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

IT’S AN Indian summer at the Toronto International Film Festival this year, which screened five Indian movies. Among them, Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s Four Women (Naalu Pennungal) in Malayalam and Buddhadeb Dasgupta’s The Voyeurs (Ami, Yasin Arr Amar Madhubala) in Bengali were part of the prestigious Masters Programme. Shivajee Chandrabhushan’s first feature in Ladakhi and Hindi, Frozen, played in the Discovery Section. Rituparno Ghosh’s The Last Lear with the Lear himself (why Mr Bachchan, of course) and Santosh Sivan’s Before The Rains (with Nandita Das and Rahul Bose) formed the rest of the Indian celluloid brigade.


Buddhadeb Dasgupta is one of the last among India’s fast vanishing tribe of art filmmakers. He lives in Bengal, makes movies in Bengali and owes his debt to the region’s cinema greats, such as Satyajit Ray, Ritwick Ghatak and still living Mrinal Sen. While Dasgupta studiously avoids creating anything similar to Ray’s work, and steers clear of Ghatak’s sentiment, the younger director often has been accused of making his films overtly poetic. This is only natural, because Dasgupta is a renowned poet and to a lesser extent a novelist. The use of verse as a metaphor and the seemingly absurd make his movies distinct from many others, and highly suitable for art-house audiences. Dasgupta’s latest, Ami Yasin Arr Amar Madhubala (The Voyeurs) may hold wider commercial prospects, appealing to viewers outside this discerning circuit, given the picture’s plot and its treatment.

The Voyeurs is a critique of the modern surveillance system that makes a mockery of individual privacy. At the very beginning, we are introduced to both the goodness and evil of the system. A hospital chief installs monitors to keep an eye on negligent nursing staff. Well, good, if they are for saving lives. But a little later, at a busy train terminus, a policeman gleefully watches on his screen a young couple smooching. Dasgupta pans across these scenes to take us to a young woman’s (Rekha, played by Sameera Reddy) room, whose window affords voyeuristic scope for men on a terrace across the street. This idea is developed into a close-up with sharper visuals when the woman’s neighbour, a strapping youth called Dilip, and his friend, Yasin, plant an ‘eye’ in her room for endless peep-shows on their little screen.


Also at the Toronto International Film Festival, Shivaji Chandrabhushan’s debut feature Frozen paints in black and white the stark landscape of sparsely populated Ladakh. He studies this community of simple folks through the curious, often irreverent eyes of Lasya, a bubbly teenage girl essayed by Gauri. In fact, the story of Frozen is the story of Gauri as she grows up watching a subtle evolution around her, and Chomo, her little brother she imagines to be alive, is her sounding board.

Extremely arty and hence with little chance of opening in regular commercial cinemas, the movie most likely will be confined to festival screens. Chandrabhushan’s attempt to give his work a slight commercial edge by letting the camera play on Lasya, resplendent in rich Ladakhi costumes, doesn’t quite work.

Lasya lives on barren terrain, complete with snow and leafless trees suggesting cold hostility, and she grows up seeing her old father, Karma (Danny Denzongpa), losing a battle with modern existence. At the local market, his handmade jams can no longer compete with factory-produced food. The enormous debts he owes scheming moneylenders (who shamelessly suggest writing off the loans in exchange for a night with Lasya) push him to the brink of soulless mountain crevices. And when the Indian army sets base close to his home, it seems like the end of the road, especially when the commanders want him to move out. Lasya is caught in this endless, irreversible conflict, but manages to skate on thin ice, bluntly refusing irresponsible sexual propositions from Romeo (Shakeel Khan) and splendidly adapting herself to the rapidly changing scenario. Frozen works all right, though, at a somewhat naïve level. Its locales and restrained treatment add essence to the film.


Chak De! India grips you from the word go, and I do not understand why it has not done well in overseas territories. Maybe because, the movie has none of Bollywood’s trappings of song-and-dance and mushy romance. The film is even better than Laagan, and is an honest attempt to tell us all that is wrong with hockey as a sport in India. India’s national game, hockey, now languishes in the dumpyard with all its heroes gone, and the sport itself being treated like a poor, poor cousin of the more glamorous cricket and tennis.

Shah Rukh Khan is Kabir Khan, a disgraced hockey captain, whose patriotism is questioned when he loses a penalty corner in a India-Pakistan match. He is called a traitor and has to leave his family home with his mother. But seven years later, he returns as the coach of a women’s hockey team in a sullied atmosphere where the selectors are a bunch of male chauvinists and could not care less if the team makes it to the World Cup. Khan tackles this terrifying pessimism along with in-team barriers like language, economic status, swollen ego and lack of group spirit to get the players on their feet and their sticks cracking.

There are several situations that appear too coincidental for comfort, but director Shimit Amin does not yield to the temptation of pushing Khan into king-sized romance with one of the 16 hockey girls. Nor does Amin let himself be trapped by the Bollywood formula of overt emotionalism, and this is where Chakde! India scores many more runs – sorry goals – than Laagan did. In the ultimate analysis, Amin’s is a clean sports movie with admirable performances by Khan and the girls, all newcomers. A must see.