Mayuri Dance Group

Mayuri Dance Group (Sara Krulwich/The New York Times)

One of the many enjoyable things about reading Alastair Macaulay, the dance critic of the New York Times, is his deep appreciation of Indian dance. And it seems as though that appreciation has become even greater over the past year or two. It's been delightful to share his sense of discovery in the pages of the Times; he writes with a rare warmth and enthusiasm.

Last winter he made a dance-centered visit to India, and wrote about his stay in Nrityagram, a village devoted to the classical dance form Odissi: "Although I have spent over 35 years following dance in the West, a four-week visit to India in February made me feel that only now have I witnessed dance where it is truly central to culture" ("In India, Eternal Rhythms Embody a National Spirit," NYT, March 16, 2012).

Macaulay is not only an exponent of Indian classical dance; his appreciation also extends to Bollywood. In Sunday's NYT he had a piece on the Downtown Dance Festival's annual program of Indian dance, "Erasing Borders" (NYT, August 19, 2012). The festival involves street performances by the participating companies, and appearing in the festival this year was the Mayuri Dance Group, from Petrozavodsk, Russia. The troupe was formed in 1987 at the Petrozavodsk's Railway Workers Cultural Center, and performs their own choreography to classic and contemporary Bollywood songs. Here's a sample: Kailash Kher's "Jhoomo Re":

Of course, Russians performing Bollywood won't come as a huge shock to anyone who has watched a Bollywood movie in the last decade—Russian dancers have become ubiquitous in nightclub scenes. But usually they're wearing sequined hot pants, not a sari or salwar kameez. The all-female Mayuri troupe also convincingly performs male dances, as in Daler Mehndi's bhangra "Ek Dana":

The sheer joy this troupe projects is palpable, even on grainy, nonprofessional video. Macaulay wrote of the group's performance at 1 New York Plaza on Friday that MDG danced "eight numbers with zest, glee and an array of costumes so admirably vivid that audience members exclaimed about them. Combinations of azure with gold, emerald with cream, and black with scarlet flooded the cityscape with color. The dancing, often with lip-syncing and flashing eyes, had all of Bollywood’s engaging vivacity."

A Bollywood Persuasion

In Old is Gold's Let's Make Pride and Prejudice in Hindi!, Bollyviewer picks heroes and heroines from the 1950s and the 1960s to play Darcy, Elizabeth, Bingley, Jane, Lydia, and the other major characters in P & P. Inspired by her delightful post, I thought I would make an attempt to cast a contemporary Bollywood version of my favorite Jane Austen novel, Persuasion.

Austen's novels have been adapted on film many times, but they would seem to be especially natural material for Bollywood. The novels, like many Bollywood movies, turn on uniting the right couple in marriage at the end. The heroine must overcome the obstacles of class differences, interfering friends and parental figures, romantic rivalries real and imagined, and her own or her hero's misunderstandings.

It's perfect romantic comedy/drama material, and so I'm only surprised that there haven't been more Bollywood versions of Austen's books. Recently, Bride and Prejudice (2004) featured Aishwarya Rai as a vivacious Elizabeth Bennet and Anupam Kher as a sympathetic Mr. Bennet, but was fatally handicapped by New Zealand actor Martin Henderson's lackluster Darcy and writer/director Gurinder Chadha's mediocre script.

Aishwarya also played Sense and Sensibility's headstrong Marianne Dashwood/Meenu in the excellent Tamil film Kandukondain Kandukondain (I Have Found It, 2000), with Tabu as her wise older sister Elinor/Sowmya. The movie's flaws are minor: it doesn't make as much of Aishwarya's superb dancing skills as it might have, and (as is the case with many Sense and Sensibility adaptations) it's not clear that Meenu and the much older Colonel Brandon character (Mammootty as the wounded Major Bala) are really meant for each other.

The flaw that no Austen adaptation can overcome, though, is having an unsympathetic heroine, and that's precisely the problem with Sonam Kapoor's title character in the 2010 film Aisha (based on Austen's Emma). Not only is Aisha a shallow and thoughtless character, she's played by an actress of limited emotional range and no dancing skills. Abhay Deol's Arjun/Mr. Knightley is the one bright spot in an adaptation that left me utterly indifferent as to whether any of the three main couples got together by the end of the film.

So Bollywood's mixed track record with Austen would not seem augur well for an adaptation of one of her most complex and emotionally compelling novels. In Persuasion, Anne Elliot has passed the first bloom of youth, and now must face regret and fading hope. Eight years before the opening of the novel Anne fell in love with the handsome but penniless naval officer Frederick Wentworth, and he with her. But under pressure from her family and from her well-meaning friend Lady Russell, Anne broke off their engagement.

Now in her late twenties, Anne suddenly encounters Wentworth again. The spoils of the Napoleonic wars have made him a man of means, and he has returned to the area with the express purpose of getting married. Understandably, Wentworth attracts the attention of all the local young women, and in particular the pretty and flirtatious Musgrove sisters Henrietta and Louisa. Meanwhile, Anne herself begins to receive the attentions of her charming but unscrupulous cousin William—but does he have ulterior motives?

Persuasion was made into a superb BBC film in 1995, with the perfectly cast but unheralded Amanda Root as Anne Elliot and Ciarán Hinds as Frederick Wentworth. I wrote about this wonderful film in my post The Complete Jane Austen: Unpersuasive. I'd love to see a well-done Bollywood version, and what follows are my choices for the cast:

Anne Elliot: One of Austen's wisest, most thoughtful, and most sensitive heroines, by Regency standards she is, at 27, approaching spinsterhood. The role requires an actress of a certain maturity, not to mention depth, emotional conviction, and beauty not dependent on obvious surgical intervention. Fortunately there are a number of actresses who would make splendid Annes:

Vidya Balan: She first came to my notice as the wronged Lalita in Parineeta (2005) (for which she won the Filmfare Best Debut award) and as Sanjay Dutt's charming love interest in Lage Raho Munnabhai (2006). In Paa (2009) she played a woman who, like Anne, unexpectedly meets up with a man she had loved years before. As I wrote of her role in No One Killed Jessica (2011), she "convincingly portrays a woman slowly emerging from emotional shell-shock and beginning to acknowledge the possibility of hope." I think she'd make a wonderful Anne, and by a narrow margin she'd be my first choice.

Vidya Balan in No One Killed Jessica (2011)

Konkona Sen Sharma: Konkona made her name in films like Page 3 (2005), Aaja Nachle (Come Dance With Me, 2007), Life in a...Metro (2007), Luck By Chance (2009) and Wake Up Sid (2009) playing young women who are slowly discovering what they want from life. Anne, who has had to go through the same painful process, would seem to be a perfect next step.

Konkona Sen Sharma in Omkara (2006)

Rani Mukherji: In whatever role she plays Rani can't help but be sympathetic, and she has already played at least two Anne-like characters. In Hum Tum (2004), Rani played Rhea, a woman who after the passage of time comes to realize the true depth of her feelings for Saif Ali Khan's Karan. In Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna (2006), she played a woman who reunites with her lover (Shah Rukh Khan) after a long separation.

Rani Mukherji in Kabhi Alivda Naa Kehna (Never Say Goodbye, 2005)

Kajol: The perfect Anne for my first-choice Wentworth (see below).

Kajol in We Are Family (2010)

Captain Frederick Wentworth: In my view, Wentworth is five to ten years older than Anne.* Wentworth is ruggedly masculine—he's a war-hardened veteran, after all—but at the same time sensitive and reticent. Representing all sides of this complex character is a tall order. I think three of the four superstar Khans could carry it off:

Shah Rukh Khan: "Reticent" is not a word that come immediately to mind when thinking of SRK, but in Kal Ho Naa Ho (Tomorrow May Never Come, 2003), Chak De! India (Come On! India, 2007), and Rab Ne Bana De Jodi (A Match Made In Heaven, 2009) he showed that he can play characters with a lot going on beneath the surface (whether that surface is antic (KHNH) or reserved (CDI, RNBDJ)). Now that his boyish good looks have become a bit weathered he'd be the perfect choice for Wentworth.

Saif Ali Khan: Saif's eyes can be remarkably eloquent, and in roles such as Rohit (Kal Ho Naa Ho), Rajveer (Ta Ra Rum Pum (2007)) and Ranbeer (Thoda Pyaar Thoda Magic (A Little Love, A Little Magic, 2008)) they suggest a deep inner pain. If SRK isn't available, Saif would be my second choice.

Aamir Khan: Speaking of boyish good looks, Aamir's might make it a bit of a stretch to imagine him as a battle-tested veteran. But as he showed in Fanaa (Destroyed By Love, 2006), he can play a character with hidden depths.

Lady Russell: I'm not sure that Austen specifies how old Lady Russell is; my guess is that she is still relatively youthful, despite her role as a surrogate mother to the motherless Anne. Lady Russell is calm, wise, and independent, but made a fateful lapse in judgement eight years ago which both Anne and Wentworth find it difficult to forgive. The actresses I'd like to see in the role:

Juhi Chawla: Juhi has just the right sympathetic nature for Lady Russell.

Nandita Das: Talented, smart, progressive, and gorgeous, she was brilliant in Deepa Mehta's Fire (1996) and 1947: Earth (1997). Come to think of it, Nandita should direct the film as well as portray Lady R.

Tabu: A thoughtful actress who was excellent in Kandukondain Kandukondain and such later films as The Namesake (2007).

Louisa and Henrietta Musgrove: The young, pretty, and high-spirited sisters-in-law of Mary Musgrove, Anne's younger sister. The names that immediately suggest themselves are Deepika Padukone and Anushka Sharma, but I'm open to other suggestions.

Admiral and Mrs. Croft: Admiral Croft is a large-hearted old salt, who has been accompanied on all his adventures by his loving and loyal wife Sophie (who is Wentworth's older sister). The Admiral has to be played by Anupam Kher, Alok Nath or Rishi Kapoor, which suggests that Mrs. Croft should be played by Kirron Kher, Seema Biswas or Dimple Kapadia.

Your alternative casts are welcome.

--

* I was a bit off here; he's only four years older. Austen mentions that he was 23 when he proposed to the 19-year-old Anne.

Alison Bechdel: DTWOF, Fun Home, and Are You My Mother?

I first encountered the work of Alison Bechdel through her comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For, which ran weekly in the fondly remembered Coming Up! (which later became, and still remains, the more prosaically titled San Francisco Bay Times). I found that the dramas and dilemmas of a group of lesbian friends interconnected by past, present and future romantic relationships quickly became can't-miss reading. On those rare occasions when DTWOF was inexplicably missing from the paper I went through a mild form of withdrawal. I felt a special empathy for the often hapless Mo, the most political of the group, who seemed like the character that Bechdel most closely modelled on herself.

A selection of most of the DTWOF strips has been collected between hard covers as The Essential Dykes To Watch Out For (Houghton Mifflin, 2008), which follows Mo, Lois, Sydney, Ginger, Clarice, Sparrow, Jezanna and all the rest as they grow and change over the years. Bechdel herself has described DTWOF as "half op-ed column and half endless serialized Victorian novel." Perhaps not endless, unfortunately; DTWOF has been on hiatus since The Essential... was published.

But even the many pleasures of DTWOF—the range of characters, the clever writing, the allusions (sly or direct) to the political and cultural issues of the day—didn't prepare me for the power of Bechdel's graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (Houghton Mifflin, 2006). Alison grew up with a closeted gay father who was domineering and emotionally volatile, and the book brilliantly and insightfully depicts the effects of his barely concealed secret life on the rest of the family. Bechdel portrays her father with sympathy, but also anger; identification, but also wounded incomprehension: he died under ambiguous circumstances which point to suicide.

Bruce Bechdel was a high school English teacher in a small town in central Pennsylvania, and had also taken over his family's business, a funeral home (the ironically-named Fun Home of the title). While his violent outbursts and inability to express affection created a gulf between father and daughter, as Alison grew older that gulf was partly bridged by a shared love of literature. Fun Home is filled with quotations from and allusions to Camus, Proust, Fitzgerald, James, Wilde, Joyce, Adrienne Rich, Catcher in the Rye and Wind in the Willows; literature is one way that both Alison and her father understand and come to terms with their experience.

In Fun Home Bechdel's father emerges as self-involved and occasionally self-dramatizing. As does her mother, a New York-trained actress who wound up performing in community theater productions of The Heiress and The Importance of Being Earnest. Bechdel has now published another graphic memoir, and as the title (borrowed from P. D. Eastman's classic children's book) Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama (Houghton Mifflin, 2012) suggests, her relationship with her mother is also emotionally fraught.

Many of the strengths of Fun Home—emotional honesty, thoughtfulness, and an clear-eyed portrayal of everyone involved—are also present in Are You My Mother?. But the later book has some weaknesses as well. In place of the rich literary allusions that suffuse the first memoir, the second primarily invokes the work of psychologists Alice Miller (The Drama of the Gifted Child) and D. W. Winnicott (although Virginia Woolf and Dr. Seuss are also referenced). Not only is the psychologists' prose more jargon-laden than that of the previous volume's literary writers, it seems to inhibit Bechdel somewhat—it begins to feel as though Miller and Winnicott are speaking for her. By the end of Are You My Mother? I wanted to hear fewer of Miller's and Winnicott's insights, and more of Bechdel's.

A second problem is noted by Bechdel herself in Fun Home. She writes there, "Although I'm good at enumerating my father's flaws, it's hard for me to sustain much anger at him. I expect this is partly because he's dead, and partly because the bar is lower for fathers than for mothers" (p. 22). Bechdel's mother Helen is still alive and they still talk frequently on the phone (or, from the evidence in Are You My Mother?, Helen delivers stream-of-consciousness monologues that Alison faithfully records). Bechdel seems to have felt more constrained and to have had more difficulty in writing about her mother than about her father (a difficulty that she acknowledges in the opening of Are You My Mother?, which she reveals is a radical revision of an earlier version that wasn't working). Perhaps, too, her feelings about her mother are more complicated and harder to untangle.

But I don't want to sound too critical. Are You My Mother? is very rewarding, and will undoubtedly be on my list of favorite books from 2012. To say that it doesn't quite reach the standard set by Fun Home is like complaining that Dubliners isn't A Portrait of the Artist.

By the way, I bought my copy at the Seminary Coop Bookstore in Chicago, probably the best store for new books in the United States. Yes, I paid list price, which thanks to Bechdel and her publisher is only $22 (and had I been a Seminary Coop member, I would have gotten a discount). If you choose to buy Are You My Mother?, which I strongly recommend, please support local independent booksellers.

Don 2

Don 2 (2011) has a built-in problem. In writer/director Farhan Akhtar's Don: The Chase Begins Again (2006), the remake-with-a-twist of the original Don (1978), good-hearted street performer Vijay (Shah Rukh Khan) is coerced into impersonating the criminal mastermind Don (also Shah Rukh Khan). It's a clever story (devised for Amitabh Bachchan in the original film by Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar, father of Farhan) that allows us to have it both ways: we can vicariously revel in the transgressive criminal actions of Don, while at the same time rooting for the good guy Vijay. It's not only the audience that experiences some cognitive dissonance: the beautiful Roma (Priyanka Chopra), who wants to kill Don in revenge for her brother Ramesh's death, finds herself instead falling in love with Vijay-Don.

There's no way for me to discuss this without a spoiler, so be forewarned, but at the end of Don: TCBA

—spoiler alert!—

we discover that Vijay was murdered by Don before he could take his place. So throughout the second half of the film, we think we're rooting for Vijay, but in the final shots of the film we discover that all along we've been pulling for Don, who was impersonating Vijay impersonating Don. With Vijay dead,

—end of spoiler—

Don 2 leaves us only with Don himself, which is the problem. Don is a pretty nasty customer—Shah Rukh's fabled charm is not much in evidence. The only thing that gives us any interest in the outcome of Don's elaborate heist at the Deutsche Zentralbank is that every other criminal in the film is even nastier. Along with a sympathetic main character, gone are the clever Infernal Affairs-like plot twists from Don: TCBA. Instead, Farhan Akhtar gives us an efficient recounting of the planning and execution of the theft. It's almost disappointingly straightforward. It also leaves very little room for songs, unlike Don: TCBA, whose remixed/remodelled soundtrack borrowed liberally from the 1978 film.

It was nice to see the underused Kunal Kapoor as Sameer, a reformed hacker who agrees to one last job for his wife and unborn son. But that's about it for subplots. The unfinished business between Don and Roma (who apparently still has residual feelings for Don despite Ramesh, who is barely alluded to) and between Don and criminal rival Vardaan (Boman Irani, who is given very little to do other than glower), isn't allowed to distract from the car chases, gun battles, explosions, and other standard action-movie sequences. But despite the high-tech slickness of the filmmaking, the object of the heist—currency printing plates—seems almost quaint. And (mild spoiler alert) the way Don eludes arrest at the end is simply lame.

Of course, the filmmakers have to leave their options open for another sequel. I found Don 2 to be an entertaining enough watch on a summer evening, but perhaps the point of diminishing returns has been reached for this franchise.

Suggested reading: Jenny Diski, Elif Batuman, Zadie Smith

Another in the (very) occasional series where I offer links to some of my favorite recent articles, reviews and the like:

Jenny Diski derides Downton Abbey, Upstairs, Downstairs, and other "Vicwardian" costume dramas ("Making a Costume Drama Out of a Crisis," London Review of Books, 21 June 2012):

"This ‘nothing will ever be the same again’ is the single motif that conditions all the plots of the books and programmes, which otherwise are undistinguished stories of love and money lost and won. Mostly the nothing that will ever be the same is the centuries-old entitlement of a small group of highly privileged people, for whom, for various reasons, we must feel sorry, both before and after the changes..."

Elif Batuman on Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk's Museum of Innocence (Knopf, 2009), for which Pamuk created an actual museum filled with the objects collected by Kemal, the novel's erotically-obsessed main character ("Diary: Pamuk's Museum," London Review of Books, 7 June 2012):

"Pamuk’s museum restores a specialness to objects of mass production, transmuting quantity into quality. A middle-class fake is more magical than a priceless painting, precisely because it’s everywhere at once.

"Late in the novel, no matter where in the world his Byronic gloom takes him, Kemal can’t stop running into Füsun’s mother’s saltshaker. Cairo, Barcelona, New Delhi, Rome: ‘To contemplate how this saltshaker had spread to the farthest reaches of the globe suggested a great mystery, as great as the way migratory birds communicate among themselves, always taking the same routes every year.’...

"Every few years, Pamuk writes, ‘another wave of saltshakers’ washes in, replacing the old generation. People ‘forget the objects with which they had lived so intimately, never even acknowledging their emotional attachment to them’. Unlike the Mona Lisa, which is always and only in the Louvre, the saltshakers are everywhere for a few years, and then they’re gone, shifting the dimension of rarity from space to time....Pamuk was astounded by the difficulty of getting hold of 1970s toothbrushes: how could they all have vanished from the face of the earth? After he mentioned the problem in an interview, a reader sent him a large collection of old toothbrushes that would otherwise have been lost to posterity."

Zadie Smith reports on her local council's plan to eliminate a beloved bookshop and public market and downsize the Willesden Green Library Centre so that private developers can turn these formerly public spaces into luxury condos ("North-West London Blues," New York Review of Books, 12 July 2012. Subscription—or library card!—required):

"Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay.

"In the modern state there are very few sites where this is possible. The only others that come readily to my mind require belief in an omnipotent creator as a condition for membership. It would seem the most obvious thing in the world to say that the reason why the market is not an efficient solution to libraries is because the market has no use for a library. But it seems we need, right now, to keep restating the obvious. There aren’t many institutions left that fit so precisely Keynes’s definition of things that no one else but the state is willing to take on. Nor can the experience of library life be recreated online. It’s not just a matter of free books. A library is a different kind of social reality (of the three-dimensional kind), which by its very existence teaches a system of values beyond the fiscal."

Update 25 June 2012: I should make it clear that, much as I admire her writing, I don't share Diski's disdain for costume dramas (a term that could as well apply to Mad Men as Lark Rise To Candleford). For one thing, I think she has over-simplified the implicit class perspective of many period dramas; it's not all nostalgia and misplaced sympathy.

In her article she mentions The Duchess of Duke Street as one of the programs of which she "never saw more than one episode." We're watching it right now, and as I recall, in the first episode the Prince of Wales is depicted as a predator who uses bribes and blackmail to coerce an attractive young working-class woman (the "Duchess" of the title) into sex. The compulsory nature of their relationship is made quite clear; not exactly the soothing message about the upholding of "the proper order of things" that Diski imagines is characteristic of the "Vicwardian" genre.

These "costume dramas" (I'd call them "period dramas," but never mind) are often based on 19th-century novels, which can be quite subversive in their attitudes towards the constraints of class and gender. Still, Diski is a brilliant writer and this article is highly entertaining—particularly when she points out the class positions of Julian Fellowes (writer of Downton Abbey and a baron) and Frances Osborne (writer of the novel Park Lane and wife of the current chancellor of the Exchequer): "These purveyors of escapist fantasies of love and landed wealth come directly from the social world and political party that talks compulsively of 'honest, hard-working families' while giving us austerity and cuts in public spending for most, and tax breaks for the already wealthy and overpaid."