The Bullfighter and the Lady [dir. Budd Boetticher]

I first came to experience the work of Budd Boetticher through the wonderful Ranown Westerns set Indicator put out some years ago. With that series of movies, Boetticher did for Westerns what Val Lewton did for horror - use the genre to tell thoughtful stories with layered characterization, and avoid being just cliched B-budget matinee fodder. So of course, when I heard that Boetticher was a fan of bullfighting as a sport and that he regarded The Bullfighter and the Lady as one of his most personal pictures, I was naturally eager to see it. My viewing was with the reconstructed 124 min Director's Cut (DC).

While American Johnny Regan (Robert Stack) is visiting Mexico with friends, he is taken up with the local bullfighting scene and meets with champion matador Manolo Estrada (Gilbert Roland aka Luis Antonio Damaso). He also locks eyes with the alluring Anita (Joy Page), engaged to one of the assistant bullfighters in Manolo's team. Possibly as a way to continue meeting with Anita, Johnny asks Manolo to teach him the art of bullfighting.

Thus begins a lengthy process of training and trials, during which Johnny develops his skill and also a meaningful friendship with Manolo and his wife Chelo (the queenly Katy Jurado, who has a showstopper scene when she tells off a drunk spectator that jeers Manolo into competing with an injured hand). The film's biggest strength is its commitment to showcasing the various aspects of the sport and not make it just a heroism gimmick. You don't see Johnny become a showboat expert after two lessons - he makes a mistake, learns, stumbles over something else, learns again. It is not dull repetition, but the thoughtful depiction of a sportsman's growth...and I mean sportsman in the best sense of the term. For it is not just technical skill that Johnny acquires, he also absorbs the patience, understanding and camaraderie that separates the great sportsman from the petty competitor. In parallel we follow his pursuit of Anita, including a misunderstanding that makes her reject him, and how they eventually reconcile. This is all one organic narrative, and the film is essentially one of deep human feeling.

Of course, this does not address the elephant in the room, or in this case the bull. In its loving documentation of the sport, the film talks about the selection of bulls for their 'bravery', and the admiration the matadors have for the beasts. All the same it does depict a form of bullfighting in which the animal is pierced with lances (that cause it pain and increase its aggression) and eventually killed by a sword. You could argue against the 'gentlemanliness' of a sport that involves such actions, but the film focuses on the art and skill involved in the sport and confers upon it a nobility of spirit.

The 87-min Theatrical cut I understand radically alters the film, chopping off many scenes of bullfighting and of Johnny's friendship with Manolo, making it a simple romantic tale of his pursuit of Anita. These cuts were apparently made to make the film more palatable for audiences by John Ford after he was invited by the film's producer, his buddy John Wayne. It will make for an interesting curiosity when I get to it.

A few words about the Powerhouse/Indicator blu-ray:

Video quality on the DC is variable. Most sequences appear solid enough, with a veneer of grain, but several shots have a softer look with blown out whites, density fluctuations and even a bit of wobble. These shots may be exclusive to what was used for the reconstruction of the DC, I'm not sure. The quality of the film itself is good enough to justify any deficiencies in the source. The (mostly) English mono audio is fine. The Spanish characters speak to each other in Spanish and these lines are not translated (but they are transcribed in full when you turn on the subs).

Extras-wise, I have not gone through them as yet but Indicator seems to have done another sterling job of compiling lengthy featurettes on Boetticher's life and movies, and the special place this film has in his career, and my copy includes the chunky booklet which I assume is packed with interesting content (the LE is still available for a very reasonable sum, and even without this booklet this can be regarded as a packed release and highly recommended).

Chak De! India [dir. Shimit Amin]

You'll have to excuse my being some 15 years late to this game. For the longest time I had been dithering about watching Chak De! India (CKI). Mainly it was on account of catching the clip where Shah Rukh Khan's hockey coach character throws out a bunch of players introducing themselves till one of them steps up and says "India". It struck me as an intensely annoying bit of poseur patriotism, and I was not eager for a film packed with that kind of sentiment. But over the weekend I had been wondering what to put on for Movie with Mum night, and, especially since I had tested her the last time with the supremely amoral Mukundan Unni Associates, just decided to go with this as a rah-rah crowd-pleaser.

Of course, CKI has to be given a lot of leeway because it was one of the early Bollywood sports movies, and possibly the first which featured the lead guy as a coach rather than as a player. Our coach is a former player named Kabir Khan who some years ago became (in)famous for having lost a World Cup match with Pakistan (horrors!) and was promptly disgraced as a traitor. We have no clue of what he has been doing in the interim, but he promptly turns up before a panel of sneering selectors (led by the king of sneer Anjan Srivastava) to apply as coach for the Indian Women's Hockey team. He is selected because apparently no one else wants the job. I find this a little hard to believe, because any job with a salary attached has takers in this country, and especially if it were a job that carried no expectations of performance, a lot of people would want to take it up purely as a cushy position.

Anyhoo, Coach Kabir is given a bunch of recruits to put through the drill. To establish his hardass credentials, he throws out players for joining late or daring to mention their domicile state. With a mixture of sermons and sadism he starts to shape up the team. There is no romantic interest for our coach (kudos for avoiding that cliche, though one wonders if we might have had a more rounded portrayal with the coach as a married man), so a fair amount of the running time can be spared to focus on the gallery of women that make up the team. This is a good thing since we get to see some interesting new actors, including Shilpa Shukla (BA Pass, which I should probably see now) as a super-bitch former captain who constantly rebels against the new coach. There's also one Sagarika Ghatge, shown to be engaged to a cricketer beau that sneers at her "gulli danda" game (apparently the actress later got married to an actual cricketer, oh the irony). The beau is such a one-note boor you wonder why she puts up with him even if she were a municipal office clerk instead of a national level hockey player. If you love your career, you can't let someone, especially a spouse, put you down in that fashion. Even in a populist film, they should have tried for a more layered portrayal.

If you've seen any sports movies before, you know exactly how CKI goes. Initially the team is a total mess with the players up in arms against each other and their coach. They learn little by little to tolerate and then stand together as a team. There are no surprises here. SRK's Kabir is in a little bubble of his own - he seems to have no personal life. We only see the mother (Jayashree Arora)  when he exits the family home in shame and re-enters after redemption. Where is she when he's at the training camp, in cryo-storage? Each time Kabir opens his mouth, it is to eject a homily. Even the scene where he talks about his period of disgrace carries little empathy because it's so rote. The pre-match pep talk he gives is utterly pointless, especially since his own character almost immediately disregards his words. Dangal's protagonist was also cliched like that, but the grounding of that narrative in a family setup (and the actual quality of writing) made it more acceptable.

On the other hand, CKI at least moves at a brisk clip, and is relatively easy to endure even in its nearly 150 min running time. It was nice, if also funny, to see a movie from "Indian means Punjabi and Punjabi means Indian" YRF in which characters from South and North East regions of India are given a chance to thumb a nose at the Hindi-Punjabi belt.While his character could have been written a lot better and less idealistic, SRK is more restrained than in other YRF movies. Mum was pleased and I didn't have too many regrets about seeing this.

Kaun Pravin Tambe? [dir. Jayprad Desai]

So I saw Iqbal Part 2. Oh wait, it's called something else, but Shreyas Talpade is playing another underdog trying to make it in cricket. This is the story of a real life guy called Pravin Tambe, a club cricketer in Mumbai who persevered in honing his game in all his spare time even though he was not selected for any national level tournament up to his 40's, which in most sports is when people start to talk about retirement. He finally got to play in the Indian Players' League, where he made enough of a splash to garner notice and have a movie made about his life.

Kaun Pravin Tambe? (KPT?) does not have the production value of an '83 (reviewed HERE) or the M.S. Dhoni biopic, and the scope is a lot smaller. There are some nice Sai Paranjpe style touches in depicting the Tambe family's lower middle class life in a chawl type society - when Pravin and his brother get married together, they have to draw lots to see who gets the 'bridal suite'. The film also looks at Pravin's struggle to keep up various jobs while he still tries to sneak in some play time - In one instance he is strung along with promises of making a company cricket team to work for cheap by an employer who has no actual intention of actually doing so.

The film also highlights how the sport outside of the more glamorous tournaments often offers meager incentive for the players. Talpade has some fine scenes in which he expresses his character's despondence, and the talented Anjali Patil (Newton) does the best she can as the spouse who loves her husband but is also frustrated with what she feels is his lack of prioritization towards his family.

But even when KPT? eschews the usual patriotic jingo of Indian sports movies (likely because Tambe never played for the country as a whole), the script is still formulaic and most of the characters are etched in very broad strokes. Parambrata Chatterjee as the sneering sports journalist Sanyal is handed a one-note part that does not do the actor sufficient justice - I know that Sanyal's scorn towards Tambe is driven by his envy, but there should have been a more nuanced portrayal instead of making him a stock villain till short of the end. Also, the background score (credited to a Sai-Piyush) is near-constant and unsubtle.

But if you like cricket in general or the idea of a Readers' Digest type slightly saccharine inspiring story, I thought KPT? was better than those bigger-budget cricket movies.

'83 [dir. Kabir Khan]

If  despite all of Kabir Khan and his team’s missteps, ’83 - the story of how the Indian cricket team under Kapil Dev's captaincy went from being complete underdogs to reaching the finals and defeating champions West Indies (WI) to pick up the trophy and forever change the future of the sport in India - works as a sports drama, it is because of the incredible true story behind it.

The screenplay (Kabir Khan, Sanjay Puran Singh Chauhan and Vasan Bala) defines lack of focus. If they were trying to tell the story of India’s entire journey through the World Cup, it should have been an ambitiously mounted miniseries, India's answer to the Bodyline series, which we adored as kids. Or if they had decided to make a feature film, they should have done better than a collage of mostly rushed moments that do not give the epic build-up the narrative deserves.

For instance, they could have begun with the knockout match against Zimbabwe when India was at its ebb, and the manner in which Kapil almost single-handedly brought back the team from the brink of ignominious defeat, inspiring them to become the world-beaters they did. A gutsy film-maker would even have considered capturing the Zimbabwe game alone since it was also the sole unrecorded match in the '83 World Cup (due to the BBC being on strike that day, and most of the press being at the WI-Australia game). In the bid to cram in every match India played in that series, the games are reduced to highlights on steroids; there is no build-up or flow in their depiction.

Star Ranveer Singh makes an impact with his uncanny ability to absorb and emulate Kapil Dev’s persona. I must admit here that I am not per se a cricket fan, but as a kid the handsome toothy open-faced persona and flashy playing style of Kapil Dev would attract me enough to sit down to watch a cricket match. The two dialog scenes that really stood out for me are a) where Kapil vents about how the one thing that makes him angry is people’s lack of expectations from India, and b) when Krishnamachari Srikanth (Jeeva) gives a speech about the ‘mad’ captain who actually thought they had a chance to win this series when no one else did.

There are the occasional field action segments when the film takes a moment to focus, and provides some delights. The  depiction of the Zimbabwe game, while still too truncated, gives a taste of what could have been. When Ranveer's Kapil gives us his iconic Nataraja pose while slamming the ball all across the ground (and smashing several window-panes and even windscreens of cars parked outside the stadium), it is hard not to feel goosebumps and lumps in the throat.

While it would be foolish not to expect a grand show of patriotic fervor in one of the country’s most significant sporting moments, there are scenes where this goes into puerile jingo: For example, the Indian team sitting in their bus after being thrashed by the Windies in their second encounter burst into happy tears seeing a lone Indian flag waved by a kid, and I am not sure the armed forces appreciate being represented as people who are caught unawares by shelling while glued to the radio for cricket updates. Even considering 80's hair, some of the wigs are awful, and there are some really cringy homages, like Mohinder Amarnath playing his own father Lala Amarnath, Kapil Dev playing a spectator cheering himself (what was that about?!), and a cloying reference to a child Sachin Tendulkar.

Thankfully the real life legend manages to overcome these glaring potholes and one is still glad that a new generation of Indians (and sports fans in general) can relive one of the great cricketing moments in Indian history, one that, beyond the sport itself, forged a nation more confident in its own worth.

 

Gold [dir. Reema Kagti]

Gold is the story of the the first post-independence Indian hockey team playing in and winning the gold medal at the 1948 Olympics conducted in Britain. It is one of those "loosely based on true events" stories, meaning just about everything other than the bare outline is made up. The fact that the real Indian team  thrashed Britain 4-0, while here we are shown a cliffhanger climactic match in which they manage to, at the very end, snatch victory from an unfair opposition tells you what kind of biopic this is.

It would be okay if it was at least made up in an interesting way. Sadly, Reema 'Talaash' Kagti's film pays a lot more attention to detail and verisimilitude in the production design than in the writing. Even as a fictional character the story of Tapan Das, a man who surmounted all manner of obstacles, including his own demons of alcoholism, to put together and guide the team that won the medal, might have been worthwhile if it had been invested with more layered characterization and entrusted to a gifted performer (Manoj Bajpayee, Irrfan Khan, Nawzuddin Siddique - any of them could have owned the part). Here it is wasted on Akshay Kumar dropping yet another big smelly deshbhakti turd. He is supposed to portray a Bengali with a drinking problem; neither aspect carries the required conviction. Mouni Roy as the stereotype nagging-but-affectionate wife only draws attention for her lips, injected with so much silicone they resemble baggage handles.

The supporting cast is talented, but let down by flimsy development. The most notable are Amit Sadh as an affable but egoistic blueblood, Sunny Kaushal as the hothead working-class Sikh who resents him, and Vineet Kumar (Mukkabaaz, reviewed HERE) as a Muslim player who, shortly before the Olympics, opts to shift to Pakistan. Kunal Kapoor as a former captain turned coach is limited to looking noble throughout and his character is an all-too-obvious deus ex machina. Atul Kale plays the jealous sports official de rigueur in almost every Indian sports drama. The bickering between the players, the lessons they learn, the quick-fix remedies for serious issues, the speechifying about setting aside individual egos for national pride...everything is so rote, there's little joy in watching the drama unfold. Lagaan and Dangal were also stories that followed a predictable path, but in building up of little incidents and the peculiarities of their characters, they made us care for what happened. Here, the story of a team that came together for a common (ha!) goal is subverted into a self-serving glory piece for a fictional character purely because he is played by a box-office draw. The makers of Gold would have done better to paraphrase JFK's famous line, "Ask not what your film can do for your star, but what your star can do for your film".