If feel-good storytelling leaves us warm and happy at being alive, what can we call cinema that leaves us uncomfortable? How about be-better cinema? The film Bengali Bhadralok Ray-lovers dislike the most is his last work, Agantuk. I loved it when I saw it first, as an 8-year-old who watched a near-complete Ray retrospective late nights on Doordarshan the year…
Author: sohinichattopadhyay
Why Do Women Carry the Mantle of Mental Health in Hindi Film?
A number of recent projects, headlined by major Bollywood stars reveal a sensitivity and awareness, likely prompted by the Modi government’s Mental Healthcare Act. But men, whose mental health figures are far more worrying, are shown as mentors and caregivers and support figures In the Hindi film Judgemental Hai Kya (Are you Judgemental), something happened for the first time. The…
Neel Akasher Neechey: When it was possible to make a hit film about the friendship between a Chinese vendor and a Bengali activist
This Mrinal Sen work became the first film to be banned in independent India in 1962 The Bengali film Neel Akasher Neeche, the second film directed by Mrinal Sen, is a marker of a time when it was considered unproblematic to cast a Bengali as a Chinese man and use make-up to pull his eyes into slits. But it is…
Kharij: The Killing of a ‘Servant Boy’
Mrinal Sen’s clear-eyed unpeeling of the cruelty of the great Indian middle class A young, upper-middle class family, Anjan and Mamata Sen, hire a boy ‘servant’ not much older than their own son in 1980s Calcutta, administered by a Communist government, in the film Kharij. The ‘servant’ boy dies one night, possibly due to a gas leak in the kitchen,…
The ‘Maid’ Who Lies and Loses Her Temper
Ilo Ilo offers what Roma does not–a loving ‘domestic help’ who sometimes gives it back The difference between the Mexican-American film Roma and the Singaporean film Ilo Ilo is that the “maid” Teresa speaks here. She has a point of view, unlike in Roma where we see Cleo mostly as the recipient of conversations, barely a participant even in her…
Asukh: A Father-Daughter Chamber Drama with Bowel Movement Talk at Dinner
A decade and a half before the Hindi film Piku, this Bengali feature offered the gender opposite of the mother-daughter drama, the Autumn Sonata, Unishe April, Tehzeeb genre As much as I love Piku, there is a father-daughter film with similar strains but darker in its comic and emotional notes that arrived a decade and a half before it. Asukh…
Why are “servants” in Hindi film so heroic?
Gully Boy and Parasite have the same front-seat-back seat dynamic of “servants and masters”. So does Joker. But Gully Boy locates its problems in the abusive, alcoholic fathers of Dharavi. Why is Hindi film so shy about class conflict? Around the mid-point of the Oscar-winning Parasite, right before it pivots to another gear, is a conversation that sums up the…
Virus: A Superb Ode to Shailaja ‘Teacher’, and Public Health and India’s Federalism
This film on the real-life Nipah outbreak in Kerala in 2018 is the opposite of a didactic film like Toilet: Ek Prem Katha. It’s moving, humane and intelligent The thing that I loved most about the Malayalam film Virus is the haughty “Delhi team” that arrives to take stock of the Nipah virus outbreak in Kerala in 2018 and peremptorily…
Clouds of Sils Maria: Therapy with Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart
In a sense, this is a deluxe lockdown film. An iconic actress Maria Enders, played by real-life French superstar Juliette Binoche, heads to the exquisite, unspoilt village of Sils Maria in the Swiss Alps to hole up in a cabin to prepare for a landmark project. With her is her young assistant Valentine, played by Kristen Stewart, who serves as…
The Silence of the Archives: Why the Grave Diggers of the Bubonic Plague are Unremembered
The Mahars of Bombay Presidency, who buried the human and animal dead, were essential to the colonial state as frontline health workers. They worked in filthy burial grounds where jackals often dug up the dead
A guest post from Sohini Chattopadhyay, PhD candidate, History Department, Columbia University