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Release date:	February 16, 2018
Director:	G. Prajesh Sen
Cast: Language:	Jayasurya, Anu Sithara, Renji Panicker, Siddique, Saiju Kurup, Deepak Parambol, Janardhanan, Cameo: Mammootty Malayalam

A former captain of the Indian football team who allegedly committed suicide by throwing himself before a moving train in 2006 – this is the sort of real-life saga crying out to be made into a film. In this country though, where we obsess over cricket at the expense of other sports, and where contemporary history remains a risky proposition for scriptwriters due to a national penchant for turning violent over “hurt sentiments”, V.P. Sathyan has remained in the shadows after his death.

This week’s new Mollywood release starring Jayasurya as the late football hero, takes us through his childhood in Kerala’s Kannur region to his rise on the sporting firmament, his descent into depression and tragic death. You would think that this poignant subject combined with Jayasurya’s natural affinity for the camera would guarantee a quality film. Charismatic stars, concepts and themes have limited value though, unless backed by strong writing and direction.

After opening with a winning shot from a tournament that was one of Sathyan’s career highlights (I am not quibbling over dates and locations here), the film switches to the title plate. Its full name is Captain: Story of an Unsung Hero. It then transitions to a shot of a grieving woman telling a large gathering of journalists around her: They killed my Sathyan.

The woman is Sathyan’s widow Anitha (played by Anu Sithara). One assumes she is alleging that the system murdered her husband as surely as if it had actually physically pushed him on to that railway track, and that the “how?” raised by her pronouncement would be answered in ensuing scenes. That introduction, as it happens, mirrors the tone of the rest of Captain: highly melodramatised, but insubstantial. Because nearly two and a half hours later, when Captain returns to the same scene and dialogue, it turns out that in that time we have still not seen or heard enough to support Anitha’s claim.

Sure, there is a segment in between where Sathyan is shown being victimised by an officer of the Kerala Police who resents the government practice of giving sportspersons jobs without putting them through the grind required for regular folk to qualify for such posts. Sure, in one scene, Sathyan is humiliated in the dressing room. However, these are only a small part of this 145 minutes long film, and however troubling they may be, they do not come across as having the power to break a tough man such that his wife can rightfully allege that the system killed him.

In fact, what stands out in writer-director G. Prajesh Sen’s narrative is Sathyan’s own asinine insistence on playing a crucial match with a serious and extremely painful leg injury, against the advice of his fond coach (Renji Panicker) and his doctor. His stubbornness ends up causing his body irreparable physical damage.

Sen appears to admire Sathyan’s actions, when in fact they were, if true, remarkably stupid. Yet later, having ruined his own fitness levels, he is shown arguing with selectors – subtly villainised – that determining whether or not he is fit to play should be his prerogative and that his confidence is his fitness. Umm…no.

You do not have to be a sports buff to know that that is a load of rubbish. Perhaps here the film could have addressed the question of whether foolhardiness prompted Sathyan to continue playing with his injured leg or depression had already taken hold of him. Sen, unfortunately, views Sathyan with an uncritical and unanalytical eye, and as a result, what we get here is a fan film steeped in cinematic clichés rather than an in-depth study of an interesting character.

(Possible spoilers ahead)

His childhood is shown in the form of slow mo shots of little Sathyan playing his favoured game in Kannur over Gopi Sundar’s background score. The music – loud, loud music! – is still on when we get a glimpse of his poverty. He plays wearing shoes that he found discarded by the wayside. We see too that his damaged leg was a result of an attack by bullies back then.

This is a long-distance view of the boy, and these scenes are no different from bullet points in a hurried print media article about him. They do nothing to draw us into his story.

Having cursorily wrapped up that part of Sathyan’s life, Captainshifts to the only part it seems genuinely keen on:his adult years as a footballer.

The narrative here gets an episodic feel. Bits and pieces of Sathyan’s journey form interludes between long passages visually dominated by close-ups and slow motion shots either on the playing field or with his wife, where the overbearing music takes centre-stage.

What Sen seems to consider likeable about Sathyan is in fact arrogance. He is shown ticking off Anitha for her disinterest in football despite being the future wife of India’s football captain. On their wedding night he peremptorily and without provocation tells her he will divorce her the day she stands in the way of his football. Weird pillow talk, that. And in what Sen seems to consider a comical moment, he reduces her to tears seconds later by telling her he is already married to his first love – we can see the laboured joke coming from a mile, but she weeps till he asks in surprise why she is crying considering that he is referring to his football.

Their pre-wedding relationship adopts the Mollywood formula for man-woman romances: she pretends to dislike him, but her barely suppressed smile – following a conversation in which she was really rude to him – sends out a different message.

(Spoiler alert ends)

In fact, Captain in its entirety is a parade of clichés by a director of indifferent talent. It is obvious that in Sathyan’s life there is a lovely story waiting to be told. In Sen’s hands though, we neither get a complete sense of the man’s achievements nor truly grasp his struggles.

Even if you, like me, are not a football fanatic, if you combine media reports about Sathyan with snippets from the film, it is evident that a well-researched, well-written biopic of the man could have offered rich insights on human nature, Kerala society, India’s destructive sporting establishment, the fallout of childhood bullying, depression, alcoholism and more.

What we get instead with Captain are broad brush strokes in a plodding drama that is more pre-occupied with looking and sounding large and grand than telling a nuanced human story.

The effort at grandeur at one point translates into embarrassing pompousness considering India’s poor track record in world football. In the film’s closing scene, when Sathyan hits a clinching goal in a crucial match, he shrugs off the feat by telling his teammate that no goalie had the strength to stop a ball that was filled with the breath of crores of Indians. Err, okay, that explains why we are such achievers I guess?

After the interval, the narrative becomes unequivocally boring. The insufferable use of music – mournful and theatrically suspenseful or celebratory by turns – might have made Captain intolerable if it were not for Jayasurya’s presence. The actor throws himself into this role, and gives it more of himself than the script deserves. His take on Sathyan’s pain, that crumbling face shrunk down from its youthful hauteur, is the only reason why I managed to sit through this film without dozing off.

In the end, Captain’s achievement is that it made me hope for a better-made film on Sathyan.

Rating (out of five stars): *

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	145 minutes

This review was also published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/captain-movie-review-jayasuryas-invested-performance-is-the-saving-grace-of-this-plodding-sports-biopic-4355503.html

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_(2018_film)

Release date:	February 23, 2018
Director:	Luv Ranjan
Cast: Language:	Kartik Aaryan, Nushrat Bharucha, Sunny Singh, Ishita Raj Hindi

Sonu and Titu have been buddies since nursery and almost brothers. The motherless Sonu even addresses Titu’s mother as “Mummy”.

Titu is the pretty and gullible one, an innocent darling who keeps falling for manipulative, controlling women. Street-smart, worldly-wise Sonu sees these women for the witches that they are and has been saving Titu from them for years.

Enter: Sweety Sharma as sweet Titu’s potential biwi. Sonu is immediately suspicious of her, as he is of any new woman in his Titu’s life, and as he probably will be of any man too, you realise as the film rolls on. But Sweety comes up trumps in every test Sonu throws at her until his opposition to his best friend’s wedding becomes: she is too good to be true, so she must be faking her goodness.

Is Sonu right in doubting Sweety? Or will Sonu Ke Titu Ki Sweety prove that in a world filled with godawful, devious women and their male victims, there are some decent women after all?

If you have watched writer-director Luv Ranjan’s earlier works, the answers to these questions are so obvious that you may as well fast forward to the final scenes. Ranjan’s calling card so far remains the sleeper hit Pyaar Ka Punchnama (2011), which was about three hapless, innocent young men embroiled in abusive relationships each with an all-out evil, calculatingshe-devil. He briefly flirted with sensitivity in Akaash Vani (2013), a film on marital rape, but returned with a second woman-hate-fest in the form of Pyaar Ka Punchnama (PKP) 2in 2015, a near carbon copy of the first with a marginally different cast.

Sonu Ke Titu Ki Sweety recycles the cast, clichés and convictions of both the PKPfilms.

Kartik Aaryan and Nushrat Bharucha who play Sonu and Sweety here, have been fixtures in all Ranjan’s films so far. Bharucha still looks like she might have the potential to do something different, but Aaryan, who showed some spark in the first PKP, is tiresome and hammy now.

Sunny Singh, who was in PKP2, delivers an off-the-mark performance here as a duh-ish Titu, although the director’s intent seems to be to portray him as naïve and golden-hearted, not dumb.

Sonnalli Seygall and Ishita Raj played horrid girlfriends in the two PKPs. Seygall has a few seconds long cameo here as one of Sonu’s female human playthings, while Raj has a longer role as – wait for it, c’moooonnnn, try guessing – a horrid girlfriend. Raj is the only breath of fresh air of the lot.

The opening scene of Sonu Ke Titu Ki Sweety features Sonu lecturing a man with a monologue of a length that is designed to remind us of the extended monologues assigned to Kartik Aaryan’s characters in PKP 1&2. Thankfully this one is much shorter, but it serves as a teaser to the formulaic story that follows. The inside joke is also amusingly self-important considering that while this actor and director have enjoyed some success, they have yet to enter the mainstream consciousness.

From that opener, the film cuts to Titu weeping over a girlfriend who has accused him of invading her privacy because he accessed her Tinder account. Sonu goes into a detailed description of the scheming harridan that she is. We are only minutes into the film, and already a cloying repetitiveness has set in.

Cut to the opening credits accompanied by a song called Bom diggy diggy, during which Sonu and Titu drum the bums of dozens of women who shake those butts in vibratory movements aimed at the camera, each other and the boys.

What comes next is from the same old mould, just much louder, more garish and even more open about its contempt for women than Ranjan’s earlier films.

When Titu asks his parents to find him a bride, Sonu asks why he needs to marry when he could just change his cook, they have already bought a new washing machine and dishwasher, and alternative arrangements could well be made for sex. I guess you have to grant it to Ranjan for frankly acknowledging what most Indians do not: that these motivations are indeed what prompt many men to marry.

The lack of pretence continues all the way up to the song playing along with the end credits, when Sonu, Titu and Sweety dance together to the Yo Yo Honey Singh track Chhote chhote peg. “Itne der se baitha bas mind main tera padd ra hoon (all this while I have been reading your mind),” a male voice sings as Sonu stares pointedly and reductively at Sweety’s almost bare breasts, because hey, that is where a woman’s mind resides, I guess?

While the director makes no bones about his desire to cash in on the deep-seated resentment towards women among a section of the film-viewing audience, I doubt whether the homosexual undertones of the Sonu-Titu bhaichaara were planned. Sonu’s lurving gaze could be read either way, but what else is one to make of the song Tera yaar hoon main playing as a moony Sonu watches Titu with Sweety?

Tu jo roottha,

Toh kaun hasega.

Tu jo chhoota,

Toh kaun rahega.

Tu chup hai toh,

Yeh darr lagta hai.

Apna mujhko,

Ab kaun kahega.

Tu hi wajah tere bina,

Bewajah bekaar hoon main.

Tera yaar hoon main.

Translation:

If you are displeased,

Who will laugh?

If I lose you,

Who will I have?

When you fall silent, I get afraid,

Now who will call me his?

You are my reason,

Without you I am nothing.

I am your friend.

Commercial Hindi cinema sorely needs a homosexual romance, but not an unwitting one. The impression of a gaymance in Sonu Ke Titu Ki Sweety comes not from a well-meaning director’s deliberate intent. It is a product of poor acting and writing.

It is possible that Ranjan may make a better film some day, once he recovers from his raging hatred towards women and realises that in giving vent to that feeling, he is also repeatedly portraying men as manipulable fools and cowards. The unfortunate part of Sonu Ke Titu Ki Sweety is that in small patches – especially in a scene in which Ishita Raj’s character Pihu is re-acquainted with Titu’s family – it shows a penchant for humour and good timing. Mostly though, this is a tacky, trite recycling of a recipe that has brought box-office success twice to this director. Why bother writing an original script when a photocopy machine is at hand?

Rating (out of five stars): 1/2

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	140 minutes 23 seconds

This review was also published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/sonu-ke-titu-ki-sweety-movie-review-a-dreary-woman-hate-fest-cum-unwitting-gaymance-4363591.html#comments-section-4363591

Poster courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/sonutitusweety/

Release date:	February 23, 2018
Director:	Najeem Koya
Cast: Language:	Shebin Benson, Joju George, Baburaj, Shammi Thilakan, Aiswarya Suresh Malayalam

Kaly is a film with a split personality. The first half lolls about for too long establishing the six male leads, best buddies from a lower middle class background in a Kerala city, who shoplift and indulge in other petty criminal activities to sustain their obsession with branded clothing and shoes. The second half is devoted to a plan that goes completely awry with far-reaching consequences for them and a group of absolute strangers.

The former is just another clichéd storyline with clichéd characters featured so frequently in commercial Malayalam cinema. We have seen them even recently in films ranging from completely low-brow fare like Chunkzzto the more tolerable Velipadinte Pusthakam, these directionless Malayali youth (students or unemployed adults) hanging around doing nothing beyond drinking together, eating together, picking fights with each other or others, behaving as if sightings of women are rarer than visitations by Haley’s Comet, stalking women and having conversations steeped in sexism, parochialism and colour prejudice.

It does not help that in Kaly these roles are played by an ineffectual lot of male artistes, while an equally ineffectual Aiswarya Suresh contributes the token attractive female presence.

The rest of Kaly is the part with potential, when a crime is committed, irresponsible behaviour has a ripple effect on everyone around and the effort to cover up one wrong leads to another and another then another, until you wonder how the persons mired in that situation could possibly extricate themselves from their self-created mess.

What the writer of Kaly needed to do was dispense with the first half almost entirely and invest just a little more thought in the writing of the second to chop out its predictable portions and the trivialisation of the leads’ earlier actions. It could thenhave been a taut thriller on how casual crime can have disastrous consequences and the differing police reactions to crime based on the financial status of the victims and perpetrators. Its flaws notwithstanding, it remains the tighter, better-written, better-acted part of Kaly.

The film takes too much time to get here. Once it does, it takes a while as a viewer to settle into the complete alteration in tone. That said, there is some fun to be had guessing where everyone’s misdeeds will ultimately lead them.

From the moment of arrival of the unscrupulous, conniving senior policeman played by Joju George, Kaly lifts off to another level. The impact of this corrupt cop is the combined effect of the interesting characterisation and George’s chameleon-like transformation from role to role. His portrayal of amorality here is in sharp – and intriguing – contrast to the stiff-necked, eccentric school principal he played just a few months back in the Manju Warrier-starrer Udaharanam Sujatha.

It is as if a completely new team is handling Kalypost-interval, or the existing team had a proper night’s rest and then proceeded to roll out the second half. Here is an idea, dear director Najeem Koya: how about catching up on your sleep before, instead of after, starting work on a film?Kaly is a half-baked affair that looks and feels as if there is a good film lost somewhere inside it.

Rating (out of five stars): *

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

This review was also published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/kaly-movie-review-two-films-jammed-into-one-uneven-venture-redeemed-by-joju-george-4366255.html

Poster courtesy: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt7548378/

Release date:	March 2, 2018
Director:	Prosit Roy
Cast: Language:	Anushka Sharma, Parambrata Chattopadhyay, Rajat Kapoor, Preeti Sharma, Ritabhari Chakraborty Hindi

Two years in a row have brought unexpected gifts from Indian cinema for the national masochists club. Last year we heard of dybbuk and ruchim from Jewish folklore via the Mollywood production Ezra. 2017 also gave us the Tamil venture Aval (simultaneously made by the same director in Hindi as The House Next Door), which tapped into our anxieties about what lies outside our windows in the still of the night. Now, in the first quarter of 2018, has come the discovery of ifrit and peri from Middle Eastern mythology courtesy Bollywood.

I learnt about these beings – the former demonic, the latter more ambiguous, says the Goddess Google – as I sat cowering in my seat with my scarf covering my mouth and nose and inching towards my eyes throughout the press preview of the film Pari: Not A Fairytale last night.

Irrespective of what the rest of this review says, know this: Pari is scary as hell and heaven and every imaginable eerie space in between.

Director Prosit Roy’s supernatural thriller stars Anushka Sharma as a mysterious creature of preternatural origins and curious intentions. Her worldly name is Rukhsana, but she appears to be not of this world. Why did her mother (played by Preeti Sharma) keep her tied up in a hole in the woods and in a filthy condition no beast deserves?

The question is answered, though not entirely so, when Rukhsana latches on to a man called Arnab (Parambrata Chattopadhyay), an employee at a printing press in Kolkata. Their connection is that her mother dies in an accident involving his car.

Seeing the daughter’s pitiable condition, Arnab decides to do what every regular follower of the horror genre knows he should not: shelter her till he can make alternative arrangements.

Elsewhere in the region, a one-eyed man (Rajat Kapoor) searches for Rukhsana, and a medical professional (Ritabhari Chakraborty) wonders about the elusiveness of the fellow she loves.

Pari is not without its weaknesses. Among other things, some of the information about Rukhsana’s background remains fuzzy right till the end, and Kapoor’s character uses the words “pari” and “peri” interchangeably but with different pronunciations within the span of two sentences in one scene.

There is also a conversation between Arnab and his fiancée that flirts with a needless intellectualisation of the goings-on in the film. Fortunately, that exchange is so brief as to barely matter. It is unnecessary anyway, since by then Pari is well on its way to fulfilling its goal of frightening the living daylights out of the viewer.

This is not to say that Pari is unintelligent – no horror film is, if it is effective in being terrifying. Writer-director Prosit Roy and his co-writer Abhishek Banerjee are aware of the wave of Islamophobia sweeping across today’s India, prevailing prejudices against spinsters and the assumptions made about women who have undergone abortions. They use these to raise our expectations in one direction while Pari heads off in another.

(Spoiler alert) The same tactic is employed with the usual clichés that makers of fearfests tend to resort to. When you are expecting a manipulative screeching sound in the background, it does not come. When you are expecting an old man to repeat an action with a glass eye, he does not. That first scene featuring that artificial appendage and a cleansing routine sickened me because it felt gratuitous, but in the end, when the eye came back to haunt us, I realised that the director was having a spot of fun with us, knowing well that many Indian viewers tend to have low expectations while watching home-grown paranormal films because our film industries do not do the genre well.

In Pari’s bloodiest portion, while the colour red screams off the screen, as disturbing as the visible gore is the expectation of how much more we will see being spilled (but do not). (Spoiler alert ends)

The director’s job is made easier by one of the best casts assembled for a spook flick. Anushka Sharma is the perfect combination of innocent and enigmatic, frail and fearsome as Rukhsana. She delivers an image-defying performance that is designed to elicit pity and dread in equal measure, from the audience and from Arnab. The fact that the star has chosen to produce this shockathon (she is one of the few female actors in Bollywood to turn producer) speaks volumes about the risk-taking streak she has brought to her career so far.

Parambrata Chattopadhyay’s filmography is dominated by Bengali cinema. He made his Bollywood debut with an endearing performance in the Vidya Balan-starrer Kahaani (2012) and brings the same quality to his well-meaning but ultimately flawed Arnab.

These two central artistes have solid backing from veteran Rajat Kapoor, who is utterly chilling, and his shadowy gang, and from newcomers Preeti Sharma and Ritabhari Chakraborty.

Everything in Pari– from its art design to the background score and sound design (refreshingly non-grating considering the traditions of the genre in Bollywood), even the sketches accompanying the credits – works towards sustaining our sense of foreboding about what is to come in that next shot, around that next corner, behind that next door, beyond that next street, after that final name rolls off the screen.

Greater clarity in Rukhsana’s back story wouldhave helped, but for now, I am too busy trying to recover from that petrifying passage in Pari when I finally shut my eyes for a moment because I could take it no more.

Anushka Sharma, you sadist…!

Rating (out of five stars): ***

CBFC Rating (India):	A
Running time:	137 minutes

This review was also published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/pari-movie-review-anushka-sharma-and-her-film-are-scary-as-hell-heaven-and-everything-in-between-4373241.html

Poster courtesy:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pari_(2018_Indian_film)

Release date:	March 9, 2018
Director:	Arjun Mukerjee
Cast: Language:	Renuka Shahane, Pulkit Samrat, Masumeh, Sharman Joshi, Richa Chadha, Aisha Ahmed, Ankit Rathi, Saunskriti Kher, Tarun Anand, Himanshu Malik Hindi

In a crowded middle-class apartment block in Mumbai, Flory Mendonca (Renuka Shahane) demands a price so exorbitant for her flat that no one has been willing to purchase it for years. Then along comes a potential buyer called Vilas Naik (Pulkit Samrat), anxious for a house near a train station.

In the same building, Varsha Angre (Masumeh) bonds with her kind neighbour and tends to her little son, while coping with daily abuse – sexual and otherwise – from her unemployed, alcoholic husband.

Flory and Varsha watch indulgently as young Malini Mathur (Aisha Ahmed) and Suhail Ansari (Ankit Rathi) fall in love, much to the chagrin of their respective parents. The girl dares her mother to explain her objection to Suhail. Say it, we will her too. C’mon, say that you do not want your Hindu daughter to marry her Muslim boyfriend. But Mum cannot bring the words to her lips and in a sense it comes as a relief that an apparently prejudiced human being is aware enough and therefore ashamed enough not to articulate that prejudice.

A couple of floors below them, lives a glamorous, dolled-up woman (Richa Chadha) with flowing black hair, a sari pinned so low below her navel and a lifestyle so unconventional as to send pulses racing among the horny men in her locality and their gossip-mongering allies.

This is the setting of debutant director Arjun Mukerjee’s 3 Storeys, a housing complex that serves as a microcosm not just of the bustling city beyond but the country as a whole. In these homes, people grapple with their past and present, with domestic violence, casteism, communal biases and long pent-up anger. Some look placid and collected on the outside, but inside there are festering wounds that will kill them if never healed.

Mukerjee’s film moves along at a clipped trot, without appearing too hurried. Each segment in 3 Storeys comes armed with a twist in the end, not in the style of crime thrillers, but in the tradition of some of the world’s greatest short-story writers in the league of one of my favourites of the lot, O. Henry.

3 Storeys serves up its best right at the start. The motivations of the eccentric Mrs Mendonca and the youthful Vilas, who looks too well turned out to fit into that grubby society, are intriguing and hold attention till the final frame. Bollywood has stereotyped Goan Christians from the beginning of time, so this lady comes as a pleasant change. The industry has not yet thought it fit to make a film featuring a sari-wearing Goan (yes, they do exist, Bollywood!), but it does show this one speaking Konkani in addition to English and broken Hindi, which is refreshingly different from the portrayal of the community as quasi-foreigners so far. Shahane is nice to watch and packs some interesting detailing into her performance (note how she pronounces “truth”) which begs the question: why do we not see her more in films?

When the denouement in Flory and Vilas’ saga comes, it should be unnerving, but instead it is executed so matter of factly and with such little fuss, that a guilty laugh escaped my lips as I watched it.

(Spoiler alert) The credits let on that this one is “based in part on the short story by Henry Slesar titled ‘The Right Kind of House’”. I had not read Slesar’s tale earlier, but managed to find it once my curiosity was piqued by Shahane and Samrat, and I cannot understand the “based in part” claim, since “based entirely” is more accurate. Ah well, in a film industry that has only in the past decade begun routinely citing its sources, this is an act of honesty worth appreciating considering that the work of fiction in question is little known in India.

If you have not read The Right Kind of House, do not go looking for it until you watch 3 Storeys. Why rob yourself of the fun to be had in discovering its secret? (Spoiler alert ends)

The remaining stories in 3 Storeys are just as efficiently related by Althea Kaushal-Delmas’ screenplay and Mukerjee’s directorial hand, though the endings in two of them are less exciting.

(Spoiler alert) Varsha’s inter-caste romance feels somewhat antiquated in its climax and the Suhail-Malini affair’s conclusion could be seen coming from a mile. I have heard a similar real-life account so perhaps it is unfair to expect an acknowledgement of the original literary source in the credits, but if you have watched The World of Rudra in Bejoy Nambiar’s bilingual Tamil-Malayalam venture Solo last year, there is a point at which you will know exactly where this one is headed. (Spoiler alert ends)

Be that as it may, 3 Storeys’ brisk pace, realistic feel and undramatised tone make it worth a watch. It would help if you do not know what the finale in each short carries, but even if you do, there is considerable enjoyment to be derived from this film. Besides, the way it is wrapped up too defies expectations. And its running time of 99 minutes and 49 seconds is just right for the written material at hand.

Mukerjee is a business-like storyteller who has clarity about his approach to the project. He does not overtly try to make a grand statement about life in Mumbai, focusing instead on particular lives that catch his eye and, as it happens, making a point while he is at it.

The cast is uniformly good. While the rare big-screen appearance by Shahane is the centerpiece of 3 Storeys, each of her co-stars is gifted. Debutant Aisha Ahmed is a commendable find, and the presence of both Masumeh and Sharman Joshi here raises the question I asked earlier about Ms Shahane: why on earth do we not see more of these talented artistes in films? For them, and much else, 3 Storeys is time well spent.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	99 minutes 49 seconds

This review was also published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/bollywood/3-storeys-movie-review-renuka-shahane-and-her-lovely-co-stars-shine-a-light-on-simple-twists-of-fate-4382925.html

Poster courtesy:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3_Storeys

Release date:	March 9, 2018
Director:	Vishal Pandya
Cast: Language:	Urvashi Rautela, Vivan Bhatena, Karan Wahi, Ihana Dhillon, Gulshan Grover Hindi

“I am somebody who can get anybody but I want nobody other than your body,” a man in Hate Story 4 tells a woman he attacks on the street.

By the time this moment rolls by on screen, we are halfway through the film and I, for one, was numbed by its ludicrousness.

To be fair to dialogue writer Milap Milan Zaveri, he prepared us for this bunkum in the opening sequence when another villain urges the heroine not to panic, to give him time to sort out a mess they are in, and she replies: “Tumne jism nahin liya hota toh aaj waqt nahin maangna padta.”

Translated for the benefit of those who do not know Hindi, but should not be deprived of the pleasures of tacky wordplay, that reads: If you had not taken my body, today you would not need to ask for my time.

The line comes in the opening minutes of director Vishal Pandya’s Hate Story 4, the latest instalment of a thriller series marked by heavy dialoguebaazi, partially clad women, lustful men, long song sequences in which their bodies heave and thrust against each other in an unconvincing enactment of sex, all wrapped around a mystery that might not have been half bad if the writing team did not have such a low opinion of the viewer and had cared to flesh out their concept with more thought.

A quick glance at the Internet tells me Hate Story1-3 have been moderate successes. Not that they deserved any better, but the fact that they notched up even average collections at the box office speaks volumes for the sexually repressed nation that we are. Do people actually think sex is what is going on on screen in any of these four films in which no one strips completely, they simply writhe about semi-clothed, with female breasts bulging out above bras that are still very much on and well-muscled male torsos are displayed while crucial areas remain covered? Are there actually human beings out there who are titillated by all that pretend sex, when instead they could easily access pornography?

Hate Story 4, like the first three, is neither artistic enough to be called erotica nor functional and overt enough to be call porn.

For what it is worth, the story is about Aryan (Vivan Bhatena) and Rajveer (Karan Wahi), the spoilt sons of a wealthy London-based Indian businessman. Aryan falls out with his girlfriend Rishma (Ihana Dhillon) and the boys fall out with each other over Tasha (Urvashi Rautela), a beautiful model who they launch through their enterprise.

During the course of the film, someone kills someone as a result of which someone else sets out to take revenge, no one can be trusted and everyone betrays everyone.

The three leads have great bodies. Rautela and Bhatena have shown flashes of potential in earlier works, but Wahi, I fear, has not one acting cell in his body. All three ham their way through this revenge saga set in London, in the company of fellow hamster Gulshan Grover playing Aryan and Rajveer’s Daddy.

While characters who treat women like crap exist in this world, the director himself reveals his low opinion of the female half of the species with the way the camera captures women here, repeatedly closing in on boobs and butts, often before we have even seen their faces.

The first sight we get of a character called Monica is a close-up of her cleavage, then a switch to her derriere encased in tiny lingerie, and only then her face. Tasha’s introductory shot is of her bottom raised in the air as she crouches cat-like on a shiny stage, then the camera slides over her in various feline poses, focusing on fragments of her before it finally deigns to rest on her countenance.

Date rape is casually tossed around in the screenplay. Efforts at earnestness end up sounding laughable or unintentionally crude, such as during that romantic number Tum Mere Ho in which Aryan and Rishma feel each other up extensively on a bridge by a water body, and a woman singer’s voice goes: “Mere andar mujhse zyaada tum” (there is less of me and more of you inside me). Yikes!

Hate Story 4 is too low-brow to be offensive, but it tries its best to earn that tag when in the end it suddenly develops scruples and, having objectified women from start to finish, closes with statistics on crimes against women on screen, followed by this exhortation: “Fight the evil of eveteasing.” Nau sau choohein khaake etc etc…

The only thing more fake than this concern for women is the simulated sex in Hate Story 4. Spare us your bogus conscience, please.

Rating (out of five stars): 1/2

CBFC Rating (India):	A
Running time:	131 minutes

This review was also published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/hate-story-4-movie-review-a-fourth-instalment-of-pretend-sex-and-tacky-dialoguebaazi-4383561.html

Poster courtesy:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_Story_4

Release date:	March 16, 2018
Director:	Raj Kumar Gupta
Cast: Language:	Ajay Devgn, Saurabh Shukla, Amit Sial, Ileana D’Cruz, Sheeba Chadha, Sulagna Panigrahi, Saanand Verma, Devas Dixit, Ravi Khanwilkar Hindi

An honest income-tax official conducts a carefully planned raid on one of the most powerful people in Uttar Pradesh. The lead star is Ajay Devgn. The director is the man who brought us Aamir and No One Killed Jessica. The year is 1981, back when sewing jewellery into mattresses and stashing cash under floor tiles was the order of the day among tax evaders.

Raj Kumar Gupta’s Raid works, for the most part, like a procedural drama. Devgn’s Amay Patnaik arrives at his new posting after being transferred from station to station as punishment for his integrity. Ritesh Shah’s writing largely mirrors this no-nonsense character, going about its business quietly and purposefully, and in the bargain throwing light on one of the least hailed of government departments.

Amay’s sincerity is established within minutes of his arrival on the scene. It is clear too right from the start that the enemy is not confined to the homes of wealthy families with unaccounted incomes. The enemy within is as lethal a combatant as any outside.

Apart from his associates, we also meet Amay’s wife Malini (Ileana D’Cruz) who unflinchingly supports him despite her exhaustion at the repeated packing and moving that have become constants in their life.

On the face of it, it could be said that Devgn has played precisely this part – a ramrod straight man within a broken system, doing his duty against all odds – a zillion times in his 27 year long career, yet there is a difference. In most of his previous such films, there was a superhero element to his role. In Singham, for instance, his Bajirao Singham virtually climbed pillars and walked on air to single-handedly bash up packs of goons. Here, in a production that strikes a far more realistic tone than the formulaic commercial Hindi cinema that dominates his filmography, Amay requires police protection to conduct his work freely, and is often afraid although he does not allow his fear to hamper his assignments.

Credible realism and Gupta’s unembellished directorial style are what make Raid such a gripping experience.

The film occasionally falters in this area – twice, to be precise, when the romantic songs Saanu Ek Pal and Nit Khair are needlessly jammed into the otherwise unrelentingly pacey proceedings. This trite device has been plucked out of the 1980s in which the tale is set, from the days when musical interludes were the primary means of portraying man-woman love in Bollywood and it was assumed that the audience wants such breaks within every powerful narrative. If anything, these numbers serve as irritating distractions in Raid, though thankfully they are brief enough to not be completely ruinous.

Once Amay’s team enters the house that is the fulcrum of the film’s action, Raid almost feels like a suspense thriller. Who is the informer who has given him such accurate information about a family with such clout? Will Amay manage to finish the task at hand or will he be disillusioned by how far the corrupt Tauji’s political allies will go to save him? And where on earth has Tauji hidden his ill-gotten riches?

As riveting as these questions is the realisation dawning on the viewer as the film rolls along, that income-tax officials operate in a very dangerous field. Potential transfers are nothing in comparison with the risk of actual physical harm that their targets could inflict upon them.

The manner in which Gupta leads up to this point is smooth and believable. It helps that he has picked a no-fuss cast who match his intent scene for scene, as does editor Bodhaditya Banerjee.

Devgn does brooding intensity better than most of his colleagues, and injects just the right amount of vulnerability into Amay to make him relatable. While some of the lines given to Amay (and wisely to Amay alone) hark back to the dialoguebaazi of an earlier era in Hindi cinema, the actor delivers them sans bombast to ensure that they are fun and do not sound dated.

Ileana as his wife gets limited screen time, but for what it is worth, she plays it well, achieving a nice note of indulgent bemusement in response to her husband’s often exasperating uprightness.

Saurabh Shukla as Tauji is the lynchpin of the striking supporting cast, with the screenplay giving him enough space to imbue the characterisation with interesting shades of gray. Sheeba Chadha as one of the bahus of his household and Amit Sial as Amay’s colleague are among the multiple satellite players who lend crucial detailing to their characters’ questionable morality.

Thankfully, none of the bad folk here are caricatures and one of the most enjoyable parts of Raid is Tauji’s relationship with his brusque, wizened old mother.

At 128 minutes and 3 seconds, Raid is just the right length for its pithy screenplay by Shah whose earlier credits include Citylights (2014) and Pink (2016). The opening text on screen informs us that it is “based on true stories”, and in the end we are told of the perils faced by income-tax officials in real life.

Media coverage and our own apathy have reduced these sarkari afsars to nothing but their nuisance value and the way they are misused by vengeful governments. Raid throws light on another crucial aspect of their story that we all ought to know, minus stereotypical Bollywood-style glorification of honest individuals. Barring those incongruous songs, the gendered language of the closing text on screen (which assumes that all income-tax officials are male, contrary to what we see even in Amay’s office) and a passing line about homosexuality that could perhaps have been better written, Raid is on point, insightful and engaging.

This is not the kind of fare you might expect to set your pulses racing, but that is precisely what it achieves in its closing scenes. Raid is not regular Bollywood. What it is though is thoroughly entertaining.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	128 minutes

This review was also published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/bollywood/raid-movie-review-ajay-devgns-brooding-intensity-raj-kumar-guptas-gripping-direction-add-up-to-a-winner-4392773.html

Poster courtesy:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raid_(2018_film)

Release date:	March 16, 2018
Director:	Saiju S.S.
Cast: Language:	Unni Mukundan, Gokul Suresh, Alencier Ley Lopez, Niranjana Anoop, Miya, Neeraja, Mareena Michael, Lena, Shanker Ramakrishnan, Saju Navodaya, Kailash, Nelson Malayalam

Of all the superpowers that commercial Indian cinema has bestowed on men down the decades, this must rank as the most inventive: the ability to know what happened at a time and place where they were not present, there were no eyewitnesses, and the only account of it comes from a flashback to the episode in a movie.

I kid you not. A murder is committed in Ira at a spot where no one but the murderers are present. The victim dies without making a statement. The culprits do not reveal themselves. Yet somehow, an important male character knows who was responsible, and the knowledge sets him off on a revenge spree.

At no point do we get an indication of who gave him the killer’s identity. The only explanation can be that he too was watching Iraand saw the flashback to the murder along with us, the audience. Just kidding, but you get my drift.

To say more would require me to give away the names of this omniscient man, the murderers and the victim, which I will not. No spoilers here, but come back and read this review after you watch Ira, and you will know who and what I am talking about.

Suffice it to say that the plot of this film is pivoted on this occurrence and since it turns out to be one big gaping loophole, everything else adds up to shunya.

Ira is the story of a senior policeman called Rajeev (played by Unni Mukundan) investigating the sudden death of K.P. Chandy (Alencier Ley Lopez), a controversial minister in the Kerala government. Murder is alleged. The prime suspect is young Dr Aaryan (Gokul Suresh) who insists he is innocent. Aaryan happens to be in a relationship with the old man’s granddaughter Jennifer Jacob (Niranjana Anoop).

When the film begins, Chandy is already no more and Rajeev is looking into the circumstances of his death. Through Rajeev’s interviews with various people who know Aaryan, the film pieces together his story while also painting a picture of Chandy for us.

(You may consider this a spoiler, I do not, but still…)

After watching the film, I chanced upon an interview with director Saiju S.S. in which he has said “Ira dignifies the oppressed”. The truth though is that this lofty ideal is just a tool around which he has built a flashy thriller puffed up with self-importance, and that “the oppressed” being referenced here – a poor tribal community – are sidelined within the film too, in a bid to build up the hero as their larger than-life saviour.

Besides, you cannot claim a commitment to one marginalised group while trivialising and stereotyping another. A rape is at one point portrayed here as the end of a woman’s life with ye oldecliché of a lamp dying out when the deed is done by the villain of the piece. Sexual harassment at the workplace is comedified via a chap called Varun Nambiar, the MD of the hospital at which Aaryan was employed. Lecherous behaviour too is treated as comedy via the fond portrayal of Rajeev’s sidekick Venkidi – he leers at bathing women through binoculars, calls women “pakshikal” (birds), yet is supposed to be a nice guy.

In case anyone offers up as a counterpoint the fact that there are many female characters in this film, including some powerful women, please note that the primary identifier of each is their relationship with Rajeev and/or Aaryan or their usefulness to one of these men. The hospital employee played by Mareena Michael, for one, is introduced as though she is of significance yet is dropped like a hot potato once she serves a purpose in these men’s lives.

So much for dignifying the oppressed. In this matter, Saiju is following in the footsteps of his mentor Vysakh, Ira’s producer along with writer Udaykrishna, who had a running joke in 2016’s blockbuster Pulimurugan (directed by Vysakh, written by Udaykrishna) involving a man who gets his kicks from peeping into bathrooms while women are bathing.

The declaration of noble intent in Ira notwithstanding, Saiju and his writer Naveen John have no commitment either to the tribals in their film or to the women. Their only commitment, clearly, is to Rajeev and Aaryan.

(Spoiler-if-at-all alert ends)

Unni Mukundan is yet to develop an engrossing screen presence, but he is interesting enough to hold attention and he does seem totally involved in the role of Rajeev. His tendency to strut about is reasonably controlled in Ira. Gokul Suresh is suitably sweet, which is all he needs to be here. The supporting cast is packed with good actors who are largely under-utilised.

The glaring flaw in Ira’s mystery apart, the dialogue writing too is shabby whenever it tries to be overly smart, mostly with Rajeev’s lines. In one scene, when Rajeev finds himself drawn to a woman, he says: “Aval oru firebrand breed aanu (She is a firebrand breed). A rare sweet breed.” Tacky, tacky, tacky.

The unfortunate part is that Ira does initially build up considerable suspense around the reasons for Chandy’s death and the apparent framing of Aaryan. However, when the end comes and you realise that the very cornerstone of the whodunnit is a writing gaffe, everything that has gone before loses meaning.

Not that everything that has gone before is sparkling. When Rajeev first meets Miya’s character, for instance, even a kindergarten kid might guess her true identity within minutes, but the screenplay seems to think it is keeping us guessing. This is the sort of film in which, when one person eavesdrops on a conversation, the ones being spied upon spell out the background to their relationship with each other although they clearly know these facts. Why? Because this is the device the writer has decided to use to spill the beans to the woman who is listening in and to the audience. This is decidedly unintelligent writing.

Ira is a lesson in how not to do a thriller.

Footnote: In the run-up to Ira’s release, there has been some effort to whip up interest in the film by creating an impression that it bears similarities to Dileep’s arrest last year in the case involving the abduction and assault on an industry colleague. There is absolutely no resemblance between the two – none, zero, zilch – unless you count the fact that both involve crimes. That is like saying the Jayasurya-starrer Captain and Gurinder Chadha’s Bend It Like Beckhamare similar because they both feature football. This transparent promotional bid is even sillier than Ira’s screenplay.

Rating (out of five stars): *

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

This review was also published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/ira-movie-review-this-unni-mukundan-gokul-suresh-starrer-is-a-lesson-in-how-not-to-do-a-thriller-4394281.html

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ira_(film)

Release date:	March 16, 2018
Director:	Abrid Shine
Cast: Language:	Kalidas Jayaram, Neeta Pillai, Joju George, Guest appearances: Meera Jasmine and Kunchacko Boban Malayalam

Being a follower of Malayalam films is an exhilarating, enriching and confusing business these days. The worst of Mollywood rivals the very worst being produced by commercial cinema across Indian industries, especially in terms of misogyny, whereas the best of Malayalam filmmakers are more consistent and prolific than the rest and routinely churn out quality works that are, along with Marathi, the best of India’s best.

Walking into a theatre screening a new Malayalam film in 2018 is, therefore, a gamble with potentially vastly unpredictable outcomes. Watching Abrid Shine’s Poomaram (Flowering Tree) this week reminded me of the warmly pleasant wave of surprise that washed over me when I saw Njandukalude Nattil Oridavela last year and Shine’s own Action Hero Biju in 2016: whatever I may have been subconsciously expecting from the film, this certainly was not it.

Poomaram is a cinematic enterprise disguised as a reality show. It takes us through the run-up to the Mahatma University Youth Festival in a particular year and the days of the fest itself, the preps, the competitiveness, the institutional and individual dynamics, crushes and awkward courtships, hooliganism and early tests of leadership, performances and final results.

The focus remains firmly on the participating teams from Ernakulam’s famed St Treesa’s College – the defending champions – and their arch rivals Maharaja’s College, especially their respective student leaders Irene and Gauthaman.

On the face of it, what we get here is an education in Kerala’s rich cultural heritage through contests in various art forms ranging from Kathakali to Mohiniattam, Thiruvathira and more, along with an understanding of the average Malayali student’s exposure to and interest in the arts from other states. The film is also bound to evoke nostalgia for college life among older audiences as we watch the level of commitment towards the festival among these youngsters and the tensions that follow, including between their trainers.

In a sense then, Poomaram is a reminder of how every challenge we face appears magnified in the present, and how what was once earth-shattering very often looks mundane in retrospect. There will, of course, be additional layers of meaning for those who know of the real Maharaja’s and Teresa’s traditional rivalry.

There is far more to it though. Through the unmelodramatised, unadorned unspooling of events at the festival, Poomaram serves up an unconventional commentary on Kerala society – on gender equations, segregation, caste, class and ideological differences.

The most obvious mirror here is the one held up to the larger student body’s reaction to the women of St Treesa’s. I don’t care that we are not winning but I am glad that Treesa’s is at No. 3, says a chap at one point. He cites the women’s “attitude” as the reason for his animosity, yet it is hard not to wonder whether it is attitude or the mere fact that they are women that has him bristling, and/or whether he is resentful because they come across as being more sophisticated and urbane in their attire, deportment and language than most of their peers.

Poomaram is the sort of content you are likely to get if you were to place cameras for a few days at a university campus, without covertly offering scripts to your subjects (as most TV ‘reality’ shows seem to do) and edit the resultant material down to 2.5 hours. The beauty of this film is the spotlight it places on the pain, hurt, humour and joy contained in everydayness.

This is not to say that Poomaram is an entirely smooth ride. Once the initial surprise is over and the fascination with its unusualness is done and dusted, there are patches in the second half that feel stretched and unexciting.

Besides, it does not make sense for a film of this nature to build up a single character at the expense of others, but Abrid Shine cannot seem to shake off the awareness that Maharaja’s union honcho Gauthaman is played by Kalidas Jayaram – son of acting veterans Parvathy and Jayaram, and a one-time National Award winner for Best Child Artiste – making his Mollywood debut here as an adult.

The marginal though discernable elevation of Gauthaman above Irene from Treesa’s becomes particularly noticeable because Irene is played by the dynamic newcomer Neeta Pillai. Poomaram’s pre-release media coverage is devoted almost entirely to Jayaram Jr, but I gathered from the Internet with some difficulty that Pillai was the second runner-up at a beauty pageant for south Asians in the US in 2015. She is attractive, charismatic and a natural before the camera, so it beats me why Shine thought it fit to underline Gauthaman’s importance over Irene.

We meet his family, not hers. A long song in Poomaram’s opening scenes remains focused on Gauthaman. Midway and in the end too he is the central figure in song sequences, although the latter is filmed among a massive crowd. It is worth mentioning that the duration and picturisation of the first and last among these, and the overtly didactic nature of the climactic number, make them a departure from the tone and apparent intent of the rest of the film.

Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that Shine, wonderful filmmaker though he is, tells stories from a male viewpoint untempered by a female gaze. It is as if he cannot help himself. The scenes with Gauthaman’s family, for one, are fixated on his somewhat pompous Dad and sideline his Mum. At no point is this male-centricity more evident than in the closing passage of Poomaramwhen Shine thinks nothing of allowing a male-led co-ed college to upstage an all-women institution, despite the latter’s remarkable achievements and talent. This is a director with such an uncommon vision that it would be a pity if he never becomes aware of his weakness.

Among the cast, Pillai and the young lady playing what appears to be Gauthaman’s second-in-command in Maharaja’s union stand out for their star quality. Kalidas is sweet-looking and likeable, but could do with more spark. The rest of the team is so deliciously believable as students and teachers that they may well have been gathered from actual universities. A special salaam then to Poomaram’s casting department.

Among the few established faces on the roster is Joju George who is his usual dependable self in a laugh-out-loud hilarious yet thoughtful sidelight at a police station. Meera Jasmine and Kunchacko Boban make minuscule but memorable guest appearances as themselves.

Abrid Shine’s school of filmmaking is one of many notable developments in the middle-of-the-road cinema coming from Mollywood in recent years. Poomaramis a delightfully experimental, contemplative college saga, far removed from the clichés, the ugly misogyny and loudness seen in too many campus films from Mollywood. Its warts notwithstanding, it is like that snuggly blanket you do not want to leave on a cold winter morning, that hot cup of coffee you embrace with both hands when you finally emerge – comforting, familiar, regular yet so special.

Shine’s latest work is not just a film. It is an adventure.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	152 minutes

This review was also published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/poomaram-movie-review-abrid-shine-shines-a-light-on-college-life-in-a-reality-show-style-film-4395019.html

Poster courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/PoomaramOfficial/

Release date:	March 23, 2018
Director:	Siddharth P. Malhotra
Cast: Language:	Rani Mukerji, Harsh Mayar, Neeraj Kabi, Rohit Suresh Saraf, Sparsh Khanchandani, Poorti Jai Agarwal, Benjamin Yangal, Jannat Zubair Rahmani, Jayesh Kardak, Riya Shukla, Vikrant Soni, Kalaivanan Kannan, Shiv Subrahmanyam, Supriya Pilgaonkar, Sachin Pilgaonkar, Vikram Gokhale, Hussain Dalal, Asif Basra Hindi

Back in 2005, when he released the excellent Iqbal, I remember writer-director Nagesh Kukunoor saying: a few minutes into the film, you will forget that my hero is deaf-mute. Truth be told, it was a while after watching Iqbal that it struck me the leading man was also Muslimsans all the indulgent clichés and compulsory cultural markers associated with Hindi film Muslims until then.

Kukunoor’s conviction and approach to that character cometo mind each time I watch a film on a differently abled person or minority community member, and I find myself asking: does it pass the Kukunoor/Iqbal Test?

Hichki does.

Director Siddharth P. Malhotra’s new Hindi film is about a teacher who is tasked with bringing an unruly, disinterested class of financially backward students in line. Apart from the children’s background, Naina Mathur (Rani Mukerji) faces two additional challenges: their elite Mumbai school, St Notker’s, seems resigned to their fate; and Naina has Tourette Syndrome, a disorder characterised by vocal and motor tics, in her case a tendency to make certain loud involuntary sounds and swing her head to the side while touching her hand to her chin, most especially when she is agitated. Her battle then is not just to help the girls and boys of Class 9F overcome their own pessimism and the prejudice they face from some of the richer students and one particular teacher, but also to guide them past the prejudice they direct at her.

Hichki (Hiccup) is based on the book Front of the Class by Brad Cohen and Lisa Wysocky which was made into the 2008 American film of the same name. Frankly, although it will very likely prompt scores of Google searches in the coming days, Hichki is not about Tourette’s – Malhotra’s film is designed to have us looking past Naina’s condition, seeing her as a woman who happens to have Tourette’s and is determined not to allow her students to succumb to their worst fears or insecurities, to recognise their own failings and biases even as they battle the biases others hold against them. Tourette’s is just one of multiple factors steering this screenplay – written by Anckur Chaudhry, Malhotra himself, Ambar Hadap and Ganesh Pandit – that, interestingly for patriarchal Bollywood, has taken a male-centric literary work and adapted it with a woman as the protagonist.

The result is a largely engaging film that, despite the hiccups in its writing journey, manages to hit the mark.

It is, in some senses, a predictable path. We know from the moment Naina Mathur enters that classroom, how the story will turn out: that the kids will resist her, they will next be won over by her sincerity, and they will finally become her allies. Occasionally it feels rather thin too as a consequence, sometimes manipulative and often also very simplistic. This is, after all, a formula that has been repeatedly visited in films since E.R. Braithwaite took up a teacher’s job in his book To Sir, With Love and Sidney Poitier followed suit on screen more than half a century back. The addition of classism within the school and Tourette’s to the situation does, however, alter the dynamics.

In the end then, Hichki offers enough surprises and enough moments of unmanipulative emotional intensity to be a rewarding experience.

One of the film’s biggest strengths is Mukerji, who has been seen in only three features – Aiyyaa, Talaash and Mardaani– since the box-office success of No One Killed Jessica in 2011. She lifts Hichkievery time she is on the scene, bringing empathy and charm to Naina’s character without at any moment soliciting the audience’s pity. Even when the screenplay is passing through its most slender passages, Mukerji elevates it with her presence.

She is surrounded by a bouquet of charismatic supporting actors, not all of whom get the benefit of in-depth characterisation. Most of the students in Naina’s class, for instance, are painted with broad brush strokes and a single defining attribute that do not do justice to the evidently capable actors playing them. Among the ones getting short shrift is Riya Shukla who delivered an electrifying performance in 2016’s Swara Bhasker-starrer Nil Battey Sannata.

The youngster with the benefit of the best-written part is Harsh Mayar playing Aatish, the last rebel standing in 9F. Look closely: that casually good-looking guy is the same fellow who played the little livewire Chhotu in Nila Madhab Panda’s I Am Kalam (2011) for which he won a National Award for Best Child Artist. Age has done nice things to Mayar, looks-wise and acting-wise. There are some rough edges that need smoothening out, such as when he is given a somewhat schmaltzy speech to deliver, but overall he has the ability to hold his own in Mukerji’s company and acting chops worth watching out for.

To learn how not to be pulled down by a spot of speechifying in a screenplay, he just needs to take notes from his co-star, theatre veteran Neeraj Kabi, playing the doggedly classist Mr Wadia, Naina’s bete noir in the St Notker’s staffroom. Even when the man sneeringly describes 9F as “municipality garbage”, Kabi ensures that his character comes across as credible rather than hyperbolic.

People can be mean. People who face nastiness from others can in turn be nasty to those less fortunate than they are. Hichki may not have the heft of Iqbal but it is a valuable reminder, through the vehicle of the Naina-Aatish equation, that intolerance is not justified simply because the person at the receiving end is flawed. It is also, of course, about not giving up on a human being if you spot redeeming qualitiesbeyond their jagged exterior.

The film itself is not without its faults, but its uplifting theme and Mukerji’s understated performance serve as compensation. Besides, it drew tears from me more than once, each time when I was least expecting it. Sweetness and good intentions make for a pleasant combination in Hichki.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	118 minutes 29 seconds

A version of this review was published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/hichki-movie-review-rani-mukerjis-to-maam-with-love-hits-the-mark-hiccups-and-all-4402515.html

Poster courtesy:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hichki

Release date:	March 30, 2018
Director:	Ahmed Khan
Cast: Language:	Tiger Shroff, Disha Patani, Manoj Bajpayee, Randeep Hooda, Prateik Babbar, Darshan Kumar, Deepak Dobriyal, Grandmaster Shifuji Shaurya Bhardwaj, Vipin Sharma, Barbie Sharma, Cameo: Jacqueline Fernandez Hindi

“One man army… Against all… Kick… Punch… Fly… Repeat” – these words flash on screen during the trailer of Baaghi 2.

“Kick… Punch… Fly… Repeat” was the formula that turned Baaghi Part 1 into the blockbuster it became for actor Tiger Shroff in 2016. Part 2 regurgitates the nuts and bolts of the template, retains Shroff in the cast and adds all-pleasing clichés into the mix.

A bow to the ongoing chest-thumping nationalist discourse in India – check.

Stylised action centred around Shroff – check.

Extreme violence – check.

Romance with pretty girl to soften the blows – check.

Pretty girl soaking in the rain to establish her vivacity a la Shraddha Kapoor in too many of her films – check.

Heroine accusing hero of chasing her though he is not, in deference to male audience members who feel that is precisely what all women do – check.

Heroine saying “I hate stalkers”, I suppose in deference to feminists in the audience put off by the aforementioned scene – check.

Heroine pretending to be irritated with hero though she is not – check.

Songs to lighten the mood when the going gets intense – check.

Villain dancing in darkened den with ‘item’ girl – check.

Excuses in the plot that allow Shroff to take off his shirt and display an impeccably muscled, painted-up torso – check.

Hero’s shirt ripped off in the final fight – check.

There are moments in Baaghi 2 that are so trite and so dated, it feels like a 1970s-’80s assembly-line product. The shirt-stripping, of course, is a 21^st century Bollywood trope that was fun when it started but is now becoming tedious in the hands of unimaginative directors.

And Baaghi 2 is nothing if not unimaginative and bland.

The film opens with an attack on Neha (Disha Patani) by two masked men while she is seated in her car. For the record, Patani here looks uncannily like Shraddha Kapoor who played the joint protagonist of the previous Baaghi.

Cut to two months later, and we meet Ranveer Pratap Singh a.k.a. Ronnie(Shroff), an Army man stationed in snow-laden, mountainous territory. Ronnie is introduced as an upright, no-nonsense fellow who tied a civilian to a jeep and paraded him around the area as retribution for stone throwing and disrespect to the national flag.

The reference is obviously to the real-life Major Leetul Gogoi who, last year, used an innocent civilian, Farooq Ahmad Dar, as a human shield tied to his jeep while he drove through several Kashmiri villages. The state human rights commission declared Gogoi’s act illegal, and there is no evidence till date that Dar was guilty of any crime that day, but the team of Baaghi 2 clearly does not care for facts since pandering to majoritarian sentiments has yielded box-office results for other Bollywood films in recent years.

The weird part is that this intro is just an aside in a film that is primarily about Ronnie’s link toNeha. We soon learn they were in love in college, and that four years earlier, she had broken off their relationship to marry a man of her father’s choice.

In the present, the Goa-based Neha seeks Ronnie out in desperation when her four-year-old daughter is kidnapped. Ronnie takes leave from work to help her, but is soon flummoxed when everyone around her, including her husband Shekhar Salgaonkar (Darshan Kumar), insists that she does/did not have a child.

The pre-interval portion of Baaghi 2 remains suspenseful as we grapple with the mystery of the missing girl. Unless you have already seen the 2016 Telugu film on which it is based – Kshanam directed by Ravikanth Perepu, starring Adivi Sesh and Adah Sharma – there are questions that hold attention for a while. Is Neha mentally disturbed? Does little Rhea exist?

The addition of a string of promising supporting characters revs up the proceedings. There is the cynical DIG Ajay Shergil (Manoj Bajpayee), the eccentric ACP Loha Singh Dhull a.k.a. LSD (Randeep Hooda), Neha’s drugged-out brother-in-law Sunny Salgaonkar (Prateik Babbar) and the well-meaning car dealer Usman Langda (Deepak Dobriyal). They offer hope especially since Bajpayee, Hooda and Dobriyal are vastly superior artistes to the gym-manufactured leading man.

Soon though it becomes evident that director Ahmed Khan and his writers (story adaptation: Sajid Nadiadwala, also the film’s producer; screenplay: Jojo Khan, Abbas Heirapurwala and Neeraj Kumar Mishra) have bitten off more than they can chew.

The action becomes almost robotic post-interval, the narrative cold, and the effort at clever dialogue writing is laughable as the film drones on.

The stunts that start off as worthy of wolf whistles lose their lustre soon enough. There is only so much that style can achieve when substance is absent. Santhana Krishnan Ravichandran’s camerawork is completely uninspired even as the film travels through beautiful locations.

Randeep Hooda’s conviction in the midst of such dullness is enjoyable for a while. He throws himself into the role of a sartorially unconventional cop – posted in Goa from Punjab –who is not above being impertinent with his seniors. He even manages to pull off lines like, “Jaise udte Punjab ko main zameen pe le aaya, waise doobte Goa ko kinaare pe le aaoonga.”

His charisma can do little for Baaghi 2 by its second half though, when scene after scene is rolled out so lifelessly that even the usually fantastic Deepak Dobriyal ends up sounding unwittingly comical when he says, with reference to himself, in a particular tragic moment, “Hyderabad is not known just for biryani, it is also known for qurbani (sacrifice).” Tee hee. That sentence, by the way, is the writers’ transparent effort to offer up a ‘good Muslim’ in the script to counter the initial pandering to Islamophobia and anti-Kashmiri-Muslim sentiment in the opening scenes.

Ronnie in Baaghi 2 is meant to be some sort of profound metaphor for the Army and the battle of nationalist versus anti-national forces. I realised this in the closing moments, after the secret of Rhea’s disappearance is revealed to be a damp squib and the villains have been vanquished in this seemingly personal enmity, when Ronnie’s army boss pops up to bellow the words, “The war is over. The war is over.” More unintentional hilarity, I say.

The much-discussed Ek Do Teen redux is the least of Baaghi 2’s problems. The music and Jacqueline Fernandez’s dancing do not deserve the condemnation they have received in response to the song video released earlier, but the overall effect is unexceptional enough in comparison with the original featuring Madhuri Dixit to make you wonder why they bothered to redo it.

At the heart of this film’s tribulations lies Tiger Shroff. The young star’s nice-guy vibe and labours at the gym are unmistakable, but can do little to make up for his blank face. Given that, and the fact that the stunt choreography has nothing new to offer (unlike the inventive use of Kalaripayattu in Baaghi), Baaghi 2 is an all-out insipid affair.

Tiger Shroff is just one of many passionless ingredients in this passionless film.

Cautionary note: Baaghi 2 is a great showcase for the inconsistent track record of India’s Central Board of Film Certification.Limbs and necks are broken with gay abandon throughout and at one point the camera focuses on DIG Shergil poking a finger into a fresh bullet wound on Ronnie’s body. Yet this film has been awarded a mild UA rating while others are routinely banned, chopped and/or given A certificates merely as punishment for being realistic.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	144 minutes 46 seconds

A version of this review was published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/baaghi-2-movie-review-tiger-shroff-pounds-his-way-through-a-marginally-suspenseful-largely-robotic-film-4412261.html

Poster courtesy:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baaghi_2

Release date:	March 29, 2018
Director:	Boban Samuel
Cast: Language:	Vishnu Unnikrishnan, Dharmajan Bolgatty, Jinu Joseph, Manasa Radhakrishnan, Indrans, Leona Lishoy, Baiju, Jayan Cherthala, Arun Ghosh, Megha Mathew Malayalam

Vishnu Unnikrishnan played an Average Joe to hilarious and heartwarming effect in 2016’s sleeper hit from Mollywood, Kattappanayile Rithwik Roshan. That film’s title – an affectionate butchering of Bollywood idol Hrithik Roshan’s name – was an all-pervasive reference to the hero Kichchoo’s ordinary appearance for which he was forever being taunted, especially since his ambition was to be a movie star. Whatever the faults of Kattappanayile RRmay have been, the gag was effective because it was relevant to the plot and woven well into it. It wears thin in Vikadakumaran though (the hottie summoned up here being Mollywood darling Dulquer Salmaan), since it does not have an accompanying convincing plotline.

Unnikrishnan in this film plays a bumbling lawyer in a lower court in small-town Kerala, a chap who can barely say the word “alibi”. Then one day, a big case falls into his lap and he sees in it the key to a bright future. The hitch is that he is defending a self-confessed murderer, a wealthy and powerful man called Roshi Balachandran (Jinu Joseph) who admits to ahit-and-run killing. Advocate Binu Sebastian (Unnikrishnan) sets about doing whatever it takes to save his rich client.

Before the film settles into this pivotal case, the opening half hour is somewhat amusing as Binu Vakeel blunders his way through various legal wrangles. Whatever humour it offers though is tainted by dialogues and situations that normalise and comedify sexism and colour prejudice. The ewww-inducing low point is the passage involving an entire courtroom leering at a buxom woman guilty of marital infidelity, following which she pays her lawyer Binu with cash and rewards his sidekick (Dharmajan Bolgatty) by pressing her body up against his. It reflects poorly on our cinema that this scene’s shudder-worthiness is mild in comparison with what we have seen in other Mollywood films.

Besides, in this Jolly LLB-style Malayalam adventure, it does not take much intelligence to guess that as matters progress, Binu will smarten up and prove to be far cleverer than anyone would have assumed from his early missteps. Fair enough. The effect is diluted though by multiple plot contrivances including the extreme stupidity and amateurishness of too many characters to suit Binu’s convenience, the unconvincing characterisation of the lead villain in particular and the abundance of cinematic clichés in the screenplay.

Roshi, for one, is built up as a menacing bad guy with immense clout, yet he proves to be quite assinine in all his decisions including the reasoning behind why he hired Binu and the way he is so easily deceived by everyone involved. Although every effort is made to convince us otherwise in early scenes, Roshi turns out to be an absolute idiot who does not do his homework and has no one else doing his homework for him.

Leona Lishoy is wasted playing an actor who gets caught in a mess of Roshi’s making. Megha Mathew is nothing more than a female prop in the office of Roshi’s bête noir. And the attractive Manasa Radhakrishnan provides the mandatory girlfriend in Binu’s life because, well, how can Everyman be deemed a protagonist in a macho world if he cannot prove his attractiveness to at least one young, good-looking woman?

Also thrown into Binu’s profile are a nagging widowed mother and a loving, hearing-impaired sister, both designed to manipulate us into feeling sympathetic towards him.

To be fair to Vikadakumaran, it is not unbearable. It is unoriginal and contrived. Is it better for a film to be terrible than to be so mediocre that it is easily forgotten within an hour? Perhaps the director can help us find the answer to that question.

Rating (out of five stars): *

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	131 minutes

This review was also published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/vikadakumaran-movie-review-vishnu-unnikrishnan-revisits-his-average-joe-act-in-a-mediocre-legal-saga-4413265.html

Poster courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/vikadakumaran/

Release date:	April 6, 2018
Director:	Abhinay Deo
Cast: Language:	Irrfan, Kirti Kulhari, Arunoday Singh, Divya Dutta, Anuja Sathe, Pradhuman Singh Mall, Omi Vaidya, Gajraj Rao, Neelima Azeem, Urmila Matondkar Hindi

The seven-year itch is a tricky thing. Legend has it that it spurs seemingly regular folk on to highly irregular behaviour even when they are in happy relationships. Imagine then the fate of unhappy couples.

Dev Kaushal (Irrfan) and his pretty young wife Reena (Kirti Kulhari) are stuck in a loveless marriage and have found completely contrasting ways to scratch that itch. His moments of respite come when he masturbates in the office toilet, and when he peeps into his bedroom from a hole in the kitchen wall to gaze at the sleeping Reena. During one of those peering sessions he learns that she too has been seeking relief from him – in the arms of a man she had once wanted to marry.

The trailer has already told us that Dev blackmails the boyfriend, a beefy fellow called Ranjit Arora (Arunoday Singh). The reason: Ranjit is married, and financially dependent on his powerful father-in-law who keeps a tight hold on the purse strings and his damaad’s testicles.

As in director Abhinay Deo’s 2011 venture, the irresistibly maniacal Delhi Belly, here too one misdeed leads to another then another and another until everyone involved gets caught up in a vortex of deception and trickery.

Delhi Belly was a novelty on the Bollywoodscape for various reasons but primarily its chosen genre – black comedy – and its openness about sex and other bodily functions. Blackmail is not as thoroughly alien territory, perhaps because much water and experimentation have passed under the bridge in the seven years since Delhi Bellywas released, but this film too is quite unusual for Bollywood.

(Spoiler alert for the ultra-picky reader)Blackmailis cleverly and self-deprecatingly misleading in its early moments. When Dev imagines multiple scenarios each time his head threatens to explode with suppressed anger, the repetition of the device is designed to lull viewers into assuming predictability on the part of the storyteller. Just as you think you have got Deo all figured out though … boom! … he stands the ploy on its head when you are least expecting it. (Spoiler alert ends)

That flip is Blackmail’s big turning point, the moment that urges viewers not to overestimate their own intelligence or underestimate the filmmaker. Surrender is the most sensible option left, and doing so yields considerable dividends.

The hero of Blackmail is not your regular bad guy. The worst thing Dev does before he resorts to blackmail is to steal photos of colleagues’ wives so he can pleasure himself while gazing at them. The believable casualness with which he and others in the film turn to crime is perhaps a commentary on the hidden villain in each of us, lying in wait below the surface, anxious for an excuse to tear through our skin.

(Possible spoiler in this paragraph) Blackmail’s characters are not repulsive, nor do they actively invite pity, but you sense the ennui in fleeting words and actions. Ranjit’s wife, played by Divya Dutta, addresses him as “Tommy”. When he protests, she asks if he would prefer “kutta”. Ranjit wonders how Dev looks, and Reena replies, “like a husband.” You can almost hear the yawn in those three words. (Spoiler alert ends)

Parveez Shaikh’s screenplay is careful not to mock the lead characters although their exploits are deliberately exaggerated and caricaturish. The ridiculous rigmarole in which they ultimately lose themselves does not match the zip and zing of Delhi Belly, but is nevertheless mad and brisk enough to be exciting in large parts.

Without any overt intellectual intent, Blackmail also holds up a mirror to what unfolds when we allow life to happen to us instead of grabbing the steering wheel with both hands.

The film dips intermittently though. Among its weakest patches is the superficiality in the characterisation of Reena in comparison with the others, and the ordinariness of the writing of two cameos – if Ranjit’s mother-in-law had not been played by Neelima Azeem and if Urmila Matondkar was not featured inBewafa beauty, there might have been no expectations from either.

Not that Bewafa beauty is an absolute write off – it is, in fact, fairly danceable and hummable – but you do not resurrect the Rangeela girl on the big screen after so many years for a song that is anything short of electrifying in its music and choreography. Worse, the number is abruptly dumped into the narrative.

The scenes at Dev’s office are tepid, owing largely to the unfunnyness of the boss’ obsession with toilet paper that is clearly meant to tickle us.

The film is also strangely indifferent to its setting. Blackmail is located in a city in Maharashtra, but offers none of the detailing and cultural specificities that made Delhi Bellysuch a delight.

Irrfan seems to be enjoying himself here playing a husband and corporate slave who lacks the energy to lift himself out of his boredom. He falters in a scene in which he confides in his friend Anand (Pradhuman Singh Mall), although the motivation for that decision is in itself so unconvincing that Shaikh should be faulted just as well here.

Besides, Dev is the only one in the story prone to underplaying his emotions, yet with barely discernable touches, the actor conveys the hope with which he had entered into the relationship with Reena and the lethargy that frittered everything away.

Kirti Kulhari is handicapped by limited writing, but still embodies a certain vulnerability through her performance, making Reena a person who is hard to hate despite the affair. (Aside: considering his unconventional career path, it is disappointing to see Irrfan too choosing to star with women who are, on an average, 20 years his junior.)

Arunoday Singh as Ranjit and Divya Dutta as his drunken spouse get the benefit of more over-the-top and meaty roles – both immerse themselves in the action to amusing effect. Jay Oza’s wicked camerawork in their joint scenes and the lens’ menacing gaze at them in a scenario played out in a toilet make those passages particularly memorable.

The standout performance of the lot though comes from Anuja Sathe playing Dev’s co-worker who metamorphoses into an aggressive monster. Sathe is a firecracker who owns her every moment on screen, even managing to overshadow a veteran like Irrfan in their scenes together.

Despite its imperfections, what sustains Blackmail is its irreverence towards the issue of marital infidelity. In an earlier era, such a theme is likely to have been explored only in a grave, weepie feature.

You know times have changed when an adulterous wife is no longer seen as either an off-mainstream focus area or the target of compulsory, lengthy sermonising if she is featured in mainstream cinema. You know times have changed when a male star of Irrfan’s stature merrily plays a chap whose daily routine includes jerking off at the workplace.

You know times have not changed enough when the non-judgemental tone of the film suddenly, without a perceivable progression leading up to that point, turns selectively judgemental towards the woman and sympathetic towards the man with Amitabh Bhattacharya’s lyrics of Bewafa beauty. Sample this: Kul mila ke saiyyanji ke / Achchhe sanskaar thhe / Sajaniya ke lakshan lekin / Thhode tadipaar thhe... (Very roughly: He was, by and large, a nice guy with the right values / she was the sort to go astray.)

The messaging is oblique (Dev and Reena are not present when the song plays) but unmistakable.

Blackmail then is an engaging but flawed tragi-comedy of errors.

Rating (out of five stars): **

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

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/bollywood/blackmail-movie-review-irrfan-and-co-drive-this-engaging-but-flawed-tragi-comedy-of-errors-4420427.html

Poster courtesy:

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackmail_(2018_film)

(2) https://www.facebook.com/irrfanofficial/

(3) https://www.facebook.com/KirtiKulhariOfficial/

Release date:	Kerala: March 23, 2018 Delhi: April 6, 2018
Director:	Zakariya
Cast: Language:	Soubin Shahir, Samuel Abiola Robinson, Savithri Shreedharan, Sarasa Balussery, Navas Vallikkunnu, K.T.C. Abdulla Malayalam

Samuel Abiola Robinson is a Nigerian footballer recruited by a club in Kerala’s Malappuram district. Although Africans are a familiar sight on sports fields here, Sudani from Nigeria makes it clear that locals have limited knowledge about the continent and are unaccustomed to social encounters with its people. How unaccustomed becomes evident when Samuel is variously described as Nigerian, Ugandan and Sudanese/Sudani, that last label inspiring the nickname Sudu. Hence the film’s title.

When Samuel/Sudu is injured in an accident, his already cash-strapped club manager Majid Rahman is forced to rope in his own mother to nurse the young man back to health at home. As he lies bed-ridden in Majid’s house, the affable Sudu becomes a curiosity among the local populace. Sudani from Nigeriastays with the two men through Sudu’s recovery and Majid’s professional and personal battles.

Kerala’s passion for football provides the backdrop to their relationship, but this is not so much a sports film as a slice of life in the state and an ode to basic human decency.

Financial compulsions are what initially prompt Majid to host Sudu, but as time goes by a genuine tenderness develops between the manager, his work associates, friends, family and the foreigner in their midst. Even the inquisitiveness of strangers turns to concern as everyone gradually becomes invested in Sudu’s welfare.

The friendly equation that evolves between Sudu and the Malayalis around him is the most winning aspect of this film, especially coming as it does at a time when inhumanity is rearing its head aggressively across the globe.

Director Zakariya has adopted a naturalistic style of storytelling for his debut feature. So convincingare the goings-on on screen that this feels less like drama designed for celluloid and more like life transposed on to it. So credible is the cast that if Soubin Shahir, who plays Majid, were not a star, it might have been assumed that all the artistes had been plucked out of reality and planted in this narrative.

Shahir is in spiffing form as Majid, representing Everyman in Kerala society with such aplomb that this could well be a live telecast from a randomly chosen period with a random sample of the population in God’s Own Country.

Nigerian actor Samuel Abiola Robinson (who shares his name with the character he plays) is unaffected before the camera. He has a tough task at hand since the language barrier means Sudu has far less dialogues than Majid, and since his characterisation is the weakest part of the screenplay. The actor’s boyish charm overrides these hurdles though.

The scene-stealers of the entire loveable cast are theatre artistes Savithri Shreedharan and Sarasa Balussery playing Majid’s darling mother Jamila and her best friend Beeyumma respectively. Their spot-on dialogue delivery, flawless timing and the way they mine their innate, earthy charm, are nothing short of acting genius.

The last time I remember experiencing such a high from the casting of a film was when Angamaly Diaries was released in 2017.

These life-like performances would not have been possible without the brilliance of Muhsin Parari and Zakariya’s screenplay aided by Noufal Abdullah’s sharp editing.

It would be remiss of me though not to point out that the writing airbrushes reality as it marches purposefully towards its goal of restoring faith in humanity. We are a racist, colour-prejudiced nation that is cruel even to dark-skinned fellow Indians. Kerala is no different in this respect. Yet in Sudani from Nigeria, reactions to Sudu are confined to the wide-eyed curiosity of innocent country folk.

That attitude was believable in last year’s Godha where the outsider being welcomed was a light-skinned, light-eyed north Indian arriving in Kerala, not a black African. Do Jamilas and Majids exist? Of course they do. Let us be frank though: if such characters in real life do not have their own biases to overcome on meeting a Sudu, they would certainly have to contend with the biases of others. Sudani would have been a more accurate film if it had taken this truth into account.

It would have also been more well-rounded if the incredible depth that the screenplay brings to the Indian characters was present in the writing of their Nigerian friend. We are given details of Sudu’s background through a flashback in his voice when the camera actually travels to Africa, but that is not what depth of characterisation is about.

At the end of Sudani from Nigeria, I felt I knew Majid, Jamila, Beeyumma and their whole gang as if they were my old pals. Sudu remained a uni-dimensional concept though, a result, no doubt, of the writers using him almost solely as a device via which to tell a tale of rustic Indian virtue. I kept waiting for him to cease to be an outsider in the filmmaker’s gaze, but that does not happen.

Parari and Zakariya obviously do have the nuance and skill to cover these angles without diluting their sunshiney worldview. Note the statement they make on communal harmony throughout Sudani from Nigeriawithout spelling it out in black and white. Or how they paint an endearing portrait of a Muslim community – sorely needed as Islamophobia engulfs India – without overtly stressing their religious identity. How they foreground a female friendship, that too between two elderly women, on a cinematic landscape known for male-bonding flicks, the marginalisation of women in general and ageist apathy towards older women. Or how they turn the evil stepmother stereotype on its head.

In fact, the unobtrusiveness of its multiple political assertions is one of the nicest things about Sudani from Nigeria.

Despite his vast, transcontinental canvas,Zakariya manages to give Sudani an air of delicate smallness that is essential to maintaining its sense of warmth and intimacy. This would not have been possible without director of photography Shyju Khalid who manages an admirable balancing act here, giving us ample evidence of the region’s natural beauty even while steering clear of showy camerawork, tempting though it must have been considering the spectacular setting.

All these elements combined make Sudani from Nigeria a heartwarming journey. This is a wryly funny, sad film about unlikely friendships and empathy for another.

Parari and Zakariya have mastered the art of laughing with a community instead of at them. The manner in which the people mingle and mangle Malayalam and English in their bid to converse with Sudu is utterly hysterical. Never though do the writers adopt a patronising tone towards these characters.

The comical fallout of communication and miscommunication might have gotten tiring after a while if that is all there was to Sudani from Nigeria. Thankfully not. The film is about how well-intentioned folk will always find a way around language barriers and a reminder that human goodness has survived centuries of batterings.

(Spoiler alert) Nothing underlines this point more beautifully than Jamila’s insistence on conducting some sort of memorial when Sudu’s relative passes away in Nigeria, and her refusal to relent when Majid argues that they are Muslim whereas Sudu is Christian and therefore their rituals would be different. The old lady’s intention – to help Sudu heal – and Sudu’s acceptance of her kindness instead of getting bogged down by their religious differences, translates into one of the most serene, life-affirming passages to be seen on film. (Spoiler alert ends)

In so many ways, Sudani from Nigeria is a soothing balm for the soul in our fractured world.

Rating (out of five stars): ***

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	123 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/sudani-from-nigeria-movie-review-an-ode-to-human-decency-a-balm-for-the-soul-in-a-fractured-world-4422731.html

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudani_from_Nigeria

Release date:	April 6, 2018
Director:	Sharrath Sandith
Cast: Language:	Mammootty, Miya George, Iniya, Siddique, Suraj Venjaramoodu, Prabhakar, Sudheer Karamana, Alencier Ley Lopez, Irshad, Muthumani Malayalam

Alex Philipose, played by Mammootty, is a model prisoner. He is a natural leader of his prison mates, the guards trust him, yet mysteriously, his son hates him to the core. What could such a nice guy have possibly done to invite such animosity from his own progeny?

After clichéd opening sequences of bonhomie among those confined with him and maudlin allusions to their backgrounds, Parole– inspired by a true story, we are told – spends its time on a flashback to Alex’s youth, the circumstances that brought him to prison and earned the wrath of his only child. The latter half is devoted to his activities in the outside world, when he finally gets a break from those heavily guarded walls.

To its credit, Parole does have a little more in terms of story than most Mammootty films of recent years. Another positive is that though director Sharrath Sandith is decidedly aware of the superstar on his team, he is not as embarrassingly gleeful about his casting achievement as too many others who have worked with Mammukka for a while now. Sandith, therefore, does not get the actor to preen and pose around as they have.

So it has to be said that though Parole is no great shakes as cinema, it could have been worse. Far worse. It could have been White or The Great Father. At least Mammootty – so splendid when he decides to surrender his stardom to a script, so self-conscious when his scripts surrender to his stature – does not disgrace himself as much here as he has in those two. Not quite as much, though he does for the nth time play the lover of a woman played by a female actor nearly 40 years his junior (Iniya) while his sister is played by another young enough to be his granddaughter (Miya George).

Give me a minute to recover from those amusing, saddening images, which bring up the memory of Aishwarya Rai as the sister of Amitabh Bachchan’s character in 2002’s Hum Kisise Kum Nahin, and numerous other legendary male stars who have made fools of themselves in a similar fashion down the decades.

Still, when it is slim pickings out there, Parole stands out for being better (read: less cringe-worthy) than the rest and Mammootty for being less studied in his performance here than usual. The film’s failing is its generic nature. First, Alex’s childhood is recounted as if some grand story is being told, though the grandeur is confined to Mammootty’s baritone, not the actual content. A sliver of Communism is thrown in because it suits the popular mood, I guess. A song and dance is initially made of the ideology, but it is pretty irrelevant to the character’s motivations, convictions and future.

Alex’s father (Alencier Ley Lopez) is a Communist leader. A mother and siblings are given short shrift. The focus is on his half sister – a daughter the old man had outside marriage – and a wife Alex himself acquires at some point.

I could give you details, but the truth is Ajith Poojappura’s writing feels tired. There is a scene in Parole exemplifying its predictability: Alex is talking to a priest in a church corridor when he hears the sound of women singing. As he walks slowly towards their voices, you know, just know that he will turn a corner, see the ladies and spot among them a much younger woman dancing in slow motion, waiting there for him to fall in love with her. She is. He does.

As for what happens to Alex when he is out on parole, it is such a contrived, strained attempt to build suspense and sympathy for the protagonist, that it is a yawn.

The only interesting part of Parole is the series of events leading to the crime that results in Alex’s conviction. They involve his wife Annie, half sister Katharina and her husband Varghese (Suraj Venjaramoodu). The dynamic between these four briefly lifts the film above its ordinariness. The fact that Annie is not demonised for her objection to the manner in which Alex indulges Katharina and Varghese is also unusual for a Mollywood in which the wife-as-a-nagging-yakshi is a beloved stereotype.

Here though comes the most simultaneously disturbing and gratifying part. Men whacking wives is par for the course in Malayalam cinema (as it is, tragically, in Kerala society) and filmmakers are rarely censorious towards such men. A man hits his wife in Parole with tragic consequences, but for most of the film he is projected as a paavam who is faultless in the entire affair. This disgraceful attitude underlines the casualness with which domestic violence is viewed by Mollywood and its core audience. Unexpectedly though, late in the film, the fellow acknowledges that it was wrong to strike his spouse. Since such an admission is uncommon, for those few seconds when he uttered those words, my glass was half full as much as it was half empty.

The debutant director struggles to compact the superstar to fit the size his screenplay demands, and therefore scales up the narration to match Mammootty’s stardom. So, while he tries to keep his tone real through large parts of the film, he feels compelled to give Alex a conventional, all-drums-beating introductory moment, and S. Lokanathan’s cinematography is needlessly flashy, delivering repetitive and irrelevant aerial shots of the gorgeous landscapes Alex inhabits in his lifetime.

It is hard to believe that an industry churning out films of the calibre of Sudani from Nigeria and S. Durga (formerly Sexy Durga), both of which are in theatres right now, only has such qualitatively abysmal or average scripts to offer a stalwart. Parole is not Mammootty’s worst, but if you have seen him at his best, you have to wonder what on earth he is thinking when he picks scripts these days – or whether he is thinking at all.

Rating (out of five stars): *

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	150 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/parole-movie-review-as-generic-as-most-mammootty-films-these-days-but-not-his-worst-4423639.html

Poster courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/ParoleMalayalamMovie/

Release date:	Kerala: March 23, 2018 Delhi: April 6, 2018
Director:	Sanal Kumar Sashidharan
Cast: Language:	Rajshri Deshpande, Kannan Nayar, Vedh, Sujeesh K.S., Arunsol, Bilas Nair, Nisthar Ahamed, Baiju Netto Malayalam

In terms of conventional storyline, this is all there is to S Durga: a man and woman on a lonely road in Kerala get a lift from two menacing creeps.

Yet, in expanding that one sentence into a big-screen feature, Sanal Kumar Sashidharan serves up a universe of meaning that tears the mask off the dual-purpose woman-as-goddess trope that patriarchy holds out to women as a carrot and, simultaneously, stick.

Durga in this film is both the ordinary woman on the street and the mighty deity of the Hindu pantheon. She is the creature that society seeks to subjugate even while it worships her fearsome namesake in temples.

When we first meet the human Durga of this tale (played by Rajshri Deshpande), she is standing by a deserted road, waiting. From her body language, even from a distance, you can see that she is anxious. Her male friend Kabeer (Kannan Nayar) arrives, they set off walking towards the railway station, and shortly thereafter hitch a ride from a passing van.

What follows is one of the most bizarre games ever played on film. The men in the van taunt Durga and Kabeer, make salacious insinuations about their relationship, bully and terrorise them in various ways, yet continuously claim that they are concerned about their safety. Even as they prepare to pounce on the protagonist, they insist on addressing her as “Chechi” and repeatedly warn her of the dangers outside their vehicle.

It is a sport that is at once weird and fascinating, a frighteningly symbolic depiction of the protector-cum-predator role that men – and female allies of patriarchy – play in the lives of women. Durga and Kabeer’s claustrophobia in that van is almost palpable. The men troubling them are another avatar of the khap panchayat issuing directives to curb women, purportedly to save us from marauding men; the husband who will not tolerate a stranger eyeing his wife but thinks nothing of raping her himself day after day.

Game-playing is a device Sashidharan seems to favour. In his last film, Ozhivudivasathe Kali (An Off-Day Game), a group of men on a break in a forest lodge hold a little contest among themselves that reeks of their patriarchal, caste and class prejudices. A woman escapes their clutches by the skin of her teeth, but their match has fatal consequences for another person on the scene.

In S Durga, we do not actually see the men physically molesting Durga, but the film is designed to fill us with a sense of foreboding on her behalf – an unsettling feeling that rears its head the second we see her standing alone at night on that desolate street, a feeling women know all too well.

Parallel to Durga and Kabeer’s journey, a religious procession unfolds in the film. Even before we meet these two, we are shown a tableau bearing a statue of a demon-slaying avatar of Goddess Shakti. Around her, a procession of live men offer up their bodies for torture. They pierce spears through their mouths and dangle from hooks passed through their skin.

These religious devotees are relayed to us unrelentingly, in documentary style, for almost 10 minutes at the start of S Durga. It is as difficult to watch them as it is to see the men in the van doing a dance of intimidation around Durga and Kabeer.

The divine Shakti is known in her multiple manifestations as Durga, Kali, Bhadrakali, Parvathi and more. Even as the pageant in the film kicks off, a male worshipper briefly harasses a woman bystander. His action is so fleeting and seemingly jestful, that you will miss it if you blink an eye. It is one of many telling moments in this multi-layered film.

S Durga’s overt messaging is about the hypocrisy of men who will pay tribute to a mythical female being even as they suppress and assault her mortal equivalents. For all her legendary ferocity, Durga in that parade and in houses of worship is but a statue that does not inconvenience earthly males in the way assertive, rights-conscious, articulate earthly females do.

Sashidharan’s is an all-encompassing feminism that alerts us to the perils of patriarchy for uncooperative men, and recognises this system as a sub-set of all marginalisation. A solitary Durga would have drawn attention because it is deemed unacceptable for her to be on her own, but here in S Durga she is judged for being with a man, she is also judged for her background and his religious identity.

Her name is Hindu. Her speech suggests that she is a north Indian, which in south India immediately attracts another form of othering. His name implies that he is Muslim, which brings up another volley of prejudice. No one says the ugly words “love jihad” but it hangs thick in the air.

(Possible spoilers ahead)

Kabeer initially introduces himself by the Hindu name Kannan to the occupants of the van – an instinctive self-protection mechanism adopted by many minorities, but most especially by Muslims in a contemporary world engulfed by Islamophobia.

The most poignant commentary on the helplessness of persecuted communities comes from a scene in which two householders hear a hubbub and step out of their gates to find out what is going on, see Durga and Kabeer surrounded in the distance, and quietly get back inside.

This is a film that should compel even the most sensitive viewers among us to introspect because, without wanting to, we might find ourselves getting frustrated with Durga and Kabeer, and unwittingly asking questions that victim-blamers always ask. Why on earth did you get into that vehicle? Get out. Don’t get out. Can you not see how treacherous that road is? If you must elope, must you do so at this hour? Go to the police. Oh wait, don’t.

Here’s the thing: the road, the van, the home, the police station – when each of these spaces is fraught with risks for women and inter-community couples, when those who are not active participants in injustice choose to be silent spectators, where are they/we to go?

My one problem with the film is its sound design. I realise it is meant to be an accurate representation of a highway with all its accompanying sounds, but the strain on the ears becomes too much in places as we struggle to hear whispers vying with loud music and passing vehicles. That said, S Durga is compelling despite this challenge. That it was made without a written script makes it even more admirable.

In case you missed the headlines it has earned so far, for the record, S Durga is the film formerly known as Sexy Durga, which Smriti Irani’s Information and Broadcasting Ministry did cartwheels to axe from IFFI last year. After a series of ups and downs – awards in India and abroad, clashes with the Ministry and the Central Board of Film Certification, and a favourable intervention by the Kerala High Court– it was finally released in mainstream theatres in Kerala last month and has come to halls outside the state this week.

Although the sarkar and the Board claimed that the title Sexy Durga would hurt Hindu sentiments, a viewing of the film reveals their more likely, unstated concerns. S Durga is not just an unnerving commentary on patriarchy, it is a cutting indictment of a society and establishment that perpetuate, participate in or unprotestingly accept all forms of social prejudice.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	89 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/s-durga-movie-review-a-chilling-expose-of-patriarchys-woman-as-goddess-trope-4424355.html

Related article by Anna M.M. Vetticad: Sexy Durga or S Durga? How the government’s reaction proves the verypoint the film makes

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S_Durga

Release date:	April 13, 2018
Director:	Shoojit Sircar
Cast: Language:	Varun Dhawan, Banita Sandhu, Gitanjali Rao, Ashish Ghosh, Isha Chaturvedi, Sahil Vadoliya, Prateek Kapoor, Nimmi Raphael, Shekhar Murugan, Iteeva Pandey, Karamveer Kanwar, Rachica Oswal Hindi

In tone, apparent intent and the nerves it touches, this week’s Bollywood release October brings to mind Althaf Salim’s 2017 Mollywood film Njandukalude Nattil Oridavela(An Interval In The Land of Crabs), a low-key entertainer about a family grappling with cancer in their midst. It requires immense finesse to treat such a subject with humour, yet not be insensitive or gross. In another setting and with another theme, Octobermanages to do just that.

When the mother’s diagnosis was revealed in Njandukalude, I remember thinking: “What kind of jerk makes a comedy about cancer?” The answer came by the end of the film: the sort who understands the inexpressible, inexplicable aura that envelops us when tragedy strikes and life seems to come to a standstill yet goes on, with all the accompanying smiles, tensions and tears; the sort who understands that it is possible to affectionately laugh at people’s quirks without mocking them or their circumstances.

Like Salim, writer Juhi Chaturvedi and director Shoojit Sircar are “that kind of jerk”.

Their October draws us into the world of a young hotel management trainee in Delhi called Danish Walia a.k.a. Dan (Varun Dhawan), a somewhat silly, impetuous, immature, angsty, antsy, exasperating, good-hearted know-it-all that you cannot help but love. He is, when we are introduced to him, a 20-something man-child skating on thin ice with his employers for all too frequently exploding at irritants that in professional circumstances require icy “the customer (or the boss) is always right” detachment.

Dan does not do detachment well. And so, when his colleague Shiuli Iyer (Banita Sandhu) slips into a coma after a freak accident, he finds himself far more disturbed by the calamity than even her best friend. Shiuli was/is a nice girl, but hardly his closest buddy. Dan cannot get his mind off her though when he discovers that her last words before she was injured were, “Where is Dan?”

October is a mellow drama shorn of conventionally filmic twists and turns. It is tough to explain because it needs to be felt. Through its running time of less than two hours, it shares with us the bonds Dan develops with Shiuli’s mother and siblings who are strangers to him until this personal ordeal brings them together, the support offered by those around him, the effect Shiuli’s condition has on his work and more.

It is a film that appears to say little while saying so much. It is about the prospect of bereavement bringing out facets of us that we did not know existed. About the loss of someone whose relationship with you has not – or not yet – been socially defined. Dan is asked more than once whether he is Shiuli’s boyfriend. If not father, brother, boyfriend or husband, then what? Must he be one of these to mourn her?

How can he explain that she was his what-might-have-been, the quiet classmate who was possibly interested in him while he was too dense to notice? In some ways his struggle to put a finger on his feelings and his inability to articulate them brings to mind Devi in Neeraj Ghaywan’s Masaan (Hindi, 2015) grieving the death of the boy with whom she had a brief amorous tryst in a seedy hotel room, a chap to whom she was no one in society’s eyes but who felt like someone to her.

As were Vicky Donor (2012) and Piku (2015)– both Juhi Chaturvedi-Shoojit Sircar collaborations – Octobertoo is a sharply observant film about small joys, small conversations and empathy. As much as it is about its overriding theme, it is also about that hospital employee who chats intimately with a patient’s friend late one night because he hangs around so much that it feels like they know each other well; the mother who can confide in this boy she only just met, more than those who have known her all her life; the uncle who does not realise that his well-intended pragmatism about Shiuli could hurt those closest to her.

It is about friends whose frustration with you rivals their fondness. It is about how different people cope differently when life throws curve balls at them, and realising that Ishani who asks Dan, “Kuchh zyaada hi affected nahin ho raha hai tu?” (Are you not getting too affected by Shiuli’s accident?) may love Shiuli no less than Dan who replies, on seeing his gang go about their lives as if it is business as usual: “Tum log itne unaffected kaise ho?” (How come you are so unaffected?)

The success of October’s writing and acting lies in the fact that each of these people is so utterly real, and the story so utterly relatable.

The best cinema reminds us of our own life experiences even when our scripts do not literally match. I confess that the night after watching October, I tossed and turned in bed for hours before waking up in tears, remembering difficult questions about a beloved relative that once confronted me in what now seems a lifetime ago. Of course I am not Dan and this is not the same thing, yet October causing those emotions to well up inside me is an indicator of its resonance with realities other than its own.

Like Chaturvedi and Sircar’s previous team-ups, this one too marks a new turning point in Bollywood, where the lines between offbeat and mainstream are continuously blurring. As much as we celebrate such an experimental film coming from a financially successful director, it is worth celebrating the fact that an actor as hard-core commercial as Varun Dhawan has chosen to star in it. In a filmography dominated by the likes of Student of the Year (2012) and Judwaa 2 (2017), it is interesting to see Dhawan stirring the mix at this early stage of his career with riskier ventures like Badlapur (2015) and this one.

Sircar is good for Dhawan. The director mines his leading man’s innocent charm well for this role, and Dhawan himself makes every effort to efface his starry swagger and trademark cutesiness to play Dan. There are fleeting moments when the latter does peek through in his dialogue delivery, but for the most part the actor hits the nail on the head with his performance.

Casting director Jogi deserves a trophy for finding October’s outstanding supporting actors. Banita Sandhu deserves another for rising to the challenge of playing a character who, for the most part, has nothing to do but be motionless. In the few minutes we get with Shiuli before she is bed-ridden, Sandhu ensures that we like her enough to stay invested in her till the end, and later brings alive even that frail creature lying helpless in bed.

October is that rare example of a film in which every single actor is remarkable, every single character memorably written and acted. While each one has stayed with me, a special mention must go to the fabulous Gitanjali Rao who plays Shiuli’s mother Vidya Iyer, an IIT professor and single mother.

As you watch Dan repeatedly messing up on the job, it is hard to believe that a five-star hotel would retain this troublesome fellow as long as Radisson Dwarka holds on to him, but Chaturvedi’s writing and the acting by the lovely Prateek Kapoor make Dan’s immediate boss Asthana so believable, that even that improbability comes across as probable.

October is not a film in a hurry, its pace entirely mirroring the painstaking healing process that Shiuli goes through. Seasons change, Avik Mukhopadhayay’s camera closes in on tired faces and moves back to capture pretty pictures of a city that is a lot more than the “concrete jungle” stereotype now attached to urban spaces.

Sircar gives us time to take in the enchanting detailing heoffers: the bougainvillea tree laden thick with pink blossoms in a splendid full frame, the mother whose demeanour in the classroom does not betray the trauma she is dealing with back home, a Delhi that is far more multicultural than most Bollywood films set here seem to realise. The Malayali nurse (Nimmi Raphael), the Bengali neurologist (Ashish Ghosh), the Tamilian professor explaining why her daughter has a Bangla name – their presence makes October far more representative of the real Delhi than Punjabi-obsessed Bollywood usually acknowledges.

Sircar’s latest film is a sweet-sad-funny saga of love, loss and coping. It has been many hours since I watched it and I am still lost in its poetic realism.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	116 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/bollywood/october-movie-review-varun-dhawans-innocent-charm-sits-well-with-this-sweet-sad-funny-film-4429839.html

Poster courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/OctoberFilm2018/

Release date:	April 14, 2018
Director:	Rathish Ambat
Cast: Language:	Dileep, Siddharth, Namitha Pramod, Murali Gopy, Andy Von Eich, Divya Prabha, Bobby Simha, Shweta Menon, Indrans, Vijayaraghavan, Vinay Forrt, Siddique, Baiju, Sudheer Karamana, Simarjeet Singh Nagra Malayalam

A film within this film falsely lionises a politician and ends up boosting his party’s electoral fortunes.

At a conceptual level,writer Murali Gopy’s Kammara Sambhavam directed by Rathish Ambat, is apt for our troubled times. The saga of a contemporary neta/party untruthfully claiming to have played a pivotal role in the Indian Independence movement rings a bell loud and clear. Napoleon Bonaparte’s words flashing on screen right at the end – “History is a set of lies agreed upon” – perfectly encapsulate the point made by the storyline until then, about a victor peddling his version of the past to the hapless masses.

The value of a message is greatly dependent on the sincerity of those delivering it though. And by slipping its own insensitive insinuation into a conversation in its closing moments, Kammara Sambhavam vastly dilutes its worth.

In that crucial scene, Kammaran Vishwambaran Nambiar (Dileep) – a traitor who has just recently been hero-ised on the big screen – tells his cohorts that they can quietly work on their agenda if they distract the public by getting a woman to accuse a high-profile man of sexual violence. The throwaway remark sans qualifiers would have been distasteful in any context, considering how the bogey of false cases has long been used to muddy the waters for millions of victims of rape, molestation and harassment. It is particularly disgusting in this specific context because of the real-life case in which Dileep is currently embroiled, in which he is charged with orchestrating an attack on a female colleague.

Dileep makes it tough for viewers to separate the artist from his art when he blatantly sneaks a potshot at his accuser into a fictional film.

Now make of that what you will.

Kammara Sambhavamis divided into two distinct halves. Pre-interval, in the present day, the members of the Indian Liberation Party, ILP (played by Vijayaraghavan, Sudheer Karamana, Baiju and Vinay Forrt) approach the hit Tamil director Pulikesi (Bobby Simha) to make a film on their ageing party patriarch Kammaran. ILP was a small armed force set up by Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose to fight the British colonisers, but it is now a political party.

(Possible spoilers ahead)

In this portion, Kammaran recalls his story during World War II, complete with his lies and machinations among the people of his village, his obsequiousness towards the British, his extreme caste prejudice, his longing for the beautiful Bhanumathi (Namitha Pramod) who does not reciprocate his feelings and his raging, all-consuming, well-disguised simmering jealousy towards the man she loves, ILP leader Othenan Nambiar (Siddharth) who is the son of another man Kammaran hates, the cruel and exploitative Kelu Nambiar (played by Gopy himself).

Despite the grim proceedings, this part is often amusing and sometimes outright hilarious as the protagonist’s ignorance, biases and manipulations are gradually revealed. It is also made evident here that Kammaran has zero interest in India’s freedom.

Post-interval, we sit with an audience in a hall viewing Pulikesi’s propaganda biopic on the man. The filmmaker paints a portrait of Kammaran that even Kammaran cannot recognise. Since those who know the truth are either dead or complicit in the lie, the public is successfully deceived.

(Spoiler alert ends)

Overall, Kammara Sambhavam is a reasonably entertaining film, not the least because Ambat more or less controls Dileep’s hammy tendencies and manages to use the actor’s naturally bland personality well. Dileep is therefore convincing as the slimy Kammaran of the first half. And when called upon to play the glamorous Kammaran of the second, he is given a thick beard, dark glasses, an attention-getting quirk and swish attire to build him up to being someone the actor and the character are not.

The rest of the cast needs no such crutches. Namitha Pramod is both striking to look at and a subtle performer. Gopy is convincing as an evil fellow you cannot even briefly sympathise with despite the ugly villainy of his bête noir. In a comparatively tiny role, Indrans displays his acting chops when he steals a scene in which the casting of Kammaran’s biopic is being discussed.

Tamil-Telugu star Siddharth, making his Malayalam debut here, is a pleasantly polished contrast to Dileep. His Malayalam diction needs improvement, but the fact that he dubbed for himself is worth commending since it shows a willingness to take risks and a desire to evolve. Besides, Siddharth is always easy on the eye.

There is an interesting tonal split in Kammara Sambhavam between fact and its distorted, fictionalised depiction. The film within the film is intentionally farcical, energetic and spiced up, and every actor featured in it (Dileep, Siddharth, Shweta Menon) is required to be over the top. Outside that celluloid take on events, the tone is more understated.

However, that romantic song and dance interlude with Bhanu in Kammaran’s imagination jars when it is forced into the first half. If Ambat’s goal is to laugh at commercial cinema even while participating in it himself, he cannot expect to be excused for resorting to one of the country’s most worn-out cinematic clichés. Besides, the director does not manage to entirely pull off the effort at relative understatement before the interval. To make matters worse, the sub-par European actor playing the British officer stationed in Kammaran’s village (his name is Andy Von Eich) robs the narrative of finesse whenever he is around, which is a lot.

The production design too is inexplicably inconsistent. On the one hand, we get some sophisticated battle scenes shot in low light, including a neatly done sequence where a bunch of men are seen in silhouette in the night fighting each other against a backdrop of a blue-back sky. On the other hand, the village settlement looks too glaringly set-like and artificial, which takes the punch out of an important passage where the paths of the story’s multiple players – the locals, the ILP, the British and Kelu Nambiar – intersect during an uncontrollable blaze.

Kammara Sambhavanremains fairly engaging despite these weak patches, which could perhaps have been forgiven in favour of its purportedly hard-hitting theme. It is impossible though to ignore the film’s lack of commitment to its own cause. Let us spell it out for Rathish Ambat and Murali Gopy: you cannot mock propaganda while being a vehicle for it yourself.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	182 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/kammara-sambhavam-movie-review-the-dileep-starrer-mocks-propaganda-while-peddling-its-own-ugly-insinuation-4432495.html

Poster courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/ActorDileep/

Release date:	April 20, 2018
Director:	Faraz Haider
Cast: Language:	Abhay Deol, Patralekhaa, Rajesh Sharma, Manu Rishi Chadha, Himani Shivpuri, Brijendra Kala Hindi

Although Abhay Deol is the leading man of Nanu Ki Jaanu (Nanu’s Beloved), the film belongs, in my ’umble opinion, to Rajesh Sharma. In what appears to be subliminal messaging snuck in by this brilliant character artiste, in a scene towards the end where he is supposed to be weeping, he turns his head gently sideways and gives the impression that he is masking a laugh. Whether or not this was his intention, it feels like an encrypted note aimed at the viewer, with Sharma’s expression seeming to say: I cannot believe I am actually working on this bizarre nonsense AND you dunces are watching it!

The other two actors in this scene, Deol and Patralekhaa, on the other hand, try to look invested in the film till it takes its last gasping, rasping breath. It is tempting to ask why they bothered at all, but the truth is, I can see what they might have spotted in the project’s concept.

Nanu Ki Jaanu is a remake of the 2014 Tamil hit Pisaasu (Devil). Although the original is not named in this one’s credits, its producer Bala and director Mysskin are listed in the acknowledgements, and the story is credited to Mysskin. I have not seen Pisaasu, but from the trailer and reviews it comes across as a somber horror flick that Faraz Haider decided to turn into a horror comedy for Hindi audiences.

The idea is not bad at all – since rationalists brush aside the possibility that ghosts exist, it makes sense to make a film that pokes fun at those who believe in spooks. And frankly, sizeable parts of Nanu Ki Jaanu’s middle portion are quite uproarious. When viewed from start to finish though, the kindest thing that can be said about it is that it is uneven.

Haider’s introduction hints at a film that is vastly different from what it turns out to be. The director also fails to make a credible transition from the humorous passages to the grave latter part. And the end is maudlin to the point of being embarrassingly silly.

In the opening moments, Nanu (Deol) and his gang barge into the house of an elderly gentleman, and threaten him into signing a flat’s ownership over to them for a pittance. The scene is trying too hard to be amusing, but is not.

Cue: change in tone: shabby ‘item’ song.

Cue: change in tone: Nanu is driving down a main road when he stops to take a call on his cellphone and sees a crowd running towards a woman (Patralekhaa) lying bleeding on the ground, her scooter beside her. Since no one else does anything but stare, Nanu rushes her to a hospital where she dies on arrival, her hand in his as life ebbs out of her body.

The episode leaves the ruffian shaken and, much to his gang’s dismay, too soft to lead them through the house-grabbing assignments that follow. What comes next is a bunch of laughs interspersed smoothly with scares as we try to figure out with Nanu & Co whether he is genuinely suffering from a psychological problem or the ghost of the dead girl is actually haunting his Noida flat.

Just as it seems like Nanu Ki Jaanu might add up to something after all… Cue: change in tone: love angle.

Cue: change in tone: messages.

Cue: change in tone: lively song with end credits.

The middle bits are fun. The scene involving the redoubtable Manu Rishi Chadha’s character Dabbu trying to scare off the spook is a scream. Chadha brings to that very long segment all the comical depth that made Hindi film-goers sit up and take notice of him in Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! (2008) and Phas Gaye Re Obama (2010). (Note: he is also this film’s screenplay and dialogue writer.)

Haider’s direction is too ham-fisted to make optimum use of his talented cast though, making Nanu Ki Jaanu a bumpy ride, until it gets to its it’s-so-bad-that-it-is-good finale.

Deol, who started off with such promise in films like Socha Na Tha(2005) and Oye Lucky, has featured in very few good projects since then. The beguiling innocence he brought to those early works and the finesse of his performance in the more recent Shanghai (2012), is proof enough that he cannot be written off. His performance in Nanu Ki Jaanu is uninspired though.

Patralekhaa, who shone in Hansal Mehta’s Citylights (2014), has almost nothing to do in this film. Sharma seems to give up part way through it. Only Chadha crackles till the end.

Parts of Nanu Ki Jaanu feel as if the production team stopped bothering with it. If you have spent money on making a film, how much would it cost you to throw some extras into a hospital scene? Or to consult grammar experts before flashing “After Few Days” and “After Few Week” on screen to indicate the passing of time?

And oh ya, Messrs Haider and Chadha, if you want to pack in messaging about beef terrorism, speaking on cellphones while driving and helmets for two-wheeler drivers, please do not make it all sound so contrived. Granted though that the point about domestic violence is well – and subtly – made.

The crux of this entire affair is that Nanu Ki Jaanu is unsure of what it wants to be, the team lacks the ability to make it everything they want it to be, and the film therefore ends up flailing its arms all over the place. It is scary in a few parts and funny in more, which is why it is so sad that in the overall assessment and especially in its finale, it turns out to be such a loosely handled, low-IQ mess.

Rating (out of five stars): *

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	133 minutes

A version of this review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/bollywood/nanu-ki-jaanu-movie-review-abhay-deol-is-uninspired-at-best-in-this-loosely-handled-low-iq-mess-4439207.html

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanu_Ki_Jaanu

Release date:	Kerala: March 31, Delhi: April 20, 2018
Director:	Tinu Pappachan
Cast: Language:	Antony Varghese, Chemban Vinod Jose, Vinayakan, Tito Wilson, Sinoj Varghese, Aswathy Manoharan, Lijo Jose Pellissery Malayalam

When a film’s leading man is Antony Varghese, the handsome hottie who shot to fame as Vincent Pepe in last year’sgroundbreaking hit Angamaly Diaries; when Angamaly’s director Lijo Jose Pellissery and writer Chemban Vinod Jose are its co-producers; when Pellissery has a cameo in this film, Jose a major supporting role, and another important character is played by Tito Wilsonwho was Angamaly’s U-Clamp Rajan; when the same technical team is on board here too; and when Pellissery’s associate on that project, Tinu Pappachan, is the director of this one, of course speculation will arise, as it has, about possible similarities between the two films.

So let us get this question out of the way first: no, Pappachan’s debut directorial venture, Swathanthriyam Ardharathriyil,bears no resemblance to Angamaly Diaries.

That 2017 film was an earthy, profoundly insightful take on gory gang wars in a Kerala town. This one is an action thriller set in a jail complex as a new inmate plans a break.

Antony Varghese plays Jacob, a finance firm employee who ends up behind bars for a bloody crime involving a policeman and linked to the woman he loves (Aswathy Manoharan). As soon as he enters this all-male universe, he starts trying to get out.

The film is as much a series of observations on the experience of being a prisoner suffering filthy toilets, mucky food and constant aggression, as it is about the protagonist’s escape strategy. Its title, which means “Freedom At Midnight”, refers to the date (August 15) and time Jacob chooses to take flight.

To say that Swathanthriyam Ardharathriyil is elegantlyshot is stating the obvious. Girish Gangadharan is one of Mollywood’s finest cinematographers, and his approximately 11-minutes-long uncut single shot of two rival groups battling it out on a crowded street during a jampacked church festival in Angamaly Diariesis still fresh in public memory.

He seems to be enjoying himself in Swathanthriyam Ardharathriyil, playing around with the rain, close-ups of faces and the hero’s pretty eyes. Those frames provide a telling contrast to an arresting aerial view of the jail that highlights its sparseness in comparison with the verdant surroundings and the isolation of its inmates from the bustling world outside. The camera pulls out to that shot in an attention-getting staccato manner.

Gangadharan is at his astonishing best during a ferocious fist fight between two men in a muddy underground tunnel. Shameer Muhammed’s editing sleekly interlaces those orange-lit shots with the stillness and gray-blackness of the night overground.

Their work is beautifully teamed with Deepak Alexander’s throbbing background score. Alexander’s percussion-heavy instrumentation is particularly effective because Pappachan knows when to use it and when not, occasionally letting the film’s soundscape go blank to dramatic effect.

That said, it speaks volumes about Swathanthriyam Ardharathriyil that I gravitated towards waxing eloquent about its technical accomplishments before describing its characters. Stylish and suspenseful though it is, the film remains fun at a superficial level because the people in it do not come alive as they should in Dileep Kurian’s screenplay.

And so we never get to understand Jacob as anything beyond a good-looking guy with a ticking brain. Chemban Vinod Jose’s Devassy, nicknamed Kallan (Crooked) Devassy, is never more than a criminal who becomes Jacob’s strongest collaborator. Simon (played by the wonderful Vinayakan from Kammatipaadam) is a brute and an unlikely ally. Vattan (Crazy) Girijan, played by Sinoj Varghese, is the prisonmate whose deceptively off-kilter façade masks a sharp mind. Tito Wilson’s character is at all times only the chap who will not forget that his own attempt at fleeing was impeded by Jacob. As for the drug-peddling twins, they are…well, they are twins who love each other, that is it.

This stupendous cast is capable of great things when given substantial writing material. Antony Varghese, for one, has the confidence and camera-friendliness of a seasoned artiste although this is just his second film. The entire troupe marks their presence in Swathanthriyam Ardharathriyilbecause of their personal charisma, but the screenplay does not flesh their characters out with emotions and motivations we can be invested in.

Even the cultural details that have made Pappachan’s mentor Pellissery’s earlier works so pleasurable are absent here. We are told Swathanthriyam Ardharathriyil’s jail issituated in Kottayam, but frankly it could have been placed elsewhere without making an iota of a difference to the storyline or its treatment.

The writing of Jacob’s scheme also required greater thought. While some of his ideas are clever, too many things fall too conveniently into place, and we are expected to buy into too much of what happens just because it does. For instance, without giving anything away, let me just say you cannot throw an unlimited amount of liquefied or soft solids other than faeces down a toilet without clogging it. And, (spoiler alert) did the police in a prison housing murderers lack firearms and communication equipment that night?

Swathanthriyam Ardharathriyil still remains entertaining becausePappachan’s adept direction, his cast’s appeal and his tech team’s sophistication keep the thrills going when all else falters. The atmospherics, the haunting ugliness of that prison complex and the suspense hold out enough excitement to make this a watchable albeit flawed film.

Rating (out of five stars): **

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	138 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/swathanthriyam-ardharathriyil-movie-review-the-angamaly-diaries-team-returns-with-a-fun-but-flawed-jailbreak-flick-4441207.html

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swathandriam_Ardharathriyil

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