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REVIEW 495: DOBAARA – SEE YOUR EVIL

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Release date:
June 2, 2017
Director:
Prawaal Raman
Cast:

Language:
Huma Qureshi, Adil Hussain, Saqib Saleem, Lisa Ray, Rhea Chakraborty
Hindi


Let’s face it: Bollywood does not do horror and spook stories well. The long intervals between the very few effective supernatural thrillers the industry has produced in the past century – such as Mahal, Madhumati and Bhoot– is a testament to that. In the same year as Ram Gopal Varma’s Bhoot, in 2003, director Prawaal Raman did manage an interesting anthology of short stories titled Darna Mana Hai (Fear Is Not Allowed). The genre has suffered a drought since then.

Raman’s new film, Dobaara: See Your Evil, fails to end this dry spell.

Based on the 2014Hollywood hit Oculus, Dobaara (featuring the original film’s director Mike Flanagan as its executive producer) tells the story of a 25-year-old woman called Natasha Merchant (Huma Qureshi) who believes a tragedy that befell her family 11 years earlier was caused by a haunted mirror that possessed her father, the artist Alex Merchant (Adil Hussain). Natasha and her brother Kabir Alex Merchant (played in adulthood by Saqib Saleem) were children when the police found them in their home in the English countryside, a gun in Kabir’s hand while Alex lay dead from a gunshot wound and the body of the mother (Lisa Ray) in another part of the house. Both siblings claimed that Kabir was innocent in the matter. After a decade of therapy, Kabir emerges in the real world, convinced that the ghostly happenings in their home were a figment of his and Natasha’s imagination, and that their parents’ deaths were a result of a marriage that had fallen apart because Dad was having an affair. Natasha remains convinced though that themirrordunnit.

Dobaara begins with Kabir’s release from a correctional facility. Natasha has spent the decade investigating the mirror and has found that many of its previous owners ended up dead in a gruesome fashion in mysterious circumstances. On Kabir’s return, she holds him to a promise he had made to her as a child – a promise to kill the mirror together. First though, she wants to prove to the world that her family was innocent in what happened to them. So, she has set up the mirror in her house with multiple cameras to record what happens when she and Kabir spend time before it.

Oculus, the material on which Dobaara is based, was much busier. This film has virtually nothing happening in the pre-interval portion except talk, talk and more boring talk between the siblings, and post-interval, when matters do speed up, it is too late.

The film runs on multiple tracks in the second half, inter-cutting between Natasha and Kabir’s childhood and present, and their differing viewpoints on occurrences within the house in their adulthood. It should have been fascinating and suspenseful, but Dobaara fails to recover from the absolute lack of energy that sets in in the first hour.

Besides, everything seems so pointless when Natasha, who set up all those cameras with such fanfare, does not bother to check the recorded footage at any point – as a result, we do not at any point get to see the difference between what she and Kabir think happened to them and what actually did.

The actors end up being victims of the film’s  listless writing, direction and editing. Saleem reveals a glimpse or two of his natural talent in a couple of scenes. Hussain – who was so brilliant in his last Bollywood film Mukti Bhawan just weeks back – tries his best to invest himself in the role, but is left struggling in the absence of overall heft. That said, for some reason, his English dialogue delivery sounds occasionally awkward here. It must be said too that the children’s accented English inexplicably gives way to perfectly desi speaking styles as grown-ups.

This lack of attention to detail is the least of Dobaara’s problems. The lack of ominousness is. The suggestive title, some mumbo jumbo about how everything that happens to us has already happened before and the allusion to a well-known children’s fairytale all amount to nothing in the face of such dull storytelling.

Dobaara takes forever to take off, and when it does, it is a non-starter.

And so the drought continues...

Rating (out of five stars): 1/2

CBFC Rating (India):
A
Running time:
107 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:





REVIEW 496: CAREFUL

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Release date:
Kerala: May 26, 2017. Delhi: June 2, 2017.
Director:
V.K. Prakash
Cast:

Language:
Sandhya Raju, Vijay Babu, Jomol, Saiju Kurup, Vineeth Kumar, Aju Varghese, Asokan, Parvathy Nambiar    Malayalam


In a week when Bollywood has brought us that damp squib in the name of a thriller, Dobaara: See Your Evil, here comes a far neater suspense saga from Mollywood and Sandalwood. Careful is the Malayalam remake of last year’s Kannada release U-Turn, which was written, produced and directed by Pawan Kumar, one of the brightest minds in Karnataka cinema.

Your experience of Careful will obviously be governed by whether or not you have already seen U-Turn. I kept the original bookmarked on my laptop until after I watched Careful for this review. I am glad I did. Imagine knowing, before stepping into the theatre, that the butler did it?

Starring the very prettynewcomer Sandhya Raju with Vijay Babu, Careful begins tamely with two parallel threads. Rachna (Raju), a young journalist living on her own in a Kerala city, is pulled up by her editor for not filing any exclusive reports for the newspaper. Meanwhile, a loving couple (played by Jomol and Saiju Kurup) spend time with their only child. While tracking a bunch of seemingly innocuous traffic violations, Rachna unexpectedly finds herself in the middle of a police investigation involving an offender she is following. The cops suspect that she is up to no good. After their initial high-handedness though, one of them (Vijay Babu) ropes her in to help crack this baffling case. 

Director V.K. Prakash’s effectiveness in this film comes from an unusual balance he manages to strike in the tone of his storytelling. When characters around Rachna begin to drop dead like flies in a Baygon haze, the happenings on screen obviously acquire a certain urgency. Yet, the narrative trots along at a sedate pace, opting for a quiet air of foreboding rather than artificially enhanced speed. It is as if the filmmaker wants to give the audience time to consider various alternative reasons why a string of seemingly unconnected events may, in fact, be connected – it is an unconventional choice to make in this genre.

Is Rachna feigning innocence? Are her boyfriend, that couple we saw first and/or the cobbler in on her game? What ties X to Y and Z? Or are coincidences being erroneously linked? Have we been given all the material we need to solve the mystery ourselves, or in the end will the maker throw in a plot twist unrelated to anything that has happened on screen until then? Whatever conclusion you arrive at, I am willing to bet that the climax is bound to throw up a surprise.

That said, it is important to mention that the road to that climax comes bearing many potholes. The writing of Rachna’s colleague-cum-boyfriend, for instance, is awkward. The two are a mismatch. And though they seem very involved with each other, when she disappears for several hours, he does not raise an alarm. Even his dialogues come across as heavy handed in the effort to sound frothy – what on earth was that about not wanting to have coffee with her?

That the police would violate an individual’s rights is not inconceivable, but it does seem strange that when the individual in question is a journalist, she does not whimper in protest once she is free from their clutches. There are other irritants, not the least of them being the unnecessary song in the climax right after the big reveal.

Team Careful also does not fully understand the workings of media organisations: pray tell me, which major newspaper would expect a trainee to break exclusive stories on her own, instead of guiding her through material fed to her by a senior?

In fact, why did Rachna need to be a trainee at all? The protagonist would have been more convincing within this plot if she had been slightly older and more experienced – an age when a reporter would naturally be expected to discover stories as a matter of routine, yet might still be intimidated by the unexpected and require hand holding. If Sandhya Raju is not as impactful as her co-stars in Careful, it is not her fault; it is the fault of this illogical choice made in the screenplay.

The rest of the cast is impressive. Vijay Babu brings gravitas to his role as a determined policeman. Jomol and Kurup opt for restraint in scenes that could easily have been overplayed. Their performances and the strategically incremental doses in which information is revealed to the audience are why Careful, in its overall impact, manages to rise above its flaws. 

The marketing of Careful has included a video testimonial by actor Mohanlal stressing the film’s message about traffic violations. That is an oddly reductive way to promote an entertaining whodunnit that does indeed raise a relevant issue, but not quite so literally. The message is not ‘about traffic violations’, for heaven’s sake. Careful is a thriller that, in its poignant denouement, makes a larger point about our tiniest casual actions having consequences. That it does so without an iota of preaching makes it uncommon. This is an immensely watchable film.
  
Rating (out of five stars): **3/4

CBFC Rating (India):
U
Running time:
121 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:



Poster courtesy: IMDB

REVIEW 497: RAABTA

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Release date:
June 9, 2017
Director:
Dinesh Vijan
Cast:


Language:
Sushant Singh Rajput, Kriti Sanon, Jim Sarbh, Varun Sharma, Cameos: Deepika Padukone and Rajkummar Rao
Hindi


Let’s get this question out of the way right at the start: Raabta is not particularly a copy of the Tollywood hit Magadheera. If you have been following news around the week’s new Hindi film release, you will know that Telugu producer Allu Aravind had sent a legal notice to the makers of Raabtaon seeing their trailer, alleging plagiarism of his 2009 venture directed by S.S. Rajamouli, starring Ram Charan and Kajal Aggarwal. Now that Raabta is out, Aravind would be well advised to avoid associating his film with this one – because whatever Magadheera’s follies may have been, it is not guilty of Raabta’s foremost failing: a complete lack of imagination.

It is possible that Raabta’s writers Siddharth-Garima got the initial inspiration for their story from Rajamouli’s film. Or maybe they did not. The truth is this project has no new ideas.

Perhaps they took the genre – reincarnation drama – literally. Making a film on rebirth does not mean grabbing a bunch of ingredients already used in a bunch of Indian films across languages, chucking them into a wok and tossing them around to create what you think you could fool people into believing is your own baby, your own recipe. From its opening scenes right till the closing song ‘n’ dance routine accompanying the end credits, from its basic plotline to its writing and directorial treatment, Raabta is bathed in déjà vu.

This is one of the most unoriginal Hindi films I have seen all year.

The first half of Raabta is devoted to the young and sprightly Punjabis-in-Budapest, Shiv Kakkar (played by Sushant Singh Rajput) and Saira Singh (Kriti Sanon). A banker newly arrived in Europe, he is busy painting the town red when he chances upon her, a beautiful Indian chocolatier.

He stalks her. She allows him into her flat on the day of their very first meeting despite being somewhat thrown off by his disturbing behaviour. He stalks her more (because conventional wisdom dictates that Bollywood heroines do not deserve to be courted with respect and sensitivity). She falls for him. Because? C’mon dumbo, that’s what Bollywood heroines do.

The only thing slightly different in this mix – if you have not seen other reincarnation films – is that she feels an inexplicable connection to him going beyond chemistry and compatibility, and related to the nightmares she has been seeing revolving around drowning and hazy human figures. We naturally guess that their bond is linked to those dreams. Hence the words from the title track, “kucch toh hai tujhse raabta” (I clearly have some sort of connection with you) and the title itself, which is Urdu for “connection”.

There is a certain cliched concept of ‘modern’, ‘youthful’ romance that has plagued commercial Indian cinema in recent years, epitomised by Mani Ratnam’s OK Kanmani in Tamil and Aditya Chopra’s Befikre in Hindi last year. You can add Raabta to that list. In all these films, the road to falling in love is lined with the same old milestones packaged in gloss: contrived conflicts, youngsters brimming with artificially scaled up energy while a frothy song plays in the background, doing stuff the filmmakers clearly consider cute (such as giving each other stupid, dangerous dares, kissing on parapets where they could end up tipping over and falling into a river, and more).

It is natural to wonder: do these people ever talk like normal people? When do they get to know each other, to really fall in love?

Their ‘liberalism’, by the way, ends at having pre-marital sex. Before Shiv’s icky persistence with Saira in Raabta, we witness him trivialising white women much like Ranveer Singh’s character in Befikreand so many other Hindi film men before them.

So although Rajput and Sanon are both charismatic, sweet and good looking, and director of photography Martin Preiss lays picture-postcard visuals across their story, they cannot save the film from its been-there-done-that feel.

The first half is stretched to breaking point to create suspense over the explanation for Saira’s dreams. The plot takes too long to get to the kookie liquor baron Zakir Merchant (played by a hammy Jim Sarbh). Once it does so, the back story (shown only post-interval) involving his past life with Saira and Shiv’s earlier avatars has little flesh. The special effects in this portion are impressive, but there is not enough of that waterfall, those fights and ancient habitations to recommend Raabta. An unrecognisable Rajkummar Rao is completely wasted in a cameo here.

It takes a great deal of writing skill to make a rational viewer enjoy a film on reincarnation, magical fantasy or the paranormal without feeling foolish. For one, Raabta gets dull quite quickly. It also makes the rebirth story sound asinine.

To makes things worse, the three leads here are all delivering self-consciously written film dialogues, rather than normal human lines. If conversations pre-interval are trying to sound cool, post-interval they are trying to sound grand but fall flat. 

Raabta’s music is as recycled as the screenplay, and is credited to Pritam’s company JAM8 because he reportedly did not want to lend his name to a film that wanted to rehash old songs.

When Pritam, who has often been accused of plagiarism, makes a point about fresh content in your film, you should know you are in trouble. Ik vaari aa (sung by Arijit Singh, with music by Pritam and lyrics by Amitabh Bhattacharya) is pleasant. The other two tracks worth mentioning here are resurrections of already successful numbers, used here in a trite fashion: Sanon and Rajput dance to Main tera boyfriend,alongside the closing credits, and the title track – picturised on a surprisingly ineffective even if gorgeous-as-always Deepika Padukone performing a tepid dance in an awkward outfit – is a remix of the lovely composition of the same name by Pritam (with largely different lyrics) in Agent Vinod. Both songs are fun and hummable here, but pallid in comparison with the originals.

Dinesh Vijan’s filmography as a producer includes the memorable Being Cyrus, Love Aaj Kal and this year’s Hindi Medium,in addition toBadlapurthat has the distinction of featuring one of Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s best performances in a career filled with brilliance. It is hard to imagine why Vijan chose to make his directorial debut with this unremarkable enterprise in which Sushant Singh Rajput, Kriti Sanon and pretty visuals are all drowned out by tedium.

Rating (out of five stars): *

CBFC Rating (India):
UA
Running time:
154 minutes 40 seconds

This review has also been published on Firstpost:


Posters courtesy: (1) IMDB for Raabta



REVIEW 498: ADVENTURES OF OMANAKUTTAN

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Release date:
Kerala: May 19, 2017. Delhi: June 9, 2017.
Director:
Rohith V.S.
Cast:


Language:
Asif Ali, Bhavana, Aju Varghese, Saiju Kurup, Siddique, Kalabhavan Shajon, Rahul Madhav, Srinda  
Malayalam


A young man called Omanakuttan works as a telemarketer in a firm that has attracted the suspicions of a Karnataka police officer played by Kalabhavan Shajon. The cop tries to get his seniors’ permission to investigate the alleged wrongdoings of the owner (Siddique) that have resulted in the stupendous success of a haircare product called Clintonica.

Omanakuttan (Asif Ali) may be a sales wiz but he is terribly socially inept. One day when a colleague cruelly rejects his romantic overtures, he goes into a slump. His boss’ effort to boost his morale by telling him to “market” himself better has an unexpected effect on him.

He begins having telephone affairs with a string of women, hiding his true identity, adopting a different attractive persona and interesting backstory for each one. Turns out sweet, simple-looking Omanakuttan with the facial twitch has a shadowy side to his personality that you would never guess at from looking at him.

So you think, okay, this looks like it could turn out to be something intriguing about the workings of a troubled human mind. Maybe what we are seeing here will later be revealed as a figment of Omanakuttan’s imagination? Maybe he used Clintonica on himself and ended up scrambling his own brain? Maybe the entire film is taking place inside his head? Who knows. The possibilities at this point seem endless.

After a while though, it becomes clear that Adventures of Omanakuttan is far from being the edgy thriller it promises to be. It is more trying-to-be-trippy than trippy.

And it is long. Gawd, it is long!

The plot recounted so far in this review accounts for just a milli-fraction of the proceedings in the film’s 2 hours and 46 minutes running time. That is 166 minutes of stretching. That is 9,960 precious seconds of my life that I will never get back because my congenital optimism persuades me to forever hope that perhaps the next scene in a film will throw up a twist so breathtaking that the journey up to there would have been worth it, or perhaps the next scene, or the next. Nothing of the sort happens here.

Adventures of Omanakuttan has a fair share of twists and turns, but the arduous storytelling style robs them of their sheen and in time, kills all suspense.  

You get the feeling that somewhere in debutant director cum co-writer Rohith V.S.’s maze of ideas is the seed of a good, quirky, experimental concept that could have been something. The film ends up being nothing much though because of its endless wanderings.

Asif Ali is as earnest here as he always is. He works hard to immerse himself in Omanakuttan’s character, managing to effectively portray the man’s diffidence and evolution without caricaturing him. Supporting cast members Aju Varghese and Saiju Kurup brighten up the proceedings with their comic abilities, but they get too little screen time.

The brightest spark in this dreary film is Bhavana playing Pallavi, a para-psychology buff and freedom freak. The ease with which Omanakuttan enters her life makes no sense, but I am grateful she stayed on, because Bhavana – who makes even plain cotton jumpsuits look swish in this film – is such a sight for sore eyes, so wonderfully easy before the camera and born to comedy.

A passing reference to homosexuality in Adventures of Omanakuttan indicates that this is a thinking team with potential as yet unfulfilled. At one point, we discover that a significant character is gay – it is an amusing moment yet the joke is not on him but on the situation. It takes writing and acting finesse combined with intelligence and basic human decency to derive humour from a social group that others routinely stereotype without resorting to stereotyping yourself. That the actors cast as the gay men in this scene are not camp, but fit very much into prevalent notions of ‘masculinity’, reveals volumes about Rohith V.S. & Co’s atypical mindsets.

These are rare qualities and the reason why it is important not to write off the team of Adventures of Omanakuttan despite this rant. The congenital optimist in me hopes that next time they will ditch self-indulgence and develop focus. Lack of focus and discipline are what make this film a meandering misadventure.

Rating (out of five stars): 1/2

CBFC Rating (India):
U
Running time:
166 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:




REVIEW 499: BANK CHOR

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Release date:
June 16, 2017
Director:
Bumpy
Cast:




Language:
Riteish Deshmukh, Vivek Anand Oberoi, Rhea Chakraborty, Sahil Vaid, Bhuvan Arora, Vikram Thapa, Upendra Limaye, Cameos by Baba Sehgal and Vikram Gokhale
Hindi


Considering the reputation Riteish Deshmukh and Vivek Oberoi have built for themselves in the comedy genre, it might be natural to assume that any collaboration between them would be filled with rhyming jokes, crass wisecracks about butts, breasts, farts and faeces, and other clichéd devices used by creators of low-grade slapstick humour. Bank Chor is a good example of why you should not pre-judge a film based on reputations. Far from being a crude comedy, writer-director Bumpy’s second film is pretty serious stuff, a seemingly innocuous comic thriller that says a lot while appearing to do little beyond trying to amuse and wow the audience at a very basic level – like the film, there is more to this sentence than meets the eye for now.

Bank Chor begins with three idiots who ain’t no Ocean’s eleven, botching up their attempt to rob a branch of the fictitious Bank of Indians (BOI) in Mumbai. The name at first sounds like a funny take on existing Indian bank names, but like most things in this film, it means something beyond its face value. This truly is a BANK OF INDIANS, housing and safeguarding our collective national intelligence, self-preservation skills and survival instincts.

So Champak (Deshmukh) and his accomplices Gulab and Genda (played by Bhuvan Arora and Vikram Thapa) look like they will not get anything right as they try to loot this BOI. The bumbling fools are further slowed down by CBI officer Amjad Khan (Oberoi) who unexpectedly arrives on the spot to deal with what should have just been a case for the Mumbai Police.

What’s the CBI doing at a simple bank heist? Ah, that would be telling.

Also in this mix are a now dead investigative journalist (Vikram Gokhale), Maharashtra’s corrupt Home Minister (Upendra Limaye) and a well-meaning reporter (Rhea Chakraborty) among the media crowd milling outside the bank.

The first half of the film is devoted to the central trio’s stupidity combined with the Mumbai-versus-Delhi and intra-NCR rivalry in their group. The barbs going back and forth between them are worthy of laughs because Bumpy and his team of co-writers here play on stereotypes without perpetuating them and gently mock those who do. There are, for instance, swipes aplenty directed at netaswho have encouraged resentment and violence against ‘outsiders’ in Mumbai in the past decade. When a Mumbaikar in the film asks a Dilliwaala to get out of the city, the gentleman shoots back: If Delhiites return to Delhi, who will do the work here in Mumbai? Touché.

(The writing, by the way, has been credited as follows: story: Baljeet Singh Marwah and Bumpy; dialogues: Ishita Moitra Udhwani; screenplay: Marwah, Bumpy, Omkar Sane and Udhwani.)

The parochial friction between the accomplices holds up even when the plot starts to drag – or at least it seems to drag, until it emerges (or at least that is what my generous soul suggests) that even that lax pace was probably deliberate, designed to lull us into a stupor as nothing much happens on screen. And then it does. Post-interval Bank Chor revs up, there are new developments at every turn, followed by an unexpected climax. The speed at which the story progresses leaves little time to dwell on loopholes and question marks over the modus operandi employed by the villains.

If this was all there was to it, Bank Chor would have ended up being a moderately interesting, harmless entertainer. There is more though. By pointedly and repeatedly emphasising the religious identity of certain players in the saga, Bumpy and his team add a mischievous layer to their entire storyline, making their film not just about good people in conflict with evil, or ordinary citizens besting corrupt corporates and netas, but also about the ‘good Hindu’, an Aam Aadmi, overcoming the ‘bad Muslim’ (complete with Urdu-laden dialogues, a background from Faizabad and a sadistic delight in tearing into living flesh). That the ‘bad Muslim’ is used by the powers that be to exploit their own people does not make it better. Oh wily Muslim and Enemies Within, do not take the ‘good Hindu’ for granted or be misled by his surface naivete, says Bank Chor’s facile symbolism.

For the record, to counter such objections from cynics, the film throws a ‘good Muslim’ into the blend and gets the Aam Aadmi a.k.a. the Common Man to let on in the end that his name was not what he claimed it was at first and that a name, in fact, is irrelevant.

It is not, dear Team Bank Chor. Names lead to assumptions about human beings, particularly in the communally charged atmosphere pervading our nation right now. So in case you claim innocence in this matter, in case you insist that you genuinely did not intend to convey any point subliminally, then let me throw back at you a line that a crucial antagonist in the film directs at a Mr Nice Guy: innocence (maasoomiyat) is the biggest problem in this world. The unthinking liberal, if that is what you are, often does more harm than the committed communalist.

As far as performances go, the three leads do a decent job of playing off each other’s crookishness, though Bhuvan Arora and Vikram Thapa suffer the effects of shallow characterisation – just because they play Champak/Deshmukh’s sidekicks, does not mean they should have been half-heartedly written. Vivek Anand Oberoi nee Viveik Oberoi nee Vivek Oberoi is effective. To re-capture the intensity he brought to his memorable debut performance aeons back in Company, he will need a screenplay to match. Still, it is a relief to see him in a role that does not require the cringe-inducing tomfoolery of the Masti series.


Rhea Chakraborty as a mediaperson is so-so, though her wardrobe by Maxima Basu – a tight pencil skirt made of leather, no less, a noodle-strapped top and stilettos – is laughably unreal for a working journalist sweating it out on the streets of Mumbai. Seriously, Bollywood, would some research hurt?

The stand-out cast member is Sahil Vaid as one of the hostages in the bank. Vaid here reveals his versatility in a role vastly different from his calling cards so far, Poplu in Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhania and Som in Badrinath Ki Dulhania. The rest of the supporting players are fair enough.

Bank Chor is produced by Yash Raj Films’ youth banner Y-Films. Bumpy made his directorial debut with an earlier Y-Films offering, Luv Ka The End (2011), starring Shraddha Kapoor and Taaha Shah. That one was an occasionally engaging but mostly dull affair. Despite its many misses, Bank Chor has more verve. Whatever little progress Bumpy has made as a filmmaker, however, is far outweighed by the insidious messaging of this film which cashes in on the prejudices that wrack Indian society today below a mask of good intentions, comedy and thrills. Sorry young man, you do not get to claim maasoomiyat here.

Rating (out of five stars): *

CBFC Rating (India):
UA
Running time:
120 minutes 9 seconds

This review has also been published on Firstpost:


Poster courtesy: Yash Raj Films
Vivek Oberoi photograph courtesy: Raindrop Media


REVIEW 500: G KUTTA SE

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Release date:
June 16, 2017
Director:
Rahul Dahiya
Cast:


Language:
Rajveer Singh, Neha Chauhan, Rashmi Singh Somvanshi, Nitin Pandit, Sandeep Goyat, Parth Sharma, Vibha Tyagi      
Haryanvi, Hindi


In a small town in Haryana, not far from where I sit writing this review, a woman escapes home in the dead of night with her lover. Within minutes, they are abducted by car-jackers. On the drive that follows, during which she is almost raped, one of the men asks why she is running away. Is her husband impotent? Does he beat her up? He runs through a list that even an ultra-conservative might see as believable reasons (reasons, not justifications) why a woman might choose to dump her pati parmeshwar, the deity she is legally and socially bound to for life.

This pretty, feisty (albeit slightly silly) creature does not fit the mould of his imagination though. She is leaving, she says, because she does not love her husband and he has no interest in her beyond the few minutes he spends each day getting into her salwar.

That early conversation in a cramped vehicle flying down a Haryana-Delhi highway comes to mind when we later meet another free spirit in a tiny Haryana village, the lovely Kiran who has a mind of her own, and emotions, plans, dreams and desires no one expects her to have. Writer-director Rahul Dahiya’s heart-stoppingly beautiful G Kutta Se (earlier called G – A Wanton Heart)is about the claustrophobic and hypocritical world that suppresses and suffocates those like Kiran, a world where family ‘honour’ resides between the legs of womankind.

This is a place where women are denied dignity and men roam free, where loneliness and sexual yearning can drive women to make foolish choices in men, where segregation could result in dangerous innocence, where such innocence and gullibility in a girl can become punishable, where men may vent their testosterone on unwilling women yet demand virginity from their daughters and sisters, where women are themselves often aggressive purveyors of patriarchy, where a disinterested woman is more desirable than one who says yes, where a man might avenge his unrequited lust by raising a din about the ‘chastity’ of a girl who did not notice him and targeting the chap she did, and where death is a real and present danger for any girl or woman who does not play by the rules.

However much the media may have told us about what are euphemistically termed ‘honour killings’, nothing can prepare us for the casualness with which such crimes are committed by ordinary people in G Kutta Se. However disturbing the film’s early scenes may be, nothing prepares us for the frightening level of misogyny and the murders that follow.

Four stories intersect here: they involve the runaway wife, her abductor Virender, his little sister who gets exploited by a creepy local boy and Kiran, a college girl who is having a clandestine affair. This is clearly a social setting Dahiya knows well. What makes his work exceptional though is its unassuming tone and utter sincerity. There is no “see how socially conscious I am” attitude here that has pervaded many recent Bollywood films made by directors who do not give a damn about women’s rights but chose to cash in on the increasing media spotlight on feminism; there is no screeching background score to melodramatise intrinsically dramatic scenarios; no fanfare with which ‘issues’ are raised. In G Kutta Se, life unspools on screen as though it just happened to happen while a camera passed by.

Far from downplaying the seriousness of the subject at hand, Dahiya’s matter-of-fact storytelling style and Sachin Kabir’s unobtrusive cinematography have the effect of further underlining the blazing intensity of their theme, so that every new development comes as a punch in the gut.

Understatement is among the film’s greatest assets. The other is its cast of actors so natural that they feel like real people whose true story is being told. Although an array of smaller characters are well-written and well-rounded off, the two who end up being protagonists of sorts are Kiran and Virender played by the good-looking Neha Chauhan (earlier seen in Dibakar Banerjee’s Love Sex aur Dhoka) and Rajveer Singh. Bothdeliver flawless performances.

“G” in the title is to be read variously as the Hindi words for “live” (from the usage “live your life”, as for example with “ja Simran, ja g le apni zindagi”) or “the human will” (derived from a scene in the film where a woman says, jisko g karega na, usko doongi” which amounts to “I shall fuck whoever I please”); or even the G-spot, which epitomises the sexual pleasure forbidden to the women of this film. This is my interpretation of the director’s notes, which I sought out after watching the film. Initially the title struck me as inaccessible, since it does not immediately offer up its meaning, but having heard the catchy song accompanying the closing credits (music: Anjo John, lyrics: Dahiya and Danish Raza), I find myself intrigued and still enjoying the challenge of translating “G Kutta Se”. Figure out your own take once you watch it.

It is a measure of the extent to which the Censor Board interferes in filmmakers’ creative choices these days that the Board had the audacity to ask for the replacement of this quote which was placed at the start of the film, “Your borrowed ego lies rooted in the same taboo, the same sexual desire, which gave you life, for which you cease my existence”, with these statistics which were earlier placed at the end: “There are about 5000 honour killings reported every year in 23 countries around the world. Official estimates state that about a 1000 persons are reported killed in India alone. However, a large number of cases go unreported.” The figures are appalling, no doubt, but where they are presented in the film should have been the director’s business and his alone. The idiocy and arrogance of the Board should be the subject of a full-length feature some day soon.

G Kutta Se runs for 103 crisply edited minutes, but feels less. Not too long back, Navdeep Singh’s excellent NH10 had taken us into a Haryana hinterland ridden with gender-related violence. G Kutta Seis completely different yet just as searingly effective. It is about hypocrisy and double standards, but the point about it is not that it merely picks a relevant topic. The point is that it does a great job of telling a solid story based on that relevant topic.

There are several bloody moments in G Kutta Se (none of them gratuitous), but the scene that shook me to the core had no gore. It features a young woman arranging a rendezvous with her male lover. When they meet, all he wants is to have sex, and he is taken aback when she refuses, assuming perhaps at first that she is playing hard to get – I confess, at first, I wondered if the filmmaker was making a crowd-pleasing concession here, to go along with the prevalent “she asked for it” response to sexual assault. The young man finally snaps: If you did not want this, why on earth did you come here? I just wanted to meet, she replies tearily.

The fact that he (a comparatively decent chap, considering the dismal scenario) had not even considered that possibility; that for him a relationship with a woman is not about conversations and friendship but about sex alone is scary and deeply saddening to say the least.

Far beyond its shock value, it is scenes like this – unexpected, acutely observant and written with moving sensitivity – that make G Kutta Se such a special film.

Rating (out of five stars): ****

CBFC Rating (India):
A
Running time:
103 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:


Poster courtesy: Rahul Dahiya


REVIEW 501: TUBELIGHT

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Release date:
June 23, 2017
Director:
Kabir Khan
Cast:



Language:
Salman Khan, Sohail Khan, Matin Rey Tangu, Om Puri, Zhu Zhu, Mohammad Zeeshan Ayyub, Yashpal Sharma, Brijendra Kala, Isha Talwar, Cameo: Shah Rukh Khan
Hindi


Kya tumhe yakeen hai, partner?” Do you have faith? Confidence? Conviction? Do you believe?

The question is repeated throughout writer-director Kabir Khan’s Tubelight, in which Salman Khan plays a Kumaoni man waiting for his brother to return from the India-China war of 1962. It has its origins in the 2015 Hollywood venture Little Boy on which this film is based, in which the boy Pepper’s actions were driven by these words of Jesus Christ in the New Testament of the Bible: “…For truly I say unto you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say unto this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. And nothing shall be impossible for you.” (Matthew 17:20)

In Tubelight, the child hero of Little Boy who is plagued by insecurities about his small size, becomes a slow-witted adult called Laxman Singh Bisht who is taunted by the local bully Narayan (played by Mohammad Zeeshan Ayyub); Jesus and a kindly Christian priest are replaced by Mahatma Gandhi and the elderly Gandhian gentleman Banne Chacha (Om Puri) who is a sort of spiritual guide to the protagonist; and a father away fighting in World War II becomes Laxman’s brother Bharat (Sohail Khan) fighting the Chinese. The title of this film, of course, is a reference to the colloquialism (cruel, in this case) that is used by Narayan & Co to equate Laxman’s congenitally imperfect intellect with the time it takes for a tubelight to come on.

Laxman and Bharat lost their parents when they were very young, and have been everything to each other ever since. When Bharat leaves their town of Jagatpur for the battlefield, Laxman becomes convinced that his faith can bring back his beloved sibling.

Meanwhile, Liling and her son Guo move into Jagatpur and are tormented by Narayan who assumes that they are Chinese and therefore, the enemy. As it turns out,theirorigins, his mistreatment of them and Laxman’s reaction are a decisive slap in the face of pseudo patriots currently dominating the national discourse in India, demanding that all of us – but especially religious minorities, liberals across faiths and Kashmiri Muslims – wear our patriotism on our sleeve, and constantly asking for proof of our love for Bharat Mata. Like them, in Narayan’s worldview too, anyone who can be deemed “the other” – Liling, Guo, even Laxman – is a potential target of suspicion, violence and/or contempt.

Since this is a Kabir Khan film, it goes without saying that it is steeped in political commentary from start to finish. In Kabir’s hands, every word, every look, every turn of phrase takes on a special meaning, especially in the context in which the film has been made. There is a passage in which Laxman, initially swayed by prejudice himself, demands that Guo prove his Indianness by shouting “Bharat Mata ki jai” and, later, by speaking Hindi. The boy’s differing reactions to the two demands are both hilarious and telling.

This is the sort of material few Bollywood directors would dare to feature in such a massive, big-budget film. Kabir dares. The man who risked giving us Bajrangi Bhaijaan just a year after Narendra Modi won the general election pulls no punches two years later.

For his courage, above all else, he deserves kudos. But good cinema is not about courage alone. Tubelight works in the first half because its messaging is subtle and woven into an endearing story filled with humour and warmth, and because it pointedly tells us not to be as literal in our interpretation of the point it makes as Laxman is with Banne Chacha’s wisdom. It flounders repeatedly in the second half though, when it begins to stretch itself, loses much of its layering and becomes overtly manipulative.

Don’t get me wrong. I love being reduced to tears by a film, and I spent a considerable part of the post-interval portion happily crying, because what was playing out on screen has such stinging resonance when seen in the light of what is happening off screen in the real India. There was no need, therefore, for the insertion of two maudlin songs in the second half. Tinka tinka dil mera was particularly infuriating, and both numbers felt as if they had been put there because the director did not have enough faith in his story’s ability to move us and wanted a safety net. You know, just in case.

Even the upbeat Radio felt like an afterthought, as if to compensate any audience member bored by the gravity of the film’s theme. It is Tubelight’s equivalent of the loud Punjabi wedding song ‘n’ dance number that is now a commercial Hindi film cliché. Sure it is fun, but it is also completely incongruous considering the kind of film that this is.

Besides, the screenplay of Bajrangi Bhaijaan(by Kabir, Parveez Shaikh and K.V. Vijayendra Prasad) was comprehensive and well-rounded, whereas this one (by Kabir and Shaikh) is not as nuanced and well thought out. (Spoiler alert) The writers might want to consider, for instance, why it was necessary to make Liling and Guo Indians of Chinese origin, rather than citizens from any of the sister states of the North-east, and what precious meaning has been lost by making this choice. Elsewhere, Banne Chacha seems confused beyond a point by the effect his words have had on Laxman and fades away. (Spoiler alert ends) This is a pity because the late Om Puri is better utilised in the first half of Tubelight than he has been in the highly acclaimed Death In The Gunj that is also now in theatres, and unlike his somewhat listless performance in that film, here in Tubelight there is enough to remind us of the great actor he once was.


While reams of screen space are given to Laxman, not enough time is spent on developing the supporting characters, especially Liling and Guo. Zhu Zhu is beautiful, Matin Rey Tangu is utterly lovable, and both are clearly gifted actors, but the mother and son they play feel more like props than full-fledged people who we can invest in. In fact, the considerate Major Tokas (played nicely by the always wonderful Yashpal Sharma) is much better written than these two. Frankly, so is the character played by a very sexy-looking (I’m-not-trying-to-camouflage-my-age kind of sexy) Shah Rukh Khan in a significant cameo.

Liling and Guo are a far cry from the well-fleshed-out Shahida and Chand Nawab of Bajrangi Bhaijaan. 

The two things that remain consistent and commendable throughout Tubelight are the polished cinematography by Kabir’s long-time associate Aseem Mishra and (possible spoiler ahead) the writers’ non-conformist, non-formulaic determination not to force a romance into their storyline.

At the centre of Tubelight’s balance sheet is Salman Khan. He is both the film’s biggest asset and its greatest liability. Salman’s acting limitations are painfully evident in this film and I kept wondering what Tubelight might have been if Laxman had been played by Irrfan Khan or Nawazuddin Siddiqui, or even Hrithik Roshan under his father’s controlled direction.

In fact, Salman here seems to be drawing on Hrithik’s Rohit from Koi Mil Gaya and the contrast between the two stars’ abilities is embarrassing. That said, it is obvious that the pre-release attention this film has received has been almost entirely due to his megastar presence. I have to also admit to being relieved that at this stage of his career, when he could play it safe with conventional projects, he is at least trying to do something different and is taking on films that many other major stars might consider politically risky. 

There is so much to celebrate in Tubelight, that it hurts to point out what is wrong with it. This is a brave film yet so much of its bravery is lost in the over-wrought tone of the second half and the strained acting by its leading man.

Still, with Tubelight, my glass is half full and not half empty. When your head points out several exasperating aspects of a film and you still find yourself weeping with it, there is something to be said about the director’s ability to strike an emotional chord. Whatever be my reservations, the big takeaway for me from Tubelight is that Salman Khan and Kabir Khan have once again teamed up in trying times to deliver a resounding snub to bigotry.

Rating (out of five stars): **1/2

CBFC Rating (India):
U
Running time:
136 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:



… AND THE GAMES THE THACKERAYS PLAY

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Sparing Hindi Medium, Raees and Dear Zindagi, attacking Ae Dil Hai Mushkil for featuring a Pakistani star– how Mumbai’s first family of cultural policing cherrypicks their controversies

By Anna MM Vetticad

(A version of this article was published in The Hindu Businessline’s BLink on June 17, 2017.)


It is Bollywood’s sleeper hit of the year, having quietly completed five weeks in theatres and grossed Rs 68 crore-plus at domestic turnstiles so far, in the midst of the high-decibel hype generated by the marketing teams of more high-profile films. Hindi Medium starring Irrfan Khan and Pakistani artiste Saba Qamar appears to have found its popular appeal with a combination of comedy, charismatic leads and, above all, a theme that has resonated with the masses.

Wait…

What was that again, you ask?

She’s Pakistani, yet the Mumbai-based nationalist crowd has not been up in arms, as they were last winter over Karan Johar’s Ae Dil Hai Mushkilstarring her compatriot Fawad Khan?

What happened to all that rhetoric about “honouring our soldiers dying at the border” by boycotting talent from the other side, following the Uri terror strike?

These are questions the film industry and mediapersons discussed in whispers around the time Hindi Medium arrived on the big screen, but avoided raising in public for fear of giving ideas to violence-prone social and political organisations or bruising their egos to the point of driving them to action despite their disinterest. Such groups tend to strike films in the immediate pre-release period, because that is when producers are most vulnerable and most prone to succumb to unreasonable demands. That is also when a controversy is prone to attract headlines, which is any violent protesting group’s primary goal. Now that Hindi Medium is nearing the end of its theatrical run, having been swept out of most theatres by Hurricane Salman’s Tubelight, it is safe for us to have this prickly discussion.

Between October 2016 and May 2017, at least four Hindi films starring Pakistanis have come to Indian theatres, but extremists have obstructed only one: Ae Dil Hai Mushkilreleased on October 28, 2016. Raj Thackeray and his party Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS), with the tacit support of the present establishment at the Centre and the state, harangued Johar to such an extent over Fawad, that the panicked producer-director issued an abject apology and went so far as to rewrite, re-edit and re-dub his film at the last minute to change a crucial aspect of his storyline: that Ae Dil was originally an India-Pakistan love story, albeit set in London, in which Anushka Sharma, Fawad Khan, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Shah Rukh Khan and Fawad’s fellow countryman Imran Abbas were all playing Pakistani Muslim characters.

(For details of the alterations made to the film, please read my column titled “How KJo reworked Ae Dil Hai Mushkil”, published on November 12, 2016).

Johar also did nothing to quell rumours that he had donated Rs 5 crore to the Army Welfare Fund, as “penance” stipulated by Raj for the transgression of casting Fawad in Ae Dil. Contrary to news reports claiming that the Army rejected this payment, sources in the film industry and defence establishment tell me that Johar made no such payment in the first place, therefore there was no question of rejection by the Army. However, Johar’s silence on the false stories being circulated in the media helped Raj to further strut his fake bravado.

Just weeks after Ae Dil, Gauri Shinde’s Dear Zindagistarring Alia Bhatt and Shah Rukh came out on November 26, 2016. Dear Zindagistarred the Pakistani actor-singer Ali Zafar in a crucial supporting role, yet did not elicit a whimper of protest from Raj Thackeray and his goons or his estranged cousin Uddhav Thackeray and the Shiv Sena, who together form Mumbai’s first family of cultural policing.

India-Pakistan relations had not miraculously normalised in the four weeks between the two, so to understand the difference in extremist responses to Ae Dil and Dear Zindagi, it is important to travel back in time to October 2, 2009. It was the morning of the release of Johar’s production Wake Up Sid starring Ranbir Kapoor and Konkona Sen Sharma. On discovering that characters in the film were referring to “Mumbai” as “Bombay”, MNS threatened to block it. Hearing reports of vandalism on Day 1 at theatres screening Wake Up Sid in the state, Johar rushed to Raj’s home to seek forgiveness, thus gifting him and the relatively new MNS an important political victory in a fracas clearly cleverly created by the party to gain some mileage just days before the Maharashtra Assembly elections.

Since Johar had keeled over so quickly, he was marked out as an easy target for any state leader wishing to stress his regionalist or nationalist credentials. And so, shortly afterwards, Cousin Uddhav decided to use him to score a point in a game of one-upmanship with Cousin Raj. The SRK-starrer My Name Is Khan (MNIK), directed by Johar and co-produced by him with Shah Rukh’s Red Chillies Entertainment, was scheduled for an early2010 release. Uddhav decreed that Shiv Sena would not allow MNIK in theatres unless Shah Rukh expressed regret for remarks made a short while earlier about the need to include Pakistani players in the IPL.

Shah Rukh, not Johar – big mistake.

Bullies usually avoid attacking unknown quantities, opting instead for tried-and-tested victims. Where Johar may possibly have complied to save his film, Shah Rukh refused. MNIK was released despite hitches, it went on to become one of the year’s biggest hits, and Cousin Uddhav ended up with egg on his face. Scorecard: Raj – 1, Uddhav – 0.

Now fast forward to 2016, and you may see why Raj was confident that grandstanding over Johar’s film would pay off whereas targeting Dear Zindagi (a Shah Rukh-starrer and a co-production between Johar, Shinde and the star’s home banner) could be risky. What if he or Uddhav had demanded contrition for the casting of Dear Zindagi and been asked to take a hike? What if… There is nothing a bully fears more than losing face.

Besides, both Thackerays understand news cycles and would have known that sustaining the ruckus for another four weeks after Ae Dil’s release would have been near impossible. However sensational a headline may be, the media tends to move on, and organisations like the two Senas are nothing without the spotlight on their aggressions.

This is not to say that Shah Rukh is unbendable. The political atmosphere in 2017 is poles apart  from 2009-10 when Maharashtra’s Congress chief minister Ashok Chavan had expressed disappointment over the Wake Up Sid imbroglio. “Johar should have approached the police or the government instead of going to any individual or party for sorting out his grievances,” Chavan had been quoted in the press as saying back then. The left-of-centre Congress was in power at the Centre and in the state, and though the party has not always been consistent in its opposition to fundamentalism, Shah Rukh may have taken a stand on MNIK with a reasonable expectation that both governments had his back. As it happens, his instincts were right. It turned out that Chavan was not spewing empty words earlier about Wake Up Sid and did indeed provide My Name Is Khan with security and moral support.

India in 2017 is a different country, the far right-wing BJP is in power at the Centre, and a BJP-Shiv Sena combine rules Maharashtra. Not surprisingly then, in the run-up to this January’s release of his home production Raees in which he played the titular lead, Shah Rukh held a pre-emptive meeting with Raj. The actor’s team projected it as a courtesy call unrelated to Raees, no doubt to assuage the disappointment of Shah Rukh’s constituency of liberals. MNS, on the other hand, tomtommed their claim that the star had met Raj to assure him that Pakistani actress Mahira Khan – Raees’ heroine – would not be coming to India to promote the film.

However saddened a liberal may feel by Shah Rukh’s decision to legitimise Raj as an extra-Constitutional authority with punitive powers, it must be acknowledged that the star managed his dignity far better than Johar did in the wake of the Wake Up Sid and Ae Dilepisodes. Besides, the sound and fury that MNS typically generates over such issues was missing in the case of Raees, making it clear that Raj felt the need to tread on eggshells around SRK.

News of their rendezvous and the MNS chief’s reduced chest-thumping reminded me of a scene from the film Fan last year in which Shah Rukh’s character Aryan Khanna is warned by his manager about a particular obsessive fan. She says: “Ek baar sorry bol do na. Sanki hai voh.”(Just say sorry once. He’s whimsical / unpredictable / a madcap.) Aryan shoots back: “Acchha, aurmain kya hoon?” (I see, and what am I?) Raj Thackeray knows that when a star has proved himself to be “sankiin these matters, a hoodlum would do well to handle him with care.

That then is a deconstruction of the games the Thackerays play: they are so transparent, that they would be laughable if they were not dangerous, and they are entirely reliant on a potent mix of a gullible public, pliable public figures, overt or covert support from the establishment of the time and – sadly – journalists who do not ask the right questions.

This brings us to the silence of both Senas on Hindi Medium. It is not as inexplicable as you might think.

A spokesperson for the production company T-Series confirms that during the Ae Dilepisode they had informed Raj that they finished shooting Hindi Medium long before the Uri attacks and promised not to use Qamar for the promotions. The ego massage he got from that communication notwithstanding, Raj would in any case have known that raising the same issue within just eight months would yield diminishing returns in the media – remember he left a gap of eight years between Wake Up Sid and Ae Dil. Besides, Saba Qamar is not as familiar a face in India as Fawad. To target her film when she and her nationality are not widely known among audiences would not have been as politically rewarding as targeting Ae Dil had been.

Likewise, controversy over a small Irrfan-starrer would probably get less media space than a massy KJo production or a Shah Rukh-starrer. Even back in 2009-10, Raj’s clash with Johar over Wake Up Sid was a whisper in comparison with Uddhav’s run-in with SRK over My Name Is Khan,a factor not just of the alacrity with which Johar succumbed in the first case while Shah Rukh did not in the second, but also of MNIK’s scale, the magnitude of SRK’s stardom and the blockbuster track record of the SRK-Kajol-Johar hero-heroine-director combination.

In any case, Hindi Medium’s marketing campaign was cleverly designed by T-Series to emphasise its theme rather than its cast. That theme – language and class snobbery– is a pet cause of the Sangh Parivar at large and the present Central government whose spokespersons routinely demean opponents proficient in English by labelling them the “Lutyens elite”. The ruling BJP is therefore unlikely to have backed an assault on Hindi Medium, since it could have ended up being a self-goal.

Like the late Bal Thackeray before them, Raj and Uddhav cherrypick their controversies with great thought. Keeping all the above factors in mind, sparing Hindi Medium would have been a no-brainer for them.

Link to the version of this column published in The Hindu Businessline:


Previous instalment of Film Fatale: “A Lament for Banglawood”

  
Photographs courtesy:







REVIEW 502: EK HASEENA THI EK DEEWANA THA

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Release date:
June 30, 2017
Director:
Suneel Darshan
Cast:

Language:
Shiv Darshan, Natasha Fernandez, Upen Patel
Hindi


A long long time ago in the kingdom of clichéd cinema, a rich man’s daughter falls in love with a poor stable boy. He is killed by her father for that crime. Decades later, his bhatakti aatma returns to claim the heart of her granddaughter. We are told the young lady is her naani’s carbon copy and, as fate would have it, already engaged to her childhood friend at the point she meets the aatma.

What happens thereafter is not what you might expect, but I am not wasting time getting into the nitty-gritty of the story because, frankly, that would amount to beating about the bush. Overriding fact: this film is awful.

It is a romantic thriller, but no twist in the end, nor even Amarjeet Singh’s slick camerawork in the picturesque English and Welsh countryside, can compensate for the all-round godawfulness, the inertness and the dated storytelling that constitute Ek Haseena Thi Ek Deewana Tha.

Producer-director Suneel Darshan’s latest venture marks the return to Bollywood of music director Nadeem Saifi, and Darshan’s second attempt at giving his son Shiv an acting career.

Nadeem’s compositions for the film are passably melodic while they last, but too generic to be memorable. The Nadeem who has churned out songs for Ek Haseena Thi EDT is not worthy of the reputation enjoyed by the man who made the blockbuster music for Aashiquiand Dil Hai Ki Manta Nahin as one half of Nadeem-Shravan in the 1990s. Like this film, his work too seems stuck in time.

 It speaks volumes about the pathetic quality of Ek Haseena Thi EDT that the music is still one of the nicer things about it.

The highlight of the film’s horrendousness is Shiv, a milky-skinned gentleman whose expressionlessness resembles the blankness of faces we see these days Botoxed into immobility.

I understand paternal devotion. I do. But to expose your child’s absolute lack of talent before the world is not love. There is no kind way of saying this, so I may as well not mince words: Shiv cannot act.

The only saving grace for him in this film is that Natasha Fernandez is almost – though not entirely – as bad. Instead of advertising itself as a film, Ek Haseena Thi EDT should have considered promoting itself as a contest for dreadful acting between Darshan Junior and Fernandez. Their co-star Upen Patel is no Robert De Niro, but he comes off looking comparatively impressive in the presence of these two and made me wonder whether he might show some spark in a better film.

Pretty Ms Fernandez struggles to work her facial muscles, poses around (clearly at the behest of her director) and delivers dialogues in an amusingly strained fashion. Her Hindi diction is awkward, she even says tukraanafor tthukraana. And director saab did not deem it fit to correct her before demanding a retake?

Perhaps Darshan was too busy focusing on getting the wardrobe and makeup departments to package his heroine to perfection so that she could be draped on his son.

The problem lies not just in a father prioritising his offspring over all else, but also in this team’s questionable attitude to women. For instance, the good guy in Ek Haseena Thi EDT is positioned as a good guy although he thinks nothing of kissing a sleeping woman who does not know him; and when one man asks another for a birthday gift, the other guy points to a woman, as though he had purchased her from a shop. Her outburst in the end, about the right to make her own choices, comes as an obvious afterthought, inserted there by writers who want to camouflage their narrow-mindedness in a changing world.

To be fair to Darshan, although he has enjoyed tremendous commercial success, he has at no point been viewed as a great artist or a liberal by serious Bollywood gazers. That said, nothing in his track record is a match for the vacuity of this film.

Ek Haseena Thi EDT is so terrible, it is riveting. (Spoiler alert, for those who still care) It is not a fantasy flick, nor does it belong to the mythical/mythological genre, yet at one point, a man reveals – with a perfectly straight face – that after an accident, he prayed to God for a few extra days on Earth and God granted him 14. What calculation did God make to arrive at that precise figure. Was God a voice in this fellow’s head? Did s/he appear in flesh and blood? Did they chat on Skype?

With nothing happening on screen, I busied myself with these profound questions. I also briefly considered headlining this review thus: Ek haseen critic thhi, ek khokhla film thha.

(Moment of silence and introspection.)

Okay, I apologise for that PJ. I think I am tipsy from the trauma of having watched such a lousy film. Allow me to sign off before I completely lose my mind. Tata, goodbye and good luck.

Rating (out of five stars): -10

CBFC Rating (India):
UA
Running time:
105 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:



REVIEW 503: THONDIMUTHALUM DRIKSAKSHIYUM

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Release date:
June 30, 2017
Director:
Dileesh Pothan
Cast:

Language:
Fahadh Faasil, Nimisha Sajayan, Suraj Venjaramoodu, Alencier Ley Lopez
Malayalam


Extracting the extraordinary from the ordinary is a unique skill, one that Dileesh Pothan possesses in bagfuls as we discovered from his debut film last year. While telling us the stories of Mahesh, Jimsy, Jimson, Soumya and Crispin in 2016’s Maheshinte Prathikaaram, the director heroined gorgeous Idukki, a “midu midukkiwho served as a microcosm of Kerala society yet bore her own unique characteristics.

Pothan is out with his second film this week: Thondimuthalum Driksakshiyum (The Exhibits and the Eyewitness), in which he teams up once again with his Mahesh – actor Fahadh Faasil – and music director Bijibal. The film is set in Kasargode, but the heroine here is not the town as much as the police station in which the action plays out, mirroring the corruption, pathos, humour and ridiculousness in what we routinely decry as the ‘system’.

First-timer Nimisha Sajayan and veteran Suraj Venjaramoodu in Thondimuthalumplay Sreeja and Prasad, a couple who elope and get married because of violent opposition to their relationship from her parents. They are a simple and loving lower-middle-class pair. Their lives are disrupted one day by a petty thief also called Prasad (Fahadh Faasil) when he steals one of their few precious belongings – or at least they think he does.

This Prasad is caught and detained at a police station where ASI Chandran (Alencier Ley Lopez) presides over the case. The goings-on at that station and how it affects the lives of everyone involved are what Thondimuthalum Driksakshiyum is about.


If you ask for a detailed description of the plot, frankly, there is nothing much to tell. This is the sort of film that might have emerged if you placed hidden cameras around a cop station and edited the footage down to a manageable, viewable 135 minutes. The conversations between characters seem so believable and the flow of occurrences so authentic that Thondimuthalumgenuinely feels like a reality show. Sajeev Pazhoor’s screenplay is one of 2017’s best pieces of film writing, which is saying a lot in a year in which Mollywood has already delivered such jewels as Take Off and Angamaly Diaries.

In the midst of all the rib-tickling mayhem in Thondimuthalum, a point is being made. What we may not wish to admit, even as we point fingers at the ‘system’, is that most of us even among the best of us are participants in its follies. Playing along is tempting and brings with it quick rewards; taking a stand, on the other hand, usually attracts quick retribution. To say the middle class make the easier choice always out of helplessness would have played to the gallery, but Pothan and his writers say it like it is instead. The truth is that the path of least resistance is less problematic than challenging the status quo, and when push comes to shove, most human beings have flexible morals.

Supplementing the writers’ commitment to realism is the cache of gems that make up the cast. Vijayan is a find. Venjaramoodu and Lopez are brilliantly believable. And Faasil, who seems to get better with each film, is a picture in understated hilarity. The supporting cast is a perfect match for this lead quartet.

The title track of Maheshinte Prathikaaram has been my earworm since I first heard it last year. Though Bijibal has not come up with an equivalent sparkler for Thondimuthalum, this film’s music too is special. In particular I enjoyed the song Kannile poika with its lyrics by Rafeeq Ahammed and vocals by Ganesh Sundaram and Sowmya Ramakrishnan.

Since Maheshinte Prathikaaram was so lovely, comparisons are inevitable. The two films are similar in their tone and narrative style, but to my mind there is an interesting difference in their cinematography. Although Maheshinte was an intimate portrait of Idukki, Shyju Khalid used his camera to give us larger-than-life images of the region’s delicious greenery while adhering to the film’s intentionally small scale with his shots of the interiors of Mahesh’s shop, his home, etc. In contrast to the lavishness of Khalid’s images of the countryside in Maheshinte, Rajeev Ravi in Thondimuthalumcarries forward the air of intimacy in the police station and Sreeja-Prasad’s home, to the rich scenery too.

That long-drawn-out chase scene through woods ending up in a water body must rank as one of the best pursuits ever captured on screen that would not find a place in a Fast and Furious kind of film.

Ravi’s camerawork and Kiran Das’ editing of that passage are among my favourite parts of this film, closely rivalled by the look of mischief Faasil summons up on his face when Prasad is being interrogated at the police station.

Thondimuthalum Driksakshiyum is as simple or as complex as you want it to be for yourself. Either way, it is a lot of fun. There are few things in this world more captivating than reality.

Rating (out of five stars): ***1/2

CBFC Rating (India):
U
Running time:
135 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:




REVIEW 504: MOM

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Release date:
July 7, 2017
Director:
Ravi Udyawar
Cast:



Language:
Sridevi, Sajal Ali, Adnan Siddiqui, Akshaye Khanna, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Abhimanyu Singh, Vikas Verma, Adarsh Gourav Bhagvatula, Pitobash Tripathy
Hindi


How could you get the politics of your film almost perfect in the first half, then descend into eternal Bollywood clichés about rape and maaaaaaain the second? How could you go from low-key to high-pitched within the span of a single narrative? How could you assemble some of the most talented screen performers ever seen together in a film, then limit many of them with one-dimensional characterisation?

(SPOILERS AHEAD)

Debutant director Ravi Udyawar’s Mom revolves around a mother whose teenaged daughter is sexually assaulted in the most gruesome fashion imaginable.

Sridevi plays the central character, Devki Sabarwal. She is not your typical old-time-Bollywood Nirupa Roy kind of perennially weeping madre who was restricted to keeping house, longing for a bahu and shouting at God for being a patthar ki murti unmoved by her adoring son’s hardships. Devki is a senior school biology teacher, and is struggling to gain the affections of her husband’s first child Arya. Her mild demeanour camouflages a tough-as-nails personality though. That hidden Durga goes on a rampage – quiet at first – when Arya’s torn and ravaged body is found one day in a ditch, and the girl is let down by the judiciary.

You probably know this much already if you have been following the film’s publicity and have read its Wikipedia page. What you do not know yet is that the pre-interval portion of Mom goes beyond the expected, the initial treatmentof the mother-daughter relationship is unconventional, and the long-drawn out scene of gangrape is chilling yet sensitively donewhat unfolds before our eyes is designed to horrify, yet we are not shown a single shot of what actually happens to Arya, which is a relief considering how Bollywood of an earlier era often used rape to titillate audiences rather than evoke empathy for the abused.

In the opening half of Mom, I found myself sobbing uncontrollably and moved to the point of speechlessness. I remember quickly pretending to check my phone during the interval for fear that a colleague at the press preview might strike up a conversation with me and realise I had lost my voice.

Understatement is the hallmark of Mom up to this point, and the gender politics is just so. But for a passing comment by Devki, which is atypical of this seemingly liberal woman, the writing does not stereotype women or sexual violence until then. (Credits: story by Ravi Udyawar, Girish Kohli and Kona Venkat, screenplay and dialogue by Girish Kohli.)

Perhaps that comment should have given us a hint of what was to come though. When Devki goes to a police station to report a missing daughter, cops brush aside her fear, with one going to the extent of saying that the girl has most likely taken off with her boyfriend since it is Valentine’s night. You may have come across many such girls but my daughter is not that type, Devki retorts. That type? Really? 

If those words had come from a character who had already been established as a conservative by the screenplay, it would have made sense, but since Devki is portrayed as an open-minded person, this sounded more like the writers unwittingly betraying their inner conservatism.

Still, that remark was overshadowed by the poignance of the film up to that moment.

Sadly, the post-interval portion of Mom leaves behind normal human beings with normal reactions to crimes against themselves and their loved ones, and gives way to cinematic clichés. Devki becomes an avenging angel in the mould of Dimple Kapadia in 1988’s Zakhmi Aurat, and Mombegins its downhill slide.

This is why last year’s Pink was so unusual– because for the most part, it showed us how ordinary people react to sexual violence in particular and injustices in general, despite the frustrations of inhabiting an unjust world.

Revenge sprees are less challenging to write though than nuanced normality. They also serve to satisfy the bloodlust of the audience, which is why commercial cinema has opted for them so often down the decades. If it was not a zakhmi aurat (wounded woman) it was a brother out to avenge the loss of his ghar ki izzat (family honour). In A Wednesday (2008), director Neeraj Pandey extended this populismto mob justice in terror cases, with a Common Man taking the law into his own hands to punish aatankvaadis who he feels are being needlessly given fair trials in the Indian system. In Mom the argument is articulated thus: “Galat aur bahut galat mein se chun-na ho toh aap kya chunenge?” (If you have to choose between what is wrong and what is very wrong, what would you choose?)

To be fair to Bollywood, it is not the only Indian film industry guilty of this charge. The Malayalam film industry a.k.a. Mollywood, for instance, has in recent years given us Puthiya Niyamam (2016) and 22 Female Kottayam (2012), which too were crowd-pleasing portrayals of rape.

Even for those who do not care about realism and reality, Momis problematic for its lazy writing in the second half where loose ends are left hanging so openly that an intelligent person might spot them from a mile away. A criminal leaves behind a mega clue at a crime scene, but casually outwits a supposedlysmart cop who gets his hands on it and who, at that point, is not sympathetic to her cause, which means he cannot be assumed to have deliberately let it go. Two people who showconsiderable deftness in committing three crimes, suddenly become really stupid with theirfourth potential victim. And those same accomplicesvow to hide their association from the world,yet subsequently provide elephant-sized evidence of it to the police.

So yes, Sridevi’s acting is wonderful; the actors playing her supportive husband Anand (Adnan Siddiqui) and Arya (Sajal Ali) have immensely likeable personalities; the use of A.R. Rahman’s music in the first half is effective; the always amazing Anay Goswami’s cinematography summons up stunning grandeur and intimacy by turns, depending on the requirement of the situation; and a particular mention must be made of the brilliant sound design by Nihar Ranjan Samalduring the assault on Arya; but none of that can compensate for the post-interval increase in the film’s volume, the limited use of a talented actor like Akshaye Khanna (as the policeman Mathew Francis), the over-use of Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s histrionics for the character of the detective Dayashankar Kapoor a.k.a. DK, the re-stressing of gender stereotypes through a transgender character in the film, the loopholes and, above all, the cliched portrayal of the response to sexual assault. 

As if all this is not bad enough, Mom’s handling of the judicial process too lacks clarity and is misleading to viewers who do not know the nitty-gritty of India’s laws governing rape. I hope a lawyer will review this film in the coming days.

Ultimately then, despite its pretensions to non-conformism, Mom does nothing more than aim at easy applause. That goal is best illustrated by its predictable, horribly maudlin ending about maaaaaaaaaa.

Perhaps it was foolish to expect anything better from a film in which one character says, “Bhagwan har jagah nahin hota, DKji (God is not everywhere),” to which DKji a.k.a. Dayashankar Kapoor replies, “Isiliye toh usne maa banaayi hai(yes, that is why he made mothers).” If you want to be Manmohan Desai or Yash Chopra, why not go all out and not pretend?

The emotional pull of the first half and Sridevi’s acting excellence notwithstanding, Mom in many ways is as dangerous as the loud, raucous, not-even-pretending-to-be-progressive-about-women commercial Bollywood of the 1970s and ’80s.

Rating (out of five stars): **1/4

CBFC Rating (India):
UA
Running time:
147 minutes 43 seconds

This review has also been published on Firstpost:




REVIEW 505: TIYAAN

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Release date:
July 7, 2017
Director:
Jiyen Krishnakumar
Cast:





Language:
Prithviraj Sukumaran, Indrajith Sukumaran, Murali Gopy, Ananya, Nakshatra Indrajith, Suraj Venjaramoodu, Paris Laxmi, Padmapriya, Shine Tom Chacko, Rahul Madhav, Ranjeet, Mohanlal (as the voice of Time)        
Malayalam and Hindi, with snatches of Sanskrit


In the dusty town of Ghagrawadi in Uttar Pradesh, several minority communities have co-existed for centuries with the north Indian Hindu majority. Among them is a small group of Malayalis, including the highly respected religious scholar and teacher, Pattabhi Ramagiri (Indrajith Sukumaran). 

Trouble starts brewing in this peaceful habitation when land grabbers run amok at the behest of the politically well-connected, nationally renowned religious guru Bhagwan Mahashay (Murali Gopy). Take the monetary compensation offered to you or else… when faced with this threat and Ramakanth’s might, the townsfolk begin falling like ninepins. All except Ramagiri. He refuses to sell hisproperty, is undeterred when he and his people are sneeringly addressed as “Malabaris”, and does not budge even when violence is rained on him.

Meanwhile, a mysterious, larger-than-life figure (Prithviraj Sukumaran) watches the proceedings from the rocky outskirts of the town.  

In another department of his life, Ramagiri is plagued by nightmares set in an era long past. 

(Aside: Fans should be forewarned that though Tiyaan comes from Mollywood, it is not in Malayalam alone. It is a Malayalam-Hindi film with some Sanskrit thrown in. Thankfully, the Hindi dialogues have all been subtitled in Malayalam.) 

Director Jiyen Krishnakumar’s Tiyaan (The Above-Mentioned) combines mythology, mysticism and contemporary reality, to provide a running commentary on the insider-vs-outsider, Hindus-vs-minorities battles tearing into India’s national fabric these days. Murali Gopy’s screenplay does not mince words about the points he wishes to make. By cleverly pitting two Hindu religious men against each other, he also makes a powerful – even if debatable – statement on how it is not religion but the misuse of religion that causes social strife.

(Spoiler alert)Muslims leaving Ghagrawadi, an extremist Hindu leader’s cohorts gobbling a beef sandwich away from the public eye, gullible disciples mistaking sleight of hand for miracles – these potent images will resonate with anyone disturbed by the ongoing effort to polarise our society. (Spoiler alert ends)

Unfortunately, great issues are not what make great films, great stories do. And Tiyaan’s good intentions are clouded by the scale of its ambitions, its unwieldy storyline and its intermittently mixed messaging.

Many of DoP Satheesh Kurup’s shots of the UP landscape are spectacular, the production design and costumes are eyecatching, but the people in those pretty frames are barely relatable and the film lacks soul. The three male leads, in particular, feel like giant cut-outs to be viewed from a distance, not flesh-and-blood persons who become a part of our lives as we watch Tiyaan.

(Spoiler alert)

The film is big on symbolism – the casting of the Sukumaran brothers to play men of different religious backgrounds, for one, should not be lost on us. Yet the same maker seems not to have spotted the meaning conveyed by portraying a Brahmin man (note the combination: upper caste plus male) as the only one who has the courage to stand up to evil in all of Ghagrawadi. Two women do support him unflinchingly, but they are very clearly placed in the conventional women-behind-the-man slot.

Elsewhere, there is beauty in a Dalit child’s refusal to stone that Brahmin in one scene when exhorted to do so to avenge all historical persecution, but when that Dalit child is shown bowing – yes, physically bowing – before a character whose Brahminhood is stressed, re-stressed and further underlined throughout Tiyaan, you have to wonder: what on earth were Krishnakumar and Gopy thinking? Or were they not thinking at all?

(Spoiler alert ends)

This is where the film crosses the line from complexity to confusion.

The other glaring problem with Tiyaan is that it is too self-conscious. In terms of writing and presentation, it comes off as too aware that it is ‘addressing issues’ and too transparent in its desire to impress upon viewers that it is a big, grand project.

It is to Prithviraj and Indrajith Sukumaran’s credit that they seem convinced of their characters and pull off their roles without over-acting even when the film veers towards bombast. Ananya too leaves an impression with her natural performance despite the overall tone of Tiyaan.

At the end of the day, however much you may cheer a film’s political awareness and guts, it is impossible to be drawn into its world if it is written like a speech rather than a story. I rejoiced when a character in Tiyaan in a north Indian setting insists on addressing a crowd in Malayalam rather than Hindi, pointing out that he is doing so because this land belongs to all of us and not to any community in particular. I rejoiced because it is an undisguised snub directed at the present ruling dispensation’s subtle efforts to revive the old language debate. I would have truly rejoiced though, if that remark had come from a more engaging film.

For all its courage, Tiyaan left me largely unmoved and – at nearly 3 hours in length – sleepy.

Rating (out of five stars): **

CBFC Rating (India):
A
Running time:
168 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:




REVIEW 506: JAGGA JASOOS

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Release date:
July 14, 2017
Director:
Anurag Basu
Cast:



Language:
Ranbir Kapoor, Katrina Kaif, Saurabh Shukla, Saswata Chatterjee, Rajatava Dutta, Saravajeet Tiwari,Cameo: Nawazuddin Siddiqui
Hindi


The infamous 1995 Purulia arms drop case forms the backdrop of writer-director-producer Anurag Basu’s new film starring Ranbir Kapoor and Katrina Kaif. Remember Purulia, the episode involving a large cache of weapons mysteriously expelled from an aircraft passing over villages in this West Bengal district? Remember the many conspiracy theories floated around it? If you do not, a quick google search will remind you how huge a news story this was back then, and what an unlikely subject it is for a mainstream Hindi film with the appearance of being a light-hearted entertainer.

That pivotal plot point is not the only unconventional aspect of Basu’s Jagga Jasoos. The film’s defining feature is that it is a departure from the traditional Bollywood musical, and a bow instead to Broadway and old-style Disney’s take on this artistic genre.

Both points are driven home without delay and with infectious verve during Jagga Jasoos’s thoroughly enjoyable and intriguing opening sequence in which cartons of arms and ammunition fall from a plane on to a television crew at work in the Indian countryside. This is our introduction to the character played by Saswata Chatterjee, who is part of that crew. The media and politicians are all agog at this bizarre case, news anchors deliver their bulletins and netas their reactions in song, and there is enough energy on screen in that sequence to light up an entire multiplex.

Cut to a pretty young woman played by Katrina Kaif, who appears to be a teacher narrating stories of the orphaned boy detective Jagga (Saravajeet Tiwari) to very young students – or are they readers of her books? – via song and dance.

Jagga has a stammer that he masks in silence. One day, Chatterjee’s character – who nicknames himself Tutti Futti – enters the child’s life and guides him to use music to overcome his speech disability. From then on, Jagga begins to converse through melody. Tutti Futti adopts him and they lead a happy life in Manipur’s Ukhrul district, before fate intervenes and separates the father from the son. Lonely Jagga (now Ranbir Kapoor as a schoolkid) has a curious mind, which leads him to solve mysteries that baffle even the police, and ultimately pursue the secret of his Dad’s true identity – hence the jasoos(detective) in the title.

How long will Basu manage to sustain interest in a format so rarely used in Bollywood? Why did Tutti Futti disappear? What was the secret behind the arms drop? Is Kaif a mere sutradhar or does she have a role in Jagga’s life? These questions keep the first half of Jagga Jasoos going, when curiosity combines with Pritam’s cleverly conceptualised compositions (pleasurable listening, if you have a taste for Broadway musicals), Shiamak Davar’s imaginative choreography and Allan Amin’s breathless action.

The dip in the second half is almost tangible. Part of the reason is that by then, we have witnessed Kaif’s entry into Jagga’s life as a certain Shruti Sengupta, so that her continuation as storyteller immediately before and after the intermission (in an observer avatar far removed from what Shruti is to the hero) does not gel with the rest of the proceedings. Her role as narrator is overplayed post-interval and the star’s own involvement in that part of the film seems to inexplicably fizzle out. More to the point, Jagga Jasoos takes too long to get to what you gradually realise is its primary point, that point being Tutti Futti’s connection to Purulia. Although the music, dance and stunts continue to be delightful, their appeal begins to feel like style working over substance, and packaging over content.

Basu’s screenplay zigzags about too much in the second half, leading to lack of clarity. Too many things seem to happen for effect rather than with good reason. How, for instance, does Shruti know African culture enough to charm a bunch of policemen in the particular way she does in an alien land? There is also too much back and forth in Tutti Futti and Jagga’s life timelines leading to confusion.

Kaif and Kapoor were reportedly dating when shooting for this film started. Their real-life break-up is said to have caused the inordinate delay in its making and release. You would not be able to tell that from their pleasant chemistry on screen.

Saravajeet Tiwari who plays little Jagga is sweet. Kapoor – who turns producer with this film – throws himself into the role of Jagga Senior with gusto, and is fun to watch, especially as he dances with charming, unself-conscious abandon to the song Galti se mistake with his schoolmates. It does take a stretch of the imagination to accept this strapping, mature-looking 34-year-old as a schoolkid – especially when the screen is packed with actors who mostly look much younger, and especially because there’s a dialogue trying to convince us that he is much younger than Kaif (uff, come on!) – but his magnetic personality and the novelty of seeing him sing some of his dialogues overshadow that incongruity.

Though Jagga Jasoos references several iconic works of detective fiction, its deepest curtsey is to Herge’s Tintin comicbooks. The older Jagga’s styling has clearly been inspired by Tintin – he even borrows the Belgian boy detective’s trademark quiff. In an obvious tribute to Herge, the sutradhar’s stories of Jagga are contained in comicbooks which she likens to life.

Kapoor and Basu also manage to ensure that Jagga’s stammer is handled with sensitivity and does not ever become a source of humour aimed at him. Oddly enough, in a scene in which Jagga interacts with Saurabh Shukla’s shadowy character and his cohorts, Kapoor seems to briefly forget his stammer completely. This is disappointing because he is remarkably consistent with it in the rest of the film.

Basu uses his leading lady intelligently. Kaif has been getting more comfortable before the camera with each passing year. She still does not have much acting depth but she does have presence, and is well-suited to this role of a clumsy but spirited woman in a zany film that calls for a touch of histrionic over-statement.

Like its main stars, Jagga Jasoos is great-looking. It has been shot in South Africa, Thailand and Morocco, with Darjeeling being the location in India. S. Ravi Varman’s visuals are extravagant, and apt for the film’s massive canvas. Barring the glaring CGI work on a scene with a pair of giraffes and some terribly done VFX involving ostriches, this is an eyecatching film.

Jagga Jasoos brings together a range of quality ingredients, but something has gone wrong in the cooking of it. It is highly engaging up to a point, but needed tighter writing and direction to stay on course. The very idea of a musical action adventure blending whimsy with eastern and western sensibilities is fascinating. The plus point for me then is that a hard-core mainstream director and two out-and-out mainstream stars have invested themselves in such an experimental project. While that is not enough, it is still something worth celebrating.

Rating (out of five stars): **1/4

CBFC Rating (India):
UA
Running time:
162 minutes


A version of this review has been published on Firstpost:



REVIEW 507: SUNDAY HOLIDAY

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Release date:
July 14, 2017
Director:
Jis Joy
Cast:





Language:
Asif Ali, Aparna Balamurali, Sreenivasan, Lal Jose, Siddique, Dharmajan Bolgatty, Shruti Ramachandran, K.P.A.C. Lalitha, Sudheer Karamana, Alencier Ley Lopez, Asha Sarath
Malayalam


Unni Mukundan (Sreenivasan) is an academic who wants to make a film. Or rather, he has written a script that he wants made into a film by the well-known director David Paul (Lal Jose). And so one day when their paths cross by chance, he grabs the opportunity to narrate his story to the stalwart.

Mukundan’s imagination transports Paul away from their meeting place to the town of Payyanur in Kerala’s Kannur district where Amal (Asaf Ali) is battling heartbreak. His girlfriend has ditched him to marry a man her family considers a better prospect, and Amal decides to get a fresh start in life. He relocates to work as a door-to-door salesperson elsewhere and encounters a motley bunch of new characters, among them a spunky fellow salesperson (played by Aparna Balamurali) who is more than she appears to be; an aspiring actor (Dharmajan Bolgatty) who sustains himself for now doing small-time ads; a writer of tacky dialogues and lyrics for the Malayalam dubbing of Telugu blockbusters (Siddique); and a man desperate to avenge his father’s betrayal at the hands of a treacherous business partner (Sudheer Karamana). 

Sunday Holiday– directed by Jis Joy who earlier made 2013’s Bicycle Thieves– is clearly designed as slice-of-life cinema. In keeping with that ambition, it gets its tone right in large parts. The storytelling style is natural and realistic until the director’s faith in his chosen genre falters glaringly when he needlessly inserts a nightclub song-and-dance into the proceedings, no doubt to give Asif Ali an opportunity to show off his dancing skills and possibly to appease viewers with a taste for formulae. The result of that jarring passage is a break in the flow of the narrative.   

The film’s multiple characters are projected as ordinary people, but each in their own way is not. The pain of a jilted lover is no less agonising to him just because he happens to be a non-entity to you and me. A professionally ambitious woman living alone in a conservative community is no less a heroine than the Manju Warriers and Nayantharas of the world in their on- and off-screen avatars. Sunday Holiday then is about the extraordinariness in everydayness.

Malayalam cinema has been delivering a string of on-point films of this nature, with last year’s Maheshinte Prathikaaram and the current rage, Thondimuthalum Driksakshiyum, being among the highlights of the lot. To have been a contender to their crown, Sunday Holidayneeded stronger writing. While it has its basics in place, once the initial charm wears off, it is hard to ignore the fact that it lacks flesh and depth.

On the plus side, Mukundan’s narration is never stretched so long as to take away from the pull of Amal’s story – the (primary) film within this film – but on the downside, his ‘secret’, revealed in the end, is a needless addition to the plot and one that is almost silly.

Let us not mistake superficiality for simplicity, and loose ends for an open ending. Sunday Holiday does. Too often. A murderous attack on a significant character, for instance, is left casually unreported to the police. One of the characters gets away with a heist that is massive in his circumstances – while the manner in which that happens is not entirely impossible, what defies believability is that family members of the culprit, who are presented as decent folk, do not bat an eyelid when they discover his crime. And several characters fail to rise above a single defining characteristic.

The cast is packed with talented character artistes. Leading man Asif Ali is likeable as always but is yet to develop the charisma to carry the weight of an entire film on his shoulders. Aparna Balamurali, on the other hand, looks like she might, if only male-centric Mollywood would give her a chance. This youngster, who shone in supporting roles in Maheshinte Prathikaaram and Oru Muthassi Gadhalast year, has the words “star material” written all over her, and deserves to be seen in films revolving around the character she plays.

As Anu, Balamurali lifts Sunday Holiday each time she appears on screen. If there was more of her in the film, it might even have been saved from its intermittent blandness.

That blandness arises largely from an overall lack of novelty. The traitorous female lover, the hapless male lover and all-male drinking sessions – familiar motifs from a vast majority of Malayalam films – play a substantial role here. They are a reminder of the extreme gender segregation in Kerala society and the anti-women prejudice that is its direct consequence – but these are unintentional insights (and the fact that they are unintentional on the part of Joy and so many other directors, including some seemingly progressive ones, just goes to show how deep-rooted these problems are).

That said, while Sunday Holiday offers little that is new, the good thing is that it is unpretentious. It is sometimes sweet, more often flat, at no point insufferable but never earth-shattering either. Having seen it once, I’d say it is watchable but thoroughly forgettable fare.

Rating (out of five stars): *1/2

CBFC Rating (India):
U
Running time:
135 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:




REVIEW 508: SHAB

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Release date:
July 14, 2017
Director:
Onir
Cast:







Language:
Ashish Bisht, Raveena Tandon, Arpita Chatterjee, Areesz Ganddi, Simon Frenay, Raj Suri, Anika Dhawan, Gaurav Nanda, Andrew Hoffland, Shray Rai Tiwari, Cameos: Sanjay Suri, fashion designers Varun Bahl and Wendell Rodricks
Hindi with English


One of the great highs of being a cinephile comes from watching a new release by a director whose body of work you love, and discovering that they have done it again. There is, I have come to realise, a sub-conscious tension I experience as I enter a hall before any film, more so before a film by someone with a solid track record, and if the film turns out to be good, a sense of relief that washes over me as I leave – relief that those couple of hours of life were not wasted, and in the case of an artist I respect, relief that they have proved to be consistent.


My heart broke a little when I saw Shab this week. It has been helmed by Onir, who made the politically brave, mind-shatteringly beautiful My Brother Nikhil in 2005 and I Am in 2011, with the latter deservedly going on to win the year’s National Award for Best Hindi Film. Shab is his first directorial feature in six years, but the intervening period has, unfortunately, not been well spent.

The title comes froma Hindustani word for “night”. The story is about what goes on under cover of a metaphorical darkness in Delhi’s social circles, where young entrants on the glamour scene are used and abused by unscrupulous veterans, where a creative person you see at work in a posh colony could be supplementing their income by dabbling in the world’s oldest profession, and where bored rich married couples find excitement in infidelity.

In one of Shab’s earliest scenes, an aspiring model from a small town walks to the head of a catwalk in the briefest of shiny briefs, wiggles his butt and crotch about for the viewing consumption of a panel of judges seated below the stage, and introduces himself in broken English that causes them to snigger. He is achingly young and eager, but they appear not to see that. What they see instead is a target for their snobbery and their lust. 

It is a moment brimming with pathos and potential, not over- or under-done, but just right. Newcomer Ashish Bisht playing the boy-child on the ramp – Mohan from Dhanaulti – seems to have been well chosen for the role. As he stands there before that elite set, the picture of innocence and enthusiasm mixed with a dash of stupidity, anxious to impress and evidently impervious to their contempt, it is hard not to feel uneasy on his behalf and sorry for him. It is possible that Bisht is acting here, but to all appearances he is just being.

That fleeting passage perfectly illustrates the difference between the objectification of a person with the reins in their hands (such as a male superstar choosing to dance shirtless to Dard e disco, and other top heroes in India’s big film industries) versus a person with less power (heroines from the same film industries, including the seniors among them) versus those with no power at all (female debutants and even men like Mohan). No one touches Mohan during that trial, yet there is exploitation written all over it.

When the wealthy socialite Sonal Modi (Raveena Tandon) decides that Mohan is a worthy toy boy, we learn that he is not quite as innocent as he looks. She later re-christens him Azfar to fit him better into snooty circles, anoints him her fitness trainer, and starts carting him around wherever she goes. Azfar develops a swagger and a seductive air with women, and strains at the leash on which his mentor keeps him.

If Shab had been able to carry forward the nuanced air of discomfort in that opening talent hunt, it could have been special. Because of that promise, when at first we are introduced to a string of individuals and we watch their paths intersect, it seems like something might come of it. Unfortunately, Shab disintegrates within its first half hour. And so, we are hauled across the criss-crossing lives of character after character, from Mohan/Azfar, Sonal and her designer buddy Rohan Sud (Raj Suri), to restaurateur Neil (Areesz Ganddi) and his close friend Raina (Arpita Chatterjee), Raina’s sister Anu (Anika Dhawan) and her neighbour Benoit LeBlanc (Simon Frenay), Neil’s lovers, Raina’s clients, and… you know what, it does not matter, because the comatose narrative – divided pointlessly into the four seasons – left me so indifferent after a while, that I could not even remember their names.


The problem lies not with the multiplicity of characters or even the acting for the most part, but with the shallow writing, jagged editing (initially intriguing but distractingly choppy as time goes by) and inert direction. Shab somehow feels like a film Onir made in the middle of a million distractions. The editing has been credited to the usually reliable Irene Dhar Malik and Onir, the screenplay and dialogues to Merle Kröger and Onir, the Hindi dialogues to Adhiraj Singh and the dramaturgy to Kröger, while Urmi Juvekar has been acknowledged for the story idea – let them decide culpability amongst themselves in this case.

Whatever conclusion they may arrive at, the fact remains that even though some of the actors in Shab are worth caring for, not a single character is.

Bisht is sweet up to a point, but is lost to surface treatment by the writers. Tandon has screen presence and gorgeousness, but after an interesting introduction, is given little to do beyond be haughty, hot and horny.

Chatterjee is a veteran of the Bengali industry. She was strong in her Bollywood debut Chauranga(2016), which was co-produced but not directed by Onir. In Shab she is inexplicably stiff as cardboard, which weighs heavily on the already insubstantial writing of Raina. Ganddi and Frenay look like they might add up to something more with a better script, but they are so under-written that it is impossible to judge them by this film. Suri, thankfully, does not go stark raving camp like designers in the formulaic Madhur Bhandarkar mould, but his motivations in his final scene are one of this film’s many mysteries that I do not give a damn enough to crack.

Restraint cannot mean zero vitality, yet that is what you get in Shab. Worse, the film does not have anything new to say. We already know that wealth does not guarantee marital happiness, that freshers in the modelling and acting professions get taken advantage of sexually, that big cities can be challenging to small-town folk. We know of the casting couch, high-society call girls and closeted homosexuality. They exist, but what more can you tell us about them beyond what has already been told? What emotion can you stir up that has not already been felt?

If the answer to either question is “I don’t know”, here is another question: is the film worth making? Shab, sadly, was not.

Rating (out of five stars): *

CBFC Rating (India):
A
Running time:
108 minutes 27 seconds




REVIEW 509: LIPSTICK UNDER MY BURKHA

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Release date:
July 21, 2017
Director:
Alankrita Shrivastava
Cast:




Language:
Konkona Sensharma, Ratna Pathak Shah, Aahana Kumra, Plabita Borthakur, Sushant Singh, Vikrant Massey, Vaibbhav Tatwawdi, Jagat Singh Solanki, Shashank Arora, Sonal Jha 
Hindi


The “burkha” in Lipstick Under My Burkha must be viewed with all the baggage the word carries. It is not a literal reference to the form-camouflaging garment worn traditionally by Muslim women. “Burkha” here is a reference both to the piece of clothing and the curtaining off of a woman’s dreams, desires and feelings.

This film is not about women of any particular religious group. It is about all women living in the shadow of tyranny.

Lipstick Under My Burkha is set in Bhopal where Usha Parmar (Ratna Pathak Shah), Rehana Abidi (Plabita Borthakur), Shirin Aslam (Konkona Sensharma) and Leela (Aahana Kumra) are neighbours in a congested lower-middle class neighbourhood. Rehana is a college student who also chips in at her parents’ tailoring shop. Unknown to them, she rebels against their restrictions and the burkha forced on her. A stone’s throw from her residence, unknown to an authoritarian husband (Sushant Singh), Shirin has been working as a door-to-door salesperson with great success, only to return home each day to be raped by him. Leela the beautician, meanwhile, has been planning a new business and simultaneously having an affair with a local Muslim photographer (Vikrant Massey), unknown to her fond fiancé or her widowed and financially desperate mother (Sonal Jha). Unknown to all of them, Usha is lost in a world of sleazy romantic novels, even as she oversees the running of her own sweet shop and a large, crumbling residential building she appears to co-own with her nephews.

Those with a penchant for whataboutery may please note that two of the female leads in this film are Hindu and two are Muslim. Read: 50% from each qaum. Happy?

Although it is very likely that writer-director Alankrita Shrivastava consciously divided the women equally between India’s two largest religious communities to pre-empt thin-skinned fundamentalists from both sides, the composition is cleverly handled and does not for a second feel forced. I thought of it only because Lipstick Under My Burkha comes to theatres in the aftermath of a tussle with the country’s ultra-Right,ultra-stupid Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) headed by Pahlaj Nihalani.

In fact, let me revise that earlier description: in addition to the four female leads mentioned, there is also a Christian woman in the picture.

Lipstick Under My Burkha opens with one of the most charming narrative devices seen in a while in a Hindi film. Shah’s voiceover is juxtaposed on visuals that are designed to mislead. The revelation of her character’s truth is one of the many amusing moments this film offers.

Despite the grim themes of female subjugation and the right to choose (your career, your spouse, the timing of a pregnancy, when you want to have sex and when you do not), Shrivastava tells the story with a light touch, and there is as much to smile about as to weep over in this film. That said, though Usha’s tryst with potboilers is funny, at no point does the film laugh at her. Each of these women – ranging in age from teensto 50s – longs for a life beyond the one she is now trapped in, each one has reason to be perennially angry and depressed, yet somehow each finds within herself the strength to hope.

(Possible spoilers ahead)

Unlike Leena Yadav’s 2016 film Parched, which featured three rural women in an oppressive environment, Lipstick Under My Burkha does not exoticise its characters for foreign consumption nor end on a conclusive, unrealistically optimistic note. It merits mention too that the world outside a stifling house is not painted as a paradise here, and we are reminded of the risks it holds for an inexperienced youngster like Rehana who is accustomed to segregation.

The inconclusiveness and the cautionary notes are among the nicest things about this film. Who can tell what the women may achieve for themselves if they choose to throw the veil away? Is freedom not a worthwhile end in itself, despite the pitfalls accompanying it?

This is not to say that Lipstick Under My Burkha is spotless.For one, the manner in which we are introduced to Shirin’s work feels contrived for effect. There are some details that needed ironing out. Case in point: shoplifting, without question, is not as easy as the film makes it out to be; and that gynaecologist looks too considerate to be examining a patient next to a window with blinds drawn back. While these are passing irritants almost forgotten by the end of the film, what cannot be excused is the self-defeating and mindless use of smoking and Mills & Boon-style escapist fiction (cheekily called Bills & Moon here) as motifs for women’s emancipation.

It is understandable, of course, that desperation might drive a lonely woman to seek refuge in such silly literature. However, the film’s failure to underline the horrendous gender stereotyping and the romanticisation of force in books of this nature is self-contradictory. Patriarchy is patriarchy even when couched in gentle terms.

In a scene clearly intended to exemplify female bonding in the film, the four women pass a cigarette around as they chat. This is not a casual occurrence, it is a very pointed exercise considering that it is a climactic moment and the first time two of them are shown around a cigarette or trying their hand at it. After getting so much right, that passage in Lipstick Under My Burkhaends up reinforcing a hugely reductive, widely prevalent perception of feminism. As a teacher, I have taken classes in which I have had to convince students as old as in their 20s that feminism is not merely a global movement to give women the right to smoke and drink (I exaggerate not). Having dwelt on so many grave issues during the film, it beats me why Shrivastava and her team chose to end with such a shallow, stereotypical symbol of a centuries-old struggle for equality. The only thing worse I could think of would have been showing the women chucking their lingerie into a fire, thus furthering the propagandist cliché about the “bra-burning feminist” (whatever that means). C’mon Team Lipstick, et tu?

The smoking scene rudely reminded me of the superficial liberalism that pervaded Shrivastava’s directorial debut, Turning 30, in 2011.Lipstick Under My Burkha, to be fair,is a vastly evolved film and those jarring references are fleeting. Still, they are references that mar an otherwise even-toned tale.

Unthinking political correctness often drives artists to portray marginalised persons as flawless creatures. The women of Lipstick, thankfully, are not. And why should they be? Women should not have to be perfect to earn the right to their rights.

The men of Lipstick too are an interesting lot, ranging from the outrightly horrid (the rapist husband) to the socially conditioned (the controlling father, the sweet but boring fiancé) and the confused/confusing (the lover). The women suffer pain, the source of their pain is not always a man, and they cause pain too.

There is a point at which a woman is startled when a man turns on her and demands to know if she sees no use for him other than as a source of sex. Elsewhere, a man is hurt by his girlfriend’s infidelity. These are sorely needed reminders that despite the overriding benefits patriarchy offers men, it also causes us to view them through a narrow lens that a society as a whole may favour but the individual male may at least occasionally not. How do so many seemingly intelligent men not see the shackles they place on themselves in a bid to shackle women?

“Burkha”, then, stands for the opposite of freedom here; “lipstick”, depending on how you interpret the film, stands variously for the hidden self brimming with dreams or the mask we use to hide our inner miseries, our secret escapades and more. In one of the film’s many telling scenes, a woman dances silently in her room before a poster of her favourite Western pop icon, with the music playing completely in her head, while her joyless family moves around outside. In another, a woman pauses as if struggling to remember her name, because it has been so long since anyone asked her who she is beneath the Buaji (Aunty) they all address her as.

(Spoiler alert ends)

The smooth writing of Lipstick Under My Burkha is credited to Shrivastava (story and screenplay), Suhani Kanwar (additional screenplay) and Gazal Dhaliwal (dialogue). When combined with Charu Shree Roy’s seamless editing and Mangesh Dhakde’s carefully conceived, supremely entertaining background score, the narrative flows with remarkable ease. Zebunissa Bangash’s pretty songs (Le li jaan being the prettiest of the lot) are neatly knitted into the script. Akshay Singh’s camera keeps moving discomfitingly close to the women, and succeeds in capturing the claustrophobia that permeates their lives whether in their low-lit, cramped homes or even in bright open spaces.

The female leads are all stupendous, almost as if each is tripping over the other to be better than the rest. I dare you to watch this film and not fall in love with Ratna Pathak Shah, in a role that might easily have been caricatured by a lesser artiste collaborating with a lesser filmmaker. Konkona Sensharma is brilliant in an unassuming way. Aahana Kumra is a firecracker. And the multi-talented Plabita Borthakur is a find. Hers is a challenging part, since Rehana’s battles are mostly internal with limited dialogue, but she wages war with herself as effectively as with the enemy outside. Casting directors noting her model-like face and frame, do also note her rich voice. For the record, she is a professional singer, she has even recorded three songs for this film and written the lyrics for two. 

The supporting cast is as talented and well chosen. Vaibbhav Tatwawdi lends appealing vulnerability to Leela’s fiancé Manoj. And Vikrant Massey, fresh from his genius in A Death In The Gunj, proves his versatility here in a completely different role as Leela’s boyfriend Arshad.

It should not come as a surprise to anyone that Lipstick Under My Burkha made the CBFC uncomfortable. It is unrelenting in its social commentary, unapologetic about the mirror it holds up to Indian patriarchy, and reminds men that women – even those old enough to be their mothers – have sexual desires. Worse, by being nuanced in its portrayal of men, and striking a fine balance between humour and gravitas in its take on women, it threatens to have a wider commercial appeal than a weepie might have had.

Besides, it is that rare mainstream Hindi film placing the spotlight firmly on marital rape. Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra had unexpectedly though briefly visited the horrors of sexual violence within marriage in 2013’s Bhaag Milkha Bhaag, as didKanu Behl in a spine-chilling fashion in Titli (2015). Shrivastava treats it differently, lending a disquieting everydayness to it – the kind of stuff lakhs of women are so used to, that they might head off to the kitchen once the monster has had his fill in bed, there to mechanically roll out chapatis even as they silently cope with their trauma. The very thought is enough to turn the stomach of a decent person.

So of course Lipstick Under My Burkha could potentially upset many, many people. It has the ability to grab a person by the collar, shake them up and make them feel unsettled even if they refuse to introspect. I am willing to bet that Pahlaj Nihalani’s Censor Board will not be the last conservatives unnerved by this feisty, disturbing yet celebratory film.

Rating (out of five stars): ***1/2

CBFC Rating (India):
A
Running time:
117 minutes 

This review has also been published on Firstpost:





REVIEW 510: BASHEERINTE PREMALEKHANAM

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Release date:
July 21, 2017
Director:
Aneesh Anwar
Cast:



Language:
Farhaan Faasil, Sana Althaf, Renjini Jose, Manikandan Achari, Sheela, Madhu, Joy Mathew, Sivaji Guruvayoor, Aju Varghese, Sooraj Harris, Sunil Sukhada 
Malayalam


Basheerinte Premalekhanam (Basheer’s Love Letter) harks back to the days when televisions were not ubiquitous in India, when the only house in the neighbourhood with a TV or a radio (not as we know it right now, but those boxy thingies, remember them?) would become a social hub even in an urban locality, and when the absence of cellphones and limited availability of telephone landlines made forbidden romances a far greater struggle than they are today.

The story is set in a Kerala village in the 1980s, when the arrival of a TV from the Gelf becomes a talking point in the entire community. Usman (Manikandan Achari) sends one as a gift to the home of the haughty Hussain Haji (Joy Mathew), father of Suhra (Sana Althaf) who has been promised to him in marriage.

Hajiyaar’s radio has already made his home a star attraction in the area. From the first moment the screen of his new Onida TV comes alive with moving visuals, the locals are hooked. The radio is relegated to the interiors of the house while everyone gathers on the balcony each day now to watch films, sports and Chitrageet on the electronic miracle that one of them describes as a radio with pictures and a devout fellow resident labels a “cheythaanpetti” (satanic box).
 
Basheer (Farhaan Faasil), a tech-savvy polytechnic pass-out, becomes a mini neighbourhood celeb when he does the job of setting up the cheythaanpetti. He falls for Suhra, but of course her situation is complicated.

Basheerinte Premalekhanam is about the hurdles they face in their romance while the goings-on around them – party politics, the battle over a bridge that needs to be built, religiosity and more – provide a peek into the world as it was back then. The title is as much a reference to Vaikom Muhammad Basheer as it is to the hero of the film, since the latter plagiarises the celebrated Malayalam writer’s novel Premalekhanam to impress Suhra.

The opening 20 minutes or so of the film are pleasant. The set-up is promising, as director Aneesh Anwar hits the nail on the head with the tone, look and detailing, including the visuals accompanying the opening credits, injecting humour and nostalgia into his deliberately kinda-over-the-top narrative. At that point, to all appearances, Basheerinte Premalekhanam looks set to be an entertaining, slightly farcical representation of a time when technology had less of a role in our lives, when the current information and entertainment overload had not yet invaded our collective existence and when attention spans were not as limited as they are now, so that a phenomenon like the Onida devil could be the talk of the town for months.

Gradually though, what emerges on screen proves to be of limited depth, and the film settles into a lack of freshness and spark that it does not recover from. Even the nostalgia ride into the 1980s does not go far enough. For instance, for a film that features so much of Doordarshan-watching from back then, it is almost unforgivable that DD’s signature tune – a cultural fixture in those days – is not played even once with the logo. I missed it.

The only thing that remains pleasing from start to finish is Sanjay Harris’ camerawork, which seems purposefully not to capture the magnificence of the Kerala landscape, opting instead for its beautiful niches, thickly green corners and wooded country lanes.

Like director Jis Joy’s Sunday Holiday last week, it is clear that Aneesh Anwar too is aiming at giving us a slice of life,even if he frames Basheerinte within farce. Whatever Sunday Holiday’s failings may have been, it had more content than this one, plus it had Aparna Balamurali’s pizzazz and Asif Ali’s sweetness going for it. Farhaan Faasil, whose second film this is, remains as uncharismatic here as he was on debut in Njan Steve Lopez (2014). This Faasil – brother of Fahadh, son of director Fazil – does not even have age for an excuse, as his leading lady does. Sana Althaf is about a decade his junior and can do little to rev up an ordinarily written part.

The legendary Madhu’s grace and dignity, on the other hand, fill the screen with warmth every time he comes on as Suhra’s late grandfather, the watchful sutradhar and guardian angel of the narrative. Not that his role is any better written than the rest. It is intriguing at first but does not go anywhere, but Madhu… well, Madhu is always just really nice to watch, now and forever, Amen. 

Another legend, Sheela, does not do half as well in her over-cutesified role as Suhra’s spirited, supportive grandmother. To be fair, any star would most likely have struggled with a screenplay that requires the old lady to be amused and charmed on seeing a creepy chappie – namely, Basheer – removing rooftiles to peep into her granddaughter’s bedroom. Ewwww!

This is not the only instance of questionable behaviour towards a woman being normalised and humourised in Basheerinte, but then that is all in a day’s work for most Malayalam commercial cinema. At one point in the film, when a man says he does not drink from used glasses, a listener concludes aloud that the man’s runaway girlfriend then clearly does not stand a chance with him.

For me, Sheela and Madhu will always be Karuthamma and Pareekutty from Chemmeen, my all-time favourite Malayalam film. Oddly enough, despite having cast the two stalwarts as a married couple, Basheerinte does not give them a single scene together, unless you count a blink-and-you-might-miss-it joint appearance in a song.

Manikandan Achari has a much smaller role than Faasil and steals the show from right under the titular hero’s nose. It is a pleasure to see him play a character as different from the iconic Balan in 2016’s Kammattipaadam– his calling card so far – or even the simpleton Murugan in the lesser known Ayal Jeevichiruppundu (2017), as chalk is from paneer. There are those who felt that Achari was credited for great acting when all he did was play himself in Kammattipaadam. I disagreed back then, but it is still a relief to get proof of his versatility and a reaffirmation of his genuine talent in this film. The tenderness Achari brings to his character Usman is the closest this film comes to being worth the price of a ticket.

That said, even Achari and Madhu cannot save Basheerinte Premalekhanam from its overall limpness. It is not unbearable or any such thing, what it is is blah.

Rating (out of five stars): *1/2

CBFC Rating (India):
U
Running time:
130 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:




… OF ZAKHMI WOMEN AND PUTHIYA LAWS

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Indian cinema’s fondness for post-rape revenge sprees continues with Sridevi’s Mom. But such films let “us” off lightly

By Anna MM Vetticad

(This article was published in The Hindu Businessline’s BLink on July 15, 2017.)


Most human beings have felt it at some point in their lives: an anger so overpowering that in that moment, you wanted to kill the person who had infuriated you. Few of us give in to that primal urge. Devki does.

In her new Hindi film Mom, Sridevi plays Devki, a high-school teacher who methodically executes the men involved in her daughter’s gangrape, after a court frees them. Mom’s first half is heartbreaking and credible as it establishes the mother-child relationship, portrays the rape with extreme sensitivity and shows us the family’s initial battle to retain sanity. The narrative changes track completely though when Devki sets off on her applause-inducing rampage. This is not self-defence or spur-of-the-moment violence, but carefully planned revenge. It is the Zakhmi Aurat Syndrome all over again, harking back to the 1988 Hindi film Zakhmi Aurat (Wounded Woman) in which a policewoman played by Dimple Kapadia joins forces with rape survivors like herself to bobbitise their attackers.

Like Bollywood, India’s other big film industries too have, over the years, delivered a small crop of populist films favouring vigilante justice for rape. Just last year, Nayanthara and Mammootty starred in the Malayalam film Puthiya Niyamam (New Law), which was about a woman killing her rapists with help from unexpected quarters. Another high-profile Mollywood film from the genre, 22 Female Kottayam in 2012 had Rima Kallingal’s character killing a rapist and castrating his accomplice.

Admittedly, real women rarely react in this fashion, but how can a spot of fantasy hurt, you ask? Besides, zakhmi women are still not a common occurrence whereas zakhmimen have been the bedrock of escapist Indian cinema for decades, taking the law into their hands in droves when the ‘system’ fails them.

Well, at an artistic level it is true that both are clichés, but at a sociological level, there is no equivalence between them. The unrealistically vengeful man of cinema does not carry with him the same baggage of off-screen social prejudice that the woman does. He, therefore, calls for a separate discussion.

Commercial cinema down the decades has swung wildly from the female rape victim with no agency — who weeps helplessly or commits suicide, while her male relatives or lover exact revenge for her lost ‘izzat’ (honour) — to another extreme, where she metamorphoses into a raging Goddess Durga. The latter is an extension of our national vocabulary, which perennially pedestalises the female as “mata” or “devi”, a deification that then becomes an excuse to deny women the right to be ordinary humans — flawed, fearful, normal, like men. When women deviate from these superhuman standards set by society, the penalty is harsh, whereas men — seen as hapless slaves of their hormones and feminine wiles — are casually absolved of grave crimes. While saying, “Ladke hai, galti ho jaati hai (after all they are boys, mistakes happen),” UP neta Mulayalam Singh Yadav echoed a widely held view of rapists emerging from this mindset.

The rape-victim-as-avenging-Durga cliché comes from film industries that almost never give space to stories of ordinary, believably tough women responding to sexual violence (Bollywood’s Pink in 2016 being an exception).

Vengeance is a quick route to applause. Watching a woman chop the genitals off a sexual predator can be deeply satisfying for those of us frustrated with the ‘system’, but such films do not compel us to introspect about our own part in that system and a culture that socially sanctions rape. These films point fingers at everyone but the citizenry. Why demand self-questioning, I guess, if letting viewers feel self-righteous pays off?

By cheering Devki in Mom, do we not prove that “we”, the good people watching her, are disgusted with rapists, that “we” are different from “them”? So what if at home we have conversations with our sons blaming women’s attire for rape? So what if our sons see evidence of women as lesser beings in the relationship of inequality between Mum and Dad? Stop this feminist bullshit, please! “Our” boys do not commit rape, only “they” do.

Films like Momlet “us” off lightly.

There is another point worth considering. In recent years, India has displayed a bizarre need to attribute qualities to anonymous rape victims that would give us the drive to fight for them — as if their being humans is not enough. The news media’s nicknames for these women reflect this attitude. In 2014’s Uber case she became Veera (the brave one), the toddler gangraped in a basement in 2013 became Gudiya (doll), and of course there was Nirbhaya (the fearless one) from 2012.

What if that woman was cowering in fright in that taxi? What if that child was not Barbie-like? What if that physiotherapy intern was begging for mercy? Would they then not be worthy of our empathy and support?

Rape victims and their families should not be objects of public fantasy. Like it or not, Vasuki of Puthiya Niyamam and Devki of Mom are the cinematic equivalents of our imagined Nirbhaya, The Fearless One. It is as if X, The Ordinary One — on or off screen — does not deserve us.

(This is the concluding piece of Film Fatale)

Link to the version of this column published in The Hindu Businessline:


Previous instalment of Film Fatale: “…And The Games The Thackerays Play”
(a shorter version was published in The Hindu Businessline’s BLink)


Photographs courtesy:



Zakhmi Aurat: IMDB


REVIEW 511: INDU SARKAR

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Release date:
July 28, 2017
Director:
Madhur Bhandarkar
Cast:



Language:
Kirti Kulhari, Neil Nitin Mukesh, Totaroy Chaudhary, Anupam Kher, Satyajeet Sharma, Sheba Chadha, Manav Vij, Ankur Vikal, Zakir Hussain, Mohan Kapoor
Hindi


Indu Sarkar is Madhur Bhandarkar’s cleverly titled film on the 1975-77 period when Congress Prime Minister Indira Gandhi got President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed to declare a state of Emergency across the country, allowing her, in effect, to be a Constitutional dictator. It is one of the most dismal phases in India’s post-Independence history, marked by the imprisonment of all Indira’s political opponents, a clamp-down on free speech and the press, and several human rights violations including, most famously, a programme of forced mass sterilisation of men across age groups.

With the Emergency in the foreground, Bhandarkar brings to us the story of the titular protagonist (played by Kirti Kulhari), an orphan in Delhi who has spent her entire life trying to overcome a congenital stammer. Teenaged and surnameless, Indu wants nothing more than to be a good wife to some man some day. On the eve of the Emergency, she meets a Bengali named Navin Sarkar (Totaroy Chaudhary), a government official whose star is rising due to his known proximity to a prominent Congress politician. Indu and Navin marry, and she lives out an opinionless existence as his servile spouse until one day during the Emergency, she happens to venture into Turkman Gate area in Delhi, where the police are engaged in a street battle with residents opposing the bulldozing of their houses by the sarkar (government).

Indu is fictional but the police firing on civilians during the Turkman Gate slum demolition is very much a part of recorded history. Our heroine’s life changes forever when she brings home two children whose parents go missing in the melee that day.

There is rich irony in the fact that some Muslims believe Turkman Gate exemplified Indira’s son Sanjay Gandhi’s “anti-Muslim agenda” (read Turkman Gate relives Emergency horror”, The Times of India, June 2015, and John Dayal and Ajoy Bose’s book For Reasons of State: Delhi Under the Emergency, excerpted on The Wire in June 2015). The irony comes from the fact that Congress has always positioned itself as a secular party, and is currently at loggerheads with the ruling BJP, which makes no bones about its majoritarian, anti-minority agenda.

Bhandarkar – a committed admirer of the BJP – is clearly conscious of the parallels, which should explain why he completely excludes Sanjay’s wife Maneka Gandhi from Indu Sarkar. No doubt, portraying Maneka in the film would have been most inconvenient, considering that she was reportedly constantly by Sanjay’s side through the Emergency, yet she is a Union Minister in the present BJP government and her son Feroz Varun Gandhi is also a BJP member.

If Bhandarkar had had the courage to reference Maneka in his film, he could have made a cutting statement on how, at least in the context of the Emergency, Congress and BJP are two sides of the same coin. He does not. Instead, he chooses to appease the present establishment, erasing Maneka from the Emergency and showing Sanjay throughout the film in the company of other known figures from that period: prototypes of his real-life shadows Rukhsana Sultana, V.C. Shukla and Jagdish Tytler among others. (Sanjay, oddly enough, is named “Chief” and not Sanjay here, Sultana’s surname is only mentioned in passing, the others are not named but each is styled to resemble the person they are obviously based on.)

The writer-director’s lack of academic objectivity is his film’s Achilles heel. Still, Indu Sarkar is interesting in certain ways. The leading lady, for one, is a telling metaphor for the voiceless who find their voice when faced with extreme injustice. The talented and underrated Kulhari, who was brilliant in last year’s Pink, lends relatable sensitivity to Indu. Neil Nitin Mukesh manages to extract something out of his role, even though Sanjay Gandhiis written here with no nuance and no graph whatsoever. Mukesh’s styling as Sanjay is remarkable. Seeing him on screen is almost like seeing the late politician’s doppelganger.

With the benefit of a better-developed part, Totaroy Chaudhary is notable as Indu’s authoritarian husband, as is Satyajeet Sharma playing the Minister Om Nath.

These positives, however, are overshadowed by Indu Sarkar’s political iffiness and often shallow writing. For one, apart from Indu, Navin and Om Nath, the rest are all cardboard cutouts and hangers-on. In choosing to downplay the other Indu, namelyIndira (and by that I mean not just her fleeting appearance in Indu Sarkar but also in what appears to be her limited role in the goings on), Bhandarkar unwittingly lays almost the entire blame for Emergency atrocities on Sanjay. The character played by Anupam Kher, leader of a group of non-violent, anti-Emergency activists, is clearly an allusion to Jayaprakash Narayan – in Indu Sarkar the great man is reduced to a one-line concept.

In failing to rein in his biases, the director has missed an opportunity with Indu Sarkar. The Case of the Missing Maneka is one of many questionable choices he makes here. By casually setting the film’s first mass sterilisation scene in a largely Muslim area, he appears to be wordlessly pandering to the prevailing Hum paanch, hamare pachchees (We five, our 25)” prejudice against the Muslim community in the country.

Bhandarkar, who once made that lovely Chandni Bar (2001) with Tabu, has delivered a qualitative downslide post-Fashionin 2008. His Heroine (2012) was steeped in clichés, and 2015’s Calendar Girlswas both crass and regressive. To be fair, Indu Sarkar’s writing (story and screenplay by Anil Pandey and Bhandarkar, dialogues by Sanjay Chhel) is more mature than those last two films. We are certainly spared his by-now-predictable template (such as satellite scenes in which household help and others from less advantaged economic classes discuss their bosses, a stereotypical gay supporting character, etc), which is a huge relief.

However, better does not mean good. While Indu Sarkar’s narrative is more engaging than Bhandarkar’s recent works, it is still inadequate.

At one point, an important character in Indu Sarkar reminds a lawyer that she is anti-government, not anti-national, “deshdrohi nahin, sarkar virodhi.” It is a comment perfectly suited to the Emergency, while also mirroring present-day India where anyone who questions the ruling party, the prime minister or the government is labelled “anti-national” by their supporters, and where several commentators have spoken of the country being in a state of undeclared Emergency. Imagine how beautifully that statement could have been used to remind us that humanity repeats the mistakes of the past because we ignore our history. For that to happen though, Indu Sarkar required writing of greater depth and analysis, with less political selectiveness. As things stand, it is a matter-of-fact narration of certain events, with very little layering, elevated by good acting. We know the Emergency happened. Can you provide us with insights that go beyond mere facts? And if you cannot, what is point?

To say that Indu Sarkar is better than Heroineand Calendar Girls is hardly a compliment to the man who made Chandni Bar and Page 3.

Rating (out of five stars): **

CBFC Rating (India):
UA
Running time:
139 minutes 

This review has also been published on Firstpost:




REVIEW 512: MUBARAKAN

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Release date:
July 28, 2017
Director:
Anees Bazmee
Cast:



Language:
Anil Kapoor, Arjun Kapoor, Ratna Pathak Shah, Pavan Malhotra, Ileana D’Cruz, Neha Sharma, Athiya Shetty, Rahul Dev, Karan Kundra, Sanjay Kapoor
Hindi


I don’t know about you, but I’ve been longing for a silly, fun yet not lazily offensive or gross Hindi comedy for a while. Too many Bollywood writers and directors have for too long now resorted to certain IQ-averse formulae to tickle the audience’s funny bone.

One, rhyming dialogue. What on earth is that about?

Two, jokes directed at the marginalised and disadvantaged. It takes a particularly slothful and insensitive kind of creative bankruptcy to laugh at victims of rape and domestic violence, persons with disabilities, LGBT persons and others who you assume do not dominate your audience and/or control most purse strings at turnstiles. Himmat aur dimaag hai toh find ways to mock rapists, wife beaters, homophobes and sarkari afsars who are apathetic to PWDs.

Three, crudeness. You know, wisecracks about butt cracks, balls, boobs, potty and gas emissions from the posterior.

Yawn.

At his worst, director Anees Bazmee has been guilty of many of the above crimes. For proof, suffer No Problem, Thank You and Ready. At his best though, Bazmee has done what David Dhawan and the much-maligned Rohit Shetty at their best have done: provide us with comic relief from our daily struggles, without making us feel foolish or tapping into our basest instincts.

Hedunnit with the screwball comedy Welcome in 2007 and Singh Is Kiing in 2008. His new film Mubarakan is not exactly a match, but it resides on the same plane as those two: slapstick, crazy, over-the-top, even loud, yet not cheap, lewd or loud-for-the-sake-of-being-loud.

The starting point of this comedy of errors is Kartar Singh (Anil Kapoor), whose brother and bhabi die in a car accident one night, leaving behind twin infant sons. Twins have long been a favourite with writers of farce, William Shakespeare being the most exalted of them. Kartar is overwhelmed by the job of bringing up the kids, so he hands Karan over to his London-based big sister Jeeto (Ratna Pathak Shah) and Charan to his Baldev pra (Pavan Malhotra) in Punjab.

The babies grow up to be the strapping Arjun Kapoor, both bearded, though Charan is turbanned (did I mention they are Sikhs?) while Karan is not. That difference helps the confounded viewer only partly, since the confusion in Mubarakan arises not just from the boys’ identical looks, but also from the fact that Karan loves Sweety Gill (Ileana D’Cruz), Charan loves Nafisa Qureshi (Neha Sharma) and neither has the courage to disclose their relationship to their respective adoptive parents, as a result of which each Mummyji and Papaji in the reckoning fixes up their betaji with another woman, causing Kartar to think up ridiculous solutions to the mess, that make things worse – of course – leading to a fight between Charan’s Buaji and Karan’s Chachaji.

(Pause, while the critic catches her breath)

Angry words pile up on angry words and misunderstandings pile up on misunderstandings until, as in real life, the original cause of the tension matters less than the egos involved.

Also in the fray is Binkle (Athiya Shetty), daughter of a rich man called Sandhu (Rahul Dev).

Binkle Sandhu. Teehee. Yes, like Binkle from Enid Blyton’s tales of two naughty rabbits named Binkle and Flip. Punjabis and Malayalis have certainly cornered the world’s weirdest names.

There’s more than Binkle’s name to evoke laughter here though. The first half of Mubarakan is unrelentingly hilarious. Bazmee does not sustain that momentum post interval – because he stretches it needlessly to 156 minutes – but Anil Kapoor as Kartar is such an uninhibited riot that it is tempting to forgive the film its elongation. The second half does not have enough of Kapoor, but what we do get of him is worth the price of five tickets.

His nephew Arjun effectively conveys the difference between the cocky Karan and his more diffident brother Charan, though the uncle and his young female co-stars manage to steal some of his thunder. To be fair to Arjun, the ladies play more interesting characters.

It is nice to see the beautiful Ileana D’Cruz evolving as a comedian with Mubarakan. Equally enjoyable is Neha Sharma as the fiery though less charming Nafisa who, by the way, is in a profession rarely assigned to women in Hindi cinema. The only dull performance comes from Athiya Shetty as Binkle, although to be fair – again – Binkle herself is a dullard.

Most Bollywood comedies in the past two decades have offered better-written parts to male actors and given primacy to their characters, while women have inhabited the sidelines. Mubarakan is different in the sense that among the younger lot, it offers more exciting roles to the women than the men, and also because it is an ensemble film in the true sense of the term.

Kapoor Sr, Ratna Pathak Shah and Pavan Malhotra have the benefit of the additional charisma that age lends to already charismatic artistes. When Kartar, Jeeto and Baldev are on screen in Mubarakan, it is impossible to look at anyone else.

The gifted Malhotra has not yet got his due – in terms of roles and recognition – from mainstream Bollywood, so it is a joy to see him rocking a substantial part in an out-and-out masala flick like Mubarakan. Also a pleasure is the sight of Shah in prominent roles in film after film in the last couple of years. Her uproariously maudlin and over-sensitive Jeeto follows the sharply contrasting Leela in Lipstick Under My Burkha, released just days before Mubarakan.

Is there stereotyping in this film? Of course there is, but although Mubarakan plays up a particular comical view of Sikhs and Punjabis, the fact is it laughs affectionately with a community, not patronisingly or contemptuously at them. More important, despite occupying that space, it does away with many of Bollywood’s more nauseating Punjabi/Sikh clichés. No one, for instance, says “balle balle” with each breath or indulges in identity-centric buffoonery. This choice is worth far more than the mandatory tribute to Sikh bravery you find as compensation in most such Bollywood comedies (and here too in a song), designed to appease the Sikh clergy that has proved to be disappointingly touchy and nosy in the past decade.

One episode in the film does briefly seem headed in the direction of “baarah baj gaye” territory – yup, that tired joke targeting Sardarjis – but thankfully it does not go there. It takes skill to write entertaining, relaxing rubbish without being regressive, and except for fleeting taunts directed a couple of times at wives and at Kartar’s singleton status, the rest is surprisingly okay. 

In Kartar’s beleaguered gora sidekick Jolly (played by American actor Alexx O’Neill), the film even cocks a snook at that old Hollywood staple: the white leading man’s wacky black flunkey.

(Spoiler alert) The most intriguing aspect of Mubarakan is the inclusion of Nafisa Qureshi. When Hindu-Muslim tensions are at an all-time high in India, when the heightened ‘love jihad’ campaign has vitiated inter-community romances, the insertion of a Hindu-Muslim love angle in slapstick fare is curious, especially because of its unsatisfactory resolution in the film. To me it seems like Bazmee & Co chickened out, fearing going the whole hog in these disturbing times, though I guess there could also be another interpretation. Without revealing details, let’s just say that the conclusion could, alternatively, perhaps be seen as a clever act of subversion that makes the point: you can put it off all you want, or pretend it is not happening, but it will and it is. I leave you to your own interpretation. Irrespective of its intended meaning, Nafisa’s final scene is awkwardly handled, hurriedly done and the worst part of this film. (Spoiler alert ends)


Be that as it may, and despite the considerable dip in pace in the second half, Bazmee has delivered to a great extent with Mubarakan. The film does not strain the viewer’s intellect too much yet does not demand that we – to quote a reviewer cliché – “leave our brains at home”.

At one point, Kartar has a chuckle at the expense of 60-year-old Anil Kapoor’s much-vaunted eternal youth, when he tells a group of youngsters: “Arrey main kehta hoon, goli maaron un buddhon ko. Baat aapas mein hi rakhte hain, yooouthh mein”? (I say, to hell with the oldies. Let’s keep this secret to ourselves, the youth.) The star is clearly allowing the film to laugh at him, just as Mubarakan is clearly mocking itself and its entire genre. This is intelligent silliness.

Rating (out of five stars): **3/4

CBFC Rating (India):
UA
Running time:
156 minutes 

Poster courtesy: IMDB


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