Oxford’s annual Asian theater show, ‘Chutney & Chips’, was back at it last week, delighting crowds who streamed in to St John’s Garden Quad Auditorium for one of four performances. Nisha Julka’s original script combined traditional Bollywood tropes–love triangles, song and dance, and comic relief–artfully in a way that spoke to the Oxford audience. The core conflict in the production was about what it means to be both Indian and British; yes, just like “Bend It Like Beckham,” but situated at Oxford and in which the main characters don’t play soccer but rather act in a play. And though that sounds irreverently self-referential (oh, a play about characters who act in a play), the whole thing does–perhaps surprisingly–work. Chutney & Chips is enjoyable because it doesn’t take itself too seriously. 

The great strength of the production is the infusion of Bollywood into anything and everything. The thorough celebration of all-things Indian makes the thematic conclusion of the play never in doubt–Jeevan will, of course, reconnect with his Indian roots and get the girl that he loves. I found Chutney & Chips’s exuberance of India exhilarating  The costumes are wonderful rich and Indian to a T. The opening 10-minute Bharatanatyam sequence is well-executed and sets the scene for the rest of the play: there ain’t nothin more Indian than Bharatanatyam.

The token white characters (yes, Bollywood films have them too) had the innocuous names of Dave and Sonia. But Dev and Sonia are Indian names too, and Chutney & Chips makes a strong case against racial exclusivity: the point here is that anyone can be Indian, no matter the color of skin or accent of voice. Indeed, Chutney & Chips’s message of pan-Indian universalism is something that Indians themselves should take to heart–too often it seems that India is riven by internal rivalries: Hindu v Muslim, north v south, caste v caste, etc.

The strongest part of Chutney & Chips is how well song and dance was integrated into the production. From the opening Bharatanatyam sequence to the closing Harlem Shake, everything was just fun. Including, incidentally, the scene that used Some Nights by fun. The seeming randomness when dance would break out was just awesome: the needlessness of the dance scenes is what makes Bollywood Bollywood, and Chutney & Chips captured it perfectly. The best dance was the impromptu red repairmen dance at Bridge. It sounds ridiculous, and it was. But so good.

The use of music was strong as well. I wouldn’t want to take the music director in a round of Antakshari–I’d get hosed. Clearly these guys know their stuff, and they chose the exact right music for the right scenes. The wide range of music, from classical Indian to Western pop, was excellent. Even better was how the music was integrated into the plot. I don’t know of a better song than Pretty Woman for that moment when Dave met Sonia, and Jeevan’s strumming of Ladki Bardi Anjanni Hai was perfect.

I enjoyed the simple sets and props. The totality of props included a few tables, chairs, a bed, and a broom. But even these items tell a story. For example, the set director somehow found an old palang to use–a cheap bed to Western eyes, but so much more to Indians in the know. I nearly gasped when I saw it rolled on to stage: I mean, that’s what I sleep on when I go back to India.

The acting was varied throughout the performance. The highlight, no doubt, was the passionately comedic performance of the character Mukesh (Johnny Lever beaten at his own game, dare I say). Continuing with the ‘play-within-a-play’ motif, Mukesh is told that he is the breakout character in the play-within-a-play. While that’s not true, Mukesh certainly was the breakout in Chutney & Chips. He was sassy and sexy, and you can’t beat unzipping blue coveralls to expose a full tux underneath (very Bondish). The other strong performance was the bit piece of Jeevan’s high school girlfriend’s over-protective older brother. He gets to beat up Jeevan, and actually does. Those kicks hit real ribs, and I’d hate to see the bruises day-after. The fight was certainly better than the stale Bollywood fight scenes of the 80s.

Unfortunately, most of the emotional scenes (particularly when Jeevan confided in Rachana) didn’t seem exactly right. The actors had trouble expressing openness and love between one another. Luckily our amateur actors have at least 5 years to learn these emotions before their parents marry them off in arranged marriages. Paging Dr. Mukesh from Chandigarh.

I had two other criticisms of the performance. First, Chutney & Chips suffered from something that all Bollywood films and old Indian aunties can commiserate with: bloat. The performance was perhaps 15 minutes too long.

My second criticism is more substantive, however. Thematically, Chutney & Chips played it too safe. There is nothing outre in the three couples of Jeevan and Rachana, Chirag and Shivani, and Dave and Sonia. All are heterosexual, and each pair is racially homogeneous. Unfortunately while Indian film today is pushing boundaries on sexuality, race, and religion, Chutney & Chips was uncomfortably blase. Indeed, the only stirring of social criticism in the script is the portrayal of child marriage, though Balika Vadhu does a better job in that regard.

Chutney & Chips 2013 was a strong performance, and I look forward to the 2014 iteration. I will certainly be there, and I hope to see you too.

CONGRATULATIONS to Bithia Large, winner of our ‘ANIMALS’ photo competition! Here’s her winning shot

[mm-hide-text]%%IMG_ORIGINAL%%7081%%[/mm-hide-text]

We had some lovely things in this week, so we’ve also picked a runner up. Congratulations Rachel Hutchings!

[mm-hide-text]%%IMG_ORIGINAL%%7082%%[/mm-hide-text]

Thank you to all our entries, we’ve loved seeing your interpretations of the themes throughout the term. As always, all of our competition winners can be found on the Cherwell Photo Flickr page 

Mama began life in 2008 as a three -minute short, but in expansion to feature-length it has been a victim of mutation. Andres Muschietti has put his film on the rack and painfully stretched it until, weirdly, it has ended up as nothing at all – not scary, not sad, not clever…dragged out from what was ostensibly a clip.
And it shows.

The Mum-off between the mutated tree-woman (an estranged cousin of Pocahontas’ more benevolent Old Mother Willow; why she appears to
be half-tree is never actually explained.) and Jessica Chastain is developed without subtlety, and nowhere is the failure clearer than when the smaller
of the two insipid girls is taken by the woman, and you just don’t care.
Which you probably should, about the untimely death of an 8-year-old.

The film breaks the fundamental rule of horror by revealing its fear-figure within the first two seconds. And it’s like the moment when you realise Jeepers Creepers is a giant gorilla with wings, or that the girl from The Ring is just a slightly damp child in need of a haircut. But here it happens so early on in the film that you have yet to associate any fear with her. So there she is, for
the rest of the film, present without eliciting any response at all, other than confusion as to why her face has been CGI-ed to resemble a self-portrait of the sort found on class tea-towels from primary school. A face only a
Mama could love.

And it’s just. So. Bad. Like the love child of Helena Bonham-Carter and one of the aliens from Signs. In a dress. And not in a scary way. In the sort of anti-climactic way which, instead of compounding an already paralysing sensation of fear, totally obliterates any notion of horror or even interest you might be experiencing.

The Woman in Black is the winner of this game of hide-and-reveal: fleeting glimpses and fragments, creepy handprints and unidentifiable noises right up until you’re too scared lift a finger, let alone turn it off or leave the room. A really good fear-figure has to lurk in the shadows, appearing only when you’ve
already slapped your disproportionately sweaty palms to your increasingly contorted face more times than is appropriate for your age-range.

The key is the mask: Jigsaw has his puppet, and his lackies in hogheads, Mr Texas Chainsaw has his skin-mask, there’s the bag-on-headchild of El Orfanato (another of del Toro’s ‘production’ collaborations), so why couldn’t this one stick to the tried and tested fear gear?

The lack of suspense caused by a premature reveal denies the audience any real climax: leaving it frustratingly unsatisfied, not only by the promise of del Toro’s touch, which is absent throughout the film, but also by an emotionally impotent final scene, and a very real sense of wasted hours.

Ever heard of William Nicholson? Apparently he’s a screenwriter. A pretty successful screenwriter. The screen writer of Gladiator and Les Miserables in fact. So, why isn’t his name plastered over all the posters? Didn’t he write the damned things?

Screen writers, Nicholson said in an OUFF talk this week, have a hard time. Want to be a screenwriter? Think about it carefully. We highly intelligent, emotionally sensitive types probably haven’t got a chance. Screenwriters need to be able to take a lot of rejection. “Be prepared to have your work ripped to
shreds, criticised, ignored.” Heartening stuff.

Nicholson left Cambridge with a degree in English Literature, having invested his time in “learning to not be clever”. He subsequently spent 15 years trying to be a latter-day Proust, with a day job at the BBC, before finally giving up on his high-brow dream and turning to TV. Writing for TV, he muses, has an interesting future. “TV serials can work like novels; they have the time to really develop character in a way that a two-hour film simply can’t.”

Once you’ve been in the industry you develop a sort of zen. Every director has made an awful film (even Stanley Kubrick – did you see Eyes Wide Shut?); every director is hoping to make a great one.

Nicholson was the third screenwriter brought onto the Gladiator set. A remarkable number of films, he tells us, start filming without a decent script. The producer picks a screenwriter, and later a director, and then the actors appear, and the crew, and everyone assumes that at some point in that process the script will become ready. Sometimes it just isn’t. 

On Gladiator, working alongside filming, Nicholson got to see which parts were working and which weren’t. They soon realised Joaquin Phoenix was great, he says, and expanded his part.

“Writing a screen play is not about dialogue; it’s about the story. It’s creating pictures on paper. Some write screen plays like nineteenth century novels, others just write noises.” “Write quickly”, he advises. It doesn’t take weeks to perfect a sentence. And you’ll be drafting and redrafting quite a bit.

“What I do,” he says, “is listen to the criticism my scripts are given, and realise
that yes, maybe those bits aren’t working.” But what he does not do is listen to anyone else’s advice about how to fix those bits; that’s his problem to solve.

“Screenwriters, at least for Hollywood, are underrated. In TV they get a bit more credit. The director swings onboard and takes it as his, or her, movie. But the direction doesn’t really matter,” Nicholson quips. “What you need is a good script, and good actors. And with that, the director doesn’t need to do much.”

Of course, there are truly great directors – he doesn’t deny that – but let’s all spare a thought for the screenwriter.

For those of you who couldn’t be bothered to sit through 84 hours of the American film industry’s most self-indulgent piece of self-congratulation, Cherwell Film&TV brings you the ‘important’ bits of what you missed…

The sheer masturbation of it is pretty clear in the winner of Best Film over the last two years, two films which celebrate film itself: The Artist (#omghowgreatisfilm?) and Argo (#omghowpoliticalandgreatisfilm?). That Hollywood is an important part of the giant cultural structure which is the Great American Mythology is clear, but the inundation of America-Fuck-Yeah cinema this Awards Season was something to behold: would the Academy celebrate its abolition of slavery? Its CIA heroes? Or the rogue team responsible for the capture of Bin Laden? Argo got the Best Motion Picture award, “a middle option between the tubthumping patriotism of Lincoln and the hot potato juggling of Zero Dark Thirty” (Guardian).

So, all this aside, essentially here’s what you missed: Jennifer Lawrence fell over on her way to the podium, but was still easily the bestest person in the room; Ben Affleck charmed us into almost forgetting the horrors of Jersey Girl; Adele cried. And Seth MacFarlane was a tit, albeit one with quite a decent singing voice.

Actually, Seth MacFarlane was much worse than a tit – his spiel consisted argely of odious fratboy bullshit, from jokes about the Kardashians’ facial hair to a song  named ‘We Saw Your Boobs’ (even if it was given a framing device so it seemed  to be laughing at itself.) Haven’t we had enough easy jokes about Chris Brown and Rihanna? Are jokes about a nine-year-old getting with George Clooney funny? Was it Gervaisesque? Was it even entertaining?

It was not only distinctly not funny but among the weirdest Oscar ceremonies of all time, a lot of singing and dancing around the point. What the point was remained obscure. There were redeeming moments (Jennifer Hudson and Adele’s performances among them) as well as Daniel Day-Lewis’s acceptance speech (for his third Best Actor Oscar), and Tarantino’s ever-perplexing sense of his own identity somehow enabling him to finish his acceptance speech with a heart-felt “peace out”.

Ceremony aside, other news involves people wearing clothes of various descriptions (the fact that clothing comes in different forms perpetually seeming to astound certain commentators), awards for filmmaking being handed out to people involved in the filmmaking industry, each of whom got up to the podium and said some stuff.

The results are interesting enough, but the ceremony itself seems a real waste of the hours invested. Why not watch the 90-second highlight instead and use the time to actually watch one of the films…or read. Of course the film industry needs critics and awards, but the shows of self-importance and celebration, especially in comparison with awards in other media such as books, is somewhat distasteful.

That said, there was something really human about the multiple thanks given to spouses by this year’s winners: it reminded us that the players in this blindingly sparkling game have lives off the red carpet as well, and maybe even real life feelings outside of the uniformly gushing gratitude of acceptance speeches.

Rather wonderfully, this year a toilet flooded the foyer of the venue minutes before the ceremony was due to start. That and the bottle of Windex (surface cleaner) reportedly provided in the Oscars goodie bag seemed to top off the whole thing with an oddly suitable sense of banality.