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Release date:	April 27, 2018
Director:	Sudhir Mishra
Cast: Language:	Rahul Bhat, Richa Chadha, Aditi Rao Hydari, Saurabh Shukla, Vipin Sharma, Dalip Tahil, Deepraj Rana, Anil George, Sohaila Kapur, Vineet Kumar Singh, Anurag Kashyap Hindi

Text flashed on screen before the first scene rolls lets on that this film is inspired by both Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s novella Devdas, arguably the most adapted home-grown literary work in Indian cinema, and William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. What common ground could there possibly be between the story of a weak-willed Bengali aristocrat drowning his unconsummated love in alcohol, and a Danish prince drowning in a desire for revenge against his scheming uncle and allegedly traitorous mother? What meeting point is there between a spineless fellow who wept at a fate he could have fashioned if he had had the courage to defy his convention-ridden, classist parents, and another so single-minded in his quest for vendetta that he let everything else in his life slip away as a result?

The answer is quite simple, actually: it lies in the self-destructiveness of both Hamlet and Devdas. In merging these two characters and turning each on its head in the end, Sudhir Mishra has conducted one of the most exciting writing experiments seen in a while for the Hindi film screen. The writer-director’s protagonist Dev Pratap Chauhan (played by Rahul Bhat) is melancholy like the legendary fictional men on whom he is based, but is not fatalistic like the foolish – and frankly, boring – Devdas, nor quite as mentally muddled as Hamlet.

Mishra’s Daas Dev might have been phenomenal then if its women characters – based on the Paro, Chandramukhi and Queen Gertrude prototypes – had been written as well as the leading man. Sadly, they are not.

Daas Dev is set in the political badlands of Uttar Pradesh where, in the opening scene in 1997, we see Dev’s father, the charismatic star politician Vishambhar Pratap Chauhan’s very public and untimely death before his little son’s eyes. Twenty years later, the boy is now a drug addict, an alcoholic and a laggard, in love with his childhood friend Paro (Richa Chadha), daughter of his late father’s right hand man Naval Singh (Anil George) who has been politically exiled by Dev’s uncle Awdesh Pratap Chauhan (Saurabh Shukla).

The Chauhan family wealth is managed by Shrikant Sahay (Dalip Tahil) and his Woman Friday cum fixer-about-town Chandni Mehra (Aditi Rao Hydari) who is in love with Dev. She watches over him through his tumultuous relationships, his desperate attempt to recover from his substance abuse and his journey from indifference to interest in politics, knowing that he does not reciprocate her feelings for him.

The first half hour of Daas Dev is intriguing. Chandni is the narrator, the one who has watched and seen more than anyone realises. Oddly enough though, she is completely marginalised halfway through the storyline, so that what remains of her in memory now is not her strength but Hydari’s flawless back to which Mishra has paid considerably greater attention than to the writing of her character.

Paro and Chandramukhi were far more appealing people than Devdas in the original text. The screenplay by Mishra and Jaydeep Sarkar does wonderful things to the main man but seems not to know what to do with these two strong women. Richa Chadha still manages to lend some spark to Paro, but Hydari seems unable to rise above her exquisite looks to invest herself in Chandni. More than ever, her limp performance made me long for Madhuri Dixit’s firecracker of a Chandramukhi in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s 2002 extravaganza Devdas.

As for Gertrude, in this case Dev’s mother Sushila Devi (Sohaila Kapur) – she exists on the sidelines for so long that even the wonderful Kapur’s speaking eyes cannot save her from being anything other than a sidelight, albeit one who eventually turns out to be pivotal to the plot.

The men are better served by the writing, and some of them return the favour with gusto. Rahul Bhat has the remarkable ability to look bruised, damaged and torn when he gets into a character. His Dev, who is a slave (daas) of his own weaknesses until he finds his life’s purpose, is a beautifully broken fellow, still mourning the loss of a beloved father he idolised and deriving his earnestness towards politics from the memory of that idealistic man. Bhat gives his character both vulnerability and strength, making you wonder why we see him so rarely on the big screen and why he is so vastly underrated.

DoP Sachin K. Krishn’s use of darkness and shadows in Daas Dev enhances the air of intrigue in the plot and is especially dramatic around Dev. There are shots in which his face is completely black, his reactions therefore inscrutable if it weren’t for the actor’s body language.

Vipin Sharma playing a wily politician is fantastic as always, as is Saurabh Shukla. Producer-director-writer Anurag Kashyap makes a short but impactful appearance as Vishambhar, giving us yet another reminder – after 2016’s Akira– that he is an under-explored actor. Vineet Kumar Singh, who was astonishingly good on his debut as a lead earlier this year in Kashyap’s Mukkabaaz, is impressive in a brief role as a man in love with Paro.

The uneven characterisation apart, the plot too unfolds in a series of twists and turns that, though not unconvincing, play out in a narrative style that feels by now too familiar in the mould of films made by Prakash Jha, Kashyap and Mishra himself.

Someone on the team of Daas Dev seems to have assumed that you can compensate for inconsistent writing with an unrelenting soundtrack. Although several of the songs in Daas Dev are quite lovely (in particular Sehmi hai dhadkan composed by Vipin Patwa, Rangdaariby Arko and Challa chaap chunariya by Sandesh Shandilya) there are just too many musical interludes in the film, and the songs and background score are played too much and too loud so that at one point when a character snapped, “Can you shut off that damned song?” for a moment I thought someone in the audience had called out those words because the music had gotten so overbearing by then.

It is surprising that writing would be the Achilles heel of a film by Mishra, the man who co-wrote the screenplay of Kundan Shah’s cult classic Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, but that is the way the cookie crumbles in Daas Dev. When Mishra released Yeh Saali Zindagi in 2011, I remember writing that that film felt over-crowded with characters and complications. Ditto for this one. A Devdas-cum-Hamlet story still feels like it is worth a shot, perhaps even another shot by Mishra, but this one fails to live up to its promise despite an excellent central performance and an unusual interpretation of two iconic literary characters.

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

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

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

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/bollywood/daas-dev-movie-review-sudhir-mishra-stands-devdas-and-hamlet-nicely-on-their-heads-but-does-not-live-up-to-his-own-promise-4447635.html

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

Release date:	April 27, 2018
Director:	Girish Damodar
Cast: Language:	Mammootty, Karthika Muralidharan, Joy Mathew, Muthumani, Kailash, Ganapathi, K.P.A.C. Lalitha, Suresh Krishna Malayalam

In so many respects, the conception, writing and execution of Uncle: My Dad’s Friendis brilliant. Director Girish Damodar’s film is startlingly honest in the way it grabs men in the audience by the collar and demands that they introspect about their hypocritical attitude towards women – protective of and fearful for the safety of the ones they love; casually disrespectful and lascivious, if not contemptuous towards the rest.

Joy Mathew’s writing is brutally frank in its assessment of ugly notions of masculinity that pervade our society and nurture these double standards. Considering that misogyny is intrinsic to so many contemporary mainstream Malayalam films, especially those headlined by Uncle’s star, this is a refreshing surprise.

Uncle stumbles repeatedly though by strewing bizarre red herrings around to cause us to make certain assumptions about Krishnakumar, the story’s Uncle played by Mammootty.

In the opening shots, as the credits roll, a violent mob vandalises property in a picturesque hill town. Soon, we see Shruthi (Karthika Muralidharan) standing on the street with a backpack. She is waiting for transport, perhaps a bus, and we can sense her unease when men sidle up to her with questions.

Already the air is thick with foreboding. Already as an audience member, I am worried for her. As a woman, I am doubly distressed, because I have been there a zillion times. The manner in which Damodar conjures up these feelings in just seconds is remarkable.

A car stops. The heart stops. But no, this time it is not a creepy stranger, it is Shruthi’s Dad’s buddy. Krishnakumar Uncle offers to drop her from Ooty where they are to her home in Kozhikode. And so the film’s journey begins.

Most of Uncle’s running time is spent cutting between Shruthi and Krishnakumar’s road trip through mountainous forest terrain on the one hand, and on the other hand, her parents back home. The mother (Muthumani) feels reassured of her girl’s safety since she knows KK to be her husband’s friend. Yet the husband Vijayan (Joy Mathew himself) appears inexplicably troubled by the news of the company his daughter finds herself in.

We soon figure out why. When the film dwells on him, it also repeatedly cuts to a group of men somewhere nearby, drinking, discussing women loosely, speculating in crude terms about the woman KK is with at that moment.

They are a disgusting lot and those early scenes are designed to other them, giving women viewers a sense of comfort in the conviction that they are not the kind of men we would spend time with – not my husband, my father, my boyfriend, my brother, my pal, not any man I love. Or are they?

(Spoilers ahead)

The mind freezes over when the narrative switches to a flashback and the painful awareness dawns that these are, in fact, men who move among us. Shameer Muhammed’s editing of this portion is so unfussy, the shift so discreetly done, that we do not detect it until we spot Vijayan and Krishnakumar on screen in that same repulsive gang, and Vijayan – gentleman, gentle husband, Shruthi’s darling Daddy – is the one using the most vulgar language to describe KK’s sexual partners, as the men all appear to live vicariously through their bachelor friend’s promiscuous ways and his particular talent for hooking much younger women.

These passages are unnerving because of their everydayness. These men are not killing or raping women, they are not indulging in any form of physical violence, yet their lightly spoken words – reminiscent of the sexist, casteist sport in Sanal Kumar Sashidharan’s Ozhivudivasathe Kali (An Off-Day Game) – mirror the visceral hate harboured by men who do. And they are people like us. They are our husband, father, boyfriend, brother, pal. They are the men we love.

Vijayan cannot tell his wife or child why he distrusts KK, because it will mean revealing a side of himself he has hidden from these women whose love and respect he values.

(Spoiler alert ends)

When it is with Shruthi’s parents and her father’s gang, and in the horrifying realness of a crowd scene later on, Uncle is an extraordinary film. The quality dips when it is on the road with Shruthi and KK though, because that is when we get transparent efforts, too clever by half, to heighten the suspense around their fate.

Shruthi’s achingly youthful innocence, the reactions of people they encounter, Vijayan’s unspoken fears and the audience’s own preconceptions are enough to underline the issues Uncle obviously wishes to highlight: social biases towards single people, the conjectures made about any man and woman seen together unless they are married, and more.

Mammootty’s track record of incessantly romancing female actors young enough to be his daughters and granddaughters in film after film since the 1990s, contributes too to the red flag that goes up as soon as we realise that the Krishnakumar Uncle who stops to give Shruthi a lift is played by him. In that sense, he is an on-point casting choice. Nothing more was required to keep the audience on tenterhooks on her behalf.

Yet in KK’s presence, Uncle tries to be more of a thriller than it needs to be. In its bid to build up our (the audience’s) suspicions of KK, it has him indulging in inappropriate behaviour which it ends up normalising when the denouement guilts us for reacting negatively to him in these parts.

The writing and Mammootty’s acting are both intentionally misleading here. In shots dotting their drive together, we catch KK looking oddly at Shruthi, who is still a minor. He has a decidedly lackadaisical attitude towards the security of this child in his charge, which results in them being out late at night despite her parents’ expressed misgivings and in unsafe places without her parents’ explicit consent. We are also acutely aware of his tendency to invade her personal space when there is no need to do so, such as when he insists on reaching across and buckling her seatbelt for her in spite of her protestations.

Any discomfort audience members may feel towards him here is natural and acceptable. It makes no sense to equate that response with the other condemnable prejudices he faces.

It is hard to understand why Messrs Damodar and Mathew would spoil their film by getting this crucial element so wrong, when they get so much else right in Uncle.

DoP Alagappan N. uses spectacular aerial shots to emphasise the remoteness of the locations where Shruthi finds herself with KK, while at one point he resorts to a distorted close-up of their vehicle’s interior and elsewhere to a fish-eye view of the outside. His camerawork, the understated sound design and Bijibal’s background score are crucial to the ominous air that blankets the film throughout. Even the unnecessary full-length song with Shruthi dancing in the woods fails to kill the mood, though it does act as an irritating distraction. The number in Mammootty’s voice though (the old Entha Johnsa Kallillerevived), is well slotted and lots of fun.

All the artistes other than Mammootty are exceptional. Young Karthika Muralidharan perfectly conveys guilelessness without consciously trying to be cute, with a confidence undented by the presence of her veteran superstar colleague. Mathew, who has one of the film’s most challenging roles, strikes a flawless balance between Vijayan’s good and awful side. And Muthumani is outstanding in the climax.

In that scene and in the one preceding it, Mammootty metamorphoses into the actor that cinephiles have reason to adore. Shrugging off his trademark swagger, with the screenplay no longer requiring him to pretend to be anything other than what KK is, he gives us a slight droop of the shoulder and a fleeting pain in his eyes that remind us of why he is an acting legend. That we do not see more of that artiste on screen these days is one of the saddest realities of our time.

When it is at its best, Uncle: My Dad’s Friend is an excellent psychological drama bordering on a work of genius. By making needless overt attempts to manipulate the audience though, it robs itself of its potential greatness.

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

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

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/uncle-movie-review-gripping-theme-dragged-down-by-mammoottys-misleading-performance-and-other-red-herrings-4449241.html

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

Release date:	April 27, 2018
Director:	Ravi Jadhav
Cast: Language:	Kalyanee Mulay, Chhaya Kadam, Om Bhutkar, Madan Deodhar, Kishor Kadam, Naseeruddin Shah Marathi

Nude did not make as much news as S Durga nee Sexy Durgadid when the I&B Ministry barred both from the International Film Festival of India (IFFI) last year. That is because S Durga’s director Sanal Kumar Sashidharan made his displeasure public, challenged the decision in court and waged a high-profile battle with the establishment. Marathi director Ravi Jadhav and his producers chose a quieter, perhaps safer, path than their fiery counterpart from the Malayalam film industry.

Fortunately for cinephiles, their differing approaches to countering censorship have got the same result in each case: a month after S. Durga’s theatrical release, Nudetoo is here.

Nude(Chitraa)is the story of a poor woman who comes to Mumbai with her son to escape an abusive, adulterous husband in her hometown.

After struggling to find work in the big city, Yamuna lands a job as a nude model for art students at the prestigious Sir J J School of Art. The film is based on a true story but the identities of the actual individuals involved have been kept secret, as a written statement from Jadhav on screen testifies at the start, “in keeping with our commitment to the school’s protocol and related sensitivities”.

On the face of it, Nude is about Yamuna’s struggles against poverty, patriarchy and conservatism. At a macro level though, it examines the failure of social and political fundamentalists to understand art, and their conscienceless denunciation of the very works they consume with a lustful gaze.

Like sanctimonious men who masturbate to lovemaking scenes on screen, but condemn the actors they are watching as whores, Nude’s villains are all around us in real life. This film is a hard-hitting exposé of the fake piety of such conservatives.

Despite the wistful tone, there is a lot about Nude that is positive and life-affirming, with even a flash of humour emerging unexpectedly while Yamuna settles into her new profession. Jadhav has shown extreme sensitivity in the way he portrays his heroine’s initial shame at the job and how she overcomes that feeling. The bond she shares with Chandrakka, the woman who introduces her to nude modelling, is heartwarming.

Although Yamuna’s decision at the end of Nude does not flow convincingly from her journey until then, so much else in the film is credible and inspiring. The high point of Nude for me is a scene in Yamuna and Chandrakka’s hovel right after Yamuna gets her first payment, when we see a transformation in her body language, a melting away of the fearful youngster who had entered the massive metropolis not long back, and a shift in the very air around her. Yamuna at that moment embodies the confidence that comes from financial independence – it is a marvellous thing to behold.

Considering the sophistication of the rest of the film, a crucial scene involving placard-bearing protestors is written and directed with surprising awkwardness. I also could not help but wonder if Jadhav was not taking too uncritical a view of the artist community by not even mentioning the possibility of sexual violence against women like Yamuna.

The care with which she chooses people to pose for came across more as a general observation about the safety of women in society and not a specific reference to those in Yamuna’s situation. It would have helped to throw light on a question as obvious as this.

DoP Amalendu Chaudhary shoots the painting scenes in Nudeso delicately that voyeurs looking for flesh-and-blood bottoms and breasts to peruse will be deeply disappointed. If in an early scene running alongside the opening credits, the camera does appear to objectify Yamuna – the only time it does so in Nude– it is to make a point, as you will realise if you heed the lyrics of the soulful song Dis yeti playing alongside in Cyli Khare’s ruggedly attractive voice. “Tell me, oh dear,” she sings as the lens travels over Yamuna’s drenched body encased in a wet sari, “where all will your gaze trail?”

Although the cinematography in Nude is rarely lavish (a choice well suited to the kind of film this is), a mention must be made of a visually noteworthy scene featuring Yamuna on a beach. In closer shots, as the ocean rages before her and a gusty wind blows, those mighty waters look intimidatingly real. The camera keeps pulling out though to long shots in which she and her companion appear like figures in a watercolour painting.

The story of Nude (written by Jadhav) derives its strength and substance from Yamuna and Chandrakka. Chhaya Kadam is a powerful actor and paints Chandrakka as a feisty creature of immense mental muscle. Kalyanee Mulay faithfully captures Yamuna’s passage from misery to upliftment and pain again, not wilting once as the camera stays on her expressive face and body almost from the first shot. Naseeruddin Shah makes a small but memorable appearance as the renowned barefoot painter with a Picasso-esque style, Mallik Sahab, no doubt an ode to the late M.F. Husain.

This of course brings us to why the I&B Ministry objected to Nude being screened at IFFI 2017. The reasons reported included that the film was not yet cleared by the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) and that the title was deemed objectionable. The reason assumed by many liberals was that the title hinting at the possibility of naked people in a film was deemed offensive to India’s culture police. Once you watch Nude you will know that it does not feature a single shot in which we actually see an actor’s unclothed body in its entirety. What we do see though is a Muslim painter hounded by violent political goons so reminiscent of religious extremists who harassed Husain for his goddess paintings. Draw your own conclusions now for whether and why the present ruling party would have a bone to pick with Nude.

As we now know, better sense has prevailed and the film was cleared with no cuts and an A (adults only) rating from the CBFC. While these are small mercies in the present dismal scenario we find ourselves in, the truth is it is ludicrous that such a thoughtful feminist film has been given the strictest available rating, while ugly commercial ventures glorifying violence against women get away with a mild UA (unrestricted public exhibition subject to parental guidance for children below 12) and even U (unrestricted). This is a crying shame, because Nude is excellent material for children especially for the turn Yamuna’s relationship with her son takes.

Nude’s journey to theatres then mirrors the very societal double standards it explores. This is a lyrical film about human beings and the arts struggling to survive in a hypocritical world.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	A
Running time:	112 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/nude-movie-review-a-lyrical-account-of-a-nude-models-life-among-sanctimonious-conservatives-4449895.html

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nude_(2017_Marathi_film)

Release date:	May 4, 2018
Director:	Hansal Mehta
Cast: Language:	Rajkummar Rao, Timothy Ryan Hickernell, Keval Arora Hindi

From the commonplace emerges the terrifying, from the unexceptional comes horrifying evil in Hansal Mehta’s unusual biography of the dreaded terrorist Omar Sheikh. As biopics go, this one chucks all templates out of the window: Sheikh’s childhood is given a complete go-by, as are a backstory and conventional ‘explanations’ for his murderous actions in the years of his life brought to us in Omerta.

What we get instead is a clinical, factual, dispassionate account of his role in the 1994 abduction of Western tourists in India, his release from an Indian prison in exchange for hostages in the hijacked Indian Airlines Flight IC 814 held in Kandahar, his involvement in the 9/11 attacks and the 2002 beheading of Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl for which he was convicted and sentenced to death by a Pakistani court. Sixteen years later, he is still in a prison in Pakistan. (Note: Although Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh – a British terrorist of Pakistani descent – was convicted for Pearl’s murder, doubts have been raised in certain quarters about whether he actually killed the American with his own hands. Omerta unequivocally accepts that he did.)

In the way these events are recounted matter-of-factly, with the film cutting between the actors and news footage, Omerta feels like a dramatised documentary feature. No overt effort is made to evoke sympathy or revulsion for the man at the centre of it all. True, we learn that he was angered and embittered by the slaughter of Bosnian Muslims – his “brothers and sisters” as he repeatedly calls them – in Europe in the early 1990s, but there is no suffering at his own doorstep, the sort that might help an ordinary viewer wrap her head around the icy detachment with which he commits unimaginable acts of violence.

Omerta offers nothing to those who are invested in the idea of the inertia of human goodness (the notion, as Isaac Newton might have put it, that all people are reasonably good and will remain reasonably so unless compelled by external forces to act against their natural instincts), nothing that would allow regular folk to say “That happened to his parent/sibling/wife/child/friend/him? Ah okay, now that explains it.” Instead we are compelled to confront the possibility that a seemingly normal, intelligent, educated individual with no personal tragedy haunting him could be easily brainwashed into deep commitment to an extremist cause, or worse, that a human being could be unadulterated evil simply because he is.

Perhaps we should have expected this. Mehta is not one to provide easy answers. In his 2017 film Simran, he had Kangana Ranaut playing an eccentric woman whose journey into crime is motivated not by a grand catastrophe but by a claustrophobic home, frustration at the workplace and a humdrum middle-class existence. Yet, while Simran was about a person who could have been you or me gone wrong, Omerta is about someone who looks like he could have been you or me but is far, far from it.

After chronicling the manner in which he held four Western tourists hostage in the narrow bylanes of Delhi, the film travels back a short period to 1992 London, where Sheikh was a student at LSE leading a comfortable life with his loving father Saeed Sheikh (Keval Arora). His indoctrination came at the hands of another deceptively normal seeming person, the trusted local clergyman Maulana Ismail (Rupinder Nagra).

From then on, as it slices through time and space in editor Aditya Warrior’s hands, Omerta plays out like a crime thriller, the anticipation heightened at each step by Mandar Kulkarni’s sound work and Ishaan Chhabra’s score.

The glacial coldness with which Sheikh slips easily into a vile training camp in Pakistan and his terrorist activities are made all the more unnerving by the run-of-the-mill nature of his early days. Even as we come to terms with his part in mass murders, the vehement brutality with which we finally see him work on Pearl’s body – in Omerta’s version of the facts – comes as a punch in the gut.

Anuj Rakesh Dhawan (whose DoP credits include Simran and Shubh Mangal Saavdhan) does not show the actual beheading on screen, yet manages to capture every molecule of ruthlessness in that gory scene. Whether in conveying the essence of a city or portraying such savagery, Dhawan’s camera is never literal in this film. He respects the audience enough to know that we do not need to see knife on neck to grasp the horrendousness of that crime.

The lifeblood of Mehta’s film is Rajkummar Rao who is so much Omar Sheikh that he will for a long time now be the yardstick against which other actors will be measured if they are cast as Sheikh. That Rao is an extraordinary actor is beyond debate, but there has been a niggling personality trait he has not so far been able to shave off in his performances – that clipped accent, which is easily identifiable as his. In Omerta, even that quirk melts away as the actor disappears into the character he is playing. Not only does Rao erase his own personality for this role, he manages to capture the manner in which the chameleon-like Sheikh would erase his personality in his multiple real-life avatars: as Daniel Pearl’s likeable Pakistani contact, a friendly British Indian tourist in a flea market in Delhi and the boy from Southall, the south Asian neighbourhood in London.

Rao’s challenge is that the camera is on him from start to finish. New York-based actor Timothy Ryan Hickernell’s is that he barely gets a few minutes and a handful of lines to convince us that he is Daniel Pearl. His minimalist acting combined with the minimalist writing and direction ensure that Pearl becomes a full-fledged person in our eyes in those few scenes, instead of being a mere statistic in Sheikh’s roster of crimes.

Keval Arora is completely relatable as Sheikh’s affectionate father who knows his son is going down a dangerous path, objects to his choices, but does little to stop him. The rest of the supporting cast is just as convincing.

Hansal Mehta’s film (written by Mehta with a story by Mukul Dev) takes its name from the vocabulary of the Italian mafia. Encyclopedia Britannicadefines omertàas “the obligation never, under any circumstances, to apply for justice to the legal authorities and never to assist in any way in the detection of crimes committed against oneself or others.”

The title, like the rest of the film, is not to be taken literally. The authorities, in Mehta and Dev’s view of Sheikh’s vision, are callous Western superpowers and other exploiters of the Muslim qaum (India included for the situation in Kashmir) who will never punish their own and therefore must be brought to justice by those they have wronged.

Would I like to find out what Sheikh was as a kid, spend more time with his father and wife, meet his classmates, friends and child? Certainly, but in another film. Omerta is different. Mehta’s film is as much terrorography as biography. It does not spell out Sheikh’s motivations in black and white, but reminds us that the villain of the piece rarely looks like one and need not have reasons we may identify with, relate to or understand.

Besides, Omerta’s pace is so unrelenting and Rao’s acting so immersive that it is impossible to turn away from the screen for a single moment of the film’s compact 97 minutes and 37 seconds. To call it gripping might be an understatement.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	A
Running time:	97 minutes 37 seconds

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

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/bollywood/omerta-movie-review-rajkummar-raos-stellar-performance-carries-hansal-mehtas-gripping-clinical-terrorography-4455985.html

Poster courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/Omerta2018/

Release date:	Kerala: April 27, Delhi: May 4, 2018
Director:	M. Mohanan
Cast: Language:	Vineeth Sreenivasan, Sreenivasan, Nikhila Vimal, Urvashi, Aju Varghese, Shanthi Krishna Malayalam

A woman abandons her child in a famous temple town during Navarathri festivities in the 1990s. As the little boy desperately searches for her, he is found by Madhavan (played by Sreenivasan). The mother is nowhere to be seen, and Madhavan takes him under his roof where the child grows up to be the happy, sociable Aravindan (Vineeth Sreenivasan), popular among locals and an asset in the small hotel run by his foster father.

He never stops waiting for the beloved parent who left him without a word though. And every year during Navarathri, he mourns her disappearance by refusing to enter the temple despite joining the community in the rest of their celebrations.

Since parent-child separations have been dealt with ad nauseum in Indian cinema down the decades, any film revisiting the theme would have to work doubly hard to make itself worthwhile. The initial appeal of Aravindante Athidhikal (Aravindan’s Guests) lies in its slice-of-life texture and tone (notwithstanding some forced humour), and the close-up it offers of the goings-on around Mookambika Devi Temple in Kollur, Karnataka. The hustle and bustle of the pilgrimage centre alone should have been enough to keep it running, but the film soon strays from its USP in favour of clichés.

Once director M. Mohanan is done with establishing the atmosphere of the town and introducing us to a motley crew of potentially charming characters, it becomes clear that he has only two pre-occupations: one, to introduce a romance between a good-looking young woman and Aravindan, to establish his hero-worthiness in a stereotypical sense; and two, to re-unite Aravindan with his mother.

Mohanan does both in such a lackadaisical, unimaginative fashion, with an extended and silly smokescreen involving a renowned dancer thrown in, that Aravindante Athidhikal is reduced to a pile of very average, sentimental mush.

Malayalam filmmakers really need to get over this self-imposed mandatoriness of a romance in every male protagonist’s life and the trite manner in which such romances are portrayed. The second the actor Urvashi emerges from a bus and the camera pauses, you know a pretty youngster will follow – she does. The moment this youngster called Varada (Nikhila Vimal) appears, you know she and Aravindan will fall in love – they do.

Vineeth and Ms Vimal have zero sparks between them but they are soon smitten. She is shown noticing his innate goodness, possibly to justify those feelings on her part, but frankly, there is an inevitability to their emotions since she is clearly marked out as the designated heroine to his designated hero in this formula.

And the usual track follows: you know, boy meets girl, boy likes girl, boy bugs girl, etc?

As if the derivative writing by Rajesh Raghavan is not bad enough, there is the fact that Vineeth Sreenivasan has neither the charisma nor the acting depth to carry an entire film on his shoulders. His singing is a separate matter altogether. So it is that Vineeth himself saves Aravindante Athidhikal with his distinctive voice dominating the all-pervasive soundtrack by Shaan Rahman. While these numbers are not the best that Rahman has produced in his career, they are melodic enough and the singing (especially of Rasathi by Vineeth) haunting enough to lend an air of sadness to the film where the writing fails.

The ordinariness of the screenplay is particularly painful because Mohanan has assembled gifted artistes in his supporting cast. Veterans Sreenivasan and Urvashi are largely wasted, as is Aju Varghese in the role of Aravindan’s friend. Varghese is one of Mollywood’s finest comedians when he is not trying to lend coolth and cuteness to lecherous behaviour. He and Urvashi have their moments here, but not enough.

Nikhila Vimal’s screen presence lends more substance to her character than the writing affords. Shanthi Krishna makes a mark in a cameo that might have been unbearably melodramatic if it were not for the control she exercises over her histrionics.

Think of what might have been if Aravindante Athidhikal had used the mythology of Mookambika Devi as a metaphor against which Aravindan’s story played out. Or if the writing had thoughtfully referenced Madhavan’s Communist ideals in this profoundly Hindu setting. Or if it had dwelt at length on the bond between a fond old man and an orphan masking his heartbreak at the memory of his mother. Or what fun could have been had in full-length face-offs between Varghese and Urvashi who, when at her best, has the ability to tickle the funny bone like few others can. Wishful thinking, as it turns out.

Even the cinematography by Swaroop Philip does not fully capture the magnificence of Kollur or the Souparnika river that runs through it or the temple. Barring a few interesting frames here and there, the camerawork appears constrained for the most part.

Philip’s best shots are reserved for a scene at a tiny temple on a mountaintop where Adi Shankara is said to have prayed, but there the direction and writing let him down. I could not help but wonder how that scene would have turned out in the hands of director Venu in the mood he was inwhen he made Carbon last year, or Mohanan himself back when he made his directorial debut with the heartwarming Katha Parayumpol (2007).

No doubt Mohanan means well here too, but Aravindante Athidhikal’slack of inventiveness gives it a dated feel that is redeemed somewhat by the music. To be fair, the film is not unpleasant. It is simply plain.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	122 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/aravindante-athidhikal-movie-review-vineeth-sreenivasans-singing-redeems-a-trite-mother-son-saga-4457181.html

Poster courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/pg/AravindanteAthidhikal.Movie/

Release date:	May 11, 2018
Director:	Meghna Gulzar
Cast: Language:	Alia Bhatt, Vicky Kaushal, Jaideep Ahlawat, Rajit Kapur, Shishir Sharma, Soni Razdan, Amruta Khanvilkar, Arif Zakaria, Ashwath Bhatt, Aman Vashisht, Cameos: Kanwaljeet Singh and Sanjay Suri Hindi

An elderly Kashmiri gentleman called Hidayat (Rajit Kapur) travels back and forth between India and Pakistan under the pretext of business dealings, when actually he is serving as a double agent between both countries. His friend in Pakistan, Brigadier Syed (Shishir Sharma), is convinced that Hidayat is spying on India for Pakistan. The truth is the exact opposite: Hidayat is a loyal lieutenant of India’s Intelligence services and, as it happens, the son of a freedom fighter.

As his life nears its end, he wants to ensure that his mission is not disrupted at this delicate juncture – the year is 1971, when India-Pakistan tensions are running high in the midst of the liberation war in East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. It dawns on Hidayat that continuity can come if his daughter Sehmat (Alia Bhatt) marries the Brigadier’s son. The catch is that she is a mere teenager – a college student in Delhi University – and untrained, and there is no telling whether she will go along with her father’s plan. She does. In short, she is raazi (willing). And soon enough she is the bride of Major Iqbal Syed and a resident of the Syed family home in Pakistan through which passes crucial national security documents and senior members of the country’s defence forces.

Given the circumstances, you know your heart is at risk, even if Sehmat’s is made of stone, when it turns out that Iqbal is played by Vicky Kaushal. Unless his character is decidedly villainous, this is an actor who has the ability to reach into your ribcage, rip your heart out and tear it to shreds.

Watch Raazi to find out if that is indeed the effect Iqbal has on the viewer, but I can tell you already that that is precisely what the film as a whole achieves. Meghna Gulzar’s latest directorial venture, based on Harinder S. Sikka’s novel Calling Sehmat, is a heart-stopping, heartbreaking espionage drama the beauty of which lies in the fact that, in the era of chest-thumping nationalism and hate-mongering that we live in, this India-Pakistan saga holds out an unexpected healing touch.

“In a war, nothing else matters but the war. Not you, not I, just the war,” a significant character in Raazi tells Sehmat. Although this is the premise on which the establishment operates on both sides of the border, the film’s overriding theme is the human cost of war. And so it compels us to ask uncomfortable questions. Are undercover agents callous or dutiful? Does a father have a right to sacrifice his daughter’s future at the altar of a nation’s safety and survival? And above all else: If there is pain on both sides of the divide, then who is benefiting from this confrontation and why, in the name of all that is logical, are we fighting?

This is the kind of story that conventional Bollywood would drench in bombast, condescending clichés about the ‘good Muslim’ and “aisa nahin ki unke sab log bure hai” (it is not as if all ‘their’ people are bad) sort of dialogues. If you have seen Meghna Gulzar’s Talvar (2015), you know of course that she is anything but conventional.

Raazi’s screenplay by Bhavani Iyer and Ms Gulzar, with dialogues by the latter, is a political tightrope walk that never lets up. Sure there is a line about the watan / mulq (country) being above all else repeated by more than one actor, but it is woven so smoothly into the larger picture and delivered so naturally by the actors in question, that it serves its purpose without trumpets blowing or bugles calling. Even a line from Hidayat about how Sehmat is a Hindustani first and then his daughter passes muster, although it is the closest the film comes to bowing to Bollywood traditions in these matters.

So yes of course, there is a – necessary – point being made about the patriotism of a Muslim Indian citizen from insurgency-ridden Jammu & Kashmir, but by not spelling it out or emphasising her Kashmiri Muslim identity, Team Raazi delivers the gentlest of slaps in the face of Islamophobes and advocates of hatred who dominate the current national political discourse.

Raazi says so much else without feeling the need to say it. Its feminism, for one, goes beyond the obvious fact that it is a woman-centric film. In the emotionally wrenching number Dilbaro, with music by Shankar Ehsaan Loy and lyrics by the legendary Gulzar, a daughter sings: “Fasle jo kati jaaye, ugti nahin hai / betiyaan jo byaahi jaaye, mudti nahin hai (when a daughter is married off she does not look back) / Aisi bidaai ho toh / Lambi judaai ho toh / Dehleez dard ki bhi paar kara de.” Note the irony of those words, coming as they do during the wedding of a girl who, far from conforming to the social norm of turning her back on the house she leaves for marriage, proves to be one of her home country’s most invaluable assets.

As much as it is a poignant story of human relations, Raazi is a suspense thriller so tautly executed that I could feel knots of fear in my chest for several hours after I had stepped out of the hall. The unrelenting parade of risks and twists owes as much to Meghna’s conviction as to Nitin Baid’s brisk editing, Kunal Sharma’s intelligently crafted sound design and the nerve-wracking background score by Shankar Ehsaan Loy & Tubby.

A further boatload of kudos to the music directors for imbuing a Pakistani patriotic anthem with emotional resonance for Indian viewers. Ae Watan– written by Gulzar and incorporating lines from Allama Iqbal’s Lab pe aati hai dua (not mentioned in the credits, but in the Making of Ae Watan video) – is beautifully sung by Sunidhi Chauhan and the Shankar Mahadevan Academy children’s chorus. It marks a turning point in Sehmat’s effort to win over the people in her new life.

Jay I. Patel’s camerawork is intrinsic to the nervous edge that is a constant in the narrative. He seems to shadow Sehmat rather than shoot Bhatt, and is particularly responsible for underlining heightened stress levels in a scene involving a chase down a lonely street.

The lynchpin of this enterprise is Bhatt’s stupendous performance as Sehmat, with the young star once again displaying the maturity and confidence of a veteran on camera. She is as convincing wielding a gun as she is crying her heart out at the betrayal that is unavoidable in the task she has taken on. By mining his innocent persona, the astonishingly versatile Kaushal becomes a perfect match for the baby doll looks that Bhatt uses to carefully camouflage her character’s iron will. In his Iqbal Syed there is not a trace of the serial killer he became for Anurag Kashyap’s Raman Raghav 2.0in 2016.

The supporting cast is a roll call of strong artists. As Sehmat’s trainer, Jaideep Ahlawat of Gangs of Wasseypur (2012) gets a role worthy of his talent after a gap. Ashwath Bhatt as Sehmat’s brother-in-law is remarkable in a smaller part.

(Spoiler ahead) With all its achievements, the film does slip up in one important aspect of Sehmat’s operations in Pakistan. For a girl who displays instincts that belie her lack of experience, her decision to do so much of her work by a curtainless window is surprisingly amateurish. I realise that in traditional and country homes in the subcontinent, bathrooms with glass and uncovered windows are not uncommon – our ancestors and rural folk seem/seemed to place an inordinate amount of trust in human decency that our species has not necessarily justified – but it struck me as a glaring loophole that such a bright girl would commit such an error. The only reason why I am prefacing this paragraph with a spoiler alert is that I do not want to ruin the experience for viewers who may not agree or may not notice what I believe is a gaffe.

Her other mistakes, if they can be called mistakes at all, can be put down to her youthful inexperience and/or sense of urgency coming from awareness of an impending crisis, but this one calls for considerable indulgence on the part of the viewer – indulgence that, I confess, I have willingly given, swept away as I was in Raazi’s sincerity, political sensitivity and overall appeal. (Spoiler alert ends)

The information Sehmat conveys to her bosses in India is related to Pakistan’s planned attack on the Indian naval vessel INS Vikrant during the 1971 war, which was the subject of the 2017 Tollywood film Ghazi (Telugu), also made in Hindi as The Ghazi Attack. That film was primarily a defence forces procedural. Raazi, on the other hand, is an espionage venture with heart and soul tempering its gritty core. Even as it kept me on the edge of my seat for its entire 140 minutes, it broke my heart.

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

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

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

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/bollywood/raazi-movie-review-alia-bhatt-is-stupendous-in-meghna-gulzars-heart-stopping-heartbreaking-espionage-drama-4465137.html

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

Release date:	Kerala: April 14, Delhi: May 11, 2018
Director:	Ramesh Pisharody
Cast: Language:	Jayaram, Kunchacko Boban, Anusree, Ashokan, Salim Kumar, Dharmajan Bolgatty, Joju George, Mallika Sukumaran Malayalam

When the most interesting part of a film is the sound of its title, it goes without saying there’s a problem.

Ramesh Pisharody’s Panchavarnathatha (Five-Coloured Parrot) is a carelessly assembled potpourri of ingredients, most of them unrelated to each other and that title itself unrelated to pretty much everything that goes on in the film. The odd part is that some individual elements in the mix have immense potential. The cast, for one. Veteran actor Jayaram is a past master at comedy, Kunchacko Boban and supporting actors Anusree and Ashokan too have solid comic timing, and Boban has such a genial screen presence that he could raise the tolerability levels of even the worst project. Odder still, some of the dialogues and situations in the pre-interval portion are genuinely funny. While putting it all together though, Pisharody rambles so inexorably and the scenes are so disconnected from each other that after a point I felt embarrassed on his behalf.

The debutant director cannot even hide behind the excuse of a terrible screenplay. He must take most of the blame in that department too since he is the co-writer of this project with Hari P. Nair.

Let me tell you the story as best as I can…

Hmmm.

Thinking.

Thinking some more.

Trying to remember it.

Trying some more.

No seriously, I am not being clever here. It is truly hard to explain what Panchavarnathatha is about.

Oh okay, I got it, I got it, I know what to say. Boban plays the Kerala politician and MLA Kalesh who lacks the political acumen that made his late father a many-term MLA. His mother (Mallika Sukumaran) and wife Chithra (Anusree) are convinced he will lose his second election. To make matters worse, his closest rival (Salim Kumar) gets up to all sorts of dirty tricks during their campaign.

Somewhere in his constituency lives a mysterious man (played by Jayaram) who runs a pet shop with exotic creatures in a house in a residential locality. These include – c’mon guess – a panchavarna thatha! Applause!

After the film has wandered all over the place for what feels like forever, this enigmatic fellow becomes firmly entrenched in Kalesh’s life. Then Dharmajan Bolgatty pops up out of the blue. Then the election happens. Then Joju George pops up. Then it gets sappy. Then there is a deep message because because ergo therefore hence, you know?

At least the first half offered some laughs here and there, the second half does not have even that.

Somewhere in this mess is a kernel of an idea for a kooky comedy about a motley group of madcaps whose shenanigans throw up existential questions. Sadly, Messrs Pisharody and Nair are not cut out for the job. The direction is lax, the pacing completely off from the start and Panchavarnathathadoes not settle down at any point.

Jayaram’s character wears a sacred thread across his chest, carries a rosary in his bag and says “inshallah” (god willing), which no doubt is meant to make a profound point about the secular ideals of our nation’s founding parents that are at risk from unscrupulous politicians. Whatever.

Nowhere is the film within even touching distance of the idiosyncratic tone it is clearly aspiring to achieve. This is most evident in the scene in which Kalesh and Jayaram’s character ride a horse to Kochi airport since protestors are blocking motor vehicles on the streets. In the hands of a more skilled director, this scene could have been a hoot. Here though, all I could think of was why the horse was walking with the gait of a camel and at the speed of a snail, and why a considerable part of that scene was shot in a studio and obviously superimposed on footage of fields and the city. Was permission to shoot in the city not sought, or was it sought and not given?

The title track is a foot-tapping number that has little to do with what goes on before or after it. And while I enjoyed the potshot about Malayali crookishness woven into the screenplay, what was not enjoyable was the casual inclusion of domestic violence in the film’s humourscape. Kalesh keeps threatening to beat his wife, at one point he actually pushes her off a swing and she falls on the floor, and it is all meant to be haha hehe.

Panchavarnathatha is not the first Mollywood film to treat intimate partner violence as a joke. It is hardly a consolation that it takes itself even more lightly than it takes this sensitive issue.

Rating (out of five stars): 1/2

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	148 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/panchavarnathatha-movie-review-kunchacko-boban-and-jayaram-are-squandered-in-a-directionless-comedy-4466719.html

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

Release date:	May 18, 2018
Director:	Harish Vyas
Cast: Language:	Sanjay Mishra, Ekavali Khanna, Shivani Raghuvanshi, Pankaj Tripathi, Brijendra Kala, Anshuman Jha Hindi

Autumnal love tales hold out the promise of yearning and hope combined. They speak either of happiness reclaimed and second chances claimed or of opportunities forever lost. Writer-director Harish Vyas’ Angrezi Mein Kehte Hain is one such. Produced by the National Film Development Corporation and Drumroll Pictures, it is the story of a middle-aged man who has taken his wife for granted through almost a quarter century of marriage but realises her worth when the possibility of losing her looms large.

Sanjay Mishra plays the silver-haired Varanasi-based post-office employee, Yashwant Batra, who has shared his life and home for 24 years with his accommodating spouse Kiran (Ekavali Khanna). The couple has a college-going daughter, Preeti (Shivani Raghuvanshi), who is secretly involved with the local boy Jugnu (Anshuman Jha).

We have all seen couples like Yashwant and Kiran, the sort who seem to be together out of habit more than anything else, whose bond is sustained by custom and tolerance not affection or attraction. In terms of thematic plausibility then, Angrezi Mein Kehte Hain is initially on solid ground. However, it stumbles after a while, because the screenplay runs out of imagination and is unable to take the story forward with conviction, depth or gravitas.

Firstly, it wants us to see that below his rough façade, Yashwant fosters a great love for Kiran after all. This claim is hard to swallow though considering that his behaviour towards her through the first half is not merely undemonstrative, it is outright selfish.

His attitude goes beyond the social conditioning that leads him to tell Preeti: “She (Kiran) manages the house, I go to office – this is what you call a marriage.” It goes beyond the daughter’s admonition that he does not know the difference between love and duty. In truth he is a narrow-minded patriarch who genuinely thinks it is the natural order of things that the entire household should revolve around him and his needs.

It is possible to buy into the house-bound Kiran’s longing for an expression of tenderness from her boring, brusque husband, but Yashwant’s post-interval claims of fondness for her defy believability, unless you accept the conventional notion that habit and love are the same thing. While this failing is largely due to weak writing, it does not help that Mishra – who has been so remarkable so often in the past – is unable to pull off the role.

Not only is the veteran actor miscast here, he has zero chemistry with his heroine. He is a particularly awkward fit in scenes in which Yashwant belatedly courts Kiran. Far from injecting poignance or the intended humour into these passages, the writing, his acting and styling reduce the man to a caricature.

In sharp contrast to Mishra’s turn as Yashwant is Ekavali Khanna as Kiran. She is a knockout, an actor with a personality so arresting that you have to wonder why on earth we see so little of her in films. Khanna was in Sudhir Mishra’s Daas Devlast month, playing a poorly sketched character. In a dominant role in Angrezi Mein Kehte Hain, she steals the show fromright under the nose of the film’s more famous leading man.

When Kiran (in lovely cotton saris, I must add) is not around to overshadow him, the strong-willed Preeti does. The girl’s refusal to settle for a husband like her Dad is unapologetically articulated, a refreshing change from the dutiful tone good children compulsorily adopt towards the worst of parents in orthodox Bollywood. Her disgust for his self-centredness co-exists with love for him, whether instinctive or in recognition of his better qualities, far more credibly than the characterisation of Yashwant.

Shivani Raghuvanshi’s natural performance as the firebrand Preeti lives up to the expectations raised by her brilliance in 2015’s Titli. And Brijendra Kala as Jugnu’s father is fun to watch. Pankaj Tripathi, usually a critic’s delight, is wasted in a clumsily written satellite role, as a devoted husband called Firoz Khan nursing his unwell wife.

Although the insertion of songs in the narrative is not always smooth, the pleasantness of Angrezi Mein Kehte Hain’s soundtrack compensates for this abruptness. It is a joy to hear Shaan’s distinctive voice after such a long time, partnered by the talented Vaishali Mhade and Pravin Kunwar in the sweet romantic track Meri ankhein composed by Kunwar. Another star singer, Mohit Chauhan, toplines Oni-Adil’s melodic Tera hua main jab se with its introspective lyrics by Pratibha Tiku. The album features an eclectic mix of numbers, all hummable, ranging from the catchy Aaj rang hai, which is Oni-Adil’s take on a traditional Amir Khusro qawwali, to a semi-classical piece and one wedding song.

Three numbers reportedly mark a return to films of the lyricist Yogesh whose past credits include the iconic Anand, Chhoti Si Baat and Baton Baton Mein. Yogesh writes in Meri ankhein: “Mere khayalo ke aasmaan par tum hi toh chhaaye ho / mere jivan mein leke bahaare tum hi toh aaye ho / main sach kahu toh tum jaan ban kar mujh mein samaaye ho.”(Roughly: My mind is filled with thoughts of you / you have ushered a spring into my existence / truth be told, you are the life that resides within my being.)

These earnest lyrics, the soothing musical score and two cracking women are betrayed by the tepid writing of Angrezi Mein Kehte Hain’s second half, belying the bunch of international festival awards listed in its trailer. The film derives its title from the song Angrezi mein kehte hain ki I love you in the Parveen Babi-Amitabh Bachchan-starrer Khud-Daar (1982), reminding us, as the strapline on the poster puts it, that you should “just say it!” The problem with Harish Vyas’ film is that though the hero does say it, he does not convince us that he feels it at all.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	108 minutes 30 seconds

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

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/angrezi-mein-kehte-hain-movie-review-sanjay-mishra-is-miscast-in-a-tepid-love-saga-saved-by-its-leading-ladies-4473949.html

Poster courtesy: National Film Development Corporation

Release date:	Kerala: May 4, Delhi: May 18, 2018
Director:	Lijo Jose Pellissery
Cast: Language:	Chemban Vinod Jose, Vinayakan, Pouly Valsan, Dileesh Pothan, Kainakiri Thankaraj, Arya K.S., Krishna Padmakumar Malayalam

For a city kid, there is nothing more amusing or revelatory about rural life than a death in the family, complete with rituals, ritualistic wailing and more. Growing up in Delhi as I did, my earliest education in the way country folk react to the demise of an acquaintance or relative came with the loss of my beloved grandfather who was in Kerala at the time. I can never forget the bawling and chest-beating by a particular household help called Pathumma who, while no doubt fond of the man we all called Appachan, seemed to be moved to hollering out weird weepy tributes only in the first few minutes of the arrival of each fresh batch of guests paying their respects to him, relapsing magically into normalcy and even laughter immediately after. I watched goggle-eyed and listened as an entire mountainside reverberated with shrieks of “ Ende Appacho, the last time you spoke to me you asked me for biryani, but I did not make it. Now when will I ever get a chance to cook for youuuuuu?” etc etc.

My late aunt could summon up similar bouts of yelping and crying with every new visitor to her home for months after the loss of her husband.

Memories of Pathumma and my aunt came flooding back as I watched Lijo Jose Pellissery’s Ee.Ma.Yau. written by P.F. Mathews, the story of an impoverished man who promises his father impressive last rites just minutes before the old chap passes away. It would be easy to adopt a lampooning tone in such a tale, but Pellissery and Mathews are never patronising or reductive in their portrayal of characters and circumstances here. The result is a delightful slice of reality among a small community in a coastal village in Kerala and an unexpected overview of larger existential questions.

Chemban Vinod Jose plays Eeshi, son of the elderly alcoholic Vavachan (Kainakiri Thankaraj) who is in the habit of disappearing from home for long stretches of time. We realise there is more to his disappearances than eccentricity when, upon his latest return, we learn that his daughter-in-law Sabeth, short for Elizabeth (Arya K.S.), intends to spike his food with something she expects will keep him in check.

Vavachan’s wife Pennamma (Pouly Valsan) approves of the plan. Eeshi’s younger sister Nisa, short for Agnes (Krishna Padmakumar), is too wrapped up in a clandestine love affair to notice what they are up to.

When Vavachan collapses in the middle of a drinking and dancing session with Eeshi, his death sets off a chain of occurrences that offer a highly entertaining, sobering study of the community.

Ee.Ma.Yau. (short for Eesho Mariyam Yauseppe a.k.a. Jesus, Mary and Joseph) is a prayer for and a salutation to the dying and the dead used by certain sections of Malayali Christians. With this choice of title, Pellissery has once and for all shown that he was genuinely indifferent to the ludicrous review of his otherwise widely acclaimed Angamaly Diaries (2017) by a Malayalam TV channel believed to be close to the RSS, in which the critic objected to what he considered a surfeit of Christian imagery albeit in a film with a Christian leading man.

Angamaly Diaries created waves nationwide, revealing to cinephiles outside Kerala what viewers within the state already knew: that Pellissery is an acute observer of human behaviour. The director brings the same quality to Ee.Ma.Yau., offering viewers a satirical take on Eeshi’s funeral preps without ever allowing the comedy to descend into insensitivity even when people around him do.

Actor Chemban Vinod Jose, who made a smashing writing debut with Angamaly Diaries, displays his acting versatility as Eeshi here. His deadpan heartbreak at his father’s sudden death is vastly removed from his villainous turn in the recent Swathanthriyam Ardharathriyil, or his menacing, spine-chilling appearance as a vengeful, lustful creep in 2016’s Kali.

Other familiar faces in the cast include Vinayakan as Eeshi’s fond friend and Dileesh Pothan as the local priest with a proclivity for crime sagas. Both are characteristically excellent.

The rest of the cast are not stars, but they, like the established names, act as if they are real people written into a film script and being shot without their knowledge. Pouly Valsan as Eeshi’s mother comes up with a delicious take on a woman forced by social expectations to publicly, vociferously mourn an unfaithful spouse and using the opportunity to vent some steam.

Constantly present in the background are two unidentified characters who nonchalantly play cards and chat while mayhem unfolds around them, a metaphorical representation of the unending cycle of life and death in the village.

The other witness to the unstoppability of nature is Shyju Khalid’s camera which appears unconstrained although the action in Ee.Ma.Yau.revolves largely around Vavachan’s lifeless body. Khalid’s cinematography makes the film’s locales a pulsating presence in the plot. From that spectacular opening shot of an extravagant funeral procession on a pristine beach accompanying the credits, to the more unassuming, everyday frames within and outside the dead man’s home, to two particularly luscious shots of coconut palm tops swaying in the breeze, Khalid swings seamlessly from the lavish to the modest, aided by Deepu Joseph’s slick editing shorn of unnecessary flourishes. Together they ensure that we are aware of the beauty of the surroundings without ever allowing their glorious grandeur to overwhelm the emotional core of Ee.Ma.Yau.

Prashant Pillai’s music is sparingly employed but supremely effective when it is. Renganaath Ravee’s sound design is rich in detail though understated, especially in the use of rain as yet another reminder of the constancy of nature irrespective of the games humans play.

The technical polish in Ee.Ma.Yau. serves its purpose by enabling some great storytelling. By finding laughter in morbid situations and social commentary in the unlikeliest of places, in the tradition of other fine funeral films, Pellissery fashions Ee.Ma.Yau. into a keenly observant, fabulously funny insight into the politics, economics and theatrics around death.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	120 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/ee-ma-yau-movie-review-lijo-jose-pellissery-returns-with-a-keenly-observant-fabulously-funny-funeral-film-4474405.html

Poster courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/eemayau.movie/

Release date:	May 18, 2018
Director:	Akarsh Khurana
Cast: Language:	Sumeet Vyas, Kumud Mishra, Natasha Rastogi, Taaruk Raina, Sonnalli Seygall, Sarthak Kakar, Mantra Mugdh, Sarang Sathaye, Muzammil Qureshi Hindi

A DJ whose career is in the doldrums agrees to carry a package on a flight without knowing what it is. He is travelling by an airline that is about to shut down, and as it happens, he chooses to fly on a day when the plane is hijacked by a bunch of disgruntled employees. The ensuing chaos spirals further when drugged passengers enter the mix. The title of course is a play on “hijack” and a drug-induced “high”.

An accomplished director of comedy could have turned Adhir Bhat’s story for High Jack into a rib-tickling affair. Sadly for this film and some of its gifted cast members, Akarsh Khurana seems not to be that person. Khurana, who was a co-writer on the screenplays of Krrish and Krrish 3, has written this screenplay too in addition to helming the project. Despite brimming with potentially hilarious situations and boasting of some razor-sharp actors, High Jack crash-lands not long after it takes off.

Sumeet Vyas plays DJ Rakesh / Rockesh who is desperate for money and a career. Vyas was impeccable last year as the joint lead with Kalki Koechlin in director Rakhee Sandilya’s incredibly realistic Ribbon. In High Jack he displays a flair for comedy that will hopefully in future be tapped in a better-directed film. His natural affinity for the camera and spot-on dialogue delivery along with the presence of the always dependable Kumud Mishra and Natasha Rastogi as fellow passengers Mr and Mrs Taneja, are not enough though to salvage this half-cooked enterprise.

The fact is, there are several laugh-out-loud moments in High Jack. The opening scenes on the plane with Rakesh, the intrusive young fellow seated across the aisle and the squabbling Tanejas are rip-roaringly funny. A joke that could have been deemed Islamophobic is turned on its head, and Mr Taneja’s wisecracks about a possibly transsexual flight attendant are repeatedly called out for their prejudice. Yet the film faces turbulence from multiple quarters.

Foremost among them is the indifferent casting and writing of the supporting characters other than these four. They mostly sit around unenthused even by gun-toting men taking over the plane, as if their entire beings are too botoxed to react. Sonnalli Seygall, who played one of the evil girlfriends in Pyaar Ka Punchnama and its sequel, is cast as a pilot of whom zero acting is required.

A sense of urgency is sorely missing from the atmosphere of that aircraft from the instant that it is hijacked. Scenes involving air traffic control officials and the airline office completely lack energy. But the death knell is rung halfway through the film when the humour starts getting repetitive. Soon the narrative is so haphazard that it appears as though no one knows quite what to do with it.

The slapdash editing – visual and audio – gives High Jack a flaccid feel, with too many shots, scenes and silences in between over-staying their welcome. In the end, the film remains a stringing together of good concepts that are not carried to their fruition. Such as that rap number titled Aapaatkaaleen(Emergency) playing in Rakesh’s drug-addled brain, muddling up lines from standard in-flight announcements by pilots and cabin crew:“Iss vimaan mein chheh aapaatkaaleen dwaar hai / Do saamne / Do-do wings ke oopar / Do-do-do saamne / Do-do wings ke oopar/ Do-do saamne / Do-do wings ke oopar / Do do do / Do do / Do do do / Do do.”

“This aircraft has six emergency exits / Two in front / Two each above the wings / Two-two-two in front / Two each above the wings / Two each in front / Two each above the wings / Two two two / Two two / Two two two / two two.” It is a clever idea, funny and zippy at first, then it gets tedious, and then it unravels too soon. Just like the film.

It is hard to believe that High Jack passed muster with Phantom Films, same producers that have given us the high-quality Lootera, Queen, Masaan, NH10, and Anurag Kashyap’s best directorial works of the decade, Raman Raghav 2.0and this year’s Mukkabaaz. High Jack? Really guys?

Rating (out of five stars): *

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	102 minutes 27 seconds

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

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/high-jack-movie-review-sumeet-vyass-comic-timing-is-the-best-thing-about-this-doomed-hijack-drama-4474615.html

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

Release date:	Kerala: May 5, Delhi: May 18, 2018
Director:	Mridul Nair
Cast: Language:	Asif Ali, Arjun Ashokan, Aparna Balamurali, Niranjana Anoop, Anoop Menon, Sreenath Bhasi, Deepak Parambol, Saiju Kurup, Alencier Ley Lopez Malayalam

If I have to watch one more Malayalam film set in an engineering college where students – mostly men – skip classes, get into fights with rivals, mistreat teachers, ogle women and while away their time drinking, even as the director chronicles their lives with indulgent affection, I might retire into a hut in the Himalayas.

Well past the halfway mark in B.Tech, just as I was about to google real estate prices in Uttarakhand and Himachal … boom! … something happened to draw attention back to the events unfolding on screen. Mridul Nair must explain why he chose to devote almost two-thirds of his film to goings-on as old as the hills in Malayalam cinema, when the sharp and politically relevant crux of B.Tech lies in the subsequent one-third.

Asif Ali in B.Tech plays Anand Subrahmanyam, an angst-ridden student of Bangalore’s Wisdom Institute of Technology (WIT), who is now in his eighth year in college. Engineering institutes are a dime a dozen in the city and, as he puts it, there are more engineers in this country than there are mosquitoes. He and his gang of layabouts make the situation worse for themselves by doing nothing about it.

Anand is the de facto head of the group that includes fellow students JoJo (Sreenath Bhasi) and Nissar Ahamed (Deepak Parambol), unemployed alumnus Prashanth Puthenveetil (Saiju Kurup) and the token woman, Ananya Vishwanathan (Niranjana Anoop). They hang out at Fathima Café whose owner Syed Ali Kuttiparambil (Alencier Ley Lopez) dotes on these freeloaders. Anand’s girlfriend Priya (Aparna Balamurali) is not a no-hoper like the rest. She is perennially angry with him and he is constantly inconsiderate towards her, but well, a hero’s gotta have a girlfriend, y’know.

Enter: Azad Mohammed (Arjun Ashokan), a virtuous child from Payannur. He gels with them despite being a first-year student and evidently earnest about his studies.

Azad’s arrival notwithstanding, this is a plot filled with generic characters in a generic setting who are even given a generic song, Ore nila ore veyil, through which they ride around the city on motorbikes looking generically cool. Just to prove how with-it they are, Nissar is called Puffs, Puffs leers at the neighbour’s wife’s and daughters’ panties hanging on a clothes line, and a bottle of hard liquor is called Sunny Leone. So hip, na?

The entire pre-interval portion is devoted to familiar antics that are very occasionally funny, but mostly not. The top-notch cinematography by Manoj Kumar Khatoi and overall polished packaging matter little in such a scenario.

The acting by the youngsters and Lopez is fair enough. Arjun Ashokan is especially sweet and gets us emotionally involved with his Azad. Anoop Menon, on the other hand, gives a stilted performance as Ananya’s lawyer Dad.

B.Tech inexplicably has Malayalam subtitles embedded in the print for English dialogues but not for Hindi dialogues. Is it this team’s contention that the film’s primary audience (read: Malayalis) understands Hindi and not basic English? Really?

Hold your cynical horses though. Early on we get a hint that writer Ramakrishna J. Kulur and writer-director Mridul Nair are not ordinary minds in a scene in the WIT principal’s office in which a teacher (Aju Varghese) gets Azad to take off his skullcap while having no problem whatsoever with a turbanned Sikh standing just inches away. If his was a sincere in-principle objection to external manifestations of religion, then, err, umm…

This is a truly great moment, not because it draws attention to Azad’s Muslim identity, but because the presence of the other gentleman in the room along with Azad raises a question that even liberals rarely have the guts to ask Islamophobes in India. Besides, it is so fleeting and executed without a fuss, that for a while I wondered whether Messrs Nair and Kulur had meant anything by it. They did. And they leave it there to simmer in the viewer’s mind until many scenes later when Led Zeppelin’s Kashmir is referenced, once again unfussily and in passing. Also gently woven into the otherwise run-of-mill, over-stretched narrative is a scene at a police station I will not describe here, and you begin to hope that at some stage this will go somewhere other than the boring route taken by innumerable Mollywood campus flicks.

It does. And when that happens, B.Tech fearlessly shames an Indian establishment steeped in prejudice against the Muslim community. Unfortunately the film takes too long to get to its politically explosive portion, and even when it does, the treatment of the sensitive matter is infused with commercial cinema conventions. For instance, in a scene that is designed as a nod to the scorching intensity of Kanhaiya Kumar’s azaadislogans, actors pose around looking grim and a looooong song plays loudly in the background when the police charge at them.

Storywise, B.Tech has so much going for it by now, but subtracts from its own impact by stressing and restressing every point made either by showing characters play out episodes already recounted by others or with its high-decibel soundtrack that is used to underline emotions and actions already conveyed by the actors.

Having come out admirably with all guns blazing in its condemnation of Islamophobia within the police, B.Tech falters when a lawyer slams a policeman in court for stereotyping an entire community because of the crimes of a minority among them. No doubt this is a well-intended statement, but offered as it is without any addendum, it is also not far removed from the “all terrorists are Muslims but all Muslims are not terrorists” cliché in a world where a bearded, brown-skinned chap engineering a bomb blast will automatically be deemed an aatankwaadi / teevravadi, but the President of a global superpower does not earn the same label despite invading a foreign country under the pretext that it was hiding weapons of mass destruction, and within India, the tag is yet to be bestowed on those who plan ‘spontaneous’ beef-related lynchings and ‘riots’ in which minority community members are raped and murdered.

In its analysis of communal politics then, B.Tech is unexpectedly evolved, but not enough. Its failure to take its liberalism to a higher level might still have been excusable considering the real-life context in which it has been made, where open expressions of hatred are now so prevalent that any gesture of reconciliation comes as a relief. What is inexcusable though is the way the film lazily ambles through an unoriginal campus set-up for what seems like aeons before getting to the point.

A glass half empty could be viewed as half full by an optimist. B.Techis a glass two-thirds empty. It takes more patience than I possess to view it as one-third full.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	146 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/b-tech-movie-review-two-thirds-dull-and-generic-one-third-sharp-and-politically-relevant-4476113.html

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

Release date:	May 18, 2018
Director:	M. Hajamoinu
Cast: Language:	Bhama Arun, Mamitha Baiju, Anagha Nair, Diya, Vismaya Vishwanath, Indrans, Balaji, Reena Bashir, Ashkar Saudan Malayalam

In future, when almost 19 minutes of a film have passed and all that has been covered are the acknowledgments (which are even longer in this case than in most Mollywood productions) followed by opening credits monotonously playing out against a pretty green landscape followed by a song introducing the female leads who dance awkwardly to some very rudimentary choreography in the picturesque countryside, treat that as a warning that worse is to come.

Writer-director M. Hajamoinu’s School Diary is the sort of bad film that critics dream of while praying for small mercies: so bad that it is entertaining. It would probably have gone unnoticed if an icon had not participated in it and promoted it. M.G. Sreekumar, two-time National Award winner, three-time Kerala State Award winner and long-time singing voice of Mohanlal, is the film’s music director and has a cameo as himself in an extended scene in which he is honoured by the primary characters. He also released the poster of School Diary.

Chetta, just one question: why?

School Diary revolves around five Class 12 students in a school in Kerala. They are Aarcha, Indu, Rima, Diya and Yamuna. Aarcha has been covered in the news media because she wrote a poem called Aksharamaalayil Amma (Mother In The Alphabet), which is being considered for inclusion in the state’s school syllabus.

These youngsters are out to make a difference in the world. So they farm vegetables for poor folk. And Aarcha comes up with the idea of having a diary in which kids in their school can confide their problems that staff and student leaders then will try to solve – an idea that is treated by her peers and faculty as worthy of a Nobel for Novelty.

Along the way the girls encounter two villains. Never mind what they do. Point is, School Diary is not just a case study in amateurish filmmaking, it is also a poorly disguised effort to appear progressive while masking its conservative core.

In one of the opening scenes, when students and teachers are discussing Aarcha’s new concept diary, their principal makes an off-hand comment about how cellphones are spoiling young people. Uff!

In one of the film’s silliest scenes, pandering no doubt to the prevailing chest-thumping nationalism dominating the Indian political discourse, a bunch of people in a cafeteria stand up on hearing the national anthem being sung in a nearby schoolyard, the camera then intercuts between the school and the café, continuing to do so until the anthem is over! This interlude plays no part whatsoever in taking the story forward. I repeat, no part.

It was around this point in School Diary that I started giggling to myself, in the theatre where I watched it as one of just two audience members. The silliness continued throughout the film. The halfway mark, for instance, was announced not with “interval” or “intermission” flashing on screen, as is the norm, but with the words “tension break”.

Despite positioning School Diary as a woman-centric affair in its opening scene, Hajamoinu reveals his true patriarchal colours when he ultimately places the baton of Protector of Women in the hands of a male teacher in Aarcha & Co’s school. I laughed out loud in that moment when this gentleman, who appears ordinary until then, suddenly rips off his shirt to reveal a bulked-up, muscular torso in a red-bordered black baniyan before proceeding to beat up the bad guy.

A quick Net search reveals that School Diary’s shirtless wonder is Anvar Sadath, also its producer. Sadath has generously featured footage of himself from that body-baring scene for 23 seconds in the film’s 1 minute 35 seconds long trailer, although he only plays a supporting character. He has also brought out a couple of posters in which he is the dominant visual, not the five heroines.

Of the young leads, Bhama Arun playing Aarcha looks like she may be watchable under less tacky direction. It makes no sense though to critique the lot since I doubt even a Dadasaheb Phalke Award-worthy veteran’s skills would survive such a misadventure. The music of School Diary is better than the rest of the film, but is still not as sophisticated as you might expect, consideringthe high-voltage stalwart to whom it is credited.

To be fair to M.G. Sreekumar, he is not the only respected name associated with School Diary. The Kerala State Award winning actor Indrans, one of Malayalam cinema’s best, also stars in it. This, by the way, is not a phenomenon unique to Mollywood. Across Indian film industries, while successful leading men and women are careful about their choices, it is not uncommon at all to find top character artistes and singers aboard cringe-worthy projects usually because their images tend not to take a beating from such detours, which also usually pay solid financial dividends. Yeah, I know – it is sad.

On second thoughts, if Sreekumar had not been part of School Diary, it may have slipped under the radar, it may not have managed to travel outside Kerala, and I may not have found myself gigging helplessly over it in a darkened hall in the National Capital Region in the middle of an exhausting day. Thank you, universe. Thank you.

Rating (out of five stars): 0 stars

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	108 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/school-diary-movie-review-whats-m-g-sreekumar-doing-lending-his-name-to-this-non-film-4476737.html

Posters courtesy:

(1) https://www.facebook.com/Schooldiarymalayalammovie/

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

Release date:	May 25, 2018
Director:	Abhishek Sharma
Cast: Language:	John Abraham, Diana Penty, Boman Irani, Anuja SatheHindi

1995: An earnest young bureaucrat’s proposal to make India a nuclear state is mucked up in execution by a minister anxious for personal glory.

When we meet AshwathRaina (John Abraham) again three years later, he is still disillusioned and bitter about his suspension from his job for a politician’s mistakes. Raina has been leading a quiet existence, taking private tuitions at home for IAS aspirants while his astrophysicist wife Sushma pulls most of the weight for the family that also includes their nine-year-old son Prahlad.

When life gives him a second chance through the medium of Himanshu Shukla (Boman Irani), principal secretary to then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Raina first hesitates but then takes the challenge head on, becoming the head of an ultra-covert team that goes on to conduct nuclear test explosions in May 1998 in Pokhran, Rajasthan.

Raina is fictional. The Pokhran operation, as newspaper archives attest, is not. Parmanu: The Story of Pokhran recounts the events of that crucial episode in contemporary Indian history.

This is a tricky subject in this age of high-decibel, aggressive nationalism, and could have gone unbearably overboard in the hands of a smarmy director trying to ingratiate himself with the present right-wing government, especially considering that India’s current ruling party also headed the regime under which the Pokhran tests were conducted in 1998. Director Abhishek Sharma, best known for Tere Bin Laden, seems to be aiming at least for a balanced tone. Instead of getting his characters to spout hosannas to any particular political party, he leaves them to do their work while the then PM’s stances and the international response to the tests are conveyed purely through news video footage from back then of the real-life players involved: Vajpayee, US President Bill Clinton, Pakistan PM Nawaz Sharif and his predecessor Benazir Bhutto. Viewers are thus largely left to interpret the proceedings as we wish.

Except for the slimy minister who wronged Raina, Sharma also steers clear of maligning Vajpayee’s Opposition, keeping them absent from the picture. Pakistan (a favourite whipping boy of Bollywood) and the rest of the international community are not lazily demonised either. US Intelligence officials do end up looking stupid in the film, but what the heck, American commercial cinema trivialises the rest of the world all the time, so a similar lack of nuance in the portrayal of the US establishment in a commercial Indian film is worthy of a chuckle and some forgiveness. So is the somewhat delusional description of India’s post-Pokhran might in the closing text on screen. The clincher in favour of Parmanu is that though Sharma gives in to the temptation to speechify here and there about commitment to the country, the point is not stretched and the film does not descend into maudlin deshbhakti.

The result is a reasonably effective thriller as Raina & Co race against time, the watchful eye of US satellites and the fragility of Vajpayee’s coalition government to conduct the explosions that made international news in 1998. True, the glaring amateurishness of a couple of their moves on this most secret of missions is laughable. I mean, c’mon, in an area packed with spies, six undercover operatives take on the aliases Yudhishthir, Arjun, Bheem, Nakul, Sahdev and Krishna – can you be more obvious than that? But pace compensates for these missteps which are, in any case, not the norm with this bright, hardworking lot. The writers of Parmanu– Saiwyn Quadras, Sanyuktha Chawla Shaikh and Sharma himself – also need to be commended for making the conversations about the processes involved in their work sound comprehensible yet believably intelligent to the average, inexpert viewer.

What could have elevated this film to another level altogether, of course, would have been at least an allusion to the perils of military aggression irrespective of the perpetrator, rather than a celebration of weaponisation. Perhaps not wanting to make his film cerebral in any way, Sharma avoids any such discussion. Fair enough. If he had stuck to a clinical account of the work done by Raina’s team (in the style of the recent Bollywood release Raidstarring Ajay Devgn), Parmanu could have still risen above being merely passably entertaining. It does not because of a needless string of songs jammed into the narrative. And then there is the matter of John Abraham’s performance.

Abraham’s charm in films all these years has come from his nice-guy vibe combined with incredible sex appeal. What he gives us in Parmanuis pared-down glamour, which is well-suited to this role, and a remarkable job on Raina’s look including what appears to be considerable weight loss and a toning down of visible muscle bulk. For a hero whose shirtless scenes and unbelievably hot body have been his USPs so far, no doubt these are brave choices to make, but his expressionlessness from start to finish costs Parmanu dear. Abraham’s nice-guy vibe is still very much in evidence here, but it is just not enough.

The rest of the cast are all good with whatever little they are given to do. Anuja Sathe is both convincing and likeable as Ashwath Raina’s neglected spouse. Diana Penty, who was luminous in Cocktailin 2012 and funny in Happy Bhag Jayegi,deserves a larger role, but at least she is not treated as a sexy female sidekick to a charismatic leading man as is the norm with similar Hollywood and Bollywood films. Besides, there is a small thrill to be derived from the presence in the story of a woman official from India’s IB who does not let it pass that the hero expected a person in her position to be a man. Coming as this does in a film in which the same hero’s wife is an astrophysicist, and the writing team does not overtly pat themselves on the back for envisioning a woman in such a profession (unlike most of their Bollywood colleagues for whom feminism is a trend to be profited from, rather than genuine conviction), it is hard to understand why they did not give the rest of their script the same unobtrusive depth. What might have been can be a long discussion. What is is the point here: Parmanu, with all its faults, is moderatelyentertaining fare.

Rating (out of five stars): **

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	129 minutes 32 seconds

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

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/bollywood/parmanu-the-story-of-pokhran-movie-review-john-abraham-thriller-is-reasonably-effective-passably-entertaining-4482333.html

Visuals courtesy: (1) https://www.facebook.com/ParmanuTheMovie/

(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parmanu:_The_Story_of_Pokhran

Release date:	May 25, 2018
Director:	B.R. Vijayalakshmi
Cast: Language:	Tovino Thomas, Pia Bajpai, Rohini, Suhasini, Manobala, Prabhu Malayalam with some Tamil dialogues

It takes more than just charisma to rise above the inadequacies of a script. It takes experience. Tovino Thomas made for an irresistible scamp as a gangster hopelessly in love in Aashiq Abu’s Mayaanadhi last year and blazed across the screen with his intensity in Oru Mexican Aparatha, but his rawness becomes clear when his character who is meant to be a lovable young fellow turns out, in fact, to be quite irritating as he romances the heroine in the new Malayalam film Abhiyude Kadha Anuvinteyum (Abhi’s Story Is Also Anu’s Story), titled Abhiyum Anuvum (Abhi and Anu) in its simultaneously shot and released Tamil avatar.

He is not alone of course. Pia Bajpai, who plays Anu to his Abhi, is hampered as much by the writing as by her own acting limitations. Her Anu is just as irritating as Abhi is when their characters woo each other in the film’s first half.

Cinematographer-turned-director B.R. Vijayalakshmi’s Abhiyude Kadha Anuvinteyum (AKA) is written by Udayabanu Maheswaran. Before I proceed with this review, let me register my protest at the absence of English/Malayalam subtitles for the sizeable number of Tamil dialogues in the film. This calls for a separate discussion. Here for now is the story. AKA revolves around two youngsters who are poles apart – he works at a regular office in Chennai, she is a free-spirited organic farmer in Idukki, his preoccupations are personal, she is a social worker. Anu and Abhi encounter each other on the social media, then meet, fall in love and marry in a jiffy, before fate threatens to tear them asunder.

(Possible spoilers ahead) The revelation about Anu and Abhi’s relationship that comes in text on screen at the end, answers a question that was staring us in the face for almost an hour. It is a wonder that the lead couple were either too stupid or ignorant about biology to think of asking it. Without giving anything away, this is it: whose egg was it? Watch the film and you will know what I am referring to. When the answer comes in the finale, the entire premise of the tragedy that befalls them collapses.(Spoiler alert ends)

Vijayalakshmi spares no effort in embellishing AKA’s wrapping. Compared to the other two Malayalam films I have watched this week, Kaamuki and Aabhaasam, this one is clearly the most technologically accomplished and appears the most costly.

Dharan Kumar’s background score, for one, adds to the surface allure of this package although the songs are too many and too generic. Cinematographer Agilan has made optimum use of the locations at his disposal, from thickly vegetated mountainous regions that lend themselves to great visuals to a less conventionally handsome urban high-rise apartment complex. His work in home interiors in the city and the countryside are facilitated by Shiva Yadav’s spiffy production design.

However much fluff and gloss AKA couches itself in though, it cannot hide the fact that it is a regressive film convinced of its progressiveness. Among other things, there is the exasperatingly clichéd route taken by Anu and Abhi’s courtship, rejigging tropes that should be familiar to anyone who regularly watches commercial Indian cinema across languages. Everything these two do is positioned as cute and sweet and breezy and forward, but at the end of the day she turns out to be a tease who plays a cruel game with him to test his love for her, in scenes that conform to the standard assumption that this is precisely how all women behave with men, that when a woman says “no” what she means is she wants to be chased.

In some ways, AKA reminded me of Mani Ratnam’s OK Kanmani in which the veteran director gave us not a true-blue young romance but his vision of what today’s youth do when in love blended with a quaintly traditional older person’s idea of coolth. AKA is far more harmful. For genuine coolth born of conviction and broad-mindedness, not just a desire to engage with a new audience, watch Mayaanadhi, my friends.

Anu and Abhi are the Barbie and Ken of Indian conservatism, with all the trappings that tend to be viewed by mainstream Indian cinema as hallmarks of modernity – a bustling social media life for both, short skirts, strappy tops and teeny shorts for her – although they camouflage a dangerously conservative core.

(Spoiler ahead) It must rank as one of the longest running conspiracies in human history that generations of women have chosen to hide from their daughters and friends or even outrightly lie to them about the extreme discomfort and pain involved in pregnancy and childbirth and the emotional difficulties that follow, painting instead a picture of mommydomas unadulterated bliss. Via Anu, Vijayalakshmi plays along with this nonsensical romanticisation of motherhood (which denies young women the right to make informed choices about whether or not to have babies). When Abhi expresses regret that he cannot share the difficulties she will endure to give birth to their child, Anu replies, “Idiot, no woman sees what she goes through for childbirth as difficulty blah blah blah.” Speak for yourself, Ms.The truth is,no woman can bust the myth without risking being shamed as selfish and unfeminine. (Spoiler alert ends)

At first, the post-interval portion of AKA raises interesting and pressing questions related to the pro-choice versus pro-life debate, but the mask is blown off its superficial liberalism once and for all in a speech delivered by Abhi’s neighbour Revathy (Suhasini) to his mother Bhuvana about the true meaning of maatrithva(motherhood). While there is no doubt that Bhuvana has been a neglectful parent to Abhi, she is no less deserving of condemnation than her husband, but he, of course, is spared a lecture because, as we all know, fathers are held up to lower standards than mothers.

Quietly implied in this sermon is also an anti-abortion message.

For all its shimmer and sparkle, pretty pictures and pretty 21st century people, Abhiyude Kadha Anuvinteyum is just a bunch of medieval values wearing expensive make-up.

Rating (out of five stars): *

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

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/abhiyude-kadha-anuvinteyum-movie-review-pia-bajpai-and-tovino-thomas-play-the-barbie-and-ken-of-indian-conservatism-4483589.html

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

Release date:	Kerala: May 11, Delhi: May 25, 2018
Director:	Binu S.
Cast: Language:	Aparna Balamurali, Askar Ali, Kavya Suresh, Baiju, Kochu Preman Malayalam

When we first meet her as a teenager, the heroine of Kaamukihas just one preoccupation: she wants larger breasts so that lecherous men will stalk and harass her.

Yes, you read that right. This is not about a pubescent kid’s increasing awareness of her changing body, nor about a girl’s new-found interest in boys, or even an immature young woman’s desire for male attention. Let me say it again, slowly, so that it sinks in: Kaamuki’s leading lady Achamma Varghese a.k.a. Achu w.a.n.t.s. l.a.r.g.e.r. b.r.e.a.s.t.s. s.o. t.h.a.t. l.e.c.h.e.r.o.u.s. m.e.n. w.i.l.l. s.t.a.l.k. a.n.d. h.a.r.a.s.s. h.e.r. She does not consider it stalking or harassment, of course. She has far more positive nouns and adjectives for such obnoxious male behaviour. And the film’s attempt through that entire segment is to draw laughs from the audience courtesy the young woman’s desperation.

It goes without saying that writer-director Binu S’s Kaamuki (Female Lover) belongs to the Omar Lulu school of crude, deeply disturbing cinema. It is politically incorrect and insensitive not just on the gender front, as you will learn later in this review. In fact, it is deficient in pretty much all departments: itlacks focus, it jumps from theme to theme, it is heroine-centric in the opening half but relegates Achu to a supporting role in the hero’s existence post-interval, and it is brimful of clichés about Kerala college life.

At first it appears that this will be a comedy about a girl who is burdened with the old-fashioned name Achamma in the modern world. Next it heads in the direction of being a comedy about a girl from a conservative home – the same Achamma – anxious to catch the eye of a man, any available man, leery ones included.Finally Kaamuki rolls around to being the tale of a boy who is blind but does not want his disability to define him.

The latter gentleman is Hari, Achu’s collegemate when she enrols for a post-graduate degree in social work, and soon the object of her affection. Her initial encounters with him and his best friend Jaffer at their college in Kerala’s Kalady town are designed to play to the gallery with the widely perpetuated notion that sexual harassment is usually a figment of women’s imagination as a result of which paavam men constantly get into trouble for things they did not do or intend.

Having spent Kaamuki’sfirst half wincing at the light-hearted tone Binu S. adopts while portraying men – including teachers – flinging words like “piece” and “item” around to describe women in Achu’s college, casually hounding these women and worse, I spent the second half shuddering at his idea of what it takes to move an audience to tears at the travails of a sightless man.

In a scene that puts in the shade everything that passed before it in Kaamuki, a father’s proprietorial attitude towards his daughter prompts him to test a blind man’s husband-worthiness by challenging him to locate the girl in a crowd without any help. She allows it to happen. The gathering too allows it to happen, convinced no doubt about a man’s ownership rights over his daughter. And it does not occur to the couple that the decision to be with the boy should be the girl’s and hers alone.

The hypocrisy and muddled nature of Kaamuki, and the lack of intelligence in India’s film Censorship system are particularly glaring in two scenes in which the following words flash on screen: “Violence against women is punishable under law.” Whether the declaration was voluntarily placed there by Binu S. or forced on him by the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), it illustrates Indian society’s twisted understanding of “violence”. The line first appears when Achu’s father hits his other daughter for marrying a man of her choice; and later when a male collegemate attempts to intimidate Achu, only to be punched by Jaffer.

It seems not to matter to anyone involved that before Achu’sDad struck her elder sister, considerable time in the film had been devoted to trivialising sexual harassment while Achu longs for her breasts to attract random lewd men. While the father physically attacking a daughter elicits these words of censure on screen, what is one to say of the romanticisation of that later scene in which the same father denies another daughter her agency and is cruel to the man she loves? Or the fact that Jaffer, who seeks to protect Achu from a sexual predator, is predatory towards other women? For the record, this horrific film has been awarded the mildest available CBFC rating: U, which means it has been deemed fit for viewing by children.

If this were a non-descript venture it would be a separate matter, but Kaamuki has the redoubtable Aparna Balamurali playing Achu. Ever since this young star sparkled as Jimsy in the memorable Maheshinte Prathikaram (2016), I have been silently willing Mollywood to give her the central role in a quality film worthy of her, longing to see her in a heroine-led film about hercharacter’s prathikaram, her swargarajyam, her suvisheshangal, herpremalekhanam, her Edanthottam– the sort that tends to orbit men and routinely falls into the laps of male actors who are as talented or far less than she is.

No doubt the trailer and first half of Kaamukirevolve around her, but a woman-centric project such as this is as harmful to women as a male-centric film with the same mindset, since the director and indulgent audience members in the case of the former are likely to use the importance given to its heroine as a defence against charges of anti-women prejudice (just as the mere decision to have a blind man as the hero might be held up as a shield against criticism of this film’s horrendous treatment of disability). No Binu S., making Achamma dance in a mundu or getting her to say she wants a man for fun and not for love – “You mean premam? Athu okke veliye thalavedneyaa (That stuff’s a big headache). Only entertainment.” – does not absolve you of your misogyny.

Aparna Balamurali, how could you degrade yourself by signing up for Kaamuki?

Rating (out of five stars): -10 Stars

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

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/kaamuki-movie-review-oh-aparna-balamurali-what-were-you-thinking-4484205.html

Posters courtesy: IMDB

Release date:	Kerala: May 4, Delhi: May 25, 2018
Director:	Jubith Namradath
Cast: Language:	Suraj Venjaramoodu, Rima Kallingal, Sheethal Shyam, Nirmal Palazhi, Alencier Ley Lopez, Indrans, Nithin Raj, Nassar, Abhija Sivakala, Mammukoya Malayalam

When a bus called Gandhi from Democracy Travels takes off on a Karnataka-Kerala highway, it seems inevitable that this will be an eventful ride. The passengers include a lustful male conductor out to maul a beautiful single woman on board, a transsexual who bonds with the latter, a horny man who is turned on at the sight of a couple making out, a solo female traveller separated by a few seats from an attentive and attractive young fellow, a sickly chap seated beside a considerate youth, a child sexual abuse survivor, an over-zealous Christian duo, a hypocritical Muslim guy who makes puritanical demands on his wife, a thin-skinned Hindu pilgrim and a foreigner curious about Hinduism. Gandhi is part of a fleet that includes vehicles named Godse, Jinnah, Marx and Ambedkar.

This is the sort of concept that could potentially translate into terribly pretentious or terribly clever satire. Debutant writer-director Jubith Namradath’s Aabhaasam is a mixed bag. The christening of the buses ends up sounding puerile in a film that whiles away too much time getting to where it wants to go, and packs in too much blatant messaging on the way there. Too many metaphors in Aabhaasam lack subtlety, too many characters rear their heads with promise but then fade away, and there are too many socio-political references that, though current and relevant, barely skim the surface of the issues in question. In its exploration of gender dynamics on the bus though, Namradath does indeed make a significant point.

Aabhaasam variously means immorality, indecency and vulgarity. The director says the title is also a crunching down of Aarsha Bharatha Samskaram, a glorious era in India’s (arguably mythical) past. The irony clearly did not go down well with the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), which initially gave Aabhaasam an unfairly severe A (adults only) rating, which was changed to UA after a long-drawn-out battle.Namradath has told the news media that the Censors attributed the A to his film’s “anti-establishment” nature. I will leave it to lawyers to discuss the illegality of that criterion, and dwell instead on the over-sensitivity of the sarkar.

If “establishment” is to be read literally here as “India’s present government / ruling party”, then the examining committee was most probably irked by the (amusing) mention in the film of beef dishes being camouflaged on the menu of a Malayali restaurant in Karnataka. It is a measure of this government’s extreme insecurity that its flunkies in the CBFC have found this passing aside in Aabhaasam bothersome.

If “anti-establishment” is to be read as “anti-status quo”, well then, it is the job of creative persons to question prevailing power structures, and yes, Aabhaasam does that. It is not the CBFC’s job to object to this (or any) filmmaker’s decision to hammer patriarchy and sexual repression, take minor potshots at major religions and the government.

Aabhaasam’s earnestness in an intimidating political environment is no doubt impressive. Sadly, its good intentions take it only so far and not further.

The success of an ensemble enterprise depends on the writer developing multiple single-line descriptors into full-fledged characters, memorable whether they are big or small. The sexually unapologetic Seema from Angamaly Diaries, Kachra the Dalit spinner from Lagaan and Maman the vile gangster from Slumdog Millionaire are what iconic ensemble films are made of – etched forever in the public consciousness although they were just satellite presences in their respective films. Despite Aabhaasam’s ensemble cast of respected artistes, most of the characters are briefly engagingbut not effectively expanded by the screenplay into individuals with a distinctive personality and profile that goes beyond the markers of the social group they are meant to represent.

The only fully-fleshed-out player in Aabhaasam, the person who makes the film worthwhile, is the creepy bus attendant played by Suraj Venjaramoodu. The story emerging from his actions, the equation that forms between the woman he targets (Rima Kallingal), her new found trans friend (Sheethal Shyam) and the stranger played by Abhija Sivakala, lead to well-thought-out consequences and a credible conclusion.

It helps that all four actors are remarkable. Kallingal and Shyam deserved better-scripted roles, but they do well with what they are served. Venjaramoodu, with the benefit of the film’s best-written part, makes a chameleon-like descent into sliminess that is particularly striking because his turn as a sweetly subdued husband to a fiery wife in Thondimuthalum Driksakshiyumlast year is still so fresh in the mind. Sivakala is a powerhouse performer and makes a mark with just a few minutes of screen time.

Namradath’s potential is evident with the strand involving this quartet in Aabhaasam. Their impact is diluted inexcusably though by the many wanderings in the screenplay, including a self-indulgent, intellectually la-di-da sequence in the lap of naturefeaturing Kallingal and Shyam. As if infected by the mood, editor Shameer Muhammed, who is otherwise so wonderful, allows too many moments, shots and scenes to linger longer than they should until the film’s final, finally interesting half hour.

If great principles alone could make great art, every activist would be an artist. Jubith Namradath’s sincerity is evident in Aabhaasam but obviously more was needed. Where his film works is when it is not making over-smart, snappy statements, but telling a story instead. Honestly, that story should have been enough.

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

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

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/aabhaasam-movie-review-gender-dynamics-save-the-day-in-this-over-stuffed-satire-4485763.html

Posters courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/aabhaasamFilm/

Release date:	June 1, 2018
Director:	Shashanka Ghosh
Cast: Language:	Kareena Kapoor Khan, Sonam Kapoor Ahuja, Swara Bhasker, Shikha Talsania, Sumeet Vyas, Vivek Mushran, Ayessha Raza, Manoj Pahwa, Anjum Rajabali, Ekavali Khanna, Sukesh Arora, Vishwas Kinni Hindi

I confess I set out to watch Veere Di Wedding with some trepidation. Honestly, I am exhausted from the parade of so-called ‘women-centric’ Bollywood films in recent years by directors who do not understand or care a fig about women but smelt an opportunity as the rights of our half of the population moved from the inner folds of newspapers to Page 1 and television prime time after the December 2012 Delhi gangrape. When feminism is a fad and a formula for you, not a conviction, obviously you will churn out empty vessels such as Akira or stereotypes like Tanu in the Tanu Weds Manuflicks.

Veere Di Wedding is none of that. Director Shashanka Ghosh’s new film is about real, relatable women. They fight everyday battles, laugh and cry by turns, trip and fall as human beings often do and pick themselves up each time, all the while defying not just social strictures but also Bollywood’s boring cliché of what constitutes a ‘strong woman’ that even good films like NH10and Mardaani did not entirely shake off. In the world according to Hindi cinema’s aspiring or fake feminists, if a woman is tough, she must compulsorily smoke heavily, drink, swear incessantly and if possible, be sexually promiscuous – teetotalers in particular apparently do not count.

Thankfully, Shashanka Ghosh, his writers Nidhi Mehra and Mehul Suri are not faking anything. Their Kalindi, Avni, Sakshi and Meera are not trying to impress us with what other shallow minds have perceived as mardaani(masculine), hip habits worth striving for, nor are they founts of what is conventionally considered feminine virtue. They simply are who they are.

These are women with agency, flaws, humanity and, above all, a sense of humour they often turn on themselves. Their vocabulary and behaviour are not borrowed from American serials that are often tapped by unimaginative, mindless writers who see the US as the Mecca of coolth and liberalism. They speak and act like educated, city-bred, wealthy or middle-class Indianwomen might and do.

The bride and buddy (veer) in the wedding of the title is Kalindi (Kareena Kapoor Khan) who has returned home to Delhi from Australia with her boyfriend for what turns out to be a garish, extravagant shaadi that his parents insist on organising, ignoring the couple’s wishes. Kalindi’s prospective saas-sasur– wealthy, unsophisticated, conservative, smothering their son with affection and attention – are a sharp contrast to her suave father (Anjum Rajabali) with whom she has barely had a relationship since he married after her mother’s death.

Of course her wedding is incomplete without her childhood friends, each grappling with their own problems. Avni (Sonam Kapoor Ahuja) is a divorce lawyer who sees marriage and babies as the next step for herself though she does not appreciate her mother being on her case about it. Sakshi (Swara Bhasker) is a mess, a creature of unhealthy propensities who is dawdling about her millionaire parents’ home, refusing to tell them why she left London, dumping the man she had picked and married in a rush.

Meera (Shikha Talsania) loves her husband and baby, hates her over-sized physique, seems incapable of staying away from food and drink, but steers clear of the father who objected to her choice of life partner.

By the end of the film’s running time, life has changed significantly for each of the four.

Romantic comedies, not just in India, tend to underline the indispensability and inevitability of marriage, or at the very least a romantic relationship, in every individual’s journey. Veere Di Wedding is about having a choice at every turn. Its achievement is that it arrives at this point without any dialoguebaazi or overt effort at messaging.

There is a tendency in the liberal public discourse to dismiss the concerns of women like Kalindi, Avni, Sakshi and Meera because of their apparent privilege. Ghosh and his writers refuse to underplay their wealth, instead occasionally emphasising it, as with that scene where they exit a building housing some of Delhi’s most expensive clothing stores and one of them grumbles about the forbidding cost of designerwear. Sure, they visit designer outlets but that does not make their problems any less pressing or their stories any less worth telling.

Veere Di Wedding is impactful especially because the lead quartet are enjoying themselves even while their film remains an unapologetic commentary on the lives of women in this setting. They are funny, these four. Funnier still is the picture in my head of the notoriously narrow-minded Censor Board viewing Indian female characters openly speaking of masturbation and sexual droughts, and – Hey Bhagwan, hamari sanskriti ko koi bachaao!– de-romanticising motherhood, in addition to discussing careers, marriage and kids.

Yes, this happens. In a mainstream Hindi film.

Without appearing to strain a muscle, Ghosh and his writing team end up smashing more barriers with laughter than a million weepy, vacuous Akirascould. It’s enough to make you want to forgive them for repeatedly getting Sakshi to equate courage with having “balls”, and to forgive the producers for the surfeit of product placements in a single film, one for a car too in-your-face to be ignored.

Kareena delivers a neatly restrained performance as Kalindi. Sonam is sweet and equally convincing with her character’s confusions as with her ultimate decisiveness. Swara is born to comedy and takes to this glossy set-up – vastly different from the two wonderful, low-budget films she has headlined so far, Nil Battey Sannata and Anaarkali of Aarah– like a fish to water. Shikha is pleasant and as impactful here as she was in Wake Up Sid back in 2009. Remind me again why we do not see her more often in films?

The supporting cast includes a bunch of reliable actors. Their performances cannot be faulted though the writing of some of their characters leaves much to be desired. The rigmarole of anger, fights and misunderstandings between Kalindi, her father and uncle are not as well articulated as the rest of the story. Ekavali Khanna as Kalindi’s Dad’s second wife Paromita and Edward Sonnenblick as Meera’s husband are the worst hit – he is gora, she has a weird laugh, there is nothing more to either of them. C’mon.

This is not about screen time, but about depth and detail in brevity. Just that one scene in which Avni and her mother (Neena Gupta) have a heart to heart conversation tells us all that we need to know about the older lady and their relationship. Kalindi’s fiancé Rishab too is treated with empathy, and actor Sumeet Vyas fashions him into a congenial fellow.

I have heard some chatter describing Veere Di Wedding as “India’s answer to Sex and the City”. For god’s sake,do not undervalue this film. The women of Sex and the City may have been entertaining, but at the end of the day, let’s face it, these were their primary preoccupations: the next lay, the next boyfriend, a husband. Kalindi, Avni, Sakshi and Meera are far more forward thinking. What they do have in common with Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda is their hilarious frankness about subjects so far untouched by Bollywood and an endearing bond that is far more believable than the clingy relationships shared all these decades by numerous gentlemen yaars and dosts in Hindi cinema.

Shashanka Ghosh has already worked with Sonam in Khoobsurat, which introduced Fawad Khan to Bollywood. In Veere Di Wedding he proves yet again his ability to tell sensible, engaging stories about women without being painfully self-conscious about his sensitivity or their gender, without elevating female characters to devi status, but presenting them to the world as they/we are, as human beings, good and bad, with the ability to laugh our heads off even as we deal with the multiple challenges this damned male-dominated world and our own failings throw at us.

As lyricist Anvita Dutt puts it in Veere veere, which is part of the film’s soundtrack:

Hum to aise

Toote phoote se

Dham dhadaam se

Din dahaade

Baithe baithe

Gir gaye muh ke bal yun

Humne socha hume to bhai sab pata hai

Mil rahi is galat faimi ki saza hai

(A rough précis: We are flawed. We have fallen flat on our faces as a result. We are suffering the consequences of having assumed that we know everything.)

Bless you Ghosh & Co for saying it like it is. Bless you ladies for signing up for this.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	A
Running time:	125 minutes

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

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/veere-di-wedding-movie-review-kareena-sonam-swara-shikha-play-relatable-non-conformists-in-a-fun-buddy-flick-4491491.html#comments-section-4491491

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

Release date:	June 15, 2018
Director:	Remo D’souza
Cast: Language:	Salman Khan, Anil Kapoor, Jacqueline Fernandez, Bobby Deol, Daisy Shah, Saqib Saleem, Freddy Daruwalla Hindi

In a ritual that male stars of the Hindi film industry have followed with religious fervour for too long now, Salman Khan and Bobby Deol strip off their shirts in the closing minutes of Race 3 for an extended sequence of hand-to-hand combat. Some directors in recent years have managed to lend heat or humour to this over-familiar cliché, as Ali Abbas Zafar did last year with Tiger Zinda Hai when Khan’s character – hilariously and memorably – gave ISIS the full blast of his naked torso. Remo D’souza’s Race 3 lacks the panache to turn such triteness on its head and/or to keep it still interesting.

In 2008, Saif Ali Khan redefined “debonair” and directors Abbas-Mustan reinvigorated the action thriller genre in Bollywood with Race, in the able company of Bipasha Basu, Anil Kapoor, Akshaye Khanna and others. The film wove double crosses into double crosses into further double crosses in a novel fashion and was justifiably rewarded with massive box-office collections. The surprise element was gone in 2013’s Race 2, but it remained kinda fun albeit forgettable.

Race 3 is an example of a franchise failing to recognise its own strengths and shooting itself in the foot in the bargain.

One Khan’s entry into this money-spinning series resulted in another Khan’s exit. And Abbas-Mustan have been replaced by D’souza (F.A.L.T.U., ABCD: Any Body Can Dance). The loss is the film’s, entirely.

Salman Khan here plays Sikander Singh, nephew of the dubious billionaire business tycoon Shamsher Singh (Anil Kapoor). We are introduced to Sanjana (Daisy Shah) and Suraj (Saqib Saleem) as Shamsher’s twin children who resent the attention and affection he showers on Sikander. Yash (Bobby Deol) enters this explosive family mix as a fond employee, along with a beautiful traitor who goes by the name Jessica (Jacqueline Fernandez). Shamsher leads a life of luxury in the Middle East but has not forgotten his days in his village in Allahabad.

Since this is the Race series, it goes without saying that twists are piled upon twists unrelentingly from start to finish, and in the suspense department, this third instalment does fare better than Race 2– which was too obviously conscious of its desire to startle the audience at every turn – although it is not a patch on Race 1. The best of Part 3’s mystery elements are not enough compensation though for the dilution of several pluses that made Race what it was.

In the matter of acting, it goes without saying that Salman is no match for Saif. In Race 3, his face appears even more immobile than it has been in his earlier films. That alone might have been excusable since Salman has in recent years made up for what he lacks in the histrionics department with charming self-deprecation and amusing quirks. Not here.

Race 3’s screenplay by Shiraz Ahmed and the dialogues by Ahmed with Kiran Kotrial have been written not with commitment to the story at hand, as much as a deep and abiding commitment to the leading man (whose company has co-produced this film with Tips) and his by now legendary connect with his core fan following – the rest of the audience be damned.

This is never clearer than in the finale when Khan looks at the camera and directly addresses his fans, as has been his wont through most of his career. Khan a.k.a. Sikander makes them a thinly veiled promise that there will be a Race 4 and teases them by refusing to confirm that he will be a part of it. The problem with this device is that it assumes everyone in the hall is a devotee, and effectively excludes the rest.

In a similar scene just moments earlier, Kapoor too confirms that there will be a Race 4 and he will feature in it. Yet, he remains in character as Shamsher while delivering those lines, he does not stare at the camera and the lines are written in such a way that though the intent is clear, they simultaneously also take the story forward. This is the difference between a star and an actor, a star who is playing to the gallery and an actor whose sincerity to his craft extends to immersing himself in his role even in the silliest of works.

Further emphasising this film’s Salmania is a comment about the dispensability of women – whether in big-banner commercial ventures (as producers, directors and analysts have openly said in the past) or in men’s lives is unclear. When Jessica saves Sikander’s neck in Race 3, she asks him: Main nahin hoti toh kya karte (If I weren’t around, what would you have done)? Koi aur hoti (there would have been another woman), he replies without batting an eyelid, giving her a speaking look.

Read: women don’t matter. Yeah, we got that.

Fernandez and Shah are good with their stunts, and it is particularly nice to see Sanjana cocking a snook at those who are cynical about women and action by modifying her tight skirt for a fight scene in which she turns her stilettos – a constraint in such a scenario, you would assume – into a deadly weapon. Sadly, Shah lacks presence and it is exasperating to imagine that D’souza or his producers felt she could equal Basu’s charisma that was such an important part of Race.

Oh wait. I forgot. Women don’t matter?

Race 2 was replete with bombastic dialoguebaazi. Fortunately for Race 3, silly lines like, “Ise dil nahin Dell kholke dikhao (gist: instead of talking so much, show him the video we have on your Dell computer)” that Sanjana tosses at Suraj do not come too often.

The film has been released both in regular 2D and 3D. I watched the 3D version and I found it rewarding in the sense that it had the effect of drawing a viewer into its world while being intermittently shocking, even if the determination to impress in 3D got too glaring twice when Salman throws his sunglasses at the screen, once early on and once towards the end.

Kapoor is the best thing about this film, even though he is constrained by the not-so-imaginative writing and staccato rhythm of the screenplay that follows this pattern from beginning to end: high-adrenaline action, song, action, song, action, song, action, song. That arrangement is especially problematic because the soundtrack is packed with colourless compositions, redeemed only by Selfish with music by Vishal Mishra, sung by Atif Aslam and Iulia Vantur. “Ek baar baby, selfish hoke, apne liye jiyo na (Just once, baby, be selfish and live for yourself),” it goes. I approve of the sentiment.

The Allah duhai hai reprise retains the original robust tune, but much of its impact is watered down by the way songs are used in the film.

For the record, Kapoor looks handsome and immensely dignified with a grey beard and hair. That he is playing his age ends up underlining the fact that 52-going-on-53-year-old Khan is not. Sikander is 35 years old. Seriously? Why?

Race 3 is perhaps Khan’s way of assuring fans that he does not intend to make a habit of films like the gutsy, politically subversive Bajrangi Bhaijaan(2015) and the thoughtful even if flawed Tubelight (2017).

To be fair to him and to D’souza, some of the whodunnitandwhy in Race 3 is genuinely engaging, but the film needed more where that came from. Besides, the narrative style is tired and ends up adding nothing new to the Race franchise. Everyone and everything looks pretty and is dressed pretty in Race 3. The evidently expensive production design and the visuals by DoP Ayananka Bose – especially that aerial shot of vehicles in a desert looking like ants from high up above – give the film its polish.

You know what would have added depth to that polish? Saif Ali Khan and a better laid out screenplay.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	160 minutes

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

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/bollywood/race-3-movie-review-salman-khans-generic-conversation-with-his-fans-is-no-match-for-saif-ali-khans-coolth-4515811.html

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_3

Release date:	Kerala: June 15, Delhi: June 22, 2018
Director:	Ranjith Sankar
Cast: Language:	Jayasurya, Jewel Mary, Innocent, Aju Varghese, Joju George, Shobha Mohan, Suraj Venjaramoodu, Malavika Menon, Siddhartha Siva, Kochu Preman, Jins Baskar, Advaith Jayasurya Malayalam

Mathukkutty has been torn by internal conflict since his childhood. Though born with the external appearance of a boy, he has always identified as a girl, and grows into adulthood feeling like a woman trapped in a man’s body. Realising that this inner turmoil will haunt him forever if he does not become who he believes he was meant to be, he quits his high-flying corporate job in Chennai, undergoes gender reassignment surgery to begin the physical transformation to a woman and returns to Kerala for this arduous journey.

Writer-director Ranjith Sankar’s latest film is the story of Marykkutty nee Mathukkutty – not necessarily told in the order followed by that opening paragraph – and the many battles she must fight in a society that not merely rejects her but reacts viciously and even with physical violence towards this new challenge to the patriarchal status quo.

Men molest, humiliate and defame her. A female government official snarls at her for giving up the huge social advantages of being a man. Shunned by some, ridiculed or assaulted by others, she also finds kindness in unexpected places.

The most notable aspect of Njan Marykkutty is the normalisation of a character who, across Indian film industries, would usually be a source of humour. When Marykkutty is lampooned, the lampooning comes from people in the film, not the tone of the film itself.

This is significant because mainstream Mollywood in particular is unapologetically patriarchal and frighteningly misogynistic too often. Ranjith Sankar himself has revealed disturbing gender politics in earlier works: his supernatural flick Pretham (2016), for instance, among other things featured an ugly rape joke by Jayasurya’s character.

Njan Marykkutty appears to emerge from conviction, so hopefully he has evolved. If his writing of this transitioning woman can be faulted at all, it is for its inability to see any faults in her. A member of a marginalised community does not have to be a saint to deserve equal rights, and this sanitisation is another form of othering to guard against.

That Sankar needs to evolve further becomes evident in a scene in which a Collector (Suraj Venjaramoodu) snubs a man for his transphobia by insinuating that he is a eunuch. Err, if you see eunuch as a pejorative, then you are part of the problem, no?

In another scene, Sankar seems to imply that reservations are for untalented individuals through a conversation between Marykkutty and the Collector, which fails to grasp the social complexities that give rise to the need for affirmative action.

In its own way Njan Marykkutty buys into prejudice again in an unthinking scene in which Marykkutty is asked by her teacher, “Are you a feminist?” and she feels the need to issue a clichéd denial. “No, I am a humanist,” she says. Umm, you are not a feminist, Marykkutty? So you are against gender equality? Duh.

The screenplay also needed greater clarity in a conversation in which Marykkutty states: “I am not a transgender, I’m transsexual.” Since transgender is an umbrella term that covers transsexual, it is unclear whether Marykkutty is not aware of this or whether she objects to being labelled with a general rather than specific term. Yeah yeah, I know what some of you are saying – this is not a documentary. But when you choose to make a film on a theme about which there is such widespread ignorance, you need to find ways to disseminate correct information without sounding like a PhD thesis.

These questionable portions in Njan Marykkutty do not, however, eclipse its over-arching inspirational spirit. The fulcrum of the film is Jayasurya’s interpretation of Marykkutty shorn of all tropes that have been seen as a compulsory aspect of LGBT+ individuals by most Indian filmmakers and actors, with a few exceptions. Don’t come looking for a limp wrist, over-the-top camp mannerisms, swivelling hips and a high-pitched voice here – this is not to say that trans persons with such characteristics do not exist, but that there are different kinds of trans persons and Indian cinema has rarely acknowledged that fact.

The only overt changes Sankar and Jayasurya make involve a visible touch of makeup, a switch to saris and blossoming breasts – the rest is barely discernible. Arun Manohar and Saritha Jayasurya are credited for the film’s costumes, and Saritha reportedly designed the endless array of gorgeous cotton saris that Marykkutty wears. Her wardrobe too defies Indian cinema’s stereotypes of trans persons.

Jayasurya’s sensitive portrayal of Marykkutty sans caricature is on a par with Sanchari Vijay’s National Award-winning turn in 2015’s Kannada release Naanu Avanalla…Avalu (I Am Not He, I Am She). As he did with the relatively ordinary Captain recently, here too he has shown his determination to be an actor rather than a star in his roles.

The most credible aspect of Sankar’s powerful screenplay is the equation between a transphobic policeman (Joju George) and Marykkutty. The defining passage in Njan Marykkutty comes when that cop takes sides in a fight between the heroine and some hooligans. The manner in which he, his colleagues and those goons manufacture a series of believable lies playing on prevalent biases against transsexuals and women is chilling.

It is interesting that through her struggles Marykkutty seeks refuge with awoman friend (Jewel Mary) who herself is widely reviled for her non-conformist life. Although the characterisation of a friendly RJ (Aju Varghese) is briefly confusing – creep or nice guy? – and Siddhartha Siva’s acting when his character flirts with Marykkutty borders on comedy that is incongruous in the kind of film this one clearly wants to be, it is interesting too that Sankar does not see a romantic relationship with a man as essential to complete a trans woman. Self-realisation and the acceptance of the self are far more important than the approval of others, even our loved ones, Njan Marykkutty tells us.

Barring Siva and Venjaramoodu, who does not quite pull off his nice-guy act here, the rest of the supporting cast do a good job of their roles, big and small.

Though the film’s background score gets mushy and over-emphatic at times, the camera’s relaxed gaze on Jayasurya is crucial to viewing Marykkutty as a regular person. Not once does DoP Vishnu Narayanan objectify or exoticise this unconventional lead.

This then is Ranjith Sankar’s great achievement here: that he sees Marykkutty not just as a trans person, but as a person. Jayasurya’s unaffected performance in Njan Marykkutty is a landmark not just for his career or Malayalam cinema, but for Indian cinema at large.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	126 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/njan-marykkutty-movie-review-jayasuryas-unaffected-performance-as-trans-woman-is-landmark-for-indian-cinema-4577361.html

Visuals courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/NjanMaryKutty/

Release date:	Kerala: June 16, Delhi: June 22, 2018
Director:	Shaji Padoor
Cast: Language:	Mammootty, Anson Paul, Renji Panicker, Kanika, Siddique, Yog Japee, Kalabhavan Shajon, Suresh Krishna, Tarushi, Sudev Nair, Shyamaprasad Malayalam

To review a Mammootty film these days, you can either analyse it in the context of the rest of Malayalam cinema, or you could acknowledge that Mammukka appears to occupy a separate universe in his mind and in the minds of his die-hard fans. Option 2 will result in less heartache if you erase the legend’s iconic performances from your mind and stick strictly to his works in the last decade. Option 1 is, of course, inviting heartbreak since it requires you to accept that he has been confining himself to the tried and tested and boring, unlike his young contemporaries like Nivin Pauly and Fahadh Faasil who are redefining what constitutes mainstream or even Prithviraj Sukumaran and Mammukka’s own son Dulquer Salmaan who are conventional in comparison with those two yet push the boundaries of commercial cinema.

I am going with Option 2 for this write-up. Abrahaminte Santhathikal(Children of Abraham) directed by debutant Shaji Padoor is better than most Mammootty films of the past couple of years, but nothing compared to his best. It is not horribly misogynistic like Kasaba (2016) and last year’s The Great Fatherand Masterpiece, nor is the camera as entirely enslaved by its star as it was in these films. On the Mammootty spectrum of Malayalam cinema, it lies in the vicinity of Shamdat Sainudeen’s Street Lights which was released this January: a suspense thriller with a somewhat engaging storyline that could have been more than it turns out to be if it were not so fixated on underlining its hero’s coolth, yet is not so obsessed with him as to be nauseating.

Abrahaminte Santhathikal requires Mammootty to play a policeman for the nth time in his career. Here he is ASP Derick Abraham, investigating a spate of serial killings when we first meet him. Not long after we are led to believe that the case has been concluded, he is caught up in another. Derick is not very well liked in the force because he is such a stickler for rules that he has refused to bend or skirt them when his own colleagues have been in a tight spot. Adding to his fleet of enemies is Public Prosecutor Diana Joseph (Kanika) who has not forgiven him for an old romantic relationship gone sour.

Derick has the support of SP Shahul Hameed (Renji Panicker), but several senior cops (played by Siddique, Yog Japee and Suresh Krishna) have for long been waiting for a day when their bête noir becomes personally vulnerable. Their moment comes when Derick’s brother gets caught up in a heinous crime.

The nice thing about Abrahaminte Santhathikal is that Mammootty allows himself to be made up and styled to look older than he usually does in his films. Just when you think there is hope yet and start celebrating that baby step forward in his evolution, you realise that at 66-going-on-67 he has as his younger sibling Anson Paul who, the Net tells me, is 29-going-on-30. Okay then. This is as funny as Amitabh Bachchan and Aishwarya Rai playing brother and sister in the 2002 Bollywood film Hum Kisise Kum Nahin.

So the cases Derick is called to investigate turn out to be not what they appear to be. They are reasonably enjoyable and would have been more so if so much time was not being wasted on DoP Alby giving Mammootty slow motion shots and fancy-schmancy camera angles to highlight his height, build and striking personality.

Even the usually excellent Mahesh Narayanan makes a couple of questionable editing decisions while presenting the timeline of the second case in Abrahaminte Santhathikal, I guess on the instructions of a director intent on scaling up the epic feel of his film. The shaky shift from the first to the second case is a jump that should be blamed not on him though, but on the writing.

That said, Haneef Adeni’s story of the mystery involving Derick and his brother is not half bad and does throw up some surprises. This is the kind of narrative that would have been enhanced by greater zip and zing. But no siree, instead let us drag back the pace to let that moving vehicle gradually glide on to the screen, then for the door to open at a snail’s pace, then for one stylish shoe to be placed on the ground and then the next before the camera rises to reveal … OMG, you will never guess who!

Well at least there is not as much of this nonsense going on in Abrahaminte Santhathikal as there was in Masterpiece, White (2016) and their ilk which have, over the years, ODed on close-ups of The Big M’s sunglasses, bracelets, footwear and profile in addition to slow-mo shots of him sauntering towards the camera. At least Mammootty’s swag is not offensive here, as it was in The Great Father where the central plot – a serial rapist killing the hero’s daughter – was sidelined as the hero strutted about in leather jackets.

What do I know though? Mammootty fans in the hall where I watched Abrahaminte Santhathikal went hysterical with happiness during that introductory scene, cheered wildly in anticipation of a sighting, and at the appearance of the star’s first shoe began yelling, “Mammukkaaaa, Mammukkaaaa!”

For the record, the film’s title is a clever play on words because it implies a lofty reference to Abraham in the Old Testament of the Bible, which is in keeping with the ominous tenor of Derick’s opening case, but you later realise that santhathi is being used here not simply to literally mean children or offspring but also in its disparaging avatar. Like I said, the story of this film is not half bad. On the weighing scale of its pluses and minuses in the Mammoottyverse, Abrahaminte Santhathikalcounts as passable fare.

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

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

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/abrahaminte-santhathikal-movie-review-mammoottys-swag-is-better-suited-to-this-passable-thriller-than-his-recent-misfires-4581471.html

Visuals courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/AbrahaminteSanthathikalMovie/

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REVIEW 595: NUDE

REVIEW 596: OMERTA

REVIEW 597: ARAVINDANTE ATHIDHIKAL

REVIEW 598: RAAZI

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REVIEW 600: ANGREZI MEIN KEHTE HAIN

REVIEW 601: EE.MA.YAU.

REVIEW 602: HIGH JACK

REVIEW 603: B.TECH

REVIEW 604: SCHOOL DIARY

REVIEW 605: PARMANU – THE STORY OF POKHRAN

REVIEW 606: ABHIYUDE KADHA ANUVINTEYUM

REVIEW 607: KAAMUKI

REVIEW 608: AABHAASAM

REVIEW 609: VEERE DI WEDDING

REVIEW 610: RACE 3

REVIEW 611: NJAN MARYKKUTTY

REVIEW 612: ABRAHAMINTE SANTHATHIKAL