The idea of a review as an analytical, personal take on a film is still a radical one.
One of the most annoying varieties of feedback a film reviewer can get is when someone says, “Nice piece, but you didn’t say anything about the music.” Or “Nice piece, but why didn’t you mention XYZ’s performance?” Or “Nice piece, but what about the shot where Aishwarya dangles artistically from the tree branch before falling into the lake in slow motion?”
This sort of thing is an offshoot of a long-established culture of movie writing in India, where reviewers are expected to touch on every element in a film in 400 or fewer words (while, of course, not really saying very much about anything) — in other words, to serve as a one-stop shop for information. The idea of a review as an analytical, personal take on a film, where the writer might selectively discuss the things he found most stimulating, is sadly still a radical one.
Even so, most people would ultimately concede that there are only a limited number of things you can discuss in a review space. But what happens when you write an entire book about a single film? I’ve had reason to think about this question, because my monograph on the 1983 film Jaane bhi do Yaaro is being published later this month. Jaane bhi do Yaaro is a very interesting movie to write about, with many potential talking points. It’s one of Hindi cinema’s best-loved and most unusual comedies — mixing such modes as slapstick, absurdism, satire and black humour — but it’s also a pointed commentary on social evils such as the nexus between construction magnates, police commissioners and media, and on the plight of the helpless common man. And because it’s a polemical film in some ways, friends have asked me if I’ve written at length about the socio-political backdrop in India in the 1980s.
My answer, often to their disappointment, is no, I haven’t written explicitly about those things, though they are lightly woven into the main narrative, which is about the circumstances that led to the making of the film against many odds. I found the movie’s back-story, with its many twists and turns, fascinating: to begin with, I was intrigued by the series of events that led writer-director Kundan Shah — a man from a business family — into a creative field. I was also intrigued by the strange workings of the moviemaking process and the very different sort of movie Jaane bhi do Yaaro might easily have become, given its original English-language script. Those are talking points too, and though they might not appear to have the “wider relevance” that a socio-political focus would have, they can tell us interesting things about the process by which a work of art comes into existence, and how it strikes a chord with an audience in a particular time and place.
I know many people who are bemused by the idea of a book about a movie: how many words can you write before you simply run out of things to say? But to the contrary, I think it would be entirely possible for 20 writers to produce 20 good monographs on the same film, taking different approaches, and without infringing on each other’s territory. (This would have to remain a hypothetical situation, of course — no publishing industry would permit such an apparently self-indulgent venture!)
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The books that would emerge wouldn’t just be “about the film” in a narrow, confined sense — they would be equally about the authors, casting light on the many ways in which it’s possible to respond to a film. One of my own favourite movie books, Peter Conrad’s intense The Hitchcock Murders, was as much about the author’s own private obsessions and fears — and how Alfred Hitchcock’s cinema had tapped into them — as it was about the movies. Film writing of this sort can be hugely rewarding, though there’s nothing “holistic” about it.
[Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based freelance writer]