A pretentious film bamboozles critics

Indian film critics/reviewers are perhaps so starved of good stuff that they have lost the ability to judge a bad movie when it is made by an apparently intelligent filmmaker like Vishal Bhardwaj.

He has won laurels with two of his earlier films, Maqbool and Omkara, oblique adaptations of Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Othello. There were problems with these two films but no questions were asked in the critics’ quarters.

It would seem that they thought it would be churlish to be critical of films that were so different from the run-of-the-mill mindless films that are rolled out from the film factories. So, when Bhardwaj’s Kaminey was released last week, the critics were a little more than generous in their praise for the virtues of the film which do not exist. They were literally ecstatic.

There are several problems with Kaminey. First, it is made in the format of a commercial film with all its stereotypical elements — hero, heroine, villains, songs, romance and fights. The curiosity was how Bhardwaj would use the clichés of the regular film and infuse new meaning into them.

The fact is that Bhardwaj makes a mess of it. The hero and heroine dance and sing in an AIDS-awareness promotion procession. In the next scene they decide on their marriage based on an impending pregnancy.

The story stutters forward and ends in a blaze of shoot-outs, where all the frames are echoes of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now with a comic flavour. It ends up as a spaghetti gangster film.

Bhardwaj belongs to that tribe of self-conscious filmmakers who are keen to flaunt their virtuosity in cinematic acrobatics. It should not then come as a surprise that the ordinary commercial film continues to dominate even as the high priests of the art of cinema are busy strutting about with their half-formed notions of what constitutes cinema’s innate beauty. Good filmmakers are not conscious of their art. By that criterion, he does not make the grade.

Like in other parts of the world, it is a handful of critics who make and mar cinematic reputations. That is why it becomes so important to challenge the assumptions of an existing group of critics who declare some filmmakers and some films to be of great importance. It had happened with Ritwik Ghatak.

The critics abroad and in India hero-worshipped Satayjit Ray to the exclusion of all others. It took a long time to notice Ghatak’s artless cinema. Even today, Bimal Roy remains an unrecognised genius though Do Bigha Zamin, the neo-realist masterpiece, preceded Ray’s Pather Panchali by three years.

It was not until the 1980s that Guru Dutt was recognised as a director of critical achievement. The change came around because it was the French who discovered the cinema of Guru Dutt and Indian critics just fell in line.

Similarly, it is not until the Cannes film festival authorities in 2002 organised  a retrospective of Raj Kapoor’s films that the critical importance of popular Hindi cinema was felt. It is only now that prigs are turning to study commercial Hindi cinema.

In this vitiating atmosphere, the people who write and talk about cinema have started shouting that filmmakers like Bhardwaj, Anurag Kashyap (Dev D), Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra (Rang De Basanti, Delhi 6) are the new rebels who are subverting commercial cinema in a meaningful fashion.

The critics’ verdict is patently untrue because these filmmakers remain on the margins. Popular taste refuses to be moulded by the self-appointed arbiters of taste. That is why it is so necessary to call the bluff of the critics when they anoint faltering filmmakers like Bhardwaj as the masters of cinema.

A country that produces a thousand films a year deserves wider debate as to what constitutes cinema. Critical taste has to be rooted in a broader understanding of cinema and society in India and in the world. This important job cannot be left to intellectual rookies.