Arshi ji, three cheers for 'himmat' bytes... You are indeed more charitable than I ever could 😳
Again, I started today's episode... Watched it to the point where Kumud said, Kalika aur mere beech ka difference - jhooth aur sacchaii. At which point I laughed so hard that I choked on the chocolate milk I was drinking...Pot meet kettle. At least 'pot' bhag toh gayyi, before she could be coerced into an unwanted relation.. 'Kettle' abhi tak mooh uthhaye khadi hai, further abuse ke liye. Toh kiske paas hai 'aatma sammaan'? At that point, I again realised that Kumud is not only a kettle but she is an empty one, where even the dregs have dried up and are starting to give off a bad smell, and then I promptly switched the telly off.
Let's all witness Ratnagiri's foremost graduate's, mighty fall from grace. A lost cause & she ain't even irresistible to me, anymore... I was never a Kumud advocate to begin with, and with today's and yesterday's epi's... I've reached my tolerance threshold with her. I cannot even applaud the sham and token 'walkout' which will now be staged... Thrown like rotted breadcrumbs to appease. Well, it is my choice and I refuse to gobble. SP can just shove their token Nayi Soch crap. I would have respected them more had they brazenly followed through with their ghatiya soch. This just shows that they have no respect, and no convictions in their mathematics either. So-called paragons of virtue, cannot rise above low, and below-the-belt, blows. Not only are they fickle, but they are the fickle-who-wield-power. Those kinds, are worse than the tryrants. They're out & out megalomaniac's.
Her walking out and same foot coming back in, under pressure or what not, takes a butcher knife to the carcass of Kumudsundari left remaining and hacks with a vengeance. Prepare for a bloodbath, unlike any others... Until she looks up at a Postive Pakau Pramad with stars in her eyes 🤢
And now, for a bit of diversion... Right now I'm at an all-day conference, and placed such that I can surreptitiously use my phone, while the proceedings around me, toddle on... Thank God for the small mercies 😛 The speaker is a windbag and worse, speaks in a mind-boggling monotone... He is blessed with the superpowers of making even the topic of something as cutting-edge as Intellectual Property Law for Games, sound even more pre-historic than the dinosaurs. And he does it with flashy powerpoints. I suppose that too is an Art... The guy next to me, is playing Temple Run on mute, and that makes me feel a bit vindicated... At least, my engagement is more, umm productive... 😉
Anyways, so right now, I am counter-employing on Mr. SuperBore, my superpowers of tuning him out... And since I'm sitting in the auditorium of my Alma-Mater... I keep flashing back to old memories... This is relevant to SC, how? Well, as part of my English major, I had to take part in the requisite drama classes... Shakespeare, Chaucer, Marlowe, Wilde, Sarte etc (I tell you, the cross-dressing bits were so much fun 😆) And... As part of my FTVMS (Film, TV and Media Studies) post-grad, we had to take Screen Production papers, wherein our class of thirty-five actually made a tele-film, of which we students handled ALL aspects - scripting, direction, technical, acting, production, marketing... Which we were marked upon. And in the course, I learnt some valuable lessons, which I tried applying onto SC yesterday, comparing MG's and AK's direction. That is when I realised one of the places, apart from the usual no script, no sense concerns, where SC is falling apart...
This would be from a director's POV:
Arshi, having dabbled in theatre yourself... You would have come across this golden rule in some form or another... That in any endeavour in the Performance Arts realm (theatre, dance, opera, vaudeville, magic, puppetry, film, television, radio and contemporary performance), it is about the other person, even more so than it is about you. And the same goes for the other person as well. In performance arts, an artist falls flat if he/she simply 'plays'... She/he ALWAYS has to "play off"... You cannot go rogue and act as a law unto oneself, you have to act as a team... Not ME, but WE. Even if you are doing a soliloquy, you're still playing off, this time, against your own self!
This is also the fundamental, IMHO, the most important tenet of the 'Shot Reverse Shot' technique... Jack Johnson put it best, in his recent song...
"Shot Reverse Shot/Look what the other got"... It can't be about you, it ALWAYS has to be about the other. You do your prep, your practice... But at crunch time, when the camera's start rolling, you trust the cues you are getting... If someone starts, you follow their lead... Because they'll 'follow' you back to create a seamless experience. If 'follow' or 'follow back' of visual and behavioural cues fail to happen, or shut down mid-way, then that is dishonest storytelling and dishonest performance.
"Playing off" is like a duel... "You're the rock, I'm the paper/You're the scissors, I'm the rock" For perhaps the best exemplification of this 'duel'... I would direct you to revisit the Kul-Devi pooja scene again... From the very start... Right from when Kumud gets out of the car, and Saras follows... Even whilst walking apart and unaware, they were infact doing a 'dance'... Both 'anticipating' each other. Playing off, does not entail harmony. It means war. Anticipating, manouvering, counter-manouvering, bobbing, weaving, feinting and KO/TKO. While you trust, you also hold your own... That is why in a performance, we appreciate the artists both on their own merits, and as a team. As a team, because, they've trusted each other, which allows them to play off, and on their own merit, because in 'playing off' they were still able to hold their own. An honest artist practices both sportsmanship and formidable play. That marks them. The absence of which, also marks the dishonest artist.
And once more, for emphasis, the 'golden rules' of SRS/Playing off, reiterated:
Feel this storm go through my sail/Follow someone else' trail
Camera A, Camera B/In your home, on your TV
Hook me up, look in my eyes/Dilate, do I surprise you?
Watch me blush, blink, sink/ Trust in me so you don't have to think
Twila and Happy, here goes my critique for yesterday... Because I cannot stomach the storyline and especially, Kumud, anymore. Plus, Aanshul Trivedi is too expression-less for my liking. He'll become even more bland, while 'good'... Pramad can put me to sleep even when he is shouting. He does not even envince hatred in me, anymore. Simply leaves me irritated. He lost me as a viewer the day he lost that manic edge and became a buffoonish 70's caricature. Thanks, TOI. So I won't be watching until the shraad sequence, if and actually happening. For that epi, I'll be praying for AK in the directors chair and I'll be hoping for magic. Until then, I'll give my remote and SP channel a break =)
Disclaimer: To all CB folks, and especially to the ones responsible always for the burgeoning thread views... Take the following in the right spirit. This is neither a rant, nor a bash. This is nothing personal. This is an analysis, otherwise I would not have bothered with all of the explaining above. Feel free to disagree but bring points to the table. Valid, intelligent points that rebutt and refute mine.
Yesterday, Jennifer Winget refused to play by the rules of SRS, right through the episode. She was merely playing rather than playing off in all her scenes, and in her confrontation with Kalika, the way Soni Singh tried to read and react to all the mis-aligned cues, and the fact that Jennifer was neither 'following' nor 'following back' compelled me to deliver a standing-frickin'-ovation to her. Because SS alone both displayed sportmanship and held her own against the lead. And she frickin' outshined Jennifer in all of their scenes yesterday, something that Guman was never able to do. That is huge, considering we all know what Jennifer Winget, the actress, is capable of.
The end result of which was that Kumud came off as fake, and trying-too-hard-not-to-be- sanctimonious yesterday, in forcing Kalika to get married. And Kalika walked away with all my sympathy, because had Kumud been portrayed as malicious, as 'settling score/playing Kalika at her own game' or even honest as to why she wanted Kalika married off, I would have believed and digested. But no, she had to be stuck, fully convinced and mega-watt-beaming on her epic delusion that she wanted Kalika to have a good home. What a load of BS... Who died and made Kumud Kalika's father? Moorakhdass is still alive... Kumud was grade-A hypocrite yesterday... In her own bubble, forcing a girl to breaking point, compelling her to run... And she did it all with a beatific smile on a face, with 'goodness' in her heart 🤢. Both Kumud's and Saras' delight at Kalika's engagement was indecent, and wrong. As a girl, there I relate. I would have shot down the person who dared forced me into an unwanted relation. And if they were so full of themselves, like Kumud to say, ki woh meri bhalai ke liye kar rahe hai, I would have kicked them a million times after that, for good measure. To throw Kumud a line, strictly as a girl, koi uski bahen ke saath aisa kare toh?
Saras, at least, still had the guts to admit to both himself and Kumud that he wanted Kalika out of the way, for his own reasons, for Kumud's sake, but not Kumud. For her, "it was I want her to be happy, really." Excuse me while I go barf. And today, she's crying buckets because she could not believe she could be so 'ruthless' with Kalika. Let me barf some more. What was she, stoned yesterday when she was forcing clothes and jewellery upon her. Didn't she realise yesterday, that she was forcing? Kumud's means (getting Kalika out of the way by pretending/believing in her happy place that she is only doing this for Kalika's good) and Kumud's end (so she can have her attempted rapist hubby, after getting rid of the maid) are both vile and demeaning. For a woman, as a woman, to a woman. Kumudsundari Pramadhan Dharmadhikari is a disgrace. And she is well on her way to setting a damaging new precedent for portrayal of women in Indian telly. Bravo.
The character of Kumud is already in a dark coffin, and the nails are never-ending, being hammered in place with wow-precision. We're witnessing a nuclear annihilation, of character blocks and character building. The CV's are being sadistic, uncouth Wreck-It Ralph's and Fix-It Felix has permanently left the building. Moreover, the actress needs to go back to SRS classes, or she needs to take a deep breath and realise there are other people in the room. This is my long simmering resentment... For the past two weeks, intermittently, Jennifer has gone back to playing and being her own team. Coming across as inconsistent and leaving others in the lurch at execution time. At first I thought yeh MG ki mayaa hai, but yesterday with Arshad Khan as well, she was effing with the rules of 'playing off'... She was in her own zone. And if this sorry state continues, Kumud's character is gonna get weaker and weaker and all other characters orbiting around hers will also be rendered haphazard and inconsistent. It's just like dominoes... One topple and you watch the 'empire' fall.
Another scene where Jennifer merely played rather than playing off was the laddoo scene... She 'leads' and GR 'follows'... But when he 'leads' she refuses to 'follow back'... He inquires in a soft baritone and she reponds, utterly high-pitched. Whatever on earth was that?! She refuses to match him on voice modulations in all instances, but one... And by then, GR, refuses to 'follow back'... Tit for tat. Honestly, the scene worked better for me after muting Kumud's voice, and this is from someone who is a fan of both the lead's awesome powers of voice modulation. Where is the kryptonite, I ask? And that is why I adore that smile moment of Saras, all the more. She leads, and expects him to, but he refuses to follow, and walks off. A perfect shot of independence of artist and character, both 👏
Now, as per my two-week long observations, Jennifer isn't the only one not playing by the SRS rules. Others such as Pramad, SD, Alak, Dukbaa (most notably in that suicide sequence) and even at times, Saras do too... But she is by far the worst offender and I wonder why the director does not do anything about it. Time crunch on episodes, maybe, but this is basic integrity of story-telling and should be considered sacrosanct. This is one of the reasons why, apart from a story that is straining the lines of all intelligence and decency, SC does not work anymore. I hinted at this once before too: Both the leads are playing to their strengths while the script dies a painful death. It is not seamless, it is disjointed, and when the illusion breaks, we have no choice but to hunt down the cracks in the mirror. But when 'play-off' happens, we are too engrossed to think about anything else. Why do I, despite myself, enjoy Kalika and Saras scenes more, despite the utterly rudiculous content. It is because GR and SS play off against each other. As another point of contrast, watch the Danny and Kumari scene... Varun plays off even against an asleep Vinita. That is why we find them 'charming', 'fresh'... Another offender yesterday (minor) was VC. He was supposed to look at Danny but looked like he was off into space and giving angry glares to thin air. Or maybe to Pluto.
Maybe the next episode of SC, you all might like to notice how actors play off against each other... Mirroring of body language, gaze and eye level, voice modulations... First in harmony to signal trust and then a battle of 'performances'... Using the other, but holding your own. And maybe notice the ones breaking the rules of playing off. I find the exercise v interesting... Breaking the fourth wall, kind of like, even though no one looks at you from the screen and complains, "look so and so just made a foul." Because CB, for its part, has always acted as a 'fifth wall' allowing all of us, to invest, engage and contribute in a shared experience 😳
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