Khalid Mohamed

Rs 799

He was super boss, once upon a time. His style, substance, sizzle were extraordinary. I was zapped by Nayakan, Thalapathy, Anjali, Roja and Iruvar. And despite flaws galore, Alaipaayuthey and Kannathil Muthamittal had their passages of emotional wallop. Here was a filmmaker who inspired and edified — pssst, the Mast mahaul dance set piece in my Fiza was emboldened by his super item numbers.

But Mani Ratnam’s evolution has been disappointing, if not disillusioning.
The forays into Bollywood are partly to blame; they just don’t stand up to a Nayakan or Thalapathy. The 56-year-old writer-director with an oeuvre of 20 films in 30 years, is far more at home in his Tamil films. In Hindi cinema, he hasn’t broken new ground.
Indeed, his Hindi and multi-lingual films catch him dithering, especially towards their concluding reels. Bombay, never mind its run-in with the censors, failed to take a clear stand on the ’93 communal riots; the issue of terrorism went berserk in Dil Se; Guru apotheosised an industrialist, forgiving him for the trespasses that may have been; Yuva closed on a contrived note with youngish idealists making inroads to the corridors of power; as for Raavan, the less moaned about that the better. Ratnam doesn’t quite wear his suit of hyper-commercialism comfortably.
Yet without a doubt, I look forward majorly to his upcoming film, Kadal, hoping for a return to form, and also for the fringe benefits of A.R. Rahman’s music score, besides the classy cinematography he extracts from Rajiv Menon, not to forget Sreekar Prasad’s editing chops. Adore him or have reservations about Mani Ratnam, he cannot be ignored.
Indeed, Conversations with Mani Ratnam is the first book in its genre, which I lunged for this year. Conducted by the fluent writer and perceptive critic Baradwaj Rangan, the confabulation-fest is a must-check for every aficionado of Indian cinema. I might disagree with Rangan’s takes and constant whoopees over each and every film from the basket of 20. But that’s okay. I am more than persuaded to see the director’s body of work from another critic’s eye.
The reconstruction of Ratnam is enlightening but to a point. In the course of some 287 pages — with stills — I learnt about the pleasure and the pain in achieving several key scenes in the films, and whether they had an intentional metaphorical context. The director’s frequent use of window frames, trains, water, lavish choreographed set pieces and the popping up of old ladies are explicated.
Improvisations and deletions, the reasons for selecting one theme over the other, and unconventional casting coda are discussed threadbare. The dwelling on scenes may escape the reader who isn’t blessed with an elephantine memory or who may have missed out on some of the films. Quite correctly, Baradwaj doesn’t care for those who may not be as much into Ratnam as he is.
Correctly, because the conversations — neatly chaptered with plot synopses — do serve in enticing re-looks or coming in late on quite a few of Ratnam’s significant films: Mouna Ragam (1986) in particular for its then daring theme of a married woman still bonded to another man. A reversal, in a way, of the classic pati-patni-woh syndrome, the “woh” being a male. Such a triangular story has been essayed before but Mouna Ragam did have a daring edge to it, in terms of its dialogue and dramaturgy.
The usually reticent Ratnam opens up with the interviewer like he has never before in any published text. A stellar achievement that, but again I wish Baradwaj had been inquiring rather than hagiographic. No filmmaker can take criticism, particularly Ratnam as I am aware from personal experience. If a sliver of doubt is expressed in the questions, it is countered by the predictable retort that critics tend to read meaning where there is none. Also, “intellectualisation” is employed as a bogey word by Ratnam. How you want to ask him what his notion of “intellectual” is anyway?
The two-pager introduction by A.R. Rahman is a warm salute to the director who gave him his career-defining break with Roja. Writes Rahman candidly, “I try to be a man of faith. And here’s a man who is an atheist by choice. We co-exist as opposites.” The introduction by Baradwaj, on the other hand, is as fawning as it gets. Even while declaring his status as a Ratnam fan, the gush bursts forth like a power shower. For instance, after watching Nayakan, the critic recalls, it was “…as if we had unknowingly stepped into the competition ring of a village fair and ended up flattened by the local wrestler. We couldn’t move, we couldn’t speak...” More: when the filmmaker assented to the idea of a book, “I was a devotee standing on one leg on an anthill, and here was god before me bestowing the rarest of boons.” God! As unabashedly, it is claimed that the interviews have been pitched “so to speak, for a jam session between two musicians”. With such an approach, can there be any objectivity in the questioning at all?
Immodestly, the format of the book is claimed to be “something of a homage to Hitchcock/Truffaut”. Err, is that possible? Neither is the book in the same format. Nor is Baradwaj a filmmaker himself. Francois Truffaut, in the vanguard of the French New Cinema, was articulating his regard for the undervalued master of suspense, from one film-making disciple to a stalwart. Where’s the comparison with Baradwaj in a jam session with Ratnam?
The adjectives “wondrous” and “wonderful” sugar-spray the questions, some of which tend to be too lengthy. Ratnam’s sense of humour surfaces when he replies with a terse, “Yeah”. Moreover, if he is quizzed about the pockmarks on the faces of Abhishek and Vikram in Raavan(an) as marks of “an external manifestation of internal beastliness” — like the hunchback of Shakespeare’s Richard III — he retains his composure and replies ever so seriously, “...There is a hurt, a wound that’s generations old, which he has been carrying since his birth…” Now, that’s some interpretation of pockmarks. Plus, I do wonder whether Ratnam uses a word like “amortise” in the course of a conversation.
Any intrusion in the private life of the director Gopala Ratnam Subramaniam is strictly avoided. No quarrels with that at all. Yet the parting of ways with Kamal Haasan, after Nayakan, could have been addressed. It’s no national secret that the lines between the personal and professional blurred there, preventing the director and actor from ever teaming up again.
Be that as it may, Conversations with Mani Ratnam is worth spending a week over — it’s surely not a rapid-read — since it makes a case for revisiting and reassessing the filmmaker. He has been imitated extensively, lionised at international film festivals and has won so many awards that the trophies couldn’t possibly be
displayed on a single mantlepiece. Just yesterday he was way ahead of his times. The book celebrates that with champagne-popping fervour. Today, where does Ratnam figure in the pantheon of Indian filmmakers? Alas, Baradwaj ignores that aspect, as if he was still flattened out by a local wrestler at a village fair.

Khalid Mohamed is a journalist, film critic and film director