as a friend, and my favorite scene was the one with Prakash Raj dancing around in only a towel to Hava Nagila Hava, of all things (and you thought all those Kosher dosa places on Curry Hill were the only link between Israel and southern India).  It’s quite funny to hear a man of his years and not insignificant figure refer to Little Prakash Raj as his “shame shame puppy shame.”

While Prithviraj plays him with great reserve, Karthik is written as such a decent hero that you almost expect to see a halo over his head.  And his strength in resisting the repeated pouty advances of the sexy neighbor girl seemed rather super-human to me; I think most men would have been flattered and given in.  But Prithviraj is credible as this guy with a heart of gold, and his lisp is endearing.

For Tamil movie fans, there’s an opening movie-within-a-movie sequence where Karthik and Viji work on the film’s score.  When commenting on the plot of the film, Prakash Raj (who not only acts in Mozhi, but is also the producer) says to his buddy “I pity the landlords’ daughters in Tamil cinema, they only find beggars for husbands.”

The film was shot in and around Madras, so anyone feeling a bit homesick will catch some glimpses of Marina Beach and several shots at MusicWorld and the food court at Spencers Plaza.

And a brief word about the DVD I watched, a Moser Baer version.  For Rs. 34, I think it’s a great deal.  The picture quality is good, the English subtitles were there, and there were even extra features!  (A long press conference and the music release.)

See it or skip it

See it!  In spite of being a little too long (did we really need the storyline about the Professor who was stuck back in 1984?), and having one or two snafus on the subtitles (“banquet” instead of “bouquet”), the movie is a lovely change from a lot of what has come before.  The characters are all older than undergrads and so their stories involve more than hanging out and flirting at the local Barista, even if the plot still evolves around the ubiquitous filmi concern: marriage.

And by the way, when was the last time you saw a filmi heroine who wore trousers through all but two or three scenes in a film?

You can see a clip here.  They get to Bollywood around minute 1:50.

So here’s the thing: normally it takes Eddie Izzard, George Carlin, Damon Wayans or Bill Maher to get me to laugh out loud, and yet, the other evening, arriving at the cinema in not a good frame of mind at all, I actually found myself laughing through most of Mike Myers latest, The Love Guru.

I guess there was something – in the goofy juxtaposition of the Guru Pitka living in a marble palace ashram twanging out that old Dolly Parton working class number “9 to 5” on sitar as he goes through his morning ablutions,

or the PowerPoint presentation of trademarked self-help platitudes dispensed to the vacuous Left Coast faithful, or even some of the sight gags (Justin Timberlake’s Treasure Trail tattoos) - that pressed the right buttons and had me chortling in spite of myself.

The story on which these gags are built is this:  an American kid is raised in an Indian ashram and becomes a guru in order to get girls.  He becomes an expert in advising people on les affaires du coeur, but is still a constant runner-up to the man he considers his rival:  Deepak Chopra.  One of his handlers (John Oliver) tells him that if he can re-unite Darren Roanoke (Romany Malco) a Toronto Maple Leafs player whose estranged wife has taken up with the famous opposing team member Quebecois Jacques “Le Coq” Grande (Timberlake), thereby ending his troubles on the ice as well, Guru Pitka will get booked on Oprah, which he considers making it to The Big Time.

Along the way there are midget jokes, many, many, many jokes having to do with male genitalia, and quite a few having to do with bodily functions.  Stephen Colbert, Verne Troyer and Sir Ben Kingsley are part of the cast, and Deepak Chopra even makes an appearance as himself. 

Former Bollywood Dreams star, Manu Narayan, has a major role in the film as Rajneesh, Guru Pitka’s ever-present, ever-helpful assistant and moral compass.  He has a sweet face and his real musical talents come into play when he performs a duet of “More Than Words” with Mike Myers.

There’s an early mise-en-scène where Pitka preaches to a rapt audience and is sought out afterward by Jessica Simpson, Val Kilmer and Mariska Hargitay (whose name he uses as a greeting in place of “Namaste”).  Upon encountering Jane Bullard (Jessica Alba) the owner of the failing Toronto Maple Leafs, Guru Pitka is smitten and has a true filmi moment as his mind wanders off into a dream sequence, imagining himself frolicking with the lovely Ms. Alba in true old-eshtyle Bollywood song picturization mode, complete with bizarre onscreen lyric translations (e.g. there was something about “…lugubrious recalcitration..”)  This is the first of two filmi scenes.

The main character is rather smug (in spite of his DeepakChoprian Achilles heel) and annoying, but then again, my hackles go up when anyone tries to preach at me, and I smiled at his early comment about “…when the student becomes the teacher, or some such bullsh!t.”  Pitka sports a hrishi-like hair-do in one scene, and Indian clothes and accessories throughout, but what Myers is sending up is not Hinduism, but rather the scores of people who blindly buy into these “neo-Eastern” wealthy, self-help, self-important con men. 

See it or skip it?

It’s got a lot of cheery colors, moves at a quick clip, has lots of gross-out humor and a LOT of Mike Myers.  If you don’t object of any of that, and you’re in the mood for a light, silly movie, you might enjoy The Love Guru.

Not everything was fair game for my funnybone.  I could have done without the wee-soaked mops hitting people in the face, and the two poor elephants copulating on the ice at a hockey championship.

I tried to finish reading Monica Ali’s much lauded debut novel Brick Lane before going to a recent screening of Sarah Gavron’s film adaptation, but only got as far as Nazneen’s first pregnancy. 

The film opens with the briefest of gloss over Nazneen and her sister’s early days in Bangladesh (the part I had read about), and by the time the opening credits have rolled, Nazneen has long been married, and is residing near London’s Brick Lane in a council flat (in Dublin, we used to call them corporation flats, but they looked exactly the same) with her husband, Chanu, and two daughters, one who is a young teen, in full eye-rolling, mouthy rebellion, antagonizing her father at every opportunity.  (Mumbling her way through a forced performance of Tagore’s poetry when a guest is over for dinner.)

Tannishtha Chatterjee plays Nazneen, the (literally) much put-upon wife.  (Not only does she endure her oversized husband’s silent-then-wheezing mating habits with her eyes wide open, on other evenings she tends to the corns on his feet.)  It was drummed into her and the sister who remains back in Dhaka that we must all accept our fate, which must be why Nazneen goes about with much of the film with her eyes downcast, head covered and silently going along with most of her husband’s ideas and directives.

Chanu (played by Satish Kaushik, a man many will recognize for his comedic roles in Hindi movies) takes great pride in his knowledge of Chaucer and Thackeray, and as he trundles off to work every day, anorak over his suit (just like Bertie Ahern in his early days as Taoiseach), he is convinced that a long-awaited promotion is just around the corner. 

When Chanu gets passed over, he quits in a huff, thereby setting up a situation that will lead Nazneen into the arms of hunky Karim (Christopher Simpson):  her neighbor, Razia (Harvey Virdi), a short-haired and independent woman, gives her a sewing machine, allowing Nazneen to make some money for the family by taking in tailoring work, delivered each week by the afore-mentioned Karim. 

Attraction and love bloom between the two, in Karim’s increasing visits to the close quarters of the flat.  In those scenes between the two, you can feel the warm undertow as they are drawn to each other.  Then September 11 happens.  Karim tries to go funda, growing a beard and attending local meetings of the Bengal Tigers.  Chanu declares that, to avoid the backlash he expects to come, the family will return to Bangladesh, and he slowly begins planning for that event, much to the despair of his elder daughter, and the bewilderment of Nazneen.

Visually, Brick Lane is lyrical and lush with color.  The action will often cut back to Bangladesh, to rich greens and Nazneen’s memories of her young self and her sister.  In the dull, redbricked low-income housing estate and the grey London streets, the many different saris Nazneen wears (honestly, for a woman whose family is not well off, I don’t think I saw her in the same sari twice) are a rich contrast.  Other rare flashes of relief to the urban English monochromatic landscape come as cherry blossoms and snow appear and disappear with equal speed.

But where I had problems was with the main characters.  I couldn’t see enough of what was lurking behind the set pieces of The Domineering Husband, The Obedient Wife and The Brash Young Lover.  Surely there was more?  What were they thinking as they made the choices they did?

The film’s ending is somewhat satisfying, somewhat confusing, and bittersweet.  I did feel a bit teary for poor Chanu and happy for Nazneen, but I wondered how this scenario could have realistically come to be.

See it or skip it?

Tough call.  The film left me feeling curious about the storylines and the characters’ motivations, and somewhat unsatisfied, but I am very glad to have been introduced to Tannishtha Chatterjee and Christopher Simpson, as well as having a chance to watch Satish Kaushik in a more serious role, and to have enjoyed the visual treat of Gavron and her team’s use of color. 

Naeema Begum, the young girl who plays the firebrand in the household, Shahana, does a wonderful turn in Brick Lane, and like Chatterjee and Simpson, I hope we’ll see more of her in the future.

Also, given the heft of India, it’s not often that we get to see a mainstream movie that tells a story of her neighbor to the East, and this too is welcome.

Amazingly enough, those of us in the US got to see Kamal Hassan’s big, big, big release hours before it plays on some 1000 screens in India.

The theater in Newark was 3/4 full, many people coming straight from work, laptop bags in tow, and the film started spot on at 8pm.  No sooner had the lights gone down, the words Aascar Films (funny, eh?) flashed on the screen, then Kamala’s name loomed over us and a chorus of cheers and whistles came up from the crowd.  More cheers a few minutes later when the camera swooped down over the Madras coastline.

So yes, the man who 10 years ago became a woman in order to be closer to his kids in Chachi 420, has this time taken on 10 roles in one film, some more successful than others.

The first story line, of a holy man in the 12th century involved in a Shivite / Vaisnavite dispute, packs a wallop as an opener, with a meaty and muscular Kamal Hassan as Nambi (Avatar #1), who’s willing to die for his faith, even as his wife (Asin) and toddler son beg him to give in.

From the distant past, to the recent future, late December 2004 (that’s right, just before the tsunami), KH is now Dr. Govind (Avatar #2), a super-scientist working in the US at the biotech firm named, get this, Beagle II.  The firm has gotten into bed with Dubya (Avatar #3), using the PhD’s powers to create a mega-virus, capable of killing tens of thousands of people in no time. 

Realizing his boss intends to sell the viral vials to Evil Doers, Dr. Govind grabs them and goes on the lam, accidentally ending up back in India.  This opens the door for the entry of several baddies onto the scene, including Christian Fletcher (Avatar #4), a flaxen-haired, waxy-faced, ex-CIA assassin. 

Both Fletcher, and Bush, require large amounts of facial padding, and they, plus the ancient Krishnaveni Paati are the characters that I had the biggest problems with, just because their faces looked like Halloween masks, and because, with the men’s roles, Kamal Hassan has such a distinct voice, even as he does an American drawl, you still hear him coming through, so between the visual and aural cues, it’s hard to suspend disbelief.

Dasavathaaram is a good three hours in length, and therefore is able to include comedy (the Telugu- AND Tamil-speaking Balaram Naidu, who was very popular with the many sons of Andhra Pradesh in the theater tonight), lots of martial arts and dishoom, multiple locales, surprisingly not that many songs, and also some attempts to instruct while making the case for striking a balance between science and faith, abandoning caste- and religious-based prejudices, and saving the environment.

For me, the movie went on a bit too long.  As we hurtle through Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and the inevitable arrival of that wall of water on Boxing Day, I did start doing a mental checklist of which characters still remained to reappear for the final denouement. 

Is it a big problem?   Not really, not for me.  Even with the bad make-up jobs to overlook, KH did undertake quite a project here, and much of the story/ies entertain, especially as he manages to wind them all up into a huge ball of twine at the end, back on the Madras waterfront, while simultaneously finding a mainstream, populist way to examine many topics (superpower politics, caste issues, dalit rights, religious extremism, corruption, gee, is that everything?)

Mallika Sherawat is rather wasted here as the vamp/Pakistani-trained assassin Jasmine.  Her item number is screechy and forgettable, her costume has rather odd crystal spiderwebs placed over her front and back in rather obvious areas, and once she’s done vamping, she just becomes a second-fiddle moll along on the run.

See it or skip it?

See it.  It’s an entertaining saga, and you get to watch the man himself in action, playing so many different parts, even when encumbered by all the whiteface make-up.

Asin is cute, though there’s no real spark between the two lead actors.

 

On the occasion of the recent DVD release of his debut film, Vanaja, here’s the first part of an interview with the film’s director, Rajnesh Domalpalli: 

Can you talk more about how this film took some inspiration from a cry in Sophie’s Choice?

I remember seeing Sophie’s Choice a long time ago, before I joined Columbia, and the thing that stayed with me was the child’s scream, that moment of mother-child separation.  It lingered with me for a long time.  The first semester we had to write a synopsis and that’s when I decided to go back because I knew there was material there that would probably come out in the writing.  To my surprise I found that the story began to meander.  I started there with mother-child separation.  I wrote about the experience, what it feels like through the child.  The story began to take on elements that were peculiar to my own experience in real life, growing up in rural Andhra where my father used to work in dam construction.  Those elements of life in rural Andhra are finally what got their way into the script and infused the entire film with a sense of a rural ethos.

How long ago did you have, and how clear was, the idea for this film?  Did it pre-date you being in the MFA programme? 

There are elements I explored a long time ago, when I was in IIT in India, I had written a short story that was picked up by the BBC, that was called The Dowry and that story was about a rape of a young girl, not young girl, but close to a twenty-year-old.  That was another thing that worked its way into the film.  I think that the earliest seeds of the film were multiple shades, that’s how I would put it.  One set was Sophie’s Choice, the other set was my story that I had written in the 80s, so it goes back a long time.

Why kuchipudi dance?

Several reasons why.  First, I love our dance and our culture.  And I think when you love something you always will try to incorporate it into your work.  The second is a the fact that I think our arts are, in general, in trouble because, as I said at several of the places, if you take for example our burra katha, the people who open Vanaja, two of the three are storytellers and they’ve both passed away recently, but when you see their sons, one of them has taken, two sons and a daughter, and two have taken jobs in construction, one is in plumbing. 

Now, long ago, if you were to go back 50, maybe 70, years ago these people would have taken their fathers, their parents’ profession and would have carried it on.  They would have been performing burra katha in villages and travelling.  But they’re not, simply because they can’t make ends meet as burra katha artists. 

In the evenings people would watch burra katha because it’s a very entertaining program, there’s comedy, pathos, so many things.  Now it’s completely supplanted by TV. 

If you take for example, janapatha geetham, which are folk songs, you will hear them in Vanaja in the background, and there again, in the rural areas where I would go and tape these songs, when I would ask the little kids, even the teenagers, “Ok would all of you just sing janapatha geetham?”, and they would say “No, we don’t want to” and I would say “Ok, what would you want to sing?” and they would pick the latest Telugu pop song, the latest Chiranjeevi song. 

Somehow now a sense of what is good is really what is coming down from the West.  We’re all guilty of that, I wear jeans, I listen to an iPod, and modernization is not going to change, it’s not going to go away.  But I feel that we need to capture these elements from our past before they disappear.  So coming back to your question, why kuchipudi, I feel all these art forms that we have, are something that we need to showcase.

How did you envision the dance sequences?  When did you start work with the choreographer?  Did you already have images in your head of what you wanted Vanaja to be expressing as she was dancing or did that come later?

In some ways, some of the things I had already planned.  If you read the script, that the script specifies “here we have a tillana” “here we have a dance that has this tone to it” so they’re already there, the tone is already specified.  What happened was Mamata started with basic steps in March of 2004, and I would say some time in October I think was where I sat down with the person who was teaching her, and we worked through the choreography of the dance, because it had to feel integral to the story also. 

For one of the dances, the second dance, where she’s in a light mood and she’s calling the lover, and kind of boasting about her beauty, that song was written and composed by the music teacher Indiran Periade.  The first one is a traditional kuchipudi item that goes back a long time.  In the third one, the mood is kind of pining, where she’s calling her lover and is a lovelorn maiden, that was Jayadeva, an ancient poet and the music was composed by the same person who played the violin in the film, his name is Mr. B Narayana.  I don’t know whether you’re familiar with carnatic music, but he is a disciple of Mr. Jayakrishnan, who I used to admire as a college student. 

When Mr. Jayakrishnan had come to college I remember sitting right at the front row and writing a note that I wanted him to play Vijayvanti which is a nagum, and I remember kind of crawling up to him, he was at this podium, and I remember going very shyly and giving this note, and he played it.  At the end he looked at me to see “Did you like it?” and of course it was great.  I still remember that.

How old were you then?

I was about 19 or 20.

To be continued…