Reminiscence : Why Dibakar Banerjee's "Shanghai" is so much more than just a good film.

It is uncanny how Dibakar Banerjee's characters can stay with you.

You are introduced to a seemingly harmless dope as he whistles while cradling a hockey stick and calmly discusses violence like it is Sunday brunch. As the gale of a dusty riot animates on the screen, Banerjee, with remarkable precision, builds himself an India within an India in a wink. It is a hellhole that you haven't seen but have heard about, have ignored, which exists somewhere in the badlands of the country you don't want to hear about.

Banerjee is the man. The auteur's fourth film is far from his best work and yet, the man has a voice worth hearing. Shanghai spooks and schools, and it is in this astute, irascible adaptation of Vassilis Vassilikos' Z that Banerjee bares his most commercial film. It is a cautionary tale or a film pretending to be one, but it works so beautifully on both levels that you don't care. It is a film so shameless, so rasping, that it begs to be watched. It needs to be watched.

You hang on. It takes its own sweet time to flog. 

I have always tagged Banerjee - and quite obdurately, I might add - as the the finest working filmmaker in the Hindi film industry. He has painted portraits of the Indian middle class, shot a film on video camera in its entirety and gave us a political drama raring to point fingers. It is his recherche ability of accurately assessing people and situations and turning it into his advantage that makes him a budding talent. Because in his films, the characters aren't caricatures. We are not watching people whom we can't relate to, whom we don't know. These people are us, and this precise element makes Shanghai a spook story.

In the simplest words, it is a film about a country trying to be taken seriously. Loyally following the words of Vassilikos' novel, Banerjee aptly constructs and dissects the ideologies that have been plaguing India for months. 

It is not a film that inculpates, not directly, at least. It is not a film that seeks to change the situation the country has got itself embroiled in. It only enthusiastically wants to paint a splintered picture of a shriveling economy and steps back to let you be the judge. That's a different thing. It is not an anarchistic film, though bleak, though angry, though indignant, it is not.

Anyone who has read the novel or seen Costa Gavras' brilliant 1969 adaptation of the same knows how everything is going to pan out in the end. For me, there wasn't any concluding revelation waiting, you know, I just knew what the film was leading to. Shanghai, for me, was not about the suspense as it was for a majority of those ninnies who hadn't been an audience to one of the most relevant political films of the last century. And yet, even with the suspense killed, I gasped at the right places. Because Banerjee, ever so coolly, showed me how small an entity I am in a democratic country that secretly aspires to be a powerhouse on the global platform.

Of course, having lived in the birth country of a film industry obsessed with minting money, we're not accustomed to nurturing films that give us food for thought. And if that is why some of you have lightly dismissed Shanghai as simply being a good film, I ask of you to watch it again, think deeper, ponder. 

It may not be a film that entertains, but is a film that illuminates. In any film industry, that is a rara avis. 

Reminiscence: Martin Scorsese's "Mean Streets" and "Taxi Driver" : The Choice Puts Me In A Pickle.

In 1973, a year after Francis Ford Coppola changed the game for gangster movies by making Brando place the head of Khartoum on Jack Woltz's kingsize bed, Scorsese was gearing up for his would-be breakthrough film. Mean Streets was certainly iconic in its perusal of street crime and its attempts to mould a gangster movie with words and not guns. Scorsese knew crime, you see; he was brought up in Little Italy, a place in New York City where, as he disclosed in the making of the film, a whole bar would tussle over nothing at all. Maybe if you said something in jest or you didn't get a drink on time, tempers flared up and every single guy in the bar would brawl until one capitulated. He fashioned these observations into Mean Streets, which starred a young Harvey Keitel and an even younger Robert De Niro.

Harvey Keitel in Mean Streets.

I watched Mean Streets a couple of years ago when I was sixteen or maybe seventeen. It remained incised in my mind ever since because I couldn't believe a modernistic movie like that was made in a time when family films were walking away with the Oscars. 'Course, Mean Streets was spurned at the Oscars because it was too small a movie, too low-budgeted. I mean, you won't want a layman winning an Oscar, would you? Well, as they found out in the next four decades, Scorsese wasn't just another filmmaker. Anyway, I loved the movie. The coarsish script was talky, layered with dense jargon and the execution was masterful. That was pretty unexpected since I was under the daffy impression that we were dealing with a supposed amateur here. Keitel nailed his role, kept the urgency at the apex with his terse exchanges with De Niro and walked away with a coolheaded performance. Skookum!

But De Niro was the revelation here. He was. Even in his salad days, he could put together a textured performance that showed sparks of promise of a future luminary. His was a more controlled performance, a character that he was seemingly familiar with and he played him accordingly. In his four decades as an actor, I'd probably single this one out as the most neglected. Second comes the one in Ronin.

So, I was watching Taxi Driver the other day on television, a rare instance when the channel operators choose a movie sagaciously and another one of my most cherished movies, I wondered why was Mean Streets the movie with the shit end of the stick. Yes, Taxi Driver was a landmark film for obvious reasons, maybe the most audacious of all movies, but it came four years after the ravishing Mean Streets which ushered in the heavily eye-browed master filmmaker in the first place. Taxi Driver was a gorgeous piece of cinema, I won't dispute that, but it couldn't match Mean Streets in terms of style. Mean Streets was a ballad, an ode to the movies that young Scorsese saw as a boy. The soundtrack, a stockpile of old American classics, complemented the images smoothly. And it did what it did with such finesse that you're captivated from the moment it begins. 

Conversely, Taxi Driver was more of a character study. A demented man falters in his romantic life and he avenges this humiliation on the world that he sees as merciless. He meets loonies like him who fuel the rage inside him. And, in the end, it all comes forth. He goes bananas all over New York City. Scorsese isn't new to characters who work like a ticking bomb about to go off. He strayed in those waters later with Raging Bull, Cape Fear and even Goodfellas up to a certain point. But Taxi Driver was his most fearless coup, a 'man against the world' story that gave an insight into the mind of a wacko. In those times, movies like that were hard to come by. No wonder legendary film critic Roger Ebert instantly affirmed it as one of the greatest he had ever seen. Hell, here I am, all of twenty, four decades later and it's one of the best movies I've ever seen.

Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver.

But when it comes to judging between the two, I'm iffy. Sure, go on, point your stubby little finger at Taxi Driver and chide me for not seeing the obvious choice. But when I think about it, and I mean really think about it, I ask myself - what would Scorsese have done if he had got a healthier budget on Mean Streets? What would that movie have been like? Hey, to all you twits who doubt it, remember - Scorsese made Goodfellas on a bigger budget so I wouldn't necessarily maul the idea. He can work both ways, you know. He made After Hours on a scant one and The Departed two decades later on a pricey one.

So, I'm trying to gauge what I want to say. It's a known fact that Scorsese has made a landmark movie in every decade he has worked in, like Jack Nicholson who is the other bigwig of the honor. But a lot of folks believe that Taxi Driver should walk away with the glory. I'm going for Mean Streets. I treasure those films that can whip up a ravishing experience on modest production and Mean Streets fits the bill perfectly. It gave us a gangster movie with minimal violence and a lot of smarts. A generation later, on a better production, crime movies don't match the panache of it.

Mean Streets is as close as you'll ever come to knowing a gangster in New York City and still be aware that it's just a movie. That's genius, you know.

Reminiscence: William Friedkin's "The Exorcist" : It Still Delivers The Creeps.

I saw it forty years after it first released. And it's still the scariest movie I've ever seen.

That's the magic of The Exorcist. It never fails to deliver the goods. Never, ever. Even if you watch it for the third or the thirtieth time, it's still spooky. And it's not a lame excuse for an exercise in laughable scares which most horror movies are striving on, as of now.

Now, while I was snooping around for a little titbit on the movie, I came across a few interesting facts. For one, I was intrigued on knowing the theaters in America provided barf bags for any nutjob who dared to watch it in the theater. Really, how many theaters care for you that much? And for a film that shamelessly fucked with my sleep for two days straight, I was gratified to know that the crew didn't have an easy time making it. There were a number of weird incidents while filming, and a priest was called a few times to bless the set. Hey, I'm not saying that that didn't spook me further. Believe me or not, it scared the bejesus of out me more than the possessed girl did.

I know Friedkin because he made The French Connection, a movie I'm ready to watch ten times incessantly, but to see him turn a jeepers-creepers script into a compelling psychological-horror movie was meritorious. The Exorcist isn't your regular horror film. In fact, it's not a horror film at all. There are no ghosts. And a horror movie is not a horror movie if it doesn't have a ghost, right? I don't believe that, no. But that's something I learnt from the fans of the genre, which I'm not, so I'll take their word for it. And I admit, I'm not a big sucker for horror movies. The only other horror movies I've watched and liked are The Omen, for its absurdity, and The Silence Of The Lambs, for its sheer power. The Exorcist is different, it's a strange amalgam of both, you know. It's an absurd piece of cinema but ridiculously powerful in its own way. And it's made with spectacular skill and finesse.

So, what have you got? You've got a possessed girl, a demonic spirit in her and refusing to budge, she's got an atheist for a mother, a disturbed priest who has recently lost his mother and you've got winning special effects. That's The Exorcist in a nutshell. I watched it in a darkened room to encourage the impact but I needn't have bothered. It's like a pizza, you see, in an eldritch way - no matter what's in it, it'll still be delicious and you'll still end up enjoying it.

Of course, The Exorcist, being a Hollywood baby at the time, inspired a few sequels. And it was a stupid, stupid decision to tamper with a masterpiece. Some dumb sod must've thought, "Let's milk the plot more and earn some money while we're at it!". Now, for the record, I haven't seen The Exorcist II or The Exorcist III simply because I haven't dared to. Anyway, the legend goes that the first part was jinxed in more than one way.

Linda Blair, twelve years-old at the time of its release, is incredible in the role of the possessed Regan. I mention her because I did not expect a juvenile to pull off what she has pulled off. It's a brave performance, an honest performance and one that feeds The Exorcist till its end. Take Blair out of it and it's just a movie with some people and a bunch of old film tricks.

The Exorcist is a different kind of horror movie, minus the screams and loud bangs, but it's got enough guts and creeps to give you the chills for a long time after. It's a beautifully-made classic, a rarity in its genre.

Pleasant nightmares!