#Scurf187: Conversation with Sal
The critic and aesthete Saleha Salam has done more than writing on films — she turned film writing and tweeting into the central art form of her time
For this edition of Conversations I speak with Saleha Salam, a writer and speaker living in Chicago. Her essays on Indian cinema have appeared in publications including Foreign Policy and The Daily Star Weekend. She is also a performer and an organizer within the queer and trans South Asian community in and around Chicago.
Links:
👙 X: Salandthebadpun
👅 Instagram: thesalamanderchicago
🐍 Letterboxd: LehaByTheLake
🔗 Recent writing:
The Greatest Movie Epic You’ve Never Heard of
To kick off this chat, could you share how a bit about your background and how you found your way to Hindi movies?
I grew up in a family that, in its particulars, did not look very different from numerous other barely-middle-class Muslim South Asian immigrant families living in the Gulf of the late nineties and early aughts; like most of these families, we too rented videotapes of Hindi movies (generally considered more family-friendly than English-language ones) from the video store and made occasional outings to the movie theater for the big holiday releases (generally SRK pictures). My father, unlike his peers, however, was something of a film buff, and he had a familiarity with cinema from all around India and the world. His knowledge and appreciation of the movies went beyond that of other parents in our social circles; he could name directors and producers, recall decades-old on-set controversies, explain, to some degree, what the various technical aspects of filmmaking were. I did not have an easy relationship with him, but I bonded with him over his interest, which soon became a preoccupation for me independent of him.
As a writer you have a powerful way with words in the sense you not only communicate what you aim to but also in a very stylish cadence. Almost as if writing was a red-carpet event. And I love it so much! Almost like a Joan Didion-esque style and chic aura for words. This applies for your tweets as much as it does for your longer pieces. We need so much more of this in today’s “everyone in a writer” era, especially. How did you come to writing? Who are the writers you look up to?
How kind! I came to writing in the most unremarkable fashion, really. I began reading earlier than children near my age. Books (and films) became to me more compelling than people fairly early in my life. Because I spent so much of my time with books, I wanted to be able to make them as well. So I began writing just from a love of storytelling, just as I would force friends and neighbors into skits because I wanted to approximate the experience of filmmaking. I wrote a composition, as we used to call them, in fifth grade about my favorite movie (Lamhe, of all age-appropriate films) that my teacher read aloud to all the classes above us, and that might have been the point at which everyone around me was like, “Oh, this is this kid’s thing.”
Didion is a favorite of mine, actually. I love a ruthless, assiduous prose stylist. I love an eye. Alan Hollinghurst was a formative influence. Edith Wharton, Nabokov. Pauline Kael, of course. I remember reading, as a very young child, some tiny thing Richard Corliss had written about Devdas in Time; that was one of the earliest bits of serious international writing I’d read on mainstream Hindi cinema. Around that time, blogs had started becoming a thing, and I used to haunt Baradwaj Rangan’s Blogical Conclusion, arguing with people probably twice and thrice my age and being generally obnoxious. His essays on “commercial” cinema then were very different from what he is doing now, and those were a significant influence as well.
Do you have a writing process? Especially for film reviews?
I let the essay find shape in my head before I start writing. Like, what is the thrust of this thing, why do I need to say it at all, what is the narrative, that sort of thing. Usually, a few phrases or sentences come to me while watching the film and I build the paragraphs of the first draft around those; but that first draft is generally pretty close to the last, because I edit as I go.
Your twitter feed embodies a studied sense of awe and appreciation of movies. Their tiniest of details (like your tweet about Mani Ratnam and waterfalls being a love story unto itself has stayed with me till now!!!) in a movie don’t miss your attention and then you articulate them in such precise, beautiful ways. What do you have to say about that?
I generally feel like I don’t see, don’t understand enough when it comes to the movies. I feel a considerable sense of inadequacy around my lack of knowledge regarding, say, editing or lighting, all of that technique-y stuff. I want to understand more, to learn more, to get a grasp on the craft of the thing, although that is not how my mind works, that is not the kind of information it clocks and processes intuitively. My observations on Twitter are generally the things I do intuitively clock, that my gaze is organically drawn toward. The way I make these observations online or in any kind of writing is primarily designed to entertain myself. I want to find my own tweets funny or clever, that’s basically it.
What do you think about the current state of writing/film journalism in India?
Bleak. Cannot think of anyone with a major byline that I can recommend to someone with an interest in Indian cinema.
I think it will be correct to assume that you had some feelings after watching Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani (2023). Can you share exactly what about it moved you so much?
It’s the sort of film only Bollywood knows how to do and has stopped doing entirely. It felt like a true-blue Bollywood event, grand and warm and star-driven and gorgeous-looking, the kind I grew up with and went to the theater with my family on Eid for, not the post-Ghajini kind that is an imported template and not uniquely Bollywood in any way, really. Stars presented like stars, actual chemistry, proper musical numbers, a full ensemble with veteran thesps playing parents and grandparents, moments that play to cheers and gasps in the theater. It really is a unicorn of a movie in these times.
Sridevi, Aishwarya, Rekha are some of the Hindi film goddesses you worship. What do they have in common according to you?
It’s the word you used. Goddess. A fundamental unknowability, untouchability, remoteness, mystique. Irreplaceable, singular, beguiling, screen-filling. Not one’s next-door neighbor.
How Bollywood is Bollywood these days?
In the documentary about Yashraj on Netflix, there’s this bit about how Yash Chopra and Aditya Chopra argued over whether Kajol’s sarees in “Tujhe Dekha” ought to be chiffon or silk. No film these days, except perhaps Rocky Aur Rani, conveys the sense that anybody behind the scenes is having these very specific conversations about costume, about presentation, about music. Things feel pretty low on soul.
Who are the film writers you don’t miss a single review by?
I very infrequently agree with her but I enjoy reading Angelica Jade Bastien (also on Substack) because her point of view is so idiosyncratic. I also anything my friend Aaditya Aggarwal, who does film curation and tweets under @stelladilli, has to say.
It is not very well executed overall and a deeply flawed screenplay too, but I think Ae Dil Hai Mushkil (2016) could be one of Karan Johar’s stronger films. What do you think?
The last half hour is deeply misguided, but this is a film I quote ad nauseam and screen for anyone who is getting particularly close to me, because its worldview, its sense of humor, and its women characters all feel very personal to me.
You articulated it very well in your essay for Foreign Policy about the films, and thanks to your tweets in the lead up to their release I actually enjoyed Ponniyin Selvan: I and II so much more than I usually would have. What did you think of the films?
Accomplished, masterful, stunning across the board. As good as major-league Indian filmmaking has gotten in a long time. Films are so ugly and careless-looking right now, and this diptych has image after image that would be the crowning achievement in any other filmmaker’s body of work. The pre-interval block in the sequel is my favorite scene from any film in recent memory.
What about Aishwarya in Ponniyin Selvan?
Other than the fact that her voice was dubbed, which is, I understand, fairly standard practice for leading ladies in South Indian cinema, it is an all-time-great performance to me. It’s also the sort of role women actors just very rarely get in Indian movies, especially movies of this scale. And you really need a star-actor with a very specific kind of aura and star persona and narrative to be able to pull it off. I think Aishwarya is always at her best when filmmakers cast her in roles where no one else works, not because no one else can act the part per se, but because no one else can star the part like she does.
What do you have to say about the film community on Twitter? Do you think it is frittering away now?
I think a lot of the funniest, cleverest, most unhinged Bollywood-related content does come out of Indian film Twitter; but also, I feel like a lot of the takes these days feel especially ahistorical and uninformed. Also, full-throated misogyny seems to have made a major comeback as part of the total machofication of Indian cinema, so uh, that’s fun.
This is the first time I am using an image in a Conversation.
Can you put to words exactly what we lost here and how not having more of their movies together was a missed connection?
To use an expression from their own film, ishhhh. Ash and SRK are, to me, the perfect pair, because they have very similar acting styles – mannered, fluttery, tending toward the tragic; they have this very intense, almost doomed, quality together; they are both brand-name stars in a way that just doesn't exist anymore – they are among the biggest of that last real generation of mythical monoculture stars alongside AB Sr and Sachin; and they always look desperately in love when cast opposite each other, like they just have to keep looking at each other. I will always mourn the Veer Zaara that never was.
You are also a trans performer. How do you think Hindi, specifically diaspora films, has influenced your craft?
Hindi films in general, enormously, and your next question speaks to this, actually. I perform out of a love for the Hindi Film Heroine, her adaas, her nakhraas, her airs, her graces, her micro-expressions, her mythos. I am a dilettante, really, and I perform only because I want to pay tribute, want to dive into the lore.
Do you think the songs of Kareena Kapoor and Madhuri Dixit lend themselves richly and automatically to performance (of any kind)? Are we losing that rich tradition of dance numbers in Hindi movies?
Yes, and yes! Madhuri is a performing school unto herself. Almost every dance number of hers is an essential text when it comes to the Bollywood form of performance. She does more with a raised eyebrow than most other actors can accomplish with their entire gym-trained bodies across a lifetime of performances. Bebo, of course, is one of the great joys of contemporary Hindi cinema. I often say that if Bebo in Jab We Met hadn’t existed, most Millennial and Gen-Z heroines would have no idea what to do in front of the camera. Dupatta Mera changed my life before it had even begun in earnest.
While in older Hindi films, trans people had a steady appearance and even strong character roles, recent Hindi movies don’t have many of them. Recently, I watched Tara Vs Bilal where the trans character Ritz (played so very delightfully by Raheem Mir) really stayed with me.
As a trans person yourself, can you speak about the existence and representation of the trans community in Hindi films?
Well, on one hand, we do see trans and enby characters being played by trans actors in films like Thank You For Coming and series like Made In Heaven. The writing is sympathetic and well-researched too. Monkey Man isn’t a Bollywood film, but it had some cool representation of the Hijra community in India. It’s not all caricatures and objects of pity and ridicule and fear, which is heartening. It’s disappointing that cis actors continue to play trans roles, though, and that both the teams working on these projects and the journalists covering them still don’t know basic terminology.
What are you reading these days?
I am very slowly working through Swann’s Way.
OMG, me too..!
I watched Paheli (2005) in 2023 and I feel I was able to better appreciate the ghost dynamic in it while also being able to see what Rani and SRK’s pairing brought to the story. What do you think of it?
It is one of my favorite SRK films and performances. What a gleaming, affecting, droll little gem of a film. Wild that Ravi K. Chandran lensed both this and Black the same year. A true master.
If there’s anything at all you want to add here about films — watching them, writing about them, rewatching them — I’d be so glad!
I’d urge people to watch older films. They are easily accessible and gorgeous to look at and witty and lovingly made and all-round delightful.
Movie you watched recently (new or old) that you loved.
Watched a couple of Irene Dunne screwball comedies from the thirties (The Awful Truth and Theodora Goes Wild) that gave me so much joy.
A television series you think more people should watch.
An Interview With The Vampire.
A recent mainstream super-hit Hindi movie that did big but failed to impress you and the reason why.
Animal was pretty terrible. Like, not even the politics of it, it was just laughably made? You get the same kind of filmmaking and dialogue in Hindi TV serials but done with less self-importance and more of a sense of fun. It’s like, if a bunch of American dudes tried to convince you that (The) Boondock Saints was the 21st century Taxi Driver, that's how funny the response from Indian men to it online was. I was honestly bemused by the furor just because it's too awful and too silly to be taken seriously?
What music are you listening to these days?
BRAT, of course, and this one Shubh track, You & Me, on repeat. So basically I am Rocky Randhawa if he did coke and went to gay clubs.
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