Exotic and irrational entertainment

At some point during the evening of February 17, Exotic and Irrational Entertainment surpassed 100,000 page views. When I started writing E & I, I never imagined that anything I wrote would be of interest to more than a few family members and close friends. So I want to take a moment to thank all of my readers and commenters over the last five and a half years; it means a great deal to me that so many people have taken the time to stop by, consider my views and share their thoughts. I also want to thank fellow bloggers Memsaab, Beth, Bollyviewer, Daddy's Girl, Filmi Girl, Sita-ji, theBollywoodFan, and many others, without whose examples, support and encouragement I would likely never have begun or been able to sustain this adventure.

Knowingly or unknowingly, E & I violates every rule of blogging. You are supposed to write on only one subject, post frequently (daily if possible), and keep posts short and breezy. But E & I covers anything I'm watching, reading, listening to, or thinking about. I post whenever I can, but I'm lucky if that's more than once a week. And my posts are sometimes lengthy; while I hope they're not unnecessarily so, I know I could always edit myself more ruthlessly. I'm amazed and honored, though, that some of my longest posts are also among the most viewed.

I'll return to my thoughts on opera, books, Indian and non-Indian movies, television, music, and other subjects shortly; many thanks again for reading E & I.

Edith Wharton at 22, 1884

That terrifying product of the social system he belonged to and believed in, the young girl who knew nothing and expected everything, looked back at him like a stranger through May Welland's familiar features; and once more it was borne in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas....

What could he and she really know of each other, since it was his duty, as a "decent" fellow, to conceal his past from her, and hers, as a marriageable girl, to have no past to conceal? What if, for some one of the subtler reasons that would tell with both of them, they should tire of each other, misunderstand or irritate each other? He reviewed his friends' marriages—the supposedly happy ones—and saw none that answered, even remotely, to the passionate and tender comradeship which he pictured as his permanent relation with May Welland. He perceived that such a picture presupposed, on her part, the experience, the versatility, the freedom of judgment, which she had been carefully trained not to possess; and with a shiver of foreboding he saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other.
—Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence, Ch. 6

In The House of Mirth (1905) and The Age of Innocence (1920), Edith Wharton makes the risky choice of creating central characters who largely forfeit our sympathies. Both Lily Bart (in The House of Mirth) and Newland Archer (in The Age of Innocence) are self-centered, superficial, and self-defeating. Like most of the people around them, they are trapped by the hypocritical mores and rigid unspoken rules of the New York social world. What makes them figures of tragedy is that they can see clearly the bars of the gilded cage in which they are imprisoned and the emptiness of the goals for which they are struggling. But ultimately neither has sufficient imagination or moral strength to find a way out.

Lily Bart—an unmarried woman nearing the critical age of 30—passes up a chance at true companionship with Lawrence Selden, a man with whom she shares intellectual, emotional and aesthetic sympathies. But he lives in what she considers genteel poverty (he has to work—as a lawyer; what could be more déclassé?), and spends much of his time with disreputable writers and artists. Both Lily and Selden recognize that she would not be happy without a husband who could provide her with social distinction, an unlimited budget for clothes and jewels, and a splendid house to decorate.

“...You despise my ambitions—you think them unworthy of me!"

Selden smiled, but not ironically. "Well, isn't that a tribute? I think them quite worthy of most of the people who live by them."

She had turned to gaze on him gravely. "But isn't it possible that, if I had the opportunities of these people, I might make a better use of them? Money stands for all kinds of things--its purchasing quality isn't limited to diamonds and motor-cars."

"Not in the least: you might expiate your enjoyment of them by founding a hospital."

"But if you think they are what I should really enjoy, you must think my ambitions are good enough for me."

Selden met this appeal with a laugh. "Ah, my dear Miss Bart, I am not Divine Providence, to guarantee your enjoying the things you are trying to get!"

"Then the best you can say for me is, that after struggling to get them I probably shan't like them?" She drew a deep breath. "What a miserable future you foresee for me!"

"Well—have you never foreseen it for yourself?" The slow colour rose to her cheek, not a blush of excitement but drawn from the deep wells of feeling; it was as if the effort of her spirit had produced it.

"Often and often," she said. "But it looks so much darker when you show it to me!"

He made no answer to this exclamation, and for a while they sat silent, while something throbbed between them in the wide quiet of the air.

But suddenly she turned on him with a kind of vehemence. "Why do you do this to me?" she cried. "Why do you make the things I have chosen seem hateful to me, if you have nothing to give me instead?"
—The House of Mirth, Ch. 6

Their mutual retreat from this moment of emotional honesty is only the first of a series of misjudgments that have momentous consequences for Lily. Running afoul of both men and women who play the game far more cynically and ruthlessly than she does, Lily finds herself in an increasingly compromised position as the social vultures begin to circle...

Like Lawrence Selden, Newland Archer affects bohemian attitudes, suggesting scandalously that women should be allowed the same sexual freedoms as men, and inwardly denigrating his beautiful fiancée May Welland as unimaginative and conventional.

But Archer does May an injustice: she is actually far more perceptive and understanding than he is, and is willing to grant him the freedom in reality that he only extends to her theoretically. Their moment of truth comes when, despite her demurrals, he persists in urging her to marry him right away:

"Is it—is it because you're not certain of continuing to care for me?"

Archer sprang up from his seat. "My God—perhaps—I don't know," he broke out angrily.

May Welland rose also; as they faced each other she seemed to grow in womanly stature and dignity. Both were silent for a moment, as if dismayed by the unforeseen trend of their words: then she said in a low voice: "If that is it—is there some one else?"

"Some one else—between you and me?" He echoed her words slowly, as though they were only half-intelligible and he wanted time to repeat the question to himself. She seemed to catch the uncertainty of his voice, for she went on in a deepening tone: "Let us talk frankly, Newland. Sometimes I've felt a difference in you; especially since our engagement has been announced."

"Dear—what madness!" he recovered himself to exclaim.

She met his protest with a faint smile. "If it is, it won't hurt us to talk about it." She paused, and added, lifting her head with one of her noble movements: "Or even if it's true: why shouldn't we speak of it? You might so easily have made a mistake."

He lowered his head, staring at the black leaf-pattern on the sunny path at their feet. "Mistakes are always easy to make; but if I had made one of the kind you suggest, is it likely that I should be imploring you to hasten our marriage?"

She looked downward too, disturbing the pattern with the point of her sunshade while she struggled for expression. "Yes," she said at length. "You might want—once for all—to settle the question: it's one way."...

Her face had taken on a look of such tragic courage that he felt like bowing himself down at her feet. "I've wanted to say this for a long time," she went on. "I've wanted to tell you that, when two people really love each other, I understand that there may be situations which make it right that they should—should go against public opinion. And if you feel yourself in any way pledged...pledged to the person we've spoken of...and if there is any way...any way in which you can fulfill your pledge...even by her getting a divorce...Newland, don't give her up because of me!"
—The Age of Innocence, Ch. 16

May is here offering Archer a chance to honestly reveal what she has already guessed: that he's fallen in love with another woman. What May doesn't suspect is that the woman is May's cousin, Ellen Olenska, who has come to New York to separate herself for good from her dissolute European husband. But Archer shows himself to be a prisoner of the conventional opinion he professes to disdain. He conceals the truth of his illicit love from May, as he had earlier advised Ellen not to expose herself (and by extension, himself and May) to scandal and social ostracism by divorcing her husband. His choices ultimately destroy the happiness of everyone involved.

Edith Wharton was herself a product of the New York social world that she portrays so unsparingly. She also had a troubled marriage that ended in divorce, and conducted a passionate extramarital affair. Perhaps only someone who had experienced the crushing weight of social convention and the remorseless surveillance that enforces it could have written so incisively about those who are simultaneously its victims and perpetrators.

Awāra (The Tramp, 1951) is one of the most acclaimed Indian films of all time. Raj Kapoor's performance in the title role is listed as one of ten Great Performances in Richard Corliss and Richard Schickel's "All-TIME 100 Movies since the beginning of TIME" (Feb 12, 2005). Awāra is featured in Rachel Dwyer's 100 Bollywood Films (BFI, 2005); Subhash Jha writes that it "figures in the list of the three most influential films in Indian cinema" in his Essential Guide to Bollywood (Roli, 2005), although he doesn't name the other two; and Philip Lutgendorf writes that the film is "generally considered one of Kapoor's finest."

My feeling is a bit more ambivalent, mainly because of the parallels between Awāra and my least-favorite Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, Carousel (1945). More about those parallels in a moment.

There's no question that Awāra is filled with excellent performances. This was the first film in which Kapoor appeared as The Tramp, a character based on Charlie Chaplin's beloved Little Tramp, although Kapoor's character Raj has a harder, more criminal edge. In fact, we first see Raj as a prisoner on trial, accused of attempted murder:

Raj in the dock

(The film's often striking images were composed by Kapoor—Awāra was the third film he directed—and cinematographer Radhu Karmakar.)

Raj's intended victim was Judge Raghunath (Prithviraj Kapoor, Raj Kapoor's father—a relationship that will soon have resonance in the world of the film). Judge Raghunath has definite ideas about the origins of crime:

Judge Raghunath's genetic theory of crime

Raj's advocate is a young woman, Rita (Nargis), raised as the ward of Judge Raghunath. Throughout the film Nargis is simply radiant:

Rita for the defense

Under Rita's questioning, Judge Raghunath soon begins to reveal his family history: more than two decades ago, his wife Leela (Leela Chitnis) was kidnapped by a notorious daku, Jagga (K.N. Singh). This is no random kidnapping; Jagga had been unjustly sent to prison by Judge Raghunath, who condemned him because of his father's and grandfather's criminality:

Jagga discovers that Leela is pregnant and returns her to her home. When Judge Raghunath learns of the pregnancy, though, he believes that Leela is carrying Jagga's child. In an echo of Ram's repudiation of Sita after her rescue from Raavana, Judge Raghunath throws his pregnant wife out into the street on a stormy night:

Leela gives birth to a son, Raj, and raises him in poverty. At school the young Raj and Rita are classmates, and she befriends him. But they are soon separated when Judge Raghunath intervenes with the schoolmaster to have Raj barred from the classroom:

(If the young Raj looks familiar, it's because he's played by Raj Kapoor's younger brother Shashi.)

Leela falls ill, and a desperate Raj tries to steal some bread to ease her hunger, but he is caught and sent to a wayward children's home. Throughout the move Kapoor and writers K. A. Abbas and V. P. Sathe show how assumptions about criminality become self-fulfilling prophecies.

When we next see Raj, he's an adult, and has spent the past decade in and out of prison for a variety of petty crimes committed as a member of Jagga's gang, which he celebrates in the song "Awara hoon" ("I'm a tramp"; music by Shankar-Jaikishan, lyrics by Shailendra, sung by Mukesh):

Raj meets Rita again when he steals her purse, and then pretends to recover it from the thief. Raj and Rita begin a flirtation that soon deepens into love when the childhood sweethearts recognize each other.

Raj is torn between the salvation offered by Rita and the inescapable hold of Jagga; and this is where the parallels to Carousel start to become apparent. In the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, a man who lives outside of social norms (Billy Bigelow, a carnival barker) falls in love with a woman who is firmly tied to the local community (Julie Jordan, a millworker). Billy is lured into crime by a man named Jigger; is the name Jagga in Awāra a coincidence? When Billy dies he is taken to a version of heaven (Up There), but then plunges into a fiery hell before he can return to Earth; Raj similarly has a vision of heaven and hell in the famous dream sequence (the songs are "Tere Bina Aag Yeh Chandni" and "Ghar Aaya Mera Pardesi," sung by Lata Mangeshkar and Manna Dey):

One day at the beach, Rita playfully calls Raj a "junglee"—savage—and he flies into a rage. He twists her arm, chokes her, and then starts hitting her:

He slaps her three times hard across her face, and then shoves her to the ground. The violence of this scene is shocking. What makes it even worse is Rita's response:

This is where the parallels to Carousel become inescapable. In anger and frustration at his ostracism by the townspeople, Billy hits Julie, but she stays with him. When, later in the play, Billy strikes his daughter Louise, she notoriously asks her mother if a hard slap can feel like a kiss, and Julie agrees. Awāra's great music (the playback singers also include Mohd. Rafi and Shamshad Begum), gorgeous black-and-white images, and the fiercely committed performances of its cast can't outweigh for me the sickening image of Rita offering her face to Raj for a slap as though for a kiss.

Arthur Schopenhauer, age 58, 1846

Another in the occasional series of links to some of my favorite recent articles and reviews:

Kerry Howley imagines a conversation between pastor Joel Osteen, the toothy writer of inspirational best-sellers such as Become a Better You, and Arthur Schopenhauer, the author of Studies in Pessimism, conducted in alternating quotes from their works ("Hope Against Schope,"Bookforum, Feb/Mar 2013):

"JOEL OSTEEN: Arthur, I’m so glad you came to join us at Lakewood Church today. We love you. You are one of a kind. You are a masterpiece. You are a prized possession. When you wake up in the morning and look in the mirror, instead of getting depressed, instead of saying, 'Oh man. Look how old I look. Look at this gray hair. Look at these wrinkles,' you need to smile and say, 'Good morning, you beautiful thing. Good morning, you blessed, prosperous, successful, strong, talented, creative, confident, secure, disciplined, focused, highly favored child of the most high God!'

ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER: This world is a scene of tormented and agonized beings, who only continue to exist by devouring each other, in which, therefore, every ravenous beast is the living grave of thousands of others, and its self-maintenance is a chain of painful deaths; and in which the capacity for feeling pain increases with knowledge."

Hilary Mantel meditates on Kate Middleton, Princess Diana, the wives of Henry VIII, and our fascination with royalty ("Royal Bodies,"London Review of Books, 21 February 2013):

"The royal body exists to be looked at. The world’s focus on body parts was most acute and searching in the case of Jane Seymour, Henry’s third wife. No one understood what Henry saw in Jane, who was not pretty and not young. The imperial ambassador sneered that ‘no doubt she has a very fine enigme’: which is to say, secret part. We have arrived at the crux of the matter: a royal lady is a royal vagina."

Andrea DenHoed writes about the viral YouTube video (posted below) in which actress Mila Kunis is interviewed by Chris Stark, a novice BBC reporter. Stark starts out by confessing that he's "petrified," and then "quickly veers off-script" to talk about his pub mates and their favorite drinks, the soccer team he follows, and pre-wedding bachelor rituals. Kunis, obviously heartily sick of robotically mouthing the same answers over and over, "encourages Stark to stay away from his planned questions" ("Mila Kunis and the Lad Interview,"The New Yorker, 8 March 2013):

"Great interviewers often describe their craft as something between a dance, a seduction, and a magic trick. You have Truman Capote spinning webs of trust and charisma around his subjects. You have Joan Didion, dependent on being 'so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests.' You have Janet Malcolm using the fine touch of her 'Japanese technique' to elicit information and draw people out of themselves. And then you have Chris Stark, talking about eating chicken, scoring 'massive lad points,' and 'dropping trou' at his friend Dicko’s wedding. And it works. The result is great. Good for him."

This interview is highly enjoyable, and it reminds us that when stars are interviewed they are on the job for the studio's publicity department. Kunis's 30-second monologue where she spouts every press-release cliché that she's been instructed to hand out to other interviewers is hilarious.

But I hate to break the news to Andrea DenHoed: the interview didn't "veer off-script." Chris Stark had clearly planned everything he was going to say; in essence, it was shtick, and probably shtick that was pre-approved by his bosses. Nonetheless, Kunis was charming, and graciously rolled with it in classic Hawksian woman fashion (as she did with Sgt. Scott Moore's video request that she attend the Marine Corps Birthday Ball as his date in 2011). Seeing her relieved and spontaneous responses to Stark is a reminder of just how tedious being a star must be most of the time. If you haven't already seen it, here's the interview:

Mothers, don't let your sons grow up to join the Indian Air Force. At least on the evidence of our Bollywood viewing, characters in the Air Force may as well wear a sign saying "I'm doomed." We've seen Air Force pilots:

Get killed when their defective planes crash (Flight Lt. Ajay Rathod (Madhavan) in Rang de Basanti (Paint it Saffron, 2006))
Get imprisoned for decades by a certain hostile neighboring country (Squadron Leader Veer Pratap Singh (Shah Rukh Khan) in Veer-Zaara (2004))
Get shot down during a border conflict with a certain hostile neighboring country (Squadron Leader Shekhar Malhotra (Shashi Kapoor) in Silsila (Connections, 1981))

So when we discover early in Aradhana (Adoration, 1969; directed by Shakti Samanta and written by Sachin Bhowmick) that Arun (Rajesh Khanna) is an Air Force pilot, it can only be a matter of time before the inevitable happens. First, though, he woos Vandana (Sharmila Tagore) by serenading her from a jeep as she travels through the mountains on a train in "Mere Sapno Ki Rani" ("Queen of my dreams"):

(You may recognize this song as one of the many to which Shah Rukh Khan pays homage in "Phir Milenge Chalte Chalte" from 2009's Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi (A Match Made in Heaven).)

Vandana is swept off her feet by Arun—who could resist?—and a few days later as they are visiting a temple they exchange wedding garlands in the presence of a priest. Caught in a sudden thunderstorm, Arun and Vandana take shelter, and of course Vandana has to remove her wet sari and warm herself by the fire. Although she modestly covers herself with a blanket, the temptation proves too much for both of them, as the thunderstorm raging outside echoes their own overwhelming passions ("Roop Tera Mastana" ("Your beauty is intoxicating")):

Afterwards, Arun assures the guilt-stricken Vandana that they will be married in the eyes of their families as well as in the eyes of God in just a few days; first, though, he just has to make a short flight to bring his uncle and aunt to meet Vandana...

I don't think it will be much of a spoiler if I reveal that, sure enough, Arun's plane crashes and he is fatally injured. On his deathbed, he exacts a promise from the pregnant Vandana that their son will grow up to be an Air Force pilot. That seems reasonable: what parents wouldn't want their son to take up the same profession that killed his dad?

Of course, Arun's death is only the first of a series of tragedies that strike Vandana; mild spoilers follow. Her father dies, leaving her impoverished, and Arun's family rejects her and her story about their secret marriage. She agrees to anonymously give her son Suraj up for adoption, but return to adopt him herself the next day. But her plan goes horribly wrong when another couple, the wealthy but childless Saxenas (Anita Dutt and Abhi Bhattacharya), adopts him first. Vandana then takes a job as a servant in the Saxena household so that she can be close to Suraj as he grows up, even though she can never let him know that she is really his mother.

As if this giant helping of Maternal Self-Sacrifice isn't enough, her employers' sleazy relative Shyam (Manmohan) tries to rape Vandana. The assault is only averted when Suraj comes to his beloved "nanny"'s rescue with a sharp pair of scissors. To protect him, Vandana takes the blame, even though she realizes that it means prison and a lengthy—perhaps permanent—separation from her son.

In the intervening years Suraj (Rajesh Khanna in a double role) becomes a young man, joins the Air Force (gulp) and, like his dad, woos a local beauty with a flirtatious song, "Baghon Mein Bahar Hai" ("Has Spring come to my garden?")

Will Suraj find happiness with the lovely Renu (Farida Jalal)? Will Vandana and Suraj ever be reunited? Will he ever learn that Vandana is his mother? And most importantly, can Suraj somehow avoid the Curse of the Air Force?

Even if you can guess the answers to most of these questions, Aradhana is very much worth seeing for Sharmila Tagore's whole-hearted performance as the devoted Vandana (I'm already seeing Vidya Balan playing the lead in The Sharmila Tagore Story), for the obvious chemistry between Sharmila and the far too handsome Rajesh Khanna (this was the role that made him a superstar), and for the classic S.D. Burman/Anand Bakshi songs sung by Lata Mangeshkar, Asha Bhosle, Kishore Kumar, Mohd. Rafi, and S.D. Burman himself.

For additional thoughts about Aradhana, please see the reviews by Filmi Geek and Philip Lutgendorf.

Thanks to RajShri Films, you can watch Aradhana with English captions on YouTube for free.

Update 21 March 2013: Memsaab has written two wonderful appreciations of Rajesh Khanna, My ten favorite Rajesh Khanna songs and The complicated superstar.

The accepted notion is that age confers a spirit of reconciliation and serenity on late works....But what of artistic lateness not as harmony and resolution, but as intransigence, difficulty and contradiction? What if age and ill health don’t produce serenity at all?
—Edward Said, "Thoughts on Late Style,"London Review of Books, 5 August 2004

When we think about an artist's "late style," Edward Said writes, we may think of Bach creating the crowning masterpieces A Musical Offering (1747), Mass in B-Minor (1749), and Art of the Fugue (1751) in his final years.* Or of Shakespeare writing The Tempest (1611), his bittersweet farewell to the magic of the stage. Or of Henri Matisse, often wheelchair-bound or bedridden and unable to paint, making the playful, brilliantly colored cut-outs that were published as Jazz (1947).

But there are also artists whose late work is difficult, dark, and challenging, posing problems that can never be finally resolved. Goya's Black Paintings (1819-1823), which he painted on the walls of his house when he was in his 70s, feature horrifying scenes of violence and rapacity. Monteverdi's final opera, L'incoronazione di Poppea (The Coronation of Poppea, 1642), features some of the most ruthless, corrupt and cynical characters ever put on stage.

In his final years, Beethoven continued to push the accepted boundaries of his chosen forms, producing works that achieved new extremes of scale, complexity and technical difficulty. Said, following Theodor Adorno's essay "Late Style in Beethoven," devotes much of his essay to a consideration of Beethoven's last compositions. These include his final string quartets, works which I think are aptly described as presenting a "bristling, difficult and unyielding—perhaps even inhuman—challenge" to listener and performer alike.

A Late Quartet (2012, directed and co-written by Yaron Zilberman) focusses on the fictional Fugue Quartet as its members prepare for a performance of Beethoven's String Quartet No. 14 in C-sharp minor, Op. 131. This quartet was composed in the final year of Beethoven's life, after he had gone entirely deaf and while he was struggling with illness. Much about this quartet is unusual, if not unprecedented: it's in seven movements, instead of the then-standard four; it begins with a slow movement instead of the then-standard fast movement; the movements range in length from nearly 15 minutes to under a minute, and were intended to be played continuously, without a break; the movements modulate over six different keys, instead of the usual two or three, and can feature abrupt shifts of mood and tempo.

Here is the opening movement of the quartet, marked "Adagio, ma non troppo e molto espressivo" (Slowly, but not too much so, and very expressively):

In Zilberman's film the Fugue Quartet's cellist, Peter (Christopher Walken), is diagnosed with early-stage Parkinson's disease, a disorder that affects motor control and will soon make it impossible for him to play.

Peter's revelation of his diagnosis to the other members of the Quartet throws the group into crisis. And from my point of view, far too much screen time is spent on the melodrama surrounding the rocky marriage of second violinist Robert and violist Juliette (Philip Seymour Hoffman and Catherine Keener), and on the affair first violinist Daniel (Mark Ivanir) initiates with Robert and Juliette's daughter Alexandra (Imogen Poots).

Peter's story—that of a musician facing the loss of his ability to perform the music that has been his life's purpose, dealing with the many diminishments of old age, and mourning the recent death of his wife Miriam (a brief but poignant cameo by mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter)—is far more compelling, and I wish it had remained the central focus of the film. Instead, for long stretches Peter remains in the background as we follow the increasingly erratic behavior of the other characters. It is a huge relief to return to Peter, who is the only member of the quartet who seems to deal with the situation like an adult.

The film includes some thoughtful touches. To commune with his memory of Miriam, Peter puts on one of her recordings; the music he chooses is "Mariettas Lied" from Erich Korngold's opera Die Tote Stadt (The Dead City, 1920), about a man seeking consolation after the death of his beloved wife:

The words mean: "Joy, stay with me. Come to me, my true love. Night falls now; you are my light and day. Our hearts beat as one; our hopes rise heavenward...Though sorrow darkens all, come to me, my true love. Bring your pale face close to mine. Death cannot separate us. If you must leave me one day, know that there is a life after this."

Another thoughtful touch is the cellist that Peter suggests to the other members of the Quartet as his replacement: Nina Lee, who in real life is the cellist for the Brentano Quartet, the group that performs on the film's soundtrack.

These kinds of touches, and the fascinating discussions among the characters about the challenges of playing Op. 131, are hints of the more music-centered (and in my view, more interesting) film that A Late Quartet could have been. As it stands, with its focus on not-very-engaging interpersonal melodrama, Zilberman's film feels like a missed opportunity.

Beethoven's Op. 131 in its entirety, played by the Quatuor Mosaïques on period instruments:

--

* But I've also written about why Bach isn't (yet) carved on my musical Mount Rushmore.

Do you feel smarter?

You: In college I thought that what people liked—especially their favorite music, movies, and books—told you everything you needed to know about them. It was one of the surprising discoveries of adulthood that the complexities of personality can't be defined quite so easily or simply.

Or can they? Researchers at the University of Cambridge have found that Facebook "likes" can be used to guess with a high degree of accuracy your gender, sexual orientation, political leanings, religious affiliation, whether you're a smoker, and even whether your parents split up before you were 21. As Geoffrey Mohan writes, perhaps it's not unexpected that someone who likes "Proud to be a mom" is most likely female and a parent. But more surprising is that David Stillwell and his Cambridge colleagues found that likes also correlate with traits such as intelligence, openness to new experiences, and conscientiousness—at least, as far as these traits can be accurately measured by personality tests. ("Liking" curly fries correlates with high IQ, while liking Hello Kitty indicates that you are open to new experiences but not highly conscientious.)

One or two of these correlations could be dismissed as statistical happenstance; taken together, they can create a highly detailed picture of who you are. And it doesn't matter whether, in any individual case, the correlations are accurate, as long as employers, insurance companies and marketers think that they are. What you like can say a great deal more about you than you may realize. (Geoffrey Mohan, "On Facebook, you are what you 'like,' study finds"Los Angeles Times, March 11, 2013)

Somini Sengupta

Illusions of control: Of course, we're all concerned about Internet privacy. Aren't we? But when you create an account on a site, you often must enter personal information such as an e-mail address and even your date of birth. We often do this without thinking—and as Somini Sengupta reports, with such key pieces of personal information sites can find out a huge amount of additional data about us.

Behavioral economist Alessandro Acquisiti has explored what motivates us to act against our own interests and surrender important personal information. And he's made some disturbing findings:

We are inconsistent: If shoppers are offered a $10 coupon and told that it will be increased to $12 if they share information about their purchases, only about 50% agree to share. But if they are offered a $12 coupon and told that it will be decreased to $10 if they keep their data private, 90% agree to share.
We are irrational: Participants in a study of lying, stealing and drug use were far more willing to share data that could personally identify them if they were given a greater degree of choice about what information to share.
And we're distractable: Students surveyed about cheating were far more likely to admit to it if an unrelated offer popped up while they were answering the survey.

It seems that we find the illusion of control and choice far too reassuring. (Somini Sengupta, "Letting down our guard with web privacy,"New York Times, March 30, 2013)

Adam Phillips

Parents as sadists: Psychologist Adam Phillips writes about parent-child dynamics, and concludes that parents can't avoid acting in ways that are perceived by the child as sadistic. And sometimes, even with the best-intentioned parents, it isn't just perception: "The parent who punishes the child for his tantrum—punishment being itself a kind of tantrum, a despair about the rules rather than their enforcement—says to the child: my tantrum is more powerful than yours, but tantrums are all we have got...The punitive parent is giving the child what we have learned to call a double message: he is being told by someone who is enraged by their frustration that he should not be enraged by his frustration." (Adam Phillips, "The magical act of a desperate person,"London Review of Books, 7 March 2013)

With a cast that includes Rajesh Khanna, Shashi Kapoor, and Vinod Khanna, the gender balance and narrative focus of Prem Kahani (Love Story, 1975) is definitely shifted towards the manly side. The "love story" of writer-director Raj Khosla's film is one of masculine friendship, loyalty and self-sacrifice.

But by far the most interesting character in Prem Kahani is Kamini (the adorable Mumtaz). Kamini is in love with her next-door neighbor Rajesh (Rajesh), an apolitical poet who plans to become a teacher. The famous Rajesh-Mumtaz chemistry is in full effect in "Prem Kahani Mein":

Prem Kahani's superb soundtrack is by Laxmikant-Pyrarelal, with lyrics by Anand Bakhshi; the playback singers are Kishor Kumar, Lata Mangeshkar, Mohd. Rafi and Mukesh.

Kamini's wealthy father, Judge Shrikant Sinha (K. N. Singh), is a supporter of British rule—the film is set during the days of the Quit India movement of the early 1940s, although the clothes and hairstyles scream mid-1970s—and he arranges Kamini's marriage with police inspector Dheeraj (Shashi). Defiantly, Kamini declares her intention to marry Rajesh. Her father tells her that if she goes against his wishes, she must carry her proposal to Rajesh herself—and she does:

But Rajesh's politically committed brother Brijesh (Trilok Kapoor) has been killed leading an anti-British demonstration. Rajesh, radicalized, has decided to join the freedom struggle. He sacrifices his love for Kamini because he doesn't want to see her widowed like his sister-in-law, and pretends that his feelings were never serious:

Kamini, deeply hurt and angry, agrees to obey her father's wishes and marry Dheeraj.

Rajesh now embarks on a campaign of assassination and becomes a wanted man. He's wounded during a police dragnet, and is smuggled to the house of a close friend in the truck of the Pathan tribesman Sher Khan (Vinod Khanna):

(Sher Khan doesn't realize how quickly his willingness to sacrifice himself will be tested.)

The close friend Rajesh has chosen to hide with is none other than...Dheeraj! And sending the irony meter pinging off the scale, Rajesh's unexpected arrival at Dheeraj's house interrupts Dheeraj and Kamini's wedding night. But Dheeraj has the right priorities:

Dheeraj is indifferent to his wedding night

Despite Dheeraj's and Rajesh's supposed closeness, apparently neither one has ever mentioned Kamini to the other. Of course, this puts Rajesh and Kamini in a painful and awkward situation, and they both pretend that they've never been anything more to each other than neighbors. But there's still plenty of emotion simmering beneath the surface, as in "Phool aahista phenko" (Gently pluck the rose):

When Dheeraj finds out that Rajesh was once in love, he puts him on "trial" with Kamini as the judge. She delivers her verdict on Rajesh's behavior towards the unnamed girl:

Kamini's verdict: Rajesh should have been honest

Of course, Kamini herself isn't being fully honest with Dheeraj—or, perhaps, with herself, as Rajesh's presence brings old feelings flooding to the surface (or should I say pouring down like the monsoon):

(Notice how, at the end of the song, Rajesh closes the windows—symbolically closing off the resurgence of their feelings for one another. It's just one of Raj Khosla's many telling directorial touches in the film.)

Meanwhile, Sher Khan has been arrested and is being tortured to reveal Rajesh's whereabouts, and Dheeraj can't intervene without throwing suspicion on himself and endangering Rajesh. (If you're thinking, as I'm sure you are, that this scenario is eerily similar to the moment in Puccini's opera Turandot when the servant girl Liù is tortured so that she'll reveal the true name of Prince Calàf, the parallels don't end there.)

As the police manhunt for Rajesh closes in, and as it becomes harder for Rajesh and Kamini to conceal their (former?) love from Dheeraj, Kamini is forced to make a final, fateful choice—a choice which, if the men had been listening, she made long ago...

You don't mess with Kamini!

Kamini is an incredibly compelling character: smart, courageous and complicated. And Mumtaz is wonderful in the role. In a film packed with male stars, she more than holds her own, and makes Kamini the focus of our sympathies

For an additional take on Prem Kahani (including the gorgeous lyrics of "Phool aahista phenko"), please see MemsaabStory.

Soprano Angela Moser; photo from West Coast Opera

On Tuesday we had dinner in a lovely candlelit square in Venice, surrounded by music. Or at least that's the way it felt as we attended the final Opera Night at Caffe Venezia. Venezia has been our favorite Berkeley restaurant for more than two decades; it was the place we'd go for birthdays and anniversaries and pre-show dinners. The restaurant was designed and decorated so that it seemed as though you were sitting at an outdoor cafe in Venice, an illusion fostered by Silvio Ronzone's cleverly detailed trompe-l'oeil murals (click on the picture for a larger version):

The murals at Caffe Venezia: a cat (in the doorway of the bakery) watches over our favorite table
Photo from Berkeleyside

The whimsical verisimilitude extended to a splashing central fountain, pigeons perched on a balcony, and a laundry line that stretched high above the tables. The laundry changed seasonally (on Valentine's day, the line was hung with bright red lingerie):

Note the pigeons (on the balcony at top left) and the laundry
on the line; photo by Gourmet G.

And of course, what would Venice be without opera? Every New Year's Eve Venezia presented an Opera Night, where singers from the Berkeley/West Edge Opera and other local companies would perform while your meal was served. It felt so festive to be sipping a glass of prosecco while being serenaded with the greatest hits of 19th century opera.

But to our dismay Caffe Venezia announced earlier this year that it would be closing at the end of May, and offering a final Opera Night on Tuesday, April 9. (Opera Night had begun as Tuesday Night Opera until it gradually became an only-on-New-Year's-Eve event.) We made sure to get reservations, but were uncertain what to expect with the looming closure.

The mood of the evening was bittersweet indeed, but this was one of the best Opera Nights we'd ever attended. Perhaps recognizing that this was their last chance to show their appreciation for the restaurant and the event, the audience responded to the performers enthusiastically. And the singers seemed to be inspired by their reception. Soprano Angela Moser, in particular, playfully engaged the audience by singing "Una voce poco fa" from Rossini's Il barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville, 1816) and the Habanera from Bizet's Carmen (1875) while strolling among the tables and directly addressing (and sometimes caressing) the diners.

Among the many highlights of this truly delightful evening were two duets sung by Moser and soprano Jillian Khuner. The first was the Flower Duet ("Sous le dôme épais") from Leo Delibe's Lakmé (1883), one of the few operas with a South Asian setting. I wasn't able to find a version with Moser and Khuner, so Elīna Garanča and Anna Netrebko will have to do:

The second duet was the Barcarolle ("Belle nuit d'amour") from Offenbach's Les Contes d'Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann, 1881); the act from which this duet is taken is set (appropriately enough) in Venice. The video below again features Garanča and Netrebko:

Savoring a deliciously earthy Refosco from Friuli as the accompaniment to my favorite Venezia dish, malfatti con funghi ("badly cut" pasta with a richly flavorful mushroom sauce), in the company of my sweetheart, while listening to Moser and Khuner's gorgeous voices intertwine—it's hard to imagine a more enjoyable way to spend an evening. Perhaps we should regret the disappearance of the 18th-century tradition of having supper and drinking champagne while attending the opera.

Caffe Venezia’s warm ambiance, excellent staff (Amy was our attentive and efficient server on Tuesday), well-prepared food and affordable elegance will be sorely missed. Many thanks to everyone at Venezia who made every meal we had there over the years a special occasion. We can only hope that another restaurant in Berkeley or San Francisco will take over the tradition of Opera Night.

You can read about Venezia in longtime staffer Allison Etchison's article in Berkeleyside, from which the first photo of Venezia was taken.

And for a hint of what we heard on the final Opera Night, here is Angela Moser performing Donna Anna's aria "Non mi dir" from the August 2010 Open Opera production of Mozart's Don Giovanni (1787) in Berkeley's John Hinkel Park:

For two-thirds of its length, Aap Ki Kasam (Your promise, 1974) is a delight. Poor boy Kamal (Rajesh Khanna) and rich girl Sunita (Mumtaz) meet at college; after the inevitable initial misunderstandings, they tease, flirt and begin to fall in love. On a trip back to Kamal's village, Sunita's car runs out of gas (by design?) in the middle of a thunderstorm. Sunita has providentially brought along a thermos of tea; when she sips out of Kamal's cup, and then he turns the cup so that he sips from the same place, it shows how sexy suggestion can be:

R. D. Burman's and Anand Bakhshi's music, and the voices of Lata Mangeshkar and Kishore Kumar, continue the playful, romantic mood in "Suno Kaho":

Kamal and Sunita marry, and Kamal's friend Mohan (Sanjeev Kumar) gives Kamal a job in his electronics shop and a home next door to him in a little cottage. The newlyweds spend most of their time billing and cooing, and this gives us the perfect opportunity to enjoy the Rajesh-Mumtaz jodi in all its glory.

Kamal and Sunita's hearts beating as one

There's a moment in the film that perfectly illustrates their famous chemistry, when Mumtaz reaches out and gives a little tug to a tuft of Rajesh's chest hair. It's charming, touching, funny, surprising, and utterly believable besotted newlywed behavior. And judging from Rajesh's reaction, I'll swear it's an unscripted, spontaneous moment of unfeigned affection between the actors:

When Kamal pretends to have a headache to avoid early-morning tennis with Mohan and stay in bed with Sunita, Mohan sends a doctor over to see him. The doctor tells Kamal (perhaps as a practical joke by Mohan) that he should abstain from so much lovemaking. Since the temptation is too great at home, Kamal and Sunita go to the park—which turns out to be filled with cuddling couples. Sunita teases Rajesh mercilessly in "Paas nahin aana" (Don't come near). "Don't forget," she tells him, "today you are under oath and love is banned!":

Kamal and Sunita go to a temple to pray for a child. Kamal tells Sunita (to her surprise, and ours) that he would prefer a daughter; sons, he tells her, are neglectful, but daughters always love their parents. (Foreshadowing!) They drink a celebratory cup of bhang, and are feeling no pain in "Jai Jai Shiv Shankhar" (Hail, Lord Shiva). Mumtaz under the influence is especially hilarious:

I would be perfectly happy to spend the rest of the movie watching Kamal and Sunita's love games, but of course neither they nor we can be left in such bliss. Discord soon arises in the form of Mohan's unhappy marriage and his (too close?) friendship with Sunita. Kamal frequently finds Mohan in his house, sharing coffee and laughter with Sunita, and begins to wonder whether Mohan has ulterior motives.

At a housewarming party, Sunita sings an exquisite love song...to Mohan! But "Mohan" ("enchanting") is one of the names of Lord Krishna, and Sunita, as Radha, is singing about the God of Love as a sign of her devotion to her husband. But Kamal thinks she's confessing her "Chori Chupke" (Secret, silent) love for his sitar-playing neighbor and boss:

Things spiral downwards pretty quickly from this point. Kamal's suspicions are confirmed, or so he thinks, when he returns unexpectedly from work one day to see a man scrambing over the wall between his house and Mohan's. The back door is open, and Mohan's cigarettes are in his ashtray. Not only that, but Sunita greets him at the door with her hair disheveled and her sari disarranged, and Kamal notices the sheets on their bed are mussed. But instead of having an honest conversation with her, he shuns her without explanation, which she—entirely innocent, of course—finds bewildering and hurtful. And when she finally confronts him about his cold, accusatory behavior, Kamal goes too far...

And this is where writers Ram Kelkar and Ramesh Pant, and director J. Om Prakash, themselves go too far. We're forced to watch Kamal make mistake after self-destructive mistake, and subject himself to misery on self-inflicted misery. Even more fatally, Sunita virtually disappears from the screen.

The first part of the movie features many wonderful moments between Rajesh and Mumtaz, and the songs are classics. But the change of tone in the final hour is jarring: it feels like someone replaced the final reels of Vivah (2006) with the final reels of Devdas (2002). As a result, Aap Ki Kasam ultimately fails to deliver on its initial promise.

You can watch Aap Ki Kasam on YouTube, for free.

Like many people, I'd guess, my first encounter with the work of Philip Pullman was His Dark Materials. Marketed as young adult novels, the trilogy—Northern Lights/The Golden Compass (1995), The Subtle Knife(1997), and The Amber Spyglass (2000)—featured themes not usually found in books aimed at middle schoolers, such as the murder of children, the death of God, and cosmos-healing sex between 13-year-olds.

But before Pullman became famous for His Dark Materials, he wrote another young adult series: the Sally Lockhart mysteries. It's pretty unusual for a male writer to feature a heroine; Pullman did it in both of these series.

In the first Sally Lockhart title, The Ruby in the Smoke (1985), the heroine is a 16-year-old in late Victorian London. As the book opens she is trying to learn more about the death of her father, Matthew Lockhart. Matthew was a shipping agent who drowned when his company's schooner was sunk in the South Seas with the loss of (almost) all hands, leaving Sally orphaned and virtually penniless. Sally's investigation brings her into contact with a gritty underworld of opium dens, brothels, East End slums, and street gangs.

It also brings her into contact with the legacies of British colonialism: the military occupation and exploitation of India, and the forced opium trade with China. (It soon becomes clear that the ruby of the title is derived from the former, while the smoke derives from the latter.) The later books in the series deal with the arms trade (The Shadow in the North (1986)), Jewish immigration and 19th-century social and labor movements (The Tiger in the Well (1990)), and great-power conflicts over resource-rich smaller countries (The Tin Princess (1994)). But while the books are firmly grounded in the grim realities of 19th-century capitalism and imperialism, they are also ripping yarns featuring criminal masterminds, powerful industrial magnates, international spies, and other fiendishly evil nemeses for Sally.

Aiding Sally over the course of the series are Frederick Garland, a photographer who is a few years older than Sally; Jim Taylor, an office boy and former street urchin, who becomes Frederick's assistant; and later, Daniel Goldberg, a Jewish refugee and labor organizer. As with Will in His Dark Materials, the men occasionally threaten to take over the narrative; fortunately, Sally is such a compelling character that the focus never shifts away from her for too long.

The voice of the narrator is also somewhat unusual. Sometimes the narrator adopts the limited point of view of the characters, especially when the situation is suspenseful or perilous. But at other times the narrator takes time out to explain the world of Victorian England from the standpoint of our contemporary mores—probably a necessary concession to the teenagers who are the books' intended audience, but a slightly disorienting shift in perspective nonetheless.

Apart from the narrator, there are a few other mild anachronisms as well. In The Shadow in the North, a factory is illuminated by electric light several years before the commercial manufacture of incandescent bulbs, and a character is described as having "a wide knowledge of matters on the fringe of psychology" at least a decade before the term "psychology" was in wide use. Pullman also discreetly signals his own tastes, as when he name-checks Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope. Jim has a substantial collection of penny dreadfuls, referred to throughout the series, that he enthusiastically shares with other characters; after the first two novels in the Sally Lockhart series were published, Pullman wrote a book based on a character from penny dreadfuls, Spring-Heeled Jack (1989).

The level of violence in the series is amazingly high for books ostensibly aimed at young readers. Savage beatings and fights are described in gruesome detail, and over the course of the series characters are shot, stabbed, burned to death, killed by dogs, mutilated by bombs, drowned, crushed, felled by heart attacks, and plummet to their deaths. And it's not just the bad guys who get hurt: Frederick, Jim and Sally all sustain major injuries at various points, and (not to give too much away) one of them doesn't survive the series.

Another atypical aspect of the books is Pullman's frankness about sex. Prostitution, rape, and sexual torture are alluded to, although not described graphically. In the second volume in the series, The Shadow in the North, Sally and Frederick go to bed together—outside of wedlock!—while in the third volume in the series, The Tiger in the Well, it's suggested that Sally sleeps with a man she finds loathsome in order to divert suspicion and extract information.

If those aspects of the books seem aimed at modern sensibilities, other features are derived from sensationalist Victorian fiction itself. As Philip Pullman has written, "I wrote each one with a genuine cliché of melodrama right at the heart of it, on purpose: the priceless jewel with a curse on it—the madman with a weapon that could destroy the world—the situation of being trapped in a cellar with the water rising—the little illiterate servant girl from the slums of London who becomes a princess . . . And I set the stories up so that each of those stock situations, when they arose, would do so naturally and with the most convincing realism I could manage."

How convincing that realism is depends on the reader, of course. For me, the books get steadily more fantastic as the series progresses. The Tin Princess, in particular, reads a bit like a novelized Tintin adventure: it's set a central European principality riddled with spies, skullduggery and nefarious plots, which our protagonists confront with forthrightness and pluck.

A gap of several years separates each subsequent volume in the series from the previous books. The Ruby in the Smoke takes place in 1872, when Sally is 16; The Shadow in the North takes place six years later, in 1878; The Tiger in the Well three years after that, in 1881; and The Tin Princess the following year. Pullman may have created a minor dilemma for himself by spacing the books so far apart chronologically; Sally is an adult by the start of the second book, and a mother by the start of the third, which is perhaps why she only has a cameo role in the last book. I'm thinking, though, that should Pullman ever want to return to these characters—and I hope that he does—there might be room for an adventure or two in the gaps between the books in the original series.

So if you give the books to a 12-year-old, be prepared to face some interesting questions. I recommend reading them yourself first—but that's a task that will be highly enjoyable whether or not you intend to pass them on to a young person later. As with His Dark Materials, the Sally Lockhart series is utterly addictive. Once you're hooked (which for me happened by the time I hit the second chapter of the first book), you'll want to devour them all.

The first two books in the Sally Lockhart series were adapted for television, with Billie Piper in the role of Sally. I haven't yet seen these films, but it strikes me that Piper may perhaps be miscast as the autodidact Sally (she was certainly miscast as Fanny Price in ITV's dreadful 2007 Mansfield Park, miswritten by Maggie Wadey and misdirected by Ian McDonald, and broadcast in the US as part of the PBS series The Complete Jane Austen). Still, I'll reserve judgment until I have a chance to see them.

Philip Pullman's informative website includes the author's own discussions of his books, along with brief extracts from each, and was the source of the cover images of the Sally Lockhart novels in this post.

Apollo and Daphne (detail), Tiepolo, 1744

Repression leads to sublimation. When public performances of opera were banned in Rome by papal edicts in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—opera audiences engaged in "casual and promiscuous social intercourse, always noisy, sometimes riotous and indecent" [1]—composers instead turned to the cantata.

Cantatas were a more intimate form for one or two singers with instrumental accompaniment, were performed in private residences, and were not generally staged. But, like opera, they required a very high degree of virtuosity from their performers. And under the cover of portraying mythological or historical figures, cantatas could treat the same subjects that the Pope found so objectionable in opera: lust, madness and death. Cantatas became miniature operas by another name.

When Handel travelled to Italy as a young man in the first decade of the 1700s, he spent much of his time in Rome, a major center of musical patronage, and quickly mastered the cantata form. Before he left Italy four years later he'd written more than a hundred cantatas. (The composer he took as his model, Alessandro Scarlatti, wrote more than 600!) Apollo e Dafne (Apollo and Daphne, 1710) is one of the longest and most richly scored of these.

Apollo and Daphne (detail), Bernini, 1622-25

It tells a story from Book I of Ovid's Metamorphoses: the god Apollo is smitten with the chaste nymph Daphne, and when she resists his advances he pursues her; unable to escape, Daphne prays to the gods for deliverance, and is transformed into a laurel tree. Handel wrote the cantata for soprano and bass-baritone, and it contains some exquisite music, such as Dafne's first aria, "Felicissima quest' alma, ch'ama sol la liberta" (Happy is my spirit, which loves only freedom):

This lovely performance is by Karina Gauvin, accompanied by Les Violons du Roy conducted by Bernard Labadie. Her partner in this recording (Dorian xCD-90288) is baritone Russell Braun, who delivers Apollo's final lament with an understated lyricism:

On a last-minute impulse last Sunday I attended a concert by American Bach Soloists, conducted by founding music director Jeffrey Thomas, that featured Apollo e Dafne along with Handel's sacred motet Sileti venti (Silence, ye winds, 1708) and three arias for bass from Bach's cantatas. The soloists, who were in excellent form, were bright-voiced soprano Mary Wilson and the bass Mischa Bouvier.

Bouvier's voice has a very appealing timbre, warm and robust, and so hearing the Bach cantata arias was a real pleasure. But I do have to question the decision to combine Bach and Handel in the first half of this program. Bach's forbidding Lutheranism was in perhaps too stark contrast with Handel's joyous Italianate sensuousness. In Liebster Gott, wenn werd ich sterben? (Dearest God, when will I die?) Bach set the text "Nichts, was mir gefällt, Besitzet die Welt" (Nothing that delights me belongs to this world). The singer in Sileti venti, by contrast, speaks of the soul's "felicissima laetitia" (supreme joy) as she asks to be pierced by sacred love. The performance in this video is by British soprano Sarah Fox:

In this cantata Handel and his anonymous librettist, perhaps deliberately, suggest parallels between sacred and erotic love. And Wilson's alluring voice and thrilling coloratura only heightened the confusion.

I'm very glad I took the opportunity to hear these rarely performed Handel masterpieces in the serene setting of St. Mark's Lutheran Church, one of San Francisco's best venues for music. It was a delightful way to spend a late spring Sunday afternoon. And it proved that repression can sometimes have its uses.

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1. David Kimbell. Italian Opera. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 108

As someone whose short list of favorite Bollywood movies would include Devdas (2002), Umrao Jaan (1981), Mughal-e-Azam (1960), and Sadhna (1958)—don't ask me for the other titles on the list right now—I've clearly got a major weakness for tragic-courtesan-with-a-heart-of-gold stories. And the creators of Amar Prem (Immortal Love, 1972), director Shakti Samanta and writers Arabinda Mukherjee and Ramesh Pant, know exactly how to push my emotional buttons.

Mukherjee was the writer and director of the original Bengali version of the film, Nishipadma (1970), which was based on the short story "Hinger Kochuri" by Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay. (Hinger kochuri is a typical Bengali dish of fried dough stuffed with lentils and chickpeas.) If Bandopadhyay's name sounds vaguely familiar, he was also the author of the novels Pather Panchali (1929) and Aparajito (1932), which Satyajit Ray adapted as The Apu Trilogy (1955-1959).

The childless Pushpa (Sharmila Tagore) is violently driven away from her village home by the brutality of her husband and his second wife. As Pushpa is about to commit suicide, a solicitous neighbor, Nepali Babu (Madan Puri), stops her and offers her a job in Calcutta. Of course, the job is fictional, and Pushpa discovers too late that she has been sold to a brothel. On the first night that she performs for the brothel's clients, singing "Raina beeti jaye, Shyam na aaye" (The night has passed, and Shyam (Krishna) has not yet arrived), the drunken Anand (Rajesh Khanna) follows the sound of her voice and is instantly smitten (click on the CC button for English subtitles):

Tawaif movies tend to have excellent music, and Amar Prem is no exception. The songs were composed by R. D. Burman, with lyrics by Anand Bakshi, and were performed by Lata Mangeshkar, Kishore Kumar and R. D. Burman's father S. D. Burman.

The wealthy Anand is trapped in an unhappy marriage to an faithless wife, and has been drowning his sorrows in drink and the allurements of the pleasure quarter. He immediately becomes Pushpa's patron. Although they quickly fall in love, they each recognize that they'll remain forever separated by caste and status. The melancholy mood is beautifully sustained in "Chingari koi bhadke" (A raging fire), as Anand and Pushpa drift on the Hooghly River at night:

Meanwhile, the Sharmas, a couple from Pushpa's village, move in across the way from her. Their 8-year-old son, Nandu (Bobby), is mistreated by his stepmother (Bindu) and finds a refuge with Pushpa. She, in turn, sees in him the child she never had, and lavishes affection on him.

Of course, the tenuous happiness of Anand, Pushpa, and Nandu can't be permitted to continue, as it's an implicit critique of the lovelessness of the more conventional relationships that surround them. Anand's brother-in-law (Rakesh Pandey) demands that Pushpa separate from Anand. Meanwhile, Nandu's stepmother forces Pushpa to agree never to see Nandu again; before Nandu's family takes him back to the village, though, Nandu gives Pushpa a cutting of night-blooming jasmine that she literally waters with her tears.

Twenty years later the night-blooming jasmine is a flourishing tree, and the adult Nandu (Vinod Mehra), now an engineer, returns to Calcutta. Will Nandu ever find the woman he thinks of as his real mother...?

Almost every socially-sanctioned union in the film—Anand with his unfaithful wife, Pushpa with her violent husband, and the unhappy Sharmas—seems to offer nothing but misery and emotional deprivation. The only happy marriage in the film is that of the adult Nandu with his wife (Farida Jalal). Amar Prem remains radical more than 40 years on for suggesting that true families are those formed by love.

Thanks to Rajshri Films, you can view Amar Prem online, for free, with English closed captioning.

In 19th-century fiction, a young woman of the middle classes or above faces a stark sexual double bind. As soon as she comes "out" into the marriage market, she has to use whatever exists of her family's social position and wealth and her own personal advantages to try to find a husband—preferably one significantly higher in social and economic standing than herself. Although this quest is understood by everyone around her, she cannot be too open or brazen in her angling for a rich husband without risking social censure. She cannot commit to a potential partner too soon, in case she encounters a better offer, but after she passes her mid-20s her marriage prospects diminish rapidly. And the cost of a mistake is high. A woman who becomes publicly engaged but who breaks it off is considered a faithless jilt; a woman who becomes publicly engaged but whose partner breaks it off is tainted by his rejection.

Anthony Trollope and Edith Wharton each created several characters who skirt (and sometimes transgress) the boundaries of respectability in their search for a husband. In Trollope's The American Senator (1875) we meet Arabella Trefoil, a woman fast approaching 30 who has just engaged herself to John Morton. Morton is an official in the Foreign Office and has inherited a country estate that, on her first visit, Arabella finds disappointingly modest. She then contrives to be thrown together with Lord Rufford, the richest landowner in the neighborhood, by angling for invitations to fox hunts, the homes of mutual acquaintances, and Rufford's own estate (in the company of her mother, of course: the mothers of marriage-eligible women act both as procuresses and chaperones). Arabella has to maintain her engagement to Morton, in case her scheme to hook Lord Rufford goes awry, but must also deny her engagement in order to leave herself free to pursue Rufford.

Arabella is a liar and schemer who has no scruples about using underhanded methods to try to entrap Rufford. But Rufford himself isn't above trying to take advantage of the situation to steal a kiss or an embrace; he's flattered by Arabella's attentions but struggles to avoid committing himself. And as we come to realize, despite her many shortcomings Arabella would actually be a good match for Rufford. Trollope portrays not only her greed, selfishness and dishonesty, but also her courage, her boldness, her defiance of confining social limitations, and her clear-sightedness about herself and those around her. Arabella also changes over the course of the novel, coming to realize that Morton truly loved her.

Perhaps Trollope's own relatively humble origins made him sympathetic to the underdog, but we actually wind up hoping for Arabella's ultimate success. That's not the case, for this reader at least, for the heroine of Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country (1913), Undine Spragg. Undine has all of Arabella's faults—vanity, selfishness, venality, dishonesty—but few of her virtues. Undine is also vulgar and ignorant: feigning an interest in the arts (her only real interest is in opportunities for displaying herself and jockeying for social position), she recalls seeing the actress "Sarah Burnhard" (Sarah Bernhardt), and she wants to go see "that new tenor" (presumably Enrico Caruso) in an opera she calls "Cavaleeria" (Cavalleria Rusticana).* Undine is extremely beautiful in face and form, but, along with her fellow Midwestern husband-hunters Mabel Blitch, Indiana Frusk, and Ora Chettle, is intellectually and emotionally vacant.

The discordant names and the risible malapropisms all too clearly signal Wharton's own contempt for these characters, and for Undine in particular. And here Wharton—born into a socially prominent old-money New York family, the Joneses—seems to betray her own class prejudices. She even has a minor character, Charles Bowen, explain how the commercial values that drive American society have marginalized women. Money is the bribe wives receive for remaining incurious about what their husbands are doing all day at the office, and results in a feminine fixation on clothes, jewelry, cars, and other visible signs of wealth. Undine, Bowen says, is "a monstrously perfect result of the system: the completest proof of its triumph" (Chapter 15).

Unfortunately, Wharton's disdain for Undine means that she is allowed no redeeming features. She is utterly self-absorbed and cares nothing for her husbands, her lovers or her son; they are merely the means for her social advancement. And most of the men in her life are equally cynical. For them Undine is a trophy, one more beautiful possession to place among their pictures, porcelain or tapestries—just another manifestation of their material dominance. It would be a devastating portrait of pre-war society, except that Wharton so clearly disapproves of most her characters. She tells us all too explicitly what we should think of Undine, and her judgments tend to close off our engagement with her characters.

Ironically, while Wharton herself had experience of the double bind (and the double standards) of the marriage market, it is Trollope who is able to portray a woman caught in the implacable forces of that market with the greater understanding. Both Arabella and Undine are women who trade on the promise of sex to try to make their way in a man's world, but only Arabella ultimately engages our sympathies.

Both novels are available for free in multiple formats from Project Gutenberg.

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* Oddly, Wharton gives us a scene at the opera house that doesn't fit with the work she has named. The narrator tells us that there are three "entr'actes": "the curtain fell on the first act," "the curtain fell again," and "when the last entr'acte began..." (all quotes from Chapter 5). However, Mascagni's one-act Cavalleria is usually performed with a second two-act work, a combination that would result in two intermissions (one between the operas, and one between the acts of the second opera). And, indeed, the work that was paired with Cavalleria during Caruso's 1908 Metropolitan Opera debut in the role of Turiddu was Puccini's two-act Le Villi. There are no performances by Caruso in Cavalleria at the Met before the publication date of the novel which would have had three intermissions.

Khubsoorat (Beautiful, 1980), centers on the friction between generations and sensibilities within a family.

As the hearts dotting the i's and j in his name suggest, Hrishikesh Mukherjee's films don't feature reincarnated sons seeking bloody revenge, villains with secret lairs, or heroes who single-handedly beat up armed gangs. Instead, they feature middle-class families struggling with modest dilemmas that reflect broader social issues, often presented in a gently comic way.

Nirmala Gupta (Dina Pathak) and Dwarka Prasad Gupta (Ashok Kumar) have raised a family of four sons. As is often the case, one of the parents (him) is the indulgent one, and the other (her) is the disciplinarian.

Nirmala enforces household rules of decorum, which include speaking softly, cleaning up after yourself, being on time, eating meals together, and offering food to others before taking it for yourself. She also limits her youngest son's pop music enthusiasms and her middle sons' obsessive bridge-playing. Nirmala's final, impossible task is to keep her husband on the straight and narrow; he has diabetes and a heart condition, but still tries to sneak cigarettes, tea and sweets when she's not looking.

Into this reserved, rule-bound family bursts Manju (Rekha). Manju is the irrepressible sister of the demure Anju (Aradhana), whose marriage with second son Chander has just been arranged. Manju immediately earns Nirmala's disapproval for being loud and boisterous, speaking her mind without hesitation, and generally lacking manners. It's pretty shocking to see a film heroine behave this way, and Nirmala is not amused:

Not everyone in the family has the same reaction, though:

But it's Nirmala's household, and Manju chafes under the rules she imposes:

It's like the Martial Law! How do you live here?

The youngest son, pop music-obsessed Joginder (Ranjit Chowdhry, later of FIre (1996) and Today's Special (2009), among others), tells Manju how the family manages under Nirmala's benevolent dictatorship:

The problem is, you have to fulfill your desires secretly in this house

Can anyone identify the album visible over Joginder's left shoulder?

So Manju decides to organize this hidden resistance to Nirmala's prohibitions. She encourages card- and game-playing, Joginder's music, Dwarka Prasad's gardening and tabla-playing, and the dancing of Sunder's wife (Shashikala)—which she gave up, of course, when she came into her husband's household:

The music was composed by R.D. Burman, with lyrics by Gulzar. The playback singers on "Piya Baawri" are Asha Bhosle and Ashok Kumar himself, with choreography by Gopi Krishna.

Manju and the third son, Inder (Rakesh Roshan), engage in the sort of teasing practical jokes and insult exchanges that immediately signal that they like each other. And, late '70s hair and fashion aside, you can definitely see in Rakesh where his son Hrithik got some of his good looks:

It doesn't take long for the observant Nirmala to realize what's going on between Manju and Inder, and she's not happy about it:

Inder urges Manju to charm his mother, rather than deliberately antagonize her:

You are a magician. Cast your spell on her as you have on the others

But when Manju stages a parodistic play for the other members of the family about the overthrow of a dictator, Nirmala walks in and is offended, hurt, and upset. Her rules, she tells them, arose out of love and concern for her family: she has been trying to maintain Dwarka Prasad's health, Chander and Inder's focus on family and work responsibilities, and Joginder's success in his studies. Manju realizes that she has to leave—but then a crisis occurs that requires all of her boldness, plain-speaking, and lack of deference to authority.

As Manju's reference to martial law suggests, Khubsoorat can be seen as a parable of the Emergency, with the overly strict Nirmala representing Indira Gandhi's government by decree, and the freedom-loving Manju representing the forces of opposition. (The dialogues of the film were written by Gulzar, whose own films often focussed on social issues, and whose Aandhi (1975) was banned during the Emergency.)

At the 28th Filmfare Awards Khubsoorat won Best Film, and Rekha won Best Actress. (Little did the voters know that her greatest role would come the following year in Muzaffar Ali's Umrao Jaan (1981), for which she was nominated but did not win.)

You can watch Khubsoorat on YouTube, with English closed captions, for free.

Léon Spilliaert, Self-Portrait in Mirror, 1908

On the face of it, Jacques Offenbach was the least likely composer to create the opera Les Contes d'Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffman, 1881). Offenbach wrote dozens of lightly comic operettas that satirized contemporary French political and social life, including Orphée aux Enfers (Orpheus in the Underworld, 1858), La belle Hélène (The beautiful Helen, 1864) and La Vie Parisienne (Parisian life, 1866). E.T.A. Hoffmann was the author of dark Gothic stories featuring possession, automata, vampires, doubles, and other elements of the uncanny. Most famously, Hoffmann wrote "Nußknacker und Mausekönig" (Nutcracker and Mouse King), later the basis of Tchaikovsky's ballet The Nutcracker; the story is much darker and eerier than the ballet.

Despite the apparent clash of sensibilities, Offenbach had apparently nurtured an interest in Hoffmann's tales ever since seeing the play Les Contes fantastiques d'Hoffmann (1851) by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré. More than two decades later, Offenbach began composing a serious opera based on the play.

Léon Spilliaert, Night, 1908

But the 1870s were difficult years for Offenbach: he was dogged by financial troubles and failing health. By the end of the decade he had completed most of the vocal score for Hoffmann, but changes required for the staging of the work at the Opéra-Comique—primarily tailoring the vocal parts to its resident company of singers—caused further delay. Offenbach died several months before the opera's premiere and while the score was still unfinished. Offenbach's family hired Ernest Guiraud to complete the orchestration and recitatives (at the Opéra-Comique spoken dialogue was employed). At the behest of Léon Carvalho, the impresario of the Opéra-Comique, Guiraud also made extensive cuts to the score (including an entire act).

As a result, the opera has never had a fixed form, but rather multiple versions. Producers and directors assembled the available materials (some by Offenbach and some by Guiraud and other composers) as they chose. Recently Jean-Christophe Keck and Michael Kaye have produced what they term an "integral edition" that attempts to restore as much of Offenbach's original vision (and music) for the work as possible. Crucially, it includes the Muse's appearance at the beginning of the Prologue and her transformation into Hoffmann's companion Nicklausse, which was omitted from Guiraud's version of the opera. It is Keck and Kaye's edition that was the basis for the striking production by director Laurent Pelly which we saw last week at the San Francisco Opera.

Léon Spilliaert, Vertigo, Magic Staircase (1908)

The opera includes Hoffmann himself as a character and incorporates elements from four of his tales: "Don Juan," "The Sandman," "Councillor Krespel," and "The Lost Reflection." The framing prologue and epilogue take place at a tavern adjacent to the theater where Stella, the object of Hoffmann's unrequited love, is performing the role of Donna Anna in Mozart's Don Giovanni. While waiting for the performance to be over, a drunken and despairing Hoffmann regales the bar with the stories of three of his loves. First there is Olympia, who seems like a vision of beauty to Hoffmann, but who turns out to be a mechanical singing doll, and who is ultimately destroyed by the mad scientist Coppélius. Then there is Antonia, a tragically ill woman for whom singing may prove fatal, and who falls under the spell of the sinister Dr. Miracle. Finally, there is the temptress Giulietta, a Venetian courtesan who conspires with Hoffmann's enemy, the evil sorcerer Dapertutto, to steal Hoffmann's soul. As Hoffmann finishes his stories, Stella enters the tavern, sees the miserable and abject Hoffmann, and leaves with his nemesis, the villainous Councillor Lindorf. The anguished Hoffmann is left alone with his Muse as the curtain falls.

Pelly's production is inspired by the art of Léon Spilliaert, a Belgian artist who was born the year of Hoffmann's premiere. Spilliaert's paintings feature eerie landscapes and interiors, sometimes empty and sometimes containing solitary, isolated figures. The connection to the Gothic world of E.T.A. Hoffmann is generally one of mood, rather than specific imagery. Pelly, set designer Chantal Thomas, and lighting designer Joël Adam created some striking stage images involving skewed perspective. But if the virtually monochromatic dark blue sets and stark, angled lighting effectively created an oppressive atmosphere, they became visually monotonous after a time; the billowing green curtains that appear in the Giulietta act were a relief. And there was at least one miscalculation: when the spirit of Antonia's dead mother appears, it is as a skull-like projection that visually echoes some of Spilliaert's self-portraits. But Antonia is supposed to be inexorably drawn to her mother's memory; it's hard to imagine anyone being drawn to this nightmarish image.

The music of Hoffmann covers an extremely wide range of moods, from comic songs and drinking choruses to dark, brooding music reminiscent of Wagner. And it contains one of the most beautiful duets in opera, the famous Barcarolle that opens the Giulietta act (the video below was taken from Pelly's staging of this production at the Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona, six months ago):

San Francisco's cast was exceptional. Matthew Polenzani brought a lyrical tenor and an ardent characterization to his portrayal of Hoffmann. As the four villains, Christian Van Horn's dark voice and tall, slender figure (he towered over Polenzani's Hoffmann and Natalie Dessay's Antonia) made him especially sinister. Angela Brower sang appealingly in the double role of the Muse and Nicklausse. And two of Hoffman's four love objects deserve special mention. As the dying Antonia, Natalie Dessay gave an affecting and movingly sung performance. And Hye Jung Lee deftly handled both Olympia's stratospheric coloratura and strenuous comedy (at one point Pelly has her sailing high in the air on a crane, and at another roller-skating in and around crowds of people onstage, all the while tossing off high notes left and right).

Hoffman has been recorded many times, but perhaps the first choice remains the 1948 recording featuring the stars, chorus and orchestra of the Opéra-Comique conducted by André Cluytens. It's in mono sound, and uses a "bad" performing edition that includes Guiraud's recitatives, the interpolated "Diamond Aria" and Barcarolle septet, and mis-ordered acts (the Giulietta act comes second, rather than third as Offenbach intended and narrative logic demands). But with performances this good, it doesn't matter. On video, the version staged by film director John Schlesinger at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in the early 1980s featuring Plácido Domingo as Hoffmann, Luciana Serra as Olympia, Ileana Cotrubas as a powerfully affecting Antonia, and Agnes Baltsa as Giulietta, remains a favorite.

Les Contes d'Hoffmann will be performed at the San Francisco Opera through July 6.

Indian cinema is often divided into commercial movies (Bollywood, Kollywood, et al.) and art films (parallel cinema). However, there are films that bridge the two categories: they have the look, subject matter, and ambiguity of parallel cinema, while using the stars (and often the song sequences) of mainstream Bollywood. Teesri Kasam (The Third Vow, 1966), directed by Basu Bhattacharya, features major stars in Raj Kapoor and Waheeda Rehman; and in its wistful, melancholy scenario (based on Phanishwarnath Renu's short story "Maare Gaye Gulfam") it employs parallel cinema's narrative compression and simplicity of means.

Hiraman (Raj Kapoor) is a bullock-cart driver who is hired one night to transport the nautanki dancer Hirabai (Waheeda Rehman) to a village fair for her next engagement.

The sleeping Hirabai

The gorgeous cinematography of Teesri Kasam is by Subrata Mitra, Satyajit Ray's cinematographer for the Apu Trilogy, among other films. Bhattacharya himself had been an assistant to another towering figure of Bengali film, Bimal Roy. As a result, Teesri Kasam looks as though it could have been filmed in the 1950s, and that's intended as a high compliment.

The trip takes 30 hours, and over the course of the journey the naïve Hiraman and the worldly Hirabai form a friendship that for him, at least, borders on love. She insists that they call each other "Meeta"—close friend—because of the name they share ("Hira," meaning "jewel").

When they reach the banks of a river and she decides to bathe, he tells her to use the area reserved for unmarried girls. Since most men she encounters assume that she's not only sexually experienced but available, she's surprised and touched by Hiraman's insistence.

Hiraman and Hirabai at the river

Hiraman helps the long hours pass by singing songs from "older times," such as the lovely, sad "Sajanwa Bairi Ho Gaye Hamar" (My beloved has become my enemy):

The song tells of a woman who is forever estranged from a distant lover, and who feels alone and bereft; Hirabai's tears suggest that this is a story with personal resonance, although we are never given her backstory. Teesri Kasam is filled with superb music, composed by Shankar-Jaikishen with lyrics by Shailendra. "Sajanwa Bairi" is sung by Mukesh; the film's other playback singers include Asha Bhosle, Lata Mangeshkar, and Manna Dey, among others.

As they travel, Hirabai insists that they share the hardships and pleasures of the road as equals. When Hiraman serves a lunch of rice and yogurt bought from a nearby village, Hirabai refuses to eat unless he eats with her rather than waiting for her (as his paying guest) to finish. And when they finally arrive at the fair, Hiraman buys Hirabai some tea, but won't drink any himself. When Hirabai asks him why not, he says that unmarried men shouldn't drink tea:

Hirabai's amused response:

This sly suggestion of mutual attraction is surprising in both its subtlety and its acknowledgement of female desire and sexual agency.

Hirabai joins her dance company and invites Hiraman to come see her perform the next night. The film's wonderful dance sequences were choreographed by Lachchu Maharaj, and Rehman is a skilled and expressive dancer. In "Paan Khaye Saiya" she complains about a lover who is too caught up in his betel-leaf habit to pay her any attention; her mock-pouting expressions are delightful:

When a drunken customer starts making crude remarks about Hirabai, Hiraman becomes outraged and starts a fight. Hirabai later quarrels with him over this incident. "Are you going to fight with the whole world?" she asks him; rude and suggestive comments are clearly something she has to deal with constantly.

As are outright propositions. After her first show the local thakur (landlord) comes backstage and makes her a blunt money-for-sex offer. In the past, clearly, Hirabai has accepted similar deals, which her manager treats as a matter of course. But Hiraman's respectful treatment of her has given Hirabai a new sense of self-worth, and she refuses the thakur. He assumes that she's sleeping with Hiraman, and sneers at her choice of lover; she realizes that neither man sees her for who she really is:

In your eyes I'm a whore and in his eyes a goddess

She also realizes the impossibility of living up to Hiraman's idealization of her. One of the dances in the company's repertory is the legend of the pure and steadfast love of Laila and Majnu. "We can play Laila every night," Hirabai tells one of the other dancers, but

Hirabai's illusions were thoroughly smashed long ago, and as a result she can't bear the thought of shattering Hiraman's. And although she allows herself a brief moment in which to imagine herself in the role of a rural wife and mother,

Hirabai gazing into the mirror as a demure wife

she also realizes that she is utterly unsuited to such a life. Even though she cares deeply about Hiraman, Hirabai recognizes that they inhabit different worlds. Sometimes, no matter how much we might wish otherwise, love can't conquer all, and Hirabai finds herself faced with making a Laila-like self-sacrifice...

Teesri Kasam is a minor-key masterpiece that rewards multiple viewings. For an insightful essay about the film, please see Philip's Fil-ums.

Miah Persson as Fiordiligi and Anke Vondung as Dorabella
in the 2006 Glyndebourne production of Così fan tutte

Two soldiers, Ferrando and Guglielmo, make a bet on the fidelity of their girlfriends, the sisters Dorabella and Fiordiligi. The men pretend to get called up to war, and then disguise themselves as copiously-mustached Albanians (!?) to try to woo each other’s sweethearts: Ferrando tries to seduce Fiordiligi, while Guglielmo makes a play for Dorabella. At first (to the men's secret delight) the women rebuff these strange and ardent new suitors. But over the course of a single day both sisters, to the men's dismay, unexpectedly yield. When the men reveal their disguises, the original couples are abruptly restored, and the chagrined and contrite women promise to remain true from now on. "I believe you," both men tell their lovers, "but I won't put it to the test."

Così fan tutte, ossia La scuola degli amanti (All women do the same, or the School for Lovers, 1791) was the third and final collaboration between Mozart and librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte. The first two, Le Nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro, 1786) and Don Giovanni (Don Juan, 1787), regularly vie for the title of the greatest opera ever written (my vote goes firmly to Figaro in that contest). But Così—at least for the first 150 years or so after its premiere—had a very different reception.

In 1791 Friedrich Schröder called Da Ponte's libretto "a miserable thing, that debases all women." An anonymous reviewer that same year called it "a miserable Italian piece of work" [1]. Nearly a century later, the critic Eduard Hanslick wrote that "the boundless triviality of the libretto everywhere deals a death blow to Mozart’s lovely music." Richard Wagner thought that the libretto would have "desecrated" Mozart's music if the music had been any good, which (according to Wagner) it wasn't [2].

It's hard not to agree with Schröder's judgment about the libretto's misogyny. Ferrando and Guglielmo may be foolish and manipulative, but Dorabella and Fiordiligi are unfaithful (and a bit dim-witted)—as all women are, according to the title. Peter Sellars' modern-dress production attempted to redeem the story by indicating that the sisters see through the men's half-hearted disguises immediately, and decide to teach them a lesson (or, perhaps, explore their mutual curiosity). But unexpectedly, each of them really begins to fall for her "Albanian." Sellars' version ends without the couples reuniting; instead, the characters reel about the stage as the curtain falls, their former bonds of friendship and love forever shattered. But Sellars' version goes against the grain of the libretto (he's even been accused of mistranslating it to make his points [3]). There's nothing in Da Ponte's words to suggest that the women aren't really taken in by Ferrando and Guglielmo's absurd disguises.

Another intriguing possibility that some directors have explored is that the original couples—Ferrando and Dorabella, Guglielmo and Fiordiligi—are mismatched, which in terms of sensibilities (and operatic conventions) they are. Ferrando and Fiordiligi have both comic and serious elements in their characters, while Guglielmo and Dorabella are more straightforwardly comic. In other Mozart operas, the "mixed" characters (the Count and Countess in Figaro, Belmonte and Konstanze in Die Entführung aus dem Serail (Abduction from the Harem, 1781)) are coupled, as are the buffa characters (Figaro and Susanna, Pedrillo and Blonde). Also, in terms of the emerging conventions of voice type (though they were conventions that were not yet fully established, and which Mozart did not generally follow), the leading tenor (Ferrando) was usually matched with the leading soprano (Fiordiligi). But if the original couples are mismatched, a new arrangement would be better for everyone, no?

The problems presented by Così are only deepened by Mozart's music, because it is among the most sublime he ever wrote, especially in the numerous ensembles. In "Soave sia il vento," Fiordiligi, Dorabella, and the cynical Don Alfonso (who has goaded the men into their bet, and is working to make them lose it) bid farewell to the men as they head to war—or so the sisters think:

The words in Italian and English are: "Soave sia il vento, / Tranquilla sia l'onda / Ed ogni elemento / Benigno risponda / Ai nostri desir" (May the breezes be gentle, and the waves be calm, and all the elements smile on them in response to our wishes). This video is from the 1996 production at the Palais Garnier, Paris, with Susan Graham as Dorabella, Susan Chilcott as Fiordiligi, and William Shimell as Don Alfonso.

As Bernard Williams has pointed out about this trio in his brilliant essay "Passion and Cynicism: Remarks on 'Così fan tutte'" (included in the collection On Opera, Yale University Press, 2006), "already at that early moment—the earliest possible moment—we can hear something of the reserves of desire which are going to engulf these ladies' conventional commitments" [4].

The depth of feeling expressed by Mozart's music complicates the cynical farce of Da Ponte's plot, and in Williams' view, contradicts its misogyny. Through Mozart's music, "if Così...says anything special about women's feelings, it is that they are more serious than men's" [5]. This is especially apparent in the character of Fiordiligi, who resists seduction longer, and who is more anguished about her newfound desire, than the light-hearted Dorabella. In "Per pietà," Fiordiligi begs for pity from her absent lover for the new feelings that have overwhelmed her, and which she is trying, unsuccessfully, to resist:

Cecilia Bartoli in the 2000 Zurich production

In Williams' view, the attachments of the original couples, based on social expectations and convention, are overthrown when both women (but especially Fiordiligi) discover their true desires. But this means that there is a bitter, even tragic, dimension to the restoration of the social order at the end, where the women "are briskly, indeed brutally, returned to a conventional arrangement which was grounded, as we were shown, in shallower sentiments." As Williams concludes,

"If one feels that Mozart in this work agreed that it was better so, then one may be able to hear the ambivalent end of the second act as a convinced, if rather wry, celebration of a return from danger. If on the other hand one finds, as I do, that the end makes a rather stunned and hollow sound, one may feel that this work is more concerned to display the demands of the world against feeling than it is to justify them." [6]

There are several excellent recordings of Così. For more than a generation the standard was set by the 1962 version featuring Elizabeth Schwarzkopf as Fiordiligi, Christa Ludwig as Dorabella, Alfredo Kraus as Ferrando, Giuseppi Taddei as Guglielmo, and Walter Berry as Don Alfonso, conducted by Karl Böhm. More recently a superb period-instrument version was issued on Harmonia Mundi, with Veronique Gens, Bernarda Fink, Werner Güra, Marcel Boone, and Pietro Spagnoli accompanied by Concerto Köln conducted by René Jacobs. On DVD the Glyndebourne production from which the still above was taken features a cast of youthful, good-looking lovers (Miah Persson, Anke Vondung, Topi Lehtipuu and Luca Pisaroni) in handsome costumes and settings.

Live, the recent San Francisco Opera production (seen June 12) was a disappointment. It featured an excellent Fiordiligi (Ellie Dehn) and Guglielmo (Philippe Sly). But Christel Lötzsch as Dorabella, in the difficult position of stepping in for the previously announced Heidi Stober, had such a disconcertingly wide vibrato that her voice did not blend well in the ensembles; nor did the slightly nasal tenor of the Ferrando, Francesco Demuro. The greatest problem, though, was the slack-paced conducting by SFO music director Nicola Luisotti, who wallowed in Mozart's lovely melodies as though he were instead conducting a Puccinian tragedy. It completely drained the production of comic energy, did the singers no favors, and made for a long and oddly dispiriting evening in the theater.

By far the best live performance I've seen was by the young singers of the Merola Opera program in a 2001 production directed by John Copley, with musical direction by Scott Bergeson; it was so good that it transformed my view of the opera. At the beginning it was clear that the sisters (Elizabeth Caballero and Sarah Kleeman) were enjoying the theatricality of their own emotions; later, those emotions deepened, and real feelings came powerfully into play for all of the lovers. By the way, the cast we saw included Bryan Hymel as Ferrando, who triumphed last year in Les Troyens.

Copley also staged the comic bits with Despina (Saundra DeAthos), the women's maid, with such cleverness that they were actually funny—a rarity, in my experience. The direction was highly detailed, but never fussy, and made the piece work onstage in a way that it generally hasn't for me before or since. But given the work's complexities and contradictions, perhaps the scarcity of productions so carefully thought through, well performed, and emotionally satisfying shouldn't be a surprise.

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1. Otto Eric Deutsch, Mozart: A Documentary Biography, Stanford University Press, 1965, pp. 394-395.

2. Bruce Alan Brown, W. A. Mozart: Così fan tutte (Cambridge Opera Handbooks), Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 172.

3. Brown, p. 181.

4. Bernard Williams, On Opera, Yale University Press, 2006, p. 46.

5. Williams, p. 45.

6. Williams, p. 47-48.

"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again." The famous opening of Daphne du Maurier's novel Rebecca (Doubleday, 1938) evokes dreams, or perhaps nightmares, and nostalgia for what is irrevocably lost, encapsulating (though we don't know it yet) the journey its heroine will undertake over the course of the novel.

The heroine—whose name we never learn—is a young, shy and naïve girl who has been hired as a ladies' companion. While staying with her overbearing employer in Monte Carlo, she encounters the brooding widower Maximilian de Winter, and they begin to spend time together. When de Winter learns that she is about to leave for America with her employer, he abruptly proposes marriage, and she accepts, although her first prescient response is "I don't belong to your sort of world." And no sooner does she return with de Winter to Manderley, his family estate on the southwestern coast of England, than she begins to discover how right she was.

At Manderley the couple's honeymoon idyll is shattered, as the new Mrs. de Winter everywhere encounters the indelible traces of de Winter's first wife, Rebecca. Rebecca was seemingly perfect: beautiful, graceful, tasteful, at ease in every situation, a gracious hostess and a beloved mistress of the household. In contrast the new Mrs. de Winter is uncertain, clumsy, and feels at every turn her inferiority to the worldly Rebecca. Anyone who has ever felt the awkwardness of entering a social situation governed by unstated rules that everyone else seems to know instinctively—and that's pretty much all of us—can't help but empathize with her.

Our heroine's feelings of inadequacy are made infinitely worse by the malevolent housekeeper Mrs. Danvers, who preys on her insecurities and has an identification with Rebecca that is unhealthily close.

Looming over everything is the mystery of Rebecca's fate: she apparently drowned in a boating accident, and Maxim de Winter identified the battered body that washed up on shore. But then her sunken boat is discovered, and inside is a woman's corpse...

The film rights to Rebecca were bought by producer David O. Selznick (who also produced Gone With the Wind (1939)), and it became the first movie Alfred Hitchcock directed in Hollywood. The two men clashed over the script of the film, to which Hitchcock ill-advisedly tried to add scenes not in Du Maurier's book that appealed to his earthy sense of humor. One of Selznick's notorious memos to Hitchcock read in part:

"[Every] little thing that the girl does in the book, her reactions of running away from guests, and the tiny things that indicate her nervousness and her self-consciousness and her gaucherie are all so brilliant in the book that every woman who has read it has adored the girl and has understood her psychology, has cringed with embarrassment for her, yet has understood exactly what was going through her mind....[Your changes in the script] have removed all the subtleties and substituted big broad strokes which in outline form betray...just how bad a picture it would make without the little feminine things which are so recognizable and which make every woman say, 'I know just how she feels...I know just what she is going through...'" [1]

Despite the many brilliant Hitchcockian touches in the film, the director claimed in his famous interviews with François Truffaut that "it's not a Hitchcock picture" [2]. In fact, as Truffaut points out, with its emphasis on the heroine's state of mind and its theme of over-identification, the film is a template for several of Hitchcock's later masterpieces such as Notorious (1946) and Vertigo (1957). Franz Waxman's haunting, evocative soundtrack for Rebecca also seems to have been a model (in emotional, if not musical terms) for Bernard Herrmann's great score for Vertigo.

Although the solution to the mystery had to be changed to satisfy the Production Code, the film is remarkably faithful to the atmosphere of the book. And the touches added by Hitchcock, including the slightly altered dénouement, are highly effective. In one example, as Maxim and his bride drive up to Manderley for the first time a sudden rainstorm breaks. (In the novel, it's sunny.) The new Mrs. de Winter is quickly soaked to the skin, and so as she meets the impeccable Mrs. Danvers and the household staff who have been assembled to greet her, she looks bedraggled, lost and forlorn—an outward representation of her inner anxieties.

The casting is perfect, from Joan Fontaine's tremulous heroine, to Laurence Olivier's dark, enigmatic Maxim, to Dame Judith Anderson's creepily effective Mrs. Danvers. Rebecca went on to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, the only Hitchcock film to be so honored (although the award was actually given to Selznick, the film's producer). George Bruce also received the Academy Award for Best Cinematography, but Hitchcock was bypassed for Best Director (as he would be throughout his career).

Rebecca was also adapted into an Indian movie, Kohraa (Fog, 1964), directed by Guru Dutt's former art director Biren Nag and starring Waheeda Rehman. For an excellent review with many tantalizing stills, please see MemsaabStory.

Update 20 July 2013: Thanks to Rajshri Films, Kohraa is available for viewing on YouTube with English captions, for free.

Update 21 July 2013: M. Lapin has alerted me that there are a number of people who profess to love du Maurier's novel, but hate the Hitchcock film. In her post "Hitchcock Got 'Rebecca' Dead Wrong: Sucking the Soul out of a Classic Novel," Elizabeth Langosy complains about Joan Fontaine's "flirty smile and curled hair...[and] too-sophisticated voice" and Judith Anderson's physiognomy, which "looks nothing like the skeletal housekeeper described in the book." She also dislikes the screenplay's differences from the novel, in particular a scene where Olivier's Maxim de Winter is standing on a cliff in Monte Carlo, staring mesmerized at the crashing waves below and evidently on the verge of throwing himself over the edge.

To take her objections one at a time, I guess a "flirty smile" is in the eye of the beholder; I thought Fontaine embodied the heroine's shyness, uncertainty and desire to please painfully well. As for her hairstyle, the heroine is described by du Maurier as having "straight, bobbed hair," and indeed Fontaine's hair is shoulder-length. But it is often pulled back, flattened down, and otherwise deglamorized or made to look schoolgirlish. It's not a literal interpretation of du Maurier's description, but it captures its plain, unstylish essence:

As for her too-sophisticated voice in the opening scene of the film, the narration is in flashback, after the events of the film have taken place. As Maxim tells her in both book and movie after the revelation of Rebecca's fate, "It's gone forever, that funny, young, lost look that I loved. It won't come back again...You are so much older...." (p. 299 of my Avon paperback edition). I think the contrast between the halting, naïve girl who marries Maxim, and the more sophisticated woman recounting her dream at the opening of the film, is deliberate. Whether the effect is overdone is matter of taste, but I don't find it out of keeping with the character.

As for Judith Anderson not looking skeletal, I disagree. She is often lit by cinematographer George Bruce in a way that emphasizes her eyes, forehead and cheekbones, leaving the lower part of her face in shadow. With her severe, pulled-back hair, it indeed makes her face look skull-like:

And as for the scene where Maxim is apparently contemplating suicide, it is a substitute for one in the book where he drives the heroine to a Monte Carlo clifftop and stands looking over the edge, lost in thought. As we and the heroine discover later, he isn't thinking about suicide, but revisiting a place where he contemplated murder. This is another case where I think Hitchcock's change works very well on its own terms, making the aloof, enigmatic Maxim a more sympathetic figure than he might otherwise have appeared.

None of the differences between the novel and Hitchcock's film version "suck the soul out of the novel," in my view. As I wrote above, despite these differences, "the film is remarkably faithful to the atmosphere of the book." So I have to think that the objections of Langosy and others are rooted in something else; perhaps they simply can't tolerate any deviation from the letter of the book. But representing this novel, or any novel, that faithfully would require hours and hours of screentime. To bring in a version that is merely feature-length necessarily requires compressions, elisions and changes to the source. In Hitchcock's Rebecca, those differences from du Maurier's novel seem to me to be thoughtfully considered and effective.

Longosy praises the 1979 BBC adaptation written by Hugh Whitemore; she writes, "Although this adaptation takes four hours to tell the story, it replicates as closely as possible du Maurier’s depiction of the characters and events." That "although," I think, is curious; shouldn't it instead be "because"? While sheer length is not sufficient to guarantee scene-by-scene faithfulness to a literary source, I think it is a necessary precondition. The BBC miniseries features Joanna David (later Elizabeth Bennett's Aunt Gardiner in the great 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride & Prejudice) as the heroine, Jeremy Brett (later Granada TV's Sherlock Holmes) as Maxim, and Anna Massey (later Miss Stanbury in the BBC's 2004 adaptation of He Knew He Was Right) as Mrs. Danvers. The cast is certainly promising; if I have a chance to see it (it has never been issued on video, to my knowledge) I'll make a further report.

--

1. Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory, Routledge, 1988, p. 43.
2. François Truffaut, Hitchcock, Simon and Schuster, 1984, p. 127.

Last week we caught up with three movies released in the second half of 2012 that feature second- and third-generation Bollywood actors: Student of the Year, Bol Bachchan, and Teri Meri Kahaani. Unfortunately, it wasn't only the stars that were second- and third-generation.

Student of the Year feels like a pile of old scripts in Karan Johar's office got accidentally shredded and then randomly reassembled. It combines the "son seeking domineering father's approval" plot of Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (Sometimes joy, sometimes sorrow, 2001) with the "two boys in love with the same girl" plot and flashback structure of Kal Ho Naa Ho (Tomorrow may never come, 2003) and the swishy gay stereotypes of Dostana (Friendship, 2008). But most of all, SOTY feels like the college scenes from Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (Something is happening, 1998) stretched into a feature-length movie (and that's not intended as a recommendation).

Shanaya (Alia Bhatt, daughter of director/producer Mahesh Bhatt and actress/director Soni Razdan) is the queen of St. Teresa's College; the role seems modelled in equal parts on Kareena Kapoor's Pooja (from K3G) and Alicia Silverstone's Cher (from Clueless (1995)). Despite her queen-bee status she's taken for granted by her boyfriend Rohan (Varun Dhawan, son of director David Dhawan), who wants to be a rock star but at the same time craves the approval of his father Ashok, a corrupt business tycoon. New man on campus Abhimanyu (Sidharth Malhotra, not a star kid) decides to help out Shanaya by flirting with her to make Rohan jealous, but soon realizes that he's really falling in love with her himself—the subtext of "Radha":

(Music: Vishal-Shekar; lyrics: Anvita Dutt Guptan; playback singers: Shreya Ghoshal, Udit Narayan, and Vishal Dadlani)

Meanwhile, Rohan resents the way the self-made Abhi has ingratiated himself with Rohan's father. The tensions among the three come to a head during the annual Student of the Year competition, when something happens to cause a final break between Rohan and Abhi.

That "something" is referred to by the other characters throughout the film in the hushed tones usually reserved for mass catastrophes. What happened isn't revealed until the film's final scenes, but my partner and I had guessed it by the interval, making the second half pretty suspenseless. And despite the attempts by director Johar and screenwriter Rensil D'Silva to give the wealthy Shanaya and Rohan troubled home lives (see, even rich kids have problems!), the sheer level of privilege on display made it hard to feel like anything truly significant was at stake for these characters. Family money will clearly enable them to come out ahead in "the competition of life," as one of the film's taglines has it.

On the plus side, Alia Bhatt has striking, unconventional looks, and Sidharth Malhotra is tall, hunky and has an assured screen presence. On the negative side, Rishi Kapoor's Dean Vashist is a compendium of offensive gay stereotypes, such as fawning over the straight sports coach (Ronit Roy) and acting with undisguised hostility towards his wife (Prachi Shah).

The four friends/sidekicks of Shanaya, Rohan and Abhi, who include the unhappy Sudo (Kayoze Irani, son of actor Boman Irani), are woefully underdeveloped even though they narrate the film. In particular, I thought the subplot involving Shruti (Mansi Rachh), Shanaya's best friend, had a lot of unexplored potential. Shruti clearly has a major girl-crush on Shanaya, and it's not clear whether those intense feelings are developing into romantic ones. But that subplot and its possible complications are dropped, alas, and the film seems overeager to heterosexualize the present-day Shruti. Giving her story more screen time would have made SOTY a different and more interesting film.

Bol Bachchan (Say "Bachchan") is also a mashup, this time of Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Gol Maal (Confusion, 1979) and Rohit Shetty's slapstick Golmaal series. After breaking into a locked Hindu temple to rescue a child, Abbas Ali (Abhishek Bachchan, son of actors Amitabh Bachchan and Jaya Bhaduri Bachchan) is asked for his name by the village strongman, Prithviraj (Ajay Devgn, son of director Veeru Devgan). Before he can answer, a friend (played by Krishna Abhishek) blurts out "Abhishek Bachchan!" That Abhishek Bachchan's character is called Abhishek Bachchan is one of the movie's recurring gags; others include Prithviraj speaking in mangled English, and the moustached Abhishek pretending to have a clean-shaven twin named, of course, Abbas Ali.

This alleged comedy does have its (few) moments of brainless fun, and it's clear that Abhishek (the actor) is quite comfortable in comic roles. But for me the high point of the movie was the opening credit sequence, featuring Amitabh Bachchan schooling both younger actors in screen charisma, grace, comic timing, and elocution; it goes swiftly downhill from there:

(Music: Himesh Reshamiya; lyrics: Farhad-Sajid; playback singers: Amitabh Bachchan, Abhishek Bachchan, Ajay Devgan, Himesh Reshamiya, Mamta Sharma and Vineet Singh)

Teri Meri Kahaani (Our Story) features three love stories set in periods fifty years apart: 1960, 2010, and 1910. In 1960, Govind (Shahid Kapoor, son of actor Pankaj Kapur and actress/dancer Neelima Azeem) is an aspiring music director in Bombay who meets starlet Ruksar (Priyanka Chopra, not a star kid); love and misunderstandings ensue. The costume, hair, and musical styles seem modelled on movies from significantly later in the decade, such as Teesri Manzil (The Third Floor, 1967); nonetheless, it's fun to watch Shahid channel his inner Shammi in "Jabse Mere Dil Ko Uff":

(Music: Sajid-Wajid; lyrics: Prasoon Joshi; playback singers: Sonu Nigam and Sunidhi Chauhan)

The 2010 section tries to show a modern romance conducted via Facebook and Twitter, but director Kunal Kohli's onscreen use of texting acronyms feels self-conscious and instantly dated. Krishna (Shahid) is a college student who has just broken up with his girlfriend Meera (Neha Sharma) when he meets—who else?—Radha (Priyanka). Meera takes revenge by posting embarrassing photos of Krish online, and he retaliates in kind. Radha can be excused if she wonders about this guy's emotional maturity.

In 1910, Javed (Shahid), a poet of wine, women and song, woos Aradhana (Priyanka), the daughter of a freedom fighter. However, she is distressed by his lack of commitment (both political and emotional), and her father disapproves of the match. This part of the film feels like it lost crucial pieces of its conclusion in the editing room; director Kohli makes the ending feel rushed and incomplete.

We also discover here that Javed and Aradhana have vowed to be together in all their lives to come. But if that is what is supposed to tie these stories together, either our lovers are short-lived (are they reborn every 50 years?), or Kohli and his screenwriter Robin Bhatt (one of Alia's uncles, to bring this full circle) couldn't be bothered to be coherent and thought we wouldn't notice.

My advice, for what it's worth: for a better Shahid Kapoor movie, watch Vivah (Marriage, 2006); for a better Abhishek Bachchan comedy co-starring his father, watch Bunty aur Babli (2005); and for a better Karan Johar-associated film, watch Kal Ho Naa Ho.

Many thanks to my readers

The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence

Awāra

Suggested reading: Kerry Howley, Hilary Mantel, and Andrea DenHoed

Aradhana

A Late Quartet

Suggested reading: Revealing likes, illusory control, and sadistic parents

Prem Kahani

Farewell to Caffe Venezia Opera Night

Aap Ki Kasam

Philip Pullman's Sally Lockhart mysteries

Handel's Apollo e Dafne and Sileti venti

Amar Prem

Gold Diggers of the Gilded Age: Arabella Trefoil vs. Undine Spragg

Khubsoorat

Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann

Teesri Kasam

Was Mozart a misogynist?: Così fan tutte

Rebecca

Second- and third-generation stars, and films: Student of the Year, Bol Bachchan, Teri Meri Kahaani