Vasan Bala’s Weird Worlds

IT’S A WORLD of misfits, outliers and losers, sometimes all of them rolled into one. Vasan Bala, the boy from Matunga in Mumbai, has made four feature films, the latest being Jigra. All of them feature people on the margins of the city he grew up in. Some are immigrants as in his first film, Peddlers (2012), which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, but is yet to be released theatrically in India. Some are Bruce Lee fans who feel no pain, like Surya in Mard ko Dard Nahin Hota (2018) (its title a homage to his idol Amitabh Bachchan’s famous dialogue from the film Mard). Yet others are like Rajkummar Rao’s morally ambiguous character in Monica, O My Darling (its title a hat-tip to the 1971 Helen song in the movie Caravan), always looking for the main chance.

Little wonder then in Jigra, his action hero is a woman, Satya Anand, with no emotion other than to save her brother who has been jailed for no fault of his. With his trademark easter eggs, invisible people, and love for pulp movies, Bala has created a dark world in Jigra which reflects the times we live in. There is no right or wrong, just lots of little people trying to survive when they come up against chicanery and deceit. Unlike Vijay, the hero who is repeatedly refer­enced in Bachchan’s 1973 movie, Zanjeer, there is nothing other than a personal propellant to every action in Jigra. There is no grand speech railing against the injustice of the world, no burning desire for revenge, just a quiet determination to remain alive.

In Satya Anand (Alia Bhatt), Bala has created a contemporary woman with no attachments except one; an unerring work ethic; and a single-minded focus. Like Zanjeer’s Bachchan, she is unsmil­ing, and like him, she has an unexpected ally in her quest. She will stop at nothing to get her brother back, nothing, whether it is threatening to slit her wrists or pow­ering a truck into a fortress-like prison.

She is the Angry Young Woman, but her rage is quiet, silent, simmering. It is not explosive, there is no monologue at the end, no great speech justifying her anger, just a simple return to the roots, to where it all began. “It’s all in the eyes,” Bala says. “I realised when I looked at photos of Mumbai gangsters who died in encounters in the ’90s, they were all small. They seemed normal, physically incapable of violence but all the strength was deep within, and tapping into it was the only way out of the jungle.” He says Bachchan was always lanky compared to his physically tougher contemporaries like Dharmendra and Vinod Khanna, yet it was his face that portrayed the power. “Similarly take Shah Rukh Khan’s outburst in Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman (1992). It started with the face. It’s the same with Alia Bhatt,” he says.

SO WHO IS Vasan Bala? Film aesthete, film festival favourite, film purist? All of the above with a movie projec­tor enshrined into his beating heart? Growing up in the “very middle class, Malgudi Days” kind-of Tamil-dominat­ed Matunga, the only son of a Tata Oil executive father and a banker mother who loved the movies, it was no surprise that he ended up working at a bank. But it was a time of single-screen theatres such as Aurora Talkies, Chitra Talkies, Badal-Bijlee-Barkha, and Satyam, Regal and Excelsior farther afield. His fondest memories are of his mother having to go to the UCO Bank headquarters in Mumbai’s Fort area during the year’s closing of accounts, and him and his father catching a movie at Eros and then having dinner at Olympia Coffee House, Shiv Sagar or Kailash Parbat.

He is 46 now. He did his schooling from St Joseph’s School, Wadala, and col­lege from SIES College, Sion. He studied commerce, a lazy choice he now says. “Matunga boys had only two options,” either become an engineer or a banker.

He was different, like his movie characters. “I had no direction, and it was worrying for me and everyone else around me. I wasn’t able to complete even the simplest of jobs. I felt so incompetent,” he says. This was also the time he was watching movies like Ashutosh Gowariker’s Swades (2004), Mani Ratnam’s Yuva (2004), and Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s Rang de Basanti (2006). He decided to do the impossible, and make movies. So, it was Mani Ratnam’s office in Chennai for him. “I had this crazy notion that Mani Ratnam was waiting to work with me,” he says. Sudha Kongara, the director, who was assisting Ratnam at that time met him and advised him to return to Mumbai and work on his craft.

The lack of money had never really bothered him. “My needs are minimal, so it was easy to walk away from the notional income of a regular job,” he says. He started working with Anurag Kashyap, the one-stop one-man school for all aspiring filmmakers, assisting him on movies such as Dev.D (2009), Gulaal (2009), and Michael Winterbottom’s Trishna (2011), before making his first film Peddlers.

In 2014, he wrote a script, a version of his second film, Mard ko Dard Nahin Hota, that got him invited to the Sundance Institute’s Screenwriters and Directors’ Lab for a two-week workshop, one of the perks of which was meeting the founder, actor and director Robert Redford.

The reality of the Mumbai film indus­try is very different from the hothouse world of pure cinema. The only currency it recognises is of box office revenue. Bala’s second film, Mard ko Dard Nahin Hota, won the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival. Its critical acclaim and cult status won him enough plaudits for a third film, the dark comedy Monica, O My Darling. Huma Qureshi, who worked with him on it, says, “Vasan is one of the nicest and most insanely talented directors of our times. He has the same kind of passion when he discusses the latest Telugu blockbuster to the newest independent voice on the block. A true cinephile. The way he sees all his characters is beautiful.”

Bala is also one of those rare film­makers in Mumbai who can traverse the spectrum from Kashyap’s indie sensibilities to Karan Johar’s larger-than-life spectacle. “Kashyap created an outlet for those of us who were passionate about cinema such as Neeraj Ghaywan and Chaitanya Tamhane. In Karan I found an open mind and a will to evolve to become relevant. He didn’t want me to make another thriller comedy just because Monica, O My Darling did well,” he says.

There is a logic to Jigra’s casting. Its soundtrack has the songs of Zanjeer, an ode to Bala’s late father who loved Bachchan. “We discovered a new hero in Shah Rukh Khan,” he says, “and this generation will find its hero in Alia Bhatt.” There are enough pointers to this intergenerational transfer of stardom. For her ally, the Zanjeer fan, played by Manoj Pahwa, Bhatt’s Satya is a vessel through which his incarcerated son might find freedom.

So, is Vasan Bala an artist or entertain­er, to use actor Stephen Fry’s classifica­tion? Is he an artist who doesn’t need validation or an entertainer who seeks it? Actor Sikandar Kher calls him a true maverick, with a unique voice. “When I worked with him, I realised he is not directing you, just letting you be. That’s where the actors he casts come into play. You can barely hear him on set, which is great. The energy of the director on set is the energy of everyone off the set. That’s what gets you through the movie, because at the end of the day you don’t know the fate of the movie at the box office,” he says.

Clearly his set is fun. His choreogra­pher on ‘Yeh ek Zindagi’ in Monica, O My Darling and ‘Chal Kudiye’ for Jigra, Vijay Ganguly, calls him collaborative and methodical, while also being easy going. “He is one of the best filmmakers we have today who sees things different­ly, which is so refreshing.”

And worth celebrating.

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