Sadder but no wiser: Dil Kabaddi and Mixed Doubles

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 Malti 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.

Shakespeare's sisters: Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel and Maria Anna Mozart

In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf speculates about what the life of Shakespeare's sister might have been like had she existed. If she had been equally as talented, and equally "as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world" as her famous brother, she would have been prevented—thanks to the constraints placed on Elizabethan women—from making use of her gifts.

But some great artists really did have sisters. When Wolfgang Mozart was a child prodigy he toured Europe giving concerts with his older sister Maria Anna, known in the family as Nannerl. Nannerl was clearly very talented; her harpsichord playing was described by observers as "masterly" and "brilliant." In a letter published in the Augsburger Intelligenz-Zettel of May 19, 1763, an anonymous reviewer wrote, "Just imagine a girl 11 years of age who can perform on the harpsichord or fortepiano the most difficult sonatas and concertos by the greatest masters, most accurately, readily and with an almost incredible ease, in the very best of taste." [1]

Nannerl also wrote music; in a letter from 1770 Wolfgang praises one of her songs, writing "I am amazed to find out how well you can compose. In a word, the song is beautiful. Try this more often." [2] Unfortunately, none of her compositions have survived.

But when Nannerl was 18, her father Leopold began to focus all of his attentions (and the family resources) on promoting Wolfgang's career. Nannerl and her mother were left behind in Salzburg as Wolfgang and Leopold toured Italy and travelled to Vienna. Wolfgang wrote many piano pieces that were clearly intended for performance by Nannerl, including his first piano duet (K381, from 1772). The conductor and musicologist Jane Glover writes of this piece, "It is significant that there is absolute parity between the Primo and Secondo parts; as a player, Nannerl was entirely Wolfgang's equal." [3] But while she played with her brother in public occasionally over the next decade, her life as a performer began to draw to a close, and ended entirely with her marriage in 1783.

Fanny Mendelssohn was Felix Mendelssohn's older sister, and received musical instruction from the same tutors as Felix. Like Nannerl, Fanny was a pianist and composer. But because she came from an upper-class family performances for paying customers were considered unseemly, and so Fanny played only in the family home and for invited guests. When she was a young woman her father wrote her, "Music will perhaps become his [Felix's] profession, while for you it can and must be only an ornament, never the root of your being and action....You must...prepare more earnestly and eagerly for your real calling, the only calling of a young woman—I mean the state of a housewife." When their mother urged Felix to help Fanny publish her music, he wrote her that to do this "is contrary to my views and to my convictions." [4]

Fanny continued to compose, however, even after her marriage to the painter William Hensel (who fully supported her musical activities); ultimately she produced more than 400 works. It may have been contrary to Felix's convictions to publish Fanny's works under her own name; however, he included six of her songs in his song collections Opus 8 and Opus 9. Finally in 1846 Fanny began to publish her songs and piano pieces under her own name; unfortunately she died of a stroke the following year, and after a few more works were published at William Hensel's request, nothing more appeared until 1987.

Today, however, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel is recognized as one of the most significant 19th-century composers, and a definitive biography of Fanny by R. Larry Todd has recently been published (Fanny Hensel: The Other Mendelssohn, Oxford, 2009). In her post "Celebrating Fanny Hensel," Jessica Duchen has conducted a fascinating interview with Todd and included a performance of one of Fanny's duets, "Aus meinen Tränen sprießen viel blühende Blumen hervor" (From my tears spring many blooming flowers), sung by Barbara Bonney and Angelika Kirchschlager with pianist Malcolm Martineau:

The words in German and English can be found on WikiBooks.

Many thanks to acatalano2641 for the video and to Jessica for including it in her wonderful post on Fanny, which inspired mine. There is also a website devoted to Fanny which includes links to CDs, books, sheet music, and concert performances of her work (mainly in Germany).

Update 9 March 2017: Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel's "Easter Sonata" for piano was recently rediscovered by musicologist Angela Mace Christian after being misattributed to Felix for decades. Fanny's great-great-great-granddaughter, Sheila Hayman, recounts the discovery in The Guardian UK of 8 March 2017: "A Fanny Mendelssohn masterpiece finally gets its due."

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[1] Quoted in Otto Eric Deutsch's Mozart: A Documentary Biography, Stanford University Press, 1966, pp. 17-26.

[2] From letter 102a in Emily Anderson's Letters of Mozart and His Family, Vol. 1, MacMillan, 1938, p. 219.

[3] From Jane Glover's Mozart's Women: His Family, His Friends, His Music, Harper Collins, 2005, pp. 43-44.

[4] Quoted in Carol Neuls-Bates's Women in Music: An Anthology of Source Readings from the Middle Ages to the Present. Northeastern University Press, 1996, pp. 144-148.

The Top 10 Bollywood love stories?

We're regular (if often exasperated) viewers of Namaste America's Geet TV, which airs Saturday mornings on a local independent channel. We watch it mainly for music clips from Bollywood movies past, present and forthcoming—in fact, seven years ago the clips it was airing from Devdas (2002) and Kal Ho Naa Ho (2003) were what inspired us to seek out our first Bollywood movie (KHNH, of course).

This morning Geet TV a did a show on the Top 10 Love Stories since 1990, as voted by the vistors to the Namaste America website. Here are the results, in ascending order, with my commentary:

10. Jab We Met (When We Met, 2007): This is a favorite of many Bollybloggers, but for some reason I'm resistant to its charms. Shahid Kapoor is indeed appealing—this is the film that created a legion of diehard Shahid fanwomen like Ajnabi—and Kareena Kapoor acquits herself surprisingly well. But Tarun Arora isn't a credible romantic rival, and too much of the plot is borrowed from Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995). If I were choosing a Shahid movie, I might have picked (heresy, I know) Vivah (2006) instead.

9. Maine Pyar Kiya (I Fell In Love, 1989): Sorry, but no movie in which Salman gets the girl is going to wind up in my Top 10 love stories—his real-life violence against women (alleged, of course) has landed him permanently on the E & I blacklist. (We also find his acting wooden and his dancing laughable.) Anyway, if I was going to cheat and include a movie from the late 1980s I would probably choose Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak (1988); a typically articulate review is offered by theBollywoodFan.

8. Fanaa (Destroyed by Love, 2006): As is required of every great love story, it's got some wonderful songs (the teasing courtship song "Chand Sifarish," the seductive "Dekho Na" and the gorgeous "Mere Hath Main"), and excellent chemistry between the main couple (Aamir and Kajol). For me, though, the masala quotient is just a bit too high; Ajnabi and theBollywoodFan feel differently, though.

7. Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (Something is Happening, 1998): No argument from me here, despite Salman's presence as Shah Rukh Khan's rival for Kajol. Plus, Bollyviewer has discovered the secret of Anjali's missing years.

6. Dil To Pagal Hai (The Heart is Crazy, 1997): I'm a huge fan of both Shah Rukh Khan and Madhuri Dixit, and think Karisma is the more interesting Kapoor sister. Thanks to a rash impulse one afternoon in the Bombay Music DVD shop, I even own this movie. But there is no way that I would put this in my Top 10 love stories, or Top 10 anything. Disappointing on pretty much every level. I'd rather see a wildly uneven but genuinely affecting movie like Dil Hai Tumhaara (2002) on the list instead of this one.

5. Jodhaa Akhbar (2008). This movie is beautiful. Aishwarya Rai is beautiful, Hrithik Roshan is beautiful, the sets and costumes are beautiful. What it's not is moving. Again, I'm definitely in the minority on this one; the review by Memsaab makes a strong case for its inclusion. I think I'd put Veer-Zaara (2004) in this slot, though.

4. Devdas (2002): I've never quite understood why Devdas (in any version) is considered a great love story—the title character's tragic death-spiral isn't very romantic viewing. But this film is compelling thanks to its sheer Sanjay Leela Bhansali-directed sumptuousness, Ismail Darber's great music, and the affecting performance of Madhuri Dixit as Chandramukhi, the courtesan whose selfless love for Devdas is utterly spurned. Still, not exactly a date movie.

3. Kaho Naa...Pyaar Hai (Say You Love Me, 2001): Wound up on my list of flat-out awful films of the 2000s. I find it unwatchable. I'd dump this one in a New York minute and substitute Kal Ho Naa Ho (2003).

2. Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (The Brave Heart Takes the Bride, 1995): I'm only amazed that this didn't come in first, as it always seems to in polls like this. While some scenes don't work for me, this movie and its songs are classics and the Shah Rukh-Kajol chemistry is undeniable.

1. Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (My Heart Belongs to Another, 1999): A surprise first choice. I liked this film quite a bit when I first saw it, towards the beginning of our Bollywood viewing, but I'm not really sure what I'd think of it if I saw it again. On the positive side, it has a young, vivacious Aishwarya Rai as a dancer who loves a musician (Salman), but agrees to marry the rich man (a very sympathetic Ajay Devgan) her father selects for her. It's also got the lush direction of Sanjay Leela Bhansali and excellent songs by Ismail Darbar (also big pluses for Devdas). On the down side: Salman. Even so, I think this one would be on my list, too.

But this list still seems pretty strange. For one thing, the biggest jodi in the early 1990s was Aamir Khan and Juhi Chawla, but none of their films make the list (Hum Hain Rahi Pyar Ke (We are Travelers On The Path Of Love, 1992) is one I'm eager to see). I'm amazed (and relieved) by the absence of Hum Aapke Hain Koun...! (What Am I To You, 1994), and amazed (and dismayed) by the presence of Dil To Pagal Hai and Kaho Naa...Pyaar Hai. And given the preferences of the voters for Shah Rukh, Kajol, and Hrithik, I'm sure that Veracious and I both want to know why Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (2001) is missing from the list entirely (though I find K3G a little too polished to be a personal favorite).

As ever, your own nominations and comments are welcome.

Update 12 June 2011: We recently re-watched Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam, and you can read my (not entirely positive) responses here.

Update 17 March 2012: The viewers of Namaste America have created another eyebrow-raising list, this time of The Top 10 Shah Rukh Khan movies.

Femininity as performance: Konkona Sen Sharma

Konkona Sen Sharma has quickly become an Exotic and Irrational favorite. She first came to our attention in Aaja Nachle (2007), where she played the distinctly unglamorous Anokhi. Anokhi is a tomboyish village girl who is trying to get Kunal Kapoor's Imran to notice her; when they are cast as the legendary lovers Laila and Majnu in the theatrical show that Madhuri Dixit's Dia is directing, Anokhi has her chance.

Even without English subtitles, the dynamics among the characters and the shifts between the film's reality and the characters' fantasies in Aaja Nachle's "Ishq Hua" should be pretty clear. That's Vinay Pathak and Sushmita Mukherjee as the older couple, and Ranvir Shorey dancing with Madhuri in his character's fantasy (music by Salim-Suleiman; directed by Anil Mehta):

Under the tutelage of the older, more experienced (and divorced) Dia, Anokhi learns that the way to a man's heart is to glam up, flirt, and become more feminine. By making a parallel between Anokhi's role in the show and her adoption of a more girlish personal style, the movie is suggesting—perhaps not inadvertently—that femininity is a performance.

And this isn't the only Konkona movie that makes that suggestion. In Life in a...Metro, Konkona plays Shruti, as a woman we are supposed to see (at least initially) as exaggeratedly severe; it's only after she gets some girl-to-girl advice about her appearance and demeanor that she begins to get some (initially unwanted) attention from Irrfan Khan's Monty. It's a measure of how good she is as an actress that the striking Konkona is so convincing as these supposedly unattractive women.

Incidentally, both movies also suggest that men are crude and self-centered until love allows them to let down their emotional guard a little. In other words, masculinity is also a performance—or to put it another way, an act.

In addition to (or sometimes along with) the ugly duckling who becomes a swan, Konkona also often plays young women beginning to make their way in the big city. Her characters, with the same mixed success as the rest of us, are seeking not only love, but creative fulfillment in their work. In Page 3 (2005), she plays a naïve journalist who realizes too late that she's become a part of the empty-celebrity machine; in Luck By Chance (2009), she plays an aspiring actress who discovers that talent and ambition aren't all that's required for Bollywood success; and in Wake Up Sid (2009), she plays a young writer who eventually lands a column in a hip nightlife magazine as the "New Girl in the City." Konkona's sympathetic performances are the best thing about all three of these movies.

Here she shows Aisha's recognition of her growing love for Ranbir Kapoor's Sid in Wake Up Sid's lovely "Iktara" (music by Shankar-Eshaan-Loy, lyrics by Javed Akhtar; directed by Ayan Mukherjee):

After Wake Up Sid, which was very successful both critically and commercially, Konkona may have felt that she was finished for the time being with "new girl in the city" roles. Certainly her current projects seem to involve very different kinds of characters. We haven't seen Atithi Tum Kab Jaoge or Right Ya Wrong (both 2010)—neither slapstick comedy nor suspense thrillers (Hitchcock aside) are favorite E & I genres. We are, though, looking forward to Iti Mrinalini (announced for a June 2010 release), Konkona's reunion with her mother Aparna Sen, who wrote and directed Konkona's breakthrough Mr. and Mrs. Iyer (2002).

Three love problems: George Eliot's Middlemarch

"...men know best about everything, except what women know better."

—Celia Brooke to her sister Dorothea

George Eliot's Middlemarch is irresistibly quotable. One reason is that 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 set out to make "a study of provincial life," as her subtitle has it. She peopled her fictional village with a memorable cast of characters viewed with an affectionate but critical eye and depicted with an almost painful psychological acuity. But the frailties and failings she depicts in her early 19th-century characters are so familiar that they seem very modern—or, perhaps, as ancient as human society itself. (Image of the first edition of Middlemarch from earlywomenmasters.net)

At the center of the novel are the "three love problems" that provide the title for the fourth of Middlemarch's eight books. The first love problem is that of Dorothea Brooke, who wants to give herself passionately to important social and intellectual projects. All too aware that the prospects for such great endeavors are sadly limited in Middlemarch, the youthful Dorothea thinks she has found her soulmate in Edward Casaubon, a "formal studious man thirty years older than herself." Casaubon has spent decades doing research for a work he calls "The Key to All Mythologies," a work that Dorothea wants dedicate herself to bringing to fruition. But is Mr. Casaubon truly the "great soul" that Dorothea ardently imagines him to be? And should Casaubon's poor young cousin Will Ladislaw disabuse Dorothea of those notions, or would that be entirely self-serving, since he's falling in love with her himself?

The second love problem belongs to Fred Vincy, the son of a local manufacturer, who wants to marry his childhood sweetheart Mary Garth, daughter of a local estate manager. She very intelligently refuses him, however, because he has no purpose in life other than the pleasures of billiards, gambling, and hunting. In the first half of the novel we follow Fred's hapless attempts to clear himself of a debt, and his disastrous entanglement of Mary's family in his money problems—which of course, just sinks Fred lower in Mary's estimation. Fred pins his hopes for escaping debt and becoming worthy of Mary on an expected inheritance from his childless uncle, the miserly and sadistic Peter Featherstone—but will that inheritance really materialize?

The third love problem is that of Tertius Lydgate and Rosamond Vincy, Fred's sister. Rosamond is the town beauty, and knows it. She wants a husband who will provide her with a life full of grace, charm, and beautiful things, preferably someplace other than Middlemarch. Lydgate is a crusading young doctor who has come to Middlemarch to showcase some new medical ideas, and Rosamond builds a fantasy world around this dashing outsider. Lydgate has decided, though, that as much as he enjoys flirting with Rosamond he's not yet ready to get married; he hopes to establish himself professionally first. But Rosamond usually gets what she wants—only, is what she wants what either she or Lydgate truly need?

In her wonderful essay "Middlemarch and Everybody" (from the collection Changing My Mind (Penguin, 2009)), Zadie Smith writes of the importance for Eliot of the moment that "the scales fall from our eyes," the moment that our self-deceptions become glaringly apparent to ourselves. Making this process even more agonizing, though, is that there are usually several layers of self-deception that have to be painfully peeled away, one by one. Of course, coming to understand that the world and other people do not match our fantasies, and learning to see them (to the extent we're able) as they are, is an essential part of growing up. But that doesn't make it less distressing, or less dangerous to our capacity to give ourselves wholly to life and to love. As Eliot writes, "To have in general but little feeling seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion." (Image of George Eliot from womenshistory.about.com)

This is why Virginia Woolf famously called Middlemarch "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people": its subject is the compromises, sacrifices and disappointments of adulthood, and particularly of married life. I'd disagree with Woolf—I think Jane Austen's novels, for example, are best appreciated by people who have experienced some romantic disappointment in their lives. It's true, though, that Austen's novels typically lead her characters up to the moment of engagement and marriage, but don't go much beyond that point. The difficulty of getting that far puts the lovers to a test which, as Austen assures us of Northanger Abbey's Henry and Catherine, "so far from being really injurious to their felicity, was perhaps rather conducive to it, by improving their knowledge of each other, and adding strength to their attachment." But Austen's novels end just when the couples' lives together are truly beginning. (In its final moments, the superb 1995 film version of Persuasion gives us the equivalent of one of Austen's brief post-ceremony codas with a vision of Captain Wentworth and Anne sharing the sort of wonderfully companionate marriage that we've seen earlier with Admiral and Mrs. Croft.) George Eliot, on the other hand, follows her couples unsparingly after marriage, through their misunderstandings, disagreements and trials both small and large.

And that we may ultimately be disillusioned in our partners and ourselves is not, for Eliot, so much a tragedy as a necessity. "For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it," she writes. In a flawed world we ourselves are necessarily flawed, and to recognize our imperfections is just the beginning of compassion and wisdom.