A friend reminded me of my childhood favorite today.yesterday i watched umrao jaan again. muzaffar ali’s film about the legendary courtesan amiran, aka umrao jaan ‘ada.’ more relevant, one of rekha’s best performances ever.I would go so far as to say that as the hindi film industry goes, this is probably the most complete film i’ve seen.
As a child, My aunt loved this movie and we would view it during balmy summer night.
I have watched quite a few p
eriod films yet nothing matches Umao jan Ada.Period films tend to be opulent, excessive and trite… or plain silly.Many such come to mind…Devdas, for all its ‘splendour’ was bereft of any feeling. It did not move me, it did not stay with me… why,I could not stay with it and walked away after a while.It seemed to try to hard like a man vowing you which made it unauthentic.
Parineeta was a favorite for a while, It was winsome but when I saw it on the small screen,It lost half its kashish and the melodrama in the end had always put me off a bit.
Lagaan was too long and too futile a movie for me.Paheli lacked feeling and seemed all too blithe in every department. Mughal-e-azam i have not been able to sit through — but partly due to logisitical problems — still, what i saw didn’t wrench the heart.
Maybe it is the players as well. Ashwariya Rai is superficial, Rani mukherjee lacks ‘dard,’ Madhubala, while exquisite, shows that she is ‘acting.’ Vidaya Balan and saif acted well, but between them, there seemed little want — and then the wall breaks.
But umrao? Rekha’s voice, its quality and tone and her eyes all speak umrao’s heart and urdu adds to the magic,every word spoken furthers the story and every song sung needs to be there.
Muzaffar Ali made an epic. Apart form that, his sensitivities to the culture and the period were very intense. He hails from Lukhnow himself, so he knows what he is talking about in the movie.
And he had Rekha! Rekha posses a intensity which her neither her peers nor her predecessors possessed.She was the truly BIG heroine, the kind with larger than life charisma.The kind of leading ladies MGM used to put on the screen;Like Greta Garbo. She captures the screen.When it comes to sheer onscreen presence, she’s unparalleled… she is a fierce, raw, flinty performer with unbridled honesty. Her acting isn’t gimmicky.
But more than anything, I never once could separate rekha from Umrao.There is an amazing heartache in her in this role,An alienation.She is a poetess rather than a courtesan.She dances on broken glass.
Raswa’s Umrao Jan is a dark tale.It speaks of betrayal and disillusionment.Its really very Dickensian.Great expectations in Lucknow.
Set among the elite Muslim society in mid-nineteenth century northern India, Umrao Jaan portrays a romanticized version of a tawaif, a kind of courtesan who has something in common with Japan’s geishas. Tawaifs were accomplished in the high arts of kathak (north Indian classical dance), poetry, and music. The film’s Umrao Jaan, sold to a brothel as a young girl, excels at all three, and becomes the most sought-after and famous tawaif in the region. But in spite of all her accomplishments, Umrao is never happy, and while she can find some measure of escape in crafting her much-admired poetry, she longs to extricate herself from the world of the tawaif.
She works her way through a brief series of lover/patrons, hoping each one will be her ticket out of the degredation of brothel.Needless to say, freedom is not Umrao’s lot, and after each attempt at escape - literal and metaphorical - she finds herself right back where she started :Umrao Jaan the famous courtesan, performing for the benefit and the pleasure of others.
It is Rekha’s ineffable Rekha-ness that makes her so perfect for this role, as she somehow manages to appear tired and worldly while remaining delicate and other-worldly. She carries Umrao’s transition from innocence to disillusionment in her body and in her face.Umrao never loses her grace, but, as Rekha conveys, she does lose her idealism.She sings both of succumbing completely to love (“What is a heart? Take my life”) and also of her own particular power (“Thousands are intoxicated by the power of these eyes”).
Early on she muses that it is “circumstances” rather than “destiny” that made her a tawaif, and circumstances can change. Later on, she seems nearly broken, and the sadness just grows in Rekha’s eyes on each iteration of her Sisyphean attempts to redefine her circumstances.
A couple of shots of the Rekha version are really touching-especially the part where Umrao teaches her brother to speak, and the same brother grows up and throws her out of the house. Rekha’s acting at that point is memorable.Her eyes spoke all the dissolution and despair,words couldn’t.
I dont want to be her psychoanalyst but perhaps there was something in Umrao’s story which struck Rekha in her deepest self.She once remarked that “After reading the script, I had a strange feeling that I had Umrao in me.A child star brought into show biz by her actress mother due to financial problems and abandoned by her biological father.She has spoken of her teenage days in Bombay, forced to act and wear crazy clothes when she should have been in school.
She also drank from the bitter cup of love of by spineless men…who profess to love you but are doomed to ultimately leave you. Yups She must have understood Umrao.
Lee Strassburg ( The method acting teacher) believed all acting was really exposing the subconscious trauma’s and self and great performances are elicited when the boundary between Performer and character are blurred.This happens in Umaro..You dont see Rekha anywhere rather you see an 18th century courtesan-used by the worlds..abandoned by those she loved…beautiful but ultimately damned.
Just look at this last song, When Umrao finds her birthplace and remebers her home.In probably the most beautiful lyrics, she sings of her helplessness.It was such an enigmatic end…..Umrao back in a looted broken Lucknow at the place from where she had been running all her life.No hysterics …No drama.Just silence among the ruins.
She needed some green in her apartment.
Before she bought furniture, she was at the flower shop - a subconscious evocation of a fecund childhood, romping in gardens, rolling in lawns, clambering mango trees, picking flowers in the morning for the breakfast table…
“Philodendrons, lilies, ferns, azaleas, bonsai…”
Hmm. She spends long minutes gazing at each plant, fingering the leaves, feeling the texture, inhaling its aroma.
Then, among the flowering pots, in a tangle of pink, yellow, purple, red, blue, she spies a familiar star-shaped white…
She blinks, startled. Is it? It can’t be…bending forward, she buries her face in the modest little shrub bearing the two pale-faced flowers and takes a deep breath…
Suddenly, she’s not in Washington DC’s China Town
She’s home.. on a warm summer’s night. The grass is damp from the afternoon rain. Crickets and other invisible creatures of the dusk trill madly in the bushes, and a velvety breeze rustles in the bougainvillea creepers andGulmohar above, filling the air with a shower of orange and fuchsia…
It smells sweet, but a subtle kind of sweetness – of budding love, and clasping a dear one’s moist hand, of late-night drives and dewy white bracelets bought from the barefoot little boy on the curbside, of cooing pigeons and clouds of fluttering wings on the rooftop, of twinkling black eyes rimmed with kajal, white blooms wreathed in black hair, and the enveloping scent of flowers in a bride’s bedroom…
“So you want the jasmine, miss?” The Chinese lady grins, her cropped black head nodding vigorously, round black spectacles bouncing on her nose.
Jasmine! Motia….”Yes, I’ll take the jasmine,” she nods vigorously back.It was a ticket to her past, a nostalgic train which passed through her charmed childhood.She needed to hop on that train occasionally to navigate the bleak passages of her new life.
It sits on a windowsill in her apartment, in a modest little green pot – spreading its delicate, memory-laden perfume over the folds of her new life, a graceful remembrance, a lingering fragrance of the past.
The book I just finished is Daniyal Mueenuddin’s “In Other Rooms, Other Wonders”, a collection of short stories about Pakistan.I heard about this book on Fareed Zikaria’s show, of all the places.
Mueenuddin’s stories leave you puzzled, stunned - I knew as little about the world he described as I knew about Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo or Tagore’s rural Bengal. He wrote them while living on his mango farm, which is a story by itself.Why would a half amreeki live in Pakistan after going to Duke and that too live on a mango farm.But as a french surrealist would say-creation comes from bleak places.
Nawabdin electrician, Saleema, Zainab, Rezak - all these people are not alien to me, but their private lives detached from mine by an invisible wall becuse I too lived in two worlds like most Pakistani’s.We see them but we are not very concerned about their inner world.They are drones to us.
Of course I knew people like them - we kept servants at home, I was raised by one after my mother’s death, and most of them came from our native village. But I really knew nothing about them, the cook, the maid, the chowkidaar, the sweepress, the driver, all the people who worked in my house; I knew nothing beyond the rudiments, the apparent facts.
I liked to think that I was friends with the maidservants, those pretty, smiling young girls who washed and pressed my clothes and dusted my room everyday; at least I had every intention to be friendy. But would I ever know what they really thought about me, or any of us.Like any cruel capitalists I “assumed” they were happy and uneffected by the sight of my wardrobe and perfumes.
And when Mueenuddin’s wrote of K.K. Harouni in his attitude towards his servants’ personal lives, “He didn’t particularly care one way or the other, except that it touched on his comfort”, I realized that it was, more or less, painfully true about me as well.But now I wonder how stupid I was.
Ofcourse they were affected by the opulence they saw around them while they worked for food and rent.Perhaps this explains the resentment, the unexplained out bursts and backbiting they indulged in.They hated us as Marx says they should.Their hatred always baffled/baffles my grandmother who believes these scum should be grateful we even hire them, without us how would they eat.
But ironically, I understand even less about the “other” world – K.K. Harouni’s, Sohail’s or Lily’s, or any of the wealthy people in Mueenuddin’s book. I’m not like them. We’re not like them. My family doesn’t own apartments in London or Paris, my father has never touched alcohol, my mother doesn’t wear saris or grape-sized emeralds in her ears everyday, we don’t socialize with people called ”Mino” or “Bumpy”, neither have we ever hosted Tsunami-themed parties with artificial beaches in the lawn, or been invited to one – thank God for that.I was always taught I had to study hard and work hard and be frugal and live responsibily.Even going to America was an investment in my future, on my grandparents part and not a ticker for clubbing.
I know who these people are - in our family we call them the “filthy rich”.I was briefly acquainted with them or rather their female offsprings during my teenage in Kinnaird College Lahore.They seemed to care about parties, models , men when I was fussing over my SAT scores. And I dismissed them as irrelevant to my world and never really took any interest. But there’s is a parallel universe in Pakistan along with the drone attacks and atta riots. A universe filled with Ecstacy? Getting drunk on bootlegged alcohol, Getting high on Charas,sleeping around. In Pakistan??
How little I knew! How naive I was! People who didnt care about working or saving money or other mundane stuff that I focused on but wanted to be seen at the right place with the right escort at the right time. They are grotesque and hilarious.Grotesque because of their obnoxiousness and hilarious because they are living in such a fragile pink bubble a la St Petersburg or even Versailles.In a place like Pakistan …simmering with so much angst do you really want to carry a Birkin Bag and wear tight jeans.As a pathan driver once said to me ” BibI you can be killed for the way you look here”
But the question which Mueenuddin’s poses in his book to the reader is; Are there only three kinds of Pakistanis then, the struggling, servile poor, the opportunistic middle-class like Husna and Jaglani, and the hedonistic elites? All parallele universes existing together.And would they continue to exist togehter or would they collide in a huge burning explosion and if so, Which universe would survive? Who is the fittest of them all.
But it also posed a more troubling question to me..Where did my family fit in? Where do I fit in with my boarding school education but middle class frugal ways.With an american stamp on my passport and a foreign degree on my resume but an anxious habit to check the money in my purse after I spend too much.I don’t seem to fit in any of these neat categories… neither lower class Salma nor upper class Lily.
And furthermore is this social homelessness a curse or a blessing??
If home is where the heart is, my heart is forever moving, a gypsy
If a piece of cloth and a stadium slogan is a test of nationalism,
I have no nation
If piety is measured in prayers, in a ledger in a language I don’t understand,
I am a heathen
If speech is an adequate expression of sentiment,
I have no words
If living by somebody else’s rules is sociability,
I am a misfit
If white is black and black is white,
then I don’t exist.
Melancholia is an amazing movie in the time of Transformers and sSeeping beauties.The movie makes you think infact it induces a trance like state.At the end I found myself feeling hollow, light on my feet and vacant which is in tune with the film’s central themes.
Melancholia is a physical planet that’s headed for Earth {which translates to doomsday for earthlings}, but it’s also the blatant symbolism for Melancholia as a state of mind. The name is taken from this enigmatic painting by Durer. But it seems to point to living in a state of melancholia.Von Trier made the movie after a depressive episode.
What I loved about the movie were its themes of anxiety and alienation from everything and everyone around you.When you look at Justine’s eyes..she is distant from everything.There is a veil separating her and reality.I have felt like that so very often and so must have you..but strangely to see it depicted on screen…was very calming to me somehow.Almost like a validation of an experience.The move seemed to say to me “Its human to feel like that” We all feel like that.I wish I had watched this movie as a teenager when I used to feel I was martian , sent to earth and Pkaistan of all the places, as a punishment for my crimes.
In amusing and diverting way, the wilful, depressed Justine behaves appallingly, leaving and rejoining the party as she pleases. She urinates on a green on the surrounding golf course, has sex with a young stranger in a bunker, insults the best man (Stellan Skarsgård) who is both her new father-in-law and her employer at an advertising agency….she is really willing to do anything if only she can feel something…anything.
There is so much suffocation inside …even pain would be a sensation, which perhaps explain as the catastrophic planet draws nearer.Justine becomes calmer and resigned and discovers a new composure.She seems to welcome the collision as bringing a fitting end to an evil, isolated, unnecessary world. At one beautiful and very symbolic scene, she rearranges a display of art books in the chateau’s library to give prominence to reproductions of Edward Burne-Jones’s Death of Ophelia and several Bruegel paintings, among them the chilly Hunters in the Snow.
Life was such an effort and Death seems so welcoming.Its a visually stunning film.When Justine goes out into the fields to look at the awesome blue planet, and then takes her clothes off to bathe in its light – that really is powerfully erotic and strange.
hahhaa
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