Exotic and irrational entertainment

Favorites of 2011: Television

2011-12-30T17:26:00.000-08:00

John Everett Millais (Samuel Barnett), Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Aidan Turner),

and William Holman Hunt (Rafe Spall) walk through an exploding art gallery

in the "Heroes" promo for Desperate Romantics

This was our Year of the BBC Series. We saw so many excellent series that it's hard to pick out just a few as standouts; the general standard for acting, writing, directing, and production design was amazingly high. So my apologies for a list that's a bit overstuffed; the series are given in the order in which they were viewed:

Matty Jenkyns (Judi Dench) in Cranford

Cranford (2007) and Return to Cranford (2009): As the titles might suggest, these Heidi Thomas-scripted Elizabeth Gaskell adaptations focus on the inhabitants of the fictional town of Cranford, and the challenges to their traditions posed by new social, political and economic changes. Dame Judi Dench heads an ensemble cast of excellent British actors such as Imelda Staunton, Barbara Flynn, Claudie Blakely, Lesley Manville, Jim Carter, Michael Gambon, and the serenely radiant Julia Sawalha (I could hardly believe that Lydia Bennett in 1995 adaptation of Pride & Prejudice was created by the same actress, so different are the characters). Julia Sawalha is the reason we began watching Lark Rise To Candleford (see below).

Molly Gibson (Justine Waddell) in Wives and Daughters

Wives and Daughters (1999) is another Elizabeth Gaskell adaptation, this time written by Andrew Davies (who also wrote the screenplay for the 1995 Pride & Prejudice). It's centered on Molly Gibson (the ethereal Justine Waddell), a young woman who must deal with her unpleasant new stepmother (Francesca Annis) and her beautiful but emotionally manipulative new stepsister (Keeley Hawes). Another excellent cast that also includes Michael Gambon, Barbara Flynn, Barbara Leigh-Hunt, and Rosamund Pike.

Mirah (Jodhi May) and Daniel (Hugh Dancy) in Daniel Deronda

Daniel Deronda (2002): I wrote about this George Eliot adaptation my earlier post "Why BBC literary adaptations are so delightful: Daniel Deronda edition." It features gorgeous locations, a wonderful Andrew Davies script, and another excellent cast (including Amanda Root, Hugh Bonneville, Hugh Dancy, and Jodhi May).

Dorcas Lane (Julia Sawalha) in Lark Rise To Candleford

Lark Rise To Candleford (2008-2011): I wrote about this series in my posts "Lark Rise To Candleford" and "The Victorians and Bollywood: Lark Rise to Lagaan." The high quality of the scripts is maintained to the end of Season Four.

Mr. Slope (Alan Rickman) in The Barchester Chronicles

The Barchester Chronicles (1982): For a more detailed appreciation of this series, please see the Update to my post "A guide to the novels of Anthony Trollope, Part 1: The Chronicles of Barsetshire." The young Alan Rickman is especially slimy as the sibilant snake-like sycophant Mr. Slope, a forerunner of Harry Potter's Snape.

Irene Heron Forsyte (Gina McKee) in The Forsyte Saga

The Forsyte Saga (2002): Strictly speaking a Granada Television, not BBC, series, but equally lavish and equally well-cast. At first I wondered whether the problems of the self-involved members of this rich family (and the unfortunate people who found themselves in their orbit) were going to hold my interest for ten episodes and 700 minutes; we started to call it the "Lack of Foresight Saga." Then came the episode in which the family's dying patriarch, Old Jolyon, discovers an intellectual companionship that blossoms into platonic love with the sensitive Irene, his nephew Soames's estranged wife. In this episode, too, Old Jolyon begins to understand and accept the choices made by his artist son Young Joylon when he followed the imperatives of love over those of duty. This touching episode was beautifully written by Stephen Mallatratt and acted by Corin Redgrave (Old Jolyon), Gina McKee (Irene), Rupert Graves (Young Jolyon) and the other members of the cast. From then on, we were hooked.

Lizzie Siddal (Amy Manson) and Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Aidan Turner)

in Desperate Romantics

Desperate Romantics (2009): If you're somewhat allergic to costume dramas you'll still enjoy Desperate Romantics. It follows the misadventures of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood as they drink to excess, sleep with their models, and scandalize the Victorian art world. What makes the series take off is the larger-than-life performance of Aidan Turner as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, an artist and poet who is determined to make up for his relative lack of talent (or, at least, his lack of application) through relentless self-promotion. From the neo-glam-rock theme song on, the series is given a deliberately anachronistic tone by writer Peter Bowker and directors Paul Gay and Diarmuid Lawrence. Ordinarily deliberate anachronisms annoy me, but they work brilliantly in this very modern tale of sex and art-world success. Great fun, and a surprising amount of bare flesh (male and female). Definitely not your typical BBC series.

More Favorites of 2011: Bollywood, Books, Movies, and Music

Favorites of 2011: Music

2011-12-29T17:27:00.000-08:00

Favorite live music events:

Jill Tracy (photo credit: Neil Girling)

Jill Tracy and Daniel Handler: "The Ballad of Fantômas." City Lights Books, San Francisco, April 6; presented by Peter Maravelis' Fantômas-By-The-Bay centenary celebration

Jill Tracy is a gothic cabaret chanteuse who has composed soundtracks for silent films, including Murnau's 1922 horror classic Nosferatu. Handler, among other activities, is an accordionist who has played on projects with Stephin Merritt (Handler appears on The Magnetic Fields' 69 Love Songs as well as albums by The 6ths and The Gothic Archies). Together they performed an unforgettable version of Kurt Weill and Robert Desnos' Ballad of Fantômas, which enumerates, in graphic detail, the many crimes of the title character. The performers were helped along on the gruesome choruses by an enthusiastic absinthe-soaked crowd (absinthe generously supplied by St. George Spirits). Dark cabaret, indeed.

For a taste of Jill Tracy's work, here is a short film of her song "The Fine Art of Poisoning," directed by Bill Domonkos:

Philippe Jaroussky & Apollo's Fire, "Handel and Vivaldi Fireworks," Hertz Hall, Berkeley, October 30; presented by Cal Performances

The countertenor Philippe Jaroussky is a truly amazing performer, and his appearance with the period instrument ensemble Apollo's Fire was far and away the most thrilling live music event we witnessed this past year. You can read more details about this electrifying concert in my earlier post.

Favorite classical music recording:

Philippe Jaroussky: Carestini — The Story of A Castrato. Le Concert d'Astrée; Emmanuelle Haïm, conductor

[Carestini] rendered everything he sang interesting by good taste, energy, and judicious embellishments. He manifested great agility in the execution of difficult divisions from the chest in a most articulate and admirable manner. It was the opinion of Hasse, as well as of many other eminent professors, that whoever had not heard Carestini was unacquainted with the most perfect style of singing.
—Charles Burney, A General History of Music v. 2, pp. 782 - 783

The countertenor Philippe Jaroussky has many excellent recordings, but Carestini perhaps best showcases the full range of his gifts. This recording of arias written for the castrato Carestini includes examples of both lightning-fast coloratura and affecting slow arias. The works performed include some less-familiar arias by well-known composers such as Gluck and Handel, as well as wonderful arias by such undeservedly neglected composers as Capelli, Graun, Hasse, Leo, and Porpora. Like Cecilia Bartoli, Jaroussky seeks out underexplored areas of the repertory and brings his most exciting discoveries to renewed life. This is a superb disc, and of his recordings perhaps comes closest to suggesting the excitement of his live performances.

Favorite opera performances (live):

Handel: Acis & Galatea. Jordan Hall, New England Conservatory, June 18; presented by the Boston Early Music Festival

I wrote about this brilliantly staged and beautifully performed chamber opera in an earlier post. We were fortunate to see one of its stars, Aaron Sheehan, as Orpheus in our other favorite live opera experience of 2011:

Charpentier: La Descente d’Orphée aux enfers. Magnificat; Warren Stewart, director. St. Mark's Episcopalian Church, Berkeley, October 15

Another superb evening of music from Magnificat. Orphée retells the myth of Orpheus' liberation of his beloved Eurydice from the underworld realm of Pluto and Proserpine. Charpentier's chamber opera compresses a huge range of emotion into a compact package. Magnificat's principal singers—Aaron Sheehan (Orphée), Laura Heimes (Euridice), Jennifer Ellis Kampani (Daphné, Aréthuze, Proserpine), and Peter Becker (Pluton)—performed Charpentier's exquisite music beautifully. Another triumph for the singers, Magnificat's instrumental ensemble, and director Warren Stewart.

Favorite opera (broadcast):

Renée Fleming (Rodelinda)

and Andreas Scholl (Bertarido)

Handel: Rodelinda. Met Live in HD broadcast, December 3

For Rodelinda Handel wrote some of his greatest music and created one of his most affecting heroines. Renée Fleming, the title character in this production from the Met, has a voice that at this stage in her career seems to have lost some agility and is showing some wear. The countertenor Andreas Scholl, as Rodelinda's husband Bertarido, was also not in his best voice for this broadcast. However, all hesitations were swept away by their total commitment to their roles. Their farewell scene at the end of Act II was passionately convincing; during Rodelinda's Act III mourning aria "Se 'l mio duol non e si forte," real tears coursed down Fleming's cheeks; and the kiss Bertarido/Scholl planted on Rodelinda/Fleming at the conclusion of the opera was full of unfeigned affection.

San Francisco Opera might take note of how effective Stephen Wadsworth's thoughtfully detailed but straightforward production was; it required no updatings to fascist Europe, and refused to undermine Handel's drama with jokes or camp. The contrast with SF Opera's well-sung but emotionally inert production of Rodelinda from several seasons ago couldn't have been more stark.

Most clueless audience members:

Philip Glass: Satyagraha. Met Live in HD rebroadcast, Century Cinema 9, San Francisco, December 7

Satyagraha is about the young Gandhi's encounters with injustice in South Africa and the formation of his philosophy of compassion and non-violent resistance. In the final scene of the opera, Gandhi (Richard Croft) steps forward and sings an extended solo on an excerpt from the Bhagavad Gita which means in part "I come to earth...for the protection of good, holding back evil and upholding virtue." Suddenly the screen was illuminated by a flash—a woman sitting several rows in front of us had taken a flash picture of the screen. Not only is that incredibly rude, it's incredibly stupid: when you take a picture of a lighted screen, using a flash will both wash out the screen image and brightly illuminate anything directly in front of you (like the backs of the seats in the next row). Evidently this woman was indeed unhappy with the quality of her picture, because as the scene progressed she went on to take several more. After the third or fourth flash, a guy a couple of rows behind her screamed "IF YOU TAKE ONE MORE PICTURE I'M GOING TO COME DOWN THERE AND KILL YOU!" Meanwhile, Gandhi sang on about compassion and non-violence.

Websites:

Jill Tracy
City Lights Books
The Fantômas Website
St. George Absinthe Verte
Philippe Jaroussky (in French)
Apollo's Fire
Boston Early Music Festival
Aaron Sheehan
Magnificat
Metropolitan Opera Live in HD

More Favorites of 2011: Bollywood, Books, Movies, and Television

Favorites of 2011: Movies

2011-12-28T15:26:00.000-08:00

Brief Encounter (1945): I have a penchant for movies about doomed love; after all, among my ten favorite films of all time are Vertigo, Casablanca, La Jetée and Kal Ho Naa Ho. So I'm not sure why it took me so long to see this David Lean-directed classic. Perhaps I wasn't ready to see it until now; I do think that to fully appreciate this film it helps to be at least as old as its protagonists (who seem to be in their mid-30s). I'm just glad I didn't let any more time go by.

The story is taken from Noel Coward's play "Still Life": a man and a woman (Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson) meet in a railway station cafe every week at the same time. Their casual encounters for movie-watching and window shopping soon deepen into love—only, both of them are married and have children. If you're thinking, "This can't end well," you're right.

The film is filled with wonderful scenes. Probably the most excruciating is when on a rainy night the couple winds up together at the apartment of an absent friend, and seem to be on the verge of consummating their affair, only to have the friend return unexpectedly. And the couple's final parting, interrupted by an oblivious, chattering busybody, is agonizing.

Brief Encounter is beautifully photographed, and Robert Krasker's stunning black and white cinematography is gorgeously rendered in the Criterion Collection DVD transfer. Another striking element of the film is the score: Rachmaninoff's sweepingly romantic Piano Concerto No. 2 ebbs and swells through virtually every scene. (Cleverly, the music has a diegetic origin: the film is largely told in flashback, and a radio is playing the piece in the background of the frame story). Having a single piece of music so closely intertwined with the story was a technique later used by Alfred Hitchcock in Vertigo, with Bernard Herrmann's variations on Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. Curiously, the conductor of the Vertigo soundtrack, Muir Matheson, also conducted the Rachmaninoff score of Brief Encounter (Eileen Joyce was the soloist).

But what makes the film so memorable is the extraordinary performance of Celia Johnson as Laura, the suburban housewife who unexpectedly discovers in Howard's Alec a final chance at passionate love—only to find herself incapable of the necessary cruelty and selfishness to seize it. Johnson's face, which looks almost plain from some angles and classically beautiful from others, registers every nuance of her self-condemnation. A masterpiece of thwarted desire.

Mädchenjahre einer Königin/Victoria in Dover (aka The Story of Vickie, 1954): A young girl discovers that she's really a queen, meets her Prince Charming, and they live happily ever after. It's the stuff of fairy tales, but it really happened to Alexandrina Victoria of Kent, who at the age of 18 became Queen Victoria.

In Victoria in Dover the young queen is portrayed by the even younger Romy Schneider, who was only 16 when the film was made. Schneider is utterly delightful as a teenager who suddenly has to negotiate her way through the minefields of power. Amazingly (as I discovered after the film) pretty much all of the details of her early reign as portrayed in the film are historically based, in particular her mother's attempt, in league with her lover Sir John Conroy, to seize control and reign through her daughter.

Only the incident that gives the film its English title is fictional. Victoria is being pressured to marry, and has already seen (and rejected) two of the three suitors selected for her. The only one she hasn't yet met is Prince Albert. Sick of the intrigues at court, Victoria decides to flee in disguise to spend a few days in Paris. When she reaches Dover she stays overnight at an inn while waiting for the next boat to Calais. Staying at the same inn is a dashing young man who introduces her to waltzing and both literally and figuratively sweeps her off her feet.*

Of course, we can see where this is going, but director Ernst Marischka gets us there charmingly and with a deft comic touch. And Schneider is simply radiant. She went on to become famous in the Sissi trilogy, another real-life fairy tale directed by Marischka; if the Sissi trilogy is as delightful as Victoria in Dover it will be wonderful indeed.

More Favorites of 2011: Bollywood, Books, Music, and Television

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* Historically, Victoria really was smitten with Albert; she wrote to her uncle Leopold, "He possesses every quality that could be desired to render me perfectly happy. He is so sensible, so kind, and so good, and so amiable too. He has besides the most pleasing and delightful exterior and appearance you can possibly see." In her diary, she confided that she found him "extremely handsome," with "a beautiful nose and a very sweet mouth with fine teeth; but the charm of his countenance is his expression, which is most delightful." They had a happy marriage by all accounts, and Victoria gave birth to nine children. She was devastated when Albert died of typhoid in 1861, nearly 22 years after their marriage.

Favorites of 2011: Books

2011-12-26T22:12:00.000-08:00

Fiction:

John Everett Millais: "Was it not a lie?"

The Chronicles of Barsetshire: My 15-month journey through the novels of Anthony Trollope is coming to a (perhaps temporary) end, although I haven't yet read even half of the novels he published in his lifetime. Before I embarked on this voyage I thought of Trollope with a kind of condescension. How could someone so prolific be any good? I quickly discovered how misplaced that condescension was.

The six-novel series The Chronicles of Barsetshire (1855-1867) certainly ranks among this great novelist's greatest achievements. I wrote more extensively about the series in A guide to the novels of Anthony Trollope, Part 1. I wrote then, "If you think that a series of six novels about rural English clergy sounds boring, think again. Trollope's Barsetshire novels are filled with power struggles, class dynamics, financial disasters, and impossible loves. Fierce emotions seethe under the placid surfaces of the proper Victorian characters."

The first two novels were also made into an excellent BBC series, The Barchester Chronicles (1982), which will make an appearance in my list of favorite television shows seen in 2011. And the fourth and fifth novels in the series, Framley Parsonage (1861) and The Small House At Allington (1864), were illustrated by John Everett Millais, a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and one of the subjects of the BBC series Desperate Romantics (2010)—which will also be on my list of favorites from the past year.

Henry O'Neil: Before Waterloo (1868)

Vanity Fair: In An Autobiography (1883) Trollope wrote, "I myself regard Esmond as the greatest novel in the English language." I confess that on reading this I had to look up the author of The History of Henry Esmond (1852), and discovered that it was written by Trollope's onetime editor William Thackeray. This made me curious to read Thackeray; instead of starting with Trollope's recommendation, though, I decided to begin with Thackeray's most famous novel, Vanity Fair (1847). Since as of this writing I'm only halfway through, perhaps it's a bit premature to put it on my list of favorites. But so far I'm thoroughly enjoying this "Novel Without a Hero" and its two heroines, the good-hearted Amelia Sedley and the delightfully unscrupulous Becky Sharp.

Just a year or two before he died, Trollope himself wrote an "answer novel" to Vanity Fair entitled Ayala's Angel (1881). Vanity Fair's Becky Sharp is the orphaned daughter of a disreputable artist, and—realizing that the game is rigged against those of her parentage, class and gender—uses all her wiles to make her way in society among the wealthy and socially connected. in Trollope's novel Ayala and her sister Lucy are also the orphaned daughters of an artist, and also find themselves having to make their way among their "betters." Perhaps Trollope had initially imagined the sincere Lucy and the beautiful but willful Ayala as his versions of Amelia and Becky. Only, in Trollope's world both young women are ultimately able to marry for love; in Thackeray, marrying for love is either an impossibility or a self-delusion.

After Vanity Fair, I'm looking forward to Henry Esmond and The Luck of Barry Lyndon (1844)—perhaps they'll appear on my list of favorites for 2012.

Nonfiction:

Predictably Irrational (2008): The sad news from behavioral economist Daniel Ariely's research over the past several decades is that not only are we not the utility-maximizing rational calculators portrayed in standard economic theory, we are extremely irrational, but in utterly predictable ways. This means that, even if we think we are aware of our irrational tendencies, those tendencies can be (and are) exploited by economic actors (advertisers, retailers, and bosses) for their own financial advantage.

For example, we judge prices, salaries, and romantic choices in comparison to what else is available, not by any absolute standard. So we insure our perpetual unhappiness, because there will always be someone earning more than we are, or dating someone better-looking than our partner. Perpetual dissatisfaction is music to the ears of those who want to sell us new things to replace those that are perfectly fine, but which we no longer desire.

This also means that we can be manipulated by the way goods are priced. So much for the equilibrium between price and demand; as Ariely writes, "it is market prices themselves that influence consumers' willingness to pay" (p. 45-46). What we perceive as our personal preferences are often simply the result of arbitrary choices made at some point in the past; those choices have become anchors in a process that Ariely calls "arbitrary coherence." We tend to procrastinate, try to keep our options open endlessly, unconsciously allow our expectations to determine our perceptions, and overvalue what we already own or things that are "free." All of these tendencies are used against us by those who stand to profit by them.

The only bright side is that public policy can be crafted to take account of our irrational impulses and behaviors. The dark side is that in a society that fetishizes freedom of choice, such attempts are usually portrayed as paternalistic (or as creeping socialism). Meanwhile corporations are free to ruthlessly exploit our irrational impulses. A fascinating and sobering book.

More Favorites of 2011: Bollywood, Movies, Music, and Television

Favorites of 2011: Bollywood

2011-12-25T22:16:00.000-08:00

It's that retrospective time of year, and over the next week or so I hope to review my favorite music, books, movies and television from 2011. In my Favorites of 2010 my Bollywood choices dated from 1972, 1958 and 1960. But oddly enough, my two favorite Bollywood films seen in 2011 were actually released in the last twelve months. In alphabetical order:

Band Baaja Baaraat (Bands, horns and revelry, 2010)

I wrote about Band Baaja Baaraat in an earlier post. Since then we've seen it a second time, and enjoyed it even more. I'm still disappointed by the final speech of Bittoo (Ranveer Singh), which, if the subtitles are reliable, seems too self-involved. But up until that moment the film offers the compelling story of two wedding planners, Bittoo and Shruti (the excellent Anushka Sharma), who don't recognize until it's almost too late how much better they are together than apart. Plus BBB has some good Salim-Sulaiman songs; click on the link to the earlier post to see the charming "Ainvayi Ainvayi."

Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (You don't get a second chance at life, 2011)

In Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, three college friends who have grown apart over the years are drawn back together when one of them becomes engaged. The engagement pushes them to finally take a long-delayed road trip through Spain. On that trip each of them must face his greatest fears and make a life-altering choice.

Initially I thought that the friends-learn-life-lessons-on-road-trip plot seemed too well-worn. But an excellent script (by director Zoya Akhtar, actor Farhan Akhtar, and Reema Kagti) and strong performances, particularly from Farhan Akhtar, Abhay Deol and Hrithik Roshan as the three friends, made this one of the most memorable films I saw in the past year. And while Shankar-Eshaan-Loy's songs didn't impress me tremendously when I heard them before seeing the movie, they work beautifully in the context of the film. "Khaabon ke Parinday" is a good example of a low-key ZNMD song that's grown on me, in part due to the spectacular Spanish scenery:

I have to confess that another reason I was reluctant to see ZNMD at first was the presence of Katrina Kaif in the cast. The few times we've seen her we've found her acting to be self-conscious, her dancing to be graceless, and her collagen-enhanced lips to be distracting (and not in a good way). But here she does a wonderful job as a free-spirited scuba instructor who helps the stressed-out workaholic Arjun (Hrithik) re-examine his priorities. A lovely movie that I look forward to re-watching soon.

More Favorites of 2011: Books, Movies, Music, and Television

Montserrat Figueras, 1942-2011

2011-11-24T10:17:00.000-08:00

Once heard, Montserrat Figueras' voice could never be forgotten. It was rich and dark-hued, and at the same time could suggest fragility and suppressed tears.

Yesterday came the sad news that she had died after a year-long battle against an unnamed illness. Our thoughts are with her and with her husband of more than 40 years, Jordi Savall.

"Dolcissimo sospiro" from Giulio Caccini's Nuove Musiche (1601); Montserrat Figueras, soprano, with Jordi Savall, viola da gamba:

Update 2 Dec 2011: A number of Montserrat Figueras tributes have been posted on the web. Among the best of them are Mark MacNamara's "In Memoriam: Montserrat Figueras (1942-2011)" for the San Francisco Classical Voice, and Alex Ross's "For Montserrat Figueras" on The Rest Is Noise.

Philippe Jaroussky and Apollo's Fire

2011-11-20T15:50:00.000-08:00

Astounding is the first word that comes to mind when encountering Philippe Jaroussky in live performance or on record. Here's a taste: "Alto Giove" from Nicola Porpora's opera Polifemo (1735) (unfortunately shorn of its instrumental instroduction):

His amazingly pure and agile voice is usually described as a countertenor (that is, as a falsetto), but it sounds to me like a natural soprano. Whatever its true classification, it is astonishing.

Jaroussky, though, doesn't just rely on his lovely sound for effect: he is an extremely musical singer who has the rare ability to improvise embellishments that enhance the music he's performing. You can read about our first electrifying encounter with him in an earlier post on this year's Boston Early Music Festival's centerpiece opera, Steffani's Niobe.

This fall Jaroussky toured North America with Apollo's Fire, the Cleveland-based period instrument ensemble led by Jeannette Sorrell, in a program of pieces both bravura and affetuoso by Handel and Vivaldi. They appeared in Berkeley as part of the Cal Performances Early Music concert series on October 30, 2011, and we were fortunate enough to have fifth-row seats in the intimate Hertz Hall.

For the program "Handel and Vivaldi Fireworks," Jaroussky chose some Handel rarities from the later period of his operatic career; and as far as Vivaldi goes, practically all of his vocal music qualifies as rarities. You can see a summary of the program at the Cal Performances website; the unfamiliarity of much of the music only added to our sense of discovery. And while there were plenty of opportunities for Jaroussky to exhibit flights of almost-inhuman virtuosity, there were also many tender and lyrical moments (as in the Porpora aria excerpted above).

Jaroussky evidently favors collaborations with conductors and ensembles that exhibit a performance flair that matches his own: he has worked with Jean-Christophe Spinosi, Emmanuelle Haïm, Gabriel Garrido, and Fabio Biondi, all conductors who favor what might be called an interventionist, rather than evidence-based, period performance practice. Sorrell definitely favors a highly theatrical musical approach. For example, she would frequently insert unwritten rests: stopping the ensemble abruptly on the next-to-last note of a piece, pausing for several beats, and then sounding the final chord. This is probably an anachronistic practice deriving from the later 18th or even 19th century. But if Apollo's Fire lacked something in historical accuracy or elegance, it more than made up for it in the spirited way that it attacked the demands of Handel's and Vivaldi's very difficult instrumental writing.

In spite of his self-effacing willingness to share the spotlight, Jaroussky was clearly the star of the show. The audience response to his performances was so rapturous I feared for the structural integrity of the concert hall. Jaroussky responded by performing three encores written for famous castrati, all of which brought the audience to their feet. The first was "Alto Giove," written by Porpora for Farinelli. The second was the showpiece "Venti, turbini" from Handel's Rinaldo (1711), written for Nicolini (Jaroussky charmingly announced it from the stage by saying that the aria "has many notes"). And the third encore was a profoundly moving "Ombra mai fu" from Handel's Serse (1738), written for Caffarelli (Jaroussky's comment: "This aria doesn't have many notes—just the right ones"). It sent us home floating on air:

Why I Love Bollywood: The Playlist (Part 2)

2011-11-06T15:49:00.000-08:00

A continuation of Why I Love Bollywood: The Playlist (Part 1):

Song: "Choli Ke Peeche" (What's beneath your blouse?)
Film: Khal Nayak (The Anti-Hero, 1993); dir. Subhash Ghai
Stars: Ila Arun, Madhuri Dixit, Sanjay Dutt
Composers: Laxmikant-Pyarelal
Singers: Ila Arun, Alka Yagnik

I can't resist the playfully suggestive lyrics, propulsive music and Madhuri's outrageously flirtatious performance.
Song: "Dil Laga Liya" (I gave you my heart)
Film: Dil Hai Tumhaara (My Heart Is Yours, 2002); dir. Kundan Shah
Stars: Preity Zinta, Jimmy Shergill, Mahima Chaudhary, Rekha
Composers: Nadeem-Shravan
Singers: Alka Yagnik, Udit Narayan

Samir (Jimmy Shergill) loves Shalu (Preity Zinta), and Shalu loves Dev (Arjun Rampal), while Dev is betrothed to Shalu's sister Nimmi (Mahima Chaudhary). At Nimmi's engagement party Shalu performs a song that expresses her own hopeless love for Dev...
Song: "Dil Cheez Kya Hai" (What is my heart?)
Film: Umrao Jaan (1983); dir. Muzaffar Ali
Star: Rekha
Composers: Khayyam (music), Shahryar (lyrics).
Singer: Asha Bhosle

Another story of hopeless love; the tragic courtesan Umrao Jaan is Rekha's greatest role.
Song: "Pyar Kiya" (When one has loved, why be afraid?)
Film: Mughal-e-Azam (The Great Mughal, 1960); dir. Muzaffar Ali
Star: Madhubala
Composers: Naushad (music), Shakeel Badayuni (lyrics)
Singer: Lata Mangeshkar

The dancer Anarkali (Madhubala) defiantly declares her love for Prince Salim (Dilip Kumar) before the Emperor Akhbar (Prithviraj Kapoor) and his court. Sensing a theme?
Song: "Mehndi Laga Ke Rakhna" (Adorn yourself with henna)
Film: Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (The Brave Heart Will Take The Bride, 1995); dir. Aditya Chopra
Stars: Shah Rukh Khan, Kajol
Composers: Jatin-Lalit (music), Anand Bakshi (lyrics)
Singers: Udit Narayan, Lata Mangeshkar

I love the interplay of secret glances and coded messages as Raj (Shah Rukh) performs this song for his lover Simran (Kajol) at the celebration of her engagement to another man.
Song: "Kajra Re" (Dark eyes)
Film: Bunty aur Babli (Bunty and Babli, 2005); dir. Shaad Ali
Stars: Aishwarya Rai, Amitabh Bachchan, Abhishek Bachchan
Composers: Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy (music), Gulzar (lyrics)
Singers: Alisha Chinai, Shankar Mahadevan, Javed Ali

An instant classic.
Song: "Saakhiya Aaj Mujhe Neend Nahin Aayegi"
Film: Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam (Master, Mistress and Servant, 2005); dir. Abrar Alvi
Star: Minoo Mumtaz
Composers: Hemant Kumar (music); Shakeel Badayuni (lyrics)
Singer: Asha Bhosle

The gorgeous black and white cinematography of this number (V. K. Murthy is the credited cinematographer, and this song was probably directed by Guru Dutt), with silhouetted backup dancers surrounding the brightly lit courtesan, shows what films lost when technicolor became the standard.
Song: "Dhoom Taana"
Film: Om Shanti Om (2007); dir. Farah Khan
Stars: Deepika Padukone, Shah Rukh Khan
Composers: Vishal Dadlani, Shekhar Ravjiani (music), Javed Akhtar (lyrics)
Singers: Shreya Ghoshal, Abhijeet

An homage to Bollywood heroes of the 1960s and 1970s, including Sunil Dutt, Rajesh Khanna, and Jeetendra, among others.

To see all of the songs in parts 1 and 2, watch the Why I Love Bollywood YouTube playlist. Parts 3 and 4 to follow.

Why I Love Bollywood: The Playlist (Part 1)

2011-11-06T06:26:00.000-08:00

In my second-ever post on this blog, "Why I Love Bollywood," I tried to explain why I find Indian cinema so powerfully appealing. But my halting attempts at explanation weren't nearly as eloquent as the movies themselves. After all, we had begun our journey of discovery not by reading about Bollywood, but by watching dance clips on local TV programs like Namaste America, Showbiz India, and India Waves.

So I began putting together "Why I Love Bollywood" compilations of some of my favorite Bollywood dance numbers for uncomprehending family and friends. The clips are not in chronological order; instead, I looked for connections of mood, imagery, or featured stars.* I focused on recent films because I thought that they would be more appealing to folks who had never encountered a Bollywood movie before, and also because I'm still woefully ignorant about Indian cinema's Golden Age. But (as you'll notice) I've slipped in an occasional classic or two. I clearly need some Helen, though.

This list is not in any way meant to be comprehensive or the "best" of anything. It is meant only to be entertaining.

Song: "Phir Milenge Chalte Chalte" (We'll meet again as time goes by)
Film: Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi (A Match Made In Heaven, 2009), dir: Aditya Chopra
Stars: Shah Rukh Khan, Kajol, Bipasa Basu, Lara Dutta, Preity Zinta, Rani Mukherji
Composers: Salim-Sulaiman
Singer: Sonu Nigam

Shah Rukh Khan's homage to great stars of the 1950s through the 1970s: Raj Kapoor, Dev Anand, Shammi Kapoor, Rajesh Khanna, and Rishi Kapoor (not to mention their leading ladies Nargis, Nutan, Helen, Sharmila Tagore and Neetu Singh). The visual and lyrical allusions to classic films in this number are incredibly dense—see the Wikipedia article on the song for details—but you don't have to be familiar with the originals to enjoy it.
Song: "Mohe Panghat Pe" (Krishna teased me at the well)
Film: Mughal-e-Azam (The Great Mughal, 1960); dir. K. Asif
Star: Madhubala
Composers: Naushad (music), Shakeel Badayuni (lyrics)
Singer: Lata Mangeshkar

The shot of the court dancer Anarkali (Madhubala) lifting her veil at the opening of this song is justly one of the most famous in Indian cinema. Neither she nor we yet realize that the forbidden love of Krishna and Radha will have parallels to her love for Prince Salim (Dilip Kumar).
Song: "Kahe Chhed Mohe" (Krishna teased me at the well)
Film: Devdas (2002); dir. Sanjay Leela Bhansali
Stars: Madhuri Dixit, Jackie Shroff, Shah Rukh Khan
Composers: Ismail Darbar, Nusrat Badr
Singers: Pandit Birju Maharaj, Madhuri Dixit, Kavita Krishnamurthy

Director Bhansali's gorgeous homage to the great courtesan films such as Mughal-e-Azam, Pakeezah (The pure one, 1972), and Umrao Jaan (1981). It's another telling of the Krishna-Radha story, again with parallels to the lives of the protagonists: Devdas (Shah Rukh Khan) has just forcibly seduced and abandoned his childhood sweetheart Paro (Aishwarya Rai); the courtesan Chandramukhi (Madhuri Dixit) unwittingly reminds him of his guilt, while (like Anarkali) transgressing fiercely policed social boundaries by falling in love with him herself.
Song: "Chaiyya Chaiyya" (Walk in the shadow of love)
Film: Dil Se (From the Heart, 1998); dir. Mani Ratnam
Stars: Malaika Arora, Shah Rukh Khan
Composers: A. R. Rahman (music), Gulzar (lyrics)
Singers: Sapna Awasti, Sukhwinder Singh

The mind boggles as SRK and Malaika Arora dance on top of a moving train.
Song: "Aisa Des Hai Mera" (Such is my country)
Film: Veer-Zaara (2004); dir. Yash Chopra
Stars: Shah Rukh Khan, Preity Zinta
Composers: Madan Mohan, Sanjeev Kohli
Singers: Gurdas Mann, Udit Narayan, Pritha Mazumder, Lata Mangeshkar

SRK again, this time on top of a moving bus. The epitome of a Yash Chopra "scenic India" song.
Song: "Lodi"
Film: Veer-Zaara (2004); dir. Yash Chopra
Stars: Amitabh Bachchan, Hema Malini, Shah Rukh Khan, Preity Zinta
Composers: Madan Mohan, Sanjeev Kohli
Singers: Gurdas Mann, Udit Narayan, Lata Mangeshkar

A delightful reunion between frequent 1970s co-stars Amitabh Bachchan and Hema Malini (Sholay (Fire, 1975), Trishul (1978), and many others), with Shah Rukh and Preity Zinta in attendance.
Song: "Dola Re Dola" (Swinging and swaying)
Film: Devdas (2002); dir. Sanjay Leela Bhansali
Stars: Madhuri Dixit, Aishwarya Rai
Composers: Ismail Darbar, Nusrat Badr
Singers: Kavita Krishnamurthy, Shreya Ghoshal, Kay Kay

Each time I watch this song featuring two of the greatest dancers in modern Bollywood, I'm amazed again by the swirling camerawork and lengthy continuous takes. A brilliant combination of form and content by director Bhansali.

More to follow in Parts 2, 3, and 4; I have also created a Why I Love Bollywood YouTube playlist.

-----

* A note to Yash Raj Films, Eros Entertainment, Shemaroo, Tips, and other Indian producers: I would be more enthusiastic about using your YouTube videos in my posts and playlists if they were complete, were posted at the proper aspect ratio (not stretched or squashed), and had an English closed caption option. Since those criteria are only rarely met, I also rely on the many YouTubing Bollywood fans out there who share their favorite songs as a labor of love. They are apparently more concerned about attracting new audiences to your films than you are.

Side 1, Track 1

2011-10-23T14:18:00.000-07:00

A while ago I made a list of my favorite songs that opened the second side of an album (Side 2, Track 1)—only possible, of course, in the days when albums had sides. (Now, of course, the album itself is becoming a quaint artifact.)

At the time I decided against following up that post with the (perhaps more obvious) list of my favorite side one, track ones. Partly it was because side one, track ones are usually the hits, or the would-be hits, from a band's catalog; they feel pre-chosen, in a way. They can be great songs, but for me can somehow lack that sense of personal discovery and personal meaning that is easier to ascribe to less famous songs.

But the other night, hearing a fragment of the Pixies' "Into the White" being used as filler between segments on NPR (of all things) made me dig out my copy of Doolittle, their brilliantly demented album from 1989. When the first notes of "Debaser" came on, I remembered dancing with my loving partner in a sweaty basement club called Lipps Underground in SF's SOMA district. The DJ that night was Don Baird, the SF Bay Times' "Beat This" music columnist, and he was spinning some great punk and punk-influenced rock: Joan Jett & The Blackhearts, Nirvana, Fugazi. Just when the dancing had reached a peak, he threw on "Debaser" and the place exploded.

"Debaser"—with Joey Santiago's punky guitar, Kim Deal's alternately deadpan and poppy backup vocals, and Black Francis' Surrealist lyrical allusions—started me thinking about my favorite side one, track ones. As Doolittle played on, I sat down and scribbled out most of the list that follows. I gave myself the same restrictions as with my first list: a dozen songs from albums I discovered on vinyl (so, ironically, "Debaser" was disqualified—see Frank O'Hara's "Why I Am Not A Painter"). Here, with only a few additions and subtractions, is what I came up with, in chronological order:

1. "All Tomorrow's Parties," The Velvet Underground & Nico, from The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967)

2. "What's Going On?," Marvin Gaye, from What's Going On? (1971)

3. "Let's Stay Together," Al Green, from Let's Stay Together (1972)

4. "Concrete Jungle," Bob Marley & the Wailers, from Catch A Fire (1973)

5. "Gloria," Patti Smith Group, from Horses (1975)

6. "Holidays In The Sun," The Sex Pistols, from Never Mind The Bollocks, Here's The Sex Pistols (1977)

7. "Art-i-ficial," X-Ray Spex, from Germ-Free Adolescents (1978)

8. "She's Lost Control," Joy Division, from Unknown Pleasures (1979)

9. "London Calling," The Clash, from London Calling (1979)

10. "Paralysed," Gang of Four, from Solid Gold (1979)

11. "Shouting Out Loud," The Raincoats, from Odyshape (1980)

12. "Requiem," Killing Joke, from Killing Joke (1980)

Bands that appear on both my Side Two, Track One and Side One, Track One lists:

The Velvet Underground & Nico
Bob Marley & The Wailers
Patti Smith Group
Joy Division
The Clash
The Raincoats
Killing Joke

Albums that appear on both lists:

The Velvet Underground & Nico
Bob Marley & The Wailers: Catch A Fire
Joy Division, Unknown Pleasures
Killing Joke

As ever, all comments positive, negative and alternative are welcomed.

Update 24 October 2011: I've created a Side 1, Track 1 YouTube playlist.

Update 1 Nov 2011: Two bonus tracks:

1. "She's Lost Control," Joy Division, live on BBC-TV's Something Else, September 1979

2. "To Hell With Poverty," Gang of Four, live on WDR's RockPalast, 1983

A guide to the novels of Anthony Trollope, Part 3

2011-10-07T22:37:00.000-07:00

A continuation of A guide to the novels of Anthony Trollope, Part 1: The Chronicles of Barsetshire and Part 2: The Palliser novels.

The Way We Live Now (1875): One of Trollope's greatest and most entertaining novels, which is eerily prescient about the destructiveness of rampant greed and speculation. Augustus Melmotte, a financier of immense wealth and mysterious (and possibly Jewish) origins, sets up in London and soon has rich men clamoring to buy shares in a railroad investment scheme. Paul Montague, a young and near-penniless partner in the scheme, raises questions about what is happening with all the money, but is brushed off. Meanwhile Paul is falling in love with Henrietta Carbury, which causes a breach between him and his older cousin and patron Roger Carbury, who has long loved Henrietta. Henrietta is in turn heartbroken when she learns that Paul has been seen with Mrs. Hurtle, an American woman with whom Paul has had a long-term affair and to whom he may have promised marriage.

Then there is Henrietta's ne'er-do-well brother Sir Felix Carbury, who has quickly run through his inheritance. He sees in Melmotte's daughter Marie a way of disembarrassing himself from his present and future debts, while Marie sees in Sir Felix a way of escaping her stultifying family life. Finally, there is Georgiana Longestaffe, a sister of one of Sir Felix's cronies. In her desire to marry a rich man, she makes a series of blunders that lead instead to her social ostracism. Ultimately she engages herself to the considerably older Ezekiel Breghert, an upright and honorable Jewish banker; but then she learns that, thanks to Melmotte's fraudulent machinations, Breghert has lost a vast sum of money. The portraits of Melmotte, Sir Felix and Georgiana—people who measure their relationships with others solely on the basis of the monetary and social benefit to themselves—are devastating. For none of them is happiness truly possible.

Perhaps this is the place to address the anti-Jewish attitudes that are occasionally expressed in Trollope's novels. It is difficult to know whether these attitudes are Trollope's own, or whether they are simply the expression of the prejudices of (often not very admirable) characters. Certainly, anti-Jewish feeling was quite common in Victorian society; Trollope, in portraying that society, could not ignore those feelings, and it would be remarkable if he himself were completely immune from them. However, Mr. Breghert, who is the only unambiguously Jewish character in The Way We Live Now, is also unambiguously kind, respectable, and honest. He is also one of Melmotte's victims, and Georgiana's treatment of him is a reflection of her weak and shallow nature.

Similarly, Trollope seems to share some of the common Victorian attitudes about the proper sphere and deportment of women. In Can You Forgive Her? he is capable of writing about Alice Vavasor's acceptance of Mr. Grey, "Of course she had no choice but to yield. He, possessed of power and force infinitely greater than hers, had left her no alternative but to be happy." But at the same time, Trollope shows a keen awareness of how painful and unjust could be the duties of women in Victorian society. Alice Vavasor, Lady Laura in the Palliser novels and Mrs. Hurtle in The Way We Live Now chafe at the domesticity and subservience expected of women. They want to live in a way that has an impact on the larger world, and Trollope portrays their dilemmas with great sympathy.

Then there are the portraits of spirited, independent women—among them Lady Glencora and Isabel Boncassen in the Palliser novels—which are among his most delightful creations. So again, while Trollope doubtlessly shared some of the typical attitudes of his day, he could also examine them critically and offer examples, both good and bad, of characters who transcend the expectations and constraints placed on them.

In social life we hardly stop to consider how much of that daring spirit which gives mastery comes from hardness of heart rather than from high purpose, or true courage. The man who succumbs to his wife, the mother who succumbs to her daughter, the master who succumbs to his servant, is as often brought to servility by a continual aversion to the giving of pain, by a softness which causes the fretfulness of others to be an agony to himself,—as by any actual fear which the firmness of the imperious one may have produced. There is an inner softness, a thinness of the mind's skin, an incapability of seeing or even thinking of the troubles of others with equanimity, which produces a feeling akin to fear; but which is compatible not only with courage, but with absolute firmness of purpose, when the demand for firmness arises so strongly as to assert itself. With this man it was not really that he feared the woman;—or at least such fears did not prevail upon him to be silent; but he shrank from subjecting her to the blank misery of utter desertion. After what had passed between them he could hardly bring himself to tell her that he wanted her no further and to bid her go. But that was what he had to do. (The Way We Live Now, Ch. 47)

The Way We Live Now was made into an excellent BBC TV miniseries in 2001.

He Knew He Was Right (1869) is a portrait of the corrosive power of jealousy. The happily married Louis Trevelyan becomes at first uncomfortable with, and then bitterly suspicious of, the friendship of his wife Emily with one Colonel Osborne. Trevelyan orders Emily not to see or correspond with Osborne; her disobedience (and Osborne's) throws the marriage into crisis. By the standards of Victorian society Trevelyan is "right," but his rigid adherence to principle destroys his happiness and ultimately threatens his sanity.

Meanwhile, Emily's sister Nora is being wooed by the wealthy Mr. Glascock, while her heart belongs to the penniless journalist Hugh Stanbury. And in another subplot, Hugh's sister Dorothy is pursued both by the unctuous clergyman Mr. Gibson and by her charming cousin Brooke Burgess—but both Dorothy and Brooke are informed by Dorothy's wealthy aunt that she will disinherit Brooke if he marries Dorothy.

Nora, for the last ten minutes, had been thinking that this would come,—that it would come at once; and yet she was not at all prepared with an answer. It was now weeks since she had confessed to herself frankly that nothing else but this,—this one thing which was now happening, this one thing which had now happened,—that nothing else could make her happy, or could touch her happiness...But when she was asked to come and be his wife, now and at once, she felt that in spite of her love it was impossible that she could accede to a request so sudden, so violent, so monstrous. He stood over her as though expecting an instant answer; and then, when she had sat dumb before him for a minute, he repeated his demand. 'Tell me, Nora, can you love me? If you knew how thoroughly I have loved you, you would at least feel something for me.'

To tell him that she did not love him was impossible to her. But how was she to refuse him without telling him either a lie, or the truth? Some answer she must give him; and as to that matter of marrying him, the answer must be a negative. Her education had been of that nature which teaches girls to believe that it is a crime to marry a man without an assured income. Assured morality in a husband is a great thing. Assured good temper is very excellent. Assured talent, religion, amiability, truth, honesty, are all desirable. But an assured income is indispensable. Whereas, in truth, the income may come hereafter; but the other things, unless they be there already, will hardly be forthcoming. (He Knew He Was Right, Ch. 39)

He Knew He Was Right was made into another well-produced BBC TV miniseries in 2004.

Miss Mackenzie (1865): In An Autobiography (1883) Trollope wrote, "...at nineteen...I had already made up my mind that Pride and Prejudice was the best novel in the English language." Miss Mackenzie is Trollope's most Austen-like novel, and not just because much of it is set in "Littlebath," a fashionable coastal resort that strongly resembles Bath. Miss Mackenzie reads something like a sequel to Persuasion—but a sequel to a Persuasion in which Captain Wentworth's letter declaring his love for Anne Elliot goes undiscovered.

Miss Margaret Mackenzie is a woman "neither beautiful nor clever," who has reached the age of thirty-five after spending two decades of her life serving as a nurse for her sickly father and brother. Like Anne Elliot, Margaret Mackenzie possesses an endearing kindess together with a clear-sightedness about those around her, and about herself.

On her brother's death she suddenly finds herself in possession of a modest fortune, which enables her for the first time to begin to live by and for herself. Her newfound independence of means attracts four suitors: Harry Handcock, a longtime family friend; Samuel Rubb, Jr., the self-regarding son of her brother's business partner; Mr. Maguire, a charismatic but unscrupulous clergyman; and the widower John Ball, a middle-aged cousin, whose resentful, scheming mother believes that Miss Mackenzie's inheritance really belongs to her son.

Miss Mackenzie was voted a "Neglected Classic" by the listeners of BBC Radio 4, and has been dramatized with the superb Hattie Morahan (of BBC TV's excellent Sense & Sensibility (2008)) as Margaret.

But still, if she left all her chances to run from her, what other fate would she have but that of being friendless all her life? Of course she must risk much if she was ever minded to change her mode of life. She had said something to him as to the expediency of there being money on both sides, but as she said it she knew that she would willingly have given up her money could she only have been sure of her man. Was not her income enough for both? What she wanted was companionship, and love if it might be possible; but if not love, then friendship. This, had she known where she could purchase it with certainty, she would willingly have purchased with all her wealth. (Miss Mackenzie, Ch. 13)

An Old Man's Love (1884) is Trollope's heartbreaking final novel. Written just a few months before Trollope's death, much of the novel was dictated to his 27-year-old niece, Florence Nightingale Bland. Florence was the daughter of his wife Rose's sister, Isabella Heseltine Bland. Isabella and her husband Joseph Bland died when Florence was eight years old; Trollope and his wife took Florence into their house and raised her as their daughter.

Florence's life has suggestive parallels to the situation of the 25-year-old Mary Lawrie, the heroine of An Old Man's Love. When both of Mary's parents die, she is taken in by William Whittlestaff, a friend of her father. As time passes Whittlestaff, despite being twice Mary's age, begins to fall in love with her. Mary, however, has already given her heart to John Gordon, a young man who has gone to South Africa to make his fortune in the diamond mines. However, keenly aware of everything she owes to her guardian, and having heard nothing from John Gordon for three years, Mary agrees to marry Whittlestaff. Before she does so, though, she confesses to her future husband that she loves another man. Then Gordon unexpectedly returns, and all three are faced with painful choices.

What if he should give her up to one who did not deserve her,—to one whose future would not be stable enough to secure the happiness and welfare of such a woman as was Mary Lawrie! He had no knowledge to guide him, nor had she;—nor, for the matter of that, had John Gordon himself any knowledge of what his own future might be. Of his own future Mr Whittlestaff could speak and think with the greatest confidence. It would be safe, happy, and bright, should Mary Lawrie become his wife. Should she not do so, it must be altogether ruined and confounded. (An Old Man's Love, Ch. 15).

A guide to the novels of Anthony Trollope, Part 2: The Palliser novels

2011-09-25T18:06:00.000-07:00

This post continues my survey of Trollope's novels begun in Part 1: The Chronicles of Barsetshire.

The Palliser Novels

In order to read and enjoy the Chronicles of Barsetshire you need to know very little about English religion in the 19th century. As long as you're aware that there were tensions between the ritualistic High Church and the evangelical Low Church, you know enough.

The six Palliser novels, though, feature the complex interplay of Parliamentary politics over fifteen years, from the mid-1860s to the late 1870s. To fully enjoy these, it really does help to understand something of the political parties, personalities and issues of the day. So I recommend that you choose a reading edition that features extensive textual notes, such as Oxford's World Classics or Penguin. You'll find those notes to be helpful in giving you a context for the attitudes and actions of many of the characters.

Can You Forgive Her? (1864) features three women who each face two radically different choices in their potential husbands. Alice Vavasor wants to live a life of excitement and political significance, but as a woman she is prevented even from voting. She must choose between her mercurial and unscrupulous cousin George Vavasor, who wants to run for Parliament using her money, and the uninspiring but steadfast John Grey.

The second dilemma belongs to Alice's wealthy, widowed aunt Arabella Greenow, who is comically besieged by two bungling rivals: the vain, impecunious ex-soldier Captain Bellfield, and the vain, coarse farmer Mr. Cheesacre.

But the most compelling love triangle in Can You Forgive Her? centers on Lady Glencora Palliser, wife of the emotionally reticent politician Plantagenet Palliser. Before her marriage Lady Glencora loved the unworthy but alluring Burgo Fitzgerald; her family intervened, however, and arranged her marriage with Palliser. Her attraction to Burgo Fitzgerald has persisted even after her marriage, fed by the certainty that she and her husband are unsuited to one another. Fitzgerald makes plans to run off with Lady Glencora on the night of a gala party. As Lady Glencora dances in Burgo's arms she finds herself faced with making her final, fateful choice.

'I am not such a fool as to mistake what I should be if I left my husband, and went to live with that man as his mistress...But why have I been brought to such a pass as this? And, as for female purity! Ah! What was their idea of female purity when they forced me, like ogres, to marry a man for whom they knew I never cared?' (Can You Forgive Her?, Ch. 47)

Glencora Palliser is one of Trollope's most compelling characters—headstrong, willful, with a delightfully witty tongue. She is not always wise, but somehow always manages to engage our sympathies.

Phineas Finn (1867) is a strikingly handsome young Irishman who has come to London to try to win a seat in Parliament. He is probably the fullest representation of a common type in Trollope: the young man of modest means who hopes to make both his fortune and his future by attracting the interest of the wealthy and powerful.

His own interest is particularly engaged in turn by three women of fortune: Lady Laura Standish, Violet Effingham, and the widowed Madame Max Goesler. Meanwhile, at home in Ireland he is betrothed to a simple country girl, Mary Flood Jones. Somehow we forgive Phineas his changeability, because he seems so fundamentally decent otherwise.

'I hate a stupid man who can't talk to me, and I hate a clever man who talks me down. I don't like a man who is too lazy to make any effort to shine, but I particularly dislike the man who is always striving for effect. I abominate a humble man, but yet I love to perceive that a man acknowledges the superiority of my sex, and youth, and all that kind of thing.'

'You want to be flattered without plain flattery.'

'Of course I do. A man who would tell me that I am pretty, unless he is over seventy, ought to be kicked out of the room. But a man who can't show me that he thinks me so without saying a word about it, is a lout.' (Violet Effingham talking with Lady Laura, Phineas Finn, Ch. 22)

The Eustace Diamonds (1871): Before the aged Sir Florian Eustace died, he bestowed on his beautiful young wife Lizzie a magnificent and hugely valuable diamond necklace. Lizzie now claims that necklace as her own. Sir Florian's family, however, demands that the diamonds be returned to the Eustace estate, and has the weight of legal opinion on their side.

Lizzie, worried that agents of the Eustace family will try to obtain the necklace by means fair or foul, takes it with her whenever she travels. One night the strongbox in which it kept is stolen. Everyone assumes that the necklace is gone forever. Lizzie, though, had slept with it under her pillow, and now thinks that it will work to her advantage if everyone thinks that the diamonds were stolen. In fact, it just creates more complications—especially when the necklace really disappears...

The Eustace Diamonds has, perhaps, the cleverest plot that Trollope ever created. He was evidently inspired by his friend Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone (1868), published just a few years earlier. The Eustace Diamonds is also unusual in that its heroine is unsympathetic: a compulsively dishonest woman who married for money and who is a spectacularly poor judge of men.

When she was alone she stood before her glass looking at herself, and then she burst into tears. Never before had she been thus polluted. The embrace had disgusted her. It made her odious to herself. And if this, the beginning of it, was so bad, how was she to drink the cup to the bitter dregs? Other girls, she knew, were fond of their lovers—some so fond of them that all moments of absence were moments, if not of pain, at any rate of regret. To her, as she stood there ready to tear herself because of the vileness of her own condition, it now seemed as though no such love as that were possible to her. For the sake of this man who was to be her husband, she hated all men. Was not everything around her base, and mean, and sordid?...How should she escape? And yet she knew that she meant to go on and bear it all. Perhaps by study and due practice she might become—as were some others—a beast of prey and nothing more. The feeling that had made these few minutes so inexpressibly loathsome to her might, perhaps, be driven from her heart. She washed the tears from her eyes with savage energy, and descended to her lover with a veil fastened closely under her hat. 'I hope I haven't kept you waiting,' she said. (The Eustace Diamonds, Ch. 42)

Phineas Redux (1873) continues the story of Phineas Finn, and his relationships with Lady Laura, Violet Effingham, and Madame Goesler amid Parliamentary political struggles. The central incident of the novel is Phineas being put on trial for the murder of a political rival, a murder that he (and we) know that he did not commit.

'People go on quarrelling and fancying this and that, and thinking that the world is full of romance and poetry. When they get married they know better.'

'I hope the romance and poetry do not all vanish.'

'Romance and poetry are for the most part lies, Mr. Maule, and are
very apt to bring people into difficulty.' (Lady Glencora to Gerard Maule, Phineas Redux, Ch. 76)

The Prime Minister (1876): The reserved and apparently unemotional Plantagenet Palliser, now Duke of Omnium, is called on to lead a coalition government when the two major parties fail to reach a compromise. While he struggles to lead the country, his wife interests herself in the political and romantic career of the young, handsome financial speculator Ferdinand Lopez—a career that soon entangles the Duke and Duchess in scandal.

He did doubt his ability to fill that place which it would now be his duty to occupy. He more than doubted. He told himself again and again that there was wanting to him a certain noble capacity for commanding support and homage from other men. With things and facts he could deal, but human beings had not opened themselves to him. (The Prime Minister, Ch. 7)

The Duke's Children (1879): The Duke's children are Mary, who to the Duke's distress has fallen in love with a penniless friend of her brother's; Lord Silverbridge, who to the Duke's distress is pursuing the beautiful American heiress Isabel Boncassen; and Gerald, who to the Duke's distress has been expelled from Cambridge.

'I do not think that ever in your life you have constrained yourself to the civility of a lie.'

'I hope not.'

'To be civil and false is often better than to be harsh and true. I may be soothed by the courtesy and yet not deceived by the lie.' (Lady Mabel Grex to Lord Silverbridge, The Duke's Children, Ch. 77)

The Palliser novels were adapted by BBC Television in 1974 as a 26-episode series. Unfortunately, the series is poorly cast (most of the actors are far too old for their roles) and the script makes various attempts to "improve" on its source, with dire results.

Next time: The Way We Live Now (1875), He Knew He Was Right (1869), and some overlooked Trollope novels.

A guide to the novels of Anthony Trollope, Part 1: The Chronicles of Barsetshire

2011-09-21T20:51:00.000-07:00

It was my practice to be at my table every morning at 5.30 A.M.; and it was also my practice to allow myself no mercy. An old groom, whose business it was to call me, and to whom I paid £5 a year extra for the duty, allowed himself no mercy....By beginning at that hour I could complete my literary work before I dressed for breakfast.

....This division of time allowed me to produce over ten pages of an ordinary novel volume a day, and if kept up through ten months, would have given as its results three novels of three volumes each in the year;...which must at any rate be felt to be quite as much as the novel-readers of the world can want from the hands of one man.

—Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography, Ch. 15

This three hours of literary labor was accomplished before Trollope headed off to his full-time job at the Post Office. And since London is further north than Calgary, Canada, it must often have been pitch-dark when Trollope's servant brought his coffee (the servant, of course, having been awake a half-hour earlier to make it).

This work regime enabled Trollope to be incredibly productive. He wrote 47 novels, plus several volumes of short stories, a number of travel books, plays, sketches, essays and criticism, translations, and even a school textbook. In all he published something like five dozen books in his lifetime.

Beyond his work's sheer volume, which far exceeds that of Charles Dickens, George Eliot, or Elizabeth Gaskell, another source of amazement is how good most of it is. Trollope had real insight into the emotional dilemmas of everyday life and the subtle power dynamics encoded in ordinary conversation. He often portrays characters who, faced with difficult choices, are hesitating and uncertain (the ones who lack doubt, such as Mrs. Proudie in the Barsetshire novels, are generally unpleasant). And the author is uncertain as well, making occasional direct asides to the reader about his imperfect knowledge of his own characters: "It is indeed a matter of thankfulness that neither the historian nor the novelist hears all that is said by their heroes or heroines, or how would three volumes or twenty suffice! In the present case so little of this sort have I overheard, that I live in hopes of finishing my work within 300 pages, and of completing that pleasant task—a novel in one volume..." (The Warden, Ch. 6) Trollope portrays his characters in the main with warmth and gentle humor, though he can also be unsparing.

I've spent the last year or so pleasurably immersed in Trollope's fictional world. What will follow over the next several posts is a brief survey of the novels I've read so far, which include most of his best-known works plus an unjustly neglected gem or two.

The Chronicles of Barsetshire

If you think that a series of six novels about rural English clergy sounds boring, think again. Trollope's Barsetshire novels are filled with power struggles, class dynamics, financial disasters, and impossible loves. Fierce emotions seethe under the placid surfaces of the proper Victorian characters.

The Warden (1855): A story about just how badly awry good intentions can go. A trust—originally created to feed, clothe and house a dozen elderly Barchester men selected from the ranks of the working poor—has over the years grown exponentially in value. It now provides a very substantial income to the warden who oversees the men's care, the kindly and generous Septimus Harding. When reformer John Bold begins to agitate for the men to receive a greater share of the money from the trust, it creates havoc—especially for the warden's daughter Eleanor, who is in love with John but is deeply loyal to her father.

The Warden introduced a number of situations and themes that Trollope revisited in his later novels: a young man trying to make his way in the world, a young woman trying to negotiate love's hazards, and the hard choices forced on those who try to act in accord with their sense of duty and justice. It also introduced the fictional cathedral town of Barchester and its surroundings, which Trollope would explore over another five substantial books.

...in matters of love men do not see clearly in their own affairs. They say that faint heart never won fair lady; and it is amazing to me how fair ladies are won, so faint are often men's hearts! Were it not for the kindness of their nature, that seeing the weakness of our courage they will occasionally descend from their impregnable fortresses, and themselves aid us in effecting their own defeat, too often would they escape unconquered if not unscathed, and free of body if not of heart. (The Warden, Ch. 7)

Barchester Towers (1857): Probably Trollope's best-known work, and for good reason. The novel features many of the characters introduced in The Warden, including Septimus Harding, his daughter Eleanor, and his son-in-law Archdeacon Grantly (who married Harding's first daughter Susan).

The novel has two main (and intertwined) plots. The first concerns the low-intensity war fought between Archdeacon Grantly and the Proudies, Barchester's new bishop and his domineering wife. The second plot relates to Eleanor; and if it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife, then it is equally true that a single woman of good fortune will never be in want of suitors.

Eleanor has three: Mr. Slope, an unreliable ally of the Proudies; Bertie Stanhope, the indolent and indebted son of the pleasure-loving prebendary Dr. Stanhope; and Mr. Arabin, a fortyish Oxford scholar summoned to Barchester to aid Archdeacon Grantly in his battle to oppose the Proudies. Overseeing and directing much of the action is Signora Madeline Neroni (née Stanhope), who scandalizes everyone with her feminine wiles and frank talk, and who quickly perceives how the lines of both sacred and secular battles have been drawn.

All the characters come together on the day of Miss Thorne's garden party. The garden party at Ullathorne, and its preparation and aftermath, is a remarkable (and very funny) set-piece that spans several chapters and over a hundred pages. Over the course of the party the ecclesiastical enemies plot and scheme against (and bow stiffly towards) one another, while Eleanor encounters each of her suitors alone and, to her and their discomfort, together. Overtures are rebuffed, hopes are crushed, and faces are slapped before the day is over. Mr. Arabin to Eleanor:

'We have had a very pleasant party,' said he, using the same tone he would have used had he declared that the sun was shining very brightly, or the rain falling very fast.

'Very,' said Eleanor, who never in her life had passed a more unpleasant day. (Barchester Towers, Ch. 41)

Doctor Thorne (1858): probably the weakest novel in the Barsetshire series because of its dependence on a somewhat contrived and drawn-out inheritance plot that seems like it was taken from Charles Dickens' reject pile. Still, the novel introduces us to the lovely Mary Thorne and the delightful Miss Martha Dunstable, a woman in early middle age whose immense wealth (derived from a dubious patent remedy) enables her to say what she thinks and do what she pleases.

Mary is the illegitimate daughter of Dr. Thorne's rakish brother Henry and Mary Scatcherd, a young bonnet-maker, and has been raised by Dr. Thorne, who is the only one who knows her true parentage. She becomes a close companion to the daughters of the local squire, Mr. Gresham, and catches the eye of the squire's son Frank.

As so often in Trollope, though, debt, financial problems and issues of propriety loom over the characters and constrain their choices. Frank is under immense pressure to disembarrass the family estate by marrying a woman with money and social standing; Mary has neither.

Though Frank was only a boy, it behoved Mary to be something more than a girl. Frank might be allowed, without laying himself open to much just reproach, to throw all of what he believed to be his heart into a protestation of what he believed to be love; but Mary was in duty bound to be more thoughtful, more reticent, more aware of the facts of their position, more careful of her own feelings, and more careful also of his. (Doctor Thorne, Ch. 6)

Framley Parsonage (1860): Lord Lufton, the heir to Framley Court, has fallen in love with Lucy Robarts, the sister of local clergyman Mark Robarts. Not only is there a social gulf between Lord Lufton and Lucy, but Mark owes his position to the patronage of Lady Lufton, Lord Lufton's mother. Lucy also finds herself engulfed by a scandal involving her brother, who unwisely agreed to sign a large bill of debt for a notoriously insolvent neighbor, and is now unable to repay it. All of these factors make Lucy keenly aware that Lady Lufton will strongly disapprove of her as a potential daughter-in-law, and that her disapproval may have disastrous consequences for her brother and his family.

'Look here, Mark;' and she walked over to her brother, and put both her hands upon his arm. 'I do love Lord Lufton. I had no such meaning or thought when I first knew him. But I do love him—I love him dearly;—almost as well as Fanny loves you, I suppose. You may tell him so if you think proper—nay, you must tell him so, or he will not understand me. But tell him this, as coming from me: that I will never marry him, unless his mother asks me.'

'She will not do that, I fear,' said Mark, sorrowfully. (Framley Parsonage, Ch. 31)

Framely Parsonage also introduces us to the strict, prideful, and impoverished clergyman Josiah Crawley, his long-suffering wife Mary, and their daughter Grace, who will feature prominently in The Last Chronicle of Barset.

The Small House At Allington (1864) centers on Lily Dale, one of Trollope's most appealing heroines. She has all the steadfast, honest virtues of a Lucy Robarts or Eleanor Harding, but in addition has a sparkling, playful wit. Lily is loved, silently but profoundly, by the boyish Johnny Eames, who grew up with Lily and her sister Bell and is now seeking to make his way in the world. Johnny is crushed when he discovers that after a whirlwind courtship Lily has accepted the marriage proposal of Adolphus Crosbie. He's then enraged to discover that Crosbie has jilted Lily in order to marry Lady Alexandrina De Courcy, and vows both to take his revenge and to win Lily's heart.

Sunday though it was, she had fully enjoyed the last hour of daylight, reading that exquisite new novel which had just completed itself, amidst the jarring criticisms of the youth and age of the reading public.

'I am quite sure she was right in accepting him, Bell,' she said, putting down the book as the light was fading, and beginning to praise the story.

'It was a matter of course," said Bell. "It always is right in the novels. That's why I don't like them. They are too sweet.'

'That's why I do like them, because they are so sweet. A sermon is not to tell you what you are, but what you ought to be, and a novel should tell you not what you are to get, but what you'd like to get.'

'If so, then, I'd go back to the old school, and have the heroine really a heroine, walking all the way up from Edinburgh to London, and falling among thieves; or else nursing a wounded hero, and describing the battle from the window. We've got tired of that; or else the people who write can't do it nowadays. But if we are to have real life, let it be real.'

'No, Bell, no,' said Lily. 'Real life sometimes is so painful.' Then her sister, in a moment, was down on the floor at her feet, kissing her hand and caressing her knees, and praying that the wound might be healed. (The Small House At Allington, Ch. 23)

Last Chronicle of Barset (1867) is the final novel in the Barsetshire series. It centers on the travails of the Reverend Josiah Crawley, who is accused of stealing a cheque for £20, and who, try as he might, cannot remember how it came into his hands. Crawley is a remarkable portrait: a largely unsympathetic character, he is still portrayed with an almost Tolstoyan richness and complexity.

Crawley is put on trial in both criminal and ecclesiastical courts, and his financial and legal struggles have a profound effect on everyone around him—especially his daughter Grace, who has received a declaration of love from Major Henry Grantly, the Archdeacon's widowed son. The Archdeacon finds out about his son's emotional entanglement with Grace, and—in a scene with echoes of the great Germont-Violetta confrontation in Verdi's La Traviata (see my earlier post)—goes to her to exact a pledge that she will separate herself from him:

'If you love him you will not wish to injure him.'

'I will not injure him. Sir, there is my promise.' And now as she spoke she rose from her chair, and standing close to the archdeacon, laid her hand very lightly on the sleeve of his coat. 'There is my promise. As long as people say that papa stole the money, I will never marry your son. There.'

The archdeacon was still looking down at her, and feeling the slight touch of her fingers, raised his arm a little as though to welcome the pressure. He looked into her eyes, which were turned eagerly towards his, and when doing so was quite sure that the promise would be kept. It would have been a sacrilege—he felt that it would have been a sacrilege—to doubt such a promise. He almost relented. His soft heart, which was never very well under his own control, gave way so far that he was nearly moved to tell her that, on his son's behalf, he acquitted her of the promise. What could any man's son do better than have such a woman for his wife? It would have been of no avail had he made her such offer. The pledge she had given had not been wrung from her by his influence, nor could his influence have availed aught with her towards the alteration of her purpose. It was not the archdeacon who had taught her that it would not be her duty to take disgrace into the house of the man she loved. As he looked down upon her face two tears formed themselves in his eyes, and gradually trickled down his old nose. 'My dear,' he said, 'if this cloud passes away from you, you shall come to us and be our daughter.' And thus he also pledged himself. There was a dash of generosity about the man, in spite of his selfishness, which always made him desirous of giving largely to those who gave largely to him. He would fain that his gifts should be bigger, if it were possible. He longed at this moment to tell her that the dirty cheque should go for nothing. He would have done it, I think, but that it was impossible for him to speak in her presence of that which moved her so greatly.

He had contrived that her hand should fall from his arm into his grasp, and now for a moment he held it. 'You are a good girl,' he said—'a dear, dear, good girl. When this cloud has passed away, you shall come to us and be our daughter.'

'But it will never pass away,' said Grace. (The Last Chronicle of Barset, Ch. 57)

In future posts I'll survey the Palliser novels, Trollope's other justly famous series, and some of his other novels.

Update 8 October 2011: The first two novels in the Chronicles of Barsetshire were adapted by BBC Television as The Barchester Chronicles (1982). The seven-episode series is superbly cast: especially fine are Donald Pleasance as the gentle Warden Harding, Alan Rickman as a sibilant and loathsomely snake-like Mr. Slope, Geraldine McEwan as the peremptory Mrs. Proudie, Clive Swift (later the hapless Richard Bucket in Keeping Up Appearances) as the hapless Bishop Proudie, Susan Hampshire (miscast in The Pallisers but perfect here) as Signora Madeline Neroni, and Barbara Flynn (later of Wives and Daughters (1999), He Knew He Was Right (2004), and Cranford (2007)) as Mary Bold, while Nigel Hawthorne entertainingly chews the scenery as Archdeacon Grantly. The one minor bit of miscasting is Derek New as Mr. Arabin, who seems a bit too buttoned-up (especially when he's standing next to Nigel Hawthorne). Alan Plater's wonderful script is both dramatically compelling and a model of faithfulness to the source; perhaps the only disappointment is in the handling of the garden party scene in Episode 6, which doesn't quite express all of the emotional nuances and dark humor of the novel (the scene is only one of the most brilliant set-pieces in all of Trollope). Highly recommended.

Who cares if Tanu Weds Manu?: The new Bollywood romantic comedy

2011-09-11T18:19:00.000-07:00

In the classic romantic comedy, love must surmount obstacles—romantic rivals, disapproving parents, class or caste differences, and the misunderstandings and misapprehensions of the lovers themselves—before the couple can be united for the happy ending. In Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, for example, it is not only Darcy's stubborn pride and Elizabeth's hasty prejudice that must be overcome, but differences in social status (he is immensely wealthy while her family is beset by money difficulties), other potential matches (Darcy is intended by his aunt Lady Catherine de Bourgh to marry her daughter Anne, while Elizabeth is wooed by both Wickham and Mr. Collins, and has a brief flirtation with Colonel Fitzwilliam), and social disgrace (the near-ruin that Lydia's elopement brings on the Bennet family).

So in a modern world where everyone can choose (and change) their romantic and sexual partners at will, where class and caste barriers are diminished and the concept of social disgrace seems quaint (at least, once you've graduated from high school), is the romantic comedy still possible? The evidence from three recent Bollywood movies only leaves a little room for optimism.

Tanu Weds Manu (2011)

"Opposites attract" is a time-honored device in romantic comedy, dating back at least to Beatrice and Benedick's "kind of merry war" in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. There are too many Hollywood "opposites attract" movies to list, but some classic examples include Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night (1934), Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby (1938), and Henry Fonda and Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve (1941). Latter-day versions include Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally (1989) and Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell in Groundhog Day (1993). I'm sure you can think of many more.

For an "opposites attract" movie to work, though, we need to have some feeling of hope for the couple, some sense that each of them is trying to bridge the differences that divide them. That's not a feeling I had while watching Tanu Weds Manu. NRI doctor Manu (Madhavan) returns to India to look for a bride and encounters the free-spirited Tanu (Kangna Ranaut), who has been forced to meet Manu against her will. There are some subtle signs that Tanu might not be the best choice for Manu, such as her revelation that her boyfriend's name is tattooed on her breast, or her plea for Manu's help so she can elope with that boyfriend, street-thug Raja (an effective Jimmy Shergill).

It's possible to understand why the quiet, dutiful Manu might be attracted to the vivacious Tanu: she embodies freedoms that he has never allowed himself. But Himanshu Sharma's script doesn't show us enough of what might attract Tanu to Manu, or give us any long-term hope for this couple. I found myself thinking "This is such a bad idea" throughout the final Tanu-Manu wedding scene—not exactly the note on which you want to end a romantic comedy. At least Krsna's Punjabi-inflected soundtrack is enjoyable.

Aisha (2010)

Aisha is based on Jane Austen's Emma (1815), and like that novel features a heroine who can't keep from meddling in the lives of everyone around her—usually to ill effect. But Emma's interventions are motivated by a spirit of generosity; while they are generally misguided, they are not mean-spirited.

That's not case with Aisha (Sonam Kapoor). In one particularly ugly incident, she tries to fix up her friends Randhir (Cyrus Sahukar) and Shefali (Amrita Puri) by taking them to an out-of-the-way restaurant. She drives off, and Randhir and Shefali discover that there's no restaurant: instead they've been left in front of a hotel at which a room has been booked in Randhir's name. After paying for the expensive room Randhir walks back to town with Shefali as she struggles in her unfamiliar high heels (are there no cabs or auto rickshaws around?).

So exactly why Arjun (Abhay Deol), the Mr. Knightley character, winds up professing his longtime passion for Aisha isn't really clear. It doesn't help that Aisha is played by Sonam Kapoor, who as an actress is pretty enough, but blank: her performance suggests that Aisha really is as shallow as she seems. By the end of the movie we've seen three couples united, and all of the romantic happy endings feel unearned. Why any of these folks wind up with each other rather than with someone else seems entirely arbitrary; and if it's arbitrary, why should we care?

Band Baaja Baaraat (Bands, Horns, Revelry, 2010)

BBB almost gets it right, but (if you must rely on subtitles, as I do) has a serious misstep at the end—the most crucial moment in a romantic comedy, of course. Shruti (the appealing Anushka Sharma) goes into a wedding-planning partnership with Bittoo (the appealing Ranveer Singh). Shruti is all business, and she has a firm rule never to mix that business with pleasure.

But after "Shaadi Mubarak" successfully carries out their biggest wedding to date, Shruti and Bittoo's drunken celebration ends up with them in bed together. It's clear that the discovery of the unexpected depth of her feelings for Bittoo has unnerved Shruti; uncertain whether Bittoo returns those feelings, she hints to him the next morning that she only wants to be friends. His utter relief at her suggestion stabs her right in the heart.

Anushka's portrayal of Shruti's complex and contradictory emotions in these scenes is heartbreaking. In an earlier post on Love Aaj Kal (Love These Days, 2009) I wrote that "love overcoming obstacles is indeed a classic story line, but the obstacles have to be something other than the couple's willful disconnection from their own feelings." But now I'm not so sure: BBB makes that disconnection dramatically and emotionally compelling.

The two split up personally and professionally, and discover that—like Lennon and McCartney or Strummer and Jones—separately neither one is as good or as successful as they were together. When a client demands that they work together once again, they must come to terms with their true feelings for one another—only in the meantime Shruti has become engaged to a wealthy businessman.

So far, and in combination with Salim-Sulaiman's catchy soundtrack, so excellent. As a sample, watch Bittoo and Shruti get the party started in "Ainvayi Ainvayi"; I love Anushka's exasperated expressions:

Warning: If you're in any suspense about how BBB turns out you should stop reading here! Of course as he works with Shruti again Bittoo finally realizes that he has loved her all along. He takes her aside to confess his love for her—a key romantic-comedy moment. But as the subtitles render Bittoo's speech, it's all about why he wants to get back together with Shruti ("I have so much fun when I'm around you," etc.)—not why she should want to get back together with him.

For a lesson in how a romantic comedy confession scene should be handled, scriptwriter Habib Faisal should watch Ball of Fire (1941) ("I love him because he's the kind of guy who gets drunk on a glass of buttermilk, and I love the way he blushes right up over his ears. I love him because he doesn't know how to kiss, the jerk!") or When Harry Met Sally ("I love that you get cold when it's 71 degrees out. I love that it takes you an hour and a half to order a sandwich. I love that you get a little crinkle above your nose when you're looking at me like I'm nuts...."). Bittoo's speech is all about himself, not Shruti. As I wrote in a comment on Beth Loves Bollywood's post on BBB, "I would hope a woman who had such ample evidence of how clueless and out of touch with his own emotions Bittoo is would want to hear something about how he's changed and grown."

In response to that comment, though, both Aparna and maxqnz offered thoughtful and passionate defenses of this scene. Subtitles, of course, often abridge or misrepresent what's being said onscreen, so it may be that I can't be a fair judge Bittoo's speech. As a prisoner of subtitles, though, I felt a bit let down. Still, BBB gives me at least a little hope that in an era when the obstacles to love are mainly self-created, there are still possibilities for romantic comedy.

The Victorians and opera: Trollope meets Verdi

2011-09-04T13:33:00.000-07:00

Poster for La Traviata, London, 1864, from the East London Theatre Archive

Act II of Guiseppe Verdi's La Traviata (1853) contains one of the greatest scenes in opera. It is a confrontation between the courtesan Violetta and the father of her lover Alfredo Germont. Alfredo's father has come to demand that Violetta break off her affair with his son: it is damaging not only Alfredo's own prospects and reputation, but those of Alfredo's sister. She is engaged to the son of a wealthy family who are disturbed by the rumors that are reaching them of Alfredo's involvement with Violetta.

At first the elder Germont is peremptory, and Violetta is defiant. But he soon realizes that she truly loves his son, and is touched in spite of himself. He then makes an emotional appeal to her on behalf of his daughter, and Violetta realizes that she must sacrifice her own happiness to protect that of her lover and his family. From mutual hostility, their conversation moves to understanding and then deep sympathy. At the end, the elder Germont understands how badly he has misjudged Violetta, and both are in tears.

Here is an excerpt of this scene taken from the 1994 Covent Garden production by Richard Eyre conducted by Sir Georg Solti, with Angela Gheorghiu as Violetta and Leo Nucci as Germont:

In Anthony Trollope's novel The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867), the wealthy Archdeacon Grantly learns that his widower son Henry has proposed marriage to Grace Crawley, the daughter of an impoverished and disgraced local parson who is under suspicion for the theft of a check for twenty pounds. He goes to meet her in order to separate them forever:

'Of course you must understand, Miss Crawley, that I should not venture to speak to you on this subject unless I myself were very closely interested in it.' He had not yet said what was the subject, and it was not probable that Grace should give him any assistance by affecting to understand this without direct explanation from him. She sat quite motionless, and did not even aid him by showing by her altered colour that she understood his purpose. 'My son has told me,' said he, 'that he has professed an attachment for you, Miss Crawley.'

Then there was another pause, and Grace felt that she was compelled to say something. 'Major Grantly has been very good to me,' she said, and then she hated herself for having uttered words which were so tame and unwomanly in their spirit. Of course her lover's father would despise her for having so spoken. After all it did not much signify. If he would only despise her and go away, it would perhaps be for the best.

'I do not know about being good,' said the archdeacon. 'I think he is good. I think he means to be good.'

'I am sure he is good,' said Grace warmly.

'You know he has a daughter, Miss Crawley?'

'Oh, yes; I know Edith well.'

'Of course his first duty is to her. Is it not? and he owes much to his family. Do you not feel that?'

'Of course I feel it, sir.' The poor girl had always heard Dr Grantly spoken of as the archdeacon, but she did not in the least know what she ought to call him.

'Now, Miss Crawley, pray listen to me; I will speak to you very openly. I must speak to you openly, because it is my duty on my son's behalf—but I will endeavour to speak to you kindly also. Of yourself I have heard nothing but what is favourable, and there is no reason as yet why I should not respect and esteem you.' Grace told herself that she would do nothing which ought to forfeit his respect and esteem, but that she did not care two straws whether his respect and esteem were bestowed on her or not. She was striving after something very different from that. 'If my son were to marry you, he would greatly injure himself, and would very greatly injure his child.' Again he paused. He had told her to listen, and she was resolved that she would listen—unless he would say something which might make a word from her necessary at the moment. 'I do not know whether there does at present exist any engagement between you.'

'There is no engagement, sir.'

'I am glad of that—very glad of it....Now, Miss Crawley, of course I cannot wish to say a word that will hurt your feelings. But there are reasons—'

'I know,' said she, interrupting him. 'Papa is accused of stealing money. He did not steal it, but people think he did. And then we are so very poor.'

'You do understand me then—and I feel grateful; I do indeed.'

'I don't think our being poor ought to signify a bit,' said Grace. 'Papa is a gentleman, and a clergyman, and mamma is a lady.'

'But, my dear—'

'I know I ought not to be your son's wife as long as people think that papa stole the money. If he had stolen it, I ought never to be Major Grantly's wife—or anybody else's. I know that very well. And as for Edith—I would sooner die than do anything that would be bad to her.'

The archdeacon had now left the rug, and advanced till he was almost close to the chair on which Grace was sitting. 'My dear,' he said,' what you say does you very much honour—very much honour indeed.' Now that he was close to her, he could look into her eyes, and he could see the exact form of her features, and could understand—could not help understanding—the character of her countenance. It was a noble face, having in it nothing that was poor, nothing that was mean, nothing that was shapeless. It was a face that promised infinite beauty, with a promise that was on the very verge of fulfilment. There was a play about her mouth as she spoke and a curl in her nostrils as the eager words came from her, which almost made the selfish father give way. Why had they not told him that she was such a one as this?...

'What you say does you very much honour indeed,' said the archdeacon.

'I should not mind at all about being poor,' said Grace.

'No; no; no,' said the archdeacon.

'Poor as we are—and no clergyman, I think, was ever so poor—I should have done as your son asked me at once, if it had been only that—because I love him.'

'If you love him you will not wish to injure him.'

'I will not injure him. Sir, there is my promise.' And now as she spoke she rose from her chair, and standing close to the archdeacon, laid her hand very lightly on the sleeve of his coat. 'There is my promise. As long as people say that papa stole the money, I will never marry your son. There.'

The archdeacon was still looking down at her, and feeling the slight touch of her fingers, raised his arm a little as though to welcome the pressure. He looked into her eyes, which were turned eagerly towards his, and when doing so was quite sure that the promise would be kept. It would have been a sacrilege—he felt that it would have been a sacrilege—to doubt such a promise. He almost relented. His soft heart, which was never very well under his own control, gave way so far that he was nearly moved to tell her that, on his son's behalf, he acquitted her of the promise. What could any man's son do better than have such a woman for his wife? It would have been of no avail had he made her such offer. The pledge she had given had not been wrung from her by his influence, nor could his influence have availed aught with her towards the alteration of her purpose. It was not the archdeacon who had taught her that it would not be her duty to take disgrace into the house of the man she loved. As he looked down upon her face two tears formed themselves in his eyes, and gradually trickled down his old nose. 'My dear,' he said, 'if this cloud passes away from you, you shall come to us and be our daughter.' And thus he also pledged himself. There was a dash of generosity about the man, in spite of his selfishness, which always made him desirous of giving largely to those who gave largely to him. He would fain that his gifts should be bigger, if it were possible. He longed at this moment to tell her that the dirty cheque should go for nothing. He would have done it, I think, but that it was impossible for him to speak in her presence of that which moved her so greatly.

He had contrived that her hand should fall from his arm into his grasp, and now for a moment he held it. 'You are a good girl,' he said—'a dear, dear, good girl. When this cloud has passed away, you shall come to us and be our daughter.'

'But it will never pass away,' said Grace.

—Chapter 57, "A Double Pledge"

The parallels between these two scenes are striking. I have looked for evidence that Trollope might have seen performances of La Traviata, and have found it. From late 1859 Trollope lived in Waltham Cross, a suburb of London, and London productions of La Traviata in 1860, 1861, 1862, 1863, 1864 and 1866 are documented. The 1864 production at the Standard Theatre (see the playbill above) is advertised as using "Boosey's Edition," which had both an Italian and English text. The cast of that production is largely English except for one "Madame Tonenelier" (probably Tonnelier) as Violetta; and although the character names are not Anglicized, my suspicion is that on this occasion the opera was sung in English. The 1866 Italian-language production featured 24-year-old Aglaja Orgeni as Violetta. An anonymous reviewer in The Musical World of April 14, 1866 wrote that "She is young, has a graceful stage presence, abundance of feeling, and unmistakable intelligence. Then in her voice—especially the pure soprano tones, which are at once clear, resonant, and sweet—there is a freshness which of itself is an indefinable charm." [1]

Aglaja Orgeni in 1865, by Anselm Feuerbach

Even more suggestive is the chronology of the composition of The Last Chronicle. According to Mary Hamer, the discoverer of Trollope's working diary for this novel, it was begun on January 21, 1866, and finished on September 15, 34 weeks later. [2] Unfortunately I have not been able to track down a facsimile of the diary, but Trollope's writing habits were generally very regular. Extrapolating from these dates, Trollope would have reached Chapter 57 after about 23 weeks of writing, or in early July—after the spring performances of La Traviata.

There are a surprising number of references to opera in Trollope's work, suggesting a continuing awareness of and interest in opera on the writer's part. Characters in The Kellys and O'Kellys (1848), The Bertrams (1859), Framley Parsonage (1861), and The Last Chronicle itself attend and/or mention opera, as do characters in the later novels He Knew He was Right (1869) and The Eustace Diamonds (1873). A character in The Landleaguers (1883) is an opera singer.

Even if Trollope didn't personally attend the April performances of La Traviata, by the mid-1860s he was an established member of London's literary and artistic circles, and—shortly after the highly successful Covent Garden debut of Mlle. Orgeni—the opera would surely have been in his awareness.

Of course, we may never know definitively whether Trollope had seen performances of Verdi's work (or of Alexandre Dumas' play La dame aux camelias/Camille (1852), on which Francesco Maria Piave based the opera's libretto). But even though the evidence is circumstantial, I strongly suspect that the connection is real.

--

1. "Royal Italian Opera." The Musical World, April 14, 1866, p. 232.

2. Mary Hamer, "Working Diary for The Last Chronicle of Barset," Times Literary Supplement, December 24, 1971, p. 1606.

Having It Both Ways: Bollywood Contradictions

2011-08-21T13:20:00.000-07:00

"The culture industry endlessly cheats its consumers out of what it endlessly promises."

—Adorno & Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment

In one view, commercial movies are part of a vast culture industry intended to shape popular consciousness so that it conforms to the needs of modern capitalism. And clearly, this is true: to take an obvious example, what is product placement but an advertisement not only for a particular brand, but for consumerism as a whole? The culture industry derives profit from, in Adorno and Horkheimer's words, the "producing, controlling, disciplining" of our desires.

From another perspective, popular movies reflect the longings, aspirations and anxieties of their audiences. And clearly, this is also true: if they didn't, they wouldn't be popular. Of course, if those longings, aspirations and anxieties are created by the culture industry in the first place, the feedback loop is neatly closed. Perhaps too neatly: the culture industry is not so monolithic or univocal as it is portrayed by Adorno and Horkheimer, and popular desires, while clearly manipulable, do not always perfectly coincide with the interests of the ruling class.

Perhaps this is a reason why movies often seem to embody mixed messages. They can uphold tradition while insisting on the inevitability of change; they can extoll the virtues of simplicity while acting as advertisements for upscale consumer goods. Like most of us, perhaps, Bollywood movies often want to have it both ways.

What follows are brief discussions of two Bollywood movies (of of dozens that could be possible illustrations) that simultaneously represent markedly ambivalent points of view about moral codes, ethical dilemmas, social anxieties, and personal choices.

The obedient rebel: DDLJ

Of course, the obedient rebel of Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (The Brave Heart Will Take the Bride, 1995) is its hero Raj, played by Shah Rukh Khan. Raj is a thoroughly Westernized NRI: he wears black leather jackets, drives fast cars, and drinks beer. In a famous scene early in the film he cons a six-pack out of London cornershop owner Baldev (Amrish Puri); according to Anupama Chopra's Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (British Film Institute, 2002), in an early draft of director Aditya Chopra's script Raj was instead seeking condoms.

Raj seems to represent everything that the traditionalist Baldev despises and fears. To protect his daughter Simran (Kajol) from the baleful influence of boys like Raj and the society which produces them, Baldev has arranged her marriage back in his village in India with a man she has never met. But the summer before her marriage Simran is allowed to take a monthlong Eurail holiday. On that trip she meets Raj, and they fall in love. Raj follows Simran back to India and arrives at her father's village in the middle of the wedding preparations. Both Simran and, ultimately, her mother Lajjo (Farida Jalal) urge Raj to elope with her. But the Westernized rebel Raj instead wants to dutifully seek Baldev's approval: "I'll take you from here," he tells Simran, "only when your father gives me your hand in marriage."

It is Raj's insistence on fulfilling the forms of patriarchal tradition that drives many DDLJ viewers up the wall, and some reject the movie for its apparent endorsement of those patriarchal values. In a recent Masala Zindabad podcast, Beth memorably calls DDLJ a "patriarchal ball of crap."

But I think DDLJ is more complicated than that. While Raj disdains certain forms of authority—early in the movie we see him flunking out of college—he asserts the legitimacy of others, such as filial respect and love. Raj is shown to have a very close relationship with his own father, Dharam Veer (Anupam Kher), who convinces Raj to follow Simran to India. Family is important to Raj, and eloping with Simran would cut her off from her family forever. As he says to Simran, "How can you run from your own people?"

This isn't the only time Raj puts Simran's interests (or, at least, what he sees as her interests) ahead of his own. During their summer holiday he has the opportunity to have sex with a very drunk and apparently willing Simran, but he refuses to take advantage of her inebriated state. The next morning Raj makes teasing suggestions about what happened the night before, but when Simran becomes hysterical (she doesn't remember what happened, or didn't), he suddenly becomes serious: "I know what you think of me. You think I'm a wastrel. But I'm not scum, Simran. I'm a Hindustani, and I know what honour means to a Hindustani woman. Not even in my dreams can I imagine doing that to you." Again the Westernized rebel embraces Indian values.

Raj embodies ambiguity in other ways. As Anupama Chopra points out, Raj disregards the traditional divide between men's and women's roles. He is seen sitting in the kitchen with the women of Baldev's household, serving food to the wedding guests, and even observing Karva Chauth (a fast that married women undertake ostensibly to insure their husbands a long life, and more directly as a sign of their love and devotion). In one of DDLJ's many famous songs, "Mehndi Laga Ke Rakhna" ("Put on your henna"), Raj dances over a bridge separating the women and men of the wedding party, and, grabbing a veil from one of the women, dances among them as though he were one of them:

I also love how, when Raj sings "Keep your eyes downcast," Simran looks straight into his eyes.

So DDLJ and its hero Raj both subvert and uphold patriarchal codes of honor and woman-as-male-property. Despite the manifest injustice of a father insisting that his daughter marry a man she doesn't know, or love, or feel the slightest affinity with, Raj tells Simran, "Our parents have raised us with love and can decide for us better than we can." And in the end, Baldev finally gives his consent and the lovers—symbols of West and East, the modern and the traditional—are united. They, and we, have it both ways.

The anti-abortion feminist: Kya Kehna

Like DDLJ, Kya Kehna (What Is There To Say?, 2000) can be seen as both endorsing and subverting patriarchal authority. Priya (Preity Zinta) gets pregnant by the self-involved and unreliable Rahul (Saif Ali Khan). Her father and mother (Anupam Kher and Farida Jalal) go to Rahul and beg for him to marry Priya to restore the family honor.

Marriage to the womanizing narcissist Rahul might restore the family honor, but it would clearly result in misery for Priya. This is one of several occasions in the film (written by a woman, Honey Irani) that conformity to conventional morality, enforced by the father's authority, is ostensibly upheld but emotionally undercut. Marriage to Rahul is the last thing we want for Priya.

Rahul has no intention of marrying, of course, and he and his awful mother (Naveet Nishan) suggest instead that Priya have an abortion. But Priya wants to keep the baby, despite the profound personal cost. So the film can be seen in a way as anti-abortion, since abortion is advocated by characters who either forfeit or never possess our sympathies. On the other hand, it's clearly Priya's choice to keep the baby, and so the film can also be seen as powerfully advocating a woman's right to choose.

Priya and her family are ostracized, as becomes painfully obvious when her elder brother marries and no one shows up to the wedding celebrations. (What at first seems like some gratuitous slapstick at the beginning of the movie—Priya gets drenched from head to toe in mud when trying to hitchhike home from college—turns out to carry symbolic resonance when she becomes "unclean" in the eyes of the community.) Facing the loss of his family's standing, Priya's father disowns her, symbolically shattering the chair she sits in at family meals and barring her from the house. He's clearly in the wrong, although our responses of shock and dismay are complicated by the fact that the father is played by the immensely sympathetic Anupam Kher. Once again we are encouraged to take a highly critical stance towards his enforcing of conventional morality. While no one directly challenges his authority, ultimately he is convinced by the rest of the family to go after Priya and ask for her forgiveness. Patriarchal authority is restored, but only with the active consent and support of those who are supposedly governed by it. The family (along with Priya's loyal friend Ajay (Chandrachur Singh)) then vows to defy the community together.

Towards the end of the movie, Priya faces that community and make a very difficult speech in the face of strong disapproval. She defends her out-of-wedlock pregnancy by invoking, not her right to love whom she chooses, not her sexual autonomy, but the sacred vocation of motherhood—the one value that can never be questioned in a Bollywood film. She thus defends her radically unconventional choices by embracing the most hallowed convention of all: the role of Ma.

Priya's courageous stand leads ultimately to not one, but two proposals of marriage. Thus her potentially radical challenge to patriarchal authority and social conformity is ended by her reintegration into the structures of marriage and family. But we haven't quite returned to our starting place; as in DDLJ, patriarchal authority and institutions are restored only because they are fundamentally changed.

The contradictions of these films are part of their fascination and richness. As Anupama Chopra writes of DDLJ, "It offers, to both men and women, to everyone who faces the terrifying uncertainties of new freedoms and the unpredictable future, a vision of the present which combines the both stability of the old order and the enticing choices of the new."

Berkeley Festival of Early Music

2011-08-13T11:37:00.000-07:00

This past June we attended the Boston Early Music Festival and saw three wonderful performances; you can read about them in my earlier posts.

If all goes well, in June 2012 it will be the turn of the Berkeley Festival & Exhibition (the two festivals alternate years). As a foretaste of the sort of delights which will be offered in 2012, an excellent radio program on the 2010 Berkeley Festival has been produced as part of the series America's Music Festivals. The program features nearly two hours of glorious music from the concerts in complete performances. To listen to this and other programs in this series you can go to the AMF website; that website also offers a list of radio stations nationwide that are broadcasting the series.

The Berkeley Festival & Exhibition is sponsored by the San Francisco Early Music Society, Cal Performances, and the vocal group Magnificat, among others. All of these organizations have announced outstanding 2011-2012 concert seasons; if you live in the Bay Area or are planning to visit this year take a look at their concert schedules.

Thanks to the Magnificat Blog for alerting me to the AMF series.

The Victorians and Bollywood: Lark Rise to Lagaan

2011-08-05T21:25:00.000-07:00

In Lagaan (Land Tax, 2001)—set in the Indian countryside during the late 19th century—Bhuvan (Aamir Khan) challenges the crack cricket squad of the occupying British with a rag-tag group of villagers:

So desperate are the villagers for a victory that caste differences must be ignored. All of the diverse talents of the village must be united to achieve the goal of defeating the hated British and relieving the village from the ruinous land tax.

Things aren't going well, and the village team is losing by a huge margin, when their final and best batsman steps up to the wicket:

Aamir Khan as Bhuvan

Can the outcome be in doubt?

In Season 4, Episode 5 of Lark Rise to Candleford (2008-2011)—set in the English countryside during the late 19th century—Daniel Parish (Ben Aldridge) challenges the crack cricket squad of the local aristocrats with a rag-tag group of townsmen and hamlet-dwellers:

So desperate is Daniel for a victory that class differences must be ignored. All of the diverse talents of town and hamlet must be united to achieve the goal of defeating the hated aristos and relieving Daniel from the ignominy of losing a previous match when the head of the aristocrats' team cheated.

Things aren't going well, and the town-hamlet team is losing by a huge margin, when their final and best batsman steps up to the wicket:

Sandy McDade as Mrs. Margaret Brown

Can the outcome be in doubt?

Bollywood and the Victorians

2011-08-03T06:38:00.000-07:00

In Anthony Trollope's Framley Parsonage (1860), Lord Lufton, the heir to Framley Court, has fallen in love with Lucy Robarts, the sister of a local clergyman. Lucy is aware, though, that Lord Lufton's mother has other plans for her son: she wants him to marry a woman with money and social position. Lucy knows that Lady Lufton will strongly disapprove her as a potential daughter-in-law.

So when Lucy learns from her brother Mark and his wife Fanny that Lord Lufton intends to come to the house the next day in order to propose to her, she is dismayed:

"He must not let Lord Lufton come here to-morrow."

"Not let him!" said Mrs. Robarts. Mr. Robarts said nothing, but he felt that his sister was rising in his esteem from minute to minute.

"No; Mark must bid him not come. He will not wish to pain me when it can do no good. Look here, Mark;" and she walked over to her brother, and put both her hands upon his arm. "I do love Lord Lufton. I had no such meaning or thought when I first knew him. But I do love him—I love him dearly;—almost as well as Fanny loves you, I suppose. You may tell him so if you think proper—nay, you must tell him so, or he will not understand me. But tell him this, as coming from me: that I will never marry him, unless his mother asks me."

In Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (The Brave Heart Will Take the Bride, 1995), Raj (Shah Rukh Khan) has fallen in love with Simran (Kajol) while on a Eurail holiday. Simran's father has arranged her marriage back in India with a man she's never met. Raj follows Simran to India, and finds the village where her wedding preparations are taking place. In one of the most famous shots in Indian cinema, Simran rushes to Raj's arms through a vast field of flowers, and pleads with him, "Take me away from here." His response:

"Main tumhe bhagakar ya churakar le jane nahin aaye hun. Bhale meri paydaish England main hui ho par hun main Hindustani. Main yahan tumhe apni dulhan banane ke liye aaya hun aur tumhe yahan se le jaoonga tabhi jab tumhare bauji khud tumhara haath mere haath main denge."

(I haven't come here to elope with you or to steal you. I might have been born in England but I am Hindustani. I've come here to make you my bride. I'll take you from here only when your father gives me your hand in marriage.)

Clearly Anthony Trollope was a fan of DDLJ.

--
DDLJ quotes taken, with slight modification, from Anupama Chopra's Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (British Film Institute, 2002)

Our conflicted relationship with film stars: Masala Zindabad on Koffee with Karan

2011-07-15T22:48:00.000-07:00

Ranveer Singh and Anushka Sharma on Koffee with Karan

Masala Zindabad—the wonderful Bollywood blog/podcast (blogcast?)—has devoted its latest post to Season 3 of Karan Johar's talk show Koffee with Karan. Beth Loves Bollywood, Maria of Filmiholic and Amrita of Indiequill choose the most pleasantly surprising guest, the cattiest comments, most eye-roll-inducing episodes, the most adolescent behavior, the worst-dressed male and female guests, and the most cringe-worthy moment.

These are three women you'd love to meet for dinner or to have at your party. They're thoughtful, knowledgeable, articulate, funny, and unafraid to say exactly what they think. Their conversation is highly entertaining—far more so, I'd guess, than the show they're dissecting.

But I have to ask, what is the fascination with the off-screen lives of movie stars? Our favorite stars' performances on film are compelling because of a combination of their personal attributes (a highly individual judgment of how attractive and sympathetic and graceful and sincere they appear to be on camera) and the skills of the writers, directors, composers, playback singers, choreographers, costumers, and other crew members who craft the world in which the stars enact our fantasies.

The stars themselves realize this, if they think about it at all. Shah Rukh Khan has said, "I am an employee of the myth of Shah Rukh Khan." And Cary Grant said, "Everyone wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant."

But off-screen, stars have to make up their own lines and choose their own clothes, and sometimes they fail—spectacularly—to meet our (extremely high) expectations. I want to continue to be entertained by John Abraham and Priyanka Chopra and Shahid Kapoor and Anushka Sharma and Abhishek Bachchan; I don't want to have their awkwardness, insecurity, vanity, pettiness, self-involvement and surgical enhancements paraded in front of me.

I'm anything but deluded. I understand that most actors are narcissistic monsters. They have to be in order to succeed in a savagely cut-throat business that is focussed on the highly unstable commodity of personal appeal. But the next time I watch a movie I want to be able to suspend my disbelief and enter into the world of the characters. Of course, I appreciate opportunities for analysis as well. But if there's no emotional engagement, analysis can be a pretty empty exercise.

It seems to me that an obsession with the offscreen lives of the stars is an indication of how powerfully they can affect us. But to watch a show like KwK, or to obsessively follow Bollywood gossip, is to deliberately set yourself up for present and future disillusionment. In fact, it is to actively seek out disillusionment.

And I have to ask myself, why? Is it that we can't bear to experience the powerful emotions evoked by these performers? Do we look for ways to demonstrate to ourselves that our feelings are misplaced, that the performers who bring out these feelings in us are not worthy of our emotional investment?

Whatever the impulse, for some reason I don't share it. I couldn't care less who is dating whom, who is feuding with whom, who earns what. If an actor's next performance isn't compelling, none of that stuff matters. And if it is, none of that stuff matters either.

Your thoughts?

Bollywood Rewatch 2: Vivah and India's missing daughters

2011-07-10T19:21:00.000-07:00

We've been revisiting a few of the Bollywood movies we encountered relatively early in our Bollywood viewing to see if we still like them as well as we did the first time; for details, see my first Bollywood Rewatch post on Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam. This time, it's the turn of Sooraj Barjatya's Vivah.

Vivah (Marriage, 2006)
Original rating: ★★ (recommended with reservations)
Rewatch rating: ★★★ (strongly recommended)

On my first viewing of Vivah I called it "porn for parents." I wrote,

"Almost every character is unrelentingly good, and except for the last few minutes the story is almost entirely lacking in drama. Instead, we're treated to the beautifully photographed three-hour long spectacle of the 'journey from engagement to marriage' of two really nice young people from really nice families.

I loved it."

As a film I found Vivah to be even more powerfully affecting the second time around (thus the extra star). But I've also become more aware of a real-world issue that Vivah addresses, obliquely but almost certainly intentionally: India's missing daughters.

100 Million Missing Women

"To have a daughter is socially and emotionally accepted if there is a son, but a daughter's arrival is often unwelcome if the couple already have a daughter. Daughters are regarded as a liability."

—Shirish S. Seth [1]

In 1990 the Indian economist Amartya Sen (later to win the Nobel Prize) wrote a now-famous article for the New York Review of Books entitled "More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing." He found, after studying demographic statistics for South Asia, China, Africa, and other areas, that there were more than 100 million fewer women than would be expected. While in North America, Europe and Japan there are substantially more women than men (about 1050 women for every 1000 men), in countries such as Pakistan, India and China the situation is starkly reversed. In Pakistan, for example, there are only 900 women for every 1000 men, while in the Indian state of Punjab there are only 860 women for every 1000 men.

What accounts for the missing women? Sen concluded that an interplay among a variety of social, cultural, environmental, and economic factors was likely to be involved. But fundamentally, women "suffer disadvantages in obtaining the means for survival...The numbers of 'missing women' in relation to the numbers that could be expected if men and women received similar care in health, medicine, and nutrition, are remarkably large. A great many more than a hundred million women are simply not there because women are neglected compared with men." [2]

It turned out that not only are women neglected once they are born; they are missing at birth. While slightly fewer girls are born than boys all over the world, in certain countries there are drastically fewer births of second or third daughters than would be expected. In North America, Europe and Japan there are between 950 and 975 girls born for every 1000 boys, and that ratio remains relatively constant for second or third children no matter what the sex of previous children. But in 2005 in India, one study found that for couples having a second child when the first child was a girl there were only 836 girls born for every 1000 boys. In an earlier study the same team of researchers led by Prabhat Jha found that for couples having a third child when the first two were girls, there were only 719 girls born for every 1000 boys. The birth ratios were even more skewed in favor of boys for mothers who were more urban, wealthier, and more highly educated. And the deficit in the births of girls had increased significantly over time. [3, 4]

After looking at a number of possible causes, the researchers concluded, "Selective abortion of girls, especially for pregnancies after a firstborn girl, has increased substantially in India. Most of India's population now live in states where selective abortion of girls is common." As technologies for determining an unborn child's sex (such as amniocentesis and ultrasound) have spread, 4 to 12 million selective abortions of girls are estimated to have occurred since 1990. Selective abortion is more common among more urban, wealthier and more educated couples because they are more aware of sex-screening technologies and abortion services, and are better able to afford them. [5]

Why is it that in India and elsewhere girls are selectively aborted (especially after one or two other daughters have been born)? In her book Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men (PublicAffairs, 2011), journalist Mara Hvistendahl points to the combination of decreasing family size (due to economic development and population control measures pushed by Western institutions such as the World Bank), the widespread availability of technologies that can be used for fetal sex determination, and a pervasive preference for boys. If families are limiting themselves to fewer children, they want to be sure that at least one of them will be a boy.

Boys are preferred in many societies, including our own.* But they are especially valued in societies where women's education, income and ability to own property are limited, and where the tradition of bridal dowry exists. A son can inherit a father's property, bring income to the family (including, if he marries, a dowry from his bride's family), and carry on the family name. A daughter often is not allowed to inherit property (which goes to male relatives)* or earn outside income for the family, and if she marries, her bridal dowry can be ruinously expensive. If this sounds to you like a description of Victorian England, you're absolutely right. The only difference is that the Victorians didn't have ultrasound.

As Raj Bhopal has written in a letter to The Lancet,

"As an Indian-born person raised in a traditional Punjabi family in Scotland I have been immersed in institutionalised sex bias. In a multiplicity of minor ways, I, along with other Indian men, have benefited at the expense of women—eg, by being fed first, by being served by my mother and female relatives (including sisters), by being sheltered from housework, and most importantly of all, being celebrated more from birth—just for being male....Indians worldwide need to unite, not only in condemning discrimination against the female sex, but in dismantling the structures that keep it in place. Every Indian can help by taking basic but important simple actions—eg, handing out sweets at the birth of a girl as you do with a son, and requesting them from your friends and family; raising girls and boys with equal care, resources, and respect; and refusing to give or accept dowries as a matter of principle..." [6]

Vivah

Which brings us back to Vivah, which is all about celebrating and honoring daughters. Kind-hearted Krishnakant (quintessential Good Dad Alok Nath) and his wife Rama (Seema Biswas) have raised their orphaned niece Poonam (Amrita Rao) as their own daughter.

The wealthy industrialist Harishchandra (who else but Anupam Kher, another classic Bollywood Dad) hears of Poonam through a mutual acquaintance and sets up a meeting between the families with an eye towards finding a wife for his second son Prem (Shahid Kapoor). Poonam and Prem slowly get to know one another, fall in love, and a date for their wedding is set.

And that's pretty much the movie. There is a subplot about Rama, who has never fully accepted Poonam as her own daughter, and who resents the attention and money that's being lavished on Poonam. The younger daughter of Krishnakant and Rama, Chhoti, is tomboyish and slightly darker-skinned than Poonam, and Rama is jealous of Poonam's beauty. The rejecting stepmother stereotype gets a bit tiresome, but it also becomes clear that Rama is worried about Chhoti's marriage prospects.

But lest you think that Vivah is endorsing standards of beauty that favor lighter skin, consider the possibility that it is really subverting them. It's true that most of the well-to-do, attractive people that we're supposed to sympathize and identify with in Vivah (and in virtually every other Bollywood film) have light skin. And the actress playing the supposedly plain Chhoti, Amrita Prakash, in some scenes seems to have been given darkening makeup. But while her mother obsesses over Chhoti's looks—we see Rama applying powders, creams, and other treatments in a vain effort to make Chhoti's skin lighter—

—Chhoti herself isn't bothered in the least by her looks, or lack of traditional femininity. She is smart and funny—when sent to serve food to the family's guests, Chhoti mocks her mother's admonitions to "walk properly" with an exaggerated hip-sway—and seems perfectly comfortable in her own skin, despite her mother's fixation on lightening it. And the relationship between the two girls is very close, full of teasing but shown again and again to be loving, tender, and supportive.

Barjatya has a reputation as a conservative "family values" filmmaker. But Vivah is surprisingly progressive on such questions as:

Educational opportunities for women: Both Poonam and Chhoti are college students, with Poonam about to graduate with a business degree:

Employment outside the home: The office staff at Harishchandra Industries looks to be about 50% women, and Harishchandra offers to hire Poonam as an accountant:

The dowry system: Although Vivah doesn't advocate its abolishment, it suggests that it should become purely symbolic:

Equality in marriage: The marriage of Prem's brother Sunil (Samir Soni) and his wife Bhavna (Lata Sabharwal) is presented as something of a model for the future married life of Prem and Poonam. It may have a traditional division of labor—Sunil goes off to work while Bhavna takes care of their house and child—but it is shown to be wonderfully companionate. Bhavna is clearly Sunil's equal in intellect and in authority within the marriage; she defers only (and then somewhat jokingly) to Harishchandra, who unfailingly takes her side. As he tells Prem,

Women's body image: Before their wedding, Prem has some advice for Poonam:

I don't want to make excessive claims for Vivah's progressive politics. We're still in a world where the women cook the food and serve it to the men, where Bhavna stopped working after she had a child (although that may have been her choice), where marriages are arranged (though only with the full consent of the couple involved), and where religious devotion is an unquestioned value. Nonetheless, the world it portrays looks pretty appealing; if only all families were this loving, nurturing and open-hearted. And in a world missing over 100 million women, Vivah's depiction of the joys and rewards of raising daughters can seem pretty radical.

Of course, Vivah isn't perfect. On a rewatch it is still slow-moving and sentimental, and will probably send lovers of masala screaming from the room. Ravindra Jain's soundtrack was inexplicably underrated when Vivah came out, perhaps because it was seen as old-fashioned. That's precisely why I think it's so great, as you might expect of a soundtrack that prominently features Udit Narayan, Shreya Ghosal and Kumar Sanu. Shahid Kapoor's excellent dancing skills are largely wasted, alas.

Finally, there's really not much drama until the final 30 minutes or so. Then I can hardly bring myself to watch—and I can't tear myself away. If you can make it to the credits with dry eyes, you're made of far sterner stuff than I am.

*Update 25 July 2011: When I wrote "Boys are preferred in many societies, including our own," I was referring to the United States, and making a couple unwarranted assumptions. Of course, not all of my readers live in the U. S., and so I should have been more specific. And according to Hvistendahl's book, a large majority of the couples who select for the sex of their child at U. S. fertility clinics are selecting for girls, not boys. Last July there was even a cover story in the Atlantic about this phenomenon (Hanna Rosin's "The End of Men".)

--

* Filmbuff informs me that daughters in India have the legal right to inherit property; see his comment on Bollywood and the Victorians.

1. Shirish S. Seth. (2006, 21 January). Missing female births in India. The Lancet, v. 367, p. 185.
2. Amartya Sen. (1990, 20 December). More than 100 million women are missing. New York Review of Books, v. 37, p. 66.
3. Prabhat Jha, et al. (2011, 4 June). Trends in selective abortion of girls in India. The Lancet, v. 377, p. 1921.
4. Prabhat Jha, et al. (2006, 21 January). Low female-to-male sex ratio of children born in India. The Lancet, v. 367, p. 211.
5. Jha, et. al. (2011), p. 1926.
6. Raj Bhopal, (2006, 21 May). Letter. The Lancet, v. 367, p. 1728

Boston Early Music Festival: Steffani's Niobe, Regina di Tebe

2011-07-04T13:10:00.000-07:00

Philippe Jaroussky as Anfione

People who dislike Baroque opera often claim that its plots are convoluted and absurd. Such claims beg the question of whether Baroque operas are typically more convoluted and absurd than staples of the mainstream repertoire such as, say, Verdi's Il Trovatore or Bellini's La sonnambula. They also raise the issue of whether those who make such stereotypical claims have ever heard the dramatically compelling operas of Monteverdi, Purcell and Handel.

I have to say, though, that "convoluted and absurd" is a fair description of the plot of Agostino Steffani's Niobe, Regina di Tebe (Niobe, Queen of Thebes, 1688), the centerpiece opera of this year's Boston Early Music Festival (seen June 19). The story is based on Book VI of Ovid's Metamorphoses: Manto, daughter of the seer Tiresius, urges the women of Thebes to perform rites at the shrine of Latona, mother of Apollo and Diana. Queen Niobe becomes angered, demanding to be worshipped for her own semi-divine origins and boasting that her seven sons and seven daughters surpass Latona's mere two. For her sacrilege and pride, Niobe is punished by the deaths of all her children and the suicide of her despairing husband, Amphion. Finally, surrounded by the bodies of her family, the grief-stricken Niobe herself is turned to stone.

Steffani's librettist, Luigi Orlandi, took this straightforward story and complicated it with subplots involving rival princes (Clearte, Creonte, and Tiberino), an evil magician bent on revenge (Poliferno), a bawdy nurse (Nerea—a stock character in 17th-century opera), and the repeated appearances of a bear (perhaps a real one when the opera was performed in Munich during the 1688 carnival; in Boston, a guy (the game Jay Lloyd Smith) in a bear suit). In Ellen Hargis's translation, the 1688 libretto lists among the scenery an "Ampitheater with a large aerial Globe in the center, which after opening forms a Heavenly Body," "Hell, which rises in the empty space of this Scene, and then sinks" and "the Planet Mars, which is then transformed into a Lonely Place with Grottos." "Machines" included "an enormous Monster," "two infernal Dragons," characters rising and descending in clouds, a flying chariot, and "the falling of many Buildings in an Earthquake." Fun, yes; coherent or emotionally engaging, no.

Fortunately this production offered rewards apart from the plot. Chief among them was the spectacular countertenor Philippe Jaroussky in the role of Anfione (Amphion). The moment Jaroussky began to sing an electric surge of excitement rippled through the audience. The unearthly soprano sound he produces, his amazing virtuosity and his deep musicality offer a suggestion of why in the Baroque era the castrati were showered with so much adulation. In classical myth Amphion was an Orpheus-like figure whose singing was so moving that with it he could command the very rocks to build the walls of Thebes, and Steffani did not miss the opportunity to give his primo uomo the best music in the opera. It wasn't all coloratura fireworks, either; Anfione is also given several highly affecting arias of yearning, mourning and loss.

Unfortunately, while Anfione's music was exquisite, as a hero he was lacking: he's shallow, vain, and easily duped by Niobe. Niobe herself is highly unsympathetic: proud, narcissistic, manipulative and unscrupulous. A lack of virtue in the main characters isn't necessarily a fatal flaw: Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea (The Coronation of Poppea) and Handel's Alcina both feature morally compromised heroines, and are among the greatest operas ever written. But the creations of Steffani and Orlandi somehow don't arouse the same degree of sympathy and interest.

Matthew White as Creonte and Amanda Forsythe as Niobe

Steffani also wrote some gorgeous love music for Creonte (Matthew White) and Niobe (Amanda Forsythe)—bewitched by Poliferno (Jesse Blumberg), Niobe believes that she has been chosen by the god Mars as his consort, which is how they wind up on his planet—and for Tiberino (Colin Balzar) and Manto (Yulia Van Doren). There are also some amusing set-pieces for the travesti role of Nerea (José Lemos, who has also appeared with Bay Area group Magnificat). The strongest possible case for Steffani's music was made by the superb BEMF Orchestra under the leadership of concertmaster Cynthia Roberts, with musical direction by lutenist Stephen Stubbs.

But in general I felt that Steffani's melodic invention wasn't as consistently appealing as, say, Handel's. Coupled with the bewildering story, unsympathetic characters, and (despite extensive cuts) a running time of four hours, it made for a long afternoon in the theater. While it was enjoyable to see Anna Watkin's sumptuous costumes and Gilbert Blin's recreations of Baroque stage effects, I couldn't help feeling that the best of the music might have been more effectively presented in a concert version.

Still, the BEMF is to be applauded for realizing such a massively complex undertaking onstage, and for assembling such a talented group of designers, performers and musicians to do so. Jaroussky in particular was a revelation. It looks like he will be touring in North America this fall with Apollo's Fire performing a program of Handel and Vivaldi arias—he appears in Berkeley at the end of October and in Boston in early November—and if you have the opportunity to see him in person, don't miss it.

Philippe Jaroussky performing Vivaldi's "Vedro con mio diletto"

Update 4 July 2011: The best listing of Philippe Jaroussky's upcoming concerts that I've been able to find is on the Philippe Jaroussky International Forum.

Boston Early Music Festival: Steffani and Handel vocal duets

2011-07-03T09:10:00.000-07:00

After the wonderful performance of Handel's Acis and Galatea at the Boston Early Music Festival we decided on impulse to stay for the late-night concert "Fioratura: The vocal chamber duets of Steffani and Handel." I had never heard of Agostino Steffani before this year's BEMF: the centerpiece opera this year was his Niobe, Regina di Tebe (Niobe, Queen of Thebes, 1688) which, like Acis, was based on Ovid's Metamorphoses.

It turned out that there are a surprising number of connections between Handel and Steffani. The two men knew one another, and in Hanover Steffani had been the Kapellmeister for the court of the Elector George August before Handel was appointed to the post.

John Mainwaring, Handel's first biographer, says of Steffani that his "compositions were excellent; his temper exceedingly amiable; and his behavior polite and genteel." [1] Handel, too, must have thought that Steffani's compositions were excellent. In 1973 scholar Colin Timms discovered a Handel signature dated "Roma 1706" on a manuscript collection of Steffani's duets. Steffani was an acknowledged master of the duet form, and when Handel later produced a set of twelve duets for the Hanover court he used Steffani's compositions as models. Mainwaring himself noted similarities between Handel's and Steffani's duets: he wrote of one, "The Duetto beginning, "Amirarvi io sono intento," is a beautiful example of a style truly vocal, and much resembling that of Steffani...The first movement of "Sono liete" is another..." [2]

Based on the insights of Mainwaring and Timms, "Fioratura" was a concert of Steffani and Handel vocal duets, interspersed with instrumental numbers by the two composers (and, for reasons not entirely clear, a guitar duet by a composer of an earlier generation, Francesco Corbetta). The duets were performed by a rotating group of singers (sopranos Mireille Asselin and Ellen Hargis, alto Meg Bragle, tenor Jason McStoots and bass-baritone Doug Williams; the men had also performed in Acis). Instrumental accompaniment was provided by Tragicomedia (Paul O'Dette and Stephen Stubbs, lutes; Erin Headley, viola da gamba; Maxine Eilander, harp; plus Kristian Bezuidenhout, harpsichord).

The singers were uniformly excellent, and blended their distinct voices beautifully. The duets, whose largely uncredited texts are highly conventional love poetry, were contrapuntally intricate and involved much imitative illustration of words like "sospirar" (sighing) and "infiammate" (inflamed). In Handel's "Sono liete, fortunate" (performed in the YouTube clip below by soprano Laura Claycomb and alto Sara Mingardo with Emmanuelle Haïm's Le Concert D'Astrée) the two voices intertwine sinuously on the words "catene" (chains):

Sono liete, fortunate,
Dolci, grate le catene,
Le catene un fido amor.

Crudeltà nè lontananza,
Non avran mai la possanza
Di staccarle dal mio cor.

(They are happy and fortunate,
Sweet and gentle, the chains,
The chains of a faithful love.

Neither cruelty not distance
Will ever have the power
To unbind them from my heart.
—Translation by Stephen Stubbs)

The intimate duets of "Fioratura" were a delightful bridge between Handel's Acis and the next day's fully staged performance of Steffani's Niobe, which will be the subject of my next post.

------------

1. John Mainwaring, Memoirs of the Life of the Late George Frederic Handel (London, 1760), p. 70.
2. Mainwaring, p. 197-198.

Boston Early Music Festival: Handel's Acis and Galatea

2011-06-30T22:30:00.000-07:00

Teresa Wakim as Galatea/Lady Chandos, and Aaron Sheehan as Acis/Lord Chandos
(Below: Wakim with Douglas Williams as Polyphemus/Alexander Pope)

Handel composed the English-language masque Acis and Galatea in 1718 when he was composer in residence at Cannons, the suburban London estate of James Brydges, Earl of Carnarvon (later Duke of Chandos, the name by which I will refer to him in the rest of this post).

That the Duke chose to patronize Handel is something of a curiosity. Handel had been invited to London as a composer of Italian opera, and during his first five years in England he devoted most of his compositional energies to opera seria: he wrote Rinaldo (1711), Il pastor fido (1712), Teseo (1713), Silla (1713), and Amadigi (1715), most of which were performed by impresario Aaron Hill's company at the Haymarket Theater.

But Italian operas, and in particular the castrati who were their stars, were not universally admired in England. A number of satirists published attacks on the form for its supposed effeminacy, decadence, foreignness, and absurdity. And when Hill's opera company reached the end of its financial tether in June 1717, Handel soon found himself at Cannons working with some of the arch-enemies of Italian opera: members of the satirical Scriblerus Club such as Alexander Pope, John Gay, and John Hughes.

Pope later excoriated Italian opera (but praised Handel) in The Dunciad (1728); Gay mocked Italian opera in The Beggar's Opera (1728), whose music (including tunes taken from Handel operas) was arranged by Johann Pepusch, the Duke's musical director at Cannons; and Hughes later occasioned Samuel Johnson's famous comment that he created works "intended to oppose or exclude the Italian opera, an exotic and irrational entertainment, which has been always combated, and always has prevailed" (Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779)).

Such companions would not seem to have been entirely congenial to the cosmopolitation composer who had devoted a large share of his creative energies to Italian opera. But Handel knew the Scriblerians well—he had met them at Burlington House, the London home of his previous patron Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington—and Handel was nothing if not adaptable. All of the music he produced for the Duke had English-language texts: eleven anthems based on the Psalms, the oratorio Esther (1718) to a libretto by Pope, and Acis and Galatea, whose libretto included contributions from Gay, Pope and Hughes.

Gay was the primary collaborator with Handel on Acis, adapting the text of John Dryden's The Story of Acis, Polyphemus and Galatea (1717). Dryden's poem was a translation of an incident from Book XIII of Ovid's Metamorphoses: The sea nymph Galatea is pursued by the Cyclops Polyphemus; she herself is in love with the the handsome young shepherd Acis (who in Ovid's telling also has semi-divine origins). In a jealous rage Polyphemus kills Acis; Galatea uses her divine powers to turn Acis' blood into a fountain (in Ovid, the origin of Sicily's River Acis), and Acis himself into a river-god.

Gilbert Blin's production of Acis and Galatea for the Boston Early Music Festival was just about the most intelligent staging imaginable. It was set as though we were watching a rehearsal at Cannons, with members of the court (in eighteenth-century costumes by Anna Watkins) taking the roles. It soon becomes clear that Acis (Aaron Sheehan) is the Duke himself, with Galatea (Teresa Wakim) being his wife, Lady Chandos, Polyphemus (Douglas Williams) Alexander Pope, and Acis' fellow shepherds, Damon (Jason McStoots) and Coridon (Michael Kelly), Handel and Gay.

Blin's assignment of roles to the historical personages present at Cannons in June 1718 was anything but arbitrary. The arias of Damon/Handel are all urgings to pleasure—surely a supreme value for a composer of Italian opera. McStoots did an especially beautiful (and poignant) job with the aria "Consider, fond Shepherd,/How fleeting's the pleasure/That flatters our hope/In pursuit of the fair" (there's a too-brief excerpt in the video below). Blin staged the aria, which Damon sings to Acis/Lord Chandos ostensibly about Galatea, to indicate Handel's own yearning for the Duke. Here Blin was drawing on the scholarship of Ellen Harris (a participant in the Festival), who in Handel as Orpheus: Voice and Desire in the Chamber Cantatas (Harvard University Press, 2001) posits a homoerotic subtext in the vocal chamber music Handel wrote during this period.

Polyphemus, the Cyclops, is portrayed by Alexander Pope. Polyphemus is hideous of aspect; the real-life Pope had suffered from dieases in childhood that stunted his growth and left him with severe curvature of the spine. Polyphemus nurtures a hopeless love for the beautiful Galatea, who loves Acis instead; Pope had an extravagant but apparently unrequited attachment to the married Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. When Polyphemus discovers Galatea with Acis, he explodes in rage and kills Acis to punish Galatea; when Pope felt spurned by Lady Mary, he published a savage and thinly veiled attack on her, writing that the fate of her male acquaintances was to be either "poxed by her love, or libelled by her hate." Watkins' costume for Polyphemus cleverly alludes both to the Cyclops and to Pope: he wears an eye-patch, making him one-eyed, and carries a large walking stick (later the instrument of Acis' death).

Musically the production was exquisite; Handel's vocal writing in Acis offers gorgeous aria after gorgeous aria. All of the five vocalists have wonderfully pure and pleasing voices, and their ornamentation of repeated aria verses was beautiful, intelligent, and truly enhanced the vocal line. The music looked back to Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas (1689) and The Fairy Queen (1692) in its lovely melodies, and forward to Mozart in an extraordinary trio where Polyphemus violently interrupts a love duet between Acis and Galatea; the treble instruments play the lovers' melody, while the bass instruments play Polyphemus'. The one-to-a-part instrumental forces, led by lutenist Paul O'Dette, baroque guitarist Stephen Stubbs, and harpsichordist Avi Stein, were perhaps somewhat smaller than those the Duke had at his disposal, but the stripped-down sound made the textures of Handel's writing wonderfully clear.

Acis and Galatea was the high point of our concert-going at the Boston Early Music Festival. It was so good that afterwards we decided on impulse to stay for the delightful late-night concert of duets by Handel and Agostino Steffani which followed.

But that's a post for another time. Here's a taste of this Acis production; we can only hope that the BEMF will soon release a full-length CD or DVD recording:

Bollywood Rewatch 1: Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam

2011-06-12T15:46:00.000-07:00

Every new love affair passes through a heady period of infatuation. You want to spend all your time with your beloved, you obsess about them when you're apart, and even their flaws and idiosyncrasies are endearing. As time passes, that early whirlwind of passion can settle into a more sober, clear-sighted, but perhaps longer-lasting admiration and affection. Sometimes, of course, seeing your love through new and perhaps more judicious eyes can prove fatal to the relationship.

So it was with some trepidation that we went back to rewatch some of the films that we first saw early on in our Bollywood viewing, including English Babu Desi Mem (1996), Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (1999), Hum Tum (2004), Bunty aur Babli (2005), and Vivah (2006). These are all films that we had liked very much on a first viewing, but for some reason had only watched once. Would these early favorites remain so after a rewatch? Not always, as it turned out.

Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (My Heart Belongs To You, 1999)
Original rating: ★★★ (strongly recommended)
Rewatch rating: ★★ (recommended with reservations)

In my first post on HDDCS in "Bollywood for the curious," I said that the movie "combines the attractions of director Sanjay Leela Bhansali's gorgeous settings, the young Aishwarya Rai's astonishing dancing (and astonishing beauty), and Ajay Devgan's understated and affecting performance as the husband." All of those virtues, along with Ismail Darbar's excellent music, are vividly exemplified in the song "Nimbooda." Vanraj (Ajay) sees Nandini (Aishwarya) for the first time as she performs at a wedding, and (as we do) finds her electrifying:

But HDDCS also, to an extent that I must have blocked out, features Salman Khan in a role that I think is meant to be carefree, playful, and flirtatious, but is mainly irritating. Salman plays Sameer, a free-spirited Italo-Indian musician who comes to study at the house of Pandit Darbar (played by Vikram Gokhale; the Pandit's name, we realized on our rewatch, is likely a tribute to the film's composer). Nandini is Pandit Darbar's daughter, and after an initial antagonism Nandini and Sameer fall in love.

In the song "Aankhon Ki Gustakhiyan," Nandini and Sameer flirt with and play lover's pranks on one another during a wedding. Bhansali imperceptibly segues into Sameer's and then Nandini's fantasies, and back to reality. (Sameer's fantasy begins about 2:10 when Nandini leaves the circle of dancers and ends at 2:40, when he burns his hand on the flames of the lamps that his fantasy Nandini had blown out; Nandini's fantasy begins about 3:20 when she is caught in the wrapping of Sameer's turban, and ends around 3:55, when she opens her eyes to see his turban being finished.) The whole sequence, with its swirling movement and color, and its depiction of story and character in song, shows that at his best Bhansali can be brilliant:

When Nandini's father finds out about this budding love affair, though, he banishes Sameer from his house, and arranges Nandini's marriage to the wealthy Vanraj. After the wedding, Vanraj quickly realizes that his wife loves another man, and—despite the profound pain it causes him—takes her to Italy to try to find Sameer.

—Spoiler alert!—

HDDCS was probably the third or fourth Bollywood movie we saw, and I was completely unprepared both for Vanraj's response to the unwelcome knowledge that Nandini loves Sameer, and for Nandini's final choice between the two men (which is utterly unlike the way an American version of the same plot would be resolved).

On a rewatch it's clear that Nandini's connection to Sameer was one of youthful infatuation, and that she has grown and changed over the intervening time. It's not just for reasons of wifely duty that she chooses Vanraj; she has come to recognize that his deep love and devotion, which she has begun to return, are a better basis for a lifelong relationship than Sameer's boyish excitability.

—End of spoiler—

Bhansali makes some major missteps, including having Sameer repeatedly talk to a rumble of thunder that is supposed to be his father in heaven. (His mother in Italy, I appreciated on our rewatch, is played by Salman's real-life ~~mother~~ stepmother Helen.*) To have the thunder respond to Sameer once would be an ambiguous and mildly amusing joke; to have it happen a half-dozen times or more is just silly.

So I'm sorry to say that, while we still enjoyed HDDCS the second time around, its flaws—primarily in Bhansali's conception of the role of Sameer and in Salman's hyperkinetic and over-enthusiastic performance—were much more apparent. Still, what Bhansali does well, he does really well, as in "Dholi Taro Dhol Baaje":

A word should be said here in praise of Bhansali's collaborators Shabina Khan and Neeta Lulla (costumes), Saroj Khan and Natbar Maharana (choreography), and the great playback singers such as Kavita Krishnamurthy ("Nimbooda" and "Aankhon Ki Gustakhiyan"), Karsan Sagathia ("Nimbooda"), and Kumar Sanu ("Aankhon Ki Gustakhiyan"), among others.

More Bollywood Rewatch posts to follow.

Update 10 July 2011: The Bollywood Rewatch post on Vivah is now available.

--

* See FilmiGirl's comment below.

Men against women: 7 Khoon Maaf, No One Killed Jessica, and Pardes

2011-05-30T16:18:00.000-07:00

7 Khoon Maaf (Seven Forgiven Murders, 2011) is Vishal Bhardwaj's attempt at a modern film noir. According to a typology proposed by John Blaser in No Place for a Woman: The Family in Film Noir, there are three kinds of noir women: the supportive Good Woman, the suffocating Marrying Kind, and the seductive Femme Fatale. Typically, the femme fatale "refuses to play the role of devoted wife and loving mother that mainstream society prescribes for women."

But in 7 Khoon Maaf, being a devoted wife and loving mother is all that Susanna (Priyanka Chopra) wants. Unfortunately for her and for them, the men who are drawn to marry her all have fatal flaws: they are emotionally repressed and controlling (the wooden Neil Nitin Mukesh is perfectly cast in the role of a rigid army officer), needy and narcissistic (John Abraham as a heroin- and groupie-addicted rock star), brutal (Irrfan Khan as a sadistic poet), deceptive (Aleksandr Dyachenko as a Russian agent with a double life), exploitative (Annu Kapoor as a police inspector who coerces Susanna into sex), and murderous (Naseeruddin Shah as a doctor whose mushroom diet can cure or kill). Those flaws are literally fatal for each of the men in turn, for like Blaser's description of the classic femme fatale, Susanna must "resort to murder to free herself from an unbearable relationship with a man who would try to possess and control her, as if she were a piece of property or a pet."

I haven't read the Ruskin Bond short story "Susanna's Seven Husbands" on which writer/director Bhardwaj based his movie, but the main problem with the film version is one of tone. At times 7 Khoon Maaf seems to be straining for black comedy, and at others seems to take itself entirely seriously. There's also a distracting issue with chronology—characters seem to age at different rates—and an unmotivated ending. Although it's interesting to see Priyanka playing such an ambiguous role, it's not the best work of anyone involved.

No One Killed Jessica (2011) highlights a real-life incident in which, in front of horrified witnesses at a party, model Jessica Lall was shot and killed by Manu Sharma, the son of a high-ranking politician. When the case finally came to trial after seven years, a taped confession by the killer was ruled inadmissible, it was discovered that evidence had been tampered with, and several key eyewitnesses retracted their testimony and claimed that they hadn't seen the shooting after all. Sharma and his accomplices were acquitted.

Two reporters from the newsmagazine Tehelka, Harinder Baweja and Vineet Khare, went undercover to investigate witness tampering and police malfeasance in the case. Through dogged and courageous work the journalists exposed the bribes and intimidation employed by the Sharma family to turn the witnesses and contaminate the evidence.

It's a compelling story, well-presented by writer/director Raj Kumar Gupta. And it's a true pleasure to watch the interplay between Vidya Balan as Jessica's sister Sabrina and Rani Mukherji as fictionalized crusading journalist Meera Gaity. Meera isn't a cardboard heroine: she smokes, is far from demure, sleeps with her sometime boyfriend, and won't take no for an answer. It's great to see Rani—who sometimes seems to be cast for her ability to twinkle appealingly and cry convincingly—in the role of a tough, feisty and not entirely likeable woman. In the role of Sabrina, Vidya Balan convincingly portrays a woman slowly emerging from emotional shell-shock and beginning to acknowledge the possibility of hope. Note to Bollywood producers: can we please have more movies with substantive, complex roles for actresses of the caliber of Rani and Vidya?

In Pardes (Foreign, 1997), Ganga (Mahima Chaudhry in her film debut) is a beautiful, voluptuous but innocent girl brought up in an idyllic rural village. As her name and other attributes might suggest, Ganga is the embodiment of Traditional Indian Values. Which is precisely why NRI millionaire Kishorilal (Amrish Puri) approaches Ganga's father Suraj Dev (Alok Nath) to arrange Ganga's marriage to his son.

In a Yash-Chopra-esque song sequence for "I Love My India," Kishorilal, Ganga, Suraj Dev—and director Subhash Ghai in a brief cameo—celebrate the folkloric, mythical, unchanging India that for the men is represented by Ganga:

Yeh duniya ik dulhan
Dulhan ke maathe ki bindiya
Yeh mera India
I love my India
Vatan mera India
Sajan mera India
Karam mera India
Dharam mera India

The world is a bride,
and the jewel on her forehead
is my India.
I love my India.
India my homeland,
India my beloved,
India my fate,
India my religion:

Kishorilal's son Rajiv (Apurva Agnihotri) is thoroughly Westernized, meaning that he smokes, drinks, and sleeps with his (ex-?)girlfriend. Rajiv's foster brother Arjun (Shah Rukh Khan) is sent to India to act as a go-between. As Arjun's name suggests, he's loyal to a fault: he claims that a pack of cigarettes that Ganga finds in Rajiv's coat is his own, and when she pleads for the truth tells her that Rajiv will make her happy.

Of course, when Ganga travels to America to visit with Rajiv after their engagement, things don't go well. On a visit to Las Vegas, the city that epitomizes Western sinfulness, a drunken Rajiv tries to rape Ganga. Arjun promises to help Ganga and returns with her to India, immediately leading Rajiv, Kishorilal, and Suraj Dev to conclude that they are having an affair. Soon all three are trying to kill Arjun.

Perhaps the Subhash Ghai writing and directing credits should have given me fair warning me about Pardes. For me, Ghai's movies require having a finger ever ready to press the fast forward button on the DVD remote; see my brief review of Khal Nayak (The Anti-Hero, 1993), and Ajnabi's hilarious essay on the "shameful classic" Yaadein (Memories, 2001). When Alok Nath, Bollywood's quintessential Good Dad, is reduced to a screaming maniac wielding a sword and trying to kill his own daughter and her supposed lover, then we're too deep into Subhash Ghai Land for the likes of me.

If you can ignore the movie's simplistic dichotomies and a story that's both unoriginal and over-the-top, Pardes does have some redeeming features. The lovely Chaudhry is styled and dressed to look like Madhuri Dixit circa Khal Nayak, which is not a bad thing. And as the catchy "I love my India" suggests, the music is well done, especially the climactic qawwali "Nahin Hona Tha". Finally, as huge SRK fans my partner and I are willing to forgive much in order to watch our man in action. But I don't think we'll ever be tempted again to go Pardes.

Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games

2011-05-27T05:44:00.000-07:00

A vast range of classic and contemporary Bollywood films are alluded to over the course of Vikram Chandra's 950-page novel Sacred Games (HarperCollins, 2006). The cover of the paperback version reinforces the Bollywood connection: it features images of what look like Isha Koppikar from Don (2006) and (perhaps) Abhishek Bachchan from Dhoom (2004). The crime-movie references are highly relevant, because Sacred Games tells the story of small-time thug Ganesh Gaitonde's rise to become the ruthless, hyper-violent ruler of a criminal empire. Intertwined with Gaitonde's story is that of police inspector Sartaj Singh, who becomes involved in the investigation of Gaitonde's final days.

But to call Sacred Games a crime novel or thriller wouldn't convey the imaginative richness of Chandra's storytelling or the vividness of his descriptions of the streets and alleyways of Mumbai. We experience the sights, sounds, tastes and smells of daily life in the "maximum city" (to borrow the title of a book by Chandra's friend and collaborator Suketu Mehta), and encounter dozens of characters from chai-wallas to film stars. That narrative vividness is particularly apparent in a series of "Insets" that provide in-depth backstories for several of the characters. The insets also reveal some unsuspected ironies and surprising familial connections.

Chandra's own familial connections to Bollywood include his mother Kamna Chandra (writer for Prem Rog (1982), Chandni (1989), and 1942: A Love Story (1993)); his sister Tanuja Chandra (writer for Dil To Pagal Hai (1997), director of Sangharsh (1999) and Sur (2002)); his sister Anupama Chopra, writer of books on Sholay, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge and Shah Rukh Khan; and his brother-in-law Vidhu Vinod Chopra, writer/director/producer of Parinda (1989), 1942: A Love Story, and Mission Kashmir (2000).

Chandra himself contributed to Mission Kashmir, a film to which there are a number of explicit and coded references in Sacred Games. There are the name-checks of Jackie Shroff and Sanjay Dutt. There's that impossibly good-looking gigolo, who sounds like he's modelled on another hunky actor from MK: "He was tall, an inch or two over six feet, and had the smallest waist Sartaj had seen on a man in a long while. He narrowed like an inverted triangle from the shoulders to the hips, and the quick travel from the gym-broadened shoulders to the absence of belly gave him the look of a cartoon figure" (p. 438). And then there's that morning when Sartaj sings a certain song in the shower: "Things were falling apart, but Sartaj stood in the shower and soaped his chest and sang Bhumro bhumro along with the radio from the apartment below" (p. 528):

Preity Zinta and Hrithik Roshan in a scene from Mission Kashmir.

In Sacred Games filmi songs, classic and contemporary, provide the soundtrack of the lives of cops and criminals alike, and the references will provide an additional level of pleasure for Bollywood fans. (At the back of the book Chandra has provided a glossary that identifies many of his references, plus a list of his favorite films.)

There is also some sly commentary on the film business: when Gaitonde finances a movie for Zoya Mirza, a strikingly tall Miss India turned gangster's mistress turned surgically-enhanced Bollywood star, he dreams big: "'The emotion of Mother India, the scale of Sholay, the speed of Amar Akbar Anthony. That's what we want'" (p. 676). What he gets is the generic thriller International Dhamaka, which contains "shooting and kissing and car crashes and tears and torn hearts" (p. 682)—and which flops.

Sacred Games could itself be made into a filmi thriller. But ultimately what makes it compelling isn't the mystery plot but the fullness and complexity of its characters and the messy, corrupt, unjust, violent but vibrant world in which they, like we, must live.

Vikram Chandra has his own website, http://www.vikramchandra.com/, and there is also one for Sacred Games itself: http://www.sacredgames.net/

Update 5 June 2011: Since writing this post I've learned that Sartaj Singh first made an appearance in the story "Kama" from Vikram Chandra's 1997 collection Love and Longing in Bombay. In that story his divorce from his wife Megha is finalized, an event from which he is still recovering as Sacred Games opens.

I've also learned that there is 1999 movie starring Akshay Kumar and Twinkle Khanna called International Khiladi which may be one of the models for International Dhamaka. International Khiladi is a crime/mob story, it features international travel (to exotic Canada), and lots of fight scenes, tears and torn hearts. Not to mention lady wrestlers! You can read a hilarious discussion of it on the Bollywhat? Forum here.

Lark Rise to Candleford

2011-05-14T17:46:00.000-07:00

We've become addicted to BBC literary adaptations, and are currently halfway through the excellent first season of Lark Rise to Candleford (2008). The series is based on three semi-autobiographical novels by Flora Thompson: Lark Rise (1939), Over to Candleford (1941), and Candleford Green (1943). Thompson's life closely parallels that of her fictional heroine Laura Timmins (Thompson's maiden name was Timms): like Flora, Laura is born in a rural hamlet, has a stonemason father, a mother named Emma, and at age 15 goes to work at the post office in a nearby town.

Olivia Hallinan as Laura

I haven't read the books on which it's based, but the Lark Rise television series at first feels like a cross between Anne of Green Gables (by which I mean the delightful 1985/87 CBC Television adaptation of Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne Shirley novels) and Cranford (the excellent 2005 BBC adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford novellas). Like Anne, at its center is the story of a young rural woman learning to make her way in the wider world; like Cranford, its setting offers a microcosm of the social, political, economic and technological changes occurring in England in the late 19th century.

There's another reason Lark Rise resembles Elizabeth Gaskell: key members of its superb cast are drawn from the adaptions Cranford (the magnificent Julia Sawalha—Jessie Brown in Cranford—as Candleford's postmistress Dorcas Lane, and Claudie Blakley—Martha in Cranford—as Laura's mother Emma) and 2004's North and South (Brendan Coyle—working-class hero Nicholas Higgins in North and South—as Laura's father Robert). You might also recognize a familiar face or two from various Charles Dickens and Jane Austen adaptations.

Julia Sawalha as Dorcas

For its first five episodes Lark Rise is a warm, humanistic portrait of hamlet and town. Through Laura's eyes we come to know the the colorful characters who inhabit Lark Rise, the class tensions between hamlet and town, and the wisdom and kindness of Dorcas Lane. Each episode features a minor crisis which is resolved through Dorcas' quiet good sense. We gradually learn more about the characters, including what seems to be the warmth of a lingering but unacknowledged affection between Dorcas and the handsome squire Sir Timothy Midwinter (to the dismay of his wife, Lady Adelaide). At the end of each episode, a voice-over from the adult Laura frames everything we've just seen in the retrospective glow of nostalgia.

Claudie Blakley as Emma and Brendan Coyle as Robert

Had Lark Rise continued in this way we would have been perfectly content to keep watching, especially since the series' writing, acting, and visuals are so fine. But then came Episode 6.

In Episode 6 a mute young girl, abandoned by her impoverished family, inadvertently exposes the unspoken fears and longings of any number of characters, including Emma...

Lady Adelaide...

Ruby Douglas as Polly and Olivia Grant as Lady Adelaide

Sir Timothy...

Ben Miles as Sir Timothy

and Dorcas herself.

Everything comes to a head on one sleepless night where half of Candleford winds up at the post office, while Dorcas and her staff desperately try to conceal Polly's presence. It is on this night, as well, that Lady Adelaide and Dorcas finally meet for a heart-to-heart talk—an exchange of confidences that is emotionally perilous for both of them.

Meanwhile, there is a misdelivered love poem wreaking havoc, awakened memories of lost loved ones, and the ever-watchful presence of the meddling Pratt sisters:

Matilda Ziegler as Pearl and Victoria Hamilton as Ruby

The episode is brilliantly written and structured, and takes the series into different and more deeply affecting territory. We can't wait to see where it goes from here.

Update 14 May 2011: For readers in the SF Bay Area, KTEH, the PBS station for the South Bay and San Francisco peninsula, is showing the first season of Lark Rise on Saturdays at 9 pm. The first episode will be broadcast tonight.

Ian Bostridge with Les Violons du Roy

2011-05-08T08:54:00.000-07:00

Ian Bostridge has been touring with a program devoted to music written for three 18th-century tenors: Francesco Borosini, who originated the roles of the defeated Sultan Bajazet in Handel's Tamerlano (1724) and the usurper Grimoaldo in Rodelinda (1725); Annibale Fabri, who originated the roles of Dario in Vivaldi's L'incoronazione di Dario (1717) and Berengario in Handel's Lotario (1729); and John Beard, who performed in many of Handel's English-language oratorios.

Bostridge is a tasteful, elegant singer with a beautiful English tenor voice. That voice is soft-grained and sometimes inaudilble in the lower part of his range. Instead of cutting through the sound of the accompanying chamber orchestra Les Violins du Roy, his voice was often instead just part of the aural texture. His sound is not in the least Italianate, or—fatally for his performances of opera seria—passionate.

The mismatch between Bostridge's style and his chosen repertory was immediately apparent in the Bajazet arias he sang from Handel's Tamerlano and its model, Francesco Gasparini's Il Bajazet (1711/1719). The Sultan Bajazet is in emotional extremity: he has been defeated by his enemy Tamerlane, is imprisoned, and is only prevented from an honorable warrior's suicide because of his anguish over the fate of his daughter Asteria. None of that was apparent from Bostridge's smooth, restrained delivery of the text. That flatness of affect was especially notable in the aria from Handel's Giulio Cesare (in the 1725 revival the part of Sesto, originally written for soprano Margherita Durastanti, was rewritten for Borosini). From Bostridge's performance, you would never have guessed that Sesto's father has been brutally murdered and that in this aria Sesto vows to take bloody revenge.

Bostridge, a rather tall man, has a habit of tucking his chin into his chest when singing. We were sitting in the mezzanine—usually an ideal spot to hear vocal concerts—but it felt like we were overhearing a performance being given to the first row.

In the second half of the concert Bostridge performed an aria from Vivaldi's Arsilda (1716). Hearing his melancholic, pensive delivery, I thought that he had finally recognized that his style works best in arias requiring affetuoso, or tenderness. Then I read the translation of the aria text and discovered that the character Tamese is singing, "Hostile and cruel fate will see me on my country's throne triumphing over his humiliation." The disconnect between the aria's textual meaning and Bostridge's performance, in this as in the previous arias, was jarring.

I had thought that in general I preferred it when singers allowed the music to convey an aria's emotion, rather than attempting to telegraph it vocally. But Bostridge's bland performance of these fiery opera seria arias showed me the limitations of that approach.

I was thinking that Bostridge's fine, light voice is the sort that is best suited to English-language oratorio—something he probably hates to hear—when he proved me right by singing two arias from Handel's Hercules (1744) and the highlight of the concert, an encore of the sensuous "Softly rise, O southern breeze" from William Boyce's serenata Solomon (1743). Here is a version sung by Howard Crook with the Parley of Instruments, Roy Goodman conducting, from Hyperion CDA66378:

In concert the obbligato bassoon was played exquisitely by Les Violons du Roy's Nadina Mackie Jackson. In fact, the playing of this modern-instrument band employing period-instrument style under the direction of Bernard Labadie was simply brilliant throughout. It was a particular pleasure to hear Boyce's delightful Symphony No. 1 in B-flat major, and afterwards the lovely encore from Solomon, a piece I had never heard before. I found myself wishing that Bostridge and Les Violons would return, but without the opera seria. Instead, how about an all-oratorio program?

The Borrowers: Road, Movie and Action Replayy

2011-05-04T06:39:00.000-07:00

Dev Benegal's Road, Movie (2009) holds out the promise of being a cross between Y Tu Mama Tambien and Cinema Paradiso. Like the former, it features a young man (Vishnu, played by Abhay Deol) on a road trip/rite of passage during which he picks up a beautiful woman (Tannishtha Chatterjee) with whom he becomes involved. Like the latter, it invokes cinematic nostalgia: the ancient truck that Vishnu and his fellow travellers are nursing across the desert is a travelling cinema, with a trove of old movies in back.

Unfortunately Road, Movie doesn't resemble either of its models closely enough. Instead we watch Vishnu and his passengers—Mohammed Faisal as a footpath boy, Chatterjee as a gypsy woman, and veteran Satish Kaushik, who steals the movie from affectless Abhay—rolling across endless vistas of flat, featureless desert in search of a village festival at which to show their movies. The (existential) joke—mild spoiler alert—is that the the festival only materializes once they stop looking.

—End of spoiler—

Another joke, or at least I hope so: they quickly run out of water, but are able to drive for day after day without having to replenish their fuel. Ah, the magic of the movies!

Road, Movie is supposedly based on writer/director Benegal's experiences with a travelling cinema in Rajasthan. And there is a great moment when we watch a group of villagers gazing raptly at a scene from the classic Deewar (1975). But either Benegal had trouble getting rights, or perhaps he realized that showing scenes from classic films might invite unwelcome comparisons to his own effort. In any case, there are only two instances where a film-within-the-film is shown. And the second one, where a silent film comedy is shown to a group of impoverished Rajasthanis, is a scene straight out of the Preston Sturges comedy Sullivan's Travels (1941)—another road movie, come to think of it. Add in the improbable encounters with Chatterjee and with a too-easily-mollified band of dacoits, and Road, Movie satisfies neither as slice-of-life realism nor as an homage to past film classics.

Speaking of movies that borrow from other movies, Action Replayy (2010)—a thinly disguised Hindi remake of Back to the Future (1985)—also disappoints. Bunty (played by Aditya Roy Kapoor and his hair) takes a trip in the time machine of My-Name-Is-Anthony-Gonsalves (Randhir Kapoor) back to the 1970s; he wants to make his parents (Akshay Kumar and Aishwarya Rai) fall in love and stop their bickering in the present. Don't think about that chronology too hard—wouldn't that make college-boy Bunty well over 30 in the present day? And wouldn't it have been easier (and avoided a few time-travel paradoxes) just to have convinced his parents to go to couples counseling?

Anyway, the only justification for a plot this lame is to provide an excuse for some fabulous 70s fashions and music, plus some comic future-meets-past scenes. Most of these opportunities are missed, with the biggest disappointment being Pritam's distinctly uninspired musical efforts. Perhaps the anti-plagiarism indemnity director Vipul Shah allegedly made Pritam sign inhibited him; if there was ever a soundtrack that could have used some borrowing, it's this one. The Holi song "Chhan Ke Mohalla" the only number that's at all memorable. Which is not to say that it musically attempts to evoke the period, because it (like most of the rest of the soundtrack) doesn't:

Aish is the one bright spot in the movie, but the focus is unfortunately on Akshay. I won't even mention the story's regressive sexual politics, because there are too many reasons already to skip this one.

Poly Styrene, 1957-2011

2011-04-26T22:19:00.000-07:00

Poly Styrene died yesterday of breast cancer. As a teenager she was the lead singer and songwriter for one of the best punk bands ever, X-Ray Spex. She was a nonconformist even among the rebels and misfits of punk rock: she was short, wore braces, wasn't rail-thin, designed her own clothes (often in bright colors, an anomaly in punk), and was multi-racial. She was smart, wickedly funny (her lyrics are great), and absolutely electrifying onstage. Her voice was and will remain unforgettable:

Video for "Identity" (1978); thanks to goldenhinde

Why BBC literary adaptations are so delightful: Daniel Deronda edition

2011-04-22T22:07:00.000-07:00

1. The screenplays are literate

(Usually a very good sign: he wrote the screenplays for Pride & Prejudice (1995) and Bleak House (2005), among many others)

2. The direction is striking

(He also directed The King's Speech (2010))

3. The casts are excellent

Amanda Root (of the exquisite Persuasion (1995)) as Mrs. Davilow

Hugh Bonneville (of Downton Abbey (2010)) as Grandcourt

Romola Garai (of Emma (2009)) as Gwendolen

Hugh Dancy (of The Jane Austen Book Club (2007)) as Daniel

Johdi May (of The Mayor of Casterbridge (2003)) as Mirah

4. The interiors are amazing

(Shweta, I hope you're noting the chandeliers!)

5. There's passion...

6. ...and skullduggery

(You may recognize David Bamber, the loathsome Mr. Collins in Pride & Prejudice)

7. Not to mention immense staircases

8. ...immense chignons...

9. ..and last but not least, immense bustles!

What's not to love?

Facebook is selling your information to advertisers

2011-04-17T07:49:00.000-07:00

There's an article in the Los Angeles Times this morning by Jessica Guynn about how Facebook is mining its users' profiles, status updates, posts, likes and friends, and selling that information to advertisers. Guynn gives an example: "If a Facebook user becomes a fan of 1-800-FLOWERS, her friends might receive ads telling them that she likes the floral delivery service."

"Facebook says it does not disclose information that would allow advertisers to identify individual users, but filters them based on geography, age or specific interests," Guynn writes. "It also lets users control whether companies such as 1-800-FLOWERS can display the users' names to others to promote products."

Perhaps someone can explain to me how an advertiser can show an ad to your Facebook friends which is based on your interests and which contains your name, and yet not have received any personally identifying information about you.

Here's a link to the complete article: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-facebook-ads-20110417,0,1887797.story

Update 18 April 2011: The Guardian UK has posted a video interview with Cory Doctorow in which he points out that users of social networking sites are actively rewarded—with attention, links, friends, etc.—for disclosing more personal information online, resulting in what he calls a "privacy apocalypse." You can view the interview here; Cory Doctorow has his own site, craphound.com, where you can also view this interview, as well as find links to his articles, stories and books.

John Steane, 1928 - 2011

2011-03-28T22:21:00.000-07:00

Anyone who has ever tried to write about music, and particularly singing, in a way that is both meaningful and free of technical language knows how incredibly difficult it is. John Steane was brilliant at it, as he proved over many decades of writing about music: first as the author of the never-surpassed The Grand Tradition: Seventy Years of Singing on Record, 1900-1970 (Scribners, 1974), then as a columnist for Gramophone, Opera Now and other publications. He had deep knowledge, boundless enthusiasm, and unassuming eloquence at his command. Most of all, though, he conveyed the emotional power and distinct individuality of the human voice, and made his readers want to listen with the same keen intelligence and warm appreciation.

Here is a small sample of his work, from a post I never quite got around to writing about words in opera (and Indian film songs). It is from his "Aria" feature in the May/June 2008 issue of Opera Now; he's writing about Lensky's "Kuda, kuda vy udalis" from Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin:

"Rather in the spirit of that famous child who is supposed to have expressed a preference for radio over television on the grounds that 'the picture is better,' I find much to be said for opera in a foreign language. In Italy, for example, I'm told that opera might be more popular among the young were it to be sung in English so that the embarrassing words would not be quite so mercilessly intelligible. To us, poor Lensky's solo before the fatal duel on the early winter's morning is beautiful and intensely moving in Russian, German, Italian or French. But oh, how banal the words sound in English translation. And not just the words. The ideas seem trite and the emotions sentimental. Not that we require originality from Lensky in his predicament, still less literary polish (even though he is a poet by profession, and creation of Pushkin). It is that these formalized expressions don't ring true, and the more clearly we hear and understand the words the less conviction they carry as the real utterance of real individual in these dire circumstances."

I have to interrupt here to say that my objection to English words is somewhat different. I don't require the words to simulate "the real utterance of a real individual," but rather that the words help convey the emotional truth of that character in that moment. Heightened expression is fine with me; overwrought or thuddingly obvious expression isn't.

Back to J.S.:

"The music is a different matter altogether. The sad melody we have heard in the prelude played over by the cello perfectly embodies our pity for the young man. As elegiac phrases gather urgency, so our compassion is intensified, and when the climax is reached, with the aria's single fortissimo, the heart opens in sympathy. Then, when Tchaikovsky brings back the opening phrases as in a musical coda, the effect is of more than formal artistic satifaction: rather the forlorn reiteration of an unanswerable question and the sorrowful acceptance of a young life lost.

"It is music that, as we say, 'speaks' to us. We don't want to rob Lensky of language—we want to hear his voice, but at the same time to have the freedom of illusion which spares us the banality of:

"Shall I survive the day's dawning?
I vainly try to read its warning.
It shrouds itself in mystery:
No matter, this is fate's decree."

This insight—that opera communicates on levels that transcend the literal meaning of the words—is one that I remind myself of every time I find myself squinting at supertitles rather than really listening. John Steane always listened, with deep attention, and had the ability to express what he was hearing with a rare generosity of spirit.

Here is a link to the obituary published today in the Guardian UK: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/mar/28/john-steane-obituary

Update 29 March 2011: I wrote this post last night as soon as I heard the dismaying news about John Steane's death (he died on March 17, but his Guardian obituary was published yesterday). This morning I took The Grand Tradition off my shelf and looked at its author biography (probably written by Steane himself): "John Steane is best known for his work in the field of Elizabethan literature. He has written a critical study of Marlowe, and edited plays by Jonson and Dekker, as well as the major works of Nashe and Marlowe's complete plays. He has also written a book on Tennyson. His life-long amateur interest, of which this book is the culmination, has been in singing and the gramophone." Lovely, and characteristic of his unfeigned modesty, that the "amateur interest" in music (which has resulted in the 600+ pages we're holding) is only mentioned in the last sentence. Unmentioned entirely are the decades he spent as a beloved teacher of English at Merchant Taylors' School.

You can find a partial list of his published works at WorldCat; it excludes the many entries he wrote for the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the New Grove Dictionary of Opera (now both part of Oxford Music Online), and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. And, of course, it excludes perhaps his most widely-read works: his many articles and columns for music magazines.

Who owns Kafka?

2011-03-13T14:03:00.000-07:00

Who owns, or should be able to own, the work of a great artist? A trunk filled with unpublished work by Franz Kafka has sparked a court case that, as the philosopher Judith Butler reports in the current London Review of Books, raises a host of questions about national identity, cultural heritage, the commodification of art, and the meaning of ownership, whether individual or collective.

The facts are both straightforward, and, as with everything to do with Kafka, extraordinarily convoluted. Born in Prague to Jewish parents during the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Kafka spoke and wrote in German. After publishing a number of short stories and novellas, he died in 1924 leaving no will, but only a letter to his friend Max Brod:

Dearest Max, my last request: Everything I leave behind me (in my bookcase, linen-cupboard, and my desk both at home and in the office, or anywhere else where anything may have got to and meets your eye), in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others'), sketches, and so on, to be burned unread; also all writings and sketches which you or others may possess; and ask those others for them in my name. Letters which they do not want to hand over to you, they should at least promise faithfully to burn themselves.

Of course, Brod did not burn Kafka's work, but instead immediately began editing and arranging for the publication of his novels Der Prozess (The Trial, 1925), Das Schloss (The Castle, 1926), and Amerika (originally entitled Der Verschollene, or The Disappearance, 1927); a collection of short stories, parables, and other pieces, Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer (The Great Wall of China, 1931); and an edition of his Gesammelte Schriften (Collected Works, 1935-37).

Brod, a longtime Zionist, emigrated to Palestine in 1939, carrying the Kafka manuscripts with him. He later edited editions of Kafka's diaries and letters, but refused to allow other scholars to have access to the manuscripts, or to place them in a library, museum or archive. However, as war loomed during the 1956 Suez Crisis, Brod sent the bulk of the manuscripts to safekeeping in a Swiss bank vault. After lengthy negotiations involving Brod, Kafka's publisher Salman Schocken, Kafka's niece and heir Marianne Steiner (daughter of Kafka's sister Valerie), and literary scholar Malcolm Pasley, the manuscripts were transferred in 1961 to the Bodleian Library at Oxford.

However, Brod still retained the manuscript of Der Prozess (which Kafka had given him in 1920) and an unknown quantity of unpublished material. On his death in 1968 these manuscripts were bequeathed to his secretary (and, apparently, lover) Esther Hoffe. In 1988, she put the manuscript of Der Prozess up for auction at Sotheby's, where it sold for $1.98 million. Herbert Tenschert, the West German book dealer who placed the winning bid on behalf of the Deutsche Literaturarchiv Marbach, was quoted after the auction as saying "This is perhaps the most important work in 20th-century German literature, and Germany had to have it." Kafka would surely have appreciated the multiple ironies: not only was he not German, but this wasn't the first time a German government had expressed keen interest in his work: the Nazis had seized 20 of his notebooks and a cache of letters from his lover Dora Diamant in Berlin in 1933, and probably burned them.

Kafka's work has now become a nexus of competing national, cultural, ethnic, and mercenary claims. Esther Hoffe's daughters, Eva and Ruth, have now inherited the remaining Kafka manuscripts, which they want to sell—by weight, without an inventory or any other kind of assessment. However, several parties are suing to contest the Hoffe sisters' claims to the manuscripts: the National Library of Israel asserts that the Kafka manuscripts are "cultural assets belonging to the Jewish people," and so belong in its collection (Kafka wrote in a 1914 diary entry, "What have I in common with the Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself..."). The Deutsche Literaturarchiv Marbach is also in court, suggesting that the remainder of the manuscripts ought to be reunited with Der Prozess in its collection. This isn't the first time that competing claims have been made about Kafka's work; Butler quotes a letter Kafka wrote in 1916 to Felice Bauer:

And incidentally, won't you tell me what I really am; in the last Neue Rundschau...the writer says: "There is something fundamentally German about K's narrative art." In Max's article on the other hand: "K's stories are among the most typically Jewish documents of our time." A difficult case. Am I a circus rider on two horses? Alas, I am no rider, but lie prostrate on the ground.

Further recommended reading: David Mairowitz and R. Crumb's Kafka (Fantagraphics Books, 2007). The latest edition of this book, valuable especially for Crumb's haunting illustrations of Kafka's life and works.

The Pallisers

2011-01-31T20:26:00.000-08:00

The Pallisers (1974) is a revered BBC adaptation from the early 1970s, the era of other classic series such as The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1970) and Elizabeth R (1971). It is based on the six Palliser novels (1864 - 1879) of Anthony Trollope, plus an episode from his The Small House At Allington (1864).

Trollope's Palliser novels are a rich, complex portrait of high-Victorian politics and society as seen through the intertwining lives of an ever-shifting ensemble of characters. Chief among them are Plantagenet Palliser, a rising politician and heir to the Duke of Omnium; Lady Glencora, who reluctantly agrees to an arranged marriage with Palliser, but who loves another man, Burgo Fitzgerald; and Phineas Finn, a naïve and idealistic young man who over the course of two of the novels undergoes a political and sentimental education.

We've just finished reading (aloud!) the first novel in the series, Can You Forgive Her?, and thought that we'd enjoy Simon Raven's highly-regarded 26-part BBC series. After all, we love the BBC adaptations of George Eliot's Middlemarch (1994) and of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1995) and Persuasion (1995).

But almost immediately The Pallisers goes wrong—horribly wrong. Our first surprise was that, like Elizabeth R and The Six Wives of Henry VIII, it was shot on video, which makes even the gorgeous settings and costumes look flat and cheap. But that would be a minor annoyance if the casting and Raven's script weren't so badly off.

Trollope writes of Plantagenet Palliser at his first appearance in The Small House At Allington: "He was about five-and-twenty years of age...dressed very quietly, never changing the colour or form of his garments; and in society was quiet, reserved, and very often silent. He was tall, slight, and not ill-looking..." [1] His youth is highly significant; one of the recurring issues in Can You Forgive Her? is Palliser's relative inexperience in comparison to the other men of power with whom he is vying for the position of Chancellor of the Exchequer. Unfortunately the actor portraying him, Philip Latham, was 45 at the time the series was filmed, and if anything looks older. This is just one example of the persistent miscasting in The Pallisers.

The episode from The Small House At Allington that is included in the first episode of the series is Plantagenet's flirtation with the married Lady Dumbello. She is very beautiful and (thanks to her marriage) very rich, but, as her name might suggest, not especially vivacious or witty. One of Trollope's jokes is that these two "reserved" and "undemonstrative" people, who can hardly bring themselves to utter more than a few polite banalities to each other, apparently contemplate having an affair.

However, in the extended opening scene of The Pallisers, a garden party, Palliser and Lady Dumbello are hardly reserved or undemonstrative. We see them move away together from the rest of the guests and, in a shaded nook, speak animatedly to each other about the financial issues facing the nation (a subject about which Trollope's Lady Dumbello would be unlikely—or unable—to carry on a conversation). Here there's another error of casting, or direction. Lady Dumbello is portrayed with a very thick upper-class accent (so clipped and mumbled we could hardly understand what she was saying). In Trollope's novel, however, before she became Lady Dumbello she was Griselda Grantly, the daughter of a country priest—someone unlikely to have such an upper-crust accent. In fact, perhaps it is Lady Dumbello's anxiety about revealing her middle-class origins that makes her so reticent in company. Trollope also writes that "she was a lady still very young, having as yet been little more than two years married." [2] So Lady Dumbello is likely to be in her early 20s; Rachel Herbert, the actress who portrays her, looks to be in her mid-30s, and (not to be unkind) does not have the sort of looks that would have all of society competing for her favor, as does Trollope's Lady Dumbello.

Yet another example of miscasting: Lady Glencora M'Cluskie "has only been out a few months," as we are told by one of the characters in The Pallisers, placing her in her late teens. The actress portraying her, Susan Hampshire, was 37, and even though she looks younger than her age is still far too old. Plus, Raven has her behaving far too brazenly with her swain Burgo Fitzgerald. Lady Glencora is flirtatious, but would hardly kiss her partner openly on the dance floor before all her family and acquaintances—no young woman of her class, situation and era would.

As for Burgo Fitzgerald: "He was one of those young men with dark hair and blue eyes,—who wear no beard, and are certainly among the handsomest of all God's creatures. No more handsome man than Burgo Fitzgerald lived in his days; and this merit at any rate was his,—that he thought nothing of his own beauty." [3] Barry Justice, who plays Burgo, has light brown hair and brown eyes. I mean no disrespect, and I am not the most reliable judge of men's looks, but I would not say that no more handsome man than Barry Justice lived in his days, even if those days were the mid-70s. (You can judge for yourself to the right; images "borrowed" from Ellen and Jim Have a Blog Too.)

The travesty continues: George Vavasor is not only (of course!) too old (Trollope says that he is "a year or two over thirty," while the actor Gary Watson looks to be well over forty)—he has no facial scar! Trollope: "one side of his face been dreadfully scarred by a cicatrice, which in healing, had left a dark indented line down from his left eye to his lower jaw. That black ravine running through his cheek was certainly ugly. On some occasions, when he was angry or disappointed, it was very hideous; for he would so contort his face that the scar would, as it were, stretch itself out, revealing all its horrors, and his countenance would become all scar." [4]

Finally, there's Dolly Longestaffe, a man apparently in late middle age who rather too explicitly explains all the Palliser characters and their connections to George Vavasor (and, of course, to us—he's a bit too obviously the screenwriter's stand-in). The only problem is that Dolly Longestaffe is not even a character in the first five Palliser novels. He doesn't appear until the final book, The Duke's Children (1879), after being introduced in the (non-Palliser) The Way We Live Now (1875). In The Way We Live Now Dolly is a frivolous man who is somewhere between his late twenties and mid-thirties; if the action in the first episode of The Pallisers is taking place ten years earlier, Dolly is twice as old as he should be (the actor Donald Pickering was in his forties, and is made up to look even older).

All this occurs in the first ten minutes of the first episode! Alas, that is all of that episode, or of any episode of The Pallisers, that we will ever see. Those who report enjoying the series must either have never read Trollope, or are better able than we are to block out what they remember of the books. Instead, we'll be returning to the pleasures of Trollope's writing, read aloud.

Update 3 Feb 2011: The Duke's garden party, which I had assumed was an invention of The Pallisers screenwriter Simon Raven, is based on an important scene in Trollope—but one that occurs towards the end of the second Palliser novel, Phineas Finn (1867). It's a brilliant scene, in which the rising politician Phineas Finn encounters in turn each of the three women (the unhappily married Lady Laura Kennedy, the unhappily engaged Violet Effingham, and the unhappily dis-engaged Madame Max Goesler) who represent his past, present, and future marital aspirations.

But Raven almost throws away this scene. He uses it as a means of introducing several of the major characters, and it is a spectacular set-piece. But because the characters have not yet been laboriously explained to us by Dolly Longestaffe, their actions and relationships don't yet carry any emotional weight. It's another missed opportunity; the scene would have been far more effective in its true place in the saga.

-----------------------

1. The Small House At Allington, Ch. XXIII.
2. The Small House At Allington, Ch. XVII.
3. Can You Forgive Her?, Ch. XVIII.
4. Can You Forgive Her?, Ch. IV

Bollywood mini-reviews

2010-12-31T15:17:00.000-08:00

Over the past year we watched something on the order of 30 Indian films, but I only wrote about a handful of them. Sometimes they had already been covered in such loving (or excoriating) detail by other writers that I didn't feel I had much to add. Sometimes they didn't seem worth a full-length post. And sometimes life just caught up with me and I didn't have the time.

So here are some capsule reviews of films that, for one reason or another, never got the full-length treatment.

Dor (String, 2006) is well-written, beautifully filmed, and offers two strong performances by its lead actresses, Gul Panang and Ayesha Takia. Zeenat (Panang) learns that her husband faces a death sentence in Saudia Arabia for the (accidental?) killing of his roommate in a guest-worker dormitory. Zeenat's husband can only be saved by the pardon of the victim's widow Meera (Takia), and so Zeenat travels to Rajasthan to try to find her. Along the way she encounters the itinerant actor Behroopiya (Shreyas Talpade), who—after introducing himself by stealing her belongings—comes to aid her in her search.

Panang is fiercely convincing as the driven Zeenat, showing us both her inner strength and her desperation. Takia, previously cast mainly in lightweight comedies like Dil Maane More!!! (2004) and Home Delivery (2005), gives a subdued and nuanced performance as the young widow Meera. The scene where Meera discovers that Zeenat's friendship has an ulterior motive is heartrending, and very real.

The only thing that makes me hesitate with Dor is that, while its surfaces suggest the gritty realism of parallel cinema, as it goes along it more and more betrays its filmi heart. Talpade's character is simply too good to be true, a self-conscious star turn that feels jarringly out-of-place at times. Director Nagesh Kukunoor incorporates multiple references to Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (2001) and Bunty aur Babli (2005), and in Dor's final moments he directly quotes Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995). While I love Bollywood in-references, I think the movie would have been even stronger without these touches. Still, a compelling film about the power of emotional bonds between women.

Two with Kamalinee Mukherjee: Anand (2004) and Godavari (2006)

The best thing about these two Telugu movies is Kamalinee Mukherjee, who is delightful as the confident, independent young heroines. In Anand she is Rupa, a young woman alone in the world who is pursued by two over-persistent lovers. One of them, Anand (Raja), moves in next door and randomly accosts her, and the other, Rahul (Anuj Gurwara), tries to rape her. After Anand saves Rupa by thrashing Rahul in the obligatory fight scene, he then blames her for the attack because she was too friendly with Rahul (!). Writer/director Sekhar Kammula creates a wonderful heroine, and then unfortunately matches her with a woefully conventional, not to say sexist, hero. Despite its charms—Kamalinee's performance, and the closely observed interactions between Rupa and her next-door neighbor Anita (Satya Krishnan) and her kids—Anand felt like it would have been better with a better hero.

Godavari, Kammula's next film, has a slightly different hero problem. Sriram (Sumanth) is travelling by boat down the Godavari River to attend the wedding of Raji (Neetu Chandra), the woman he loves but whose family has arranged her marriage with another suitor. As they float downriver to the temple of Lord Ram at Bhadrachalam, he meets Seeta (Kamalinee). Ram, Seeta, Bhadrachalam—that's not overdetermined, is it? The morose Ram and the plucky Seeta argue constantly, which means, of course, that they're falling in love, even if they're not quite aware of it. Unfortunately in the second half there's an odd incident that makes us doubt whether Ram is really ready to have someone like Seeta—or, really, anyone—in his life.

Seeta is a complex character, very sympathetically portrayed by Kamalinee: she's smart, open, generous, and aware of her own attractiveness, but given to occasional moments of doubt and jealousy. The shots of the river trip and the details of the community life on board the boat are wonderful, beautifully framed by director Kammula, and, together with Kamalinee's charming performance, are the best reason to watch Godavari.

Three with Priyanka Chopra: What's Your Raashee? (What's Your Sign?, 2009), Pyaar Impossible! (Love Impossible, 2010), and Anjaana Anjaani (Strangers, 2010)

Speaking of hero and script problems...

Priyanka may have looked great in the backless, gold-lamé swimsuit she wore in Dostana (2008), but her best asset is her voice, which is low and throaty. As she proves in What's Your Raashee?, though, she's capable of many voices, some extremely grating. Priyanka plays 12 hopeful brides, each representing the supposed characteristics of a different zodiac sign. Watching Priyanka portray 12 different women is pretty enjoyable, but the film gets bogged down in complicated subplots featuring the blandly handsome but distinctly uncharismatic Harman Baweja. Three and a half hours is a long time to spend in his company.

Things don't improve a great deal in Pyaar Impossible!, where we're asked to believe that Uday Chopra is a software engineer. Uday's really not bad in this; the role of the geeky Abhay forces him to tone down his usually all-too-apparent self-love. Abhay manages to be somewhat endearing, as long as you don't think too hard about his stalking of college beauty Alisha (Priyanka). I also have a soft spot for the picturization of the title song, where Abhay shows Alisha how brutal the dating market can be for nonconformists (though I have news for director Jugal Hansraj and his costume department: Priyanka would have no trouble getting a date in those cool nerd glasses). But despite the best efforts of Priyanka and Advika Yadav, who plays her bratty 7-year-old daughter, the silicon-wafer-thin story—written by Uday himself!—doesn't bear a moment's consideration.

Priyanka finally gets to play opposite a plausible hero, Ranbir Kapoor, in Anjaana Anjaani—only the movie's entire budget seems to have been spent on its stars and location shooting, with nothing left over for script development. (Curiously—or perhaps not—no writers are credited on the film's Wikipedia or IMDB pages.) Akash (Ranbir) is about to jump off a bridge when he's interrupted by Kiara (Priyanka), who is also there to jump. Nothing about this film is surprising in the least: we understand where it's going in the first five minutes, but it takes the rest of the film for these uninvolving characters to catch up with us. In the meantime, their cluelessness and self-involvement becomes ever more irritating.

There is one great moment: Kiara and Akash have agreed to a reunion on the bridge at midnight on New Year's Eve, but he hasn't shown. Dejected, she's turning to leave—and then she hears his voice. In quick succession, about a dozen distinct emotions cross Priyanka's face. It's amazing to watch, but one great moment doesn't make up for the rest of the movie.

Karthik Calling Karthik (2010) is a slickly filmed and atmospheric mystery/thriller with appealing stars in Farhan Akhtar and Deepika Padukone, and at least one catchy tune in Shankar-Eshaan-Loy's "Uff Teri Adaa." But the solution to the mystery is so ludicrous that it reveals the rest of the movie to be the empty exercise in style that it is.

I Hate Luv Storys [sic] (2010): Halfway through IHLS I asked my partner, "Do you notice a lack of chemistry between Imran Khan and Sonam Kapoor?" She replied, "I notice a lack of chemistry between Imran and the camera."

And that's the problem with over-saturating your film with references to DDLJ (1995), Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998), Dil Chahta Hai (2001), Kal Ho Naa Ho (2003), and many other romantic classics—you invite comparisons between your lead couple and the most charismatic jodis in latter-day Hindi cinema. In comparison, both Imran and Sonam are, well, inert, separately and together. And that's the main problem with IHLS—all the in-references just serve to highlight the movie's own inadequacies. It's early days yet for Imran and Sonam—this is only his fourth movie, and her third—so they may get better. I'll check back in a few years.

Dulha Mil Gaya (Found A Groom, 2010): Speaking of comparisons, Fardeen Khan should make sure that he never has to share a screen with Shah Rukh Khan again. FK's lack of magnetism is always obvious, but it becomes so glaring after SRK enters in the second half that I felt embarrassed for him. The one entertaining moment is "Dilrubaon Ke Jalwe," which deliriously mashes up SRK's and Sushmita Sen's filmographies. Otherwise, this one is for SRK completists only.

Happy New Year to everyone!

Favorites of 2010: Music

2010-12-19T21:45:00.000-08:00

A continuation of my Favorites of 2010: Books and Favorites of 2010: Movies and television. As before, my favorites weren't necessarily produced, but instead first encountered, in 2010.

Music

Favorite rock recording: Patti Smith, Twelve. Columbia 87251 (2007).

Twelve is Patti Smith's album of covers, but it sounds and feels like a really good Patti Smith record. Some of the songs were originally by artists with whom she obviously has a strong affinity: Jimi Hendrix ("Are You Experienced?"), Mick Jagger & Keith Richards ("Gimme Shelter"), Jim Morrison ("Soul Kitchen"), Bob Dylan (though the song is a surprise: the born-again era "Changing of the Guards"). Other choices are more unexpected: Tears for Fears ("Everybody Wants to Rule the World"), Allman Brothers ("Midnight Rider"), Paul Simon ("Boy In the Bubble"), Stevie Wonder ("Pastime Paradise"). Many of the songs she includes are so iconic in their original versions that it's an act of daring even to attempt to cover them--only such a strongly individual performer could get away with it. A good companion to her recently released memoir, Just Kids. Thanks very much to Robin for sending this along.

Favorite classical instrumental recording: (tie)

Joseph Haydn: Baryton Trios. Balázs Kakuk, baryton; Péter Lukács, viola; Tibor Párkányi, cello. Hungaroton 31174 (1989).

The baryton was an 18th-century instrument that falls somewhere between a viola da gamba and a cello in its sonority. In addition to bowed gut strings, though, the baryton had another 8 to 20 sympathetic metal strings that could be plucked by the performer. These baryton trios were originally written for Haydn's patron Prince Nicholas Esterházy, an avid amateur baryton player; Haydn himself may have played the viola part. They are lovely works that generally reach neither for deep profundity nor for spectacular virtuosity, but instead for intimacy and melodic pleasure. One remarkable thing about the trios is that they involve only low(ish) strings, which results in a very rich sound. An utterly charming recording.

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: Sonatas for viola da gamba and basso continuo. Paolo Pandolfo, viola da gamba; Rinaldo Alessandrini, harpsichord. Brilliant Classics 93362 (2008, originally recorded 1995).

Johann Sebastian Bach's second son, in contrast to his father, is sometimes accused of a lack of profundity. But these sonatas are masterful and expressive works that stand comparison with the senior Bach's own viola da gamba sonatas. At least, in these performances, which involve two of the most brilliant musicians to emerge from Italy's early music movement. This wonderful disc makes me wonder what other C.P.E. Bach treasures I've overlooked.

Favorite classical vocal recording: Lorraine Hunt Lieberson: Lorraine at Emmanuel: Celebrating the Lives of Craig Smith and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. The Orchestra of Emmanuel Music; Craig Smith and John Harbison, conductors. Avie 2130 (2008).

Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's voice was "primally beautiful, rich in tone and true in pitch, warm and deep and wine-dark," as Alex Ross once wrote.[1] If you ever had the privilege of seeing Lorraine Hunt Lieberson onstage, you know what a thrilling experience it was to hear that voice live. And it wasn't just that her voice was gorgeous; her commitment to conveying textual and emotional meaning was total. During the time you'd spent in her company you felt that you had lived more deeply.

This disc documents three concert performances given at Boston's Emmanuel Church: two arias from Bach cantatas, and Dejanira's arias from Handel's oratorio Hercules. At first glance the programming seems a bit odd: the Bach works are sacred, the Handel secular; the Bach is in German, the Handel in English; and the dates of recording are several years apart (the earliest is from 1992, while the latest is from 1999). But this disc holds together thanks to Hunt Lieberson's superb performances. She was once a violist with the Orchestra of Emmanuel Music, and it's easy to believe that she felt a special connection with the ensemble. And with the music: conductor Craig Smith famously founded Emmanuel Music in order to perform Bach's cantatas, and Hunt Lieberson had performed many as both a member of the orchestra and as a featured vocalist. She also clearly loved Handel: she became famous in part for her assumption of the role of Sesto in Peter Sellars' production of Handel's Giulio Cesare at Glimmerglass in 1985, and made a specialty of Handel roles in her recordings with the Bay Area's Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra. Hunt Lieberson's life was tragically cut short by breast cancer in 2006, making even more precious the rare documents (such as this one) of her profound gifts.

Favorite (semi-)opera recording: Henry Purcell, The Fairy Queen. Jonathan Kent, stage director; Paul Brown, designer. Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment/The Glyndebourne Chorus; William Christie, conductor. Opus Arte DVD 1931 D (2010).

The Fairy Queen of the title is Titania, from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Purcell's music was originally performed as a masque in between acts of a heavily cut performance of the Shakespeare play, and remarkably that is how it is performed here. It makes for a long performance—the running time is 230 minutes, or nearly 4 hours—but in restoring the Shakepearean context the director Jonathan Kent allows Purcell's songs to reflect and comment on the action of the play. And the staging of the musical material is highly imaginative and really fun: I'm pretty sure that Purcell's original score didn't call for giant bunnies to bound onstage and start having sex in a variety of acrobatic positions (the, er, choreography is by Kim Brandstrup). The cast of vocalists (which includes Lucy Crowe and Carolyn Sampson) is excellent and quite characterful. Conductor William Christie's long familiarity with this score is evident in the sparkling playing he draws from the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. A wonderful example of how Baroque theater can be reimagined for modern audiences without doing violence to its original meanings.

Favorite opera performance: (three-way tie)

Mozart and Da Ponte: Le Nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro). San Francisco Opera, with Danielle De Niese (Susanna), Luca Pisaroni (Figaro), Ellie Dehn (The Countess), Lucas Meachem (Count Almaviva), and Heidi Stober (Cherubino); Nicola Luisotti, conductor. Seen September 21 and October 5, 2010.

In an earlier post I wrote about why Le Nozze di Figaro is, for me, the greatest opera ever written. The San Francisco Opera's handsome Figaro, directed by John Copley, showed how effective a production can be when it pays attention to what the composer and librettist intended. It's set in the late 18th century (the time of its composition), and the sets and costumes realistically attempt to evoke a rural Spanish estate. There were a few missed opportunities—for some reason directors almost universally feel that they have to mess about with the garden scenes, which have no need to be changed—but mainly the action was straightforward and persuasively realized. Of course, it helped to have an excellent cast, with Danielle De Niese as an especially delightful Susanna, and Ellie Dehn as a touchingly vulnerable Countess. So good we saw it twice! (Photo: Danielle De Niese as Susanna; credit: Marty Sohl.)

Handel: Serse (Xerxes). Berkeley West Edge Opera, with Paula Rasmussen (Serse), Angela Cadelago (Romilda), Ryan Belongie (Arsamene), Anna Slate (Atalanta), Sonia Gariaeff (Amastre), Don Sherrill (Elviro); Alan Curtis, conductor. Seen November 21, 2010.

I wrote about this production in an earlier post. A wonderfully ambitious production for a small local company, with a conductor and prima donna of international stature and an accomplished supporting cast. This is exactly what companies like BWEO should be doing: programming under-performed gems in clever productions that make virtues of tight-budget necessities. I hope that the success of Serse leads to future productions of other comic or semi-comic Baroque operas: I vote for Cavalli's La Calisto.

Blow: Venus & Adonis. Magnificat, with Catherine Webster (Venus), Peter Becker (Adonis), and José Lemos (Cupid). Warren Stewart, conductor. Seen October 10, 2010.

I also wrote about this production in an earlier post. Venus & Adonis, like its successor by Purcell, Dido & Aeneas, is a lovely chamber opera that packs an emotional punch well out of proportion to its size. As I wrote earlier, "Magnificat made a compelling case for the work; given its obviously high quality and modest scale, I'm amazed that it isn't programmed more frequently....Thanks are due to Stewart and Magnificat for bringing this unjustly neglected work to life."

1. Alex Ross, "Fervor: Remembering Lorraine Hunt Lieberson," The New Yorker, September 25, 2006.

Favorites of 2010: Books

2010-12-12T12:43:00.000-08:00

A continuation of my Favorites of 2010: Movies and television. As before, my favorites were first encountered this year, but not necessarily produced this year.

Books

2010 was for me the Year of the Victorian Novel. For the first time I discovered the pleasures of curling up in an overstuffed armchair with overstuffed 19th-century fiction.

Favorite novel: George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871-72)

In my earlier full-length post on the "three love problems" of Middlemarch I wrote, "its characters are so fully realized that readers will recognize in them their neighbors, relatives and friends—and especially, parts of themselves that usually remain unacknowledged." Eliot writes with an almost painful psychological acuity and unsparingly dissects the emotional dynamics of love and marriage.

Runners-up: (tie)

The novels of Anthony Trollope: The Way We Live Now (1875), Can You Forgive Her? (1865), The Small House at Allington (1864), He Knew He Was Right (1869)

Trollope perhaps has a more conventional view of the roles of men and women than does George Eliot. And it's difficult to decide if the prejudices and conventionality of his upper-class characters are entirely their own, or whether they're not shared to a lesser or greater extent by the author. But if in Middlemarch George Eliot peoples a provincial village with richly drawn characters, Trollope manages to people the entire city of London and several surrounding towns. The only thing more astonishing than the sheer volume of his output—in the decade between The Small House at Allington and The Way We Live Now he wrote 18 other fat novels, plus short stories, essays, plays, travel sketches, and a school textbook (!)—is its uniformly high quality. His female characters are especially vivid, and Trollope makes their dilemmas keenly felt: there are women who love men unworthy of them (Lily Dale in The Small House at Allington, Marie Melmotte in The Way We Live Now, and Lady Glencora in Can You Forgive Her?), women who face family opposition to the men they love (Hetta Carbury in The Way We Live Now, Dorothy Stanbury and Nora Rowley in He Knew He Was Right), women trapped in difficult marriages (Lady Glencora, and Emily Trevelyan in He Knew He Was Right), and women who find no outlet for their intelligence and their passionate desire to make a difference in the world (Alice Vavasor in Can You Forgive Her?). Trollope's fictional world is almost Tolstoyan in the complexity and richness of its characters.

The late novels of Machado de Assis: Dom Casmurro (1899) and Memorial de Aires (Counselor Aires' Memoirs, 1908)

Six months ago I wrote a post on Dom Casmurro; after The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas I think it's Machado's strongest novel. But I have a special affection as well for his last book, Memorial de Aires, translated by Helen Caldwell as Counselor Ayres' Memorial (University of California Press, 1982). In a series of diary entries we follow Aires' observations of the slowly blossoming romance of a beautiful (and somewhat reluctant) young widow, and his elegiac reflections on love and the passing of youth. The final passages of this slim story beautifully crystallize Aires' melancholy acceptance of time's erosive power on memory and the emotions. The book is a masterpiece in miniature.

Favorite non-fiction book: (tie)

Zadie Smith, Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (Penguin, 2009)

I posted about Zadie Smith's "smart, insightful and beautifully written" essays earlier this year. "Dead Man Laughing" affectingly describes the death of her father and their shared love of British comedy, while "Middlemarch and Everybody" inspired me to pick up Eliot's wonderful novel for the first time. Changing My Mind is now out in paperback.

Patti Smith, Just Kids (Ecco, 2010)

In the summer of 1967 the 20-year-old Patti Smith arrived in New York City with $32 and a battered copy of Rimbaud's Illuminations in her pocket. By chance she encountered Robert Mapplethorpe, and the two began a romantic and artistic partnership that transformed both of their lives. Just Kids is written in an autodidact's style which is direct, genuine, unsentimental, at times incantory, and like her music, utterly compelling. The book won the 2010 National Book Award for Nonfiction and is now out in paperback.

Next time: Music

Favorites of 2010: Movies and television

2010-12-10T21:38:00.000-08:00

The end of the year tends to put one—or at least me—in a reflective and retrospective mood. What follows is a list of my favorite movies and television from 2010; books, music, and art will be included in my next post.

Please note that these are not movies or TV shows that were necessarily created or released in 2010, but rather ones that I first encountered in 2010. As you'll see, almost all of these favorites date from years or decades earlier.

Bollywood 2010

Is it just me, or was this a pretty dismal year for Bollywood? I found myself following the examples of Memsaab, Beth, and Bollyviewer in turning primarily to Bollywood's Silver and Golden Ages for my viewing pleasure.

Favorite Bollywood movie: (tie)

Seeta aur Geeta (1972)

What a delightful movie! Hema Malini is adorable in a double role as twin sisters separated at birth. Seeta is raised to be a properly submissive daughter in a rich household, but her greedy relatives cruelly exploit her. The spirited Geeta is raised by a poor family and becomes a street performer with her partner Raka (Dharmendra). Of course the twins get switched, their respective families get big surprises, and many catchy R.D. Burman songs (and a few tight slaps) ensue before everything is sorted out. If for some reason you haven't yet seen this charmer (directed by Ramesh Sippy and written by Javed Akhtar, Satish Bhatnagar and Salim Khan) put it at the top of your list.

Sadhna (1958)

Yes, this classic from Yash Chopra's older brother B. R. is a tawaif-with-a-heart-of-gold story. But the great performance of Vyjayanthimala as the courtesan Champabai, the wonderful songs of N. Dutta (music) and Sahir Ludhianvi (lyrics), and the film's powerful indictment of the exploitation and oppression of women, make this a very special experience. As always, I'm lagging behind in my discovery: see Memsaab's post on Sadhna from two years ago, which is beautifully written and filled with screencaps of M.N. Malhotra's gorgeous black and white cinematography.

Favorite Bollywood soundtrack: Barsaat Ki Raat (1960)

This movie is full of wonderful music sung by the great Mohammad Rafi, Lata Mangeshkar and Asha Bhosle. But what makes this one of the greatest soundtracks ever are a series of qawwali competitions where the performances just keep getting more brilliant with every exchange. Rohan (music) and our friend from Sadhna, Sahir Ludhianvi (lyrics), outdid themselves; this film has almost too much great music to take in. And if that's not enough, you get to see the songs picturized on Bharat Bushan, Madhubala, and the sparkling Shyama and Ratna.

Favorite non-Bollywood movie: Tokyo Story (1953)

An elderly couple (Chishu Riyu and Chieko Higashiyama) make a once-in-a-lifetime trip to the big city to see their children and grandchildren—only to discover that no one has any time for them. A radiant Setsuko Hara, the couple's daughter-in-law, is the only one who treats them with kindness; but we can see that her own life is cruelly constrained by her poverty and widowhood. Director/writer Yasujiro Ozu takes this simple story and creates a masterpiece of restraint in which details of the characters' lives and emotions are slowly unveiled. As rich an experience as reading a great novel.

Favorite English-language movie: Flushed Away (2006)

We're big fans of Nick Park's Wallace & Gromit series, but somehow we missed this Aardman Animations feature when it came out. Maybe the comical adventures of rats in the London sewers didn't sound all that appealing at the time. Flushed Away turned out to be hilarious, with sight gags and movie references coming so fast that it's difficult to catch them all. And the characters are voiced by actors Hugh Jackman, Kate Winslet, Ian McKellan and Bill Nighy.

Favorite TV show (on DVD, of course): Middlemarch (1994)

George Eliot's Middlemarch is an 800-page novel, but this excellent BBC/Masterpiece Theater series—written by Andrew Davies of Pride and Prejudice fame—manages to include virtually every major incident in the book (and many of the character-revealing minor ones). A wonderful cast, and of course fabulous costumes and locations, make this another great BBC adaptation.

Runner-up: Glee, Season 1

I wrote about Glee recently; since that post we've continued watching the first season. The story lines are getting ever more absurd, the quality of the music is wildly uneven, and it feels like the last third of the season is just marking time until the big finale. It still manages to be utterly addictive, though.

Next time: Books, music, and art

Handel's Serse

2010-12-04T22:54:00.000-08:00

When I heard that Alan Curtis would be conducting and Paula Rasmussen would be starring in the Berkeley West Edge Opera's production of Handel's Serse (Xerxes, 1738), I was astounded. Curtis is one of the world's foremost conductors of Baroque music, and together with his period instrument orchestra Il Complesso Barocco has made more than a dozen full-length recordings of rarely-performed Handel operas such as Deidamia (1741), Tolomeo (1728), and Floridante (1721). If you're looking for a great place to acquaint yourself with both Curtis and Handel opera, I highly recommend Amor e gelosia: Handel Operatic Duets featuring the beautifully intertwined voices of Patrizia Ciofi and Joyce DiDonato.

Paula Rasmussen is Serse in the only available DVD of the Italian-language version of the opera; her conductor is Christophe Rousset with Les Talens Lyriques, and her co-stars include Sandrine Piau, Isabel Bayrakdarian, Patricia Bardon and Ann Hallenberg. Here's a clip of Rasmussen from this Dresden Semperoper production, performing Serse's exquisite opening aria "Ombra mai fu":

And yes, Serse is singing to a tree, which immediately suggests that Handel intended for the opera to have a less-than-fully-serious tone. Thanks to that unusual mixture of comic and serious elements Serse came in for some criticism in Handel's time. The printed libretto contained a note To the Reader which alerted its first audiences that the story contained "some imbicillities" [sic], though those imbecilities were largely derived from Herodotus' account of Xerxes in his Histories. And Charles Burney, in his A General History of Music (1789) wrote that the libretto "is one of the worst that Handel ever set to Music: for besides feeble writing, there is a mixture of tragic-comedy and buffoonery in it..." In Handel's time, serious and comic elements in opera tended to be strictly separated: an opera was either seria or buffa. Handel, however, mixed the serious and the comic in operas such as Agrippina (1709), Partenope (1730) and Serse, looking back to the 17th-century models of Monteverdi and Cavalli, and anticipating the Da Ponte and Mozart operas of the 1780s.

With a conductor and lead singer of international stature, this fall's BWEO production of Serse (seen November 21) promised to be a landmark. But as I was settling into my excellent seat—the 600-seat Performing Arts Theater at El Cerrito High School is quite intimate, an ideal venue for Baroque opera—I noticed that this three-act opera was being presented in only two parts, and that nearly an hour of music had been cut.

Worse was the program note from BWEO artistic director Mark Streshinsky, which unfortunately I had the leisure to read before the curtain rose. First he mentions his conception of Xerxes: "He has an absolutely brilliant military intellect, he is prone to outbursts, he's evidently obsessed with botany, and he has no clue as to the personal feelings or emotions of the people around him. I suddenly thought to myself: 'This guy has Aspergers's [sic] Syndrome!'" Of course this diagnosis is not only anachronistic, it's unnecessary—after all, isn't Xerxes the absolute ruler of the Persian Empire, and wouldn't that explain sufficiently his disregard for other people's feelings? But then Streshinsky continues, "Un-doctored, Handel operas are a great challenge to a director and to an audience....Cuts and, in this case, a re-configuration of Act 3 do wonders for the plot, avoiding several moments that make me think 'Huh?'"

While the conventions of early 18th-century opera may be unfamiliar to modern audiences, a heavy directorial hand can make things less rather than more comprehensible. Cutting and re-arranging Handel's work not only does violence to its musical and dramatic integrity, but the disjointed result can drag, rather than flow. As Handel scholar Winton Dean has written, "The organization is so taut, and the equilibrium between the musical, dramatic and scenic components so nicely balanced, that almost any cut weakens the design. As a result, the duration appears longer, not shorter, when cuts are made..."* And any director whose response to an opera is "Huh?" should probably think about staging a different opera. So it was with a sinking heart that I awaited the opening chords of the overture.

It quickly became clear that Streshinsky's production was going to be bright, bold (Lucas Krech's lighting design washed the stage backdrop with intense pinks, oranges and blues), modern, and broadly campy. Here's a taste of the approach: Serse's aria "Io dirò che l'amo né mi sgomentarò" (I will say that I love her); the observers are Xerxes' brother Arsamene (countertenor Ryan Belongie) and the servant Elviro (bass Don Sherrill):

(Set by Liliana Duque Piñeiro; costumes by Romy Douglass.)

Camp is the default approach to Baroque opera by directors who don't trust the musical and dramatic material to hold the audience's interest. The danger with such an approach is that as the director strives for cheap laughs he can obscure or undercut the moments of genuine feeling. But this kind of comic approach can also work—as David McVicar's Bollywood Giulio Cesare (Julius Caesar, 1724) has shown—and it did so here, pretty delightfully.

Xerxes falls in love with Romilda, the brightly soubrettish and very game Angela Cadelago. Romilda, though, already has a secret lover: Arsamene. Here is Cadelago singing Romilda's aria "Nemmen con l'ombre d'infedeltà" (No shadow of unfaithfulness):

The burly Elviro garbs himself in highly unconvincing drag in order to convey a clandestine love-note from Arsamene to Romilda; but the message gets intercepted by Romilda's gawky, lovelorn kid sister Atalanta (the wonderful Anna Slate), who uses it to try to snag Arsamene for herself:

Meanwhile, Xerxes' dumped fiancée Amastre (rich-voiced contralto Sonia Gariaeff) shows up in male drag (all the cross-dressing is in the original, by the way) to keep an eye on Xerxes. Many love complications ensue before all the proper couples are sorted out in the end.

Musically, the evening was a bit mixed. The singers were generally excellent, especially the four principal women (Rasmussen, Cadelago, Gariaeff and the wide-eyed Slate, who practically stole the show when she emerged from under the heaving bed on which Romilda was trysting with Arsamene). Under Curtis' direction the instrumentalists (some of whom were moonlighting from well-known Bay Area Baroque ensembles) gave a strong account of Handel's great score. Highlights included Rasmussen's glorious "Ombra mai fu," her duet with Gariaeff, "Gran pena e gelosia," and Gariaeff's mournful solo aria "Cagion son io del mio dolore". Mention should also be made of Gilbert Martinez's fluent and amusing harpsichord continuo playing: at one point an all-too-familiar arpeggio indicated the ringing of a character's cell phone.

But the cuts to Handel's music were quite extensive. Some arias were cut entirely, and others lost their B sections and/or da capo repeats. Cutting the repeats of da capo arias not only makes them shorter, but less meaningful. In a da capo aria the first section expresses an emotion, and then the second section a contrasting emotion. When the music of the first section is repeated, we return as well to the first emotion, only this time it's inflected with the second emotion. Cut the second part and the repeat of the first part, and those nuances disappear (and the characters' emotional responses get flatter and less complex). However, given that Streshinky's production was aiming more at comedy than pathos, the cuts weren't as damaging as they might have been in an opera like Alcina or Ariodante.

The success of this production suggests that the Berkeley West Edge Opera might want to look at some other ironic or comic Baroque operas, such as Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea (The Coronation of Poppea, 1642), Cavalli's La Calisto (1651), or Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728). I think they'd have a chance of being as crowd-pleasing as this winning, clever and highly enjoyable production of Serse.

* Winton Dean, "Production style in Handel operas," in The Cambridge Companion to Handel, Donald Burrows, ed., Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 253.

Baroque Bollywood Part 2

2010-11-25T11:20:00.000-08:00

A continuation of Baroque Bollywood Part 1, tracing the parallels between Baroque opera and Bollywood:

Love triangles: Love triangles in Baroque opera can get quite, er, baroque. In Vivaldi's Ottone in Villa (1713), for example, the Roman emperor Ottone loves Cleonilla, who has a crush on her male page "Ostilio," who is really a disguised woman named Tullia, who has come to court seeking her former lover Caio, who abandoned her and now loves Cleonilla. Got all that?

A similarly tangled love plot features in Handel's opera Serse (Xerxes, 1738): Atalanta is in love with Arsamene, who loves Atalanta's sister Romilda, who loves Arsamene in return, but finds herself also subject to the amorous attentions of Serse.

This double triangle—two sisters in love with the same man, two men in love with the same sister—is uncannily similar to the plot of the Bollywood movie Dil Hai Tumhaara (My Heart Is Yours, 2002). In that film, Mahima Chaudary loves Arjun Rampal, who loves Mahima's half-sister Preity Zinta, who loves Arjun in return; meanwhile, Preity's childhood friend Jimmy Shergill has secretly been in love with her for years. The complication in DHT is that Preity so desperately wants her sister to be happy that she asks Arjun to marry Mahima, and for Jimmy to pretend to love herself. To do so, of course, he has to pretend that he doesn't already love her. This sort of delirious perversity is what makes DHT one of my favorite love-triangle movies, but I'm hesitant to recommend it to anyone who values their sanity.

Among my other favorite love-triangle Bollywood movies are Baarsaat Ki Raat (One Rainy Night, 1960), where both Madhubala and Shyama love Bharat Bhusan; Katha (1983), where quiet, shy Naseeruddin Shah loves Deepti Naval, who is infatuated with the heartless cad Farooq Shaikh; Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (Something Is Happening, 1998), where Kajol falls in love with her college classmate Shah Rukh Khan just as he's falling in love with new girl at school Rani Mukherjee, then years later Shah Rukh discovers that he loves Kajol after all—but only after she's become engaged to Salman Khan; and Kal Ho Naa Ho (Tomorrow May Never Come, 2003), where Shah Rukh Khan teaches Saif Ali Khan how to woo Preity Zinta, the woman Shah Rukh himself has fallen in love with. (A man acting as a go-between for the woman he loves and another man is also a subplot Handel uses in Serse.)

Some other plots that are common in both Baroque opera and Bollywood:

Revenge: A son who must revenge his father's or mother's humiliation or death is central to Baiju Bawra (1952), Amar Akbar Anthony (1978), Rocky (1981), Khal Nayak (The Anti-Hero, 1993), Karan Arjun (1995), Trimurti (Trinity, 1995), Koyla (Coal, 1997), and countless other films. It's also a subplot in Handel's Giulio Cesare in Egitto (Julius Caesar in Egypt, 1724). Sesto, the son of the Roman general Pompey, must avenge the murder of his father and the imprisonment and attempted seduction of his mother at the hands of the treacherous Greek-Egyptian ruler Tolomeo (Ptolemy). Sometimes, as with Tolomeo, the evil done by the villain is so profound that justice can only be served by his death. This is also true of the bad guys in Koyla, Trimurti, Karan Arjun, Khal Nayak, and many other Bollywood films.

But in Baiju Bawra, when the moment of truth arrives for the son, he finds himself unable to carry out his revenge. And this is another common plot element in both Bollywood and Baroque opera:

Forgiveness: In Bollywood, tyrannical fathers and other authority figures who transgress against those under their power are often forgiven, no matter how outrageously they've overstepped the bounds of justice. In Ishq (Love, 1998), for example, the fathers of Ajay Devgn and Juhi Chawla will stop at nothing to get their children married to one another, even though Ajay loves Kajol and Juhi loves Amir Khan. The fathers force their children to unwittingly sign false marriage contracts, deceive them into thinking that Kajol and Amir are lovers, have both Kajol and Amir attacked by goons and Amir brutally tortured, and blackmail Kajol and Amir into leaving India entirely. But in the final five minutes, as Kajol and Amir are boarding a ship into exile, there is a tearful confrontation on the dock, the true lovers are reunited, and everyone forgives the two fathers.

Ishq may be way—way—over the top. But Baroque opera got there first. In Handel's Rodelinda (1724), the villain Grimoaldo invades and conquers the kingdom of his neighbor Bertarido, imprisons him and sentences him to death, attempts to seduce Bertarido's wife Rodelinda, threatens to kill her child if she doesn't marry him, and abandons his own former lover Eduige. However, Bertarido escapes, and in the last five minutes of the opera saves Grimoaldo's life, forgives him, reunites him with Eduige, and reinstates him as the ruler of the neighboring kingdom.

The emphasis on magnanimity, of course, is intended to legitimate a system in which the father/ruler wields all the power. We've just spent three hours watching that power being employed arbitrarily, selfishly, and unjustly, which might tend to make us question its very basis. But both Baroque opera and Bollywood want it both ways: they want to move us with the plight of characters who are experiencing unmerited suffering, and reassure us that the father/ruler will ultimately be reformed. Because the supreme value of both forms is the...

Happy ending. As Shah Rukh Khan's Om Prakash says so memorably in Om Shanti Om (2007), if the ending is not happy, then the movie is not over, my friend. There are a few exceptions: Devdas (1935, 1955, 2002, et seq.), Mughal-e-Azam (The Great Mughal, 1960), and Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak (From One Heartbreak to Another, 1988) are tragedies, and the later films of Guru Dutt, such as Khagaaz Ke Phool (Paper Flowers, 1959) and Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam (Master, Mistress and Servant, 1962), also have dark endings. In Baroque opera, too, there are the rare works that end unhappily, such as Blow's Venus and Adonis (1684), Purcell's Dido and Aeneas (1689), or Handel's Tamerlano (1724).

However, in both Bollywood and Baroque opera the imperative that the ending be a happy one, and that a happy ending necessarily means the union or reunion of the main couple, can lead to some pretty wild plot contortions. Baroque operas went so far as to rewrite myths to make them conform to the need for a happy ending. The original Orpheus myth, for example, ends with Orpheus' wife Eurydice imprisoned forever in Hades and Orpheus being torn apart by the Maenads; but Monteverdi's L'Orfeo (1607) ends with Apollo reuniting the couple in the heavens.

So in both Bollywood and Baroque opera there can be a mad scramble in the last five minutes to tie up all the loose threads of the plot, forgive all transgressions, and unite the correct couples. For Bollywood, Ishq is a particularly egregious example, but last-minute reversals are legion. The "wrong" groom or bride realizes in the middle of the wedding ceremony that their bride or groom loves someone else, and steps aside so that the true lovers can be married (hello, Hum Aapke Hain Koun...! (What Am I To You?, 1994), Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, Mujhse Dosti Karoge! (Will You Be My Friend?, 2002), Dil Hai Tumhaara, and Main Prem Ki Diwani Hoon (I'm Crazy About Prem, 2003)). Or the woman who has spent the entire film trying to unite with a distant, absent, or estranged lover realizes that she's fallen in love instead with the steadfast nice guy who's been helping her out the whole time (stand up, Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (My Heart Belongs To You, 1998), Kya Kehna (What Is There To Say, 2000), and Jab We Met (When We Met, 2007)). But a special prize has to be awarded to Lajja (2001), in which the happy ending is the loving reunion of a husband with his wife...the wife he has spent the previous three hours trying to kidnap and murder (!).

But again, Bollywood was simply following the well-worn path of Baroque opera. In Alessandro Scarlatti's Griselda (1721), Gualtiero tests his wife Griselda's fidelity by pretending to have killed their daughter, renouncing Griselda, forcing her to work as a slave in his household, promising her in marriage to one of his courtiers, and finally pretending that he is going to marry the young ward of a neighboring prince (really, his and Griselda's daughter). In the last five minutes of the opera Gualtiero reveals his deceptions, and restores the faithful (and still loving) Griselda as his wife.

Sometimes, perhaps, forgiveness can go too far, and the happy ending can seem instead like your worst nightmare.

Baroque Bollywood Part 1

2010-11-16T21:21:00.000-08:00

A while ago, Memsaab drew attention to the many parallels between opera and Bollywood in her posts Opera and Hindi Cinema and The Bartered Dulhania. Those parallels are especially striking in Baroque opera, and so I thought I would add some items to Memsaab's lists and amplify some others. Life intervened, but at long last I'm following up on that impulse. To start, there's the question of

Originality (or lack thereof)

In the Baroque era, musical originality was not the supreme value that it later became. Composers thought nothing of recycling librettos and storylines. The librettos of Pietro Metastasio, the greatest poet of opera seria, were set multiple times by every major composer of the era.

Composers not only re-used characters and stories, they also recycled their own and others' melodies. Partly this was because there wasn't really any such thing as a repertoire—an opera would be performed for a season, or perhaps two, and then usually never be performed again. Why not make use of music that would otherwise be forgotten?

Handel, for example, re-used much of the opera, oratorio, and cantata music he'd written in Italy when he composed his first opera for London, Rinaldo (1711). One of the most famous arias from Rinaldo, Almirena's "Lascia ch'io pianga" (Let me weep over my cruel fate) was taken virtually note-for-note from Pleasure's aria "Lascia la spina" (Leave the thorns, pluck the rose) from the oratorio Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno (The Triumph of Time and Dillusionment), which Handel wrote in Rome in 1707.

Handel wasn't above borrowing other composer's music, either, although he often altered and improved it. His early opera for Venice, Agrippina (1709), for example, includes material from operas by Handel's German colleagues Reinhard Keiser and Johannes Mattheson.

How else, one might ask, could Baroque composers maintain the incredible productivity that was demanded of them? Often they'd have only weeks to compose a four-hour-long opera which might involve 30 or 40 arias. Handel wrote more than 40 operas, plus oratorios, cantatas, motets, masses...that's a lot of tunes.

The productivity question arises with Indian movies as well. While I've heard various figures for the number of films Bollywood turns out in a year, it seems to be somewhere between 150 and 300. And that's just mainstream Hindi cinema; there are also films in Bengali, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, and Telugu, among other languages. The Central Board of Film Certification reported in 2009 that there were over 1200 feature films produced in India. No wonder Indian filmmakers borrow plotlines and characters from wherever they can find them: myths, novels, and especially other movies.

I haven't tried to keep count, but I've noticed that a lot of the Bollywood films we've seen draw either indirect or direct inspiration from Hollywood movies. Pyar To Hona Hi Tha (Love Had To Happen, 1998) borrows from French Kiss (1995); Mohabbatein (Love Stories, 2000) from Dead Poets Society (1989); the first Munna Bhai movie, Hum Kisi Se Kum Nahin (We're As Good As Anyone Else, 2002) from Analyze This (1999); Chori Chori (Secretly, 2003) from Housesitter (1992); Koi Mil Gaya (I Found Someone, 2003) from E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982); Life In A... Metro (2007) from The Apartment (1960), and on and on.

The tracing of borrowings can also become quite involved. Sholay (Flames, 1975), for example, one of the most revered films in Bollywood history, takes its main plot from Sergio Leone's Once Upon A Time In The West (1968), which itself borrowed from The Magnificent Seven (1960), which reimagines Akira Kurosawa's Shichinin no Samurai (Seven Samurai, 1954) as a Western. Heyy Babyy (2007) takes its premise from Three Men and a Baby (1987), which was itself a remake of the French film Trois hommes et un couffin (1985). Chori Chori Chupke Chupke (Silently, Secretly, 2001) borrows heavily from Pretty Woman (1990), which was a retelling of My Fair Lady (1964), which was a film version of the 1956 Lerner and Loewe Broadway show of the same title, which was a musical version of George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion (1912).

I can't say that all of these borrowings, influences and inspirations bother me in the slightest, apart from the question of writers receiving proper credit. For me it's mainly a question of how effectively the borrowings are Bollywoodized. Some Bollywood films are disappointingly literal: Life in a...Metro just transplanted The Apartment wholesale from New York to Mumbai. Others, though, improve on the originals. I'd rather watch Kajol than Meg Ryan, or Rani Mukherjee than Goldie Hawn, any day.

More parallels to follow!

Cartoonish, sordid, bawdy--and irresistible: Glee

2010-11-11T11:55:00.000-08:00

Trust me to come late to any party. I've been hearing about the Broadway-goes-to-high-school Fox series Glee for over a year. Up until recently my aversion to TV programs that aren't BBC adaptations of 19th-century novels won out over my curiosity. Now that the complete first season is available on DVD, though, I've bowed to the inevitable.

Glee follows the fortunes of a high school glee club in a small midwestern city, and the format allows many opportunities for the cast (many of whom look like they haven't seen the inside of a high school classroom for a decade or so) to perform song and dance numbers. Unlike in most Bollywood movies or operas, in Glee musical numbers are usually diegetic. That is, when a character is singing and dancing, they're doing it in the context of an audition, a rehearsal, or a show that's actually happening in the world of the other characters. But like all musicals, Glee still offers the singing-in-the-shower fantasy of effortless performance. We see the performers going over a few dance steps, working on a couple of bars of music, and then the next thing we know, some Top 40 song or show tune standard has been reinvented in four-part harmony and synchronized gestures.

One reason four-part harmony and synchronized gestures don't happen spontaneously in my real life, apart from my lack of talent, is because they actually require hours of planning and grindingly repetitive rehearsal. Glee pretends to acknowledge the hard work that goes into that illusion of effortlessness, but in fact the rehearsal scenes are pretty cursory. Instead of watching our heroes practice under the critical eye of their director Will Schuester (Matthew Morrison), most of our time is spent learning the details of their lives. This being Fox, those details are often cartoonish or sordid. I'm going to betray my old-fogeydom here, but the script is amazingly bawdy for a show that's broadcast (at least for now) at the family-friendly time of 8 pm on Tuesdays. It's also amazingly funny, with the evil cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester (Emmy-winner Jane Lynch) getting many of the most cutting lines.

Glee also pretends to side with the misfits and outcasts against the popular kids, but in the first half-dozen episodes we spend far more time with the Glee Club queen Rachel (Lea Michele), the conflicted quarterback Finn (Cory Monteith), and the mean head cheerleader Quinn (Dianna Agron) than with Mercedes (the amazingly talented and criminally underused Amber Riley, who seems to be the only black person in the school), Tina (Jenna Ushkowitz, who similarly seems to be the only Asian person), Kurt (Chris Colfer, whose bullied gay teen is one of the few characters on the show who actually looks teenaged) or Artie (Kevin McHale, whose wheelchair-bound character could raise lots of interesting issues if he were allowed more than one line per episode). Having served their purpose—tokens and foils—they've been pushed into the background.

But there's no point in being curmudgeonly about Glee—it breaks down all resistance, not to mention rational thought. The creators of the show have an unerring instinct for the soundtrack of Midwestern young adulthood over the past three decades: Journey, REO Speedwagon, Queen, Bon Jovi. And the arrangements of these "classics," glee-club style, are both inherently funny and surprisingly effective. What does it say about me that I actually enjoy the Glee-ified rendition of "Don't Stop Believin'"? Nothing very good, probably.

Throw in cameos and special appearances by Broadway stalwarts like Kristen Chenoweth (an original cast member of Wicked), Idina Menzel (an original cast member of both Rent and Wicked), and Neil Patrick Harris (of the brilliant Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog), and it's a pretty irresistible cocktail. Yep—I'm addicted.

John Blow's Venus and Adonis

2010-10-11T11:31:00.000-07:00

Magnificat, the vocal and instrumental early music ensemble directed by Warren Stewart, opened its new season this past weekend with concert performances of the first English opera, John Blow's Venus and Adonis (1683?/1684). Blow was a musician and composer in the court of Charles II; among his students was Henry Purcell, whose later Dido and Aeneas (1689) has many echoes of and parallels with Venus and Adonis.

One striking parallel is that both operas were performed at Josias Priest's boarding school in Chelsea for "young gentlewomen." This is particularly remarkable given the frankly erotic content of both operas, but especially of Venus and Adonis. The opera was originally performed before Charles II, and was written in part as a satire of the sexual license at court, where only "the Foolish, Ugly and the Old" are faithful. In the prologue, lovers are urged to be "willing, lovesome, fond and gay," and Cupid commands, "Lovers to the close Shades retire, / Do what your kindest thoughts Inspire." On Adonis's entrance in Act One, he asks, "Venus, when shall I taste soft delights, / And on thy bosom lie?" and Venus promises to give him "freely all Delights, / With pleasant Days and easie Nights." In that first performance of the opera at court (probably in 1683), the part of Venus had been performed by one of the king's mistresses, Mary "Moll" Davis, while Cupid had been played by the 10-year-old Lady Mary Tudor, daughter of Davis and the king. That in the boarding-school performance of 1684 both these parts and that of Venus's lover Adonis were taken by unmarried young women—a note on the libretto (reproduced in facsimile in Magnificat's program) mentions that "Mr. Priest's Daughter acted Adonis"—would only have made the opera even more eyebrow-raising.

The story is taken from Book X of Ovid's Metamorphoses. While embracing her son Cupid, Venus is scratched by one of his arrows, and falls in love with the beautiful youth Adonis. She warns him against hunting dangerous game, but he heedlessly tracks a wild boar to its lair and is mortally wounded. When Venus finds his body, she transforms his blood into a flower. In Venus and Adonis—the libretto, long assumed to be the work of Aphra Behn, was recently attributed to Anne Kingsmill Finch, Maid of Honour to the Duchess of York [1]—it is Venus who urges Adonis to join the hunt:

Adonis: Adonis will not Hunt today,
      I have already caught the noblest Prey.
Venus: No my Shepherd, haste away, haste away,
         Absence kindles new desires:
     I wou'd not have my Lover tired.

Unusually, Blow's opera, like Dido and Aeneas, ends tragically (in Baroque opera, myths were often rewritten to have happy endings). The dying Adonis returns to Venus: "...let me on your soft bosome lie; / There I did wish to live, and there I beg to die." The opera concludes with a lament for Venus and a final mournful chorus, clearly used by Purcell as a model for Dido's lament.

Blow's flowing melodies were performed beautifully by Magnificat (with members of the San Francisco Girls Chorus as the Graces). Special mention should be made of soprano Catherine Webster's Venus, countertenor José Lemos' Cupid (his Lesson was especially amusing) and bass Peter Becker's Adonis, all of whom were excellently sung and characterized. Magnificat made a compelling case for the work; given its obviously high quality and modest scale, I'm amazed that it isn't programmed more frequently. I've been interested in Baroque opera, and this work in particular, for more than a decade and a half, but this was my first opportunity to see it performed. Thanks are due to Stewart and Magnificat for bringing this unjustly neglected work to life.

Stewart has planned a typically diverse and imaginative season for Magnificat. Upcoming concerts include Charpentier's Messe de Minuit pour Noël (Midnight Mass for Christmas); an evening of music by women composers of the 17th and 18th centuries, including Francesca Caccini, Barbara Strozzi, Isabella Leonarda and Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre; and Orazio Vecchi's madrigal comedy L'Amfiparnaso (The Twin Peaks of Parnassus). For details, see the Magnificat website.

[1] Mill, James A. (2008). "A versifying Maid of Honour": Anne Finch and the libretto for Venus and Adonis. Review of English Studies, 59 (238), 67-85.

The Sixties

2010-09-04T17:31:00.000-07:00

What exactly do we mean by "The Sixties," anyway? For almost everyone, the decade has a meaning beyond the purely chronological. Arguments can be made that the cultural, social and economic changes that are encompassed by the term "The Sixties" really begin as early as the release of Elvis Presley's first single, "That's All Right," in July 1954, or as late as first appearance of The Beatles on Ed Sullivan's television show in February 1964. The decade could also be said to have truly begun with the protests against the House Un-American Activities Committee in San Francisco in May 1960, or the election of John F. Kennedy in November 1960, or the March on Washington in August 1963. As for the end of The Sixties, a vast number of events have been given that designation, stretching from the Rolling Stones' Altamont concert in December 1969 to the end of the Vietnam War in April 1975.

Reading Jenny Diski's The Sixties (Picador, 2009), though, is a reminder that those markers are very US-centric. The Sixties were a worldwide phenomenon, as the student protests of 1968 showed. For Diski, a British writer whose book begins by questioning the entire project of retrospective historical periodization by decade, The Sixties "began in the mid-1960s...and it ended in the mid-1970s when all the open-ended possibilities we saw began to narrow, as disillusion, right-wing politicians, and the rest of our lives began to loom unexpectedly large" (p. 3).

If you think that definition sounds more personal than sociological or historical, you'd be right. (Perhaps not coincidentally, Diski turned 18 in 1965, and 30 in 1977.) The publication of The Sixties as the latest entry in Picador's Big Ideas/Small Books series, which is devoted to consideration of broad philosophical, psychological and sociological topics (other titles in the series so far are Time, Violence, Bodies, and Moral Relativism), is somewhat misleading. The Sixties does not attempt to be a comprehensive survey of the sweeping changes that occurred during the period. The civil rights and anti-racist movements in the US and UK, the parallel movements for feminism and gay and lesbian liberation, and the anti-Vietnam War movement are given only sketchy coverage. Developments in art, fashion, film, television, and books get varying degrees of glancing attention. And of the sacred triumvirate of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll, it's the first two that Diski spends vastly more time on. Music--surely a central aspect of the experience of the Sixties for anyone who lived through them--gets only a couple intentionally comic asides, perhaps because she can safely assume that Sixties music remains inescapable. (In the introduction, after puncturing baby boomer nostalgia about differences in youth culture between then and now, she writes, "In truth, the only thing that is absolutely certain is that the music then was better" (p. 3).)

So as Diski's definition of the period suggests, you shouldn't look to The Sixties for an "objective" account of the era (as if such a thing were possible). But as a description of her experience of a confusing and contradictory time The Sixties takes its place alongside Diski's other excellent and highly personal works of nonfiction. She focusses on three main areas--communal living/politics, alternative schooling, and radical psychiatry--and describes her difficult and often painful experiences with each. (Incidentally, the emphasis on personal experience as a central element of reportage was a founding principle of the New Journalism created by writers such as Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe and Ellen Willis--another legacy of The Sixties, and one which Diski doesn't mention.)

While The Sixties is most successful when it's most personal, occasionally Diski lapses into "we speak," as in "We were guilty, too, of failing to understand the power of capitalism..." (p. 132). Exactly who is "we"? Diski generally avoids the annoying baby boomer tendency to universalize individual experience, though. And she does point out that the "we" she is invoking were a far smaller group than it seemed at the time, as the later elections (and re-elections) of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher showed: "One day, I supposed, our lot would be in charge and then things would be different. It didn't cross my mind then that 'our lot' would not remain our lot, or that there were another lot (and far more of them) in our generation who were as pragmatic about power as the unreconstructed generations before us" (p. 78). As this suggests, her discussion of the legacy of The Sixties necessarily includes its many failures of both practice and imagination; the final word in this slim, highly readable and thought-provoking book is "discouraged."

Black Narcissus: A parable of colonialism, or who's the narcissist?

2010-07-15T07:12:00.000-07:00

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's Black Narcissus (1947) is a classic of Technicolor cinematography. It's also a classic of colonialist ideology.

A small group of Anglican nuns led by Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr) is sent to establish a convent in a remote Himalayan village. They are given a mountaintop palace once occupied by concubines, and plan to create a school, infirmary, chapel, and garden on its grounds. But the isolated setting, the constant wind, the obstinacy of the "natives," the erotic paintings on the walls, and the propensity of the local English agent Mr. Dean (David Farrar) to wander about shirtless are soon whipping up hysteria among the nuns.

The story, based on a Rumer Godden novel, is ludicrous, especially when Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron) snaps, dons a siren-red dress, lipstick and high-heeled shoes, throws herself at Mr. Dean and—spoiler alert!—tries to push Sister Clodagh off the mountain. The convent is doomed by the combined force of the villagers' indifference and the eruption of the nuns' own repressed emotions.

What's harder to stomach than the film's pop Freudianism, though, is its depiction of the Indian villagers. "Black Narcissus" is the nuns' nickname for the Young General (Sabu), the son of the village headman, who dresses in colorful finery and attends the children's classes in English, French and typing (very useful skills in a remote Himalayan village). When the "natives" are not being shown as childlike, comically vain imitators of the English, they are shown as inscrutable, dangerously sexual, or ominously threatening.

So it should come as no surprise that the filmmakers couldn't even be bothered to get the details of the Indians' culture right. I'm no expert, but when on several occasions we hear the drums of the villagers, their rhythms sound more like Skull Island (from King Kong (1933)) than Himalayan Indian. The clothes look like a mix of regional Indian styles with a heavy overlay of film-studio fantasy. And as 17-year-old Kanchi, a young Jean Simmons—in obvious brownface—is asked to perform hilariously inept "Indian" dance moves.

It could be that there's a satirical tone that I'm just missing. The shots of Sister Ruth in her mad frenzy verge on camp:

But I don't think the filmmakers intend any satire. The music cues us when a scene is meant to be lighthearted (most of those involve May Hallatt, who plays the caretaker Angu Ayah without brownface and with a broad Cockney accent). The gorgeous cinematography, the somber tone and the lingering closeups of a conflicted Deborah Kerr give the rest of the film a sheen of high seriousness. Our perspective remains almost entirely on the mountaintop with the nuns, and it is they with whom we are invited to sympathize. I think we are meant to see the nuns as well-meaning but naïve, attempting to do good work in a place where the climate is unsuitable and the ignorant, superstitious people are stubbornly unreceptive.

But this is classic colonialist ideology, liberal version, as memorably described by Noam Chomsky (in "Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship," from American Power and the New Mandarins (Pantheon, 1967)) and Edward Said (in Orientalism (Vintage, 1979)). To make the suggestion the nuns are serving the British imperial project and that the Indians have their own subjectivity requires reading the film against the grain.

The film's elegiac final images, where the monsoon rains begin to fall as the nuns leave the village, take on a different meaning when you note the date of the movie's release. 1947, of course, was the year that the entire British imperial project in India was abruptly abandoned. That self-regarding sense of melancholy at the end of Black Narcissus ignores, as does the rest of the film, the experience of the Indians themselves. And so it functions as a sort of parable about the loss of the Raj—only in real life the self-concern of the British turned out to have deadly consequences for their former subjects, a legacy of displacement and violent conflict that continues today. It prompts me to ask: Who are the narcissists here?

In defense of Devdas, the movie everyone loves to hate

2010-07-07T20:10:00.000-07:00

What follows is an expanded version of a comment originally posted on Bollyviewer's review of Bimal Roy's Devdas (1955):

Since everybody hates the Sanjay Leela Bhansali version of Devdas (2002), I feel I have to say a few words in its defense. After all, I did pick it as one of my favorite Bollywood films of the 2000s.

Say what you will about Shah Rukh Khan in the thankless title role—and most people say he's over the top. But I'm not sure any approach would make this character fully sympathetic. After all, Devdas is callous, weak, abusive, self-pitying, and self-destructive. Given those elements of the character, going operatic makes as much sense as any other approach (someone underplaying the role would have gotten lost in SLB's outrageously lush visuals).

But what makes the 2002 version so special for me is Ismail Darbar's music, and the way that the songs are so carefully woven into the narrative. In fact, the songs convey absolutely crucial information, particularly in the sequence "Bairi Piya," "Morey Piya," and "Kahe Chhed Mohe."

Taking the first four songs in order:

1. "Silsila Yeh Chaahat Ka" expresses the yearning of Devdas' childhood sweetheart Paro (Aishwarya Rai) for Devdas' return:

It's significant that the first number is a performance of Paro's unwavering devotion—a devotion that will be severely tested over the course of following events.

2. "Bairi Piya": Devdas and Paro tease and flirt with each other, though there's an edge that suggests Devdas' later violence against Paro. Two important things happen during this song. First is the symbolic marriage of Devdas and Paro, when Devdas gives her his grandmother's wedding bangle. And second, each makes a prediction about the other's future. His prediction for her:

Hers for him:

Both predictions, of course, will come true.

3. "More Piya" involves two intercut sequences. Paro's mother Sumitra (Kirron Kher) celebrates what she thinks will be Paro and Devdas' engagement with a love song about the encounter of Radha and Krishna on the banks of the Yamuna.

Meanwhile, on the banks of their local stream, Devdas is raping Paro. While "rape" perhaps doesn't quite capture all the nuances of what's happening between them, there really is no other word for it. Paro loves him, doesn't struggle, and ultimately acquiesces, but there's no mistaking her reluctance:

The invocations of Krishna and Radha in Sumitra's song and the prominence of the flute (Krishna's instrument) in the Devdas-Paro sequences, plus the the explicit symbolism (the river bank, the water jugs, and the way Devdas removes Paro's jewelry and veil as a husband removes his bride's on their wedding night) leave no doubt about what takes place between Devdas and Paro. And this makes Devdas' later repudiation of Paro even more heartless and cruel.

4. "Kahe Chhed Mohe": The very next song, performed by the tawaif Chandramukhi (Madhuri Dixit) for Devdas, his dissolute friend Chunnilal (Jackie Shroff) and a third man whose importance is only revealed later, is another retelling of the Krishna and Radha story. As Chandramukhi sings of Krishna,

Devdas realizes his own cruelty and callousness towards Paro, and the terrible mistake he's made in sending her a letter of rejection. Alas, his remorse comes too late.

Incidentally, thanks to Ismail Darbar's excellent music, Madhuri's brilliant, eloquent dancing and SLB's swirling, hypnotic visuals (which evoke other great courtesan dances from films such as Mughal-e-Azam (1960), Pakeezah (1971) and Umrao Jaan (1981)), "Kahe Chhed Mohe" remains my Platonic ideal of what a Bollywood dance number can be.

Devdas was the second Bollywood film we saw, and we were mesmerized by it. I realize that we're in a distinct minority, and know it's a film that people love to hate. But it's so obviously a labor of love for everyone involved that I just can't share that disdain. And SLB's hallucinatorily rich visuals are a sumptuous feast. The moment in "Kahe Chhed Mohe" when Chandramukhi spins outside, and we see the whole pleasure district behind her lit up in the night and filled with tiny moving and dancing figures, is simply breathtaking.

Bimal Roy is, of course, one of the greatest directors of not only Indian but world cinema. I think, though, that a small-scale and realistic approach to these characters just foregrounds how despicable Devdas' actions are. Instead, I feel that the story of Devdas requires a heightened quality and larger-than-life emotions, something that the SLB version certainly provides.

As I wrote in my comment on Bollyviewer's post, give me a moment to get under cover, and then you can start throwing things!

Bollywood Babylon, and two other books with Bollywood in the title

2010-07-02T20:22:00.000-07:00

The term "Bollywood" is problematic but inescapable, as Rachel Dwyer notes in the introduction to her 100 Bollywood Films (BFI Screen Guides, 2005). It persists because it's a useful shorthand: other alternatives are clunky ("Hindi commercial cinema"), only partly descriptive ("Hindi cinema" ignores films in Urdu) or misleading ("Hindi popular cinema" conceals the power of media industries in shaping popular taste).

Dwyer is Professor of Indian Cultures and Cinema at the University of London, but her book is free of film studies jargon and is highly readable. As its title implies, it consists of 100 short (2-page) reviews of Bollywood movies from the early sound era to the present. The main criteria for inclusion are language (Hindi-Urdu), production and distribution (mainstream commercial), "importance in the history of Hindi cinema," and representation of the work of significant directors, stars, music directors, writers, and playback singers. Many of the films she chooses are obviously personal favorites as well. She excludes parallel cinema, so there are no films by, say, Satyajit Ray. Dwyer does find room for Shyam Benegal's Bhumika (1976), though not his Zubeidaa (2001), which featured major Bollywood stars and a score by A. R. Rahman.

Of course, no selection of 100 (I actually count 101) Bollywood movies can be comprehensive. I'd argue with some of Dwyer's choices, such as Kaho Naa...Pyar Hai (2001), Dil To Pagal Hai (1997) (which she says "will be seen in the future as a landmark film"; I have my doubts), and Disco Dancer (1982)—all big hits, of course. I'd also prefer a chronological rather than alphabetical organization, but it's likely that Dwyer inherited the format from the other books in the series. On the plus side, names are indexed as well as titles, so it's easy to look up all of the films in the book that feature a particular director or actor. Especially if you're beginning to explore Golden and Silver Age films (movies released before 1980 account for nearly two-thirds of the entries), you'll find 100 Bollywood Films to be a useful compact guide.

Subhash K. Jha is a journalist, and it shows in the breeziness of the prose in his Essential Guide to Bollywood (Roli Books, 2005), which covers about twice as many films as Dwyer's guide. Jha's capsule reviews are shorter than Dwyer's, but he packs a maximum amount of summary, analysis and context into a small word-count. The Essential Guide is also liberally illustrated with film and promotional stills, with a majority in color (100 Bollywood Films has fewer illustrations and they're all in black and white). Nearly every right-hand page also features a short sidebar focussing on a particular film or star. And while Jha includes only one pre-independence film (Dwyer discusses 9), he offers a substantial section on parallel cinema (22 films) and has entries for 18 films from the early 2000s (Dwyer includes only 5).

Jha divides his choices rather unhelpfully into genres among which the distinctions aren't always clear—for example, he includes three kinds of drama, "War Drama," "Family Drama" and just plain "Drama," with the last taking up fully half of the book. The "War Drama," "Historical" and "Action" sections are only four pages long, and (shockingly) the "Romance" section only covers 12 films. Better, probably, to have fewer and larger sections, or to simply arrange the films chronologically. Fortunately, there's a name and title index; unfortunately, the index doesn't indicate which page contains the major entry for a film (Dwyer's index prints the main entry page numbers in bold type).

Jha's book is a good choice for its sheer breadth of coverage and its author's obvious enthusiasm for his subject. Both Dwyer's and Jha's guides are now somewhat outdated, though, and I hope new editions are being prepared.

Finally, there's William van der Heide's hilariously mistitled Bollywood Babylon (Berg, 2006). Far from the lurid exposé that the title promises, the book instead consists of extensive interviews with writer/director Shyam Benegal. While Benegal has employed actors, music directors, and playback singers that have also worked in mainstream Bollywood, his films are generally classified as parallel cinema. They are often realistic, morally ambiguous stories of women struggling against the constraints of a patriarchal society. And Benegal has had the good fortune (or good taste) to work repeatedly with extraordinary actors, including Smita Patil, Shabana Azmi, Rekha, Naseeruddin Shah, and Amrish Puri.

The book is organized into chapters on Satyajit Ray, Benegal's beginnings as a filmmaker, his views on Indian cinema, and a film-by-film survey of nearly all of his work up to 2006. This approach is similar to Francois Truffaut's Hitchcock (Simon & Schuster, Revised edition, 1984) or José de la Colina and Tómas Pérez Turrent's Objects of Desire: Conversations With Luis Buñuel (Marsilio, 1992). And it offers similar rewards: you don't have to be an evangelist for the auteur theory to feel that a director has a uniquely important perspective on his own work.

Van der Heide is a knowledgeable interviewer, perhaps to a fault—he is sometimes so busy telling Benegal his own interpretation of Benegal's films, or elicting Benegal's response to the criticism and comments of other writers, that he neglects to fully draw out Benegal's own views. The interviews are presented as uninterrupted transcripts; all explanatory material is given in the endnotes to each chapter. Those endnotes are so extensive, though, that it might have been better to try to integrate some of them (the film synopses, for example) into the main text.

Still, if you are interested in Benegal's work or parallel cinema in general, Van der Heide's book is essential reading. It, too, though, will need updating, whenever Benegal decides that he's through making films. Although he's in his mid-70s he's still going strong, having released Welcome to Sajjanpur (2008) and Well Done Abba! (2010) since this book was published.

More Machado: Dom Casmurro

2010-06-15T06:15:00.000-07:00

I read the 19th-century Brazilian writer Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis's brilliant The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas two years ago, and I'm now finally getting around to reading some of his other masterpieces. Machado is a very contemporary-seeming writer. He uses metafictional techniques that came to be called postmodern, although they date from the beginnings of literature: The Odyssey has an unreliable narrator, The Canterbury Tales and The Decameron call attention to themselves as texts, Don Quixote has multiple layers of narrative, and Tristram Shandy employs unusual typography. These, along with the plays of Shakespeare, are among Machado's literary inspirations, and his works belong in their company as classics of world literature.

Dom Casmurro (Sir Dour, originally published 1899; translated into English by Helen Caldwell, Farrar, Straus and Young, 1953) has the same sort of lightly ironic and self-aware narrator as The Posthumous Memoirs. But—like Brás Cubas—Dom Casmurro has some rather large blind spots, of which the reader gradually becomes aware over the course of the novel.

Bentinho (our narrator) and Capitú are neighbor children who grow up together and, as teenagers, discover the emergence of new feelings for each other. (In a pattern which becomes typical, other people are aware of those feelings before Bentinho himself is.) Bentinho's mother and other relatives raise objections to the prospective match: his mother because she has always wanted Bentinho to become a priest, and the relatives because Capitú's family is distinctly lower on the social ladder. Machado—himself the son of a wall painter and a washerwoman, and with mixed-race ancestry—must have known something about social and class barriers.

(Mild spoilers follow, so if you're planning to read Dom Casmurro soon you may want to skip this paragraph.) Thanks largely to Capitú's patience, steadfastness and good judgment, obstacles which seemed insurmountable are gradually overcome, and the couple embark on what should be a life of mutual felicity. But the poison of Bentinho's jealousy is soon doing its destructive work. Masterfully, Machado implicates the reader in Bentinho's suspicions. But after the tragedy unfolds, in one chilling sentence he casts doubt on everything that has gone before, and suggests that Dom Casmurro's jealousy—like that of Othello, to whom there are multiple allusions in the text—is entirely baseless.

Because we see events entirely through Dom Casmurro's eyes, a certain ambiguity lingers over the narrative, and we can't be sure which interpretation of events—Dom Casmurro's or the one we begin to suspect—is the true one. And in the end, the truth, whatever it may be, matters less than the consequences of Dom Casmurro's caustic jealousy. Dom Casmurro is a compelling and disturbing portrait of a man systematically destroying his own happiness.

Sadder but no wiser: Dil Kabaddi and Mixed Doubles

2010-06-10T21:11:00.000-07:00

After my post on Konkona Sen Sharma I realized that there were a number of her films that I'd never seen. Trolling through Netflix I discovered that she has appeared in not one, but two comedies of marital infidelity: Mixed Doubles (2006) and Dil Kabaddi (Game of Hearts, 2008).

Dil Kabaddi (written and directed by Anil Sharma) is the story of two married couples, both of which are thrown into crisis when one of the couples decides to separate. Samit (Irrfan Khan), freed from his "too intellectual" wife Mita (Soha Ali Khan), wastes no time in starting a torrid affair with his airheaded (and much younger) yoga instructor, Kaya (Payal Rohatgi). This causes their friends Rishi (Rahul Bose) and Simi (Konkona) to re-examine their own relationship in the light of their friends' dissatisfaction. It soon becomes clear that Rishi and Simi have been together long enough for the initial romantic impulse to have worn off and for boredom, routine and irritation to have settled in.

Both Rishi and Simi, it turns out, are conducting mild flirtations with people they know at work. Simi has been giving her handsome coworker Veer (Rahul Khanna) her poems to read (though she won't let her husband look at them because he's "too critical"), while film professor Rishi finds himself attracted to his (much younger) student Raga (Saba Azad). Meanwhile, Mita decides that what's sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose, and allows Simi to set her up on a date with Veer. Of course, no sooner does Samit catch wind of his wife's activities than his jealous possessiveness is aroused.

There's a certain amount of comedy wrung from Samit's ludicrous affair, Rishi's shocked titillation by Raga's sexual openness, and Mita's disastrous date. But there's a strange shift in tone that starts to occur about three-quarters of the way through the movie when we come to realize that our sympathies for every character have been called into question. By the end, the same patterns that led to the couples' crises have been re-established in both old relationships and new, and we recognize that the characters are doomed to repeat the same mistakes (or resign themselves to perpetual dissatisfaction). In the final moments of the film the only compatible couple is made up, we're told, of "predator" (her) and "prey" (him). These characters have been left sadder, but no wiser; we're left with a pretty sour taste.

If Dil Kabaddi starts out as a bedroom farce and turns into a bitter portrait of male-female relationships, Mixed Doubles (2006) follows the reverse trajectory in a way, but ends up at the same place. Thanks to the pressures of work and raising their son and the dullness of routine, Sunil (Ranvir Shorey) and Malti (Konkona) are facing a loss of desire in their eight-year marriage. Helped along by fanciful stories of the sexual escapades of his friends and coworkers, Sunil starts pressuring Malti to try partner-swapping. Of course, she's bewildered and hurt, but Sunil adopts a series of outrageously underhanded and manipulative tactics until Malti gives in. By this point Sunil is so repellent that I found myself thinking that he was going to deserve every bit of the disaster that was so clearly looming—and just as clearly, this is exactly what writer/director Rajat Kapoor wants us to feel.

The movie starts to hit its comic stride during the "date" that Sunil and Mita have with a more experienced couple, Vinod (writer/director Kapoor) and Kalpana (Koel Purie). Sunil's interaction with the wildly capricious (and capriciously wild) Kalpana is especially appalling; this is bedroom farce with a vengence. The morning after, as Sunil and Malti tentatively settle back into their former routines, their regard for one another seems to have been permanently damaged by their supposedly liberating adventure. This couple is sadder and wiser, but the wisdom has come too late.

Konkona and the other actors are excellent in both films, but I find myself unable to recommend either one. Unless, that is, you enjoy the spectacle of people who should know better causing unnecessary pain to themselves and to those that they ostensibly love.