Readers Write In #720: All Goes To Hell In The Second Half: An Aanand L Rai Retrospective

By Grace

A little disclaimer: notwithstanding the name-dropping in the second half of the title, this is nearly just as much a writer Himanshu Sharma retrospective as it is the unfortunate eponymous filmmaker’s – and I say ‘unfortunate’, of course, with nothing but the greatest respect.

Aanand L Rai and Himanshu Sharma tread the metaphorical tightrope with near-fatal nonchalance every time they step out to make a movie. It’s a strange case of the adage ‘letting yourself free in the first draft’ being stretched to include manic creative freedom even in the second, third, fifteenth, twenty-fourth, and final drafts — and eventually, the final cut. The reins aren’t let loose as much as they’re incinerated, and the horses don’t tiptoe around the edges of cinematic madness as much as they’re made to gallop headfirst into it with no end in sight. It is maddening, it is fascinating, it is beautiful, it is baffling, and it is quite like nothing else being attempted today.

But before getting into Rai’s work as a director, let’s take a brief look at his producing credits – if for no better reason than to establish the eclecticism of his tastes. Starting with the easy likeability of the pleasant but benign Nil Battey Sannata, the simple charms of Happy Bhag Jayegi, and the patent Ayushmann Khurrana enjoyability of Shubh Mangal Saavdhan, Rai, the producer, really stormed the scene with an explosive 2018: inter alia, his slate produced Mukkabaaz, Manmarziyaan, and Tumbbad. The first two films were also the last two occasions where Anurag Kashyap was a truly disruptive force that managed to balance creative recklessness with narrative potency, and Tumbbad was one of the most inventive horrors to have come out of the arguably tragic Indian horror filmmaking space. The coming years saw experiments crazier yet; some duds, some notable, some notable duds. But production after production evidenced his house’s impressive disposition of always going out on a limb — a disposition that is all the more amplified by Rai’s helming of the director’s chair.

Rai and Sharma kickstarted their film careers with the 2007 thriller Strangers, starring Kay Kay Menon and frequent collaborator Jimmy Shergil in the lead roles. Inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s 1951 classic Strangers on a Train, the film is the only ‘non-original’ story in a long writing-filmmaking collaboration defined by a wild storytelling originality. The film builds on the basic premise of the original – two strangers meeting on a train journey where one suggests that they ‘exchange’ murders – and adds layers of drama that hinge between inspired and insipid; Rai and Sharma create a set of characters and situations that combine the clichéd (a flop writer frustrated by his wife’s income-earning capacity) with the inventive (a husband exhausted from dealing with his wife’s failure to move on from the death of their child years ago). It is a highly stylised film in an uncharacteristically foreign setting. The result, particularly viewed with the luxury of hindsight, is remarkably telling: detached from the colours and flavours of small-town India, which this duo has mined like no other in a partnership marked by some of the finest on-screen portrayals of heartland India, the strain on their scene construction becomes evident. Rai and Sharma rely heavily on creating a mood, a vibe, an energy so captivating it makes the tough pills easier to swallow, the fantastical idiocy easier to buy. They thrive on imbuing a scene with a (often small-town-idiosyncrasies inspired) flavour that makes the unbelievable easier to believe. And it is in their first feature that this energy is really put under the microscope, for it is in this setting (and, perhaps, working around the conventions for this genre) that they must strive to create it without their usual crutches. And though the final product is less than satisfactory — by the climax, the film collapses under the weight of twist after facile twist — the signs are still there: look out for the scene where Kay Kay Menon’s character talks to his berth-neighbor of his child’s death years ago. The build-up to the reveal, and the casual, almost throwaway manner in which the line comes, is characteristic of their style of favouring mood to information.

Rai’s next movie was 2008’s Thoda Life Thoda Magic, of which the littler said the better. Not (just) because it’s a mediocre attempt but also because it is, along with Strangers, the least Aanand L. Rai-esque Aanand L. Rai movie. Full disclosure: I remember having seen the movie just once, long ago, and the only thing I can say with absolute certainty about the movie is that I have never felt motivated to look for it again. It also remains, to date, the only Aanand L. Rai movie not written by Himanshu Sharma, which would appear to be all the more reason to look past it in the otherwise not-too-long filmography — which is also unusually fitting for it is with their next feature that all their devices are first put under the spotlight.

Tanu Weds Manu is the precursor to everything formidable about Aanand L. Rai and Himanshu Sharma, as well as an early indicator of every way they can tumble. A delightfully colourful, bone-achingly funny, and endlessly intriguing first half — brimming with the spirited essence of small-town life, attempts to recreate which frustratingly overpopulate mainstream Hindi cinema today but are seldom a tiny fraction as successful — is a dazzling display of all the highs of their partnership. The colour and quirk of the characters they create arguably remain unmatched. The extraordinary wit and flavour of the dialogue are the best antidotes to the shallow verisimilitudes South Bombay screenwriters so often attempt to pass off as the language of small-town India. The situations are ever-inventive, and one set-up is only bested by the next; the scene construction has to be seen to be believed. Take, for instance, the hilarious scene where R. Madhavan’s Manu pulls aside his best friend Pappi (Deepak Dobriyal, in a turn that deserves the world) to inform him that the girl Manu has just agreed to get married to has brazenly revealed that she is in love with another man, one whose name she has gotten tattooed on her chest. Or consider the beautiful exchange between Manu and Raja Awasthi (Jimmy Shergil, as one of Hindi cinema’s most heart-warming ‘antagonists’) during their first meeting, where Awasthi implores Manu to marry his sister. The scenes are fuelled by a wildness that leaves you with wide-eyed excitement.

The second half, in turn, leaves you watching the film from between your fingers. The fascinating set-ups are wrapped up with taciturn pay-offs and the situations turn increasingly messy: banal in Tanu’s repetitive indecisiveness and confusing in Awasthi’s increasing turpitude. But even here, Sharma makes every attempt to iron out the wrinkles with his seemingly never-ending repertoire of dialogue-writing flourishes. While stretching Tanu’s unnecessary mental wrangling over her choice of her groom is frustrating — the possibility of Awasthi getting the girl in a film titled Tanu Weds Manu? — there is something fundamentally sweet about ‘Haath rakh ke kahiye, tabhi maanenge.’ The climactic fifteen-minute stretch may come out of nowhere, but the singular awe of hearing a gem like ‘Aur phir agar ye itne bhale insaan na hote, aap inke pyaar mein imaandaar na hoti, hum thode se beimaan na hote, aur aaj somvaar na hota, toh Bholenaath ki kasam goli maar dete inko,’ is sufficient to suspend any grudges you may have with the way the second half has turned out, if only for those few moments.

Where Tanu Weds Manu eventually suffered from the duo’s half-hearted balancing act between the conventions of boy-meets-girl romantic comedy and turbulent love-triangle romantic melodrama, their next feature charted one of the most unconventional and unpredictable courses in modern Hindi cinema. Warts and all, the first half of the 2013 romantic drama Raanjhanaa is one of the most towering displays of a writer-director duo in absolute command over their dramatic storytelling prowess. In the first ten minutes, over one non-linear opening that throws us intriguingly into the climax, one prologue that gives us one of the most swoon-worthy meet-cutes of recent memory, one terrific sequence that further establishes Rai as the finest landscapist of the Holi festivities in modern Hindi cinema, and the extraordinary delights of one of the finest music tracks of Rahman’s career in Tum Tak, the film firmly establishes its stronghold in one of the finest qualities of Himanshu Sharma’s writing: his language. Over an image of a dying Dhanush, we hear: ‘Yeh humaara hi failaaya Shanichar tha, par kya karte… hum Shanichar se dil laga baithe thhe’. As the film first shows us the protagonist as a young child happily running around with his friends, we get the beautiful innocence of: ‘Assi ghat humaare pairon ke neeche tha; hamein pakadna mushkil hi nahi, naamumkin tha’. When explaining his Lord Shiva get-up while collecting donations for Dussehra, we get the young hero’s quip, ‘Apni lugaai ko bachaane ke liye, kya khud Ram Ji chanda maangne aate?’ And when the young boy first lays eyes on his eventual lady-love, we get these gems: ‘Uss roz, uss pal, uss kshan laga ki Benaras bhar ki saari bhaang humaare maathe mein, aur Bholenaath ka saara zeher humaare aakhon mein utar aaya ho’ and ‘Namaaz mein woh thi, par laga duaa humaari manzoor ho gayi ho’. The lines, coupled with Rai’s delectable images of the lanes of Benaras, create an unmistakable, unshakeable high — and the writing sustains it. We are thrown into a wild concoction of otherworldly, borderline-absurd situations that crash into each other in chaotic yet undeniably daring ways; how many storytellers would have the chutzpah to set up a romance that develops from a wrist-slitting and the girl being shipped off to another city, and reward it with a years-later time-jump where the girl looks at the still-lovelorn guy as an old friend she used to sometimes play ghar-ghar with as a child and now has trouble remembering? In other words, how many storytellers have the guts to treat a wrist-slitting as a footnote?

The screenplay builds from one dramatic peak to another, effortlessly canvassing the religious politics of small-town love as well as the student politics of socialist Delhi’s ivory towers. It plays touch-and-go with themes of extraordinary depth and often finds better ways to show them — through deft touches and little screen time — than most films do by making them the epicentre of their story worlds. It gives us characters who aren’t necessarily likeable in the first place, and dares to take them through exceedingly troubling arcs; indeed, it is often the ones most untainted that are subjected to the greatest cruelty in this movie, and by the protagonists themselves, the people we are hard-wired to root for. It also gives us, for all the steam that it loses as far as the romantic angle is concerned (which becomes increasingly secondary), the most balanced two halves of Rai and Sharma’s careers. Even when the story veers into rather fantastical territory in the second half — as it often does in their movies — the madness is so well stitched together that it rarely ceases to be engaging. Dhanush’s rise through the political ranks in Delhi is perhaps the most confounding stretch in the film. It is also incredibly captivating and endlessly fascinating: even when the two are ostensibly failing, they’re creating magic.

And the magic of storytelling is not just in the written word but in the songs as well. Much has been written and spoken of Rai’s ability to use A.R. Rahman’s music as a storytelling technique. Key moments of character development are repeatedly conveyed not through dialogue but through songs, and key events are covered not by extensive exposition or long, played-out scenes but by highly economical song montages; credit also goes, undoubtedly, to the inimitable Irshad Kamil, whose words often make scenes unnecessary. One of the most devastating moments in the film is elevated significantly by Sukhwinder Singh’s powerful singing in the beautifully worded and composed Piya Milenge. The massively underrated Tu Mun Shudi contains one of the better portrayals of revolutionary student politics in modern Hindi cinema. And rarely has a musical sequence better served as a conduit to heartbreak than Aise Na Dekho.

Here would be a worthy debate: who has utilised the A.R. Rahman-Irshad Kamil combo better, Aanand L. Rai or Imtiaz Ali?

Raanjhanaa was followed by 2015’s Tanu Weds Manu Returns. Everything glorious about Tanu Weds Manu found replication in its sequel, with some aspects even bettered; the dialogues are funnier, the situations are crazier, and the characters are flavourful to the tee. However, every misgiving about the first is also amplified significantly in the second, resulting in another mysterious case of disjointed halves: a delightful first, followed by a confounding second. The inspired portions soar so high and with so much madcap energy that it’s easier to ignore the prickly issues with the plot, which is essentially an upgrade on several Bollywood templates put together. But even the problematic portions are, as they were in the first, imbued with incredible amounts of humour and heart. Tanu Weds Manu Returns may be the umpteenth parts-greater-than-sum movie of Rai and Sharm’s career, but the parts remain here, as they are elsewhere, absolutely glorious. The characters are as intriguing as ever — an adjective markedly tougher to pull off than ‘likeable’ — and the few new ones leave just as much a mark (you have to look no further than Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub’s deliciously foul Advocate Arun Kumar Singh). The movie is aided by the extraordinary central performance(s) of Kangana Ranaut, this time in a double role — it is worth singling her out amidst this wonderful cast, she is that good. And while in the context of a larger filmography this may only be a casual aside, very much along with its predecessor, it is worth taking note of for all the delightful ways in which it recreates everything good about the Rai-Sharma partnership and establishes that everything they touch will outclass categorisation.

If it weren’t for Atrangi Re three years later, Zero would have very likely been the most fascinating creative endeavour of Aanand L. Rai and Himanshu Sharma’s careers. At the outset though, a little clarification: I most certainly am not one of those select few film circle rebels who love Zero; with every viewing, I am struck by how many ways I see it spinning out of all narrative control. It is, however, hard to deny that the movie, once detached from the legacy of its box-office failure, was far more admirable a risk than the creative disappointment it’s often (mis)credited as.

While much has been said about idiosyncratic filmmakers losing the personality of their voices when working with (the myth of) Shah Rukh Khan — it was said about Imtiaz Ali’s Jab Harry Met Sejal and more recently about Rajkumar Hirani’s Dunki — with Zero, Aanand L. Rai and Himanshu Sharma went absurdist with a vengeance. Almost as if wanting to dispel the criticisms even before they came, they amp up every element of their traditional storytelling design; what was earlier cheeky here has to be brazen, what was light has to be featherweight, and what was prickly has to be diabolical. The first half revels in these amplified conceits, where every element of the plot is set up with extraordinary fluidity. The pointed non-linearity allows the duo to swing effortlessly between an unpredictable romance, and a characteristic small-town friendship used as a flavourful exposition device that makes it easier to swallow the unpredictability of the romance; it is an undoubtedly guileful structure, and had the smarts sustained, this way or another, the film might have been a rewarding experience throughout. But Zero is also the most markedly disappointing case of an inspired first half followed by an insipid second, in a career characterised by inspired first halves followed by insipid seconds. It’s not just the Beckettian flights of fancy that somehow throw Shah Rukh Khan’s Bauua Singh in the middle of a NASA mission to Mars, but a dullness in the motivations that is all the more exaggerated owing to the sheer inventiveness of all that has preceded it. It’s not just that the riff on the romantic angle is at that point merely a middling spin on a repentant hero trying to win over the heroine he has wronged, but the unconvincing conclusions to exciting setups that overpopulate all the character arcs in the movie. One could argue that it was the vigour with which the duo decided to throw all their cards on the table that eventually caused the film’s downfall (and surely, there are worse ways to fail), but the film certainly remains a laudable experiment that deserves more than what it is remembered for.

A little backstory: 24th December 2021. I am on my way for drama rehearsals, infinitely more excited than usual, and looking forward to watching Aanand L. Rai’s latest at the end of what I know is going to be a harrowing day. Sometime during the predictably harrowing day, I get the time to go online and read the reviews of Aanand L. Rai’s latest. I am now infinitely more depressed than I ordinarily am during harrowing rehearsal days, and I decide then and there to not watch the movie at all. I return home a tired and defeated man that night. And then, as had to be, I watch the movie.

At the outset, a little clarification: I most certainly am one of those select few film circle rebels who love 2021’s Atrangi Re; the six of us do not support the trivialisation of mental health and are not very big on making light out of the serious issues touched upon in the movie, thank you very much. It isn’t so much that the near-callous approach to mental health disorders and trauma isn’t prickly, it’s that the treatment of the story is so wonderfully magical that even when the film attempts (poorly) to get technical the other-worldliness of it all makes the prickliness glide by. The first half, like most Rai-Sharma first halves, is a delightful exercise in naturally building a screenplay that soars past conflict which otherwise would, perhaps in the hands of a lesser filmmaker (and writer), be treated as the high-drama core of the movie. And even the second, after the underwhelming — and, more tragically, dull — second halves of Tanu Weds Manu Returns and Zero, is refreshingly engaging, even at the peak of its (quite literally) drug-addled absurdity. The characters are more benign than most other creations of this duo, but at their best — in scenes including a beautiful back and forth between a boy and girl over a prospective invite to a wedding, a declaration of love masked under something as convenient as an alien language, or a rooftop conversation involving one of the most disarmingly simple confessions of love I have ever seen — they are just as fascinating.

Early on in the film, Dhanush’s Vishu is abducted and forcefully married off to Sara Ali Khan’s Rinku, in a case of groom kidnapping that is a dreaded reality in many parts of North India. The sequence, without exaggeration, is the finest sequence of Rai’s entire filmography. A kidnapped Vishu is forced to inhale laughing gas. A drugged Rinku is dolled up and practically carried to the wedding dias. Rahman’s extraordinary score and vocals kick in (this one sequence employs a Rahman score more significantly than many movies have managed in their entire runtime). And over the next couple of minutes, you get a tremendously touching sequence that could have otherwise so easily been played for laughter. Rinku struggles to stay conscious through the ordeal. A struggling Vishu laughs through the entire event — and yet, Rai chooses to push in ever so often into a close-up of him as tears flow freely down his face. Dhanush (magnificent in Raanjhanaa, magnificent here) plays the moment with extraordinary heft. The tears that could so easily have been interpreted to be the product of uncontrollable laughter, register here as a haunting helplessness. And it is not just the writing — or the acting, or the music. The sequence also evidences one of the finer moments of visual dexterity in Rai’s career; it is there in the shot selection, it is there in the editing, it is there in the striking colour palette. Every time I watch the sequence, I am forced to go back and watch it again — and then I am forced to go back and watch it a third time. It is, if I may, a microcosm of everything great about Aanand L. Rai: a stark, brutally realistic setting played at a degree of delightful magical realism and absurdity. It is also suitably representative of the two-half dichotomy of his and Sharma’s careers. An extraordinary sequence is followed by a remarkable banal scene in a train carriage; the unfortunate second half.

Atrangi Re was followed, of course, by 2022’s Raksha Bandhan. If I could stop this article at the beautiful high of Atrangi Re, I would. But, and perhaps fate would have it no other way, that beautifully madcap romance has to be followed by a troubling ‘second half’: this family drama that tips its hat to Rajshri Films for ‘keeping Indian traditions and values alive’. A Zero is laudable because it reaches for the stars. It’s also disappointing because it crashes and burns, but that doesn’t quite diminish the respectability of the attempt. But here is a film that didn’t even seem to try. It’s an anti-dowry PSA that makes its messaging with all the subtlety of a highway banner. It’s a family comedy that masks its chaotically anti-woke humour under the duo’s undeniably hilarious scene construction, except the pangs here are a little too on the nose. It is everything we love about the two, coupled with everything everyone everywhere hates about the two; and here more than ever, the balance is terribly skewered. The writing soars when the film is content to stay in light and breezy territory. But Rai and Sharma’s endearing ability to combine high drama with their patent brand of humour — at least in the first-half setups — is tragically missing. The result is a disappointing whole, where the idiosyncrasies of character and the novelty of plot amount to little more than a checklist of all their motifs built over the years, with little of their characteristic heart. You could point to a few isolated scenes for their inspired brilliance, but for this duo, it will always remain a redundant exercise; everything they touch will have moments of inspired brilliance. But you hold the ones with a higher standard to higher standards.

Aanand L. Rai and Himanshu Sharma are the subjects of a troubling discourse; they cater to conventions that defy easy categorisation and operate at a storytelling plane beyond any formula ascertainable in modern-day Bollywood. Prudent or imprudent, they are creatures of extraordinary inventiveness, diametrically opposed to everything cut and dry about the state of mainstream Hindi cinema today. They respond to the criticism directed at their sensibilities by placing a greater reliance on their strengths and sensibilities. Exhibit A: the announcement video for their next collaboration with Dhanush — and Rahman — titled Tere Ishk Mein, has the actor running in slow motion, cigarette fashionably in place, with a Molotov cocktail — a Molotov cocktail — in his hand that he throws at a wall featuring the graphics ‘FROM THE WORLD OF RAANJHANAA’, as a voiceover hints at a troubled love story. It is a take that brings to mind the criticism earlier directed at Raanjhanaa, of having ‘glorified’ (what context that word seems to have gained in the last few years) the violent tendencies of small-town love, but is also one that builds on the pair’s legacy of being the greatest champions of heartland India’s troubled heart. It is also an approach that is symbolic of everything the two represent; read against the legacy of their work, the adulation it inspires, and the criticism it is subjected to, that lone minute-and-a-half long teaser is maddening, fascinating, beautiful, baffling, and quite like nothing else being attempted today.