Little Women 2019

I was excited when I heard about this project, but then someone questioned on Facebook the need for a remake at all when the 1994 Gillian Armstrong version was still perfectly good (Please read this superb interview with Armstrong on her film here). And it’s true, I did love that film. Winona Ryder was the quintessential Jo.

But a friend who broke her arm wanted to watch the film, and I ended up going to the preview in a cinema. Here are my thoughts:

1 a. One of my niggling objections to the casting of the new film was that in my mind, Jo should be darkhaired as should Meg. I don’t know if these ideas are reflected in the novel or just that my imagination has been crystalised by the 1994 film. I thought Saoirse Ronan too pretty to play Jo and that she and Emma Watson (who plays Meg) could have swapped roles.
In the end, the enjoyed both actresses performances in the roles they were assigned to and I can’t imagine them any other way.
b. The casting that most annoyed me in the film was that of Florence Pugh as Amy. She was fine as the grown up Amy, but looked ridiculous as the girl Amy. The 1994 film had a different actress playing the child Amy from the woman and that realistically depicted how Laurie might see her in an entirely different light. Pugh does her best by playing Amy entirely different from child to woman, but it’s not enough.
c. Also, before the film, I’d been telling a friend how Laura Derne is my new girl crush, but somehow I found her too … smiley … in the film. I like the idea of Marmee being a warm and welcoming presence, but somehow I didn’t love Derne’s take on the character.

2. The dramatic difference between the 2019 and 1994 films is the structure. Greta Gerwig tells her story backwards, so that we are introduced to the pairing of Jo and (a much younger looking) Bhaer and Amy and Laurie early on. It thus preempts the shock and angst the reader of the novel felt at Jo’s rejection of Laurie and his defection to Amy while Jo then gets stuck with a grumpy old man. It also circumvented any irritation I might have felt about watching essentially the same film two decades later.

3. Another of my casting concerns was that Timothee Chalamet looked too much of a fop for him to be an attractive Laurie. But again, because the film opens with Laurie in fop-mode as an adult, it works.

4. The Beth bits are as long drawn out and tear-inducing as in the book. Take enough tissues along.

5. Gerwig plays up the feminism of the novel, with her characters explicitly acknowledging how limited the choices are for young women, even as the “little women” are encouraged by their parents to be the best versions of themselves.

6.There are some delightful additions, such as the conversation between Jo’s publisher and his wife, in which she asks “how come you never ask me about my mother?” This was possibly my favourite moment of the film.

7. A friend asked me who Meryl Street plays in the film – one would have expected it to be Marmie – and was disconcerted that she was consigned to Aunt March. But in Gerwig’s and Streep’s hands, Aunt March turns out to be one of the most memorable characters of the film.

8. The ending of the the novel, in which Jo settles for chooses Bhaer has annoyed sharply divided readers. Gerwig offers a cheeky meta-take on why the novel might have ended on this note.

9. The film also presents Alcott’s ending – with Jo happily married and having started a school –  in a somewhat slo-mo, overly saccharine mode that casts doubts on how we are supposed to read it. It is interspersed with shots of Jo watching her book being printed, offering us the satisfaction of a possibility that Alcott didn’t.

10. This is possibly a film we didn’t need, but I’m glad we have it all the same.

The Zoya Factor movie

So I finally got around to watching this, and I have mixed feelings.

• When the film was announced, I was dismayed that Sonam Kapoor would be playing Zoya. One of the defining characteristics of a chick lit protoganist is that – unlike the protoganist of the Harlequin romance – she is ordinary looking. Moreover, Zoya is defined by her masses of curly hair and being short, looking like a child basically. Sonam is the quintessential Bollywood glamazon – she is tall, has long poker straight hair and classically beautiful.
  They did make an attempt to remain true to the novel by having Sonam have curly hair during most of the film, but it was obvious she was rocking stiff salon-made curls.
• Apart from that, sadly, Sonam over-acted the part. She looked and did best when Zoya was in full Zoya Mata mode, but when she had to play an down-to-earth advertising executive, she was distinctly hammy.
• I was also not convinced that Dulquer Salman could carry off Nikhil Khoda, my favourite novelistic hero (possibly even superseding Mr Darcy, hawwww!), although I couldn’t think of anyone who could possibly play him instead (ideas anyone?). Dulquer acquitted himself quite well, and he’s sorta stuck in my head as Nikhil now, for better or for worse.
• Some of the side characters gave pretty good performances – the actors playing Robin Rawal and particularly Shivee for example. I also thought the girl that was the hybrid of Sonali of Sonali’s Gupshup and Shanta, the lone female sports reporter, stood out. I’m not so hot on Zoravar, who gave off a crazed vibe, and Harry, who had a weird hairstyle.
• Obviously, many minor plot points and characters (Eppa!, Rinku Chachi! Monita’s children! Neeelo!) were cut, though I think most of the significant parts stayed. One addition that I thought was particularly silly was when Nikhil turns up at Zoya’s house when her dad’s friends were having a party and he helps woo the aunty next door. That speech went on for too long and was very ridiculous, though I suppose the point was to show Nikhil as being super down-to-earth and also allow him to clandestinely express his love of Zoya.
• Generally, I found Nikhil’s speeches OTT but then I reread the book (of course I did) and realised that was true to the book. I think his dialogues in the book were better.
• Anil Kapoor was pretty good as Zoya’s father but I don’t understand why he played a couple of double roles in the beginning of the film.
• Generally, there seemed to be a style dissonance between the first and second halves of the film. The first half seemed to be going for some kitch tone, made worse by Sonam. The second half was much better.
• Overall, I quite liked the film, despite myself. But then, I was watching it as a rerun of the novel, and I went and reread the novel after that. Was it my perfect remake? No. Was it the worst? Nope.

Did you watch the film? What did you think?

The Zoya Factor movie

Not being in India, I may have completely missed the hype surrounding this, had a friend not sent me the poster. When I was researching my thesis, I had come across reports that the film rights to the book had been sold to Shah Rukh Khan’s Red Chillies entertainment, that Sonam Kapoor was slated to star in the film remake, and then … nothing.

So, I’m somewhat surprised, though pleased, that the project has been resurrected. Here’s the trailer.

Have to say, my first thoughts were not positive. Sonam I can accept, though Zoya is supposed to be short. At least they appear to have curled her hair.

But Dulquer Salmaan, I dunno. Nihil Khoda is a man; Dulquer looks like a boy. When I imagined Nikhil, I imaged someone Dhoni-like. I’m not sure who could have played him, though. What do you think?

Which actor would have been the ideal Nikhil?

What to read to feed your Made in Heaven craving

I came slightly late to the Made in Heaven party, but like everyone else I was besotted and struggled with the binge instinct. Since I started watching it on a weekday, I basically could allow myself only a couple of episodes a night in the interest of not sleepworking the next day.

Okay, for those living under the proverbial rock, Made In Heaven is an Amazon Prime series set in Delhi, India, created by Zoya Akhtar and Reema Katgi. It follows wedding planners Tara Khanna (Sobhita Dhulipala) and Karan  Mehra (Arjun Mathur) as they craft the formal unions of young Indians and their families. Each episode features a wedding to be planning, distinguished by its own brand of crazy.

Employing marriage as the theme allows for the exposition of the wealth-fuelled proclivities of new India’s elite – weddings have been said to be a recession proof industry, and this is particularly so in India where the celebration of marriage is a display of social status. This is remarked on in the very first episode when a rival wedding planner suggests to the parents of the groom, who will presumably fund the extravaganza and who are as important as the couple exchanging vows, that the wedding is a vehicle to brand themselves the new royalty.

The wedding theme also, however, provides scope to explore the less heavenly aspects of marriage from the get go: class differences, the generation gap that must be dealt with because of the overbearing presence of parents, especially of the groom, in a new couple’s life, dowry demands, infidelity.

And then there’s Tara and Karan themselves. Like the bride in the first episode, Tara would be seen by the elite class that her husband belongs to as a gold digger (more on this later). To counter this, she has to present the seamless facade of perfection all.the.time. Despite this, the cracks in her marriage begin to widen.

Karan is a gay man living a sexuality active life before the Supreme Court struck down Article 377 of the Indian penal code that effectively criminalised homosexuality. Despite his best efforts to pretend that one can live as one likes despite the social and legal censure, he becomes caught up in a dangerous web.

Since I can’t spend most of my day in front of the television, I felt the need to extend the feeling of the series somehow. And that’s when I decided to reread The Wedding Photographer by Sakshama Puri Dhariwal.

…

Before I go on, I must say I absolutely enjoyed this novel. While I was reading it – for the second time – I had a sappy smile on my face that had my husband grab the book out of my hands and peruse the pages to figure out what I was grinning about, then tease me about the rubbish I read. Classic, bringing to mind all those romance reader studies from Janice Radway to Radhika Parameswaran. No wonder I had to get a PhD to put a stamp of legitimacy on my “trivial” pursuits. When I am challenged about my choice of topic, I simply point out that the financially astute Hong Kong government paid me handsomely to work on this for three years and leave it at that.

Back to the novel, I enjoyed  because it is well written. Not only does it skilfully employ all the genre tropes that have hit the right buttons for readers since the 19th C, Puri has a flair for snappy dialogue  not just between the central pair but also the kind of online chat exchanges and verbal repartee between friends.

The novel’s protagonist Risha Kohli is the wedding photographer of the title. On a flight back to India from Los Angeles, she finds herself seated next to Arjun Khanna, the scion of a real estate empire, whose sister’s wedding, it turns out, Risha is slated to photograph. They are both attracted to each other, but this being a romance – I would tend not to classify it as chick lit although it ticks most of the genre boxes for reasons I will go into later – there are obstacles to their throwing off their clothes and shagging each other coupledom.

The obstacles, as they appear, are pretty stupid:

1. Arjun is suspicious of journalist and is miffed that he didn’t know she was one
2. His mother asks Risha to take photos of him with another woman so Risha assumes he has a girlfriend even though he explodes at his mother when he realises what’s going on and stalks off and there’s zero chemistry between him and the other woman
3. Risha’s gay BFF Rishabh (okay, there might be a reason why their names are so similar but it evades me) tries to make Arjun jealous by pretending to be her boyfriend and he falls for it even though his grandmother can see through it
4. Arjun asks Risha if Rishabh is her boyfriend and she gets upset and storms off
5. Then when a Rishabh’s status as bestie-not-boyfriend is made clear, she once again thinks Arjun into the other woman because he let her win at Tetris
6. The biggie is when the wedding photos are leaked thus confirming Arjun’s worst suspicions

It’s possible that I’m just a jaded old aunty but these problems seems self-made and silly, except the last one. Maybe twenty-somethings are actually this insecure and I just don’t remember.

The silliness of the obstacles brings to mind some of the complaints I’ve heard about Anuja Chauhan’s The Zoya Factor, that Zoya’s insecurities go on too long. But in that case, there was at least a kernel of a genuine cause – Nikhil was a sophisticated superstar, Zoya a naive nobody but she had something that would would be very useful to him. And also in some ways it worked because it inverted a stereotype by making Zoya, or in the case of Jinni in Battle for Bittora, the insecure one.

The Wedding Photographer however turns on a stereotype that underpins the romance genre – the gold digger. The heroines task is to distinguish herself from this personna.

Tania Modleski in her classic study of the Harlequin novel, Loving with a Vengeance, has pointed out that a core dilemma for the romance heroine is to improve her class status while not only concealing that she is doing so, but by being genuinely guileless about the whole affair.

Risha aces this.

When she meets Arjun, she shocks the adversarial stewardess on the flight who is trying to unseat her by her cluelessness as to who she is sitting next to. She is more interested in his chocolate mousse than him.

She is gorgeous but unaware of it. She is seemingly sexually inexperienced. She adheres to her parents strict rules for her as a single woman in the city even though they are not around to check.  She is down to earth to a fault.

In case we missed that this is where her attraction lies, Arjun explicitly tells us:

“Arjun couldn’t believe this girl. It was obvious she hadn’t know who he was at first, but now that she did, she didn’t seem intimidated by him in the least. Nor was she throwing herself at him.”

“The girl sitting next to him didn’t seem thrown off by his wealth or fame. If anything, she was amused by it. She teased him, laughed at him …”

“Risha seemed real. She had no idea how beautiful she was”

Mr Darcy would have been so proud. The above, however, are an argument for the “show not tell” School of writing if there ever was one.

Moreover, like Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice, Risha distinguishes herself by her personality. She acquiesces to the air hostess’s demand that she vacate the business class seat she had been upgraded to because, she explains to Arjun, she didn’t pay for it. She seeks out the mother of the annoying boy who pooped in the seat next to hers and gave her a doctor recommendation.

As Arjun muses, “How many girls did he know that he could call nice”

Risha may not quite have Lizzie’s acerbic wit but she is good at what she does and committed to it in a way that impresses Arjun. Not just a pretty face then:

“Artistic without being pompous, beautiful without being overbearing, and filled with warm bring colours. Her photography, Arjun mused, was a bit like her personality”

Nancy Armstrong has noted how the 18th century domestic novels, starting with Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson and finding their finest expression in Austen and the Bronte sisters, masked a class coup. In these novels, middle-class women are shown as being deserving of approbation (signaled by marriage to an aristocratic man) due to their morality and quality of mind.

The implication here is that inner virtue is what distinguishes a person, not class, and that this distinction is not the province of the aristocratic class alone. In fact, aristocratic women are ridiculed for their superficiality. Think Caroline Bingley in Pride and Prejudice.

The 18th and 19th century writers deliberately chose female protagonists to make this argument – after Robinson Crusoe, Defoe found greater success with his novels featuring a woman as the central character – so as not to seem to be openly challenging the ruling class.

In Risha’s case, there’s a string of women she is contrasted with: she is not Krutika the bitchy and sexually aggressive stewardess, she is not the bored and entitled Divya Arjun’s mother wants to fix him up with, she is not Arjun’s ex-girlfriend Karishma who used her association with him to advance her career and then cheated on him (it is this Karishma we are asked to believe who causes him to suspect women in general and models and journalists in particular as manipulative).

And she gets along with his family. Arjun notes that she managed to charm both his formidable grandmother and his flighty mother. A scene of camaraderie between Risha and his sister literally bowls him over.

Meanwhile, what of our hero? He ticks  all the usual romance hero boxes – handsome, rich(er than the heroine), masterful (in the opening section, he uses his status as wealthy, famous dude to cower admittedly annoying airbhostess into leaving Risha seated next to him).

He is also prone to fits of passion, grabbing Risha by the hand and commanding her to talk to him, which he admits is brutish behaviour but that must be presumably excused because it is Risha who inspires this. Ditto to smashing a glass in anger, which he then apologised to the cook about.

Because despite his privilege, he’s got the common touch, as heroes tend to. He demonstrates this by hugging the family driver during a cricket match.

In fact, mingling with the masses proves to be just the solution to his business problems – a  workers strike that threatens to throw his affordable housing project off schedule. It is Risha who suggests that the workers just want to be seen as people and their protest may not really about money. And hey presto, it appears that all the workers wanted to do was to play cricket with the boss and take selfies with his national team vice-captain friend.

The strike, despite its glib treatment, is a reminder of where the wealth of the family in question comes from, wealth that is used to fund Arjun’s sisters lavish wedding. Early on in the novel, we are given the rundown of the events – a satsang in praise of the mother of the bride’s cult leader who is gifted (and whose venality is shown up later in the stolen photos episode), a mehndi ceremony, aretro video games night hosted by Arjun for the young people, a cricket match, cocktails and dinner, a choora ceremony in which the bridal bangles are put on, and finally the wedding itself. The latter events are held at a five-star hotel.

The wedding brings together generations – Nani drinks her grandsons off the table and correctly identifies Rishabh as gay but also educated the young people on the caste hierarchy (Khanna is higher than Kholi but Kapoor is trumps them all). The latter is dismissed as the foibles of an old lady but is clearly common enough a feature even at the weddings of the cosmopolitan elite to warrant mention.mThe wedding also brings together the family geographically with the proclivities of small town cousins providing comic relief.

All the couples in the novel do not dramatically break caste and class barriers. Risha May be from the middle class, but her caste is acceptable. Chinky’s husband Rohan are from different backgrounds / which is commented on by her mother, but Rohan compensate with his self-made wealth. Nidhi, Risha’s friend, and cricket star Vikram – whose story is the subject of an earlier book that I fully intend to read as soon as possible – are also from the same social circle.

In the end, Risha and Arjun overcome the odds, and admit their feelings for one another. What these odds are however turns out of be just Arjun’s on-and-off-again antipathy towards Rishathat is predicated on his fear that she will turn out to be a gold digger. Class continues to be a central conflict, if not the only,  animating romance.

…

Which brings me back to Made in Heaven which I just finished watching. I finished the book in two days, but took a week to get through the series at my two episode per night on average pace.

The very first wedding featured is that of a middle-class nobody into an elite industrialist family. Tara and Arjun, the wedding planners, are asked to look into her background, and a problem is found that is a non-issue for the groom but a deal breaker for his parents, who one gets the feeling were looking for such an obstacle.

The situation is just a bit too close to home for Tara, who herself was a nobody who married into the elite. There is an awkward scene in that first episode in which the groom’s mother, played by the excellent Nina Gupta (ironically a woman who flouted the conventions of good Indian womanhood herself off screen) rants about her daughter-in-law-to-be calling her a gold digger before realising that Tara might not be the appropriate recipient of these comments. “Not you,” she qualifies. “You fit in very well.” Just how much Tara had to do to fit in and the hollow rewards of this labour are revealed through the series.

Made in Heaven is exceptional in how it eviscerates the grotesquery behind the glamour. Tara is the perfect daughter-in-law who combines the duties of Indian womanhood, calling her mother in law mummy without irony despite her constant barbs, with a hard-nosed head for business and impeccable style. But with her, we gradually see the toll being the pretender takes.

Nevertheless, in that first wedding, she tells the outraged bride to be to think smart, use the situation to her advantage and not throw away the fortune beckoning her. This is what Tara herself has done and refreshingly, we are not supposed to think any less of her.

At the end of the series, she realises that she will always be the outsider the world that Adil and her former best friend Faiza inhabit and that she’s sick of it.

The world that Adil and Faiza inhabit so seamlessly and that Tara has to work to fit into is milieu of Polite Soviet, Mahesh Rao’s retelling of Jane Austen’s Emma. When reading that novel, I wished we knew more about what happened to Dimple, Rao’s version of Harriet. Tara’s is that narrative.

***

Finally, a quick recap of why I think The Wedding Photographer falls into the broad romance, but not the chick lit, genre:

1. The romance heroine tends to be gorgeous, as Risha is. Apart from Arjun, we are told she has a number of admirers in the office. This is in contrast to the chick lit protagonist who is usually ordinary looking.

2. The OTT way both Risha and Arjun are described. For example:

“Her blush from her earlier embarrassment clung faintly to her cheeks, offsetting the olive undertones in her flawless skin and highlighting her full lips”

3. This OTT style of description carries on into their physical chemistry:

“He claimed her mouth in a long, ravenous kiss, igniting each nerve in her body, making her very skin come alive. She parted her lips, inviting his tongue in as he continued to kiss her greedily, passionately.”

This is straight out of Mills and Boon, rather than Bridget Jones’s Diary. As discussed in the post on The Wedding Date, extended descriptions of sexual activity are not common in chick lit.

***

Read an excerpt of The Wedding Photographer here.

Are you as obsessed with Made in Heaven as I am?

Crazy Rich Asians – a bookish view

Of course I had to watch this movie. I loved the books. Sure they’re not high literature, but what Kevin Kwan has done is offer an extremely readable ethnographic portrait of a sliver of Singapore society – the very very rich old moneyed clans with their ties across Asia.

Having read and enjoyed all three books (Book 1, Book 3 and Book 2 in order of preference if you must know), I would have been jumping up and down for the film, without all the hype, which I’ll admit was cray cray – though the justification for  the hype was that it is the first big budget Hollywood production to feature an all-Asian cast since The Joy Luck Club, which I can get on board with.

With the hype has come criticism – that the film fails in its representation of Singaporean society, effacing its multiracial character in favour of a sweeping Chineseness, with the only Indians being featured being basically servants (and no Malays at all). The defence has been that the novel and the film focus on an extremely restricted strata of society – and this is exactly it’s point, that it is clannish and exclusive.

Having read the novels, however, I can say that the novel is much more racially diverse even within the rarified world of the elite. I distinctly remember a hyper-wealthy Indian family being mentioned multiple times as part of the same social world as the formidable grandmother Shang Su Yi. The novel actually details the connections across the super wealthy and former royalty in Asia – from Thais to Indians and Chinese. I’m pretty sure that Indians were also mentioned as part of the social set of the younger generation (Rachel and Nick honeymooned in India) and generally part of Singaoire society. I cannot be 100% sure of Malays but that’s because the representation of Indians specifically caught my attention in the novel.

In the film, Indians appear in the background as servants and in one particularly unnecessary scene provoke fear as security guards when Rachel and her friend believe themselves to be lost in the jungle. The turbaned security guards brandishing guns are perceived as ‘scary tribals’, which is quite silly as Peik Lin, Rachel’s friend, is from Singapore and surely would be familiar with turbaned people. I blame this on Hollywood’s cluelessness and insatiable desire for a cheap laugh.

Even more galling is that the Singapore Tourism Board associated itself with the film – which makes its narrative (with its offensive Chinese-washing of Singaporean society) somewhat official. I can understand why the tourism board jumped on this – the film and the novel are love letters to Singpaore, and while the focus is on high society and fabulous displays of wealth, the best characters are notable for their down-to-earthness so that no visit to Singapore is complete without a visit to a hawker centre for example.

So yes, on representation, the film is a #fail, ironic because the hype promotes it as a #win for representation of Asian faces in Hollywood. But as we know, there are exclusions within exclusions and Crazy Rich Asians is a textbook case of this.

The other unnecessary Hollywoodish change in the film was the proposal scene on the plane at the end. It was straight out of some chick flick so generic that I cannot recall which one it was. It felt wrong, because for all it’s flaws – OTTness being the principle one – I don’t recall that this was the book’s ending (it was not). The book offers a much more ambiguous happy ending.

On the other hand, the film had some good additions, particularly in the form of Awkwafina as Peik Lin and Ken Jeong as her father, both of whom kept the husband entertained when he was threatening to descend into “how much longer”. There is also the much vaunted mah jong scene, though this lent itself to the Hollywood ending so I’m not sure I’m fully on board with it. Apparently, the Hollwyoodish ending – with mummy-in-law lending her ring to the festivities – was due to Michelle Yeoh, who plays Eleanor Young, Nick’s mother, refused to play the stereotypical evil mother-in-law, which is a pity, because Eleanor was both a cliche and not, a very Singaporean mother. Honestly, Michelle Yeoh plays a different Eleanor to the one I imagined when I read the book, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

In terms of casting, the film got it right, half-Brit Henry Golding notwithstanding (my Singaporean colleague tsked tsked that he is not goodlooking at all, but I don’t know). I loved Constance Wu as Rachel.

The person I had the most problem with was Gemma Chan as Astrid, the novel’s quintessential It girl. In the film, Astrid is stiff and appears to be in mourning most of the time, even before her issues with her husband are revealed, except in the scene with Rachel at the engagement party. In the novels, Astrid and her storyline are second only to Nick’s and frankly, her love story in Book 2 was super romantic, but apparently all this was squished in the movie into an exchange of looks during the credits which I missed – and am likely going to watch the whole movie again for – because the husband jumped up and made a beeline for the exit as he always does.

Apparently, a sequel film is already on the cards, and for that I’m glad. Hopefully, the makers will take on board the critique of the representation of minorities and do better next time around.

At heart, Crazy Rich Asians is in the lines of the 19th century courtship novel such as Pride and Prejudice, in which a young woman of respectable but not outstanding lineage finds herself in an aristocratic milieu. In it’s minute detailing of the life of this class, it also harks back to The Age of Innocence. This is a classic romance plot line that has been successfully handed down to chick lit via the Harlequin romance.

It is also relatable in another sense. Many young women on the cusp of their weddings (myself included) can recall the sense of uncharted waters when faced with the minefield of their husband’s family – formidable mother-in-law, catty cousins, judgemental aunties, ex-girlfriends and traditions in which one never seems to put one’s foot right. The point in the film when Rachel is humiliated and flees had a number of us, tearing up. The Chinese aunty next to me was basically bawling during the mah jong scene.

So while this is a tale of the ultra-rich, in some ways, it is one that speaks to the concerns of young and not-so-young women.