Bollywood comedy: Heyy Babyy and Om Shanti Om

With comedy, less is often more. But as both of these blockbusters from last year demonstrate, "less" is not a word that exists in Bollywood's vocabulary.

I have to confess that I've never much liked Akshay Kumar's screen presence--his wolfish grin reminds me too much of Tom Cruise (not a good association)--but he almost redeems himself in Heyy Babyy [sic] (2007). I've never seen Three Men and a Baby (1987) or its French original Trois hommes et un couffin (1985), the movies on which Heyy Babyy is based, but the common premise is pretty amusing: three bachelors (Fardeen Khan and the appealing Ritesh Deshmukh are the other two in HB) are suddenly faced with taking care of an infant girl left on their doorstep. A note accompanying the baby says "She's your daughter--you take care of her," only the men have no idea which of them is the father. So they collectively take on that role, and a fair amount of comedy is generated from the contrast between their growing sense of responsibility and their previous fecklessness.

There are a couple of especially enjoyable scenes in the first half. In the first one, the men are trying to identify the potential mothers and start listing all the women they've slept with. The baby's something like 6 months old, which would probably narrow it down pretty quickly. But clearly none of them wants to be outdone, so they start making up names: "Sheena," "Victoria," and so on, until their lists are absurdly long.

Perhaps the funniest scene, though, occurs once they've fully accepted their new roles as the joint fathers of the child they've named "Angel." They overhear a teenage girl arguing with her father about the micro-mini skirt she's wearing. This is instantly sobering to the guys as they contemplate Angel's future adolescence. One says, "We will choose her boyfriends"; another, "She won't have any boyfriends--we will choose her husband"; the third, "Let's hope she never meets any guys like us."

There are a couple of fun songs, too (music by Shankar Eshan Loy with lyrics by Sameer): the title number featuring cameos by a baker's dozen of Bollywood starlets (who are distressingly indistinguishable--was that part of the joke?), and the later "Meri Duniya Tu Hi Re" which is simultaneously a lullaby and a paean to the joys of group fatherhood.

Of course, just before the interval the mother (Vidya Balan) shows up to reclaim her child; just afterwards, we see the backstory and understand why she's justifiably angry at the baby's father (Akshay, of course). Alas, the first half is marred by a disturbing sequence where the baby nearly dies, while the second half becomes more and more tedious as the movie draws out the inevitable reunion of the biological parents with an hour of increasingly unfunny schtick. What would have been a charming 90-minute story becomes bloated and overdone, and can't even be rescued by a Shah Rukh Khan cameo.

Speaking of SRK, we missed Om Shanti Om (2007) when it was in our regional Hindi movie theaters last fall, and of course comedies are more fun when you see them with an audience. OSO is packed full of parodies of 1970s Bollywood, contemporary Bollywood, and movie awards ceremonies; it's got cameos by Bollywood greats past and present and homages to classic American musicals like Singin' in the Rain (1952), The Pirate (1947) and The Wizard of Oz (1939). The 70s hair and fashions are lovingly and hilariously recreated, and much fun is poked at modern-day superhero movies, action movies and their endless sequels. SRK himself doesn't escape unscathed: in the second half he appears as Om Kapoor, an arrogant superstar who is chronically late on set, will only do one take of a scene, and leaves early so he can film product endorsements. At the awards ceremony we see him in two virtually identical "best actor" clips where he's romancing a heroine against Yash Chopra-esque mountain backdrops (a parody more to the point when it was first done by Saif Ali Khan in Dil Chahta Hai (2001), perhaps).

It's all great fun, especially the song "Dhoom Taana" in which the stunning newcomer Deepika Padukone dances with the images of Bollywood heroes of the late 60s and 70s such as Sunil Dutt, Rajesh Khanna, and Jeetendra.

But for all its knowingness about Bollywood, OSO's parodies are hung on a hackneyed masala plot--involving impossible romance, reincarnation, revenge, and the unquiet spirits of the restless dead--which could itself have come straight out of the 70s. Good performances by Deepika, SRK and a cast of assured veterans don't quite rescue this film from its own conventional impulses, or keep the second half from seeming overlong. Perhaps someday Bollywood will realize that it is possible to have too much of a good thing.

Touching From A Distance: Ian Curtis and Joy Division

Touching from a Distance (Faber, 2007, originally published 1995) is Deborah Curtis' memoir of her life with Ian Curtis, the lead singer of Joy Division. She and Ian married in 1975, while they were still teenagers. Deborah became pregnant with their daughter Natalie in mid-1978, just as Joy Division released its first record (the four-song EP An Ideal for Living), and gave birth in April 1979, just two months before the release of the band's first full-length album (Unknown Pleasures). Under the enforced separation of touring and the pressures of Ian's newly diagnosed epilepsy, his ongoing relationship with another woman, and the bands' growing fame, Deborah and Ian drifted further apart. On May 18, 1980, the night before he was scheduled to leave on Joy Division's first US tour, Ian Curtis committed suicide.

This is an angry book. And it's not just survivor's anger. Deborah is angry about Ian's mercurial moods, his controlling behavior, his absences, his emotional remoteness from both her and their daughter, his drug use, and his infidelity. Of course, it's clear that Ian could be a difficult person. But strangely, I can hardly recall the word "depression" occurring in the text, although Ian's lyrics are saturated with despair. And Ian's incredible sensitivity, remarked on by everyone who knew him, only surfaces occasionally here. To be fair, Deborah does record moments of generosity, warmth and caring, but in the main she seems to have consciously taken aim at the icon "Ian Curtis" and tried to smash it.

But there are two things missing from this portrait. One is that Ian largely excluded her from his creative life: he didn't discuss his lyrics with her, and she wasn't present at most of the band's rehearsals, performances or recording sessions. In short, Ian Curtis the artist is absent.

The second thing that's missing is self-examination: a searching look at her own behavior, motivations and choices. Did she get pregnant in the hope of making a shaky relationship stronger? Or did she feel that a child would draw Ian away from the insular world of the band, which more and more excluded her? Or did she just not realize how all-consuming Joy Division's increasing success would be? All she says is that "hearing other women at the college talk about children had made me broody....What [Ian] wanted most in the world was for people to be happy. If having a baby would make me happy, we could have a baby" (p. 65). It seems incredible that either of their motivations could have been that simple.

The inescapable feeling is that they were a tragically mis-matched couple from the start. By her own account Deborah longed for comfortable domesticity, while Ian's overwhelming focus was his music. Late nights, long rehearsals, gigs, touring, and the inevitable drugs and groupies don't lend themselves to a stable home life. This is something that Deborah says only occurred to her "with hindsight," but the disjunction between her "ideal for living" and Ian's strikes the reader on almost every page.

And there are hints scattered throughout the book that Ian wasn't the only difficult personality in this relationship. In a passage about an incident from the first year of their married life which reveals more, perhaps, than she may realize, she writes: "Ian found it difficult to continue with his writing because there was nowhere he could find a comfortable solitude. The restrictions of living with relatives were lifted and our relationship would have been stormy if not for Ian's refusal to communicate with me. This was one way in which he would avoid confrontation. One night he turned his back to me in bed once too often. I bit into his back in desperation. Shocked by the faint tinge of blood in my mouth, I was rewarded by being kicked on to the floor" (p. 35). I can't get over the horror of the sentence "our relationship would have been stormy if not for Ian's refusal to communicate with me"--it speaks of an almost complete breakdown of communication and affection on both sides. Notice that, even though Ian can't find the solitude to create (they had their own house at this point, so his lack of solitude probably related to her demands for his attention), and though he has retreated into silence to avoid her anger, she sees herself as the only one "in desperation." She has perhaps unconsciously inverted Ian's lyrics from "Love Will Tear Us Apart":

"You lie back on your side, all my failings exposed,
There's a taste in my mouth, as desperation takes hold
That something so good, just can't function no more..."

After reading this memoir, it's tempting to see this song about a dying relationship as Ian's portrait of their marriage: it speaks of routine, resentment, stunted emotions, and two people growing ever further apart but unable to break free of each another.

Deborah Curtis' book is the basis of Anton Corbijn's Joy Division film Control (2007), and she is listed (along with Tony Wilson, founder of Joy Division's label Factory Records) as a co-producer. I haven't yet seen the film, but I hope that in addition to documenting the difficulties of the Curtis' personal lives, it does justice to what's missing from the book: the emotional power of the music that Ian Curtis and the other members of Joy Division created together.

The Complete Jane Austen: Unpersuasive

PBS is currently broadcasting a series it calls The Complete Jane Austen, but up until last week the series didn't have a whole lot to do with Jane Austen. Austen's novels (which my lover and I are currently reading aloud to one another) are full of moments involving subtle nuances of emotion and behavior. They take place in a society whose members are constrained by manners, propriety and convention from directly expressing their true feelings. But all three of the adaptations that have been completed so far in the series have dispensed with subtlety, making Austen's characters into caricatures. The adaptations aren't even true to Austen's plots: key scenes are cut and others are invented by the screenwriters.

Persuasion (broadcast January 13) is probably the worst offender of the lot. This latest version, starring Sophie Hawkins as one of Austen's most sensitive and wise heroines, Anne Elliot, fails on every level. It goes wrong almost immediately, when Anne recites key lines from the climactic letter scene near the end of the book during a dinner party that takes place within the first minutes of the film. Since the letter scene is the moment in the novel when Captain Frederick Wentworth finally confesses his undying love to Anne, you just don't mess with it. But apparently the writers thought that the letter scene wasn't cinematic enough. So to replace it, at the end of the film they have Anne running through the streets of Bath after Wentworth, something that would have been an impossibly scandalous action for a woman of Anne's situation. This isn't the only time Anne runs after Wentworth, either--in an earlier scene at a concert, Wentworth stalks out when sees his rival William Elliot sitting next to Anne. Anne jumps up and runs after him, catching up to him in the hall outside the concert room--a scene that exists nowhere in Austen's novel. Here's an excerpt from the actual concert scene in Chapter 20 of Austen's novel, after Anne maneuvers herself away from Mr. Elliot to make it easier for Captain Wentworth to approach her:

"He owned himself disappointed, had expected singing; and in short, must confess that he should not be sorry when it was over. Anne replied, and spoke in defense of the performance so well, and yet in allowance for his feelings so pleasantly, that his countenance improved, and he replied again with almost a smile. They talked for a few minutes more; the improvement held; he even looked down towards the bench, as if he saw a place on it well worth occupying; when at that moment a touch on her shoulder obliged Anne to turn round. It came from Mr Elliot. He begged her pardon, but she must be applied to, to explain Italian again. Miss Carteret was very anxious to have a general idea of what was next to be sung. Anne could not refuse; but never had she sacrificed to politeness with a more suffering spirit.

"A few minutes, though as few as possible, were inevitably consumed; and when her own mistress again, when able to turn and look as she had done before, she found herself accosted by Captain Wentworth, in a reserved yet hurried sort of farewell. 'He must wish her good night; he was going; he should get home as fast as he could.'

"'Is not this song worth staying for?' said Anne, suddenly struck by an idea which made her yet more anxious to be encouraging.

"'No!' he replied impressively, 'there is nothing worth my staying for;' and he was gone directly.

"Jealousy of Mr Elliot! It was the only intelligible motive. Captain Wentworth jealous of her affection! Could she have believed it a week ago; three hours ago! For a moment the gratification was exquisite. But, alas! there were very different thoughts to succeed. How was such jealousy to be quieted? How was the truth to reach him? How, in all the peculiar disadvantages of their respective situations, would he ever learn of her real sentiments? It was misery to think of Mr Elliot's attentions. Their evil was incalculable."

What makes the new version even more pointless and annoying is that the BBC had already done a perfectly wonderful adaptation of Persuasion in 1995 (apparently a magical year for Austen films; see Pride and Prejudice below), starring Amanda Root as Anne and Ciarán Hinds as Captain Wentworth. That version is far more faithful to the events of the books, and to the social and emotional world of Austen's characters. Both Amanda Root and Ciarán Hinds are well-cast--neither is a supermodel inexplicably dropped into the rural English society of the 1800s--and both completely embody their roles. Seek out the 1995 Persuasion, and shun the new one as the butcher job it is.

Northanger Abbey (broadcast on January 20) could only be an improvement--and it did manage to catch the spirit of Austen's novel, even if it also exaggerated the characters and invented scenes. There are a few anachronisms: Henry Tilney (the excellent J. J. Feild) confides to the Gothic-novel-loving Catherine (Felicity Jones) as they approach the Abbey that "There is a kind of vampirism" at large there. Only the first vampire fiction in English, John Polidori's The Vampyre (whose aristocratic bloodsucker Lord Ruthven is modelled on Polidori's friend Lord Byron) wouldn't be published until 1819, two years after Austen's untimely death. Still, given the producers' bizarre decision to limit the new adaptations to 90 minutes, it didn't do too great violence to its source.

I have to confess that we turned off Mansfield Park (broadcast January 27) after the first 10 minutes. In the place of Austen's Fanny Price, a poor teenager foisted on to her rich relations, whose painful consciousness of her dependence only adds to her natural shyness, the new adaption's Fanny was played as a bold, saucy, athletic modern woman. In Austen's novel, it takes Edmund Bertram almost 500 pages to wake up and realize that Fanny is his perfect match; what red-blooded man could overlook for a moment the all-too-obvious charms of actress Billie Piper, whose previous credits include Secret Diary Of A Call Girl?

The less said about the Jane Austen "biography" Miss Austen Regrets (broadcast February 3), the better. It wove highly speculative versions of some of Austen's known flirtations as a young woman with a fabricated story in which the middle-aged Jane meddles in her niece Fanny's love affairs like some sort of Lady Russell (from Persuasion). Disappointing.

Finally, though, we're back on solid ground with Pride and Prejudice (1995; the first part was broadcast February 10, continuing each Sunday through the end of February). We haven't seen it before, but so far it fulfills every expectation. A key difference: the 1995 P & P is 300 minutes long instead of 90, giving the characters room to grow and develop over time, and allowing the filmmakers to be as faithful as possible to the novel. Colin Firth is an excellent Darcy, capturing his haughtiness and strong (but fundamentally decent) feelings, while Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth Bennet simply glows. We're looking forward to the continuation with the greatest pleasure; if you aren't watching it, you're missing something special.

Opera guide 1: Dido & Aeneas

This is the first installment in what is going to be an open-ended series on my favorite operas.

Henry Purcell's Dido & Aeneas (1689) is an oddity among 17th-century operas. Most Baroque operas are 3 hours long or more, and have a happy ending, however contrived; Dido takes less than an hour to sweep from the introduction of the characters to its tragic conclusion. The primary language of Baroque opera is Italian (although there's also a parallel French tradition); Dido is in English. As a result of its unusual qualities, Dido is an ideal starting point for anyone (or at least, any English speaker) interested in exploring opera, and particularly Baroque opera. Another reason it's ideal is that the music is very tuneful and, especially at key moments, ravishingly beautiful.

The outline of the story is taken from Book IV of Virgil's Aeneid. In Virgil's great poem, Aeneas, fleeing with a few followers the destruction of Troy by the Greeks, finds a safe haven in Carthage, ruled by Queen Dido. Against her better judgment Dido finds herself falling in love with the valiant warrior, a love that is fatefully consummated when, during a hunting party, the couple take shelter from a sudden storm in a secluded cave. Soon, however, Mercury--the messenger of Jupiter--appears to Aeneas and commands him to sail to Italy to found, in Rome, a new Troy. The abandoned Dido, angry, heartbroken and desperate, commits suicide out of "the grief / Of lovers bound unequally by love" (in Robert Fitzgerald's translation[1]); Aeneas, from the deck of his ship heading seaward, sees the smoke rising from her funeral pyre.

Purcell's librettist, the poet Nahum Tate, was famously called "a cold writer, of no invention" by Alexander Pope in The Dunciad. But Tate's changes to Virgil's story actually make it more dramatically complex and stageworthy. He introduces the character of a sorceress, who is Dido's sworn enemy and who plots to destroy her; the scenes in the witches' cave are delightfully dreadful. In the opera it is the sorceress who sends a spirit "in form of Mercury himself" to command Aeneas to leave Carthage; and in Tate's version it is not just Dido's pyre, but the entire city that burns (although Tate is discreetly inexplicit about the cause of Dido's death).

Any performance of Dido & Aeneas succeeds or fails on the basis of its Dido, and my favorite recording of the opera features Lorraine Hunt (later Lorraine Hunt Lieberson) in the role. She is a powerfully moving Dido, especially in her two great tragic arias: "Ah! Belinda, I am press'd" and "When I am laid in earth." Nicholas McGegan conducts the period-instrument Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra beautifully: he's sprightly in the dance sections, but brings out the full pathos of Dido's tragic arias. McGegan does go for a very characterful portrayal of the witches and sailors, which may bother some people. And while Michael Dean is a good Aeneas, Ellen Rabiner's Sorceress has a broad vibrato that makes her sound as though she's been airlifted in from some Wagner opera. But despite these minor stylistic issues and several other fine recordings, Lorraine Hunt's Dido makes this my first choice.

Here is Hunt's performance of Dido's first aria, "Ah! Belinda, I am press'd":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HX2avHeJpHE

The words are, "Ah! Belinda, I am press'd / With torment not to be confess'd. / Peace and I are strangers grown; / I languish 'til my grief is known / Yet would not have it guess'd."

Many modern productions portray the sorceress as an aspect of Dido, and the roles are often performed by the same singer. Choreographer Mark Morris created a danced version of the opera in which he brilliantly enacted both Dido and the Sorceress; this is Dido's death scene (Dido is sung by Jennifer Lane):

The Mark Morris Dance Group, 1994

(Again, if the image doesn't load for some reason, here is a direct link.) Some of the commenters about this clip on YouTube are obviously nonplussed that Dido is being portrayed by a man. They are clearly unaware of how thoroughly gender was bent in Baroque opera. While a male Dido is unusual, a male sorceress is less so (perhaps it enhances her uncanniness). But even more surprising, in the first performance of Dido it's likely that the role of Aeneas was sung by a woman.

A single copy survives of the libretto from the first performance, "by Young Gentlewomen" at a boarding school for girls in 1689.[2] Recently a libretto for John Blow's Venus & Adonis was discovered which was printed for an April 1684 performance of that opera at the same girls' school.[3] The Venus libretto mentions that it was "Perform'd before the King. Afterwards at Mr. Josias Priest's Boarding School at Chelsey." Since Dido was modelled on Venus, some musicologists have speculated that Dido also must have been first performed at court. However, while both an early score and the libretto for Venus explicitly mention a court performance, the sole existing contemporary libretto for Dido does not. The 1684 libretto for Venus does have contemporary hand-written annotations indicating that the part of Adonis was sung by Priest's daughter; presumably the same practice--that is, having all the parts sung by women--was also followed in the 1689 Dido performance.

Alas, no score has yet been discovered that dates from Purcell's short lifetime (he died in 1695, in his mid-30s). The earliest surviving score is from around 1750, although it was apparently copied from a pre-1720 source.[4] There is a prologue in the libretto for which no music has been found, and other issues (such as the original range of the parts of Aeneas and the Sailor) that will remain a matter of speculation.

Nonetheless, what has survived is dramatically compelling and spectacularly beautiful. If you're unfamiliar with Dido & Aeneas, the Lorraine Hunt Lieberson recording is an excellent place to begin your acquaintance.

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

1. Virgil. The Aeneid. Robert Fitzgerald, trans. New York: Vintage, 1983.

2. Ellen Harris. Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987.

3. Richard Luckett. A new source for 'Venus and Adonis'. The Musical Times, v. 130 (no. 1752), Feb. 1989, 76-79.

4. A. Margaret Laurie. Allegory, sources, and performance history. In Curtis Price, ed., Henry Purcell: Dido and Aeneas: An authoritative score (pp. 42-59). New York: Norton, 1986.

Chori Chori Chupke Chupke

Chori Chori Chupke Chupke ("Quietly, Secretly") (2001), like Kya Kehna (1997/2000) (a previous Preity Zinta film that also centers on questions of sexuality and motherhood) is frustrating and fascinating, regressive and progressive, taboo-breaking and convention-affirming, in roughly equal measure.

A brief plot synopsis for those who haven't seen Chori Chori Chupke Chupke: Raj (a remarkably subdued and so surprisingly tolerable Salman Khan), the fabulously rich grandson of a major industrialist, marries Priya (Rani Mukherjee), who is soon pregnant. But due to the requirements of the plot, she has an accident that results not just in a miscarriage, but in her permanent infertility. Since Raj's granddad (Amrish Puri) has such an emotional investment in great-grandchildren, Raj and Priya decide to conceal her condition from the family, and Raj goes in search of a woman to be a surrogate mother.

A search which takes him, as it would any reasonable person, to a bar that features the dancing girl Madhu (Preity Zinta). No sooner does Raj watch Madhu bumping, grinding and crawling across tables in "Diwani Diwani" ("Crazy, Crazy") than he decides that this is the ideal surrogate mother for his and Priya's child.

One problem: no, it's not that Madhu can quote the hourly and nightly rates for her company, or that she has trouble extrapolating those rates to a full year. It's that she lacks manners: she's crude, loud, and tacky, which will never do. So Raj embarks on a Pygmalion/My Fair Lady/Pretty Woman makeover of Madhu.

It has to be said that Preity Zinta does a great job of making you cringe at Madhu's crassness, while keeping her character basically sympathetic. The whole setup is misogynistic and classist; on the other hand, when just before the intermission Madhu is finally revealed as the Preity Zinta we know and love, elegantly striding through an airport in a chic pantsuit, the transformation is striking. I guess the movie ferreted out my own unconscious class prejudices.

So Raj, Priya and Madhu jet off to Switzerland, where they'll live for a year in order to conceal Madhu's pregnancy and perform several dance numbers with spectacular background scenery. Of course, Madhu isn't impregnated in a clinic or even using a turkey baster, but the old-fashioned way. Despite the double suspension of disbelief involved (first, that this incredibly rich couple is unaware of the medical technologies of surrogacy, and second, that Raj doesn't find the transformed Madhu to be attractive), the impregnation scene is actually rather sweet--Raj can only perform after he's drunk enough to imagine that Madhu is really Priya. One night, of course, is all it takes for Madhu to get pregnant--and to fall hopelessly in love with Raj.

Oddly enough, Raj's family begins to wonder at his insistence that they have to stay in Switzerland for a year, and they show up in a surprise visit to convince the couple to return to India for the birth. (Priya stuffs a pillow under her sari to fake pregnancy, and Madhu is passed off as the wife of a business associate.) There's a remarkable scene in which Priya's mother-in-law (Farida Jalal) massages Madhu's swollen feet and legs with oil. In Hindu culture, of course, the feet are considered to be the most unclean part of the body (thus the gesture of touching an honored person's feet as a sign of respect), and the feet of a prostitute/lower caste woman especially so. Preity does a great job expressing the conflicting emotions this act--the touching of her feet by an elder/superior--arouses in Madhu: shame, embarrassment, pleasure, gratitude.

Back in India, Raj's granddad has arranged a ghod-bharai ceremony for the "expectant" Priya. Wanting the child to be blessed, Priya convinces Madhu to attend the ceremony in her place. Of course, a semi-transparent veil is enough to conceal Madhu's identity during the ceremony, since Preity and Rani look so similar. It's not like Preity has rosebud lips and sharper chin while Rani has a generously wide mouth and a squarer jaw, or anything like that...

I realize that to complain about the implausibilities of a Bollywood plot is to miss the point. Instead, I should just confess to enjoying the pleasures the film offers--the obvious onscreen chemistry among all the principles, and particularly the terrific performances of Preity and Rani. There's a great confrontation between the two in the final part of the film where Madhu decides to keep the baby and the saintly Priya finally lashes out in very convincing anger. If the conclusion of the film reaffirms that in Bollywood, motherhood is the condition that absolves all sins, it's just the price you pay for admission. And under the, er, veil of reaffirming traditional values, the movie has managed to suggest a number of fairly radical propositions: that one's identity is more a matter of life circumstances than of ineluctable fate; that the reduction of a woman's value to her childbearing ability is highly damaging; and that love--like generosity and self-sacrifice--takes no heed of caste or class boundaries. As with many Bollywood films, you just have to take the crunchy with the smooth.