Suketu Mehta: Questa terra è la nostra terra

È in vendita nelle librerie italiane Questa terra è la nostra terra. Manifesto di un migrante, di Suketu Mehta, pubblicato da Einaudi. Nella presentazione si legge: 

'Le migrazioni sono una costante della storia umana. E oggi piú che mai, perché le conseguenze del colonialismo, delle guerre, del cambiamento climatico hanno reso la vita impossibile nei loro Paesi d’origine a milioni di persone. Siamo un pianeta in movimento e Suketu Mehta, con la chiarezza e la passione che l’hanno reso celebre, ci racconta perché questa è la cosa migliore che potesse capitarci. (...) Partendo dalla sua esperienza personale - lo scrittore è emigrato ragazzo da Bombay a New York con la sua famiglia -, Mehta fa il giro del mondo per delineare il quadro della situazione in Occidente: dalla frontiera tra Messico e Stati Uniti, alla recinzione che separa il Marocco da Melilla, alle politiche islamofobe di molti governi europei, il sentimento prevalente è la paura. Perché le storie di chi ogni giorno lavora e lotta duramente per conquistare diritti che dovrebbero essere scontati sono offuscate dai discorsi altisonanti pieni di retorica populista. E allora tutti a difendersi, chiudersi, respingere invece di accogliere. È un errore, e Mehta lo racconta in questo vero e proprio manifesto a favore dell’immigrazione: non si può che trarre vantaggio dall’apertura, dall’accoglienza, dallo scambio. Appassionato, intenso, tenero, pieno di storie e personaggi memorabili, Questa terra è la nostra terra è una lucida lettura del presente, e un incoraggiamento a cambiare il futuro'.

Vi segnalo l'intervista concessa dallo scrittore a Nandini Nair, pubblicata da Open il 15 agosto 2019. Suketu Mehta: From America with Love and Anger:

'In 1977, a 14-year-old Suketu Mehta moved to the US with his parents and two sisters. In Bombay, he left behind his closest friends. To them he would write letters, not of the aching loneliness or isolation he felt at the all-boys’ Catholic high school in Queens, New York. He did not tell them that a bully had christened him ‘Mouse’, and would trip him in the hallways. He did not mention the time when his family found hate painted across their car. Instead, he would share with his friends pages from comic books, which were available in the US, and were coveted back in India. Speaking on the phone from New York, he says, “The stories immigrants send back home is, ‘Look, we’ve gone to America, this is the dream.’ But it is actually not. It is a very emotionally fraught kind of storytelling.” As an immigrant, even a teenage Mehta knew that the stories one shares with those one has left behind, are stories of success, anecdotes of joy, to prove that the move to the new land has, indeed, been a successful one. The role of stories, those which we tell ourselves, those we recount to our family, and those which politicians tell us, play a pivotal role in Mehta’s most recent book This Land is Our Land. An Immigrant’s Manifesto. (...) He writes, ‘The first thing that a new migrant sends to his family back home isn’t money; it’s a story.’ It could be about the first snowfall, or the first sight of Brooklyn bridge or the first taste of a hotdog.

But if stories bind, they can also sever. And of late, they’ve been used as tools to create discord and divisions. Mehta writes, ‘Stories have power, much more power than cold numbers. That’s why Trump won the election; that’s why Modi and (...) Orbán (...) and the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte won power. A populist is, above all, a gifted storyteller, and the recent elections across the world illustrate the power of populism: a false narrative, a horror story about the other, well told.’ It is these false narratives that Mehta redresses in his book. He says, “The debate around migration is a contest of storytelling.” He believes that all “these populists” - whether it is Trump on television, or Bal Thackeray at Shivaji Park - know how to tell a story, how to build a brand, and they do it adeptly, through lies. The only way those false stories can be fought is “by telling a true story better.” And that is the job of journalists and writers. “Why are all these people demonising writers and journalists,” he asks, “it is because they are truth tellers. (...) I felt I had to write this book now. The US 2020 election will be won or lost on the basis of immigration. It is the single most pressing issue for Americans. (...) I felt it almost like a calling. I did this because I felt angry. This book was born out of rage. Because of the staggering global hypocrisy built around migration.” 

This Land is our Land is an excellent example of crystallised rage. This is not the rage of spit and bluster, that leaves the recipient of it annoyed, but unmoved. Instead it is a rage borne from moral clarity and fostered by the truth. It is a rage that has been harnessed into adamant arguments, and which only the wilfully blind and selectively deaf can choose to ignore. Mehta comes to the issue of migration from personal experience, but through the stories of others, and in-depth research on the topic, he proves that we are all migrants. The fear of immigrants is stoked only by politicians to earn votes, make money, and to vilify the ‘other’. “Trump calls migrants robbers or rapists, I call them ordinary heroes,” Mehta says. (...) In this book, Mehta underscores that the great animating force of migration is that most human and innate of desires - to do better for one’s family, to provide for one’s children, and to toil towards a future that is brighter than the present.

An ‘Immigrant's Manifesto’ is an apt title for the book because it is as much an exploration of migration, as it is a proclamation. This Land is Our Land is a public declaration of the belief and aims of all immigrants. It is a manifesto, which in no uncertain terms declares, ‘I claim the right to the United States, for myself and my children and my uncles and cousins, by manifest destiny. This land is your land, this land is our land, it belongs to you and me. It’s our country now. We will not reassure anybody about their racist fears about our deportment; we’re not letting the bastards take it back. It is our America now.’ Mehta stakes a claim to America, as he believes all immigrants can lay ownership to the richer world, because of the past workings of colonialism and the present machinations of capitalism and climate change. Migrants from poorer parts have a right to settle into richer parts, and that right is essentially restitutionary. (...) For Mehta the restitutionary nature of immigration can be simply explained by - we are here, because you were there. Mehta adds, “The British ran India not as civilising endeavour. But to make England rich.”

While the US can choose to obfuscate and declare that they don’t owe anything to India, since they were a colony themselves, they need to be held accountable for the ruin they are unleashing upon the planet today. While the US military alone is a bigger polluter than 140 countries combined, the “US has walked away from the Paris Accord and will do nothing about climate change,” says Mehta. “Indians are suffering, and will continue to suffer, at enormous rates,” he adds, “because the developed countries, built up their economies, with fossil fuels.” Climate change of today has replaced the colonialism of the last century, as we will continue to see the rich countries get richer, and the poor countries get poorer. Mehta believes that the catastrophic effects of climate change, when entire countries get submerged, will unleash the kind of human migration that history has yet to witness. “You ain’t seen nothing yet, when it comes to movement,” he says, and even over a trans-Atlantic phone line I can hear his assertion in all capitals.

It is little surprise that Mehta’s book has been met by a range of reactions. (...) He notes how one reviewer on Amazon said he should be ‘skinned alive’ and must return to his ‘turd-world country,’ while someone else tweeted, ‘This cockroach needs sent back to whatever shit hole he crawled out of.’ But for Mehta what is interesting and meaningful is the appreciation he has received from people like him. He says, “I have been getting all these letters from Indian Americans, saying that my book has really made them stop apologising, for moving. People who came here in the ’60s, they are professionals, they are expected to be really grateful to America for letting them in. My book points out that this country would fall apart without immigration.” Now is not the time for the Indian American community to merely enjoy its economic success, instead they need to contribute to the public sphere, possibly join politics and “claim our place in the country,” he asserts.

According to Mehta, everyone benefits from migration. For the refugees, it might make the difference between life and death. For the recipient country, it will bring young and enterprising migrants who having left home and embarked on an arduous journey will work hard and honestly. The immigrants will send back money to their homes, and the remittances will benefit the countries that they’ve left behind. As Mehta writes, ‘They will make their new countries richer, in all senses of the word. The immigrant armada that is coming to your shores is actually a rescue fleet.’ Mehta might have written This Land is Our Land from anger, but it is ultimately “an angry book with a happy ending”. And the happy ending is that immigration benefits everybody. Mehta adds, “The end of the book is also a renewal of my faith in America.” He loves America because it is one country made up of all other countries'.

Malayalam Cinema: Frames of Small Things

Vi segnalo l'articolo Malayalam Cinema: Frames of Small Things, di Divya Unny, dedicato alla recente evoluzione del cinema in lingua malayalam e pubblicato ieri da Open:

'Syam Pushkaran, the writer of Kumbalangi Nights says, “There has been a very conscious attempt to look at the kind of stories we need as a society, and the lives of real people around us. A film like Kumbalangi Nights that speaks of insecurities within a family, selflessness among strangers, a kind of fearlessness in new love, brings to the fore those stories. When we show a man’s vulnerabilities or strip his ego down on screen, we are not trying to defame a gender or a person, but asking if we need to take a hard look at ourselves and our conditioning.” (...)

With homegrown stories told in the most visually intriguing fashion, these films are so local that they are global. You can see, smell and taste Kerala in them. Coconuts being scraped, banana leaves being chopped, fresh tapioca getting fried, pork being sold, fishnets being laid out, paddy being farmed - from foods to festivities, nuns and nurses, from toddy and tea shops, to buses and motor boats, from pointless strikes to churches and mikes, the filmmakers proudly evoke their state’s culture as a backdrop for their stories. (...)

You begin to empathise, answer questions, and marvel at the irony of life thanks to everyday characters within these films who are neither black nor white, but just human. (...)

With OTT platforms these films can now reach a far wider audience thanks to the subtitles. (...)

For many, the evolution of Malayalam cinema is categorised broadly as the pre and post Chemmeen (1965) era. The film on the lives of rural fisher folk in Kerala and social prejudices against them was an adaptation of the award-winning novel by the legendary author Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai, and became a cinematic benchmark. (...)

For those who have grown up on Malayalam cinema, there’s never been a lack of realism and stark humour. Priyadarshan’s films especially of the 80s and 90s painted the common man in unusual ways. Actors like Mohanlal became the face of that common man. However, it can’t be denied that much of commercial Malayalam cinema till recently was driven by the male protagonist, and his transformational powers. Both Mohanlal and Mammootty were flagbearers of this power for over four decades, and that’s now changing. The ‘Lalettan’ and ‘Mamokka’ (how the actors are lovingly referred) monopoly is slowly fading, spelling the end of an era in Malayalam films. (...)

All the characters are so well fleshed out, one can never predict where the story will lead. (...) Almost dissolving the very idea of a ‘protagonist’ in a film, and thereby setting a new foundation for cinema. No character is on a moral high-ground and you almost feel like you know them'.

È morto Shyam Ramsay

È morto questa mattina a 67 anni il regista Shyam Ramsay, appartenente al clan il cui nome è indissolubilmente legato alla tradizione horror indiana. E a proposito della sua originale famiglia, vi propongo l'articolo Indian Horror Returns: Beware the Ramsays, di Lhendup G. Bhutia, pubblicato da Open il 12 aprile 2017:

'His father Fatehchand Ramsingh owned a large electronics store in Karachi with “14 windows”, Ramsingh Radio and Electric Company, where he sold the latest radio transistors. But his clients, most of them British officers and their families, struggled with the name of the shop, at best managing to pronounce ‘Ramsingh’ as ‘Ramsay’. When the family moved to Bombay during Partition and set up a radio transistor shop in Lamington Road, and later entered film production, this new name ‘Ramsay’ travelled with them too. And the seven sons - Kumar, Keshu, Tulsi, Kiran, Shyam, Gangu and Arjun - came to be known as the Ramsay brothers.

Fatehchand Ramsingh produced several films. (...) All his films did moderate business. But the last of them, Ek Nanhi Munni Ladki Thi, was such a spectacular failure that Fatehchand not only lost a lot of money, he also lost the heart to make another film. “He was heartbroken and he didn’t want to do another film,” Tulsi remembers.

By then Tulsi had dropped out of St Xavier’s College in Mumbai to run a textile shop. Bollywood films in those times, as Tulsi remembers, used to take several years to complete. Shooting happened in bits and pieces only for a few weeks and would halt for several months until the producers raised funds for the next leg of production. The brothers would take leave from their jobs and studies to assist their father.

As the father locked himself up in his house convalescing from a broken heart, the brothers, unable to take the stifling environment of failure, would walk to the neighbouring theatre, Minerva Cinema, every evening to catch the failure unfold for free. (...) The theatre would be filled every night with just 10 or 20 viewers who would be half-asleep. But every night, the brothers noticed, Tulsi says, that at one point in the film, the bodies of the sleepy and sluggish audience members, would suddenly stir. The scene involved a heist sequence, where the statuesque Prithviraj Kapoor, disguised in a dark costume with a cape, enters a museum to steal from it. When the police would shoot at him, the bullets would bounce off his body. “He was so hideous and scary-looking in that part. The public would scream and jump,” Tulsi says. By then, Tulsi was already a big fan of American and European horror films. “We brothers began to think, ‘Why don’t we expand the elements of that short sequence? Why don’t we make an entire horror film instead?’”

The seven brothers managed to convince their father to fund their venture. But this time, they agreed, they were going to do things differently. They were going to keep costs low. They were not going to hire stars and they were not going to recruit outsiders to make and direct the film. The brothers were going to do everything. Shyam and Tulsi Ramsay would direct, Gangu, who was interested in photography, would handle the camera, Kiran, who was interested in music, would handle the sound department, Arjun would edit, and Kiran, the most educated of them, would write the script. The brothers read a book on film production, they made a small film as trial, and put together a cast of unknown characters. The family and cast got into a bus to head to the neighbouring town of Mahabaleshwar, where the wintry nights and deep woods would provide an ideal location for a horror film. The brothers would shoot during the day and night, while their mother cooked for them and the crew in the guesthouse. “It was really like a picnic for all of us,” Shyam remembers.

The film, Do Gaz Zameen Ke Neeche (1972), which cost a pittance and was completed before schedule, made the family a lot of money. “There had been Bollywood films with a horror sequence here and there in the past. But this was India’s first legitimate all-out horror film,” Shyam says.

In the next few decades, the Ramsay brothers averaged at least one horror film every year, sometimes as many as two or three in a single year. Bollywood was changing drastically by then. Films were becoming more expensive to make. (...) The Ramsay brothers lay at the other end of the spectrum, perhaps outside it completely, making films with unknown faces and tacky visuals, creating their own formula of sex and horror. According to Tulsi, during this period, the more well-known families and stars in the film industry would often laugh about their films, but because of their success, often kept an eye on their projects.

The seven brothers, as Shyam remembers it, shared two rooms in an apartment. They would challenge each other to tell new horror stories all night long, and include their discussions into a film script by the day. A bevy of actors, respectable and semi-respectable, depending on the moment in their career, made their way in and out of a Ramsay film. Many of the regular 1980s and 90s actors - Shakti Kapoor, Gulshan Grover, Satish Shah, Mohnish Bahl, even Irrfan Khan - often featured in a Ramsay Brothers’ production. In one of their biggest hits, Purana Mandir (1984), their star turned out to be a seven-foot monster, an actor named Ajay, who later played the monster in several of Ramsay Brothers’ films. “He came to me wanting to be a hero,” Shyam says. “I had to convince him to become the monster. I told him in our films, the ghost gets more screen time than the hero.”

The brothers would market their films on the radio, offering money to people brave enough to watch their film alone. Shyam recalls, “We would say, ‘Shut your doors, close your window...’ And then we would cue in the sound of a heroine screaming. And say, ‘A Ramsay Brothers’ picture is coming out tonight’.” One of their films caused a man to die of a cardiac arrest, Shyam claims. And while filming a scene one night in a jungle, they say they once accidently dug up a body. (“We just said a few prayers and dug the body back in,” Shyam says.) Saasha, who as a child would often travel with her father on shoots and later assisted him on The Zee Horror Show and some films, recalls growing up in a house filled with scary masks and prosthetics. “Most of my friends’ fathers did a nine-to-five job. I would tell everyone my dad does a six-to-six (am) job.”

The Ramsay Brothers’ films had everything. There were exophthalmic witches, monsters with scrofulous cheeks and scarred foreheads, and human heads that would either explode or appear disembodied in refrigerators. And like good horror filmmakers, they didn’t just rely on gore. Women with milky white skin would often find themselves in a shower, bosoms would perennially emerge from swimming pools, and village belles would roll about on haystacks for no particular reason. “People complain about the censor board now. I faced much more back then,” Tulsi says. For their first film, Tulsi recounts, with unusual relish for a 70-year-old, how he spent almost an entire night filming a sequence where an actor just kisses the actress. “I would find my father watching that scene again and again at home,” he says. Several minutes of that scene were edited out, but what was released always elicited hoots from the crowd.

Of the seven brothers, two have already died. Kiran passed away more than a year ago from a liver-related ailment. Tulsi recounts with some bitterness how the other brothers weren’t informed of his poor health. Professionally, the brothers had already split long before. Two amongst them had moved out of horror films in the 1990s to find some success producing action films with Akshay Kumar. After the remaining brothers finished up with their TV series and could not find the same success with their later films, most of them quit. Only Shyam continues to work, now with his daughter. While Tulsi, like always, hopes to return to making horror films.

“Do you think ghosts exist?” Tulsi asks, without displaying much interest in my opinion. “I think they do. If there is light, there is also darkness,” he says. Tulsi has a limp and a lopsided stance, somewhat like a jammed accordion. Beside him is an old fashioned briefcase that contains articles about the brothers from magazines and newspapers, many of them which have long since been discontinued. He spends his day in the house or watching films alone in a nearby theatre. He has stopped entertaining old acquaintances. Occasionally, a fan will seek him out. He tells me of a horror he has finished shooting, about his plan to start new projects, and of doing a horror Marathi film'.

Irrfan Khan International

Anno magnifico, il 2015, per Irrfan Khan. Piku ha conseguito un enorme successo di pubblico e critica. Talvar, dopo aver incantato gli spettatori festivalieri di mezzo mondo, al botteghino indiano si sta comportando dignitosamente. Jazbaa, nel bene e nel male, è uno dei film più chiacchierati, osannati e discussi della stagione corrente. Irrfan è sempre Irrfan: solido, elegante, talentuoso, ironico, affascinante. Vi segnalo Irrfan Khan International, intervista concessa dalla star a Divya Unny, pubblicata da Open il 7 ottobre 2015:

'Dressed in a simple black tee and jeans, his energy unfazed by everything that’s buzzing around him. “It’s better to be the spectator than just the subject, isn’t it?” he asks. (...) Even as an interviewee he knows how to hold your attention. His eyes (...) tell you what his words don’t. He flashes a faint smile every time he reads between your questions. He barely uses his hands, much like the way he plays most of his parts. (...) With Piku, Jurassic World and now Talvar, 2015 is his year by every rule of the book. Rules, he loves to challenge with the parts he plays. “I don’t know if I can call it a breakthrough year, but I’m fortunate that all the good films are coming one after the other. The audiences are asking to be engaged mentally, emotionally, intellectually. Hell, they are asking us to engage them with time pass, but the good thing is at least they are thinking,” he says.

It’s been one of Khan’s strongest traits as an actor. He never underestimates his audience. No matter how mindful or mindless a film he’s part of, he always finds a direct connect with those watching him. Be it through a simple throwback of the head, or by adjusting his reading glasses, or pausing a few seconds before responding to a question, he always manages to steal a moment with the viewer - even before he communicates with his co-actor. He lets them in before letting himself out, and with precision as sharp as his gaze. This is perhaps why he finds a story to tell even with characters that may be drawn out in just a few lines on paper. “My character Rana in Piku is just one of the many parts Shoojit [Sircar] had written in this world that was so real. Honestly, there was little about Rana that could be fleshed out in the context of the story because it wasn’t about him. But then, how do you play a part like that with conviction? Just by surrendering yourself to that space. You cannot imagine the things you will discover once you make yourself believe that you are truly part of that world,” he says.

It’s a philosophy that never let him define his range as an actor in the three decades that he has been performing. You still cannot predict what Irrfan’s next role might be. He has never made moulds for himself like the ‘superstars’ of the Hindi film industry. He broke all barriers - of age, language and physical attributes - to get his space. (...) Some of Khan’s most lovable parts have him playing characters at least 20 years older than he is. “When I was playing Sunil Sanyal [dalla serie In Treatment], I was really falling short of life experiences to make it convincing. I was playing a widower who’s highly insecure of his surroundings and relationships. I did not have that kind of complexity. But that’s when your experiences, your desire to create something new is tested. You push and prod yourself to a point where you start discovering things about yourself you never knew,” he says. (...)

The journey was tough, to a point that made him want to give it all up. He still remembers being edited out of his first film Salaam Bombay!, an experience that broke his spirit. “I remember sobbing all night when Mira told me that my part was reduced to merely nothing. But it changed something within me. I was prepared for anything after that,” he says. From the very start, he came across as an actor with the intensity only very senior actors like Pankaj Kapur and Naseeruddin Shah possessed. It wasn’t like he was a troubled child, but there was something that was always brewing within him. “I was not an unhappy kid, but I was always craving my mother’s attention. I would do anything to get her affection and I think at some level, acting helped me channelise a lot of those emotions.” (...)

“I remember there was a scene in Maqbool where I watch my newborn from a little window frame in the hospital door. It was the last time I was going to see my child, and at the end of the scene a tear drop trickles down from the glass frame. Now that was not planned, that’s the kind of moment that just happens.” Though his canvas as an actor only expanded from there on, it was these moments of truth he says he strived to achieve with every role. When Ang Lee cast Irrfan in Life of Pi, he said of him, “I was always familiar with Irrfan’s work, so casting him was almost a no-brainer. He’s someone who surprises you every minute with his interpretation of the story and the character. And I discovered that after I watched The Namesake.”

Over the years, he has even been criticised by many for taking up small parts in massive Hollywood films. (...) But for Khan, it was about putting himself out there on sets that were alien to him. “When I do something like The Lunchbox, it’s highly exhausting and even boring because most of my scenes are with a sheet of paper or a dabba full of food. Then when I go and act in a superhero film in Hollywood, it’s a completely opposite experience. Both films shook me out of my comfort zone, asked me to look for new ways to say things, surprise myself. (...) It makes me happy when people outside India recognise my work, because at some level I am also able to change their idea about our cinema. Our stories are getting more real, our audience is changing and the world should know about it.”

Ask him if it’s extra pressure having to represent the country as an actor in places like film festivals at Cannes and Florence, and he says, “As an actor, the kind of emotion I create in a scene is relatable because I don’t rely on false perceptions. Similarly I don’t put up a face when I go abroad. It’s the one thing I strived for during my learning days. To find my truth. Even today when I stand on the podium with five other stalwarts, who I look up to, I try to remain true to myself and I guess that’s what they appreciate,” he says. He says he doesn’t change his approach when he works with a Ron Howard or a Tom Hanks because he believes he doesn’t need to. “Their world is different, but they hire me for what I bring to them, and if that changes I will cease to be myself.”

Among his biggest challenges as an actor is to keep his opinion and his craft separate. “Talvar was the kind of script that changed many of my opinions that were formed without full knowledge. We are quick to judge and succumb to hyped reality. As an actor I think it is important to be able to not fall prey to that, especially with a script inspired by reality.” That he has now mastered his craft is something everyone agrees on, except he himself. “I have moments of panic even today. There’s nothing known as mastery. You give people something they can take from, something aspirational, something inspiring, and that doesn’t always come methodically. You have to rely on instinct,” he adds.

Years ago his only dream was to present his mother with a bagful of money. Today things have changed. “Today I have changed, my mother has changed and so have my dreams. She will now ask me to keep the bag of money aside and spend some more time with her. Even now she may rebut me for something I would do, and I will still strive to gain her attention. That’s not the actor within, that’s just me.” We ask him if “Irrfan Khan can really do anything”, (...) and all he does is let out a silent smile. “I don’t want to be able to do everything. I want to create something, break it, create and then break some more. Why look at mastering anything? Life is perishable. You will anyway become a story in some time. So why not become a great one?” he asks'.

Om Dar-B-Dar: locandina e trailer

La locandina è uno spettacolo. Diretto da Kamal Swaroop, e proiettato nel 1988 in prima mondiale al Berlin International Film Festival, Om Dar-B-Dar non ha mai giovato di una vera distribuzione, malgrado gli apprezzamenti della critica internazionale. La pellicola nel corso degli anni è assurta al rango di cult movie, e registi del calibro (anche commerciale) di Imtiaz Ali e di Anurag Kashyap la citano come fonte di ispirazione. Udite udite: la versione restaurata di Om Dar-B-Dar, non solo è stata presentata in prima mondiale al Festival Internazionale del Film di Roma 2013, ma il 17 gennaio 2014 è stata finalmente distribuita in India, in alcune sale selezionate, per la delizia dei suoi estimatori. Trailer. Ne approfitto per segnalarvi l'articolo One head scratcher of a movie!, di Mayank Shekhar, pubblicato da Open il 23 gennaio 2014:

'While the disjointed film defies description, it has enough genres heaped on to it, recurrent ones being ‘post-modern’ and ‘avantgarde’. (...) Kamal Swaroop’s Om Dar-B-Dar seems like a response to Indian cinema’s serious, self-conscious art-house movies of the 70s and 80s that stated such obvious truths about the human condition. The film is instantly surreal, making it an expression of subconscious thoughts, or dreams. (...) 

The Government-run National Film Development Corporation produced Om Dar-B-Dar. Swaroop had strong credentials. He had graduated in direction from FTII [Film and Television Institute of India], Pune. (...) He assisted Richard Attenborough on Gandhi (...). For his directorial debut, he approached the NFDC with a completely linear synopsis of his script, which is clearly not how he eventually filmed it. The producers must have been shocked by the outcome. 

Om Dar-B-Dar didn’t get a release. The film went straight to the cans, instead of Cannes; however, it did premiere at Berlin. It didn’t make it to the Government’s Indian Panaroma section that ensures screenings at State sponsored festivals. Miraculously enough, it picked up the Best Film (critics) prize at Filmfare Awards, which was then more than merely a television event. A thoroughly-confused Censor Board at the time didn’t grant the film a viewing certificate. They believed that while they couldn’t make head or tail of the movie, there must be subliminal, subversive messages being transmitted through it that may adversely affect an unsuspecting public. (...) 

The brass band section in the song Emosanal Attyachar from Anurag Kashyap’s Dev. D (2009) is evidently homage to the Om Dar-B-Dar track Meri Jaan AAA, which is also the song Natha’s son hums when his father disappears in Anusha Rizvi’s Peepli [Live] (2010). My favourite number in the film is Bablu Babylon Se. (...)

The film, in chaste Sanskritised Hindi, is a hallucinatory journey from adolescence to late teenage of young Om, who is an astrologer’s son. If you sit down to follow that story, chances are you’ll lose your mind. Deliberately hammy actors add to the humour. Swaroop says he took about three years to figure out a script, spending most of that time discarding any aspect in it that seemed like a film. He argues that if you merely remove sex and violence from a movie, it stops looking like one. (...) 

Swaroop says he drew heavily from free-spirited Maithili-Hindi-Bengali writer Rajkamal Chaudhary from Mahisi in north Bihar. Chaudhary’s writings effortlessly merged ‘American pop literature with Indian literary traditions, delving strongly in self-exorcism and black magic’. Chaudhary is often credited with one of the earliest references to lesbianism in a Hindi novel, Machhali Mari Hui, which is one of the books that Swaroop claims primarily inspired Om Dar-B-Dar. Chaudhary died of syphilis at the age of 38 in 1967. Swaroop, 61, hasn’t made a feature since Om Dar-B-Dar'. 

È morto Rituparno Ghosh

Grave lutto per il cinema indiano. Rituparno Ghosh, talentuoso e pluripremiato regista bengali, si è spento questa mattina a Kolkata a causa di un attacco di cuore. Il 31 agosto avrebbe compiuto 50 anni. Ghosh è molto noto nel circuito dei festival: numerose sue pellicole sono state proiettate in diverse rassegne internazionali. Il suo è un cinema decisamente d'autore, ma Ghosh non ha mai disdegnato di scritturare star di grosso calibro - anche in prestito da Bollywood - per i suoi film (Aishwarya Rai, Amitabh Bachchan, Ajay Devgan, Preity Zinta, eccetera). Prosenjit Chatterjee, superstar del cinema popolare in lingua bengali, ha offerto performance magnifiche nelle pellicole dirette da Ghosh (vedi Dosar). La post-produzione di Satyanweshi, ultimo lavoro del regista, è tuttora in corso.

Aggiornamento del 5 giugno 2013 - The Alternative World of Rituparno Ghosh, Myna Mukherjee, Open:

'Of all his characters, the one he felt closest to was Binodini, played by Aishwarya Rai in his adaptation of Chokher Bali (...). Binodini stood on a threshold of social transformation as she struggled for social acceptance as a widow after the British had legislated widow remarriage in the face of countrywide resistance. Rituparno felt a strong sense of identification with the tragic isolation of someone caught in the half-light of legitimacy. It was this isolation perhaps that made him one of the most sensitive Indian directors of recent years. In a society with inequalities so deeply entrenched, he put across the struggle of being a human being - swallowed by desire, choked by experience, trapped by social expectations - with lyrical melancholy. And like all accomplished tragedians, he was the master of the dark poem, the kind of poetry that only comes through when bleakness is almost unbearable.

In the 21 years since he made his first film, Rituparno was part of over 24 films. He directed and wrote over 21 of them, and acted in his last three releases as the lead. His films have won over 18 National Awards, and have travelled widely across the international festival circuit. He is acknowledged as the central figure in the late 1990s’ renaissance of Bengali Cinema that broke what was otherwise a bleak period. Best known for emotional dramas, his career spanned genres as diverse as children’s films (Hirer Angti, 1992) and murder mysteries (Shubho Mahurat). At a time when cinema was centered around the ‘Hero’, Ritu chose to make film after film about women. Unishe April and Titli, with Aparna Sen and Konkona Sen [Sharma], both explored the tensions and intimacies of a mother-daughter relationship. Bariwali won Kirron Kher a Best Actress National Award for her portrayal of an ageing spinster in a decrepit house in a state of slow decay. Dahan explored the apathy and misogyny of society around victims of sexual assault. Ritu was always willing to take risks. From incest to infidelity, he invested the hitherto sacrosanct middle-class Bengali family on screen with narratives that had been wiped off cinematically in the sanitised blaze of mainstream depictions. In Utsab, Dosar and Shob Charitro Kalponik, he explored complicated, damaged and often flawed human relations in a sensitive but unsentimental way. Rituparno was willing to break cinematic norms as well. For example, Dosar,(...) a tale of an unfaithful marriage in the afterlight of an accident, was shot completely in black-and-white. Shob Charitro Kalponik departs from linear narrative and descends into surrealism as a stunningly beautiful Bipasha Basu is interrupted in her infidelity by her poet husband’s death, an event that leads her to re-interrogate her entire relationship with him.

Inspired by Bengal cultural icons Satyajit Ray and Tagore, Rituparno’s films helped define the next generation of Bengal New Wave cinema. He paid tribute to Rabindranath Tagore by reinterpreting three classics: Chokher Bali (which won him the Locarno Best Film Award in 2003), Noukadubi (a period film) and his most recent release Chitrangada. By the time I came to know him, Rituparno Ghosh was a star director and had earned the reputation of being something of a diva. His Hindi film Raincoat, featuring Aishwarya Rai and Ajay Devgan, had established him as one of the few to cross over from regional cinema to Bollywood. Other mainstream Hindi actors like Manisha Koirala and Bipasha Basu had also worked with him. He had hosted two celebrity chat shows, Ebong Rituparno and Rituparno and Co., in which he addressed his guests fondly as tui (an intimate ‘you’). His most telling moment on TV was when he publicly scolded Mir, a well-known mimicry and stand-up artist. Mir had in the past used Ritu as material for his comic routine. Ritu shamed him on national television in that one show, asking him if he realised how prejudiced he was in poking fun at effeminate men. Ritu himself had always been effeminate, but he slowly claimed his queer self in public spaces. His flamboyant turbans, kohled eyes and flowing robes earned him notoriety and a grudging respect in Kolkata’s art appreciation circles. It was his city, one that ‘could neither ignore nor embrace him’, in his own words. (...)

It was the first time Ritu was to act in a movie [Aar Ekti Premer Golpo], and that too, in the role of an openly gay filmmaker. The film’s director was Kaushik Ganguly, but it was Ritu’s story. His involvement in every frame of the film was well known. (...) How momentous that film was in its representation of queer life. It felt as if his entire career had led up to the courage it took to make that one film. Rituparno made Memories in March and Chitrangada after that. These dealt defiantly and unapologetically with the exile of homosexuality, with retribution and, finally, redemption. Each was an intense exhalation for queer audiences. In the deafening din of mainstream heteronormativity and the trite stereotypes that are often the only representation of a largely silent and invisibilised community, here was cinema that made them belong. There was desire, pain, complexity, beauty, isolation and finally poetry. In his specificity of representation, he created cinema that was universal'.

Amitabha Bagchi: The householder

Vi segnalo la recensione del romanzo The householder di Amitabha Bagchi, firmata da Arshia Sattar, pubblicata da Open il 17 giugno 2012:

'A corrupt underling is as crooked as the system he works in, but Bagchi’s quiet, masterly prose leaves you with sympathy for his morally bankrupt protagonist. Amitabha Bagchi’s second novel, The Householder, is a delight. And a welcome breath of fresh air in a literary atmosphere clouded with stylish feints and clogged with pretentious storytelling. This appears to be a simple story told in simple, elegant prose that rarely draws attention to itself. Until you finish the book, that is. And realise that neither was the story simple nor the prose unremarkable. (...) Bagchi’s novel is set in the corridors of Delhi’s bureaucratic and political universe, a netherworld where anything can be fixed and unfixed, provided the price is right. (...) The Householder also turns its sights onto the degraded space inside India Shining, where the complete absence of personal ethics goes hand in hand with rampant corruption. Actually, the image that comes more strongly to mind is that of a serpent consuming its own tail - a seamless continuum between the private and public spheres where the decay of one implies the corrosion of the other and vice versa. (...) Bagchi writes with a studied neutrality. (...) It is Bagchi’s control over the authorial voice that makes The Householder deceptive in its apparent simplicity. (...) The power of this book lies in showing us how unremarkable corruption and the corrupt have become in India. Bagchi paints this picture without resorting to satire or patronising mockery or through lurid descriptions of sordid crimes and garden-variety misdemeanours. There is no other world but this. (...) The Householder is a masterful piece of writing because it manages to hold cynicism and righteous anger at bay. By doing so, it reveals the truly tragic proportions of contemporary India'.

Bollywood's Funny Guy

Ranvir Shorey non è solo un ottimo attore, ma anche un uomo intelligente ed estremamente divertente. Vi segnalo Bollywood’s Funny Guy, l'intervista concessa da Ranvir ad Aastha Atray Banan, pubblicata da Open il 4 maggio 2012. Di seguito un estratto: 

'“Don’t say I play middle-class characters well. That’s not true. I can just ‘be anyone’. That’s the right phrase.” As friend and co-actor Vinay Pathak says, “Ranvir has this honesty that he brings to each character that makes you believe everything he does. It’s a rare talent and that’s what makes him so good.” (...) “I have a three-tier method of selection. I first see the script, then the role and then the director. I trust Rajat [Kapoor, the director] implicitly.”  Rajat (...) says, “I have high regard of him as an actor. He is an instinctive actor and that’s great. Even in his first reading of a scene, he always catches the right note. He also brings this sense of humour and endearing quality to the role that is so him.” (...) 

It’s easy to see why people relate with him on screen. He seems so normal, a rarity for actors from Bollywood. (...) His opinions on politics and the general state of our country and film industry well thought out, he seems sorted and intelligent. I almost cringe asking him, “How did films happen?” He smiles, “I am from Jalandhar, but moved to Mumbai when I was only one. My father was a film producer, so yes, I grew up on sets and all. I wanted to be a pilot, but then did so many odd jobs when I was 21 - like working in a restaurant. There was pressure at home to make money, and so I had to work. And then I started doing TV and became a VJ, because the money was good, not because I wanted to act. And then I did Ek Chhotisi Love Story. You want to hear about my first day at shoot?” he asks, and then laughs, “I played Manisha Koirala’s boyfriend. And the first shot was that I had to ring the bell of her house, and she would pull me in and tear my clothes off. I was shivering, and Manisha was laughing.” 

Since then, he has done a variety of roles; and (...) he’s managed to convince audiences and critics that he truly gets under the skin of the character. Actress and wife Konkona Sen Sharma puts it simply, “He is a compassionate actor, he makes you feel for the character. He is much better than me, actually.” But (...) Ranvir rues the futility of being a good actor in this industry. “Investors don’t want to invest in small movies. Money comes with glam, and glam comes with stars. This niche I am working in is not completely ‘niched’ yet. Don’t fall for the fallacy that small movies are doing well. A Vicky Donor has John Abraham behind it, and a Dhobi Ghat or Peepli [Live] has Aamir Khan behind it. It’s great though that they are supporting new talent. But I will always try and bridge that gap between alternative and masala movies. I will die trying if I have to.” 

But he has no problems with being an underdog. “I’d rather be an underdog and achieve something that is not supposed to be achievable, than be a star and do nothing. The fact that I have work and people like me are doing what I am doing is such a blessing. I may have been a star, but then you may have hated me.” He’s surprised though that many good scripts never turn into films. “You know, I will get two scripts. One will be great and one not so. And the one which is not good will get made. I have no clue how this happens. There are so many scripts just lying around. I still have around three movies waiting for release.” (...)

I ask Ranvir what drew him to his wife, Konkona, when he first met her, and he wickedly remarks, “So what draws a guy to a girl, ya?” I am trying to be polite now: “Maybe her eyes?” He throws back his head and laughs, “I was 35, I had had enough eyes and legs. I wanted to settle down. So yes, apart from being attracted to her, I love Koko’s ‘qualitative exactitude’. She never overdoes anything.” Konkona, on the other hand, loves the fact that with Ranvir around, there is “never a dull moment”. At home, he is either playing with his one-year-old son Haroon, which means ‘hope’ in Sanskrit, or, “[spending] hours with his gadgets,” says Konkona. “He is also an avid foodie,” reveals Vinay, “he knows all about food - what’s good, what’s healthy, what’s nutritious. He knows everything.” (...)

As I leave him, he says modestly, “Don’t be too hard on me, okay?” Well, it’s not even an option, is it?'.