On Sriram Raghavan's Merry Christmas, Éric Rohmer and the concept of family
As everyone knows by now, Sriram Raghavan’s Merry Christmas begins with a cheeky note to Thiagarajan Kumararaja. The recluse Tamil filmmaker who prefers to stand on the sidewalk and observe rather than talk about his art is apparently also queasy to take credit. In addition to helping out with the film’s Tamil version, I am willing to bet that the part, among other things, where we discover Vijay Sethupathi’s Albert’s erotic novels written as a 14-year-old came from Thiagarajan or at least is a hat tip to him. But let’s dial back a bit. Among the several obvious references the film throws at us, one is Edvard Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King played at Maria’s (Katrina Kaif) home. It sounded zippier and louder than I remember, and my mind went to Ilaiyaraaja’s inspired score Kaamaththup-Paal from Thiagarajan’s episode of Modern Love Chennai—Ninaivo Oru Paravai. That’s the original but a rapid version with a quality of brusqueness to it. That was scored for intense lovemaking and orgasm while Grieg’s score here is used as a tease at a beginning of love and peril (much like in Fritz Lang’s M), and a way of distraction. You give a tune, a classic famous one to Raaja and request something similar, what you get is a masterclass on how to do inspiration. Which is why, the other thank you credit, one to Éric Rohmer sets high standards for a film that floats on the exchanges between Albert and Maria for much of its runtime.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwYN_EER7EM
Rohmer’s films have characters seemingly drifting through life in search of their destiny. They search for them in conversations and what they learn about each other through them. Men talk about women a lot. Women talk about men, women and philosophy a lot. They talk about love that’s both fleeting and encompassing. All of this germinates from loneliness that is internalized to the point that any human contact is received with exciting ratification. Pauline in Pauline at the Beach defines fun as “Being with people my own age”. “I’ve always made friends on vacations, except this year”, she adds. Delphine in The Green Ray is depressed and is searching for one ray of sunshine that could change everything or at least give her the acuity to express her inner conflicts. Rohmerian tales possess an unsentimental exterior which projects an air of elegance that is adept at masking the melodramatic interior filled with repressed emotions. It is not far from what Albert and Maria try to externalize to and imbue from each other.
Albert and Maria meet by chance on Christmas eve sometime in 1980s Bombay and proceed to have these conversations about love, loss and longing. The Rohmer thank you note shines brightest when we see the letters B and E projected askew in Regal theatre only to read “Please check your longings before leaving the theatre”. Both Vijay Sethupathi and Katrina Kaif get close-ups to tell their story and when together, they are filmed from a low angle. This is a wonderfully directed film, the camera glides across chambers and the actors blocked to keep up with the motion. It’s also a film that rests uneasily on all the talking. When Maria is serious, Albert is in the mood for banter. When he becomes serious, Maria kills the atmosphere. This is in keeping with what the film really is—a romantic thriller where both the characters hold the cards close to their chest. But for rest of the film, the cadence of such repartee is found wanting. Vijay Sethupathi and Katrina Kaif seem to operate at different registers for this to play out the way it is intended. There isn’t just a dead body but also dead air and Maria says twice that she doesn’t have ice in her home though both are in a constant battle to break ice. We never get further to fully enjoy this chemistry. This took me back to another film with Vijay Sethupathi where he finds himself in the process of beginning a friendship with a woman—that easy camaradarie and snappy dialogue from Nalan Kumaraswamy’s Kadhalum Kadanthu Pogum is entirely missing here.
Almost everything else bears the Raghavan stamp. The thematic foreshadowing and the central philosophy of transitory enchantment doubling up as momentary lapse in judgement, Merry Christmas (written with the trusted coterie of Arijit Biswas, Pooja Ladha Surti, Anukriti Pandey) is an enjoyable rabbit hole of a movie. There is an effortless uniformity and consistency to the storytelling—from the cabaret sequence in the restaurant, Tinnu Anand’s Yadhoom philosophy that devolves into a contented smile much later, the seven year itch in both Albert and Maria’s stories to the little things like Maria restoring a displaced snowball picked up by Albert to its original position. There are several tells throughout the film that makes you appreciate the film more in the second viewing. These fluid machinations punctuated by Hindi cinema callbacks in the score which are conducted with the glee of an ardent cinephile make Merry Christmas that magic green bill you find in a pocket after a long time but just at the right moment.
But back to Rohmer a little bit, the tribute also comes in the form of the central question of morality, the defintion of family and the things you do for love. In that, the film could very well be something like My Night at Maud’s or part of the Six Moral Tales set (oh how great it would be to get such a thematic union of films from Raghavan). Family and what it constitutes is at the centre of Merry Christmas—after all a time of the year when the family gets together. Albert lost an attempt at a family to a folly of his own. His first love chose the security of an existing one instead. He also lost the only one he had in its name—his mother. For Maria, the very concept of family is corrupt, her husband Jerome is far more despicable than even she could imagine. There is a wedding ring in molaga podi that started it all and at least two more times the idea of the ring comes up in conversation. A seven year itch is what brings Albert and Maria together, and they talk about happy families advertised by capitalism during a festival sustained by the concept. The “families” of Merry Christmas get together in the end with Scarlett (Ashwini Kalsekar), Ronnie’s (Sanjay Kapoor) wife calling him a coward to relieve him from the clutches of the police and even that sounds like a ruse. The family as a unit or at least a flawed but necessary unit is consistently questioned in this film. Maria, Albert, Ronnie and Scarlett are all ready to go to any lengths to protect what they consider family. The film ends in a long dialogue less sequence, scored to Vivaldi, but it is capped off by, what else, the traditional beginnings of a family—a proposal albeit a wordless one.