In another excellent installment of Subhash K Jha’s This Day That Year feature the spotlight is turned to revisiting Meenaxi: A Tale Of 3 Cities, the 2004 M. F. Husain directed film that starred Tabu.
Madhuri Dixit was not the only muse in legendary painter M F Husain’s life. After he directed Gaja Gamini as a homage to Dixit’s beauty, he directed Meenaxi: A Tale Of 3 Cities which turned 21 on April 2.
Husain Saab cast the then-incandescent Tabu in three roles: Meenaxi, Tanu, and Tabu, each set in a different city: Hyderabad, Jaisalmer, and Prague.
Though far less inaccessible for the viewer than Gaja Gamini (Naseeruddin Shah tells me to let him know when I know what that was all about), Meenaxi nonetheless suffered from bouts of incurable esotericism.
Tabu may not be as graceful and nimble-footed as Madhuri Dixit. But she carried the weight of the film’s basic debate on art, life and illusion with a fertile facility which transported Husain’s vision into the realm of the poetic.
The three segments were not mutually exclusive in the way of, say, Raj Kapoor’s Mera Naam Joker. Characters overlap, collide, and coalesce to the point where borders between feeling and manifestation, thought and expression seem to become joined in the dance of life.
In a conversation with this writer, Husain Saab said, “I am proud of both Gaja Gamini and Meenaxi. Both Madhuri and Tabu gave remarkable performances. Who was better? Arrey, Bhai! I can’t choose between the two. They are both beautiful, extremely talented women. You can’t ask me to select one among my two eyes. Yeh toh na-insaafi hogi.”
I remember running into M. F. Husain, accompanied by Tabu, at Gulzar Saab’s house. One could see a very special and sublime bonding between the painter and his muse in the way she clung to his shoulder like a filial muse.
Somewhere in the middle of this seamless tale—or was it the beginning of an end, or perhaps the end of a beginning? — Tabu, playing an elusive creature of fugitive desires in Jaisalmer, steals into Kunal’s haveli on tiptoes with the express intention of making her feelings manifest.
But Kunal (played by a refreshingly natural, non-iron-pumping Kunal Kapoor) is shy and apprehensive. “You here at this time of the night?” he looks uneasily over his shoulder. Meenakshi’s face falls like a thousand blooming flowers descending from a branch that, not so long ago, was waving proudly into the sky.
That scene where the woman, at the risk of her own reputation, steals into the arms of passion seems like M.F. Husain’s tribute to Devdas.
As far as Meenakshi is concerned, it’s the end of love. But for the author Nawab (Raghuvir Yadav), it’s also the cue for a new beginning. He can now take his heroine into another dimension, another continent, another chance for Tabu to showcase her enchanting enigma.
Meenaxi: A Tale Of 3 Cities dwells on the critical and ageless debate on the intricate relationship between the creator and his creation, between the artiste and his art, and the painter and his brush.
Between the brush and the brush-stroke, there lies a universe of feelings and emotions, many inexpressible, almost as elusive as Tabu’s eyes, which wander beyond the flaming frames of the screen to gaze at the very essence of love and existence.
Essence is the key to Meenaxi. The first of the three Tabus who colonize M.F. Husain’s tale of three ities is a perfume seller in Hyderabad. As Santosh Sivan dodges autorickshaws and commuters in cluttered Hyderabad to zero in on Meenaxi, the camera becomes the conscience of Nawab, the author searching for the perfect heroine for his next novel.
Perfection being the grandest illusion of art and life, Nawab finds Meenaxi, the wily, pushy, slightly crude but deliciously seductive ittar seller. A sequence such as the one where Nawab’s document goes up in flames exudes a startling aroma of a burnished creation, ripened to just the stage where the fruit doesn’t fall off the tree.
It’s in the way that Husain looks for imperfection in the art that Meenaxi shines way beyond his earlier somewhat scrambled stab at the direction in Gaja Gamini.
Deliberately, M.F. Husain makes his characters talk in unusually loud voices.
In one sequence he personally appears at a Irani restaurant (Subhash Ghai, move over) and winces the minute the first Tabu, the ittar-seller, opens her mouth to nag the writer Nawab. Her raging passion to alchemize her ordinary life into art through Nawab’s pen is also every artiste’s craving for immortality through his art. It’s that craving which comes across in Tabu’s remarkable presence. To call Tabu’s dedicated, passionate performance a performance would be belittling what Husain and she have set out to achieve in the frames.
Admittedly, parts of the film are enormously self-indulgent. Though all three cities, Hyderabad, Jaisalmer, and Prague—living throbbing characters in Husain’s fey scheme of life and art—are beautifully framed in the scheme of the narration, portions of the visuals appear touristic. On the other hand, the sheer energy and passion of the 88-year-old creator’s mise-en-scène makes you sit and savor every stroke of look in the narration. When the third Tabu, Maria in Prague, shyly tells Kunal that she walks with and not rides her bicycle because she needs company, you want time to freeze so you can savor the mystery and poetry of her confession.
As Tabu travels from one-time zone to another, she transports us to another world where maya (illusion) seduces and caresses reality. True, her ‘Czech’ accent in the last overture is strained. But then, this is a film of heightened realism where the characters are entirely emblematic. Their value is not in what they speak but in what they hold back for a time, what never comes.
Sweet melodious, tender and seductive Meenaxi is at once a celebration of abstractionism and a mirror into the heart of a woman who’s as haunted and haunting as Meena Kumari in Bimal Roy’s Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam, as enigmatic as Rosy in Vijay Anand’s Guide and as voluptuous and famished as Smita Patil in Shyam Benegal’s Bhumika.
The soundtrack and visual texture of Meenaxi elevate the film to a work of endless enchantment. The now-you-see-her-now-you-don’t quality in the 3-tiered protagonist’s personality makes her a creation of caprice like no other in Hindi cinema.
The overt and aggressive manner in which the songs-and-dances come on indicate a celebration of life in swirling blues opulent oranges and ravishing reds.
Only a painter could infuse such a steep sense of aesthetics into the narrative canvas. The frames are opulent and yet not crowded. Every song-and-dance from ‘Rang hai’ to ‘Titli daboch li maine’ (the latter, a fascinating and beguiling study of brothel eroticism in the context of ‘pure’ love) is heartstopping in its mixture of melody and emotions that yield a lingering and lush lyricism.
Indeed, Tabu, Santosh Sivan and A R Rahman are the three heroes of the film.
Meenaxi: A Tale Of 3 Cities is a film you’d want to clutch close to your heart for these 3, and also for M.F. Husain‘s dextrous transposition of the painter’s skill on celluloid whereby every stroke of the brush engenders an atom of poetry.
