Posts from — March 2009

Click here to read a review of Entre Les Murs (The Class)

From the time of the Partition, all the way up to the demolition of the Babri Masjid and most recently the pogrom at Godhra, modern India has a hefty stock of horrific tales of communal violence. Stories of meaningless murders, rape, immolations and a general feeling of fear are everywhere. You read them, you watch people crying all over news channels, while they lap up the rising TRPs, and you reach a point when it stops affecting you. [Read more →]

Shortly after a breathlessly hyper Ron Rosenbaum declared Stephen Daldry’s The Reader to be one of the worst Holocaust films ever made, comes a piece of news, if not directly, then indirectly related. According to news reports, the Iranian officials have asked Hollywood to apologise over the ‘insults and slander’ of the Iranian people evident in their films over the last 30 years. [Read more →]

“Love is not the greatest glue between two people in love. Sex is.” Tarun Tejpal says in his debut novel The Alchemy of Desire. Anurag Kashyap seems to agree. Kashyap’s DevD, a modern-day avatar of Saratchandra’s flawed but enduring Devdas, says at the end of the movie he never loved Paro. He hadn’t even seen her properly. It’s Dev’s moment of truth. Dev and Paro had never slept together, they made out yes, but never fucked. Was it then unfulfilled desire cut short by a conflict of egos masquerading as true love? Maybe. And therein lies the rub. DevD is not a film on love. [Read more →]