Still from the Hindi film ‘Kashmir Ki Kali’
Film critics can get unexpectedly bashful, when pressed for recommendations. It’s on their job description, you would think, yet they tend to shrink away. I know: blinking politely and indecisively whenever cornered in a conversation by friends and colleagues and asked to “suggest stuff.” What irks is the directness of the demand: a good thriller, a rom-com, a weekend binge. There’s little accounting for subjective taste, for personal flights of fancy (theirs or mine). The connecting tissue that binds movies in our heads is more whimsical and slippery than that, and can’t be confined by genres and sub-genres.
This column, thus, represents an effort to turn things around, to recommend movies and shows on our own terms. Every other weekend, my colleagues and I at The Hindu cinema team will be suggesting titles tied to a mood, theme or pop-cultural event.
To kick things off in the muggy end of June, I write on films about escape.
Last month, as the Cannes Film Festival unfurled by the Mediterranean, India was in the grip of a heatwave. It affected voting turnouts; Shah Rukh Khan, attending an IPL match in Ahmedabad, suffered a heatstroke. It was also the season of summer blockbusters: the sand, fire and chrome in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga all but burning up the screen.
Parvathy, Irrfan Khan in ‘Qarib Qarib Singlle’
Sweltering away at my desk, I got thinking about cinema’s retreat to cooler climes. The idea that a change of place (and, more crucially, a change of weather) can have a liberating effect on the body and soul is an old one in fiction. Films, in particular, have been attuned to this visceral need for escape.
One of the great films with summer in its title is Ingmar Bergman’s Summer with Monika (1953). In the film, Monika, the eponymous heroine played by Harriet Andersson, falls for Harry, a dreamy young lad who toils in a factory. They leave ordinary Stockholm for the vast archipelago off its coast; they live off a boat, brew coffee, smoke cigarettes, kiss and loll around. There is a famous scene where Monika, lulled and encouraged by the wind and the waves, goes skinny-dipping in a tide pool. Harry looks on from afar, as though cacheing this merry image in his heart.
Hindi films have long displayed a fondness for the outdoors. Given our tropical climate, this has usually manifested in making a dash for the hills. ‘Suhana Safar’ from Madhumati (1958) has Dilip Kumar warbling his way through Ranikhet, near Nainital; in Anupama (1966), Dharmendra meets Sharmila Tagore in Mahabaleshwar. Tagore was also the ‘kali’ in Kashmir ki Kali(1964), whose hero Shammi Kapoor became a de facto mascot of Kashmiri tourism in the movies. Kapoor’s characters from the time needed but the slightest provocation to run off to the hills (the late icon so loved Kashmir that, when he died in 2011, his ashes were immersed in the Dal Lake).
Interestingly, in recent decades, it’s Kapoor’s grand-nephew, Ranbir, who has brought footloose wandering back in vogue: his movies like Tamasha, Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani, Anjaana Anjaani, Rockstar and Brahmastra are all shot like high-gloss travelogues. For characters on a budget, meanwhile, check out Irrfan Khan and Parvathi in Qarib Qarib Singlle, traipsing around half of North India, or Vidya Balan and Pratik Gandhi in the recent Do Aur Do Pyaar, soothing their nerves as they rebuild their spark in good old Ooty.
FromThe Hindu cinema team, a fortnightly column recommending films and shows tied to a mood, theme, or pop cultural event.
