Phantoms in tunnels, and the quiet creepiness of the first Hannibal Lecter film

Being increasingly stressed out by road travel, I have had much reason to be grateful for the Delhi Metro in the last few years. But one of the more oddball benefits of the underground line involves a personal fetish, which I will hesitantly reveal here: I like watching the glow of an approaching train.

Not the train itself, mind, but the intangible things that herald its approach. This is roughly how it goes. Standing on the platform, staring into the darkness of the tunnel, you first have the vaguest sensation of light molecules shifting in the far distance, so that you’re unsure you can trust your eyes (and often, it does turn out to be an optical illusion). Then, very slowly, the sides of the tunnel light up, the specific effect depending on the degree of curvature of the route leading into the platform; in some stations you can see the train head-on from a long way off, and that’s no fun. Eventually this phantom light resolves itself into something concrete, the shadow of the train glides along the wall before the big worm itself appears, no longer scary now that it has a clear physical shape. But for those few seconds before it comes into view, there is a tantalising little Plato’s Cave effect where you can give your imagination full rein: what is there? What is coming? (Yes, I know, the more literal-minded of you might say: “It’s a TRAIN, you moron!” But indulge me.)

Here’s why I’m going on about this: I sometimes experience real-world situations as echoes of spooky moments from thrillers or horror films (at times this can be the only way to get through the drudgery that is real life), and the glow in the tunnel evokes the effect of a scene from Michael Mann’s 1986 film Manhunter. It’s been a long time since I watched this stylish thriller, but I thought of it when I heard about the new TV series Hannibal, about that most famous of fictional gentleman cannibals, Hannibal Lecter. Lecter is best known to movie-goers for his appearance in The Silence of the Lambs (and its cash-in-on-the-publicity sequels, where Anthony Hopkins reprised the role that got him an Oscar), but his first movie appearance was a 10-minute part in Manhunter, an adaptation of Thomas Harris’s superb thriller Red Dragon. Another British actor, Brian Cox, played the role, and the film – like the TV series – touched on Lecter’s complex relationship with detective Will Graham, who apprehended him.

Anyway, the Manhunter scene that I relive in Metro stations begins with a security guard in an underground parking lot, reading the newspaper. Hearing a sound in the far distance, he peers around at the slanting, covered path that cars take to reach the parking base: nothing there, so he gets back to the paper. But the noise – a deep roaring, along with the sound of something rolling along – persists and grows. The camera cuts to the curved path and we see an orange glow lighting up the wall. The guard turns back again, this time a look of terror crosses his face as he leaps up from his chair and runs away; cut back, and at last we get the morbid payoff: a burning figure in a wheelchair heading straight at the camera, at us. (If you’ve been watching the film in sequence, you will know that the character in the wheelchair is a pesky tabloid reporter who had the poor luck to fall into the hands of a serial killer called the Red Dragon.)

It’s worth mentioning that the scene is brightly lit, and it may even be daylight outside the parking lot – the sense of unfathomable evil created here, as elsewhere in Manhunter, has nothing to do with dark shadows or what we think of as the regular trappings of horror cinema. This is a classic example of a film that achieves very menacing effects by keeping explicit detail to a minimum. In Harris’s book, we are told in a single terse sentence that the killer bites off the captive reporter’s lips. The visualisation of this moment in the film is even more restrained – no blood or gore, just an accumulation of little things: the Dragon with his back to the camera casually putting on a new set of teeth, telling the reporter they must seal their deal with a kiss, slowly bending his face towards him; cut to the exterior of the house, with birds calling across the night sky, perhaps implying the lipless screaming that is going on within.

In fact, some of the scariest scenes in the film are almost unnaturally bright, and the refusal to overuse genre conventions is reflected in the art design in the Hannibal Lecter scenes, which contrast strongly with the ones in The Silence of the Lambs. The later film showed Lecter incarcerated in a gloomy, dungeon-like prison cell that looked like it might have rats scuffling about and a private uncovered sewer running down the corridor outside, while Manhunter has him in a neat, blindingly white room where you could almost smell the anti-septic (I kept feeling that the doctor had a generous dose of Brylcreem in his hair!). 

But the sterile tidiness of the setting only enhances the creepiness of these scenes: Lecter’s most distinct qualities – his old-world courtliness, his ability to look deep into the hearts and minds of others, and to manipulate their emotions – are very much on view. Visiting him in his cell, Will Graham is confronted with the terrifying knowledge that he has a deeply psychological connection with the man sitting before him, and that he might easily become a monster by wrestling with monsters. When Graham dashes out of the building after their meeting – even though the only demon pursuing him is the one inside his own mind – you can almost hear his heart pounding. And your own too. If the TV series comes close to replicating the insidiously scary quality of this film, it should be worth watching.

[Did a version of this for my DNA column. More thoughts on  horror movies infecting the real world in my essay "Monsters I Have Known". And earlier posts on Thomas Harris and Hannibal Lecter here, here and here.]

Noir’s arc - notes on an excellent anthology

I don’t spend much time in bookstores these days (it’s the old conundrum: most of my reading is for review purposes), but one of my favourite recent buys was the anthology The Best American Noir of the Century, edited by James Ellroy and Otto Penzler. Thirty-five stories in all, beginning with Tod Robbins’ 1923 “Spurs” (this quaint tale about a dwarf’s obsession with a beautiful bareback rider formed the basis for Tod Browning’s creepy film Freaks) and including such writers as Evan Hunter (also known as Ed McBain), Jim Thompson, Patricia Highsmith, Elmore Leonard and James Lee Burke.

“The thrill of noir,” writes Ellroy in his Introduction, “is the rush of moral forfeit and the abandonment to titillation. The social importance of noir is its grounding in the big themes of race, class, gender, and systemic corruption.”

And then: “The overarching joy and lasting appeal of noir is that it makes doom fun.”

Making doom fun – that’s a good way of putting it. Noir, French for “black”, was thoroughly incorporated into American popular culture in the 1940s – through a series of pulp novels and “film noirs” – until it came to stand for the dark and unknowable places in the human heart, and the character types are familiar even to readers who don’t know the genre well: the femme fatale who spins a fatal web around her victim; the morally weak patsy who helps her get rid of her husband for the insurance money; the hard-boiled detective with demons of his own. Needless to say, there are few happy endings in this world.

It isn’t easy to do a comprehensive review of an anthology that contains 35 stories, most of which are very good, so here are some short notes:

– I used to think of noir as relevant mainly to literature and films produced between the 1930s and 1950s, and indeed this book includes some solid, representative work from that period: I particularly liked Steve Fisher’s “You’ll Always Remember Me” (1938), David Goodis’s “Professional Man” (1953) and James M Cain’s bucolic, darkly funny “Pastorale” (1928) about a murder followed by problematic attempts to dispose of a bodiless head. But to my own surprise, some of the most impressive stories are from the past few decades. Twenty-one of the 35 pieces included here were written from the 1970s onward, and some of them intriguingly challenge the reader’s expectations of the genre and its tropes.

For example, Thomas H Cook’s intense “What She Offered” begins with a very familiar scenario – a weary, self-consciously cynical male narrator being approached by a mysterious woman in a bar (“What she offered at that first glimpse was just the old B-movie stereotype of the dangerous woman”). But from here, the story heads in a completely unexpected direction – it turns out that what this woman really has to offer the narrator is the emasculating knowledge that “her darkness is real; mine is just a pose”. I thought there was also a sly little observation about self-important writers and their knowing readers, and the story's beginning reminded me a little of Woody Allen's "The Whore of Mensa".

– Some of the recent stories are more sexually explicit and daring than stories written in the 1930s could be. Take Andrew Klavan’s “Her Lord and Master”, a disturbing take on the power equation in gender relationships, with a female protagonist who preys on men by stoking their appetite for violent sex games. The classic theme of the femme fatale using her wiles on a gullible sucker is given a very different spin here, and I doubt that the old masters like Mickey Spillane, Mackinlay Kantor and Cornell Woolrich (all of whom also feature in this collection) could have published something like this, even though much of their work was often controversial and politically incorrect in its own time.

– A special word for the longest story in this collection: Harlan Ellison’s powerful and literate “Mefisto in Onyx” is about a black man with a very special – and, to him, a very troubling – ability to “jaunt” into the minds of other people and scan their mental “landscapes”. To Rudy’s dismay, an old friend – a woman with whom he had a sexual liaison once – asks him to scan the mind of a convicted serial killer, whom she believes to be innocent. (The premise is slightly similar to that in Tarsem Singh’s excellent film The Cell.) I won’t give much away, except to say that the story climaxes with a fascinating game of one-upmanship and one twist following on the heels of another. It’s also one of the very few pieces in this collection that has anything resembling a “happy ending”, though given what has led up to it one can never be too sure. Incidentally, Lawrence Block’s gripping “Like a Bone in the Throat” is also about a series of mental games between two men: a rapist/killer and the brother of one of his victims.

– And some personal favourites that I haven’t mentioned above: David Morrell’s “The Dripping”, Brendan Dubois’s melancholy “A Ticket Out”, Chris Adrian’s “Stab”, and especially William Gay’s very dark and poetic “The Paperhanger”, about the strange disappearance of a little girl while her mother was just a few feet away. Also, Ellroy's own "Since I don't Have You", set in the 1940s and prominently featuring real-life figures Howard Hughes and Mickey Cohen.

The Best American Noir of the Century is a reminder that though the themes and narrative arcs of noir might appear to be limited in scope, their treatment isn’t. Reading these stories you never get a sense of repetition: in nearly every case, the characters’ actions and choices lead to the inevitable cul de sac, but it turns out that there are different ways to get there - as well as many forking, unexplored paths that might just have led them to a sunnier place.

P.S. The Windmill Books edition I have is missing four of the stories that were in the original publication, including one by Joyce Carol Oates. Pity.

John Doe, Mark Zuckerberg and The Social Network as a David Fincher movie

[Did this for Business Standard Weekend]

An early scene in David Fincher’s 1995 thriller Se7en has an elderly police detective named Somerset (Morgan Freeman) alone in his room at night, sitting up in bed, probably suffering from insomnia. A clock ticks ominously in the background. Later in the film, when Somerset and his young partner break into the den of a psychotic serial killer (known only as “John Doe”), they discover hundreds of notebooks full of incoherent rants – outpourings against the world and the people in it – scribbled in the killer’s writing. Still later, we learn that John Doe isn’t just committing grisly murders built around the seven deadly sins; he’s playing God, at least in his own mind; he’s exposing human foibles, and the world for the wretched place that it is.

On the face of it, nothing in this dark story seems like it could in any way be related to the sophomoric birth and subsequent growth (and growth, and growth) of a social-networking website. And Fincher – a director with a distinct, bleached visual style, who is drawn to gloomy, often unpleasant narratives – hardly seemed like the right person to helm a movie about Facebook. As a fan of his earlier work, I was bemused about what The Social Network would turn out to be.

And yet, within the first 10 minutes of this film, I felt the thrill that can come from seeing a gifted director take unpromising material and bend it to his own purposes. Without making a facile comparison between Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (this film's protagonist) and a serial killer, it’s worth noting that The Social Network is about a young misfit – a geek who has already spent a lot of time cocooned by himself in front of his computer, writing thousands of lines of code – who demonstrates his inability to relate to other people (including his girlfriend) in the very opening scene. Soon, for his towering achievement, he will create a concept that will captivate a generation (while also revealing some not-very-flattering things about Internet denizens). In the cyber-age, what better way to play God?

“What I’ve done,” John Doe modestly says near the end of Se7en, “is going to be puzzled over and studied and followed, forever.” He says this with the same emotional inexpressiveness - the same detached, "I don't care what's happening in this room, I can see the Larger Picture" look - that we often see on Zuckerberg's face in The Social Network. I have no idea how long the Facebook phenomenon will be studied or followed, but consider the warped interior life of Doe (who no doubt spends a lot of time talking to himself) and then consider the virtual-world seductiveness of a website where you can poke and share personal photographs with people whom you wouldn’t necessarily say hi to if you saw them across a room in the “real” world.

Social alienation and the attempt to deal with it – by trying to connect with people or by taking recourse in escapism – has been an important theme in Fincher’s work. In The Game (a movie that was in some ways prescient about game-playing in the online world), an unhappy, middle-aged banker is led through a series of situations that he believes are real, only to discover that his family and friends had played a carefully orchestrated prank on him. In Fight Club, adapted from Chuck Palahniuk’s brilliant novel, the nameless protagonist joins a support group for testicular-cancer patients (despite not being one himself) and later creates an alternate life for himself by willing a new personality into being. In the relatively conventional thriller Panic Room, the theme of isolation was given a more literal treatment: a woman and her little daughter are trapped in the “panic room” of their new house while a gang of thieves try to get in. Fincher even managed to take a quaint 1920s short story by F Scott Fitzgerald (as different a writer from Chuck Palahniuk as you're ever likely to see!) and turn it into a modern-seeming parable about a life literally lived backwards.

It doesn’t take much effort to see the lines joining these films, and The Social Network is a culmination of sorts for this director. A question that he and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin would have faced is: how do you make a serious, involving movie about the creation of Facebook anyway? Apart from being a seemingly flippant subject, this is history so recent that the protagonists are real-life celebrities who are around the same age as the actors hired to portray them. ** What they did was to turn Zuckerberg into an enigmatic cipher, a genius whose motives are never entirely clear. By underlining the irony that the young man who launches a billion “friendship requests” is oddly friendless himself in the real world – and that he betrays the only real friend he has (at least in the movie’s view of things) – they gave the story a powerful dramatic arc.

“Mark Zuckerberg is the youngest billionaire in the world” the film’s closing title tells us, but it’s imposed on a shot of Zuckerberg alone in a room, endlessly refreshing his FB page to see if his ex-girlfriend has accepted his “friend request”. The image is a pitiable one, but it’s also a comment on the very particular form that alienation has taken in the Internet age. With hindsight, David Fincher was the right director to deal with the phenomenon of millions of insomniac sociopaths staring unblinkingly into their computers, convinced that they are connected.

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** This business of celebs playing other contemporary celebs is very confusing. I was so muddled by the sight of Justin Timberlake as Napster founder Sean Parker that in a scene where Zuckerberg thinks Parker's girlfriend looks "familiar", I momentarily thought "Britney Spears?" (with whom Timberlake had a high-profile relationship)

(Side note: The Social Network is executive-produced by Kevin Spacey, who played John Doe 15 years ago. Not that I'm saying that necessarily means anything!)

Kali and the serial kkiller

As anyone who follows these things would know, Heidi Klum dressed up as the Goddess Kali for a Halloween party a few days ago, in a costume that was remarkable for its attention to detail: the many blue arms carefully in place, skulls and shrunken heads dangling from the Goddess’s hips as accessories, and Klum’s husband Seal as the finger-collecting bandit Angulimaal. My first darshan of this Kali was on the pages of Delhi Times, the photo caption memorably stating that “this proves Klum has respect for the Hindu goddess”. Because apparently that’s what Halloween is all about – dressing up as people you respect.

Even so, various Hindu groups in the US say their sentiments have been hurt by Klum’s masquerade. These people should stop worrying and take a cue from Ekta Kapoor’s recent pronouncement at a Dahi Handi celebration. "Anyone who dresses up as a God is God for me," said the creative head of Balaji Telefilms, shortly after she bent to touch the feet of Mrunal Jain, the young actor who plays Krishna in Kahaani Hamaaray Mahabharat Ki.

Ekta's remark leads me to wonder what might happen if she were to encounter a Halloween Kali.

K3, a tale of the apocalypse

Dressed as the Goddess Kali, the Jabberwock enters Ekta Kapoor’s office in the Balaji headquarters, whereupon Ekta emits a squeal of delight, then assumes a pious stance and throws herself at my feet.

“I am pleased and will grant you a boon,” I tell her, “but make it quick, I have a Halloween party to get to and you know what traffic is like these days.”

“I’m torn,” Ekta replies, “On the one hand I need better TRPs for all my K-serials, but on the other hand I want my brother Tusshar’s career to reach grand heights. What to ask for?”

“Let me be the one to worry about multiple hands,” I say. “We Gods like to keep everyone happy but your wishes are so malignant that if both of them were granted they would unleash a destructive force which would promptly end this kalpa of the world. Hence I can grant only one at this time.”

Having spoken thus, I hold forth two bowls containing liquids of an indeterminate colour. “If you imbibe the contents of this one here, TRPs will shoot up and Kyunkii Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi will carry on for another 300 years, but Tusshar will continue to appear on pet shows for eternity. If you drink the other one, your brother will shine with the luminosity of a thousand Shah Rukh Khans but your K-serials will soon be cancelled. Now choose quickly – Angulimaal is waiting for me outside.”

Unfortunately TV honchos have never been known for their restraint, and barely have I finished speaking when Ekta snatches both bowls out of my hands and gulps them down noisily. The sound of a distant rumbling is heard and I briefly wonder if the scion of Balaji is suffering from indigestion. But then Lord Kalki appears on a large white horse, and the world ends as promised. An extra K will do that.

[Earlier posts on Ekta and her serials here, here and here]

Ekta ki Mahabharata

Ekta Kapoor’s soon-to-be-telecast production of the Mahabharata (retitled Kahaani Hamaaray Mahabharat Ki, kyunki “K” ka hona zaroori hai) promises to change the landscape of mythological serials in much the same way that her daily dramas transformed how we look at Indian families. Some predictions for what we can expect to see on this new show:

– In a case of inventive rewriting, the character of Bhishma, the grand old man who shows more longevity than most of his great-great-grandchildren, will be turned into a woman and played by the actress who enacted the role of the timeless Ba in Kyunki Saas bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi. This will save the casting directors some trouble.

– Each of Draupadi’s five weddings will be shown in loving detail, over several weeks, with a budget of Rs 200 crore set aside exclusively for the costumes.

– Dramatic twists will abound. During a teary family showdown, it will transpire that Dhritarashtra’s blindness was caused by the cumulative glare from the necklaces worn by the women in his family. After the failure of the vastra-haran attempt, it will be revealed that Draupadi, being a dutiful wife, was wearing all five of her wedding saris at the time. ("No wonder she looks so fat," Duhshasana will remark, causing Bhima to swear the fearsome oath that he will catch hold of Duhshasana one day and force-feed him bean sprouts.)

– There will be at least one cat-fight between Draupadi and Subhadra, with chiffon and jewellery flying about the palace and an emasculated Arjuna watching nervously from a corner of the room. The number of speedy zoom-ins and zoom-outs in this scene will break all previous records for daytime soaps and the episode will win a special achievement prize at a Balaji Telefilms awards show.

– One of the features of an Ekta Kapoor soap is the ostentatious piety of the characters (that is, when they aren’t busy conniving to destroy each others’ lives). This is most notable in scenes where family members gather at the puja room together, fold their hands and moist-eyedly sway their heads in unison as celestial music plays on the soundtrack. In Kahaani Hamaaray Mahabharat Ki, where one of the key characters is God Himself, this sort of behaviour will cause serious disruptions in the plot. Each time Krishna enters a room, everyone will stand in a line and start singing bhajans loudly. These scenes will buy the scriptwriters a few weeks’ time to plan the next plot twist.

– Unfortunately, the censor board will disallow the scene where Krishna and his family fold their hands and sway piously in front of statues of the Kapoor family.

– Wherever possible, sentences will begin with “K” words. For instance, when Satyavati is asked why her son, the vagrant scribe, doesn’t live with her in the palace, she will reply, “Kyunki Vyas bhi kabhi sadhu tha.”

– There will be unexpected promotional guest appearances at crucial points. Midway through the episode showing the death of Abhimanyu, Tusshar Kapoor will appear onscreen to announce the forthcoming release of his new film ChakraView.

– Though the Mahabharata war lasted 18 days, it will take six years’ worth of episodes to telecast, because of the Principle of Reaction Shots, crucial to any Balaji serial. Each time a character shoots an arrow at another, we will be shown reaction shots of every man, horse, elephant and vulture on the battlefield. These scenes will make the pace of Ramanand Sagar’s soporific Ramayana comparable to that of an Indiana Jones film.

– The arrows will, of course, travel in slow motion; the more important ones like the Brahmastra will take at least four episodes to reach their target. But since the weapons will be dressed in colourful saris, viewers won’t mind.

It is said of the Mahabharata that “what is not here is nowhere to be found”. The tagline for Kahaani Hamaaray Mahabharat Ki will be “what is here is nowhere else to be found”.

Anurag Kashyap's No Smoking and Tarsem Singh's The Cell: some notes

I watched Anurag Kashyap ’s No Smoking late on Friday, just before going out of town for the weekend, and was very impressed by it. Though I had to review it for Tehelka, it wasn’t on a very pressing deadline and this meant I had time to think about the film for a while. For good or for bad, it also meant that I ended up scanning a couple of other reviews (something I normally avoid doing until I’ve written my own), and I wasn’t surprised at the way it was savaged by most newspapers. This is a very strange film, difficult to process even if you’ve seen and enjoyed movies like Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream, which have similar addled-mind visuals. And if you go in expecting a linear or realistic (in the deadest sense of that word) narrative or because of the Bipasha Basu item number, your brain cells could easily short-circuit by the halfway point.

But for viewers who are willing to open themselves to it, No Smoking is a daring, imaginative, often brilliant film, one that marries a very personal vision with a keen visual sense and some of the best cinematography recently seen in Bollywood. It takes some time for this to become obvious, however. Notwithstanding a surreal opening sequence set in a snowy landscape, most of the early scenes are routine, even amateurish. John Abraham (as a chain smoker named K) shows off his chiseled upper body in a bathroom mirror and exchanges sophomore lines with his wife Anjali, played by Ayesha Takia (Shrill question: “Tum bathroom mein cigarette kyun peete ho?” Petulant answer: “Tum bedroom mein kyun soti ho?”). Cutesy thought and speech bubbles pop up now and again.

None of this prepares you for what is to come. Prompted by a friend, K descends into the creepy subterranean world of a prayogshala to meet a Baba (Paresh Rawal, excellent, even when mouthing gobbledygook) who will help him quit smoking, and it’s here that the film signals its movement from the real world into a dream zone where anything can happen – a world of bleached colours, grotesque character types and a shift from real-world logic (the Baba watches scenes from K’s life on mouldy videocassettes and has the power to control the destinies of his loved ones; effectively – Faust alert here – he buys K’s soul).

Some of what follows can be described in simplistic plot-synopsis terms (e.g. “K tries to cheat the deal but the Baba seems to know his every move and makes his family suffer”), but beyond a point the idea of a conventional storyline is irrelevant here. Far more compelling is the way Kashyap and cinematographer Rajeev Ravi draw us into the interior world of an addict who is much farther gone than he realises. Soon it becomes impossible to tell exactly how much of this is going on inside K’s head. Perhaps the whole thing is a dream.

Bleak though No Smoking is, both visually and thematically, it’s also a darkly funny film. I particularly enjoyed the speeded-up childhood flashback (played to the tune of the Gene Raskin classic “Those were the Days”) of K and his buddy Abbas (Ranvir Sheorey) smoking in a bathroom; the hilarious Newton moment in Cuba (don’t ask!); the nod to Cabaret in a musical scene set in a nightclub called The Bob Fosse; and the caricature of a loudmouthed, drunken boor who begins a conversation with K by slurring, “Arre, aap zyaada baat nahin karte. Lagta hai sochne waale types ho?” (So familiar! This could be a swipe at mainstream critics or at viewers who turn inverse snobbery into an art form by puffing their chests out and saying "Hum toh films sirf entertainment ke liye dekhte hain".) All this is the work of a director who knows how to have fun even while he exorcises a few personal demons, which is clearly what Kashyap is doing here.

I’ll probably never be a John Abraham fan, but apart from an unintentional chuckle-out-loud moment early on (desperately feigning intensity, he hollers “What’s loving your wife got to do with smoking?!”), he doesn’t do anything particularly wrong here, which is as much as I expect from him. What’s more interesting is the way Kashyap uses Abraham’s alpha-male screen image to discomfit the viewer, to sweep the carpet out from under our feet. An early scene juxtaposes him admiring his physique in a mirror with a shot of emaciated concentration-camp victims from Schindler’s List; later, there will be another chilling gas-chamber connection, and by the film’s end the hunky Abraham persona has been considerably deglamorised. Which is why it’s a bit incongruous that the Bipasha-John song (superb though it is) comes on after the credits roll.

The Cell

After watching No Smoking, I’ve been thinking a lot about Tarsem Singh’s underappreciated 2000 film The Cell, with its sci-fi premise of a “coma-therapy psychologist” (Jennifer Lopez) entering the mind of a serial killer in an attempt to discover the location of his last victim. Unlike in the usual serial-killer film, there is no physical threat to the protagonist here; the killer has already been apprehended and is in a comatose state. The threat comes from what your mind can make your body believe, and this danger is what the Lopez character must face.

No Smoking has a few obvious things in common with The Cell. Both movies use hypnotic, unsettling visuals to explore the mental landscapes of disturbed people. (The look of the prayogshala scenes in No Smoking reminded me of the scenes set inside the killer’s mind in The Cell.) Both movies are heavily (and often magnificently) stylised, which inevitably leads to the all-argument-ends-here criticism that goes “all style, no substance” or “it looks very impressive and beautiful, but where’s the story/what’s it trying to say?” Both are largely unconcerned with the “real world”, so much so that one flaw in both films is that the waking-life scenes are half-heartedly done; the director doesn’t seem too interested in them.

Both movies also suffer from star presence. As Baradwaj Rangan points out in his excellent review of No Smoking, many viewers will walk into the hall thinking this film is standard popcorn fare, because that’s what you associate John Abraham with. But it’s equally true that Abraham’s very presence will reflexively turn off a certain type of “serious viewer”, much the same way as Jennifer Lopez’s presence in The Cell turned off a lot of people who are pre-programmed to dislike her or any project she is associated with.

Also – and it may be too early to say this – the critical reception given to both films is similar, suggesting a timid, safety-first attitude to movie-watching. Roger Ebert was one of the few critics who championed The Cell when it released, and I liked this bit from his review:

We live in a time when Hollywood shyly ejects weekly remakes of dependable plots, terrified to include anything that might confuse the dullest audience member. The new studio guidelines prefer PG-13 cuts from directors, so now we get movies like "Coyote Ugly" that start out with no brains and now don't have any sex, either. Into this wilderness comes a movie like "The Cell," which is challenging, wildly ambitious and technically superb, and I dunno: I guess it just overloads the circuits for some people.

Mentioning that Tarsem Singh is of Indian origin, Ebert writes:

Tarsem comes from a culture where ancient imagery and modern technology live side by side. In the 1970s, Pauline Kael wrote that the most interesting directors were Altman, Scorsese and Coppola because they were Catholics whose imaginations were enriched by the church of pre-Vatican II, while most other Americans were growing up on Eisenhower's bland platitudes. Now our whole culture has been tamed by marketing and branding, and mass entertainment has been dumbed down. Is it possible that the next infusion of creativity will come from cultures like India, still rich in imagination, not yet locked into malls?

“Rich in imagination, not yet locked into malls” is highly debatable, as anyone who has experienced life in an Indian city will know. Some of the reactions I’ve seen to No Smoking are equally indicative of a lack of imagination, and a simplistic idea of what a good film “must be”. I’m not saying No Smoking is unblemished – as I mentioned before, the real-world scenes are half-heartedly done, and the second half goes on for too long, much like the second half of Kashyap’s still-unreleased Paanch did – but it’s a film I’m glad a director had the talent, courage and resources to make.

P.S. Time hasn’t permitted it, but I’ve been wanting to do a series called “Favourite Films I feel Protective/Defensive About”. Included here would be movies that rank very highly on my personal list, but which I feel awkward bringing up in the film-buff’s equivalent of Polite Society – because these films have been vehemently dismissed by a majority of respected critics. Occupying a high position on this list would be films that are vulnerable to the “all style, no substance” accusation that I’ve grown increasingly suspicious of – films by the great visual artists such as Brian DePalma, for instance. And of course The Cell, a film I have a real soft spot for.

But serially

(What men want; and other thoughts on daily soaps)

Looking for ideas for my weekly Metro Now column on the foibles of mankind, I saw a feature story about how increasing numbers of Indian men want their brides to be like the women they see on TV soaps. Apparently, in matrimonial ads around the country, eager young bachelors are putting in specifications that read: “She should be like Tulsi in Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi or Saloni in Saat Phere” (this is of course in addition to the usual “traditional yet modern, fair but homely, virgin yet whore” litany).

Given that India has one-sixth of the world's population, this new trend carries huge implications for the future of the family unit. Based on what little I've seen of the Ekta Kapoor variety of daily soaps, these are the qualities I imagine the average Indian male now looks for in his life-partner:

– Her range of facial expressions must include Pursed-Lip Discontentment (when the saas-ji is praising another daughter-in-law), Simpering Complicity (the innocent girl being bullied around by more dominant family members), Evil-Vixen Smirk (when a nasty plot has succeeded) and Frantic Eye-Roll (when a plot is being unmasked).

– She must wear twice her own weight in jewellery at all times, even in the kitchen and the bedroom. Laden with family heirlooms passed down over 20 generations (most of whom are still living characters on the show), arms covered with gleaming bangles, she should resemble the robot in Metropolis, or at least an extra from a 1950s cult sci-fi movie. This means that in addition to carrying cups of tea hither and thither on trays, she can double up as a security guard: if a burglar enters the house, all she has to do is stun him senseless with the reflective glare from her 7,000-carat necklace.

– She should be able to walk in slow-motion, like the heroines (and all other characters, for that matter) of these shows.

There are two reasons why everyone on a daily soap must walk in slow motion. First, because it creates a Dramatic Effect (though people with IQs above 8 might disagree with this idea), and second, because when a new episode has to be produced every day, you need to stretch things out. It would be too much to expect the poor writers to actually work on a 25-minute script daily (what are they, bloggers?), so other dramatic devices must be used. Thus, whenever a character says anything spectacular on a soap (and of course, these people only ever say spectacular things; you'll never hear an uncomplicated "saaso-ji, pass the garlic prawns please"), it will be said in a room containing 20 others, and we will be shown elaborate reaction shots of each of these people (Evil-Vixen Smirk, Frantic Eye-Roll, etc). Or a reaction shot of a single person replayed five times, with the camera twirling drunkenly around the room, and thunder-claps on the soundtrack. This is an efficient way of prolonging a five-minute scene for a week and thus cutting down on extraneous costs (because all the money must go on the really important things – the clothes, hairstyles and bangles).

Come to think of it, maybe the new lot of bride-seekers have the right idea. If we all modeled our family lives on daily soaps, world problems would end immediately – everyone would be too busy simpering at each other in slow motion to worry about the big issues.

P.S. This business of slow-motion brings me to some general observations about the Indian daily soap, which differs markedly from its western equivalent. In the US too, daytime soap operas are generally regarded as the nadir of human achievement, but if you go beyond knee-jerk snobbery it’s possible to appreciate the professionalism with which they are made. For instance, key roles are usually played by actors with some experience in theatre (even if it isn’t Grade-A theatre), each scene is rehearsed as a scene in a play would be, and then shot in a continuous take, with the action simultaneously captured from different angles so that the footage can later be edited for maximum dramatic effect.

In Indian soaps on the other hand, I doubt that actors have to ever memorise more than a couple of sentences at any one point (which is just as well, because in most cases their previous acting experience has been restricted to saying “After using Fair & Lovely, I found a wealthy and loving husband who will only beat me twice a week”). Scenes appear to be filmed not in lengthy takes but in five-second installments and the emphasis is on reaction shots, which are probably put together separately. (I imagine that when the actors come in to work each day, they are clothed, made up and then asked to stand in front of a stationary camera and twist their faces and roll their eyes in as many different ways as possible. This stock footage can later be interspersed with the freshly filmed material whenever required.)

P.P.S. One of the many things you don’t know about me is that I’m something of an expert on the history of American daytime television, so expect more posts of this sort.

Fear, Manhunter and William Petersen

Watched bits of Fear on TV last night -- this being the late 1990s film about a father trying to protect his teenage daughter, and the rest of the family, from her possibly psychotic boyfriend (a Hindi movie along the same lines was recently made, with Amitabh Bachchan and Bipasha Basu -- I forget the title). Have seen Fear before - it used to be telecase ad infinitum on AXN - and find it strangely compelling. Of course, it’s flawed in some very obvious ways (as most "strangely compelling" things are). Towards the end it degenerates into vigilante porn, almost, with gratuitous servings of machismo. But it never ceases to be interesting. Parts of the movie, especially the climax where the family is terrorised in their own house by the psycho and his leering goons, reminded me of Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, which I saw just a few weeks ago (and which is a seminal example of the mild mannered family man-turns vigilante movie). Incidentally, both films also have a visceral, cruelly unsparing shot of a slaughtered family pet: the strangulated cat in Straw Dogs, the decapitated doggie in Fear.

Yes, the point, the point. Much of my interest in this film has to do with William Petersen, a superb actor who has worked a lot in television in the past couple of decades but somehow never had a movie career of any significance. He plays the dad here and, despite being nearly 50 now and a little pudgy, he retains much of his trademark intensity: a quality I first saw in Michael Mann’s 1986 Manhunter. That film was based on Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon; it was made 5 years before Silence of the Lambs and I still think it’s the best of the "Hannibal Lecter movies" (though Lecter, played here by Brian Cox, appears only in two and a half scenes). This isn’t just hip revisionism; Manhunter is a darkly stylish film that is almost unbearably tense and manages to chill without being explicitly gory. And it owes much of its effect to Petersen’s performance as the tortured Will Graham -- the detective who caught Lecter in the first place and must now reluctantly come out of retirement to track another murderer and face up to his own demons. With minimal "acting", Petersen takes us into the mind of one of Harris’s most interesting characters - a man simultaneously fascinated and frightened by the extent to which he can understand the mind of a serial killer. His haunted, distracted gaze adds layers to the film. For comparison, see Edward Norton’s indifferent, unremarkable performance as Graham in the inferior, recently released Red Dragon, which was made only to cash in on the Anthony Hopkins-as-Lecter craze.

Petersen was at his peak in the late 1980s/early 1990s and mainstream American cinema could have done with him during that vapid period. Among its other problems, there was a lamentable shortage of leading men worth the name. Tom Cruise was trying unsuccessfully to prove he could act; Tom Hanks was still stuck in his toy boy mould; the action stars (Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Seagal) had the biggest hits and the leading box-office draw for a time was, gulp, Kevin Costner (who I’ll refrain from commenting on, since I’m only marginally fonder of him than I am of Julia Roberts). Petersen’s brooding talent would have given American film an edge, and an identity, it badly needed.

Well, it was their loss - and, thanks to Hollywood’s influence over planet earth, ours.