During a class I recently taught about film criticism, an ancient, all-too-familiar question surfaced like a Kraken bursting foully from the ocean's depths. "Do you know if the director really intended that interpretation," a student asked in response to something I had said about a scene, "or are you over-analysing?"
Whenever this sort of thing happens, I launch into my usual litany: about how the creative process doesn't work at just a conscious level but at various sub-conscious and unconscious levels too; about the wisdom of the D H Lawrence quote "Never trust the artist, trust the tale", which means that a critic is under no obligation to consider what a creator says about his own creation - he must engage with the work itself, and if he does his job well he might tease out connections and layers that even the artist, a filmmaker, author, painter, whoever, may not have fully articulated or faced up to.
These are things I firmly stand by. But there are occasions when the impulse to stay one step ahead of a filmmaker - to engage in subtextual analysis and anticipate what will come next - has defeated me. This happened recently when I watched Dev Anand's 2001 Censor, a wildly self-referential work about a movie director's battles with a censor board made up of hypocrites.
It says something about my unfamiliarity with the logical arcs (*irony alert*) and production values of Dev-saab's last few movies that I was completely misled by scenes involving an American character named Maggie Truman (played by the very Indian actress Archana Puran Singh). In an early scene, Truman shows up for the preview screening of a film made by Director Vicky (Dev Anand himself, naturally). After extolling the film's brilliance, she grabs his hands and introduces herself as a member of the American Motion Picture Academy. ("Vaise Haalivood se hoon, ek time pe actress thi vahaan par!") She strongly recommends that Vicky nominate his movie for the foreign-language film Oscar.
And I took none of this at face value. Ms Singh's accent is so similar to the ludicrous voices used by Naseeruddin Shah and Bhakti Barve in Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, in the slapstick scene where they pretend to be "Time and Newsweek magazine ke reporter", I simply took it for granted that here was a desi naari masquerading as an American for yet-to-be-revealed reasons. (Besides, look at her name. "True. Man." Clearly an imposter!) The presence in this scene of a gargantuan, unexplained sunflower - at least two feet in diameter, on the table where Vicky and Maggie talk - further set my brain cells pulsing. Since there appeared no reason for it being there, I stuck on my Critic's Hat and decided that it was a clever visual code, telling us that "Maggie" was an illegitimate daughter of Vicky, back for revenge. (Flowers have reproductive functions, after all.)
Anyway, I continued to be misled about this woman's purpose. Later in the film, she is supposedly back in Los Angeles and speaks with Vicky on the phone, and we see her sitting alone in a generic room with a large wall-hanger - a huge photo of a nighttime American skyline, a little faded, with visible creases. That clinches it, I said to myself. This woman is not just a fake but a loon who, for whatever reason, is obsessed with America. Who else would cover almost their entire wall with such an ugly blown-up photograph of featureless skyscrapers?
And so it went, with me second-guessing everything Maggie said, and wondering what the big twist would be. Around three-fourths of Censor had passed when I realised I was meant to take her entirely at face value; that she was a full-blooded American and a member of the Motion Picture Academy who really had seen Oscar-worthiness in Vicky's film. And that the wall-hanger, complete with wrinkles, was intended to be a real, honest-to-goodness depiction of the very American view outside her very American room. And the sunflower was probably just a flower.
Once this penny dropped, all my assumptions had to be reshuffled. I had been watching this film as a suspense thriller, but now I saw with blinding clarity that it was really a profound meditation on the relationship between an artist who (much like Dev Anand himself) is ahead of his times and the uncomprehending world that seeks to keep him in chains. Including critic-types who write mocking columns such as this one.
Whenever this sort of thing happens, I launch into my usual litany: about how the creative process doesn't work at just a conscious level but at various sub-conscious and unconscious levels too; about the wisdom of the D H Lawrence quote "Never trust the artist, trust the tale", which means that a critic is under no obligation to consider what a creator says about his own creation - he must engage with the work itself, and if he does his job well he might tease out connections and layers that even the artist, a filmmaker, author, painter, whoever, may not have fully articulated or faced up to.
These are things I firmly stand by. But there are occasions when the impulse to stay one step ahead of a filmmaker - to engage in subtextual analysis and anticipate what will come next - has defeated me. This happened recently when I watched Dev Anand's 2001 Censor, a wildly self-referential work about a movie director's battles with a censor board made up of hypocrites.
It says something about my unfamiliarity with the logical arcs (*irony alert*) and production values of Dev-saab's last few movies that I was completely misled by scenes involving an American character named Maggie Truman (played by the very Indian actress Archana Puran Singh). In an early scene, Truman shows up for the preview screening of a film made by Director Vicky (Dev Anand himself, naturally). After extolling the film's brilliance, she grabs his hands and introduces herself as a member of the American Motion Picture Academy. ("Vaise Haalivood se hoon, ek time pe actress thi vahaan par!") She strongly recommends that Vicky nominate his movie for the foreign-language film Oscar.
And I took none of this at face value. Ms Singh's accent is so similar to the ludicrous voices used by Naseeruddin Shah and Bhakti Barve in Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, in the slapstick scene where they pretend to be "Time and Newsweek magazine ke reporter", I simply took it for granted that here was a desi naari masquerading as an American for yet-to-be-revealed reasons. (Besides, look at her name. "True. Man." Clearly an imposter!) The presence in this scene of a gargantuan, unexplained sunflower - at least two feet in diameter, on the table where Vicky and Maggie talk - further set my brain cells pulsing. Since there appeared no reason for it being there, I stuck on my Critic's Hat and decided that it was a clever visual code, telling us that "Maggie" was an illegitimate daughter of Vicky, back for revenge. (Flowers have reproductive functions, after all.)
Anyway, I continued to be misled about this woman's purpose. Later in the film, she is supposedly back in Los Angeles and speaks with Vicky on the phone, and we see her sitting alone in a generic room with a large wall-hanger - a huge photo of a nighttime American skyline, a little faded, with visible creases. That clinches it, I said to myself. This woman is not just a fake but a loon who, for whatever reason, is obsessed with America. Who else would cover almost their entire wall with such an ugly blown-up photograph of featureless skyscrapers?
And so it went, with me second-guessing everything Maggie said, and wondering what the big twist would be. Around three-fourths of Censor had passed when I realised I was meant to take her entirely at face value; that she was a full-blooded American and a member of the Motion Picture Academy who really had seen Oscar-worthiness in Vicky's film. And that the wall-hanger, complete with wrinkles, was intended to be a real, honest-to-goodness depiction of the very American view outside her very American room. And the sunflower was probably just a flower.
Once this penny dropped, all my assumptions had to be reshuffled. I had been watching this film as a suspense thriller, but now I saw with blinding clarity that it was really a profound meditation on the relationship between an artist who (much like Dev Anand himself) is ahead of his times and the uncomprehending world that seeks to keep him in chains. Including critic-types who write mocking columns such as this one.
Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer