God of Small Things
I read santosh Sivan’s post on PFC and read comments from PFCers on how his frames invoked nostalgia. In my memory if there is one movie maker and cinematographer who could evoke such strong nostalgia, it would be , without a doubt Balu Mahendra. The camera movements and the frame composition in the movies he cranked would speak volumes of the mood and setting than a million lines of descriptive writing. I would like to take the liberty of being a member of PFC and recount the glorious days of Balu Mahendra, a man who loves cinema next only to his life.
Balu – the God of lens
Balu as cinephiles in south call him, is an FTII Pune graduate in cinematography, close pal of Amol Palekar and other Marathi film legends. He rapidly established his name as a cinematographer par excellence. While his contemporaries captured backdrop, colours and went for enormous scale, Balu excelled in what I call “personal film making”. It is usually a depiction of life, people, love. Rarely you would get a balu frame in a movie that is focussing on inanimate artificial stuff. His frames always captured beauty of life in motion, in a very personal and small way. In a way that you would have captured your baby’s first steps in an amateur konika. No unnecessary colour corrections, just how we see in daily life- yet brimming with beauty. If anyone has a copy of his “Sandya raagam” and “veedu”, please observe the early morning and late evening frames of Chennai. I was stunned by the simplistic beauty that was lying in the dusty lanes of chennai which was invisible to my eyes, till BM chose to frame it in his movies. Bangaloreans would vouch for the fact that their city has never been shot so lovely by anyone else. If you have doubt catch hold of “Pallavi anu pallavi” and “Moodu Pani”. As a cinematographer he was not just a director’s eye, but doubled up to show other interesting things in the scene without intruding the director’s vision as certain modern cinematographers do. His tight close ups and distant slow moving shots and non bouncing lights added beauty and he was a master in filming silhouttes and gentle sunlight. “Moodupani” a hitchcockian psycho thriller is a lesson for every cinematographer – budding or established and for an ordinary film connoisseur like me, it is frame to frame worth its weight in Gold. His “Mullum Malarum”, “moondraam pirai” and “Raman Abdhullah” are the best exposition of how to capture the lights and images of a hill station. Ooty and kodaikanaal never looked so beautiful. No wonder that as a cinematographer he was the first choice for art house film geniuses in Thamizh, Kannada and Malayalam. He continues to lens his movies.
Balu , the God of small things – in your house
Balu became a director with a Kannada movie called “Kokila”. He later on made movies like “Olangal” (Malayalam – inspired by hollywood film man,woman and child),”Moodupani”,”Moondram Pirai”,”Azhiyaadha Kolangal”, “Un Kannil Neer Vazhindhaal”,”Neengal Kettavai”,”Veedu”,”RettaiVaal Kuruvi”, “Sandhya Raagam”,”Vanna Vanna pookkal”, “Marubadiyum” (remake of Arth by Mahesh Bhatt – credited in the titles),”Sathi Leelavathi”, “Raaman Abdullah”(remake of a malayalam film),”Julie Ganapathy”(remake of Misery – though Balu doesn’t admit it openly) and recently “Adhu Oru Kanaak kaalam”. He has made some movies in Telugu which are generally remakes of movies he made in Malayalam and Thamizh. Movies that have been critically acclaimed as well as critically panned. Movies that have been successful in BO to some that couldn’t even find a distributor for release. There are four things that are common and consistent in his movies.
1. A small middle class setting that you, me and anyone who grew up in 70s and 80s could readily relate to. Even his psycho thriller Moodu pani had a midle class setting which was refreshing. He probably chose to shoot in a small place mostly to increase claustrophobic nature of fear that he was trying to film there. However even if he had a wider canvas – as he had for Rajini starrer “Un Kannil Neer vazhindhaal” or “Neengal Kettavai”, he chose to place his best moments inside a living room.
2. Man – woman relations – always the centre piece of his movies. Rarely does BM go for grandeur and out of the small world of which he is a master. I have never seen middle class homes so honestly portrayed without losing beauty. Case in point – in Kamal Hassan , sridevi starrer moondram pirai – the outdoor shots of ooty are matched in beauty by the indoor scenes where Kamal and Sridevi bring the characters of Sreenivasan and Manju to life with their pet dog Subramani.
3. Very subtle and soothing music score – thanks to the master of film music Ilaiyaraja. This is one cinematic collaboration that has lasted decades and still churns out magic. Apart from “Azhiyaadha Kolangal” which was scored by Salil Choudhry and “Sandhya Raagam” which was scored by L.Vaidyanadhan, all his movies in all languages had the mesmerizing magic of Ilaiyaraaja music. BM’s images with Ilaiyaraaja’s beutiful scores had audience spell bound and transported into the small, beautiful middle class world where one felt as if living alongside the characters – so real in the story. Never has audience connection with the story so tightly binding in South cinema with such great talents collaborating. Be it the haunting theme piece in moodu pani or the lilting voice of Jesudas singing in Moondram Pirai or the mind blowing title score for “Olangal”, this is the best music made for cinema in the world – I dare say. BM leaves characteristic silent pauses that are so beautifully filled by Maestro Ilaiyaraja with flutes and cellos in such an under orchestrated fashion that creates an everlasting audio-visual experience etched into the sub conscious so fresh.
4. Characters that you see in everyday life. There has never been a BM character who is totally outlandish – save for the ones in the movie Neengal Kettavai which was done by BM as a middle finger show to distributors who told him that he is not a commercially viable film maker. This was his take of brothers separated by villains and with Ilaiyaraaja’s music and his own camera by his side, he broke every sacred rule of film making that he learnt at FTII to make a “pucca” masala that audience unsurprisingly lapped up to make it a silver jubilee hit. All his other movies had characters that walked out of your school or my office or from a Jayakanthan short story. Such was their believability and the actors chosen were controlled by BM to “be” what the character was to the T – increasing the already strong feeling of the audience of being in some one’s house instead of being in a cinema hall. Actors like Kamal hassan, Amol Palekar, Arvind swamy, Shobha, Prathap Pothen, Prashanth, Dhanush, Sridevi, Archana, mounika, Saritha have delivered some of their top notch performances in his movies. His Tight closeups in an already personal and small setting accentuated the mood of the movie and captivated the audience attention even more firmly.
Balu – the man of controversy
Balu for all his genius was a flawed man personally. His life was full of clashes with personalities and emotional turmoil mostly due to his own making. He had a fallout with the eminent film maker J.Mahendran after the success of Mullum Malarum and both of them never worked together again.
His relationship with his films’ heroines also remains a stormy one – be it the great late Shobha whose suicide was attributed to her involvement with him or the one with Actress mounika.
Inspite of all these stories his wife “Anju mahendra” provided able support to his artistic endevours.
Balu the “guru”
Balu has been one film maker who has made sure that he passes on every ounce of his film making ability and talent to every AD of his. His ADs are all set to take over Thamizh filmdom. The most noted ones being Bala who made the phenomenal Sethu and Pithamagan and Ameer who made Paruthi veeran. Bala recounts of how he(BM) influenced him in a series of articles in Anandha Vikatan a, Thamizh weekly. He recounts fondly how he took a cinematic illiterate like himself into his fold, introduced him to great literature first and then to films, thereby placing the priorities right and how this helped him immensely in character development that has been his strong point. More recently BM is actively involved in setting up a film school where he plans to pass on the film knowledge of his generation film makers like Balachander, Bharathiraaja to the younger generation of film makers. May his efforts bear fruit and may there be a new generation of film makers who succeed in creating alluring audio visual experience that leaves a nostalgic imprint in the minds of cinema lovers as he did in his heyday.
Tags: Cinematography, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
A wonderful write up of one of the most under-appreciated filmmakers. I remember watching “Moondrum Pirai” (re-made in Hindi as “Sadma”) and was totally blown away. I wept and wept at the end. Haven’t seen too many of his other films but taking some cues from your post, I will definitely set out to watch some more.
Interesting tidbit – Balu Mahendra is Sri Lankan by birth, born Benjamin Mahendra.
I watched Sadma when I was 4. I can still remember the train ride from Mulund where we watched the movie back to our home in Dombivli, looking out the central local train at the green landscape (monsoons had just arrived) rolling by. Then the train entered a tunnel between Kalva and Diva and all was black. And I cried. The sweet strains of Ilayaraja’s melancholy playing in my ears.
Years later, I watched Moondram Pirai and cried again. Regarding Julie Ganapathy, he claims that he didn’t know it had been made into a movie and had read the tamil translation of King’s book. Somehow, I believe him or want to believe him.
A problem with some of the older filmmakers is that they try and retain their style over the years and you can not sit through a movie paced and shot like that anymore. However, his disciples are doing a very good job of taking the best of him and adding their modern sensibilities to it.
As much as I like Veedu and his other movies, for me Balu Mahendra will always be the man that made me cry at the movies for the first time and perhaps the only time an actor (Sridevi) was able to outshine KamalHassan with a desperate, heroic and sincere comeback by Kamal in the climax.
My all time fave is “Moodu Pani”. An inspiration from “Psycho”, yet towards the climax the audience is torn between sympathy for the maniac and tension as to what fate would befall the victim played wonderfully by Shobha. The tension would be accentuated by a tight setting of a house where the heroine is trapped and the psychological domain of the maniac who is trying to liberate himself of his misogynist instincts that are at loggerheads with his love for the kidnapped woman. Editing of this movie is top notch as parallel sequences of characters play out accentuating the already increasing tension. Once again songs and BGMs are mind blowing to say the least. BM’s style is not static IMO. You can place that blame on some other older directors like Balachander and Bharathiraja in Thamizh. BM always had the time tested style of presenting interesting characters in interesting situations. True that he doesn’t resort to non-linear narrative and split screen visual techniques. He doesn’t even employ the technique of letting the sound of the next scene appear in the end of the first scene or letting the sound of the first scene prolong till the next scene. His scenes are simpy laid, each having a clear beginning and crisp end. We can blame him for some slow paced narrative at the worst. If the characters and story premise is interesting, we can be patient – nothing wrong with that. He is a master in using montage shots for songs.
Some of his montage song masterpieces are:
1. “En Iniya Pon nilave” from Moodupani
2. “Raja Raja sozhan naan” from Rettai Vaal Kuruvi
3. “Rajanodu raani vandhu serum” from Sathi Leelavathi
4. “Poongatru Pudhiraanadhu” from Moondraam pirai(”Yeh Zindagi” from sadma)
He also made his foray into the medium of Television and was extremely successful with his “Kadhai Neram” (Story time) in Sun TV and other short serials for DD.
He recently had a heart attack and has been unable to move freely and attributed that as a reason for establishing the film academy to pass on the knowledge he has gathered over years by collaborating with great minds.
A good time to recollect the works of a master and apt title too…
Balu mahendra – ^:)^
A cliched Triva/info – Balu was inspired to become a filmmaker when he saw the film, “Bridge on River kwai” being shot in Srilanka.
VPJ – =d>
dabba,
Yeah. Almost every film has an inspiration. What we like is, The treatment and approach from Balu, just brilliant! Even ‘Retta val kuruvi’ was “inspired” from ‘Micki + Maude’. But thats okay, It was a fine film! Again Ilaiyaraja’s music was the soul of the film!
Hi, good post on Balumahendra… but you missed another facet of Balumahendra who directed 52 beautiful short stories in a series called ‘Balumahendra’s Kathai Neram’, it is one of the best ever TV series in Tamil…. every episode was a gem…
Sureshkumar,
I have mentioned that in my subsequent comment.
His teleserial was of the highest order and surprised everyone with good TRP ratings.
In recent interview Ilayaraaja has mentioned that of all people who narrate stories, only Balu Mahendra and Maniratnam make the movies the way they narrated. That shows how much of clarity and control they have over their concept and vision.
I think this is the best review that I’ve come across on the web about Balu mahendra, the cinemataography/director genius. Great job in this post and hats off to your writing.
BM is one of my all time fav director. I had no clue when people used to talk about photography those days and truly did not have that kind of vision. But it was BM’s movies like Moodupani and Moonram pirai that got my attention. Infact moonram pirai is simply the best cinema made in tamil. The movies is like a baby’s first step; first love; nostalgic memories; nothing but a master piece. Kamal and Sridevi cannot even imagine to perform the same way given today.
Overall, BM is our south indian hitchcock; a true gift to the movie industry and for film lovers in India.
Swamy.