NEPALI MOVIES

There was a time when watching Nepali movies was a big waste of time and an altogether embarrassing experience. Fortunately for the Nepali movie aficionado out there, things are looking up. Here is my lowdown on what I consider some of the better Nepali movies released in the past few years.

But first, a couple of things. I am not a movie critic by any stretch of imagination—just a movie buff with catholic taste. For this I have to thank Mr. Bimal Gurung who called a 40+ day strike many years ago and gave me the opportunity to compensate for my cultural deficit in the movie-watching department, and also BSNL whose faultless internet delivery during that time made downloading movies from “you know where” a song.

So from Resnais to Buñuel, Tarkovsky to Kiarostami, Yasujirō Ozu to Takeshi Kitano, Lars von Trier to Gus Van Sant, David Lynch and a couple of hundred auteurs in between, I emerged out of that political turmoil a cineaste, a purveyor of noir, a cat with the kino-glaz. The andolan made me realise every dog has its dogme.

Ringata (Vertigo)

My appreciation of this movie was immediate and effusive. The day after I spent a well-invested evening watching it on YouTube, I shared its download with a colleague of Leftist affinities who, unfortunately, wasn’t too impressed and went off on a tangential harangue. His main grouse was against the manner in which the filmmakers dispensed with the schizophrenic, philosophy-spouting Marxist protagonist in the end.

This B/W political thriller is one of a clutch of films that deal with the Maoist insurgency that racked Nepal in the not-so-recent past. While some filmmakers have made a song and dance about it, this one is intense, technically brilliant, and—most importantly—held in place by a very taut and almost credible story line.

The movie opens in a Tamang village where the protagonist—“a brilliant mathematician of the revolution”—is on a clandestine initiative to recruit two young Tamang boys. The latter half features a cat-and-mouse game undertaken by an investigator to apprehend him. There are shades of Heart of Darkness in this search for a “mad” genius whose moral ambivalence has made him dangerous and powerful. Superimposed is the story of one recruit’s troubled relationship with his absentee father, who returns home just as the young lad has decided to run away and join the struggle.

The visual organisation is compelling; the acting well-calibrated and nuanced. The young boy, Pasang, is absolutely brilliant in portraying the confused intensity of an idealistic but clueless adolescent. The suave protagonist and his equally classy adversary bring a certain restrained sophistication to the Nepali screen. Some shots reminded me of Tokyo Story, the camera a mute spectator to the revolutionary’s struggles with his inner devils. The movie ends abruptly—of course it had to—but some would have liked a more open-ended resolution. The score—how could one forget—does for this film what Anton Karas’s zither did to Orson Welles’s The Third Man.

Badhshala (Slaughterhouse)

Movies that inhabit closed spaces for their entire duration can get claustrophobic and boring—especially if the intention is to philosophise (case in point: Polanski’s A Pure Formality). Badhshala, set in a detention camp where apprehended Maoists are interrogated, fortunately doesn’t belong to that category.

Sometimes Nepali films overdo the gore-fest; I remember with dismay how the wonderful premise of Saugat Malla’s Chadke was squandered by the urge to spill blood. With its ominous title, I worried how the torture scenes would pan out; fortunately, the violence is mostly psychological.

The uprising forced you to take sides. Filmmakers are political animals—each with their version of the truth—so controversy was inevitable. Be that as it may, watch it for Dayahang Rai, a harried interrogator whose humanity doesn’t self-destruct in that toxic ecosystem of state-organised violence. Watch it for Saugat Malla, Ajit Baral—familiar names that lifted Nepali cinema from the embarrassing morass it was in just a decade ago. Arpan Thapa, too, puts in a gem of a performance, reaffirming the sense that Nepali filmmaking is populated by very, very talented individuals. The film ends on a disturbing note; such retellings will be contested by those who feel wronged by the interpretation. The purpose here is to ask questions: ultimately, it is the Nepali audience that is being interrogated. Banning is hardly the way to deal with such an interlocutor.

Talakjung vs Tulke

Perhaps the most accessible and entertaining of the three discussed here. It’s reportedly adapted from a Chinese story; fortunately, the makers achieve a slick, almost edgeless interpretation. Shot in picturesque mountain villages, the cinematography does ample justice to the locale.

The film traces how power equations in a feudal village change when its denizens get politically assertive following Maoist indoctrination. Tulke (Khagendra Lamichhane, in an endearing role which—if his recent Pashupati Prasad is anything to go by—has typecast him in a Forrest Gump mould) is a village nobody whom even children address as Tulke. He longs to reclaim his erstwhile aristocratic identity—Talakjung—and almost uses the Maoist crutch to attain it.

Like Kabaddi, the film has a host of endearing characters, and like all great films it humanises even the villainous. It is largely devoid of caricatures—well, except Dayahang Rai as a Kathmandu don who takes Tulke under his wing in the second half when the movie briefly loses steam and ambles into typical Nepali inanity. Fortunately, the scene shifts back to the village; the film finds lost ground and ends on some poignant notes. Dayahang is versatile, but like Saugat Malla (in the insufferable Shree Panch Ambare), his versatility can become a burden.

In the final analysis, this is perhaps the one Nepali movie you should watch if you want to be entertained by a superbly crafted, humane document—“world-class,” as some would say.

Selfie King: A Review

If you're an avid watcher of quality Nepali cinema, you cannot escape Bipin Karki. It's not just his ubiquity but the fact that he seems to be playing himself in every role he essays. This isn't necessarily a bad thing—Robert De Niro does it, and so does Al Pacino. So there you have it: he's in good company.

Selfie King is a much-awaited movie, and its YouTube release has garnered millions of views in just a matter of weeks. The film is loaded with the usual array of tropes that populate Nepali cinema: aging parents, a long-suffering wife, didi-bahini, drivers, politicians, kalakars, and of course, Bipin Karki in the titular role.

Selfie King is a "world famous in Nepal" type of TV humor artist who is recognized by everyone—girls in lifts, drivers and their cleaners, hotel receptionists, shopkeepers. Though visually his TV persona appears as a curious cross-pollination of the Joker and Jack Sparrow, in public Selfie King walks around with his mask on to shield himself from the virus of such rampant popularity.

Spoiler alert: The movie opens with the father facing a medical emergency precipitated by Selfie King's humorous antics on TV. Sadly, the demands made on his time because of artistic engagements in a remote part of the country mean that he cannot be with his family in that moment of crisis. The rest of the movie is preoccupied with the journey of Selfie King to and from a program in what looks like a touristy Nepali town.

The Loneliness of Fame

A selfie is a vanity project. And though one presumes a selfie is taken to share with others, there's an element of intrinsic loneliness in the whole enterprise. Selfie King is a commodity that people consume on TV, at programs, and on the road when random passersby take their chance to click a selfie with him (isn't that a wefie?).

It's not as if Selfie King doesn't revel in his stardom. He knocks off a morning peg in the bathroom, has a female—not his wife—calling him at odd hours, and when he binges with his cohorts, his theatrics can raise a mean ruckus. But when Selfie King has to humanize himself into a son, he finds himself staring into a lonely void. His tears make people laugh. People find it curious when accosted with the banal nature of his existence. They seldom empathize.

At one point, Selfie King reveals he is SLC fail and deprecates his vocation by saying one needs to be as educated as a cleaner to become an artist. This is meant to be a poignant moment in the movie. However, such shallow self-pity—which sadly increases in intensity as the film reaches its termination point—drags it down into the depths where it meets the detritus of other much lesser cinematic efforts.

Brilliant in Patches

And yet the film is brilliant in patches. Nepali movies excel in the subplots and the brilliant portraiture of minor characters, and Selfie King has a veritable gallery of them. Much of the movie happens on the road, inside vehicles. There's a brilliant Stagecoach-kind of scene in which a loquacious fellow traveler—a minor political figure—engages Selfie King in friendly banter and even steals a drink with him, away from the other patrons of a wayside inn.

The unavailable Android phone charger—akin to the meal that never happens in a Buñuel movie—also plays an important role in building up to the climax, not a far-fetched premise given the times we live in.

Performance and Execution

The acting is top-notch. Bipin Karki excels in the mold of a method actor. The drunken scene, though a tad lengthy, is so realistic that it will resonate with every Nepali who has either drunk himself silly or shown cosmic patience in tolerating such behavior from friends.

The script is well-written, but some of the dialogue seems aimed at the gallery. Lines like "the glow of artistic success is like the comfort of wetting your own bed—first it is warm but afterwards you are repulsed by it"—though delivered with élan by Karki—don't hold up to analysis, and yet for some reason don't feel out of place in the film.

Final Verdict

The movie is less than the sum of its parts. The parts refuse to cohere into something creatively singular and meaningful. The melodrama weighs it down, and yet it is entertaining nevertheless and worth one's while to watch—at least once, or piecemeal by fast-forwarding through the cringeworthy bits.

The journey of Nepali cinema is analogous with the history of transport. Within a few decades of the invention of the internal combustion engine, man had landed on the moon. It is to the credit of people like Bipin Karki and his ilk that Nepali movies have made such meteoric progress in such a short time.

Come again for some more reviews.