Smoke screens and jasmine blues

[Did a version of this for Business Standard]

I have mixed feelings about the anti-smoking ads that precede the main feature in movie halls. Mainly, they annoy me because they add to the already-considerable list of distractions before a movie begins: the line of trailers, Vinay Pathak swanning about in a bright red coat as he extols a bank’s interest rates. If you're punctual to a fault, and impatient to boot, these things can be exasperating. On the other hand, my sadistic side delights in the sound of pampered brats, insulated from the world beyond their velvety multiplex seats, groaning when the grislier ads play - the thought of people being faced with such images just before the glossy movie they have come to watch (and just as they are dipping into their gold-plated caramel-popcorn buckets) is a pleasing one.

I am clearer though about the idiocy of signs scrolling across the bottom of the screen while a film is playing. And as you probably know, the decision to turn every movie experience into a public-service advertisement hasn’t pleased Woody Allen either. His long association with absurdist comedy notwithstanding, the veteran director doesn’t see the funny side of “Cigarette smoking is injurious to health” signs besmirching his creations. Which means Indian viewers won’t see his new film Blue Jasmine on the big screen.

Allen’s stand – and the equally firm one by the censor board to not make an exception for him – has revived old arguments about societal welfare versus the self-centred impulses of the ivory-tower artist. (The conversation has already headed off into predictable tangents too: on message-boards, people are pointing out that Allen – given the many controversies around his personal life – is not exactly an exemplar of public morality; so why should anyone listen to his whining about such things?) Central to such discussions is the stated purpose and obligation of art. As Orson Welles (or was it Alfred Hitchcock, or Shah Rukh Khan, or Lassie?) said once, “If I want to send a message, I’ll go to the post office.” That line sounds facetious, but the implication isn’t that films shouldn’t convey anything positive or affirming – it is that a “message” or “idea” can be delicately embedded within a narrative rather than ladled out for quick consumption; the viewer might be required to do some thinking of his own. 

Of course, pedantry can sometimes serve a purpose too, especially in a society where a large number of people are under-educated and things occasionally need to be spelled out. But these anti-smoking tickers are context-free and indiscriminate, showing up with every glimpse of a cigarette (or bidi, or cigar). It doesn’t matter, for instance, that the sort of viewer who spends Rs 400 on Blue Jasmine is likely to be someone who already knows about the dangers of smoking (and possibly doesn’t care).

At times the ads are not just distracting or superfluous, but farcical. On two recent occasions I involuntarily snorted out loud when anti-cigarette warnings appeared on the screen. One was during Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, a film in which slaves undergo various forms of mistreatment (a few stolen moments with a pipe might be the closest some of these people come to achieving peace or grace) and pretty much every character is in danger of having his head blown off at any given point; arguably, rifles are a more pressing threat in this universe than cigarettes. Then there was the recent re-release of Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay, a story about lives lived on the edge of the abyss, or on the edge of the railway tracks, with the junkie Chillum (Raghuvir Yadav) constantly on the verge of throwing himself in front of an approaching train. He is an addict (and he is leading the film’s protagonist down a similar path) but the real drug here, the thing that is most “injurious” to the characters’ health, is poverty and circumstance.

Given this, there was something morbidly funny about watching Salaam Bombay in the company of a privileged audience, with anti-tobacco riders playing almost throughout. But then good intentions and common sense don’t always go together. If a Marx Brothers film were ever shown in our halls, there would be a permanent warning at the bottom of the screen, given the cigar attached to Groucho’s lower lip. A Jaane bhi do Yaaro re-release would have a similar ticker with the scene where Ahuja sticks a cigarette between the (stone-cold-dead) DeMello’s lips. Perhaps Woody Allen – whose recent films have doubled as tourism guides to the major cities of the world – could make a Mumbai-based movie about all this, and call it Shadows and Smog.

P.S. Anyway, as long as we insist on sticking messages on our big screens, why stop at tobacco? I propose the addition of the text “Feeding strangers may be injurious to emotional health” on prints of The Lunchbox.

To Rome with Love and Death: thoughts on aging stars

Two Woody Allen moments, more than 35 years apart. In the newer one, from To Rome With Love, an old man – a shuffling, white-haired version of one of modern cinema’s most recognisable profiles – delivers a quasi-philosophical monologue in a familiar, nervous-tic-ridden style, ending with a little shrug and the remark that, of course, death probably won’t come to him for another 40 or 50 years at least! The line invites laughter, but the chuckles stick in one’s throat.

In the other scene I’m thinking of – from the 1975 film Love and Death – a much younger Allen, playing a character named Boris, speaks directly into the camera. Having just undergone execution by firing squad and now preparing to trail the Grim Reaper into the great unknown, Boris is understandably preoccupied with such subjects as Death, Life, God and insurance salesmen, and he offers us a deadpan meditation on these things (“the key here, I think, is to not think of Death as an end, but to think of it as a very effective way of cutting down on your expenses”). In one of the funniest closing shots of any film - a parody of the final scene of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal - Boris and the Reaper then perform a demented Danse Macabre through the woods together. (See video below, especially the last three minutes.)



One can of course cite countless other similarly toned moments from Allen’s large body of work. (Remember the one set in a biology classroom in Manhattan, where Allen’s Isaac chastises a friend about an extra-marital affair, then points to a particularly ugly skeleton and says, “We’re going to end up just like him – and he was probably one of the beautiful people in his time”?) One could even go back to the 1960s when, as a stand-up comedian, he was trading in self-consciously morose humour on the same set of existential subjects.

And yet, for me, the two scenes mentioned above produce very dissimilar effects. Watching a 76-year-old pontificate about death (as in To Rome with Love) is a markedly different experience from watching the same man doing so in his 30s or 40s. It’s less easy to smile at.

Allen himself would not condone such a treacly attitude – the very idea would probably be distasteful to him – but for a long-time viewer these feelings are inevitable. One can spend half a lifetime admiring certain movie-stars for their (mental or physical) toughness and their lack of sentimentality (“lack of sentimentality” itself being a meaninglessly broad category that can include Woody Allen’s Borises, Alvys and Isaacs as well as Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harrys and Blondies, to name just two venerably aged American actor-directors) – but as time passes they become vulnerable in one’s eyes. They may continue doing the same things onscreen but the way we receive and interpret those things changes. As Pauline Kael wrote in a related context about Katharine Hepburn and Bette Davis in 1968, “The two great heroines of American talkies have both gone soft on us, become everything we admired them for not being. They have become old dears – a little crotchety maybe, but that only makes them more harmlessly lovable.” Implicit here is the idea that the viewer’s perception is as important as what the actor is consciously doing.

When actresses begin to use our knowledge about them and of how young and beautiful they used to be – when they offer themselves up as ruins of their former selves – they may get praise and awards, but it’s not really for their acting, it’s for capitulating and giving the public what it wants: a chance to see how the mighty have fallen.

There have been a few exceptions: film artists whose work grew determinedly less sentimental with age – the most notable perhaps being that wily old surrealist Luis Bunuel, who made some of his sharpest films in his seventies when awareness of coming oblivion seemed almost to have fine-tuned his sense of the absurd. And indeed there are Bunuel-esque touches in To Rome with Love, such as a scene where an apparently shy, star-struck young woman accompanies a famous actor to his hotel room and ends up romping in bed instead with a thief who has broken in. But despite these moments – and despite the overall pleasantness of the film – I found it hard to shake from my mind the images of a frail-looking Allen, the skin on his face sagging, the eyes slightly more unfocused and the speech just a little slower than it used to be.

I felt a similar odd sensation a few weeks ago while watching the US Open men’s final, a five-hour marathon between Andy Murray and Novak Djokovic that must (partly because of the playing styles of the two men) have been nearly as fatiguing for the spectators as it was for the contestants. In the audience was Sean Connery – Sir Sean Connery – lending his support to fellow Scotsman Murray; he looked as spry and bright-eyed as ever, but I may have spent as much time worrying about his health as I did thinking about the match itself. At some point, as the rallies wore on, he transformed in my mind’s eye from being one of the world’s most charismatic movie stars, the original 007 and a continuing object of adulation (the Twitter accounts of Murray and his team would soon be full of photos clicked with him) to being a crabby old man needing to take yet another toilet break and wishing these kids would get on with it. You can be the fittest 82-year-old in the world but you’re still, you know, 82 years old.

As for Amitabh Bachchan turning 70 next month – that’s such an incogitable prospect for my generation of Hindi-movie viewers, I won’t even address it in this space. It may require a book-sized lament.

P.S. To Rome with Love repeatedly contrasts “ordinary” people with people living in the public glare: two of its four plotlines (including the riotous one about a middle-aged undertaker who can sing like a world-class tenor only when he’s in the shower, necessitating bizarre productions of famous operas) deal head-on with the idea that people are alternately drawn to and repulsed by the celebrity life.

In a way this is a poignant reminder of how those who achieve stardom often cling to it at all costs, past their sell-by date. Some do it with a measure of dignity. The other day I was watching the iconic sequence in Limelight with Chaplin and Buster Keaton on screen together for the only time. Both men were around 60 then and had already been performers for five decades, having begun their vaudeville careers as children. You’d think after a lifetime of this sort of thing the old enthusiasm might have begun to wane, but not a bit of it. On the other hand, perhaps it was the only thing they knew how to do.

Recos: Woody Allen stories

Via PrufrockTwo, here’s a new short story by Woody Allen, “Thus Ate Zarathustra”, which takes the form of excerpts from a little-known work titled Friedrich Nietzsche’s Diet Book.

No philosopher came close to solving the problem of guilt and weight until Descartes divided mind and body in two, so that the body could gorge itself while the mind thought, ‘Who cares, it’s not me’. The great question of philosophy remains: If life is meaningless, what can be done about alphabet soup?

There’s a notable tradition in modern American humour writing of the “what if” story, spun off from a real-life personality or event – S J Perelman for instance would often use a stray line in a newspaper report as a starting point for his stories. Likewise, Allen is very funny when he’s weaving hypothetical tales around famous historical figures. Some of his earlier short stories in this vein:

“Yes, But Can the Steam Engine Do This?” – a short chronology of the life and struggle of the Earl of Sandwich, “inventor” of the now-ubiquitous snack.

1745: After four years of frenzied labour, he is convinced he is on the threshold of success. He exhibits before his peers two slices of turkey with a slice of bread in the middle. His work is rejected by all but David Hume, who senses the imminence of something great and encourages him.

“If the Impressionists Had Been Dentists” – letters written by Vincent Van Gogh (who defied his father’s wishes and became a dentist instead of a painter) to his brother Theo.

Dear Theo,
Toulouse-Lautrec is the saddest man in the world. He has real talent but he’s too short to reach his patients’ mouths and too proud to stand on anything…Meanwhile my old friend Monet refuses to work on anything but very, very large mouths and Seurat, who is quite moody, has developed a method of cleaning one tooth at a time until he builds up what he calls “a full, fresh mouth”. It has an architectural solidity to it, but is it dental work?

“A Giant Step for Mankind”, about the three forgotten scientists who almost beat Dr Heimlich to the patent for what became known as the Heimlich Maneuver, a method used to aid people who are choking on their food.

January 7: Today was a productive day for Shulamith and me. Working around the clock, we induced strangulation in a mouse. This was done by coaxing the rodent to ingest healthy portions of Gouda cheese and then making it laugh. Predictably, the food went down the wrong pipe, and choking occurred. Grasping the mouse firmly by the tail, I snapped it like a small whip, and the morsel of cheese came loose. If we can transfer the procedure to humans, we may have something. Too early to tell.

Wonderfully funny stories all, and these, along with many others, can be found in three collections: Without Feathers, Getting Even and Side Effects. But try to get your hands on Woody Allen's Complete Prose, which includes all three books.

S J Perelman, and Motilal Nehru’s laundry

Working my way slowly back into the reading habit like a man recovering from paralysis and re-learning how to walk, I turned to some of S J Perelman’s short stories. Perelman was a great American humorist, an absolute master of the non-sequitur, who worked as a screenplay writer in Hollywood in the 1930s and helped in the development of the Marx Brothers brand of humour, among other things. He was also among the best of a long line of writers with the ability to take the most everyday occurences - a stray remark in a newspaper clipping, for instance - and spin comic masterworks around them. A good example is a Perelman story I read recently with the enticing title "No Starch in the Dhoti, S’Il Vous Plait", which is built entirely around an actual newspaper report about Jawaharlal Nehru. The original report included the following passage:

"Nehru is accused of having a congenital distaste for Americans...it is said that in the luxurious and gracious house of his father, the late Pandit Motilal Nehru - who sent his laundry to Paris - the young Jawaharlal’s British nurse used to make caustic remarks to the impressionable boy about the table manners of his father’s American guests."

What Perelman does is to home in on that one phrase "who sent his laundry to Paris" and write:

"I blenched at the complications this overseas despatch must have entailed. Conducted long before there was any air service between India and Europe, it would have involved posting the stuff by sea - a minimum of three weeks in each direction, in addition to the time it took for processing. Each trip would have created problems of customs examination, valuation, duty (unless Nehru senior got friends to take it through for him, which is improbable; most people detest transporting laundry across the world, even their own). The old gentleman had evidently had a limitless wardrobe, to be able to dispense with it for three months at a time."

The rest of the story is epistolary, as Perelman conjectures the exchange of letters that must have taken place between Motilal Nehru and the Paris-based laundryman. The letters are extremely improbable, but they are hilarious.

(P.S. "No Starch in the Dhoti, S’Il Vous Plait" is just one of the many very entertaining titles for Perelman’s stories; others include "Methinks He Doth Protein Too Much", "And Thou Beside Me, Yacketing in the Wilderness" and "I’ll Always Call You Schnorrer, My African Explorer".)

Woody Allen once said something to the effect that reading Perelman was fatal to a young writer because his style seeps into you... "he’s got such a pronounced, overwhelming comic style that it’s hard not to be influenced by him." I tend to relate this observation to the effect reading P G Wodehouse in school/college has on many young aspiring writers in India. It’s a shame that Perelman isn’t as well known or as widely read here. That probably has something to do with the fact that his stories are full of colloqualisms, with many references to things we aren’t familiar with - staples of American popular culture in the 1930s and 1940s (for every one time I chuckle out loud while reading him, there’s another time I frown, uncertain exactly what he’s talking about even while acknowledging that whatever it is, it’s probably very funny). Whatever the case, he isn’t easy to read and you have to be prepared for the occasional story that’s just too abstruse to get through. It’s a bit like that blurb about Saki, which goes "his writing is so intense, it induces a kind of literary dyspepsia".

Last month incidentally was Perelman’s 100th birth anniversary. Here’s a profile by Time magazine’s Richard Corliss.

Groucho Marx to S J Perelman: “From the moment I picked up your book until I put it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.”