The Seventh Art

[Spoilers ahead]

When their grandfather (Rishi Kapoor) falls ill, Rahul (Fawad Khan), successful novelist, and Arjun (Sidharth Malhotra), struggling novelist, return home to parents Harsh (Rajat Kapoor) and Sunita (Ratna Pathak Shah). Arjun believes that Rahul’s perfect life is built at his cost and resents that his parents like his brother more. While supportive of Arjun, Rahul believes he has his head in the clouds and is unwilling to grow up. Harsh is sitting atop a failed enterprise and is annoyed with his wife’s desire to start her own food business. Sunita complains about Harsh’s financial incapacity and dependence on his brother. Another bone of contention between the brothers is the presence of Tia (Alia Bhatt), who is romantically attracted to both of them. This interpersonal algebra is further complicated as the film unfolds, to a point that the entire family is held in tense suspension by mutual grudge.

If the Kapoor family seems out of place in this Bollywood version of Coonoor, here emptied of its local population or landmarks, it’s partly because they are exceptional. Exceptional not only because they are upper class, but because they are unhappy in their own way. Kapoor & Sons stands out in the way it puts its hand into sticky areas of familial life not generally broached by Indian cinema, where moral centres are clearly defined when the family unit is threatened. Everyone in Kapoor & Sons has their reason, and no one’s really right or wrong. (That this detail registers as revolutionary speaks of the industry’s general compulsion to infantilize its audience.) The misery of the Kapoors is spontaneous, independent of external factors. To the world, it’s a happy family, but as the shiny wrappers come off, each member confronts the image the others have of them, confirming their suspicions of not having been truly loved.

The film is centred around grandfather Kapoor’s final wish of having the whole family convened for a photograph. This conceit makes for the film’s most effective set-piece: director Batra intercuts shots of the characters finding out truths about each other with the photo-shoot taking shape under the threat of rain. It’s thrilling and low-key tragic the way this quotidian inconvenience imposes a time pressure over the intense drama: the photograph can’t be made if the characters keep talking, but it won’t be made precisely because the characters haven’t talked enough. When they do assemble for the abortive photo-shoot, we realize that the crux of the problem lies not in the existence of secrets but the in lack of time for the characters in which to explain themselves to each other. Lack of time is what the photograph is about too: the photo purports to hold memories, but constantly lies, picking out a moment in time and stripping away its history. And the lie of the photogenic happy family is what the old patriarch wants to go down with.

Kapoor & Sons is located at the twilight of Bollywood’s old vision of family (community, filial respect, hierarchy, role-playing), now being fast replaced by an occidental vision informed by disruptive liberation narratives (romantic individualism, liberalism, free enterprise, feminism). It’s curious that, despite taking place in a Westernized upper-class milieu, the film looks backwards, dealing with old familial and civilizational sentiments: the guilt parents experience over their children’s perceived faults, the obligation children feel to fix their parents’ lives, the childhood hurt siblings preserve and nurture even as grownups. While Harsh’s and Sunita’s disillusionment with the familial institution is gradual and protracted, Rahul and Arjun face a rude awakening, having to confront primal truths: finding the father at the house of a lover, learning that the mother truly loved one child more than the other.

Commendably written and directed, Kapoor & Sons is constructed out of long, fleshed-out scenes, all of them conversations of some kind – a noteworthy quality in itself. While the effort to crank up the temperature is apparent (a pipe leakage, a dog entering a clean house, a tiff at a card game always at hand to heighten tempers), there’s a clear-cut evolution to every scene. As the film proceeds and the drama reaches a fever pitch, you sense that an expiatory sacrifice in order to appease the narrative gods: it’s not the old man as you’d expect, but his son, and this sudden hole in the family fabric creates a dual perspective of the tragedy, the grandfather’s and grandchildren’s. At the same time, the film treats its material preciously and often forces the issue, spending too much time reinforcing this sibling rivalry and verbalizing that which the actors already convey without words. Rajat Kapoor stands out, but Ratna Pathak Shah’s character is somewhat hollowed out. A more austere, improvisational approach, letting the actors define the contours of their characters themselves, would have helped in a more rounded picture, and made the cruelty family members are capable of towards each other all the more personal.

Bhavesh Joshi Superhero confirms Vikramaditya Motwane’s status as a reliable metteur en scène, a filmmaker capable of mounting effective entertainment in various genres without much personality. He’s made four films so far: a coming-of-age drama, a literary romance, a lone man survival saga and, now, a social-minded superhero movie. All films with specific pleasures and specific ideas, but without any connecting theme. That Motwane isn’t an auteur is a moot proposition and, in the era of instant canonization, perhaps not even worth arguing about. What is of pertinence is that Bhavesh Joshi is his weakest film by far. The failure is instructive in its own way. His films, it now appears, are only as good as their material, and when the latter is uninspired, the films aren’t either.

Motivated by the nationwide anti-corruption movement of 2011-12, two young men from Mumbai, Bhavesh Joshi (Priyanshu Painyuli) and Sikandar Khanna (Harshvardhan Kapoor), launch an activist YouTube channel. Wearing black jackets, paper bags over their heads and carrying a smiley-faced LED panel, they confront various misdoings around them with a camera, uploading the videos online and garnering public support. The project is only half-serious, and, for Sikandar, a means to impress girls. Bhavesh is revolted when Sikandar bribes to get his passport issued and so punches him in rage. In revenge, Sikandar outs Bhavesh’s identity on the channel, just when he’s exposing the water mafia headed by the local MLA and enabled by the police.

Motwane treats the pair’s activism with irony, but when they move from policing individuals to confronting institutions, the film shifts to a serious tone and eventually into full-blown melodrama replete with a strawman villain spouting parables from Greek mythology. Casting relatively unknown actors allows for a surprising protagonist swap midway. For a film that intends to be topical – several reproachful references to the current government, the true-blue Gujarati name of the vigilante protagonist being an insurance against backlash – the characters are oddly unrooted, their familial and social situation not even getting a passing mention. This tendency for topicality is complemented by a desire for legend-building. When Bhavesh Joshi Superhero completes his first foray, we only see him as a silhouette against a burning background.

The compulsion to create a legend clashes with the work’s realist moorings to create a totalitarian vigilante story that pits one man against the entire universe. The film’s distrust of all state and public institutions results in one implausible plot point after another: because everyone is corrupt, the bad guys can get away with anything, anywhere. The opposition party has no voice, the police is rotten to the core, the media is manipulated by the powerful, and the public is swayed by the media. It’s Bhavesh Joshi (and YouTube) vs the World. Yet, it’s the media and the judiciary the script eventually looks to for resolving its plot and bringing the villains to account. For a film that started with the acknowledgement that justice is not a question of setting the crooked straight, but a long-drawn, institutionalized process of negotiation and influence, Bhavesh Joshi takes a quick U-turn.

Motwane and team imagine Mumbai like Gotham City, made and unmade over and over. The film’s best passage is a chase sequence in which the superhero on bike snakes in and out of not just the city’s roads, but impossible locations such as its local railway as well – a parody of a regular day for many residents of Mumbai. The film accentuates the home-made quality of its super-hero, he might as well be called Jugaad-man: we see him buy electronic parts from the black market, stitch together his own attire, customize his bike with makeshift power boosters. The action sequences, likewise, are shot with an improvisational, low-budget aesthetic to look like local variations on Soderbergh. The film tempers its seriousness with touches of humour: after a botch-up, the hero makes for the exit limping, his undercover identity consists of thick-rimmed glasses and an absurd, off-the-shelf bald patch he puts on with the help of a Chinese instructional manual. The final fight sequence takes place on a pipeline and Motwane shoots it like a video game – scattered grace notes in an otherwise ordinary venture.

Made during the runup to the golden jubilee celebrations of the first moon landing, First Man begins in the middle of action: Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) manoeuvres his plane at the edge of atmosphere, veers close to catastrophe, but manages to land back on earth without much damage. The reason for his lapse of judgment, it is revealed, is that his toddler daughter is suffering from an incurable tumour. She dies shortly thereafter and Neil moves with his wife Janet and son to Houston, having been selected for the test programmes in NASA’s moon mission. Life in Houston has all the trappings of middle-class normalcy – sub-urban house with a lawn, grill parties with neighbours, pastel-coloured wallpaper – but Neil and Janet can never blend in. The moon mission is proceeding at full throttle against all odds, resulting in the loss of several astronauts, all Neil’s friends and neighbours.

It appears that, constantly touched by death, Neil is a stoic, melancholy man, not yet on the moon, but entirely not of this earth. He removes himself completely from family life, content to gaze at the moon every night. In the film’s most effective scene, he is forced by Janet before he leaves for the mission to have a final chat with his sons, which Neil completes like a press meet. Gosling channels some of his work from Lars and the Real Girl and one of the ironies First Man is going for is that this man, brilliant engineer but a social outcast, is constantly asked to bear the burden of history, to be in the eye of media attention, give press conferences, attend White House dinners, and be the receptacle of popular anger against the mission; that he had to go to the moon to be able to get back home. The thrust of Damien Chazelle’s interspersing of Neil’s incurable gloom and the agitations of the sixties is that, no matter one’s privileged social-historical situation, private grief is all-consuming and can’t be relativized.

In this, the film also seems to want to paint a metaphysical portrait of the sexes. Like Western heroes, Neil’s and his fellow male astronauts’ straying away from the pull of domesticity towards the unknown and the endless suffering of their wives and children comes across as descriptions of an eternal condition. The repeated superposing of the domestic scenes at home featuring Janet and children and NASA’s commentary of the mission is supposed to have an Odyssey-like weight, but only grows increasingly wearisome. Janet’s character, more than Neil’s, remains greatly underdeveloped (Claire Foy’s drama school tics condemn it to a type) and it’s symptomatic that this film, which namechecks various discontentment of the sixties, completely sidesteps the sexual revolution that could’ve given Janet a more rounded presence.

Some of the formal choices are interesting, especially its low-budget-movie tendency to avoid spectacle for suggestion of spectacle: most of the thrill is conveyed to us not through rocket ballets but via numbers on screen, the low-key score, the sound of metals clinging, the actor’s frenetic breathing and the claustrophobic setting of the capsule. Not allowing for sights outside the capsule makes for a subjective experience of impending death. It also reinforces the film’s parallel theme about man’s conflicted faith in technological progress. In a recruitment interview, Neil says that he wants to go to space in order to get a better perspective of life on earth, hinting at a distrust of technology that wasn’t able to save his daughter.

Given that everyone knows how Apollo 11 or the preceding missions panned out in reality, screenwriter Josh Singer pegs the dramatic power of his script on the time-limited nature of the mission. Kennedy’s declaration that an American will be on the moon within the decade taken alongside the impossible odds against which that goal has to be achieved lends the film the thrill of a countdown. Chazelle employs glass as a crucial element of his mise en scène and the material comes to reflect Neil’s emotionlessness, his distance from his family as well as the vastness of the unknown facing him. The last scene, loudly understated, is La La Land Redux.

The human aspect of space travel is also at the centre of Claire Denis’ first full-length English language production, High Life. Far in the future, death row inmates are given a choice to volunteer for a one-way mission to the nearest black hole. Strict rules are observed on board, the inmates are still treated like prisoners, with everyday tasks to be completed. Overseeing the ship is a slowly-disintegrating captain (Lars Eidinger) and a cookie scientist Dibs (Juliette Binoche), who is trying in vain to produce babies by artificially inseminating the female prisoners with semen samples from the male prisoners. With exposure to radiation mounting as they near the black hole, the prisoners get increasingly restless and Dibs keeps them sedated by adulterating their rations. But the strict prohibition of sexual contact between inmates leads to a breaking point and the mission is thrown into jeopardy.

Well, that is the story, but we don’t get to it right away. The film’s opening fifteen minutes constructs an otherworldly ambience. A glide through a misty garden with a mysterious shoe hints at earth. A baby is seen in a cradle surrounded by screens and electronic equipment, her father Monte (Robert Pattinson) speaks to her through the computers, but he’s perched on top of a spaceship trying to fix an issue. There’s no information about how these spaces are linked and the enigma creates fertile connections in the viewer’s mind. The film proceeds in several stretches through such mosaic of details, which are glued together through clumsy expositional elements such as an Indian professor in a train on earth spelling out the premise. The image of a man and his child aboard a ship heading nowhere is a combination of hope and doom that the film drops for the more ordinary spectacle of the inmates going bonkers.

The everyday events on the ship unfold gradually with sudden bursts of violence, causing the attrition of the crew. We are never sure how big the prison-ship is or what the exact relation between the spaces we see is, except that the garden is a more spiritually-invested zone that disinfects the inmates, gives them an experience of home and helps them come to terms with their dire situation. Monte resists Binoche’s charms to preserve his essence, but is overpowered by her and fathers a baby unbeknownst. His resentment and eventual acceptance of the child perhaps is perhaps what the film is most committed to, turning the story into an allegory of sorts for life on earth. The narrative shifts back and forth in time and there’s a twenty-year jump that finds the baby all grown, now picking up human concepts like faith and cruelty through videos still being transmitted from earth – an improbable Bildung we are asked to take on faith.

As is customary for Denis, particular attention is given to the various textures of the ship: the plastic curtains overseeing the garden, the fabric in “The Box” where prisoners go to let out steam, the padding on the ship’s walls, Binoche’s writhing skin, the actors’ hair which seems to have some special power in the narrative. Every bodily fluid that exists is roll-called and becomes a resource to be harnessed. Denis shoots in odd aspect ratios and that adds to the echo of Solaris resounding through the film. The film, to be sure, is a distinct auteur excursion into this derided genre. But it lacks the consistent ambiguity of The Intruder or the emotional beats of 35 Shots of Rum. Going one-up on the cynicism of Bastards, High Life seems to embody a bitter outlook towards not just civilization, but the human race in totality. Why bother?