There are two questions, closely linked, that I am often asked in film-criticism classes or at talks. One is if I harbour screenplay-writing or novelistic aspirations. (A less polite version goes “Aren’t all critics just failed authors/ filmmakers?”) The other is that old chestnut about whether a reviewer let his imagination go wild while analysing a film, creating interpretations that the director (or screenwriter, or cinematographer) never intended.
Among many possible responses, one can banter: no, I’m happy being a parasite or a eunuch, I sometimes say (alluding to two of the more vivid descriptions for critics), “And anyway, why add to an already-massive stockpile of bad novels and scripts?” Or one can get pedantic, hold forth on how ‘critic’ and ‘artist’ are not hermetically sealed categories and how a good piece of criticism should ideally also be a good piece of writing.
But there are times when criticism and creativity collide more directly, when a reviewer has to impose his personal screenplay on a film. This can happen if you’re sitting through something that isn’t at all working for you, and one way to stay sane is by hurriedly organising a private show inside your head. For instance, watching a trifle called Dhan Dhana Dhan Goal some years ago, about a bumbling NRI football team, I slipped into an alternate-world scenario where John Abraham’s nose — badly wounded during a match — acquired a personality of its own and ascended divinely into the clouds.
At other times, a jarring scene might briefly take you outside a film that you are generally enjoying. This happened to me during viewings of two recent, high-profile films.
Late in Darkest Hour , Winston Churchill (a heavily made up Gary Oldman) is under pressure to broker peace with Hitler. Ducking into the London Underground, the Prime Minister spends some time with ‘regular people’ to find out how they feel about getting into bed with Nazis. The resulting sequence — which prioritises emotional realism over historical accuracy — has been widely trashed, but it’s possible to see it as a sort of opium-dream that Churchill is having in the depths of his despair.
Going further
Think I’m stretching? Maybe. One can go much further, though. Among the scene’s key elements — clearly aimed at the modern viewer — is a young black dandy in top hat and tails who completes an inspirational line of poetry for Churchill, appears to be in a romantic relationship with a white woman, and generally represents the hope of societal equality in a heavy-handed, anachronistic way.
This dude and his clothes teleported me out of the film, because I was reminded of the stoned dancer in the 1981 music video for the great Blondie song ‘Rapture’ (which you must look up on YouTube) — and that in turn got me thinking of another famous Oldman performance, as Sex Pistols frontman Sid Vicious in Sid and Nancy . My mind did return to Darkest Hour ’s world of stuffy old Oxbridge-accented parliamentarians, but for a few beautiful moments I was in a space where Churchill and King George VI were boogeying together to punk rock as German bombs fell about them.
Flesh and blood
On a similar note, I mostly liked Padmaavat (a hard admission to make in the current climate where this film is seen as a steaming cauldron of misogyny, jingoism and Islamophobia), but then came the action sequence where one of Chittoor’s defenders continues slashing about for a bit after his head has parted ways from his torso and rolled out of frame.
The scene put me in mind of the grisly mating habits of that fascinating insect, the praying mantis. Briefly: the female sometimes bites off the male’s head mid-coitus, but his hindquarters continue to do their job for a while. (Then she gets impatient and eats the rest of him, gathering important proteins for the baby mantises to come.)
This isn’t meant as a facile comparison. With all the narratives about Rajput heroism — something that Padmaavat cares deeply about — I feel the martyrdom of this unheralded creature, in the name of perpetuating its species, deserves respect.
In fact, in light of the video by standup comedian Varun Grover about how the Padmaavat story was the result of one over-chatty parrot, there may well be a parallel-universe version shot in the style of a wildlife feature with exotic creatures playing the key parts. An ostrich as Khilji? A peacock as Ratan Singh? Lemmings as the jauhar -committing women?
These would be good stories and perhaps the sort of thing we could do with more of, in a world of over-earnest films and angry responses to them.
An independent writer, the author’s latest book The World of Hrishikesh Mukherjee is NOT a collaborative biography.
