Mughal-e-Azam

In one of my earlier Bollywood posts I'd written "less is often more." Not in Mughal-e-Azam (The Great Mughal, 1960), though. Its hallucinatory sets, sumptuous costumes, epic battle scenes and delirious dance numbers are overwhelming, and I mean that in the best possible way.

The film is set during the reign of the Mughal Emperor Akbar (Prithviraj Kapoor) in 16th-century India, and tells the story of the doomed love of Prince Salim (Dilip Kumar) and the court dancer Anarkali (Madhubala). The Emperor opposes their love, banishing Salim from court and imprisoning Anarkali in Piranesi-like dungeons. Ultimately, of course, the Emperor realizes that only death can separate the lovers...

Mughal-e-Azam's Urdu dialogue is acclaimed for being highly poetic (and quotable). Unfortunately, as in Sholay (1975), the effect is lost in the English subtitles, which often make the characters sound as though they are making stilted pronouncements at each other. This is especially true of Prithviraj Kapoor as the Emperor Akbar, who has an appropriately stentorian way of delivering his lines. In contrast, Dilip Kumar as Prince Salim underplays almost to a fault. Madhubala's Anarkali is the emotional center of the film, and her luminous beauty is breathtaking.

The sets and costumes are still jaw-dropping, as are the battle scenes featuring charging war elephants and thousands of clashing soldiers. What makes the film work for me above all, though, are its songs. The music is by Naushad with lyrics by Shakeel Badayuni, sung by an exquisitely fresh-voiced Lata Mangeshkar; Lachchu Maharaj choreographed the spectacular dance numbers. The seductive "Mohe Panghat Pe" ("Krishna teased me at the well") introduces us to Anarkali; Madhubala lifting her veil in its opening moments is justly one of the most famous shots in Indian cinema. The call-and-response competition in "Teri Mehfil Main" between Anarkali and her rival Bahar (Nigar Sultana), each seeking to outdo the other in her description of the sufferings of love, is a brilliant setpiece. When Bahar is awarded a flower and Anarkali the thorns (Salim pricks his own finger as he hands them to her), we have an intimation of the lovers' unhappy end in a brilliantly compressed image. Anarkali turns this ambiguous gesture into a complete victory, though, when she responds, "Thorns will never fade." Wah!

Mughal-e-Azam served as the inspiration for many other Bollywood films. In particular both Umrao Jaan (1981) and Devdas (2002) feature rebellious aristocratic sons who insist on loving, and being loved by, women of whom their stern, unbending fathers disapprove, and both films also end tragically. Sometimes the references are direct: "Mohe Panghat Pe" is clearly the template for Madhuri Dixit's "Kahe Chhed Mohe" in Devdas, as "Pyar Kiya To Darna Kya" ("I shall tell the story of my love")--Anarkali's defiant reassertion of her love for the Prince--is for that film's "Maar Daala." In Mughal-e-Azam, "Mohe Panghat Pe" ends with the Prince rewarding Anarkali with his own necklace; Umrao Jaan's "In Ankhon Ki Masti" ends with the same gesture being made by the Nawaab to Rekha's Umrao Jaan.

The DVD version we watched is riotously colorful, although the original film was mainly shot in black and white (the original is also available on DVD). While for most black and white films colorizing is an abomination, I don't feel quite the same way about Mughal-e-Azam--visual overload was so clearly a major part of director Karim Asif's aesthetic. As Memsaab reminded me in a comment on my earlier post, "sometimes more can be more too."

"The insane frenzy of an illicit love": Mitridate, re di Ponto

Mozart's opera Mitridate, re di Ponto (1770), written when he was only 14, is often condescendingly described as an immature or apprentice work--or simply ignored. The opera is barely mentioned in both Daniel Heartz's Mozart's Operas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992) and David Cairn's Mozart and His Operas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), for example--you won't even find it listed in the Cairn book's index.

However, Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's 1987 film of the opera makes a strong case for it to be considered among Mozart's masterpieces. Perhaps I'm just responding to the excellence of Ponnelle's film, but on a first hearing I heretically prefer it to his later opera seria Idomeneo (1781), if not La Clemenza di Tito (1791).

The background to the story is the military conflict between Pontus--a kingdom on the Black Sea coast of what is now northeastern Turkey--and an expansionist Rome in the first century BCE. In the foreground, though, like most other opera seria, is a love triangle--or in this case, polyhedron: King Mitridate is betrothed to Aspasia, who loves (and is loved by) his son Sifare. Aspasia is also pursued by Sifare's brother and rival Farnace, who is betrothed to Ismene.

As with all opera seria, the complicated plot (the libretto, by Vittorio Cigna-Santi, is based on a play by Racine) exists to supply characters with conflicts between love and duty, and to give them opportunities to display a range of emotions: anger, despair, triumph, tenderness, grief. Against all expectation the 14-year-old Mozart convincingly (and often stunningly) depicts these emotions in musical terms.

The wide leaps in the vocal lines reveal the virtuosity of his original cast in Milan, for following the standard practice of the time, Mozart wrote their arias only after he had met each of the singers and understood their strengths. This caused a problem, though, because the primo uomo--the castrato Pietro Benedetti, known as Sartorini, who was singing the role of Sifare--arrived less than four weeks before the first performance. Mozart also had to rewrite several arias to satisfy Guglielmo d'Ettore, the demanding tenor singing the role of Mitridate. If all this weren't enough, Mozart and his father Leopold had to combat a faction who wanted the soprano singing Aspasia, Antonia Bernasconi, to instead perform arias composed by Quirino Gasparini. (Gasparini's version of the opera had been performed in Turin four years previously.) We know all this because alternative versions of some of the arias exist, and the process of the mounting of the opera is described in detail in letters sent by Leopold to his wife and daughter at home in Salzburg.

In any case, despite all the delay and intrigue the opera was very successful--it ran for 22 performances--and it's easy to hear why. The arias for Aspasia are particularly effective. As Jane Glover points out in her excellent book Mozart's Women (New York: Harper Collins, 2005), Aspasia is the center of the drama, and in Ponnelle's film she is brilliantly portrayed by Yvonne Kenny. Her opening aria, "Al destin che la minaccia," is electrifying, but as her situation worsens her music gets even more striking. In Act II she has an extended renunciation scene with Sifare (mezzo-soprano Ann Murray), and the act concludes with a thrilling duet between the two. And in the dramatic high point of the last act, Aspasia sings the mournful "Pallid'ombre" as she prepares to drink a cup of poison; the aria exploits the soprano's rich lower register to profoundly moving effect.

Kenny's may be the most arresting performance in the film, but Murray, alto Anne Gjevang as Farnace, and tenor Gosta Winbergh as Mitridate are excellent as well. Winbergh has some particularly jaw-dropping leaps in register which he sings beautifully (and I'm not a big fan of tenors in general). Ponnelle's one miscalculation is to cast the minor role of Arbate with a boy treble instead of an adult (apart from the incongruity--Arbate is supposed to be the governor of Nymphaneum--I just don't like the sound). Nikolaus Harnoncourt's conducting of the superlative period-instrument orchestra Concentus Musicus Wien brings out all the brilliance and fire of the young Mozart's score.

In addition to its musical riches, the film also offers striking visuals, where Ponnelle attempts to reimagine the highly stylized conventions of baroque staging. It's filmed in the elegant 16th-century Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, Italy, the final masterwork of the architect Andreas Palladio and one of the most beautiful theaters in the world. And the outrageous costumes--Aspasia's dress is as wide as Yvonne Kenny is tall, and Winbergh's wild outfit as Mitridate can be glimpsed on the cover above--are based on baroque originals, as can be seen in Charles Joseph Flipart's 1737 portrait of the castrato Carlo Siface. But while the production may be knowingly (and spectacularly) artificial, the emotions conveyed by the performers are powerfully real.

For another appreciation of Ponnelle's film--and particularly of Yvonne Kenny's wonderful performance--see Prima la musica, poi de parole. A dissenting opinion is offered by Ionarts.

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.