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Is Khalid's 'Tehzeeb' a self- probe?
By Naresh Kumar
In The News
Once a movie scribe and now a filmmaker Khalid Mohammed had visited Chennai for postproduction work on his soon-to-be released feature film, 'Tehzeeb'. The film has ghazals by Momin, Daag and Kaifi Azmi, besides lyrics by Javed Akhtar. A.R.Rahman has given the music. Rahman found a new rich voice in Madhushri, with Asha Bhonsle for a special number. So it's a mix of Rahman wanting to do something semi-classical, plus Mohammed doing a techno pop.
'Tehzeeb' is a story starting in the 1980s but continuing in the present. A career woman-playback singer mother (Shabana Azmi), launches into a lively pop number picturised on Urmila Matondkar, the TV viewing housewife-daughter, performing the song in her imagination.
"Tehzeeb" (manners) is the name of Matondkar in the film. The title of the first serious work of her pulp fiction writer husband is about a mother-daughter relationship. Mohammed pre-empts the obvious question saying that he had always wanted to do something in the vein of "Autumn Sonata." What happens between a famous mother and a daughter who doesn't want to be like her?
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Apart from Azmi and Matondkar, the cast comprises Arjun Rampal, Diya Mirza and Rishi Kapoor though in a special appearance. The mother, estranged from her husband, has had a much-publicized affair. Her daughter opts for a marriage rather than a career. The mother visits her daughter after many years. She is confronted not only with the waste of her singing talent in stubborn housewife, but with her mentally challenged second child (Diya Mirza) brought home from the institution where she had been placed. Her busy concert tours and studio recordings had left the mother little time for either child. The elder child believes that the neglect has affected her younger sister. Cordiality soon gives way to tensions. Mohammed agrees that children tend to idealize mothers as symbols of purity. But in his film, the daughter finally asks her mother about her lover. In a reversal of roles, she tells the mother that she has to face things and that she cannot escape from reality. The mother is stunned.
It is wondered if "Tehzeeb" is another self-probe and therapeutic 'mother trip,' for Mohammed? We know that his mother was the original Zubeida in Shyam Benegal's eponymous films based on Mohammed's story. A flamboyant beauty who had abandoned her son when she went to live with her royal paramour. However, she died at 19. He wonders what would have happened if she had lived longer. Somewhere he would have held her guilty for not staying with his father who went away across the border. So, in the actual writing, "Sonata" went for a toss and it became the story of a child who had witnessed scenes that created psychological traumas. "If my mother had returned to my placid house one day after many years, I too would have said, to her that she has a lot to explain."
The story of stress and strain would make a good novella, recalling how Mohammed was wary of book writing, against the bustle of life around a journalist. Mohammed reflects that fiction demands research, knowledge, and brilliance in blending narrative and description. "Far easier to write dialogue than to ornament your story with details of tree, street or home. In cinema they depend on location and camera angle," Mohammed feels.
Javed Siddiqui embellished Mohammed's screenplay "Tehzeeb," taking it "further because he is steeped in Urdu adab and Muslim culture." Inputs came from the whole team. Cinematographer Santosh Sivan is a genius and editor Sreekar Prasad innovates with his cuts.
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It was smooth sailing with the actors. The director used Arjun Rampal's sense of fun to change the grim and serious husband into a man who pulls gags, understands situations and defuses tensions. Rishi Kapoor's innate charm enhanced the father's nawabi courtliness. The film was shot in 40 days with no delays and no cancellations. "With everything going like clockwork, sometimes I felt I was in the periphery," feels Mohammed.
The script was written with Azmi and Tabu in mind. The former had the mercurial unpredictability needed for the part, which made her a deliberate choice over good friends Jaya Bachchan, Rekha and Dimple Kapadia.
Matondkar had initially been the choice for the mentally challenged girl's role, but Mohammed believes her glamour and lack of 'ultra-seriousness' made for good casting in the part that Tabu didn't play. Azmi and Matondkar caught up with memories of playing mother and daughter in Gulzar's "Masoom" when the latter was a child.
Has his reviewer's perspective changed after making films? "Now I know there are ways of getting out of problems. I can smell a lazy shot, a badly constructed scene, performance problems, see where the director is fudging it, all more acutely than before."
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Mohammed responds to the inevitable charge that he has opted for commercial rather than art cinema, the brand he often trounced in his columns as a critic. He says he hasn't been against Bollywood fare. He liked Raj Kapoor, Guru Dutt, even Manmohan Desai. But the bulk of Hindi cinema was trash.
Yes, he does have a taste for the 'other' cinema. But there is eclecticism in him, a dichotomy. "I'd like to make both kinds, but it's easier to raise Rs 5 crore than to raise Rs 50 lakh. I'd love to do a film about the last Irani restaurant in Mumbai; I even have a script about this Irani who leads a double life - a Robocop at night, a restaurateur by day. No commercial potential, so no funding. It's common sense to make a "Tehzeeb" where the Rs 5 crore investor gets Rs 6 crore back. And why not stars and glamour so long as I use them aesthetically?"
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Mention film festivals as a channel and Mohammed sees red. "You have to know the right person in Mumbai or Delhi, make the right phone calls at the right time. Recently a woman came from Locarno, asked what I'd done, saw one scene (I didn't want to show the whole) and said, 'Oh, we had a little taste, now we want the whole! But mind, no promises. Try it in Switzerland and see what happens!' Okay, the West wants to promote our commercial cinema now, but you must be sensitive about it, not treat people as if they are holding begging bowls. Don't you think it's a big political game?"
Is the commercial circuit free of politics and groups? "Of course," he replies. "But my film will get to the theatre, get its exposure, my taxi driver, my milkman and my neighbor will know my film, right?"
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