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Moondram Pirai (Tamil)

Moondram Pirai (Tamil)

Cinema, Indian Cinema

Director: Balu Mahendra
Language : Tamizh
At a brothel in Chennai, Cheenu (Kamal Haasan) finds a young woman called Viji (Sridevi) with regressive amnesia. Moved by her child-like state, he sneaks her out of there and takes her away to pristine Ooty where he is the headmaster at a local school.
 
Cheenu becomes part-parent, part-friend to Viji’s six year old self. The caretaking of this child-woman becomes his life’s purpose. Also existing in this uncorrupted microcosm are the helpful grandmother next door and a puppy that goes by the unwieldy name of Subramani.
 
Cheenu struggles to keep intact this near-perfect life with Viji, but the world begins to intrude. Juxtaposed to Viji’s naiivety is the ripe sensuality of the aged school owner’s young wife (Smitha) whose advances Cheenu finally spurns. When a woodcutter attempts to rape Viji, Cheenu becomes alert to her vulnerability and seeks the help of a local medicine man to cure her. When Cheenu is away, Viji’s parents arrive at the doorstep of the medicine man looking for their missing daughter, whose real name is Bhagyalakshmi. The cured Viji/Bhagyalakshmi recognises her parents but has no recollection of how she turned up at Ooty.
 
A distraught Cheenu arrives at the railway station just as Viji’s train is about to depart. He tries to remind her about their life together, but Viji does not recognize him. The train moves on and Cheenu is left with only memories of a period that sadly, Viji has no recollection of. 
 
Made by Balu Mahendra whose visual rendering of scenes is legendary in Tamizh cinema, Moondram Pirai was also dubbed in Telugu (Vasantha Kokila) and remade in Hindi (Sadma). Kamal Haasan won the Silver Lotus award among the National Awards that year for his performance in the movie. 
 
An edited version appeared in Culturama’s February 2011 Issue
Nizhalkuthu (Malayalam)

Nizhalkuthu (Malayalam)

Cinema, Indian Cinema

Director: Adoor Gopalakrishnan

Language : Malayalam

The title refers to a popular Kathakali dance-drama inspired by an oral retelling from the Mahabharata dealing with morality, duty and the handing out of punishments. 

Kaliyappan (Oduvil Unnikrishnan), the hangman of the princely state of Travancore is tormented by the guilt of executing people for a living. He douses his guilt with toddy and ponders the irony of using ash from the burnt hangman’s rope to cure ailments. The morbidity of his job is barely relieved by a loving family and a royal endowment of tax-free land. 

One day, Kaliyappan is informed that his services are required for an impending execution. As the date draws near, Kaliyappan’s moral reluctance affects his health. On the appointed day, his son Muthu (Narain) accompanies him to the execution. 

To keep the hangman awake preceding the execution, the Jailer (Nedumudi Venu) narrates the tale of a young girl who was raped and murdered by her sister’s husband, although the blame falls on a young orphan who wooed her. Kaliyappan, in his mind, finds resonances with his own life and gives in to empathy. When he wonders what happened next, he is told that it is the young orphan who is to be hanged in the morning. 

When fiction, fact and fragments from his own life merge imperceptibly, Kaliyappan becomes agitated and collapses. To carry out the execution on schedule, Kaliyappan’s son, a Gandhian and a propogator of non-violence, ends up doing his father’s job. 

Adoor Gopalakrishnan is an internationally acclaimed filmmaker and the recipient of numerous prestigious awards including the Padma Shri, the Padma Vibhushan and the Dadasaheb Phalke Award. Ilaiyaraaja’s haunting background score transforms into a youthful lilt when the story of the girl is being narrated but returns to the hangman’s story with a somber foreshadowing of imminent death.

(An edited version appeared in Culturama’s January 2011 Issue)
Dweepa (Kannada)

Dweepa (Kannada)

Cinema, Indian Cinema

Director: Girish Kasaravalli
Language: Kannada
At one level, Dweepa, a story by Norbert D’Souza, deals with the subject of displacement of natives near dam sites. At a deeper level, it depicts how different human facets come into play during a crisis. There is an underlying subtext of the Ramayana in the movie that will be of interest to those familiar with the epic.
Duggappa (M.V. Vasudeva Rao) is the custodian of a small temple for a local village deity at the base of a holy hillock. Duggappa’s obedient son, Ganapa (Avinash) assists him in the appeasement rituals conducted for the villagers. Ganapa’s wife, the industrious Nagi (Soundarya), constantly dreams of a better life for the family.
When the gates of the nearby dam are closed during the monsoon, there is a threat of the village being inundated. When the inmates are relocated to a nearby town, Duggappa adamantly returns along with Ganapa and Nagi to the deserted village, now rendered an island.
The ebullient Krishna (Harish Raju), an acquaintance, arrives to help them cope with rebuilding their lives. As the rains intensify, Krishna’s constant presence creates a rift between Ganapa and Nagi. Ganapa presumes Nagi’s attraction to Krishna, and is under the delusion that the two are to blame for the crisis unravelling around him. When Duggappa dies, Nagi senses that Ganapa holds her indirectly responsible for his death.
Fed up of the constant friction between Ganapa and Krishna, Nagi finally asks Krishna to leave. With Krishna gone, and Ganapa emotionally distancing himself from her, it is up to Nagi to safeguard her home from not only the dangerously rising water level but also a tiger foraging for a meal in the deserted village.

When the danger passes, Ganapa attributes their survival to benevolent temple spirits. Nagi’s efforts go unacknowledged and her isolation mirrors that of Sita’s in the Ramayana.

 
The film won a Golden Lotus for Best Film in the National Film Awards, 2002.
 
 (An edited version appeared in Culturama’s December 2010 Issue)
Meghe Dhaka Taara (Bengali)

Meghe Dhaka Taara (Bengali)

Cinema, Indian Cinema

Director: Ritwik Ghatak
Language : Bengali
Neeta’s (Supriya Choudhuri) family is one of many refugees who were displaced from Bangladesh and moved to West Bengal during the Partition. With her meagre earnings as a tuition teacher, Neeta strives to support not only her parents, but also an older brother Shankar (Anil Chatterjee) who is a struggling singer, a younger brother Montu whose passion for football she nurtures and a sister, the coquetish Gita. Neeta also financially supports her scientist fiance, Sanat, who is ultimately lured away by Gita at the behest of their mother who wants to ensure that Neeta remains unmarried to continue supporting the family.
Following her sister’s deceit and mother’s machinations, Neeta begins to feel suffocated by her life. Her sole source of emotional succour is her brother, Shankar whose life thereon gradually moves inverse to his sister’s.
The family finally begins to thrive, but Neeta’s emotional suffocation manifests at a metaphysical level as tuberculosis. Neeta is now a wasted human being and in the end, her final anguished vocalisation of her desire to live resonates in the hills that she always wanted to visit.
Ritwik Ghatak is considered one of the pathbreaking directors of Indian cinema. This movie is renowned for the way the sound and visual design communicate the emotional climate of each scene. The architecture of the scenes are also indicative of the turns that Neeta’s life takes – from the vast tree-lined riverside vistas of West Bengal to the claustrophobic confines of the courtyard in the refugee village and then again, to the pinnacle of no return in the grounds of the sanitarium in the hills of Nainital.
Meghe Dhaka Tara is a tragic story, but one that highlights the Partition’s socio-economic impact on immigrant families in post-Independence West Bengal.
 

(An edited version appeared in Culturama’s September 2010 Issue)

Rang de Basanti (Hindi)

Rang de Basanti (Hindi)

Cinema, Indian Cinema

Director: Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra

Language: Hindi

Rang De Basanti is a fascinating interplay between the narrative of a jailor in British-era India and that of his granddaughter in contemporary India. The movie evokes a comparison between the Indian freedom heroes of his time and the Indian youth of her time.
In his diary, McKinley (Steven Mackintosh) named five Indian freedom fighters – Bhagat Singh, Chandrashekhar Azad, Rajguru, Ashfaqulla Khan, and Ramprasad Bismil – whose fearless, unwavering commitment to the Indian freedom struggle shook his very belief system. Sue (Alice Patten) arrives in India to make a documentary based on her grandfather’s diary.
With the help of Sonia (Soha Ali Khan), Sue chooses a group of happy-go-lucky friends who initially seem least likely to convincingly portray legendary heroes. They are a disaffected group with no sense of identity.
Daljeet alias DJ (Aamir Khan) has long since completed his education but chooses to remain in college. Karan Singhania (Siddharth) shares a testy equation with his rich industrialist father. Aslam (Kunal Kapoor) belongs to a lower middle-class family that disapproves of his choice of friends. Exuberant Sukhi (Sharman Joshi) is ever interested in girls. Laxman Pandey (Atul Kulkarni) is the outsider to the group, a fundamentalist whom Sue chooses, much to the consternation of the group.
 
The mood shifts when Sonia, loses her fiance, Flt. Lt. Ajay Rathod (Madhavan) to an air crash. The Indian defence minister, Shastri (Mohan Agashe) casts aspersions on Rathod’s flying skills and disregards allegations of the purchase of faulty spare parts for MiG aircrafts.
The corruption among politicians evokes patriotic fervour among the friends, and in a poignant mirroring between past and present, they take the law into their hands, hurtling towards a resolution that eerily matches the lives of the Indian freedom fighters of yore.
With brilliant performances by the ensemble cast and music by A. R. Rahman that dovetails into the script, Rang De Basanti won the National Award in India. It is also the first Indian movie to be nominated by BAFTA in 2006 in the Best Film Not In the English Language category.

(An edited version appeared in Culturama’s August 2010 Issue) 

Harishchandrachi Factory (Marathi)

Harishchandrachi Factory (Marathi)

Cinema, Indian Cinema

Director: Paresh Mokashi
Language : Marathi
The curiously titled Harishchandrachi Factory (The Factory of Harishchandra) narrates the true story of how the doyen of Indian cinema, Dadasaheb Phalke set about making India’s first motion picture.
In 1911, unemployed Dhundiraj Govind Phalke (Nandu Madhav) chances upon the screening of a silent motion picture at a ‘tent’ theatre. His child-like curiosity is instantly aroused. He decides to make India’s first motion picture.
Ignoring naysayers and scraping together some finances, Phalke undertakes a voyage to London to learn filmmaking. When he returns to India, he is armed with know-how, a Williamson camera and enough raw stock to make his first movie.
Phalke, in his doggedness is much like the legendary protagonist he chooses – Raja Harishchandra – the king who staunchly kept his word even in dire circumstances. Phalke has a clarity of purpose, with no doubts or second thoughts about establishing a film industry in India.
Phalke’s winsome wife Saraswati (Vibhawari Deshpande) and their children gamely support him through his failed experiments, umpteen trials, and finally, the filming and post production of ‘Raja Harishchandra’.
Harishchandrachi Factory captures the social mindsets of that era, and how armed with humour, ingenuity and loads of chutzpah, Phalke transcends them. One of the funny yet challenging situations that Phalke faces is not finding women to play the female roles. Then, the men selected to play women refuse to shave off their moustaches.

The filmmakers have woven into the story, the real Phalke’s frames of reference. For instance, the paintings of the artist, Raja Ravi Varma, whom the real Phalke is said to have worked with and derived inspiration from.

Harishchandrachi Factory was selected as the Indian entry to the Academy Awards in 2010.

(An edited version appeared in Culturama’s July 2010 Issue)

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