Lekhayude Maranam Oru Flashback

 Movies about movie industry are fascinating to a curious audience. If that intersects with true crime or unsolved mysteries genre, it is even more captivating. Lekhayude Maranam Oru Flashback ( eng: Lekha's Death - A Flashback) directed by K.G.George, takes place in the Malayalam movie industry of the late seventies. It is loosely based on the suicide of a famous Malayalam actress of the time - Shobha. There were also rumors at the time it was not a suicide, but an accidental murder framed as a suicide. 

Many S.Indian actresses at the time came from poor families. With a few years of dance or music training in their kitties, these girls along with the rest of their family boarded trains to Madras to try their luck in movies. Of the hundreds who came to Madras with movie star dreams only a handful made it to the top and their path to stardom often was no picnic. In LMOF, the director K.G.George tells the story of Shantamma, one such girl from some village in Kerala. 

The first step to becoming a S.Indian movie actress is to change their real name into a fashionable pseudonym. This trend was more common 40-60 years ago, than now. Thus Shantamma becomes Lekha. Lekha (Nalini) is egged on by her over-zealous mother, played by Subha, who is bent on making her daughter a star at any cost. 

The costs she had to incur en route to stardom are enormous - from having to sleep with various powerful men to having to support the entire extended family through out her working life. Again this is a story typical of many girls' journeys in the south Indian film industry at the time. The character Lekha is one of the lucky few, many others find that their pinnacle of growth reaches a plateau as a  background or cabaret dancer.

The greatest similarity between LMOF and the life of the real life actress Shobha, is the affair Lekha has with a film director, Suresh Babu (Gopi). Shobha had an affair with director Balu Mahendra while he was married to his first wife which ultimately culminated in her marriage with Mahendra. Even during his short-lived marriage with Shobha, Balu Mahendra often spent nights at his first wife's place saying the he had to take care of his nine year old son. These are depicted as such in the movie, except that Lekha and Suresh Babu are not married, it is an ongoing affair in the film. Suresh Babu's attire is an exact copy of Mahendra's unifrom at the time

Nalini as Lekha and Gopi as Suresh Babu

Shobha didn't go through the struggle Lekha did trying to achieve stardom. Shobha's mother Prema Menon was already a supporting actor in Malayalam and Shobha had also been a child-artist in several films. The struggle part of Lekha's story is the stereotypical uphill battle faced by female artists in the industry at the time. 

A scene from Lekhayude Maranam Oru Flashback. Subha, Nalini, Nedumudi Venu (R to L)

The story, screenplay and direction of LMOF is by K.G.George. Shobha's suicide and the mystery surrounding it might have been irresistible to the director who was always beguiled by the unpredictability of human mind and the fragility of relationships.

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Swapnadanam : A Malayalam movie review

Broody, black and white shots of Swapnadanam come up in my mind at least once whenever I go down the rabbit hole of dreams, psychoanalysis, Freud, Jung and the whole shebang. Not that I go down this route very often. The reason is the title of the movie - Swapnadanam in Malayalam means journey through a dream. 

I saw this movie for the first time when my age could be counted on the fingers in one hand. It felt dark, eerie and strange and it stuck to my mind. I watched this movie several times afterwards at various film society screenings. In the seventies, Thiruvananthapuram served as a hatchery for several film societies tied with ISRO and my Dad used to be a member in a couple of these. The most famous among them were Soorya, SPARC, Vikas and Vishwas. Soorya film society and its 'chief operating officer' N. Krishnamoorthy went on to become a sort of a cultural institution in Kerala. These film societies had a fondness towards award winning indies, art house and international movies.The movies will be rerun several times during the years that follow after initially procuring them. There would be at least one movie each day to watch for free at Tagore theater, if you were up to it. Remember this was before television became common place in our part of the world, pre-1985.

Swapnadanam won the National Award for the best movie in Malayalam in 1976 and managed to poise delicately on the fence between art-house and commercial movies. It was also the first film by renowned Malayalam director, K. G. George. A personal point of association for me was, the main shooting location was a house in our neighborhood, although I was not present on this earth when this movie was shot right next door. It is a sprawling, gorgeous house, fit to be in Selling Sunset in the Seventies, and belonged to a son-in-law of an ex-state minister (K. R. Elamkath.) 

I feel like that the house is as much a character in Swapnadanam as the actors in the movie. The rambling airiness of the mid-century modern built structure directly contrasting with the gloomy, brooding nature of the protagonist. 

Below is a shot of the house from the front yard, you can vaguely make out the actors (left to right) Rani Chandra, M. G. Soman and Dr. Mohandas who plays the lead character Dr. Gopi

The film explores the state of fugue where the Dr. Gopi, a young newly married physician flees his home, leaving his new bride and ends up in different city. He has forgotten his identity and ends up in a mental asylum where under hypnosis he narrates his life story to a team of psychiatrists. 

Along with direction and photography, the casting is absolutely perfect in this movie. I don't think Dr. Mohandas appeared in any other movies after this one. He was a great fit for the introverted physician, Dr. Gopi.  Rani Chandra, the lovely actress who was taken away from us in an Air India air crash couple of years later, won the best actress award (state) for her work in this movie. M. G. Soman, Mallika Sukumaran, P.K. Venukuttan Nair, Prema Menon and P. K. Abraham  play other important roles.

 

Mallika Sukumaran and Rani Chandra

K. G. George was just getting started with his series of psycho-social movies with Swapnadanam. I ended up watching (or re-watching) 3 early K. G. George movie back to back last weekend. These films are rather heavy, introspective and certainly not what you would enjoy with a side of popcorn. If you, dear Malayali, are in the mood for a serious film with a glass of whiskey, try out a K. G. George movie like Irakal or Adaminte Variyellu or Yavanika.

L to R  Mallika Sukumaran, Rani Chandra and Dr. Mohandas

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After Selma

 Edmund Pettus Bridge is silent, quietly bearing the weight of history. Last month on July 26, the man who lead the march for voting rights across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, AL, crossed the bridge one final time in a casket draped with the star spangled banner.(Photo below.)

John Lewis, once a 25 year old civil rights activist  who led the march for voting rights at Selma in 1965, went on to represent Georgia's 5th district five times and was the sitting Congressman when he died a month ago. 

But what happened After Selma? In John Lewis' own words - he was always in some kind of fight - for freedom, equality, basic human rights, the fighting never ceased. Selma was just the beginning. That is the truth for millions of African Americans and people of color. Although the marches at Selma, more than half a century ago led to passing of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, racism and racists still find ways to enact legislation and infiltrate the corridors of power to suppress the representation and voice of minorities.

In the light of upcoming elections, Loki Mulholland's documentary After Selma is essential watching for all American citizens. The 45 minute documentary, is an excellent primer on how the contemporary voting system is rigged to disenfranchise minorities. It is time well spent in the last few months before a highly contested Presidential election where we are getting exposed to more novel, underhanded techniques like taking away sorting machines from USPS to delay mail-in votes and no one bats an eye-lid as if it is the most common thing to do before an election.

The world's greatest democracy is just as corruptible as any other democracy in the world. American exceptionalism is not the anti-dote to the systemic rot in U.S's political machinery. The rot and racism was never in-your-face like it has been in the last few years. But practices like gerrymandering, unethical Voter ID laws and a bigoted criminal justice system biased against the people of color leading to their mass incarcerations have always been working tirelessly behind the scenes to keep the racial imbalance and discrimination intact.

Here is a gif I clipped out of the film which explains how gerrymandering works in a few seconds

Loki Mulholland, the director is the son of white civil rights activist and freedom rider Joan Trumpauer Mulholland. He had made an award winning documentary on her younger years as an activist and sit-in protestor called An Ordinary Hero: The True Story of Joan Trumpauer Mulholland. This along with his other award winning documentaries - The Uncomfortable Truth and Black, White, & Us are available on Amazon Prime (US.)

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Netflix's show Stateless and some companion thoughts and figures

.....As you return home, to your home, think of others
(do not forget the people of the camps).
As you sleep and count the stars, think of others
(those who have nowhere to sleep).
As you liberate yourself in metaphor, think of others
(those who have lost the right to speak).
As you think of others far away, think of yourself
(say: “If only I were a candle in the dark”).

from Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish's poem Think of Others, translated from Arabic.

There are 80 million refugees or displaced people in the world right now. The crisis of displaced people was the largest and the most immediate human crisis we had to deal in the 2000s before Covid19 took center-stage. There have been hard-hitting documentaries on the refugee crisis like Fire at Sea, Island of Hungry Ghosts and Lost Boys of Sudan but not many feature films or TV shows.

Stateless - the Australian TV drama series, co-created by Cate Blanchett, Tony Ayres, and Elise McCredle for Australian Broadcasting Corporation is one of the first of its kind. It brings us a fictionalized, inspired-by-true-stories documentation of refugees and asylum seekers at Australia's immigration detention centers (at a particular one called Baxter at Port Augusta) in the mid-aughts.

Making a successful pitch for a TV drama series on displaced people is not an easy task. Sometimes the producers have to depend on the generosity of a Hollywood celebrity to be able to get their series off the ground. Thank you, Cate Blanchett, for giving life-breath to Stateless, acquired by Netflix and now streaming to your living room. Ms. Blanchett is an UNHCR ambassador and she joined the project as an executive producer to secure funding.

One commonality of all the displaced people in the 21st century is, they are not usually white. Most of the displaced people are from Asia, Africa or S. America. In a saner and brighter yesterday, they were regular people doing regular jobs - teachers, engineers, factory workers in their home countries before some political turmoil, mob lords or war decimated their way of life and their children's futures. Forced to flee their homes, their journeys to a better life is often chock-full of unbelievable hardship. These are not the people who have the luxury to 'Netflix and chill' (meme meaning not intended), so a show about them has to be tailored to the people who will make up the audience.

The producers had to make sure that there was something in the TV show that appealed to the white audience - who form the majority of viewership for streaming content in the western world. Stateless opens with a white woman running across the prickly dry Australian outback. She is what the producer Tony Ayers calls a Trojan Horse. The producers made a strategic and deliberate choice to enter into the story with a middle class white Australian woman for the sake of audience (white) who could easily relate to someone like themselves. The character on the run is Sophie Werner (played by an excellent Yvonne Strahovski), a flight attendant. The character is loosely modeled on a real-life person, Cornelia Rau - a white Australian flight attendant who was mistakenly detained for 10 months at Baxter immigration detention facility.

The fact that Stateless got to be made is commendable. It introduces some of Australia's finest immigrant acting talent to a global audience. Fayssal Bazzi, a first-gen Australian immigrant of Lebanese descent plays one of the major roles as an Afghan school teacher who with his family of two daughters and wife tries to seek asylum in Australia. Iranian-Australian actor Phoenix Raei,  Egyptian-Australian actor Helana Sawires and newcomer Afghan-Australian actor Soraya Heidari play some of the important characters in the show. Asher Keddie and Jai Courtney along with Cate Blanchett and Dominic West in brief but impactful roles make up the rest of the cast.

Stateless will make you think of others. Maybe it will even make you cry for them and despair at your helplessness to even light a candle of hope. If you are looking for a companion piece for this drama series there is Immigration Nation, a docu-series on Netflix which is a look into U.S's immigration enforcement and the treatment of asylum seekers at ICE detention centers.

Or you if you want to stay on Down Under and want to see where Australian government went from Baxter (closed in 2008), you can watch the Island of Hungry Ghosts, available on Amazon Prime (US.) It is a documentary about a local trauma counselor and asylum seekers housed at Christmas Island facility. Post 2010 Australia has been moving most of its immigration detention operations to its own offshore Guantanamos for housing asylum seekers and boat people away from mainland. In purgatories like Nauru, Christmas Island and Manus Island even the children are showing signs of giving up on life and exhibiting suicidal behavior.

I leave you with an UNHCR infographic - click here or on the image to open in a new tab. Food for thought or to discard.

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Sushant Singh Rajput: A Tribute

SUSHANT SINGH RAJPUT

1986 - 2020

Bollywood actor, amateur astronomer, physics and space research enthusiast, National Physics Olympiad winner, engineering drop-out, life-long learner, philanthropist, humanist, friend, brother, son

And now the party must be over
I guess we'll never understand
The sense of your leaving
Was it the way it was planned?

And so we grace another table
And raise our glasses one more time
There's a face at the window
And I ain't never, never sayin' goodbye

One by one
Only the good die young
They're only flyin' too close to the sun
Cryin' for nothing
Cryin' for no one
No one but you

(from the song No One But You - Only the Good Die Young by Queen, the only song the band recorded after the death of Freddie Mercury)

Sushant Singh Rajput at Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai

Pewdiepie on Sushant Singh Rajput (Youtube link)

Who was Sushant Singh Rajput ? Here's an article from the magazine The Week by Karthik Ravindranath

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