Vidya Balan as Sabrina, the sister who attempts to get justice – initially without support.
How do we decide the criteria to distinguish ‘New Bollywood’ or ‘Independent Indian Cinema’ from the mainstream? It’s a difficult question and No One Killed Jessica offers a particularly difficult case study. In institutional terms it was made under the banner of the ‘indie brand’ of an Indian major studio – UTV Spotboy. Its writer-director Raj Kumar Gupta received praise for his first film Aamir (2008) and the music comes from Amit Trivedi, the rising star of Indian cinema. Dig around and there are links to Anurag Kashyap as well as the more high-profile producer Ronnie Screwvala. On the other hand, the film features Rani Mukerji in a diva-like performance (seemingly required by the script) and at times displays a sentimentality that places it firmly in the mainstream entertainment camp.
But it is the film’s theme and the way that Gupta approaches it that sets up the dilemma over classification. The story is based on the real-life case of a middle-class Christian woman in Delhi who was shot in an incident at a party in 1999. The case took seven years to finally clear the judicial system and for the young men responsible to be cleared of charges despite committing a serious crime in front of several witnesses. These young men were the sons of influential politicians and business people. A public outcry generated partly via media coverage saw the verdict re-assessed by the High Court. The film narrative appears to be faithful to the main facts of the case and a film which addresses bribery, corruption and the misuse of power in India is certainly not in the Bollywood mainstream. But having said that, I found the presentation of the narrative was not as effective as it might have been.
In the main I have to agree with the verdict offered by Omar Ahmed when the film was released in the UK in early 2011. In attempting to detail what happened over a long period of investigation and court procedure involving witness intimidation and corruption, the filmmakers ended up with a broken-backed story in which the first half is led by the excellent Vidya Balan as Sabrina, the dead woman’s sister, seeking justice, only for the story to switch to the media campaign featuring Rani Mukerji as a TV ‘personality’ reporter/presenter which dominates the second half. Omar sees a problem in the film’s use of family melodrama, but this is my one dispute with his reading. By focusing on the impact of the killing on the family, the narrative has the possibility of grounding its social mission in a particular stratum of Indian society. At times the script does take us into the lives of ‘ordinary people’ who are faced with dilemmas caused by poverty and physical fear – and onto the streets and into the houses of those people. But these opportunities are wasted because the film doesn’t have the courage of its own convictions. It would have been better possibly to move further away from the original story and to downplay the TV reporting angle and expand the social narrative – we don’t learn enough about the central family. The impact of a death like this on a family was at the centre of the first series of The Killing and the Danish TV series has illustrated just how effective this narrative idea can be.
I think that the real problem is that No One Killed Jessica ends up being a compromise which fails to produce either a potent commercial melodrama or thriller or a genuine independent film with a clear social purpose. Instead, the commercial elements seem ‘stuffed in’. This is a shame because interesting elements such as the use of social media to construct a mass campaign are negated by Rani Mukerji’s portrayal of the worst kind of ‘star reporter’, so familiar from the Bollywood mainstream. I should point out that the inclusion of scenes referring to the media campaign being partly inspired by audience responses to the 2006 feature Rang De Basanti suggest a range of further questions about what the potential impact of No One Killed Jessica might be. However, I don’t think that this reference gets in the way of my general criticism of this later film. Although it was only a moderate commercial success No One Killed Jessica did receive nominations at the Indian Filmfare Awards. Ironically its only win was for Rani Mukerji as ‘Best Supporting Actress’ – the Bollywood star system survives another attempt to make different kinds of films.
The National Media Museum’s banner for its exhibition (designer unknown)
I thought it was appropriate to celebrate the 900th posting on this blog with a nod towards a 100 years of Indian Cinema. The first Indian feature film (i.e. a film made by an Indian in India) is usually quoted as Dadasaheb Phalke’s Raja Harishchandra released in May 1913. There are of course many celebrations planned and I’m grateful to Omar Ahmed for pointing me towards the official Indian film website at indiancinema100.in
Raj Kapoor’s 1955 film ‘Shree 420’ features his Charlie Chaplin-type character. (This image is from the Victoria & Albert Collection – similar Raj Kapoor posters are in the NMeM exhibition)
In Bradford, the National Media Museum has opened an exhibition of Indian film posters and there is a strand of the upcoming 19th Bradford International Film Festival in April featuring several archive titles and UK premieres of Indian films. In addition, the latest issue of Sight and Sound (April 2013) carries an article on film posters titled ‘Indian Ink’ (groan!) by Divia Patel. I’ll preview BIFF later this week but here I want to comment briefly on ‘Bollywood Icons: 100 Years of Indian Cinema‘, the poster exhibition in Gallery 2 at the National Media Museum. The exhibition comprises posters from the museum’s own collection plus others from collectors including guest curator Irna Qureshi the local writer and scholar who has written a background paper to the exhibition, ‘Decoding the Bollywood Poster’ – downloadable via the website link above. Ms Qureshi also writes an interesting blog about “the influence of Bollywood films on her British Muslim upbringing in Bradford”. She has recently presented a series of screenings of modern Bollywood classics at the museum. Entry to the exhibition is free and it runs until June 16. The number of posters in the exhibition is quite small but each poster is itself a work of art and I didn’t have long enough between film screenings to do it full justice. Here are just a few quick impressions – I intend to go back later. The main organising principle appears to be important dynastic system which has created and sustained the major stars. The great dynasty of Hindi cinema is the one founded by the theatre actor-producer Prithviraj Kapoor, active first in the silent cinema of India, whose son Raj Kapoor became the great star of 1950s Bombay cinema. The sons of Raj Kapoor, Randhir, Ranjiv and Rishi were stars in the 1970s and 1980s and their children, Karisma and Kareena (Randhir’s daughters) and Ranbir, son of Rishi, are stars today. The Bachchan family (Amitabh and Jaya Bhaduri , their son Abhishek and his wife Aishwarya Rai) made its mark in the 1970s and has been active ever since. The exhibition also offers ‘outsiders’ like ‘Fearless Nadia’ the Australian woman who became a star of ‘stunt films’ in the 1940s and the contemporary star Shahrukh Khan.
Visually what is most interesting is the shift from the drawn/painted images of the 1940s/50s to the photographic images of today – but within that span, also the contrast between the restrained colours and graphics of the auteur-driven films of the studio period (see the Guru Dutt poster) and the much more ‘violent’ colours of the ‘angry young men films of the 1970s (e.g. those featuring a young Amitabh Bachchan). As Irna Qureshi points out in her guide, the posters of the studio period of Hindi cinema offer little in the way of text or tagline because of attempts to appeal to an ‘All India’ audience. In the poster for Kagaz Ke Phool (Paper Flowers) here, there is text in both Hindi and Urdu (which though they use similar vocabularies are expressed in different scripts) and English. By the time of Sholay in 1973 this practice had clearly changed – though it continued for other types of films and audiences. Posters up until the 1990s were usually drawn or painted by contracted artists before photographic images became dominant. In the contrast between Guru Dutt-Waheeda Rehman and Amitabh Bachchan-Jaya Bhaduri the difference in genre emphasis from romance melodrama to action adventure-romance is clearly signalled in the graphic style. Also contained within this contrast is the evolution of the audience appeal. Both the 1950s Bombay cinema and the 1970s ‘angry young men’ appealed to all classes across India but the younger audience is addressed more clearly in the 1970s.
In the 1960s and 1970s as Indian art cinema and parallel cinema developed, the presentation of these new films shifted the address – only slightly, but distinctively. I can’t remember if the Bradford exhibition includes any examples, but the Sight and Sound article usefully includes an example of Satyajit Ray’s own graphics work on the poster for Charulata (1964). Also in the S&S piece is an image of the poster for Goutam Ghose’s Paar (1984) a stark representation of a parallel film about the oppression of villagers by a brutal landlord. Since the start of the 1990s when ‘Bollywood’ began to replace the general descriptions of ‘Hindi popular cinema’ or ‘Bombay cinema’, audience address has changed in many ways. Most significantly, the major Bollywood productions have begun to move away from attempts to capture the ‘All India’ audience (partly because the growth of regional cinemas, especially the Tamil and Telugu cinemas that dominate the South). Bollywood producers shifted towards an address to younger more affluent Indians in metros (cities of over 5 million people) and to NRIs (Non-Resident Indians) overseas. As a consequence they have lost some of the audiences in small towns. Posters are now more in the international Hollywood style, though they often still feature the stars prominently. Below I’m including a couple of photos I took in West Bengal in 2009. Hindi cinema shares screen space in Kolkata with Bengali films but Hindi films have more promotion and the giant image of Salman Khan in Wanted covers the wall of a high-rise building in much the same way that artists painted on the sides of buildings in the 1980s. The action heroes like Salman Khan, Ajay Devgn and Akshay Kumar have maintained star status partly because their appeal is across classes. The other image from 2009 is from Kurbaan, an example of the Western-orientated spy thriller starring Kareena Kapoor and her partner (now husband) Saif Ali Khan. The film was well-received by critics but considered a flop. As a poster it refers us back to those dynasties. (Saif Ali Khan is the son of Sharmila Tagore, herself first an actor for Satyajit Ray before moving into mainstream Hindi cinema. It’s also interesting to compare the 2009 poster with one in the Museum’s exhibition of Shyam Benegal’s Zubeidaa (2001) starring Karisma Kapoor. This is classified as ‘mainstream Hindi cinema’ by some sources, but I’ve always considered it to be more of a parallel film. I think that you can see the difference between the appeal of Benegal’s historical romance (a form of biopic) and that of the later film with Kareena Kapoor.
(This isn’t the same poster as in the exhibition)
So, why not pop into the exhibition when you visit Bradford International Film Festival in April? And if you teach film (or media) why not bring a class and explore the exhibition and its resources? I intend to make a return visit. I’ll preview the Indian films in BIFF in the next couple of weeks.
One last point: the Museum’s title for the exhibition is fairly carefully chosen and most of the text equally so, but it’s still likely that the average visitor to the gallery will assume that Bollywood = Hindi cinema = Indian cinema. It’s quite natural that the predominantly Urdu/Punjabi/Kashmiri population in Bradford should prefer Hindi cinema, but it would have been nice to see some posters from the South. Here’s one I’ve posted on flickr.
(from left) Govind (Raj Kumar Yadav), Ishaan (Sushant Singh Rajput) and Omi (Amit Sadh)
Why do Bollywood distributors make no attempt to sell their films to audiences outside the South Asian diaspora? Kai po che as a title doesn’t mean anything if, like me, you don’t know Hindi. I’ve learned since from a review that the title is “the war-call uttered during kite-flying in Gujarat”. The film is based on a novel, The 3 Mistakes of My Life, by Chetan Bhagat. I’ve read Bhagat’s five novels and enjoyed them all (his publicists promote him as the biggest-selling English language novelist in India) and I would have been immediately drawn to this film. Not only that but it is an Indian cricket film. Fortunately, sheer chance meant that I read a review so off I went to Cineworld without a second thought.
Kai po che is adapted and directed by Abhishek Kapoor, whose previous success was Rock On!, a film I found to be ‘OK’ but which I know was very popular in India. (Weirdly, Kai po che is exactly the kind of movie I said that I wanted to see rather than more Rock On!s.) With Kapoor and Bhagat as attractions the film has been eagerly anticipated in India, even though there are no major stars in the film. As far as I can see it is proving to be a winner of sorts after only a couple of days on release.
The story is set in Ahmedabad, the main city of Gujarat. It spans a period of ten years or more and the film narrative is mostly concerned with a flashback to 2000-2. Three young men are attempting to set up a retail business. Govind the maths genius is the sensible one, Ishaan the cricketer is the dreamer and Omi is the one with contacts – notably his uncle who is a local Hindu nationalist politician and the controller of the local temple properties. He agrees to lease the trio a shop space. The narrative drive comes from the different aims of each of the three leads – which represent the alternative goals/dreams of middle-class Indian men: success in business, politics or sport. (The importance of family is, of course, central to the plot.) Govind wants to make a success of the business, but he also falls for Ishaan’s sister Vidya, who he is attempting to tutor in maths. Omi finds himself, against his will, sucked into supporting his uncle’s political ambitions. Ishaan at first is unenthusiastic but then very taken by the amazingly talented 12 year-old Ali who comes to play cricket at the shop’s nets and eventually to accept Ishaan as a coach (Ishaan has played cricket at ‘district level’). This relationship will be one of the triggers for a crisis in the narrative, since Ali’s father is a political campaigner for the local Muslim party in opposition to Omi’s uncle. There are two other major dramatic events which will threaten the strong relationship between the three young men, the prospects for their business and the future of Ali as one of India’s great cricketers – but I won’t spoil the plot.
Amrita Puri as Vidya
The adaptation changes the original story in several ways. One whole section is removed and some of the outcomes are attached to different characters. Chetan Bhagat is credited as one of the scripting team so I assume that he approves (whereas his relationship to 3 Idiots is more contentious). The excluded section is the trip the trio make to Australia but that would have been an extra budget cost and it isn’t essential to the story. Bhagat’s presentation of his stories is quite unusual – more like the idea of short stories being ‘told’ to an audience – in his case told to the real-life novelist Chetan Bhagat. This prologue and epilogue device has been cut and overall the narrative has been streamlined and made more ‘feelgood’. I’d have liked to see the original story on screen but I understand why it has been changed in this way. The pluses still remain. The three central characters are quite ‘real’/ordinary middle-class young men and it’s good to see a different city environment (beautifully presented). The performances are very good and the direction and editing deliver an engrossing and coherent narrative drive in just over two hours (running times vary in reviews but the UK certification agency says no cuts in the 125 mins). There is only one ‘song sequence’ – a day out on the coast when the three young men have a ‘bonding session’, including a leap off a cliff into the sea, possibly the only really cheesy moment in the film. I can’t really comment on the rest of the music in the film, which I confess I didn’t really notice.
Ali, the cricket prodigy, (centre) played by Digvijay Deshmukh alongside Amit Sadh as Omi
I think this is going to be an affectionately-remembered film in India and it adds one more title to the emergence of a new kind of popular cinema which is more realist, more interested in social issues, but still ‘popular’ in appeal. If you are close to a multiplex I’d urge a visit – why not avoid the tedium of the Oscars and go see something more interesting?
Mohanlal superstar as a British police officer in ‘Tezz’
How can I begin to write about this Bollywood film? I went to see it because I know someone involved in the UK shoot and the story promised to be set on the West Coast mainline rail route which I travelled regularly in my youth. I’ve seen plenty of Indian films with UK-based sequences and two Hindi films wholly set in London, but in all these previous films the action has been more or less confined to Indian diasporic communities. Not so here.
Tezz is one of those Bollywood films that happily ‘borrows’ Hollywood plots (and plots from other film industries) and ‘mashes’ them up. Here the borrowed plot ideas come from Speed, Runaway Train, Unstoppable and numerous other films. The anti-hero played by popular ‘heavy’ Ajay Devgan (or ‘Devgn’ has he is now known) is an Indian engineer who has been brutally deported from the UK in very unlikely circumstances. His ‘revenge’ is to place a bomb on board a UK train in the hope of getting a large ransom payout from the UK authorities. But since this is Bollywood, there is also a sub-plot in which he will pay for the eye operation desperately needed by the brother of one of his co-conspirators. The tagline for the film is something like “This is not a terrorist movie”.
Bollywood tends to create imaginary worlds and this is an imaginary UK so we really shouldn’t be bothered by the geographical nonsense that is the train’s route from London to Glasgow. Nor should we be bothered by the fact that the principal characters defending the train are all Indians – the train controller (Boman Irani), the security chief (Anil Kapur) and a cruelly under-used Mohanlal as a police sergeant who just happens to be on the train. Obviously there would be no problem in them all being British Asians. My main question is why was this set in the UK? The plot requires that the train is scheduled to take 10 hours to get to Glasgow. The real journey time is only 5 hours. I can only assume that because journeys in India are so long, 10 hours makes more sense for an Indian audience. So, is this meant primarily for the ‘all India’ audience? I suspect that it won’t work for NRIs. I’ve seen references to a ‘bullet train’ and the film certainly tries to use architecture alongside the railway shots to create a sense of glamour. I presume that cost considerations (and possibly the pre-Olympics work) prevented them from shooting on the Eurostar line from London to the Channel tunnel – the only high-speed operation in the UK.
The film was made mostly in the UK with shoots in London, Birmingham and Glasgow (and some scenic rural footage) with interiors shot back in Bombay. On the plus side, I thought some of the action sequences on Glasgow streets and especially a chase along the canals of Birmingham worked very well. But then there are the songs. A few nostalgic shots of the central character’s UK romance and wedding before his deportation are easily integrated as a montage with a music accompaniment (quite a nice track by Rahat Fateh Ali Khan), but a spectacular night club dance sequence with Mallika Sherawat is simply inserted into the action to the embarrassment of all concerned. The inclusion of songs is now becoming a real problem for mainstream Bollywood – as if producers can’t decide whether they are necessary or not. I think that they don’t work here because the overall narrative doesn’t make sense. If the script had presented the underlying family melodrama in a more coherent way that would have helped. Several Indian reviewers have suggested that the basic premise is ludicrous.
Overall this is a film with a good pool of talented actors and some well-worked action sequences. Unfortunately the script is nonsense and the prolific veteran Malayali director Priyadarshan seems to have completely lost control of it and wasted the potential. My favourite bit of silliness seems to be based on a sight gag that dates back to Buster Keaton’s The General in 1926 – but this time conducted with a train travelling at 70 miles an hour! The film flopped badly in India and disappointed in the UK on a 42 screen release despite quite a strong promotional campaign with a Facebook page here.
Here’s a Hindi dubbed trailer for the Indian release:
Patiala House is clearly inspired by Bend It Like Beckham and the true story of Monty Panesar’s selection (and initial success) as the first Sikh to play cricket for England. In many ways it is sentimental tosh, but I still found it good entertainment and there are several interesting aspects of the film in terms of its depiction of British Asians as viewed from an Indian perspective.
Plot outline
The Kahlon family has grown so large that they now occupy a whole small crescent of houses in Southall, West London. This small fiefdom is controlled by a fierce patriarch (Rishi Kapoor) who has named it (and his mini-cab business) ‘Patiala House’, presumably after his home town in the Punjab. He does indeed rule his little kingdom, declaring it almost outside UK law. A flashback reveals that the family suffered racist attacks in the 1970s with the death of a leading local Sikh figure in the struggles against racist thugs and the notorious SPG or Special Patrol Group (a controversial Metropolitan Police squad associated with harassing Black and Asian Londoners). The film uses archive footage, I think from 1979, when the New Zealand teacher Blair Peach was killed during a demonstration. Because of this history, the father hates the goras (‘whites’) and several years later he forbids his son Gattu to play cricket for any English team. The 17 year-old schoolboy is shown as an outstanding prospect who has already made his mark.
In the present day Gattu (Akshay Kumar) and his legion of younger brothers and sisters are kept in thrall of their father, all fearful of following their dreams to leave home and do exciting things (beyond the girls marrying approved partners). His siblings are all frustrated by Gattu’s decision to honour his father’s wishes. He still secretly practices cricket each evening but during the day runs a small newsagent’s owned by his father. He’s 34 now and seems resigned to his fate until . . . the appearance of Simran (Anushka Sharma), a young woman who has returned from an abortive attempt to make it in the Mumbai film industry. She has in tow a 12 year-old cricket-mad boy (for whom she acts as a guardian) and when the England cricket team announces that it is searching for new talent after several terrible defeats, it seems only a matter of time before the boy is urging Gattu to ‘come out’ as a cricket talent.
Commentary
The film is predictable in terms of what happens next – we want Gattu to win a cricket match for England without upsetting his father and to get the girl. It would be a pretty odd Bollywood film if it didn’t at least attempt to reach these goals, preposterous though it might seem. One review I read made the observation that what follows is similar to the German film Goodbye Lenin and that seems a good call. Since Gattu’s success would effectively ‘free’ all his siblings, they are keen to help him keep the truth from his father until his final triumph on the pitch – all they have to do is to nobble all the people who might tell the patriarch about his son wearing an England shirt. Although what ensues has its comic moments, much of it is also quite poignant. Akshay Kumar is an athletic man who, although 42 when filming started, can just pass for 34. (By contrast, Sharma is perhaps too young even if her performance is convincing.) Monty Panesar is a spinner, but the producers have made Kumar a fast-medium bowler and with training by the great Wasim Akram he can pass as a medium pacer – perhaps like Mohinder Amarnath the Indian all-rounder who was the matchwinner when India won the 50-over World Cup in 1983. (Amarnath’s family boasts several test cricketers and since they come from Patiala it is no coincidence that they should be mentioned in the film.)
Unlike some of the mainstream Bollywood films that present only a fantasy London comprising Trafalgar Square and a villa in Hampstead, this film presents a recognisable Southall. The cricket matches utilise the Oval and for the main matches, Trent Bridge in Nottingham. Several famous test cricketers appear as themselves: David Gower, Graham Gooch, Andrew Symonds (as the Aussie who looks like he might spoil the party). But it was the appearance of Nasser Hussain, the former England test captain who was born in India that was most noticeable. His Hindi seemed rather hesitant to me and created some mirth from the South Asian audience in the cinema. I don’t remember Hussain ever provoking any comments about his decision to play for England – he moved to the UK as a 7 year-old I think and his mother is British. Andrew Symonds also has an interesting background as a cricketer. In more recent times three young British Asians of Pakistani background in the North of England, Sajid Mahmood, Adil Rashid and Ajmal Shahzad have joined the ranks of Asians playing for England. It’s interesting to go back to this Observer article written in 2006 when there were media stories about who British Asian cricket fans would support when England played South Asian touring sides in Test matches.
In some ways this film seems the closest I’ve seen to melding a Bollywood approach to a specific narrative with a setting outside India that is more than simply an ‘exotic’ backdrop. (I haven’t seen Shah Rukh Khan’s last US-set film.) I suspect that other producers will study it carefully. Meanwhile, with the Cricket World Cup in India bubbling up nicely and England and India tying a match, it offers an entertaining diversion.
The revolutionaries conduct training camps in the forest for the teenagers.
I really didn’t think anyone made films quite as old-fashioned as Khelein Hum Jee Jaan Sey any more. I was surprised, partly because of the range of contemporary Hindi films I’ve seen recently that could easily compete in the international marketplace and specifically because this title was written and directed by Ashutosh Gowariker of Lagaan fame. Like that film (which was India’s Oscar contender in 2001) Khelein Hum Jee Jaan Sey is a ‘period film’ involving conflict with the British. This time the setting is Chittagong in what was in 1930 still in undivided Bengal. Chittagong is on the eastern shores of the Gulf of Bengal, nearer to the Burmese border than to Calcutta. (Burma was also part of the Raj until 1937). In 1930 a group of revolutionaries recruited some 50 plus teenagers and attempted to take over all the key British institutions in Chittagong simultaneously – the police and army barracks, European club, telegraph office and railway line were all attacked on April 18th. Brilliantly planned, the attacks failed ultimately only because of two key mistakes in intelligence gathering. Over the next four years all the revolutionaries were killed or captured. Nevertheless the exploits of this group were important in the overall history of the liberation struggle in India. This true story was written up in 1998 by Manini Chatterjee in a book titled Do and Die: The Chittagong Uprising 1930-34.
Gowariker decided to tell this story ‘faithfully’, so he accepted the straitjacket imposed by the biographies of characters and the facts that are recorded about the events. We all know that the British Raj in India didn’t fall in 1930 and that other events assumed greater importance over the next 17 years, so there are no major narrative surprises. The interest for the audience (many – most? – of whom don’t know the history, which I had to research) is to find out who these people were, exactly what they did and why and what happened to them in the end. To be fair to Gowariker, he succeeds to a certain extent in doing just that and, as several reviewers have pointed out, that is an important achievement. However, beyond a simple appeal to the patriotism of Indian audiences and a useful historical primer, the film struggles to engage with the range of possibilities offered by the material – unlike for instance Rang De Basanti (2006) with its intriguing linking of contemporary polity and the actions of 1930s freedom fighters. Instead, Gowariker finds himself caught between biopic, action movie, love story and ‘outlaw’ movie. I think he fails to explore any of these genre repertoires with much conviction. But that isn’t to say that the film is without interest. I was never bored over the 170 minutes – although sometimes I was probably engaged for the wrong reasons.
The first point to make is that the film cannot be judged by the conventions of European or North American historical films where the surface detail of ‘authenticity’ is of paramount importance. Though the film is well photographed and well acted (apart from the British roles) the period detail simply isn’t there. A Morris Minor car from the early 1950s and a radio from the same period or later suddenly appear and a railway locomotive looked like a plywood construction magically pulling into a station. I quite accept that such historical details are not important for the narrative or the political meaning of the film. I mention them simply because it is an indication either of Gowariker’s lack of budget or his decision not to actively sell the film outside the diaspora (although I wonder if a diaspora audience hooked on ‘Hollywood realism’ might not notice this ‘lack’). Certainly no thought appears to have been given to translating the film’s title in the UK. The title on my ticket stub bore little resemblance to the correct Hindi. How come Gowariker, with an A-List star on board (Abhishek Bachchan plays Surjya Sen, the leader of the revolutionary group) couldn’t afford a little touch of CGI here and there?
Overall, I think that the film was clunky and stilted – although there were lyrical passages. I wasn’t impressed by the film’s score. In the first half it seemed too obvious and intrusive. Only the choral singing of the nationalist song ‘Vande Mataram’ was memorable. Though many of the younger actors were engaging, Abhishek seemed stolid rather than inspiring – but then so did the ‘real’ Sen according to the archive photo that appeared in the credits. The action scenes were exciting but very much in the mould of a Hollywood western from long ago – the revolutionaries never missed, even with a revolver or muzzle-loading musket from twenty or thirty feet away. At first I thought that the revolutionaries were amazingly well-fed for Bengalis in the 1930s. Then I realised that this was almost an entirely middle-class Hindu revolution in a part of India where the farm workers and labourers would, I assume, have been primarily Muslim. This seemingly important facet of the conflict was not really developed in the narrative. We simply learn that some of the teenagers are from zamindar (landlord) or merchant families and are able to acquire motor vehicles and relatively large sums of money to resource the attacks.
Politics and ideology
What does the film mean in terms of Indian history and politics? There are several obvious issues for an outsider viewer. One is that the group led by Surjya Sen is almost entirely Bengali (apart from one of the leaders – a Punjabi). Bengal has always had a prominent role in the history of Indian politics and one of the issues raised by the film concerns casting. I’ve read several comments about the film which focus on the confusion caused by some non-Bengali actors attempting to pronounce Bengali names correctly. I understand the commercial reasons why the film is made in Hindi, but why not have everyone speaking the same language in the same way? This carries over into the British parts. As far as I can see, none of the ‘British’ actors have much experience and some could hardly read their lines. The fact that the English dialogue was then subtitled in English only added to the sense of comic buffoonery. The British officials were all named with on-screen titles, so I assume that these too are historical characters. No doubt they were as brutal in history as they were depicted in the film, but allowing them to be seen as comic or vaguely inept doesn’t help the representation of the freedom fighters.
The question of Bengali identity is important because of the inference in the film that this was a revolutionary group working independently. Surjya Sen is a school teacher and his past is only sketched in. His deputy, Nirmal Sen, has recently emerged from prison and therefore has a track record but generally the group appears to have few contacts – and no specific ideology. At one point Surjya tells the teenagers that they are now part of the ‘Indian Republican Army: Chittagong Branch’. At other points, Sen is shown to be using Congress Party activities as a cover. The narrative does represent the revolutionaries as consciously rejecting Gandhi’s ‘non-violent resistance’ as promoted in 1930. My understanding is that Sen was indeed officially a Congress organiser and the Chittagong group was one of several revolutionary groups intent on active campaigns against the British across different parts of India. There was a specific Hindustani Socialist Republican Army in the 1920s but it had ceased to function by the early 1930s. Perhaps the ‘Republican’ reference was supposed to link to the Irish struggle? At one point in the film, Kalpana, one of the two women in the group, reads out a message of support for the Indian struggle from the Irish President and former Irish Republican, Eamon De Valera. But the more controversial link is to the ‘Indian National Army’, created first in 1942 and then led by Subhas Chandra Bose who worked with the Japanese to raise an army from prisoners of war to fight the British in Burma. I don’t remember any real political discussion in the film – possibly because there was no conflict between the initial group members who then recruited eager, but politically naïve teenagers.
Kalpana (Deepika Padukone) and Pritilata (Vishakha Singh) disguised as sweepers
I must stress that I did find the film interesting and I appreciated the two young women’s roles in that they allowed the women to be active and resourceful. The two actors were definitely a plus. I haven’t seen their previous work but I will now certainly look out for Deepika Padukone and Vishakha Singh. Director Gowariker did add some amusement by making the ‘inciting incident’ in the opening sequence a football match played by the teenagers that is stopped by the British who intend to set up camp on the playing field – a reference back to the cricket game in Lagaan perhaps? When Kalapana and Pritilata are introduced it is via a badminton game – Deepika Padukone is the daughter of a badminton champion and has played herself. The film might have benefited from a few more imaginative touches like this. I understand that a Bengali film about the Chittagong uprising was also made in 2010. I’m intrigued to see it.
Here is the Hindi trailer. The location shots are from Goa which Gowariker argued was the closest in appearance to the Chittagong region.
The diverse group of young women representing India at hockey.
I’ve now seen three films written by Jaideep Sahni and they have all been consistently interesting and enjoyable, all picking up on aspects of contemporary Indian society and developing stories that are slightly unusual but still offering mainstream entertainment. Earlier posts discuss Khosla Ka Ghoslaand Rocket Singh, Salesman of the Year. Chak De India! has a big star in Sharukh Khan but he gives a nuanced and restrained performance allowing the real stars, mostly unknown young women working as an ensemble, to come to the fore.
The title refers to an exhortation supporting India’s Women’s Hockey Team. The scenario is that the Shahrukh Khan character was India’s Hockey Captain in the World Championship Final against Pakistan when he missed a penalty in the dying seconds which could have taken the game into extra time. He is vilified in the press and then accused of being a traitor and handing the game to Pakistan. Because he is a Muslim, this charge is pursued throughout the media and he is forced to withdraw from the sport. Seven years later he is given the chance to return, but as the coach of the women’s team, who so far have been poorly supported by the hockey establishment. Nobody gives the team much chance of even being sent to Australia to compete in the World Championships and the little group of senior players is not initially impressed by the appointment of a new coach.
There are some interesting ideas involved in this set-up. The corruption of the sporting establishment is hinted at. The lower status of hockey in comparison with cricket becomes part of one of the many subplots when one of the young women rebuffs her boyfriend who as a cricketer in the national team assumes that his girlfriend will just abandon her ‘hobby’ to follow him. (Hockey is one of India’s main sports and there had been considerable national success for the men’s team before the women emerged at this level.) But the major issue in the film is the ‘shame/injustice’ that the coach feels about his World Championship failure and the national pride that he feels so strongly. This translates into more than just ‘team building’ – the young women must also learn to play for India first, for the team second and for themselves (or their specific state/cultural identity) only third.
As an ‘external’ viewer I haven’t quite decided if the film goes slightly too far with its patriotic zeal and nationalist fervour, but I guess I’m prepared to accept it. If this was a British film, I wouldn’t – I’m the kind of sports supporter who always roots for their own town/county team ahead of ‘England’ as a national team. So, I’d have been sent home from the hockey team. However, I can see that in India the issue is rather different.
The best part of the film for me was the sequence showing young women turning up from all over India representing different regions, ethnicities and religious affiliations. Their clashes with the old-fashioned administrators and then amongst themselves was well written, as was the struggle they faced in meeting the coach’s tough training demands. Throughout this Shahrukh Khan showed admirable restraint. The second half of the film shows the young women in Australia. If anything I would have liked more of this. I’d like to have seen them interacting more with the other teams and coming more into contact with Australian culture. As it is the games are well shot and exciting. The other teams are not demonised too much (but the script is endlessly confused by whether it is England, Great Britain or the UK which is competing – I don’t blame the writer, it is confusing). For the record, Wikipedia reports that the success of India’s women at the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester was the inspiration for the film.
I tend to think of Sahni’s scripts as being a form of ‘New Bollywood’ as they don’t feature song and dance ‘spectacles’ (but the music score by Salim and Suleiman Merchant is very effective and Sahni wrote lyrics for two or three songs, including the title song). This was the first film Shimit Amin directed from a Sahni script and he does a good job. The stories take place in a recognisable fictional world and the characters are believable. I think that this is one of the best sports films that I have seen.
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