Thursday April 30th Maqbool (2003)
Upon reading about the sad passing of Irrfan Khan on Wednesday, I decided to go back and watch some of his work. Being a reinterpretation of my favourite Shakespeare play, Maqbool was a natural choice. Reinterpreting Macbeth as a Mumbai gangster story, Khan takes the titular role as Miyan Maqbool.
Writer-director Vishal Bhardwaj doesn’t just update the original text into a contemporary setting alongside co-writer Abbas Tyrewala. Instead he alters character relationships to tell a unique story. One of the most notable changes is that Nimmi (Lady Macbeth) is now the young mistress of ageing gang leader Abbaji (Duncan). Having an affair with Nimmi, Minyan’s motivations are doubly conflicted because he sees Abbaji as nothing less than a father figure.
Additionally, Om Puri and Naseeruddin Shah play the Weird Sisters role as a pair of corrupt cops. Instead of just being conveyers of prophecy, they act as behind-the-scenes meddlers, whose machinations prod both Miyan and his enemies throughout the story. They could be seen as a mediating force between the powers of law and lawlessness. There’s something to be said about the supernatural being reimagined as the power of the state here.
There are so many tweaks to the Macbeth story that it’s impossible to name them all here, but they all serve to tell a unique story and serve the film well in both its pacing and theming. Like, my god, each one of the subtle idiosyncrasies could be a paragraph on its own.
It would be remiss of me though not to highlight Pankaj Kapur’s performance as Abbaji. His voice and facial expressions are full of menace and yet he is utterly compelling. Kapur straddles a difficult line because we have to understand why Miyan is so reluctant to kill him, and why Nimmi finds him so repulsive.
However, this is still Khan’s movie. Usually when actors play Macbeth they tend to depict his fall as that of a dutiful man who is twisted into irredeemable evil and tyrnanny. Khan’s rendition of this character differs in that he somehow becomes more sympathetic as the film hurtles towards its fatal conclusion.We see a man who committed crimes against others and himself out of love as well as ambition. I don’t want to spoil it, but the moment Miyan realises all is lost at the very end is a sledgehammer blow. Khan’s performance imbues the character with an all-too brittle stoicism. There’s this brooding tough-guy surface that he tries to maintain yet is so easily undermined by his passions and paranoia.
Maqbool is a terrfic film and a reminder of what a loss Irrfan Khan’s passing is.
Friday May 1st Throw Down (2004)
Just as I coaxed him to watch Running on Karma, Paul Farrell convinced me to watch Johnnie To’s Throw Down. It gave me more of what I liked about Karma in that it was entertainingly idiosyncratic with a bubbling undercurrent of melancholy.
The film follows a former judo pro turned alcoholic, an aspiring singer, and a judo champion. All of these characters are on the ropes in some way. Together they form an oddball friendship, best encapsulated in a scene where they try and get a balloon out of a tree.
One of the cool little quirks of the film is the prominence of Japanese culture, particularly judo. This is made explicit at the end when a textual salute to Akira Kurosawa is made before the Gillette ad that precedes the end credits. The judo-heavy plot is inspired by Kurosawa’s directorial debut Sanshiro Sugata. The mentally handicapped character Jing, always introduces himself by saying: “I play Sanshiro Sugata, you play Higaki.”
Made during the war, when the Japanese film industry went full-tilt into nationalism, Sanshiro Sugata is a significant choice for Throw Down to name-drop. It’s likely that To himself was aware of the context in which Sanshiro was made in order to make a point about the porous cultural boundaries in a rapidly globalising world. As such, perhaps we can see the placement of the multinational Gillette ad as something more significant than awkward product placement.
The film overall is indicative of an emerging transnationalism in East Asian cinema at the time. It’s worth noting that the cross-cultural anthology film Three… Extremeswas released in the same year as Throw Down.
Of course, everything I just said could be ridiculously off-base, but hey, it’s something to consider right?
Thank you for reading this newsletter and apologies I didn’t finish it yesterday as promised. Woke up on Saturday morning with a bad stomach and was weak for the rest of the day. Been trying to keep busy in lockdown. Earlier in the week I finished this online course on film distribution (shout-out to Neil Ramjee for drawing my attention to it).
Hope that all of you reading this are doing ok and that you and your families are doing as well as can be.
Might fuck around and play some video games for the next week.