Film Essays

  My neighbour in Mumbai is Saeed Mirza, one of the pioneers of the Indian parallel cinema movement. Growing up, I gained a lot of philosophical and political insight from long-drawn conversations with him. He was a Marxist filmmaker who made protest cinema and came with a strong filmmakers’ voice, primarily about themes like alienation, identity and injustice. Often, I used to go to him for feedback on my stories and films. Of the many great anecdotes he shared with me, I was reminded of a few of them during the extraordinary masterclass with Asghar Farhadi. He used to tell me, “Cinema must be a texture-work of a kind; the audience must be able to smell your film” (translated from Hindi) and “Son, don’t try to be clever, be wise. Do not make weightless theme-park movies, you’re more than that.” He encouraged me to develop an intellectual worldview by watching world cinema, and raise moral questions through my work. This is also primarily why I joined film school, to expand my cult...

Part I: Story Structure When I saw Lady Bird on Netflix last year, I instantly remembered a quote that a filmmaker once told me. Your film must smell of the solidity of the earth, he said. A great aficionado of the auteurs of the French New Wave, he often persuaded me to capture people in their candid best, almost cinema vérité or documentary style, to understand the language of cinema better and in a more deeper sense. Lady Bird (2017) by Greta Gerwig, along with others like Boyhood and Marriage Story (directed by Gerwig’s partner Noah Baumbach) did that for me — it was a good blend of fiction and non-fiction. And beyond all, it was a film made with artistic weight and integrity. Lady Bird is a coming-of-age story of high schooler Christine McPherson (aka Lady Bird) who believes that she is born on the “wrong side of the tracks” as she longs to break out of the loving womb of her ordinary Sacramento family home on a journey towards culture and sophistication, which she believes sh...

A film should be more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what’s behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later. – Stanley Kubrick Chamomile-scented incense. The spreading carpet in the living room. Candle flames, casting their giant shadows upon walls. The tinted-glass paintings. Meditation mantras playing softly in the background. Flashes. Just flashes of reminiscences…some still alive, most long forgotten. Memories of a time and space that once existed, but ones that I yearn to revisit. This, through the films I make. I see movie-making as a very personal selfish act – an emotional satisfaction that every filmmaker is trying to give himself, by reliving past experiences through the artifice of a constructed world. Filmmaking is making a connection with your inner life, finding a rhythm and expressing passions with utmost honesty – a less cerebral, more musical process. Be it in the scripting phase, the pre- production, sh...

Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944) is a classical film noir. The genre of film noir is known to contain a femme fatale, or a character archetype of a mysterious, seductive and beautiful woman who eventually causes, or accelerates, the protagonist’s problems. However, what makes Laura (1944) atypical of the genre is Laura Hunt is not the kind femme fatale who leads her man to destruction, but instead her presence indirectly leads to death without any intentionality. This ties into concepts spoken by Julie Grossman in her paper Rethinking the Femme Fatale . Grossman argues that contrary to popular critical discourse about the film noir genre, a large number of so- called bad, sexy and mysteriously seductive women — or femme fatale’s — have not been demonised in the films in which they appear but have been shown to be a victim. In fact, one can argue that Laura is the kind of femme fatale woman who has been used in the story as more of a red-herring to mislead the audience, than a red-herring ...