UDAAN

In the gloomy evenings that we spent hanging around the neighbourhood pulia worrying over our JEE exams in that do-or-die summer of 1993, I remember some of my less privileged bihari friends asking me why I was not trying to get into TISCO as an apprentice. I’d scored well in my 10th standard exams. I was supposed to do reasonably well in my 12th too. They told me that if I appeared for the annual apprentice exam that TISCO held every year- I could get in as an apprentice and be set for life. Of course, I’d have to slog my butt off in the first few years-but then I’d be a permanent employee by the time others were finishng college. Wasn’t that good for me?

I was surprised when I heard that. It was something that my parents had never thought of and that struck me as weird. It was weird because each of my (very few ) career options had already been spelt out and ground grimly into my thick skull by my parents on so many occasions-I didn’t think there could be other career options beyond them. I coould either become an Engineer or I could become an engineer. That was it. How was a small town boy who’d never been out of the city alone to blame? I myself had never had a chance of trying to discover what it was that I wanted to become in life. That was 1993.

Now, eighteen years later, when I sit down to watch a small indie film that’s set in JSR after a jog through a light evening drizzle, I find myself swamped by everything that I thought I’d left behind. That is the power of cinematic expresssion of this most basic, unadorned yet tenderly told tale.

In Udaan, I find a promising young director from Mumbai (who’s never been to JSR before) reminding me how some things never change-no matter how much they appear to. What young Vikramaditya Motwane manages to achieve with Udaan is siginficant in the quietest of ways-just like its shy and confused 17 year old protaganist who finds himself getting trapped into a life that he most certainly doesn’t fit into and is dying to run away from.

Udaan is a small coming-of-age film-yes; but its been put together with such honesty of purpose and conviction in its voice that -it makes its surprise shortlisting at this year’s Canne’s Film Fest feels almost obvious in retrospect. Just the fact that the film’s set in JSR makes it a must watch for anyone from the steel city.( The director gets the local lingo+ ethos bang-on right and the parts of the city that are covered look seeped with old-world-colonial-charm ) For everyone else, Udaan still worth a definite dekho as proof of what can be achieved within the framework of a small time-frame, a non star cast, modest physical setting and apparently mundane middle class concerns about the values/concerns that dictate small town urban life.

Rajat Barmecha stars as the poetic protaganist who gets packed off from his boarding school for repeated misdemeanours and is then taken to task by his strangely insular and sadistic father(Ronit Roy) who runs his house like Hitler in the early forties. Ronit Roy wants his teethering son to straighten up, join an engineering college and work in the steel factory but young Rajat would rather take his chances in trying to make a career out of writing. This obvious autobiographical motive forms the pivot around which Motwane spins his very 400 Blowish tale. While the tension between the father and his long estranged son is played out around familiar issues of unrequited love and misunderstandings, the film still manages to make an impact because of the impeccable scene constructs, great dialogues+poetry and uniformly good acting by the entire cast-including a six year old (Aayan Boradia) who has to be the best child actor to grace in the indian screen since Jugal Hansraj in Masoom(1983).

There’s so much of unspoken angst and unexploitative true-to-life aches/pains of growing up in Udaan, writing about the film seems to alternate between redundancy and holding up a cracked, dusty mirror that leads you back to a tree lined road somewhere far behind. Sure the mirror’s small and modest, but if you wipe it clean from edge to edge-you can see your whole life wound up inside the road that links Kadma to Sonari.

ANURAG KASHYAP'S PAANCH

Ever since the emergence of Anurag Kashyap (AK) as the poster-boy of India’s indie revolution, the ill-fated ( & still unreleased ) Paanch has acquired a mythical status amongst the growing legions of his fans. For all those fans, there’s belated news. Paanch is not the unfairly repressed art-house classic that it’s been made out to be. That much is obvious from the film’s pehle Paanch minutes. The casting sequence (visuals+ static fizz laced music) is a direct rip off from David Fincher’s- Seven (1994).

Over the last ten years, Paanch has allegedly gone through so many erase/rewind-restart episodes in terms of its basic storyline that the end result is more of a saath or an aath, nau, dus-bus, maybe. What remains available on Torrent today are the compromised remains of a could-have-been scorching rebel-yell. [According to AK,Kay-Kay Menon’s character was originally a Tyler Durden- totally imaginary and he was later forced to make him human so that he could sing the customary five songs that every commercial film must have. [ At one point, AK got mad enough to add all five songs Right at the beginning~ to be done with the song thing]

Story :-After spending eons doing pot and dreaming of getting rich in a claustrophobic neon lit voodoo lounge, Kay-Kay’s rock band decides to record a demo tape and prove its mettle in the recording industry. They carry one demo song to an agent and what do they hear? The boot-leg song’s already out on torrent!! Koi novelty value rahi nahi.

Actually they’re told to get a professional demo piece done, and that would cost a small fortune. Now where can a down and out band get so much money for nothing? No, they don’t enter a talent contest on TV (since they don’t have any). Instead, they stage a fake kidnapping on one of the band’s amir-baap-ka aerosmith-betas and when push turns to shove- Kay Kay ends up bashing his guitar not on stage but on a hapless bandmate’s head. The bodies keep piling as the fivesome get more desperate for money and unable to keep their secret under wraps. What wracks more than the impossibility of sadak chaap ma-behen taporis wanting to get a rock band going is the control Kay-Kay has on his band-members, especially after they’re all in the thick of goat’s head soup. About 75% of the film unfolds as successive flashbacks that the unforgiven lot narrates in a Police station as a (cheat) confession. This much of the film is almost watchable-at least for AK fans who can discern the same stark shades of red and blue that he painted the galees of Dariyaganj (with DevD). What transpires in the last twenty minutes is like the proverbial levee breaking. A sudden rush of muck that goes downhill and drowns everything. But before that, there are other notable people who deserve honourable mentions for Paanch. The Music by Vishal Bhardwaj( though obscure) is good.

And since Paanch is a film about a rock-band, maverick lyricist Abbas Tyrewala pens gems(!) such as this for the soundtrack:

Kya din Kya raat hai yahan par- Ki sala yahan dono barabar

Na raaste kabhi ho khali- Na band hoti hai gaali

Ma-behen ki yaad Sabko aati hai pahar

Hall-gulla shor-gul Yeh kaisa hai sheher.....

To be fair to AK, a post DevD analysis of Paanch is a bit like comparing Amitabh Bachchan’s goonga act in Reshma aur Shera to his fiery Deewar Days. Even so,AK’s own protégée Motwane’s Udaan is a much better first film effort than Paanch (who-incidentally is credited with the sound design+song picturizations here). The basic idea of a sort of clueless-shoeless rock band set in an alienated teenage wasteland may be interesting to start with but the end result is as believable as a redneck draping a shawl over his shoulder and trying to render ghazals on a Kashmir carpet.

Apart from the inanity of the band’s musical range that includes a swinging club cabaret number along with a 70’s metal inspired wallop, AK gets the basic demographics of the aspiring Indian rock group as wrong as could be. In his first film, Kay-Kay Menon is more than competent as the egoistical, psychotic lead singer+driving force of the band but both he and his percussionist (!!) Aditya Shrivastva look as much RSJ cover boys as topiwala Van Morrison looks like a classical hindustani vocalist.

Getting inspired by ‘western cinema’ is fine but how come no one told AK that rock music and everything associated with it in India is the (obvious) domain of the anglicized, college educated youth that do not look like sadak-chaap scum of the earth even when they wear their hair long and run piercings through every non-sensitive visible appendage on their bodies? Tejaswini Kolhapuri, who gets a look in because her brother in law produced the film, stars as the band’s femme-fatale and visual relief. She stands out like a pixie amongst the paunches-what with her bob-cut hair, carefully done up mascara and stand out designer clothing. Ironically enough, the only person in the cast who looks like she might belong to a raap-chick band is the one who isn’t in.

Kay-Kay’s rock band never talks about music or musicians and there is zero bonding established as a precursor to redemption through the idea of ‘rock music’-come what may. Just the fact that Kay-Kay hails from Goa is enough to establish stereotypes. Goan=rock musician, enough said. Predictably, in the end, the idea of a fortune stolen is just a fortune stolen and up for grabs for the last man standing. How guys who themselves look and behave like Lower-Middle-Class scalpers - know / preach /worship /interpret /articulate their creative energy+angst ridden souls through ROCK is never addressed. AK is happy in restricting rock music to an unknown beast that’s an excuse for indulging in other ‘associated excesses’. All Indian fans of rock get in the band’s velvet underground lair are some Jim Morrison sketches and corny graffiti on the wall. That’s all.