Print Email to Friend| From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 9, Issue 27, Dated 07 July 2012

CULTURE & SOCIETY   ASHIM AHLUWALIA

DIRECTORS IN THEIR OWN WORDS

‘A C-grade film is misfits making cinema with blood, sweat and tears’

Ashim Ahluwalia’s familiarity with the characters of smutty C-grade film has bred respect, even affection, rather than contempt. Screened at Cannes, his new film, Miss Lovely, is a dark fable about a lost world

Ashim Ahluwalia Photo: Appurva Shah ALSO READ ‘We live in an illusion of civilisation’ ‘Float a camera and you find crazy things’ Fair Factor

On Bollywood Hypocrisy, Sexual Liberty And Exploitation

Between 1998 and 2000, I spent a lot of time hanging out on the sets of Bombay’s C-grade film industry. I was planning a documentary about the shooting of Maut Ka Chehra (Face of Death) — a sex-horror film that was being cranked out in four days by a bunch of ex-convicts. The producer was actually a dubious builder from Karjat and this was going to be his grand debut. He didn’t understand a thing about the film, but liked the idea. He also roped in Jolly, a director who lived in his building and claimed to have been an “assistant of Guru Dutt”.

The business plan was simple. Jolly, who was hitting 70 then, and had painted a lotus for V Shantaram at some point in his career, needed about Rs 6 lakh to make a “sexy horror film”. He convinced the builder to provide the cash.

Soon after, Jolly employed his friend Shirish, “a ladies supplier”, and assigned him the task of finding girls who would get naked on camera. Shirish would swallow a big chunk of the budget, but in return, he’d bring along a cameraman who wouldn’t talk but could pull it off quickly, “without his hands shaking”. They would shoot on glorious 16 mm, a simple story of a serial rapist who lives in a sandy graveyard and wears a mask made of gum. Of course, this was just the wrapping. The secret ingredient would be contained in the two additional “tota” or “bits” reels of illegal sex that they would shoot with Rosie and Sheeba, Shirish’s girls, in a flat in Madh island. These “X-rated inserts” would bypass the Censors, be carried at night on bicycle, and then be spliced back into the film later, in a small-town cinema. The police would be paid to look the other way, the projectionist would roll the inserts and red-blooded men, deprived of actual female flesh, would flock to the cinemas. Everybody would make a killing. Or so they thought.

I was naïve enough to tell these guys that I wanted to make an “educational documentary” on Indian horror films so that they’d let me hang around. Surprisingly, they believed me. It was probably because we were all amateurs, and none of us really knew what the hell was going on. Except Shirish. He immediately questioned me. Battle-scarred, with a mutilated face and a dark energy, he kept probing me about where I lived and why an “English type” like me would care to hang out with them. I really needed to be his friend if I wanted to make my documentary.

My attempt at social assimilation was shameless. Within a few weeks, we were drinking together in his dank home-office, embedded in the maze of seedy production companies behind Adarsh Nagar. This was (and still somewhat remains) at the heart of the smut film business with “production” and “casting” offices opening and closing on a weekly basis. He had about six women living with him, including Sheeba and Rosie, who had by this point shot the sex scenes for the film. Suddenly all this didn’t seem very scary or smutty at all — here was just an ageing pimp watching Kaun Banega Crorepati with his impoverished, underage harem of “actresses”. It was sad, but also strangely beautiful, all of them just sharing their dinner and watching TV together.

Reel people, real lives A scene from Miss Lovely

A couple of locations were all it took to finish Maut Ka Chehra; the producer’s ex-girlfriend’s flat, an abandoned factory, a one-hour love hotel in Andheri and some exteriors shot at the crumbling Essel Studios — the “MGM” of Bombay’s gutter cinema. When the time came to shoot my documentary, they all refused to tell their stories on camera. Shirish and the girls asked me if I was insane. Nobody wants to go to jail, they said. It dawned on me that they would all be sentenced to three years of imprisonment for pornography if caught. Suddenly, it was all so palpable — my film would never get made.

By this time, I had spent over a year submerged in the lower depths of the sleaze film industry. I watched Jadu Tona and Bombay Fantasy, the first Indian porn films shot on “U-matic” tape in the mid-1980s and now almost consumed by fungus. I had gotten dangerously trashed with some of the most alarming financiers I’ve ever encountered and understood how Indian sex films were marketed in Indonesia and the Philippines. I had met Jyoti Rana, Sapna, Kanti and Kishan Shah, J Neelam, Satnam Kaur and Rani, Honey, Pinky, Jyotsna and a million struggling nymphets who all opened up and told me things that depressed me for weeks. I drank with Joginder, watched his awkward groping and became buddies with the Meena Kumari of C-grade cinema, Poonam Dasgupta. I met her dad, a Mughal miniature painter, and discussed the death of the classical arts with him. We celebrated Poonam’s birthday in her red flat on Yari Road with MacMohan blowing out the candles. Those images are beautiful, and will stay forever burned into my mind.

Spending time with these hard-drinking producers, directors and divas was exhilarating. They taught me so much that I began to realise what we shared in common. It was a dislike of Bollywood. They hated the hypocrisy of the A-grade film, and the way in which actresses had to be forever in the service of the hero, the repressed sexuality garbed in middle-class moralism. In a ‘C’ film, the woman is the lead — she kills the bad guys and chooses her own sexual partners. No man does that on her behalf. It is what it is. Here was genuinely independent filmmaking —misfits working on the margins with abysmally low-budgets, making cinema with their own blood, sweat and tears, defying every convention of Indian society. These renegade filmmakers produced films out of nothing. The films may have been awful, but their raw energy reminded me of why I set out to make films in the first place.

On Finding Miss Lovely

Then I met a striking young “actress” from Kolkata who called herself Karishma. It was discernibly a fake name; she even said it half-heartedly. We met in a bar in Marol where she told me her life story — about an old man she used to sleep with whom she called “Uncle” because he would protect her. An escort from time to time, she was waiting for a “proper role”. She would boast about her sexuality, how she could play producers off each other. Then one day, she just disappeared. She couldn’t be found, though, I heard that a female body without a head showed up in a mangrove swamp not far from where we had once met. It was deeply disturbing. What was more eerie was that everybody who knew her started pretending as if she had never existed. When I would ask about Karishma, they would just feign confusion. Maybe people in that world don’t ask questions because awful things just happen too often. But for me, that was it. I knew it was time for me to get out. I stopped contacting everyone and changed my phone number.

Meanwhile, I got busy working on another film, John & Jane — set in the faraway world of call centres — and soon lost touch with my C-grade friends. When I tried contacting them a few years later, their numbers had all changed.

As time went by, the whisky-soaked evenings we had once shared began to take on a mythical significance. I began to forget faces. Then many years later, at the dentist’s office, I opened a Mid-Day and read a piece about four people who had been detained shooting a porn video in Karjat. The article mentioned Shirish, the “ladies supplier”, and two of his girls, along with someone I didn’t know. They would be in jail for three years. That evening, I decided to write a script about everything I had experienced. It would be set in the 1980s, during the period that many describe as the “golden age” of Indian sleaze. The real reason was so I could protect the privacy of the individuals who had shared so much. I thought of Karishma, the girl who disappeared. Then I thought of a title. It didn’t make any sense but it felt all right. Miss Lovely.

On Staying True To Your Story

There is nothing more ironic than writing a screenplay set in the C-grade industry, for the very simple reason that C-grade films don’t have one. Maybe a few short scene sketches, some lines of hurriedly written dialogue… but that would be all. They simply don’t have time for scripts because the films are shot in a matter of days, and completed within a few weeks.

In Miss Lovely, I decided to use a fragmented style of storytelling, almost episodic, the way I had experienced these events. I had to reconstruct this into a single story yet it needed to be able to digress, to stretch over many years, over many individual stories. I knew there would be a girl with a fake name, and another that would disappear and be found dead in a mangrove swamp because she played too many men off each other.

People expect the film to be a comedy, or make fun of the dreadful films and the mindless titles like Tamboo Mein Bamboo. I can’t do it. It feels like a betrayal. I spent too much time with real individuals to make a spoof. I can’t make a Tarantino-esque homage, or a Boogie Nights biopic. In actuality, Miss Lovely just had to be this gritty documentary-style parable set within a very real, very murky universe, no matter how outrageous it may sound on the written page. Tikoo, the midget “casting director” and Jolly, the “film director” are, in fact, real people playing themselves, as are many others that populate this film. Almost all the primary characters in the final film are sparsely disguised versions of actual individuals that I met.

Miss Lovely is a hybrid film, then, all shot on location — with documentary glimpses of Mumbai’s underworld of cheap hotels, crumbling movie studios and fading cinemas and real faces gathered from the depths of the industry. However, it runs alongside lush atmospherics that surface from classic film tropes — film noir, melodrama and art house cinema.

And still it all feels abstract now that Miss Lovely is finished. Showing it at Cannes was odd because it’s a world so far removed from the struggle that permeates the shadowy margins of the industry. I’m thankful I did get to dig deep, exploring those shadows, but it did leave me marked in ways I’m unlikely to ever forget.

letters@tehelka.com