Kaminey’s ode or the ‘masala’ shortcut..

this one’s for GF… long-promised…

The extent of the riches otherwise called ‘masala cinema’ can be gauged by the number of failed attempts to re-frame this heritage in contemporary times. The crucial point that is always missed is that ‘masala’ cinema does not constitute a ‘genre’ but a worldview. As such it deploys a whole array of narrative and audio-visual strategies, in short an entire matrix of cinematic grammar, to conjure up that world. But for all the ways in which its virtues (or vices) might seem obvious ‘masala’ turns out to be in fact rather elusive when it is a question of replicating its triumphs or even one of offering homage. Vishal Bhardwaj’s Kaminey is the latest such wager in Hindi and produces in turn the same uneasy pact, even if in a different configuration, so that in losing the form of ‘masala’ one also loses the soul. For the moment though a different plot-line has to be developed here…


There are not too many films in Hindi cinematic annals that are more impressively shot than Kaminey*. One must admit this right away. Bhardwaj puts up a master class in this respect. The rapid cuts that suit the film’s staccato rhythm (itself appropriate for its subject), the marvelously claustrophobic backward and forward tracks, the moody atmospherics that include the darkly lit netherworld of the film, its cavernous spaces, its ‘framing’ portals that the camera peers out through so often or thresholds that characters cross in equal measure, the operatic use of rain in the entire second half of the work or the ‘train’ punctuations in the entire narrative, the richly detailed sense of mise-en-scene all through the same, in short the entire apparatus of ‘auteurist’ imagining to create not just an intoxicating film but also a love letter to the city of Bombay (or Mumbai). The older plot-strand should now be re-introduced..

‘Masala’ is not a series of narrative strategies only coincidentally linked to its formalist choices. One therefore errs in supposing that ‘masala’ can be ‘refined’ or that a more auteurist visual grammar can simply be grafted onto these narratives. ‘Masala’ again is not a genre. It is a world which operates with its own logic, its own visual ‘games’. All films belonging to this group are hardly equal. This world is not another name for ‘anything goes’. It exhibits standards just as any other kind of film-making would. But neither is this a framework where the soul can exist without the body. Yet this is precisely what Bhardwaj attempts and more radically than anyone else. The two branches of this narrative are finally converging…

This critique of Kaminey could immediately be brought forth based on everything that has so far been suggested — the visual splendors of this work cannot quite mask its very uneasy ‘masala’ referencing, its often lethargic narrative pace (that is highlighted all the more inasmuch as Bhardwaj strives to replicate the kinetic in masala), its rather dramatic inability to render its tale ‘metaphysical’ in the manner of all the best examples of the heritage being alluded to here, its not unique failure to substitute the epic pitch of ‘masala’ with the ironic distance of present modes. The graft is somewhat too evident in Kaminey which is to point out that the layers remain separable. In a related vein one could also assert that the film offers a whole kaleidoscope of ‘hints’, a potpourri of allusive riches touching on the socio-political concerns of the present, a potent polemics directed at ‘new India’ smugness, but still all of this is never woven into a seamless fabric. Because these hinge points of the film are very apparent the director is unable to build on his own cues and the work is reduced to a stance of ‘cleverness’ without ever reaching the level of formidable critique. This is not however the end of the story…

Perhaps there is a way to perform a grand rescue on Bhardwaj’s edifice (where the soul seems to be absent from the very beginning). What after all is the improbable (for the part) Shahid Kapoor doing in this film? Could he in some sense be the exemplary representative of the new Indian formation of the last two decades keeping in mind his proximity to the romance ideals of the age (a sober Shahrukh clone to put it a bit uncharitably… and this connection is more than fortuitous.. the older actor’s Don remake is a hubristic tale of mismatch and misreading if ever there was one.. Kaminey will have traced this move with great humor!)? His twin characters a trope for the ‘divided being’ of contemporary Indian cinema (‘un-masala’ and yet not strong enough to avoid the burden of the same) and of course the ‘new India’ which Janus-like always has one face gazing out to shimmering modernity and the other fixated onto the ‘mysticisms’ of tradition? The film perfectly encapsulates this divide in the Bombay/New Bombay/Mumbai logic (as in one of the exchanges where New York leads to New Zealand and this in turn leads back to ‘New’ Bombay) where the ‘newest’ form of the city of course reeks of ethnic chauvinism (this film is quite obsessed with all kinds of stereotypes.. another one of its masala ‘hints’) and certainly the ‘old’. Shahid Kapoor’s bland double of Charlie/Guddu with comparable speech impediments, Shahid Kapoor of Jab We Met fame somehow wandering onto this terrain, this gangster extravaganza, in turn negotiating ‘masala’ gestures as the seedy bookie and subverting ‘family values’ in a romance rife with sexuality. Perhaps Kaminey is most convincing as fantasia, a romp through the present with a line thrown out to the tradition with nary a hope of ever ‘repeating’ anything. It might be that Bhardwaj accepts the impossibility of his wager at the outset and proceeds heroically anyway. Kaminey will have proven that ‘masala’ is that which can never be forgotten but also that which can no longer be. No mausoleums for masala, no matter how grand, but no triumphant arches either. There remains a twist at the end…

Kaminey is a supreme exercise in style (even in a very self-conscious which is to say ‘Hollywood’ way, where technological mastery is not often married to vision). There is nonetheless one director who was once upon a time able to split this (impossible) difference. Conjure up gestures of old and yet do so in a realist vein before in time yielding to the stylization that informed many others who followed in his wake. This is the Ram Gopal Varma of Satya who can be read in this fashion retrospectively but who alas never had enough faith in his model and abandoned it all too soon. The grandly operatic Sarkar films are also something other than masala. It should be noted that Kaminey too ends in a comparably operatic ‘pyrotechnics’ finale. Something has been afoot over the last decade. The ‘realist’ and ‘stylized’ schools have not necessarily re-invigorated this heritage nor has the practice of ironic distance or parody. Nonetheless the attempts have multiplied. The subject of this discussion is the latest such exercise (the even more recent Wanted simply denies the gap between the past and the present or pretends that no history has intervened in between). Bhardwaj’s film is a fascinating response to the continuing allure of ‘masala’. But there is a sadness in Kaminey, a melancholy that cannot cease naming what it lacks…

[a minor complaint.. the pehli baar mohabbat ki hai video was beautifully shot and really deserved more than the end credits]

*Kashyap’s Dev D also makes a very similar impact even if here there is more of an Antonioni via Kar-Wai color-coded set of registers in play. Not to reduce the film’s many splendid framings only to this latter set but it seems to be the predominant one. In terms of personal preference I prefer Dev D to Kaminey and I would even risk suggesting that it offers the more intriguing ‘auteurist’ re-coding in this sense.