Jabberwock: Analyse this (and a quick note on three Idiots)
Jabberwock
"It seems very pretty," she said, "but it’s rather hard to understand."
Saturday, January 02, 2010
Analyse this (and a quick note on Trio Idiots)
The “don't analyse, just love” line is very familiar; I hear it whenever I attempt to discuss a hugely popular film using any sentences more complicated than “This movie rocks from beginning to end!” Take Rajkumar Hirani's three Idiots , a film I loved a lot on the entire. It's utter of some indeed good bits and the very first half in particular was outstanding. But watching the 2nd half, I couldn't help wondering why so many good Hindi films take the trouble to establish a nuanced thought process and then simply cop out of it at crucial times. Why does it feel like five different writers were sitting in a room, each attempting to tug the film in a different direction?
For an example of what I'm talking about, consider a superb 20-minute open up close to the film's midway point: the scene where the three heroes (fun-loving students at an engineering college) make a public spectacle of their colleague Chatura, a teacher's pet who learns everything by rote. The sequence embarks by placing us, the viewer, in a position of identification with the three leads. When one of them plays a phone gag on Chatura while another switches around the words in a Hindi speech he has to recite (“balatkaar” for “chamatkaar”, etc), we approve of the prank; after all, Chatura is such a smug little toady. We then laugh our goes off at him as he makes the unintentionally ribald speech (it's one of the excellent paisa-vasool/taali-maar scenes you'll ever see). But then – in the scene that goes after – the film shortly turns the tables on us by permitting us to see his anger and abasement; to see him as a victim of a flawed educational system.
Taken together, the entire 20-minute section is a brilliantly sustained sequence of moral complexity – one of the best I’ve seen in a mainstream Hindi movie. It builds up in such a way that when Chatura denounces the “three idiots” on the rooftop, he’s also denouncing us in a sense. (At any rate, anyone who has been through the formal-education grind in India – and done even moderately well in school or college – should find it very difficult to take any sort of higher moral ground against Chatura. To varying degrees, we’ve all done what he does.) But this train of thought is never truly followed through. Instead, the film makes the predictable, feel-good, mass-audience-pleasing decision to let Chatura remain a buffoon and a comic foil, as if he were personally the villain of the chunk instead of a little cog in a giant cracked wheel.
This also leads to a disconnect inbetween the film’s (over)stated “message” and what actually happens at the end (something I felt was a problem in Taare Zameen Par as well). Trio Idiots spends over two-and-a-half hours preaching about how individual satisfaction and following your desires are more significant than “success” as society defines it (status, bank balance, size of car, etc). But in the last ten minutes it can't stand against providing the audience the very superficial thrill of watching that the Aamir character has ended up in a position where he can make the pompous Chatura grovel. (And besides, isn’t his Ladakh lake fatter than the rich NRI's indoor swimming pool?)
There are a few other examples of liberate writing. Like the Javed Jaffrey sub-plot, thrown in only because they couldn’t find another way to justify the Aamir character cutting himself off from everyone after college. And the lazy treating of the "Ten years after" screenplay, with Kareena improbably on the edge of getting married to the same moron she was engaged to a decade earlier (you get the impression the writers stuck with the fellow only because he was such a soft target for humour).
When I spoke to a friend about these little short-cuts, he said, “Well, yes, but we expect our Hindi films to be wishy-washy about these little things, right?” I know what he meant, but I'm commencing to wish that our default expectation mode about basic internal consistency in our movies didn’t always have to be set low – especially when the film is so good in many other ways, as Three Idiots undoubtedly is.