Essay: Kundan Shah’s “Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa” and the Birth of the Likable Loser.

I still remember the first time I saw Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa. I was nine and holed up in a hotel in Nashik, flipping through the channels on television, contemplating whether I should watch a talk show on MTV or a movie on the next channel starring Shah Rukh Khan which I happened to stumble upon. On instinct, I chose to go with the movie.

Back in 2002, when I was watching it, Khan had already established himself as a romantic hero. Tousled hair, a dimpled smile and a boyish charm accompanying a seemingly bratty persona, there was no question of imagining anyone else playing it with such aplomb, such ease, such grace. Khan seemed to be born into the skin of the role; as a child, I could scarcely believe the tales from his days as a struggling actor and that he didn’t come from privilege. But watching Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa was, I remember, a singularly frustrating experience, all because I was familiar with this image he had carved for himself. I put the channel on at that moment in the film in which Sunil, the character he plays, is at his most vulnerable, most innocent. He is at a carnival with the girl of his dreams, holding two cones of ice-cream, and has just been caught lying. The other man, the manifestation of the ‘perfect’ man and one of the two victims of this rather harmless lie, threatens to tell on him. But Sunil, suddenly panicky, does not want him to. He does, though, and Sunil is compelled to tell the truth. The truth is simple enough: He lied for her, because he wanted her to go to the carnival with him, just the two of them. He fumbles through his explanation but his reasons are genuine. He may not be bright but he is pure, purer than the girl and the guy, purer than most of us, any of us. His actions may be deplorable but in that moment I didn’t hate him. And after several viewings over several years, I still don’t.

I don’t know how Khan did it. And I don’t know how director Kundan Shah and co-writer Pankaj Advani wrote it. Sunil never wins at anything. He lies to his band-mates when he is late to a practice session. It's the second time in a week. He has failed his exams thrice. (Later on, when he fails again, he grudgingly agrees to lie to his father that he passed and back it up with a fake mark-sheet.) And then that lie to go to the carnival with the girl of his dreams. He tries, fails, and then tries again. Over and over. He hurts people. He hurts himself. And then he’s back to his cheerful old ways, trying to make amends. In the hands of a lesser actor with little charm to spare, the results would have been unsatisfactory, to say nothing of how unwatchable and bland it would have made the film. But Khan manages to pull it off by playing it just right. His performance is a mixture of empathy and courage, vulnerability and bravura. Sunil’s whimsical world is limited, his dreams are modest, and he keeps them together in his own clumsy way.

For a Hindi romantic-comedy or even a Hindi film for that matter, Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa is a surprisingly testing watch. Sunil’s love evades him. The girl never cares about him enough to stop and consider him as a potential suitor, never takes him seriously. He is always, always a friend. And in his innocence he doesn’t push it, doing as much as he can with the little attention she gives him. He lets her slip out of his grasp, choosing loneliness and music to help him tide over his heartbreak when she falls in love with someone else. We see him suffer, helpless and distraught. And in the climax of the film that I now recall so vividly as if it were only yesterday that I saw it for the first time, right after he chooses to let her go purely for the sake of her happiness, and just after the cursed ring slips out of her hand and rolls into the benches as she’s putting it on the finger of the man she’s about to marry, which makes the whole church get up and look for it, he sees her as if in a dream, exuberantly happy, calling out to him. It’s a confusing moment for him: there is his sister is in the crowd, weeping silently for her brother for only she knows how much this would take from him, and there is the girl he loves, wanting to know if he has found the ring. He has. He’s seen it. But, he shakes his head. Emotion floods his face, overwhelming him. It’s Sunil at his most selfish, most human. This is one thing he cannot do. He can never truly let her go.

If a single moment can indeed define a film, this one is Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa. It allows us a cursory glance into the mind of a character that Hindi films seem to fear, a character they put up so rarely, and never so exquisitely: a guy who’d rather be selfish than generous, who’d rather be flawed than saintly, who’d rather follow his heart than do what the world expects him to. 

Hindi films are often about the hero and heroine walking into the sunset together. This one rolls its eyes at it. It is, bravely, far too busy consoling the guy the hero beat to get to her.

[Not For Reproduction]

Review: Why Paul Greengrass' "United 93" is the best film of the first decade of the new century.

There have been good films, great films and films which were criminally ignored in the '00s. Though Paul Greengras' United 93 clutched a deserving Oscar nod for Best Director, and being one of my favorite films, I had to endure the scalding insult of answering the disparaging question, "United 93? What's that? Oh, is it, like, a football movie or something?"

Uh-uh. It's something else, you know, something that can't be put into words. Is it enjoyable? Not really. Is it, um, great? Absolutely. But yeah, not many people have heard about it. That's because it doesn't feature any known actors, it wasn't a film of a big, sweaty budget, but it was a film of such prodigious power that it stunned me to my very core. Oh, you'll see, you'll see what I mean when you watch it. That's something a small treatise like this won't do justice to. You can't read about United 93 to get an idea what's it like, you've got to watch it to know it.

So, I had my first encounter with Greengrass' United 93 while I was scanning through the winners of the 79th Academy Awards, which was a big event because, as most film-lovers might recall, Martin Scorsese overpowered his peers to win a long overdue Academy Award for Best Director. And when I saw his name being called out, it was a moment of deep joy for me. But there was Greengrass, the only nominated director that night whose product wasn't in contention for the top prize. I had to watch it because my conscience wouldn't have it otherwise. Little did I know what I was about to see could whiff out any movie vying for any prize on any night.

Concisely, United 93 chronicles the events of United Airlines Flight 93, one of the planes hijacked during the September 11 terrorist attacks, which crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, when the passengers stirred up a surprise rebellion in the aboard flight. And when tackling a film that's based on true events, United 93 gets just about everything right. You've got the hand-held camera style of directing that's almost guerrilla, a way of reminding the audience that it could be passed off as a documentary too, you've got non-actors so that remind us that you don't always need actors to make a film experience endearing and you've got extemporized dialogue that makes the setting look so authentic. And you've got a lot of people playing themselves, most notably FAA operations manager Ben Sliney.

To tell you the truth, for most of its runtime I thought United 93 was spellbinding but not good enough to be ranked as one of the decade's finest, you know. That was until I saw the amount of filmmaking and emotions that Greengrass packed into the last half-hour, the thirty minutes of pure bliss that we are promised and denied so often. And I'm not lying when I'm saying that the last half-hour changed me as a person. Really. A piece of cinema so perfect that it's shattering. I couldn't remember the last time I had watched a film that had moved me so much. And when I finished it, I knew that United 93 wasn't just good, wasn't an experience to be had just once. It was different, a movie that knows what it wants from a director who knows what cinema is.

United 93 is a mammoth achievement, no less, a film that needs to be honored and cherished and watched. I can't tell you just how good it really is, because I don't know myself. My vocabulary shames me. And when a moment like this presents itself, you know the movie's a knockout. If you haven't already seen it, please do so. I can't seem to find a better film to recommend to you. Not in the '00s anyway.

Review: Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now" : Why It's Great In Two Very Different Ways.

There is a word I don't use very often to describe a movie : cocky. But I'll use it now because Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now is nothing less than that. In fact, there hasn't been a movie I've come across that deserves to be described in that way.

Coppola illustrated his magnum opus in a brief yet profound manner during the 1979 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Palme D'Or : 'My film is not about Vietnam, it is Vietnam.'

Now, if you're a film-lover, there's a very thin chance that you might've not heard of Apocalypse Now. And if you haven't, the slime-ball you are, I'll tell you about it. Because not to tell someone about it would be a crime. The nerve, the audacity, that went into making it is something I'd never even heard of. It's something like a nirvana for film-lovers but a haunted house for those with a fetish for an enjoyable movie experience. And Coppola has just put me through one of the most grueling experiences I've had at the movies.

I've always had a certain aversion to big productions with a high visual quotient. My fascination for them has always been zilch, and shall remain so. So, Apocalypse Now was a discovery. It sneaks up on you, like a carnivore waiting to strike, stealths you and finally climaxes with a sequence so unnerving, so horrifying, that it's absolutely maddening. And I mean that as a compliment. It's a crazed fuse of explosive energy, landmark use of visuals and sound and incredible guts. 

But Coppola's road was not an easy one. He once remarked : 'We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane.' That's true, by the way. The film was notorious for the length of its production. Coppola edited millions and millions of feet of footage. He had also shot footage that was 100 hours long, can you believe that? And from those 100 hours, he just picked out the best 153 minutes. He contemplated suicide once because the film was going out of his hands. Sheen suffered a mild heart attack because it was so exhausting. And don't get me started on what Brando did, or almost did, to it. Brando's arrogance was legendary but it made the movie much more elegiac, you know, in a weird way. 

Martin Sheen was the second choice to play Captain Benjamin L. Willard. Pacino scoffed at the script when Coppola told him about it. So, here was Sheen, half-actor, half-soldier for most of the production, playing Willard, the juiciest role of his fine career, who has been sent to assassinate Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, a decorated army officer but who's a psychotic renegade. Brando, bald and overweight, hadn't even bothered to read the book the film was based on. Coppola's perception of Kurtz was a tall and thin man, but Brando was the opposite. But, hey, a name sells a film, right? Always does, always has. So, Brando was on for just 10 minutes. And he charged a million dollars a week for that small part. Or should I say, for half of his face 'cause that's only what you get to see of him, folks. Only that. And before you judge him, he was known to be a difficult star. So, half a face is a good deal, innit?

And yet, and yet, here was a movie experience beyond your wildest dreams and the smoky realms of your imagination. Here was Coppola, the big, bearded guy who made The Godfather, at his most visionary. Here was a studio willing to go bankrupt in an attempt to show you something different. Here were the characters, the human-beings, stripped bare emotionally, doing things so inhumane. And here was an experience so hellishly exhilarating that you can't get rid of its prodigious impact even a week after you've watched it. 

I'll be honest about this. If, say, Apocalypse Now were to release today, I wouldn't have liked it. Why? Because it'll be just another movie experience, you know. We're living in a techno-driven sphere, and the magical sound of Apocalypse Now would be attainable in our living rooms with just the right use of the right resources by the right people. Apocalypse Now looks chic on film without such hooey blunting its impact.

There's one scene I've got to talk about. The sequence where a water-buffalo is slaughtered is intensely horrifying, more so because it was slaughtered in real. A sacrifice Coppola witnessed with his wife when he was doing research for the movie was something that inspired the idea, but I strongly condemn the inessential sequence.

Apocalypse Now, nearly thirty years after it first released, is one of the nuttiest war films I've seen. But the grit and grime come from a fantastically clairvoyant filmmaker who is undoubtedly one of the most ingenious filmmakers of the past century. And Apocalypse Now cheekily haunts your conscience, a symbol of its triumph.

Haunting. Try it.