Out of India, GAUTAMAN BHASKARAN considers the current Indian and Bollywood Cinema.

OSCAR-WINNING Hollywood classic Casablanca will soon pop out the cans in an Indian avatar, titled Ezham Mudra (The Seventh Seal). Director Rajeev Nath will swap Rick’s Café Américain for Dev’s Inn, a restaurant not in the Moroccan desert, but on the beaches of God’s Own Country, Kerala. If Michael Curtiz used the notes of a piano to evoke romance between Rick and Ilsa in wartime Paris and Vichy-controlled Casablanca, Nath will draw on the bloody Sri Lankan civil strife to create melody and mood for his version of three little people. Dashing Humphrey Bogart will be reborn as Suresh Gopi, a popular Malayalam film star, and ravishing Ingrid Bergman will transform into Bollywood’s sexy siren Mandira Bedi.

Gopi, essaying diplomat-turned-restaurateur Dev, not a rebel fighter-mellowed-salon-keeper settling in Casablanca for its waters, will woo Bedi with “Here’s looking at you, kid”, a line immortalised in the chronicles of cinema. With a song on his lips and beat on his toes – and perhaps a tabla master replacing pianist Sam – Dev will stir up memories of Rick and his rings of smoke. He may also get to frolic with Bedi on the waves to the lilting tune of “As Time Goes By”.

Nath will be a pioneer at this remake of sorts. Several earlier attempts, including a request to Francois Truffaut who refused, were in vain. Interestingly, Ezham Mudra will use the Sri Lankan war that has left 70,000 people dead since 1983 to give a contemporary feel. And Nath’s Victor Laszlo will be a Tamil revolutionary fleeing into India. The movie will go on the floors in September and premier early next year at Casablanca, where Bogart and Bergman once discovered Paris all over again.


India’s only living auteur, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, still swims and survives in a sea of big-budget films, aggressively promoted by Bollywood bucks and bigwigs. His latest feature, Naalu Pennungal (Four Women), tenth in 35 years, proves his unwavering commitment to meaningful cinema that began with his first, Swayamvaram (One’s Own Choice), in 1972. A keen eye for detail, a remarkable feel for authenticity and an undying love for each of his characters have helped Adoor, as he is popularly known, create celluloid excellence. His Naalu Pennungal in Malayalam – to be premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September – is divided into four chapters, each dealing with a different problem women face. These stories take place in 1940s Kerala, but are relevant even today, for the Indian woman, especially in the village, still has to grapple with social prejudices and impediments. What gives the movie an even greater impulsion are the strong performances that Adoor has been able to draw from his actors, turning them into eminently believable characters. In perhaps her best attempt ever, Nandita Das as Kamakashi infuses the anguish of a woman left by the wayside. Her face conveys pain and helplessness, and we walk out of the auditorium feeling tremendous sympathy for the Das character. Padma Priya transits with consummate ease from a brash streetwalker to one seeking stability, even if it is within a live-in relationship. If Geetu Mohandas brings dignity to Kumari stoically bearing the mortification of marital rejection, Manju Pillai gives nuances to the frustration of being childless. Freezing all this has been Adoor’s new cinematographer, M. J. Radhakrishnan, who replaces the director’s old hand, Mankada Ravi Varma. He had been an integral part of the Adoor oeuvre. Isaac Thomas’ music complements Adoor’s directorial vitality without being distractively intrusive.


While the hockey film Chak De! India has been running to packed houses in India, it failed to score a goal at the lucrative North American box-office. In fact, its scanty $351,000 take in three days could push the movie’s lead player, Shah Rukh Khan into all-time hall of shame. Even in the United Kingdom, the film has reportedly done disappointing business. The reason, as I guess, could be the film’s strong patriotic flavour: No Pakistani or Bangladeshi would perhaps like to see it, and North America and Britain have a large number of people from these two regions. So, the movie’s tone and flavour of “mera Bharat mahan” has not gone down well with India’s neighbours.


Feroz Abbas Khan’s Gandhi My Father, which opened on August 3, rolls into virgin ground by placing son Harilal on a pedestal. A lofty idea, indeed, but a trifle hard to translate it to film. Gandhi was a phenomenon, and it would need another phenomenon to eclipse him. So despite Khan’s best efforts, the son fails to emerge from the dark and forbidding clouds. Gandhi may not have been an ideal parent – or even a great husband – but he played perfect Father to the Nation.

Though the father often appears selfish in the cinema version, putting the interests of the nation before his son’s, Harilal never rises, in our esteem or psyche, above Gandhi. Harilal’s frustration and disappointment at having to live in the elder man’s shadow translate into unlawful activities that include shady business deals and hitting the bottle. The movie’s attempt to show him as a victim of circumstance and parental neglect gets negated largely because Khan is unable to strike the right screen balance or time between the two men. Gandhi’s scenes are longer and are a stealer, Harilal’s pales in comparison. It is Gandhi’s shame and sorrow at having failed to shape Harilal into a good human being that we remember, not quite the wayward son’s despair and dilemma.

Narrated in a series of flashbacks, Gandhi My Father begins with a dying Harilal in a Mumbai hospital saying, to the disbelief of those around him, that he is Gandhi’s son. The movie takes us to Gandhi’s days as barrister in early 1900s South Africa, where racism forces him into a lifelong battle against injustice. His saintly qualities of forgiveness, honesty, fairplay and duty to humanity – that compel him to overlook his son’s desires and ambition to the point of denying him a splendid opportunity to study law in England – have been captured in highly emotional scenes. Harilal’s diffidence and his marriage to Gulab are juxtaposed with Gandhi’s own life with Kasturba. She invariably sees her husband’s folly in his relationship with Harilal, but chooses not to go beyond mild protest. The film comes a full circle with an alcoholic, penniless Harilal’s death five months after Gandhi falls to an assassin’s bullet in January 1948.

The movie’s highpoint is performance. It is incredible how a flashy Bollywood star like Akshaye Khanna has been tamed into a mellow and shy Harilal. This is probably his best role to date. Equally amazing is the way Darshan Jariwala, known for his comic, theatre parts, has been moulded into an imposing, controlled Gandhi. The women have little to do, but Bhumika Chawla as Harilal’s wife, Gulab, injects a spark into her character that cannot be easily missed.


The National Film Awards for 2005 have been just announced, a clear delay of two years. A member on the jury moved court alleging that the prizes were “fixed”. The petition was dismissed by the Delhi High Court a few days ago. Without passing my judgement on the jury’s choices – because I feel they are highly subjective depending on the mood and mind of the panelists – I firmly believe that there is much to be desired as far as selection of members goes. I have written several times that the Directorate of Film Festivals, which is in charge of the National Awards, must rope in big names. Often the Directorate fails here, because it waits, either by design or compulsion, till the eleventh hour to send its invitations. Most people refuse, because of their prior commitments. I remember the Directorate asking me to serve on the National Jury virtually hours before the screenings were to begin in New Delhi. And I was not even living in New Delhi! The result of such royal bungling is so damn predictable: the jury includes people not qualified to be there, and they can be somebody’s bored wife or even a politician. Now for god’s sake, what do they know about cinema! Sadly the National Awards continue to be a scandal.


Shyam Benegal has now the Dada Saheb Phalke Award, Indian cinema’’ highest honour. This comes to him after 43 years and 60 films. One of the pioneers of India’s New Wave, Benegal made fascinating movies, such as Ankur, “Nishant, Manthan and Bhumika in the 1970s. My favourite remains Bhumika, where the late Smita Patil played the flamboyant and unconventional life of the 1940s Marathi actress, Hansa Wadkar. Though Smita was a wonderful performer, it was Benegal – much like Guru Dutt who made Waheeda Rehman – who moulded her into a great piece of art. Now at 72, Benegal continues to wave his magic wand to create meaningful cinema, and is one of the few directors in our country to keep alive a healthy celluloid tradition.


The death of Ingmar Bergman was, to the point of sounding clichéd, a great loss to cinema. He was 89, and was living all by himself on the Island of Faro, off the Baltic coast of Sweden. Bergman used his own bleak life, with its divorces and unfulfilled relationships, as ideas, themes and plots for his films. Pain and suffering were often the hallmark of his cinema. He often tormented his viewers with guilt and the evils of religion. In his movies, the world is a place where faith is tenuous; communication, elusive; and self-knowledge, illusory at best, Michiko Kakutani wrote in The New York Times Magazine in a 1983 profile of the director: “God is either silent or malevolent; men and women are creatures and prisoners of their desires.” Bergman moved from the comic romp of lovers in Smiles of a Summer Night in 1955 to the Crusader’s death-haunted search for God in The Seventh Seal in 1957; from the harrowing portrayal of fatal illness in Cries and Whispers in 1972 to the alternately humorous and horrifying depiction of family life a decade later in Fanny and Alexander.