Movie Review : Manhattan Murder Mystery(1992)

Before watching a Woody Allen movie, you would have already been primed up for the following from him- The film will center on middle and upper class people who are unhappily married. If Allen stars in it, he is going to be a misunderstood intellectual who is always apprehensive of his wife having feelings for someone else. There will be moments when you open up with both your hands to laugh at a funny sequence and instantly check your response and stifle it, perceiving the underpinning of sadness over which the humor has been so delicately assembled upon. There will be veritable references to literature and delicious historical vignettes here and there and an inevitable --blink-and-miss dig at the Nazis. But there is something else , which Allen specializes in , for which his hardcore fans canonize him ---- he is an desperate, yet an untiring excavator, who remains unhappy till he finds some meaning to all our mundane lives and existence ,which he believes is interred miles beneath layers of science , materialism and modernity.

But , case in point, Manhattan Murder Mystery, is, thankfully for some, a refreshing light weight movie where Allen has tried hard to extricate himself from his philosophical alter-ego , thereby taking a sabbatical from his regular job and deciding to pursue something  else that is completely uncharacteristic of him—pulling out a magnifying glass and follow fingerprints. He has become a sleuth. He has divorced Bergman and invited the ‘Rear Window’-ian Hitchcock to dine with his Chaplin.

The result is ,not surprisingly, delightful. Allen plays Lipton, an old publisher, married for quite a long time with a bored home-ridden Diane Keaton. The old couple meet their new neighbours- an another old couple who are in an enviably long blissful conjugation. The next day , the wife of their neighbor dies and the ensuing events suggest that the death could have been unnatural. Keaton is excited at the prospect of solving a possible murder mystery and brings her friend Alan Alda to help her with the new job. Lipton embodies the typical middle class city dweller indifferent to his abnormal neighbourhood, who descends into a perpetual paranoia of losing his wife to Alda, in the course of her new found obsession of sleuthing. Lipton turns ‘Aadhavan’ Vadivelu throughout the movie unable to stand his wife’s near neurotic prying in her neighbor’s affair.

In one stretch that happens at the neighbour’s flat, Keaton leaves her husband and the neighbor in the hall and goes to prepare coffee in the kitchen. The neighbor offers Lipton to display his achievements in stamp-collecting to which he is unable to immediately express his disinterest. Keaton,meanwhile discovers something fishy in the kitchen and soon she retreats to the hall with the coffee and starts a conversation with the neighbor, taking a seat on the couch along with her husband. The camera zooms on towards the couple as the dialogue progresses. You cannot choose whether to listen to the conversation or burst into laughing at the disgruntled Lipton, seemingly lost in a state of insuperable torpor after listening to mind numbing lectures on stamps by his neighbor. Allen is a riot here.

The best scene , indubitably, is the lift sequence where the couple is locked up inside for sometime, discovering to their horror , a dead body hanging over their heads. Here is where Allen’s prowess as a writer-comedian comes to the fore. In a sequence in Pandiya Naadu, Vishal would invite Soori to talk things over a ‘cutting’. The scene cuts to a saloon where Soori discovers the other ‘cutting’. The scene would have retained its humour had that ‘joke’ not been oversold. But, Soori would proceed on to say ‘Naan cutting na udane andha cutting nu nenachan.Indha cutting na vanthurkave maatan’.[Had I known that ‘cutting’ refers to literal cutting (of hair) I would not have come].  Here , Allen does the same thing but the result is doubly terrific , ‘Claustrophobia and a dead body, it’s a neurotic’s jackpot’. Don’t do that, unless you are Allen.

Allen employs the technique of moving the camera clandestinely behind his characters , many a time giving the impression of us following them secretly. The film is rich in tributes to the noir genre and the climax where the villain hostages the wife of the protagonist, is one.Manhattan Murder Mystery (1992) is one of Allen’s lesser known works, possibly an underrated one. 

“The best you can do to get through life is distraction. Love works as a distraction. And work works as a distraction….But the key is to distract yourself” This was Allen , when he spoke about life and the pessimism that shrouds it.  MMM , was essentially a comedy thriller and his favourite theme of adultery ,remains very much at the surface. MMM is lesser known, possibly because Allen wanted to take a break from brooding over life, atleast once. He was content ,for a change, just to entertain and get distracted.

And Justice for All..

Having been part and prime mover of numerous political discussions and arguments on contemporary politics over the years with my friends, I have never taken the time and trouble to put on paper of what my stand is, on any specific issue. This endeavour, the first of its kind, for me, arises as a result of the combined effect of unexpected and unprecedented  public sympathy for a convicted incumbent Chief Minister of a state, and from a deeper wistfulness on my side, to establish myself as a writer in future, who can express himself on politics or any other sphere which has a profound impact on people and their lives.

I have been surprised greatly and it is not just limited to the rare, quirky successful conviction of a corrupt politician even after years of struggle and intentional protraction of judiciary proceedings.The middle class, the Indian urban intelligentsia of which I am very much part of,which was some months back, up in arms against any form or scale of corruption, under the Anna Hazare movement, has suddenly transmuted itself into a mass of forgiving altruists, ready to brush aside the malfeasance of their leader, simply as a childish, guileless peccadillo committed during her political infancy.

The reaction to the landmark judgment, can be split into two – one from the devoted partymen resulting in acts of violence and arson, and the other from the educated middle class.

The partymen, though their reaction to the event, has been weak and less pronounced than I anticipated, have continued to damage public property desperately trying to record their anger, and disrupt normal life as much as possible. Many of my friends, as well as, noted political commentators have credited Jayalalitha as an efficient political administrator, having a near perfect record of maintaining law and order throughout the state during her regime. The foremost duty of any Chief Minister, which should take precedence over all other public responsibilities and functions, shall be the establishment and sustenance of law and order, under any event or political exigency, throughout his/her administerial domain. The Tamil Nadu Chief Minister, and a tall political leader at the same time, who elicits so much adoration and love from her supporters and partymen, could have atleast sent a word to them, to remain calm and composed, to renounce any acts of instant furore resulting in violence, assuring them that she can overcome all odds with resilience by herself, only through the mandated judicial procedure followed in the country. This could have gone a long way in sustaining the normalcy in the state and in addition, possibly could have enhanced the respect she already commands from many quarters.

The middle class on the other hand, have been complaining of the ruthlessness and vengeance underlining the judgment on the following grounds- the age, sex of the convict, the negligible degree of corruption and her achievements as the current Chief Minister.

As everyone might be aware, the corruption case filed in 1997, was in response to her frivolous acts carried out during her first term (1991-1996) as Chief Minister.

The case began in 1997, and had India been blessed with an robust and incorruptible judiciary, by all probability, it should have been closed by end of the millennium, with the accused successfully convicted with a 7-year term in prison, stripped of the eligibility to contest in polls.

This eventuality would have broken all bases of argument of her sympathizers. Firstly, the convict would not have aged more than 50 yrs at that time, which I presume, is not an age that would summon sympathy from most of us.

Secondly, the 2000s were the age where a crore still remained a humongous sum, when our politicians were not getting tired of dealing in lakhs of rupees.The magnitude of the larceny hence,no doubt, would have not looked negligible.

Thirdly, the successful conviction, as early as the 2000s, would have possibly sealed the fate of the ADMK leader, rendering her ineligible to contest any elections in the future. No one can doubt the gravity of such a development, bolstered by, probably, a case of rejection of the bail plea, on the party organization and its future. The political history of Tamil Nadu would have been rewritten possibly with Jayalalitha, having been denied another chance of assuming Chief Ministership  and salvaging herself from the ignominy by implementing expansionary fiscal policies in defence of the state’s poor.

But, to top it all, it was not just the malleability of the judiciary that was responsible for the delayed delivery of justice, but also, the malicious intent and wily execution on part of the accused which expertly bended the law, to its whim and fancy, to ensure that the justice delivered was either delayed or obsolescent, and the punishment as benign as possible.

A man’s world, cannot become a woman’s world immediately, if it forgives its delinquent women.

Bill Clinton lost his second election to his presidency, owing to many reasons, the chief one being his extra marital attachment to a woman, which in India, would sound very much trifling.

We, Indians, can take dubious pride, from being the only one among many other nationalities of the world, willing to sympathise with someone who has been found guilty and deserving punishment by its own judiciary.

We have been voting for aeons, not for the one whom we prefer, but for the one whom we dislike the least. Many of us, spend not more than ten minutes of our time daily, to politics and economics, which we very well know, control every minute of our lives till we are liberated from our existence.

Hence, I cannot be indignant on politicians as much as I am on my citizenry. I admit, that the instances of corruption, of which we are getting accustomed to, has been huge and outrageous than its precedents. But, it is on us, to remain insulated to regressive changes that the system forces on us and ensure that our perspectives are not diluted and flawed under any circumstance, and reflect the highest levels of morality, rectitude and reason.

Book Review : Madame Bovary

Emma lured me soon after she becomes Madame Bovary .But when she was over , just like her lovers, I too began to feel disillusioned with her. It was not that it had a bad ending or a clichéd one as you may call it.It was because when I started to recount how good the book was, I could see that , as a writer I cannot even try to emulate the meticulousity and conviction that characterised Flaubert’s storytelling.

The novel belonged to the 1800s and I have been fairly acquainted with the literature that belonged to the Victorian period through the likes of David Copperfield and Pride and Prejudice. Madame Bovary has all typical characteristics of the literature of this era – the painstaking endeavours to find and use the perfect,irreplaceable word throughout, the characters that are never allowed to become humans due to overemphasis of their distinct features (Homais for instance) , the obstinacy or fear to stay away from  obscenity (inspite of the tempting premise) , but what sets the novel apart was Flaubert’s success in sketching Emma , the protagonist , with so much ingenuity that for never once I could hate her as much as I could sympathise with her.

Emma is confined to her countryside as long as she is with her dad and for obvious reasons loathes her mundane living awaiting for a Prince Charming to usher her into her dream life. Just like infants who love strangers for the sole reason that they take them outside their boring homes for a walk , Emma assumes Charles Bovary, the doctor , who visits frequently to attend to her ailing father,to be her dream man because he is her only hope for freedom. Emma marries him,and is initially pleased with her new life and tries to love her husband but, is surprised to find she cannot.

She begins her quest for happiness through books and stories and starts to believe that she still can start afresh with someone else to satiate her desires. But she is reluctant and tries hard to resign herself to her destiny. This resignation, as time moves, transmutes itself into a huge sacrifice before her eyes and gives her a sense of contentment that she is able to cling to morals and societal restrictions inspite of the cruelty of her fate. This contentment soon emboldens her to unfetter herself at the cost of morals and innocence , because it teaches her to feel that the good always deserve something better. At some juncture she is of course, offered the alluring chance to break free, in the form of young and naïve Leon but she turns it down and this incident reinforces her sense of honesty and sacrifice. However, her moment arrives later and she is swept off her feet by Rodolphe , a wealthy tycoon and an unhappy husband in his 30s.

My heart , however went out for Charles Bovary who after a first doomed marriage senses a new beginning in Emma and in fact achieves it easily. He is an immaculate man with so much love for his wife and is extremely happy throughout, mistakenly assuming that he is being reciprocated. Ignorance is bliss. He never for once suspects her infidelity and is able to alienate even his mother for his wife on a few occasions. Emma in turn cheats him, swindles all his hard earned money ,even ignores her baby girl ,tries to earn the hatred of Charles(but in vain) and soon descends into doom quite predictably. You can see that these are all clichés in a typical drama based on adultery but Flaubert’s plotting of the Emma’s character arc is impeccable that she remains human inspite of her detestable acts.

Bovary is honest , lovable and competent but Emma cannot love him because she cannot. How can you love someone whom you do not find attractive at all even even though he is revered by everyone around you? How can you be happy in a life ,however rich and opulent it could be, if you have been born with the disease of insatiety? She does not even try to apprise him of her unhappiness because she deems him incompetent to understand it. Whether the caring Charles would have helped her out had he known  it ,is a very difficult question to answer.  Emma looked helpless and vulnerable throughout my journey with her and I admit she could have tried other ways to reach her end. These dilemmas and imperfections elevated the experience of my reading several notches.

I have seen a similar instance of an unhappy wife in Pirivom Sandhippom . I expected, initially that Emma would reform after she graduates into motherhood and the child will complement her desires, as many Indian movies portray.Visalakshi and Emma are of course ,different women in many aspects and, the former had a savior, but Emma, unfortunately had only masqueraded ones.

After Emma’s death, I forgot about one inevitability in any tale of adultery that is the event of the husband discovering the unfaithfulness of his wife. The moment arrives some time later,when Charles reads her secret letters and I was surprised to see that he finds himself unable to hate his wife even after the shocking revelation ,since he is so irretrievably sunk in depression over the loss of his beloved. This was the instant it struck me that I should write a review for the book.

 I could contrast this incident with a similar one in About Schmidt when Jack Nicholson discovers the same uncomfortable truth about his wife after her death. He reacts violently disposing her belongings from his house and does things which his wife had forbidden him to. Schmidt’s was a natural reaction since he never once loved her during her lifetime , but begins to love her out of guilt and loneliness only to be hampered by the revelation that she was unfaithful. Bovary is very much his antithesis.