WATER

It was by a sheer stroke of luck that I could lay my hands on Deepa Mehta's Water late this evening. I admit Water was not on my must-watch list atleast for sometime to come what with its never ending saga of postponements atleast in India. I have followed its travails to hit the silverscreen right since it was supposed to be made in and around the early 2000s; 2000 in fact.

Doff my hats to Deepa Mehta for not losing it in this period. Also credit to her long term aide David Hamilton for not letting it get confined to the cans and gather dust. From the frame one to the last Deepa slowly but surely takes us back in time, to 1938, to be precise and paints the saga of Chuiya, Kalyani, Madhumati and Narayan on such beautiful canvas with right brushes and an ethereal palette, that one is left wondering, how!! Sarala with her innocent yet masterly looks blows one away with such genuineness in her potrayal of Chuiya that other performances by child artistes in recent times look farcical. Lisa Ray surprises and I will leave it at that. She puts in a restrained performance and I shall well stop at that for I somehow cant take to actors who cant dub their voices. John Abraham again proves that he is a raw piece of clay ready to be moulded by the director the way he/she wants to. My feeling is that here is an honest man who knows his limitations as a performer and respecting that very well he pitches in a performance within the boundaries of the comfort zone he shall not come out of. Brilliant. His voice is such a soother that I will not be surprised if he is roped in for more suthradhars or voice overs. Rich.

Seema Biswas, Raghuvir Yadav, Cerson Da Cunha, Vinay Pathak, Manorma show it's so pejorative calling them character actors for without them the movie would look a tad incomplete. Seema Biswas in her silent and subdued role conveys what sound-barrier breaking harangue cannot do. Thanks to Shekhar Kapur for discovering her. Good such people aren't offered more stuff because their absence only makes me crave them more. Ditto for Vinay Pathak. He proves a small theory of mine that actors who are good at comedy can do great justice to all other emotions and can leave one spellbound. Manorma with her potrayal makes you hate Madhumati and you only end up hating her.

For all those cineastes who believe that cinema is primarily a visual medium and all follow, this is a spectacle. I have always been in awe of Giles Nuttgens right since his Fire days, and he shows that the Director of Photography needs to be close to, if not, the alter ego of the director. Deepa Mehta sticking to him for years now only ratifies that. Never before has a film looked so heavenly in natural light. For those who believe that monsoons heighten the visual effect, Water shows that sunlight if utilised properly, can match up too. By restricting themselves to stable trolly movements and by not resorting to any camera callisthenics, Giles Nuttgens and Deepa Mehta do us a favor. The focus is more on the lighting to aid the storytelling than kinetics that would distract us. Good cinema is also about that. Aspiring filmmakers would do well to watch the film for this is a textbook in cinematography at its best, if not the Bible. They would also do themselves a great service if they learn that visual chicanery is all crap if it doesnt elevate story.

A R Rahman doesnt hold our hand and take us his way with his background score, and if he did, that's manipulative for me. Good cinema is also about that. His soft, melancholic score is worth listening to.

Deepa Mehta shouldnot feel disheartened if the Academy does not look her way. She has produced such a marvel that awards dont count at all and it's as simple as that. Thanks to her for not going overboard with the period look for the sake of verisimilitude. The best and the most heartening part is this story can unfold in any era or any time and the pre-independence period feel and the look is only incidental. Her effort is commendable for she trusts rank newcomers to convey her story in this project. Though I hate doing this, I still can't resist wondering about the effect if the people who were originally touted to play the roles, Shabana Azmi and Nandita Das stayed aboard the project. Well thats in the hindsight and should be left at that. Rumors were rife way back in 2000 that Akshay Kumar was supposed to play Abraham's part and for some reason he backed out. Thank you Akshay.

Canada's envy, tch... India's loss

Unlike water which vanishes upon the slightest occurrence of heat, this eponymous wonder stays on and quite ironically, in the slow fire that Deepa Mehta fans all along.

You turn hydrophilic at the end of it. Cinematic Excellence at its best.

DOR DARSHAN

Nagesh Kukunoor, take a bow...

Firstly, thanks for those lines of Hrishikesh Mukherjee in the beginning

"Zindagi badi honi chahiye.... Lambi nahi"

You have yet again shown that to make good cinema one doesnt have to resort to extremes, and go radical. That at times the act of combining common sense with the established does take you places, letting you live your dream, whatever that dream be.

Your Dor, at the outset, was not real. I shall make no bones about it, the theme is not real. For all those who harp on realistic cinema and the goodness in it, your creation might be a shocker. What then sets apart your cinema is the execution and treatment. What is real is the treatment and the handling. The tale that you have woven is pure fantasy, and you have effectively shown that fantasies can be lapped up if the only the way you go about is convincing.

The effort that you have put in expanding your cinematic spectrum is laudable and the result is there for me to see. In all the glory and glam of Dor, I shall not forget your utterly delicious VHS-friendly Hyderabad Blues.

I know what it takes and how it feels to make the audience chortle by feeding them subtle naunces in an extremely appetising fare. Those moments of poignance, those shades of love, those outbursts of joy no matter how naive, those vents to the inner long suppressed feelings shall stay for long.

In Ayesha Takia and Gul Panag you have found two of the more fabulously eye pleasing and natural actors of recent times. Going by Ayesha's choice of films in the past, mea culpa, I have been a little uncharitable about the histrionics capability of this petite beauty. She proves me wrong. I havent seen an actor who has displayed such a gamut of emotions in a single film in a long long time. Kindly do not shed a tear if she doesnt get to lay her hands on the "Black Beauty," for they are reserved for our ladies who are bold with their infidel thoughts, and who are cash counter friendly. The amazon-beating smile on her face in the railway station when she gets to hand over the signed mercy petition to Zeenat is marvellous and I cant describe that effect enough.

Gul Panag was class apart; typified a bold, confident woman torn inside by her own insecurities and desires. That she was eye candy in a matte way enhanced the effect. She oozes that class wherein she doesnt have to thump her breast to declare her feminity or desire for respect.

You along with Sudeep Chatterjee are forgiven for getting overzealous in your attempt to be bombastic in your visual grammar. Yes the subject lent itself to some great frames which demanded some effective lighting to highlight those subtle moments and this delivered what a hundred words couldn't. The geographical demands in Himachal Pradesh and Rajasthan may have warranted some great visuals, and thanks for not going overboard.

Thank you for not giving Rajasthan a cottage industry look set in Film City Mumbai, or Ramoji Rao Hyderabad. I know Rajasthan with all its dryness, barren landscape and scorching sun doesnt have anything more to offer than has been beaten to death by your ancestors. It can be stiffling at times when it come to Rajasthan. Thanks for enduring so much pain in your realistic and commendable effort.

Thank you for not resorting to some farcical cliches when it came to depicting Jodhpur where most of the story unfolds. Thank you for employing a few classy cliches when required. Thanks for showing yet again that cinema, for all the realism required, cant do without some cliches.

Thank you for getting the basics right. Thank you for your honest approach.

The movie as I said was full of drama and by reining yourself at the right time, you didnt let it slip into melodrama, and in it Mr.Kukunoor, lies your success. It is this precisely this balance of yours that makes you one of those marvellous little magicians around. Thank you for dishing out such fantastic fare so pregnant with rich symbolisms, and for not insulting our intelligence.

Kudos to you and Elahe Hiptoola for constantly churning out good cinema, and I hope we dont get to see something from you that we end up getting SIC of.

and finally, thank you for Shreyas Talpade. Holy Christ! he in a magical way endears himself with nothing but sheer rawness and simplicity. My experience would have been nothing without his element to Dor. Yes I know the movie is about Meera and Zeenat, and their quest for their lost love, but pardon me if I have to select one clincher of a scene in the entire movie, it will be the bahroopiya masquerading as the police wallah. The expression on his face when he shoos away the eve teasers is worth watching, and all this is made great by the fact we know he is a rascal and truly I was left in splits. He brings in those light moments which has him cheating people and us, making merry all the time, sombre most of the time in this otherwise story of grace, dignity and selfrespect of woman.

You make him speak out and how!

There is something about his performance in the film, and I shouldnt try rationalising it.

It's beyond that.

B or not to B

I have my own reservations about Amitabh Bachchan running for the post of the highest and the most majestic seat of the Republic of India... The President


This is not to insult AB and his body of work which has been amazing so far, but in a race where there is room for "relative", Mr.Bachchan please back off. and by no means do I intend to disparage the field he comes from, as is the usual temptation.

I might be jumping the gun and for all you and I know he himself wouldn't have given a serious thought to this.

If diplomatic skills, vast experience at the international level mean anything and are deemed prerequisites for the post, then my candidate is Shashi Tharoor

I am sure the fact that Shashi Tharoor was a contender for the post of the UN secretary general and that he waxes eloquent about a multitude of topics should do him no bad.

Good Friday

Pavan Malhotra...Aditya Srivastava...Hussain Zaidi...Bombay... 1993... News Today... India Today... Sync sound... hidden cameras... Mid Day... dingy bylanes of Bombay... Vijay "Dawood Ibrahim" Maurya... Anurag Kashyap, the writer...



Blue filters... Stock Exchange, Air India blasts... no-holds-barred dialogue... the chapter format... real video footage... Anurag Kashyap, the Director...


Indian Ocean...


Nataraja Subramaniam...Kay Kay Menon...



and the Yeda Yakub Steadycam chase on the pipeline











all the gore, and the grit... gut churning factual orgy finally lead to a day that ultimately proved to be a Good Friday for me, personally.

VISHAL & BARDWAJ

Okay, that typo and a desperate pun notwithstanding which will have the showman squirm no end, I declare my love yet again for this wonder.
Where the hell was he all this while? Why did it have to be a 2001/2002 for him to bloom on 70mm?
What does he have for his breakfast that the bollywood kitchens seem to be out of stock of ?

He is the one I am going to watch out for for the next 10-15 years, and I am sure each of his nuggets shall slowly but surely finds its way to my DVD collection.

What a man!

Will he along with Farhan Akhtar, Ashutosh Gowariker, Anurag Kashyap, Rajkumar Hirani, Nagesh Kukunoor, Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra form the cream that has honest cinematic blood flowing in its arteries? and to digress a little, why the hell cant I have more of one Mr.Vidhu Vinod Chopra? No one should have any problems if these guys are too happy counting their green bills and in the process have our movie watching sensibilities twisted and tweaked. It would be a pleasure being aboard their vehicles leading us into the worlds of disbelief and pure joy.

Has it meant the show is all over for the pretentious scums who seem to have infested the cinematic space robbing us of the pure magic that cinema was all and should be about?

Oye! BC

This one's no advertisement for Sehwag, only a exercise in wonder yet again, as to how champions perform when they have people and quite ironically their own fans breathing down their neck, and breathing fire.

What do you do? What does one do ? How different will he be this time around when the neck is upon the altar? Its tempting to say that it's all in the mind. Well it could be, but is that all? Will the paddle sweeps change, or will the intensity of that slash cut get diluted in the process of appeasement?

Again quite ironically you would be playing to the same galleries that were agog a while ago, and now they are gunning for you. Where were those wagging tongues when you gave them joy no matter how flawed the execution was, or gave them their paisa vasool and in the process shredding conventional manuals to pieces? How do you answer? How does one answer? For the junta, sadly it's the results that counts and one has to live with it.

This is not about a certain Sehwag or a certain Tendulkar at all. If one looks closer, it could conveniently and with no guilt be extended to a whole lot of people we come across whose crime is that in their success they have given people hope and raised a few expectations.

It doesnt matter what you want. It doesnt matter what you do. It doesnt matter what you go through. It doesnt matter by what margin you lose. In the end it's the result.

While this freaky chakra of expectations and realisations continues, here's an imaginary quote from Sehwag, when a scribe poses a query regarding his "approach". This one's a little tangential.

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Times Now: "Viru, what have you got up your sleeve this time around? Now that you have been bestowed another chance to cement your position in the team, what is your strategy? You must be worried."

Viru: Up my sleeve tho maine phir se slash cut maarni hai. Yeh psychology and sports management principles kuch nahi hota.. sab BC bakwaas hai... mujhe tho bas field par jaana hai, gendh dekhni hai, aur bas thokna hai... Maine nahi badalna... BC, yeh sab bakwaas hai... Worried aur main? arrey koi nahi yaar... Bas lassi peeni hai, kheer khaani hai, do chaar paraanthe aur achaar ke saath, makkan maarke aur bas... BC, is baar tho bas ch**na hai. Dally (Delhi; rhymes with tally, pally) ke liye hameshaa aise karta aaya hoon aur BC, aisa hi karna hai maine.