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Release date:	June 29, 2018
Director:	Rajkumar Hirani
Cast: Language:	Ranbir Kapoor, Paresh Rawal, Vicky Kaushal, Anushka Sharma, Sonam Kapoor, Dia Mirza, Jim Sarbh, Manisha Koirala, Piyush Mishra Hindi

As Sanju opens, a chap called D.N. Tripathi reads aloud from a book he has written on Bollywood star Sanjay Dutt to the man himself. In that passage, Tripathi has drawn parallels between the lives of Bapu and Baba. It is a clever line to take in a hagiography since Bapu, of course, is the father of the nation Mahatma Gandhi, Baba / Sanju Baba is Dutt’s nickname, and the actor’s most popular screen role till date has been of a modern-day Gandhi devotee. Far from being flattered by the comparison, Dutt is appalled and throws Tripathi out of the house.

Dutt/Baba is on the lookout for a biographer, you see, and what this interaction conveys is that he wants to tell the unadulterated, undiluted truth. The scene offers a precis of what Sanju wants you to believe it is: an honest account of a controversial star. The fact though is that this is one among many moments of insincerity in the film. Because Sanju, writer-editor-director Rajkumar Hirani’s biopic of Sanju Baba, is anything but honest.

Sanju is the story of Sanjay Dutt, Bollywood superstar, acclaimed actor, convicted criminal, son of the screen legend Nargis and the much-respected actor-activist-politician Sunil Dutt. The film skips Dutt Jr’s childhood and takes us through his work on his debut film, his mother’s illness, his rocky relationship with his father, his alcoholism and drug addiction, the allegations of involvement in the 1993 Mumbai bomb blasts, his arrest under the draconian and now lapsed TADA, the acquittal on terror charges and conviction under the Arms Act, his jailing and ultimate release.

Hirani does all this through a well-chosen narrative device: Sanjay Dutt trying to convince an acclaimed London-based biographer called Winnie Diaz to make him her next subject, while she parallelly investigates his claims about himself. The words are Dutt’s, but hey, they are all being verified by Diaz, so you gotta buy into them. Right?

Wrong. Abhijat Joshi and Hirani – who are credited with Sanju’s story, screenplay and dialogues – have cherrypicked facts and bathed their selectiveness in large doses of affectionate indulgence for their protagonist. For instance, we are told that Dutt acquired three AK-56 rifles and bullets without a licence out of fear for his Dad’s and his sisters’ safety following threats to Dutt Sr for his missionary work among Muslim riot victims in 1992-93 in Mumbai. This is a claim Dutt had made on the record in real life. However, the film fails to mention that he had also gone on the record to admit that he already owned three licensed firearms which, he reportedly told the police, he purchased because of his love for hunting. So why did he need any more weapons? (Note: he later withdrew the latter statement.)

Messrs Hirani and Joshi play this game throughout the film.

They are also wise in their choice of issues they do not whitewash. For instance, they make no bones about Dutt’s substance abuse, his sexual promiscuity, his unprofessionalism, his irresponsible behaviour towards his parents and colleagues, and his lies in these matters. But all this is portrayed in a cutesefied, comedified fashion to a fandom that has already forgiven him for these widely known facts anyway, each one carefully presented in such a manner as to elicit an “aww, cho chweet” reaction from us.

The object of the film is two-fold: to project Dutt as a misguided but well-intentioned man and all-round nice guy, and to scapegoat others for his failings. So yes, he was not committed to his work, but c’mon, what is becharaBaba to do when he is under so much strain to match his father’s greatness? So yes, he took drugs and alcohol, and no Ma’am, that was not okay, but c’mon, can you really blame Baba when his work stresses and personal traumas were compounded by that evil drug dealer who tricked him into addiction? Yes, he bought firearms, but did we not tell you it was because of his desire to protect his father and sisters, as any good Indian mard should? And yes of course he slept with hundreds of women and treated them lightly, but that is sho funny and sho cute, na?

The most well-strategised choice of scapegoat is the media, which is skewered in the closing song featuring Ranbir Kapoor and the real Sanjay Dutt himself. For everything wrong that Baba has done, the buck stops at the door of the lying press, according to the lyrics of Baba bolta hain bas ho gaya. This is a stroke of propagandist genius, because vast sections of the Indian media are so disgraceful that it is tempting to cheer when a finger is pointed at them for anything, even if our disgust for media sensationalism is being used to quietly influence us into viewing a movie star’s misdemeanours, vices, crimes and contemptible qualities with fondness.

Other facets of Dutt that are conveniently papered over include his difficult relationship with his siblings – Priya and Namrata are marginal, virtually dialogueless characters in Sanju– and his misogynistic, patriarchal mindset. I guess because you cannot expect to drive an audience to tears over Baba’s wish to bachao his behnas if you point out that their equation is so troubled that when he married his current wife Manyata, sister Priya Dutt appeared not to be aware of the development till the media asked her for a reaction; or if you remind us that he once publicly snubbed Priya by famously telling a newspaper reporter: “There is only one Mr and Mrs Dutt of Pali Hill (in Mumbai), and that’s Manyata and I. Girls who become part of a new family after marriage must assume their new surname and all the responsibilities that come with it.”

No doubt with the goal of painting this portrait of virtue, his first marriage to Richa Sharma, who died of cancer, is completely ignored. His second marriage finds no mention either. Manyata Dutt, on the other hand, is presented as his only pillar of strength once his father is gone and his best buddy leaves him.

How unfortunate that this should come from Hirani, creator of the brilliant Munnabhaifilms (both starring Dutt), in addition to 3 Idiots and PK, which, whatever their flaws may have been, had very relevant points to make.

This is not to say that Sanju is a lost cause. Initially, when its intent is not yet clear, it is often funny. There are several moving portions right through the film, interestingly all of them involving the late Sunil Dutt – perhaps because these are the only parts that come from a place of genuineness (Duttsaab, from every available account, was indeed a great human being, so the film is not lying about him) – and/or Baba’s friend Kamlesh Kanhaiyalal Kapasi.

The latter is played by Vicky Kaushal who is thoroughly convincing as the once innocent, now disillusioned Kapasi. He is particularly wonderful in a drunken scene in which he begs the father to understand the immense pressure his son is under because of the larger-than-life figure he is expected to live up to, and to tell the boy that it is okay to be ordinary.

Sonam Kapoor has not much to do in Sanju, but is still sweet as the girlfriend who gives up on Sanju Baba early on, understandably convinced that he will never emerge from the depths of decadence he had already sunk to. Anushka Sharma as Baba’s biographer Winnie Diaz has a decidedly unchallenging role in which her charisma is wasted. Paresh Rawal has the film’s best-written role, but is only okay as Sunil Dutt. A terribly miscast Manisha Koirala is awkward as the barely-there Nargis.

Sanju belongs though to Ranbir Kapoor who drowns out his own personality so completely in favour of the Baba persona, that in that closing song when he appears as himself – slim, handsome and not looking ravaged like his character – I had to remind myself that this is actually what he looks like.

Kapoor’s turn as Sanju Baba rises far beyond his physical transformation though. He delivers an immersive performance, especially in scenes of emotional intensity when the script is not using a farcical tone to soft pedal the hero’s life choices. But even this gifted star cannot camouflage the reality of Sanju being little beyond a PR exercise for Sanjay Dutt (and Manyata).

Rating (out of five stars): **

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	161 minutes 45 seconds

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

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/sanju-movie-review-ranbir-kapoor-is-superb-but-what-a-startlingly-dishonest-sanjay-dutt-biopic-this-is-4629331.html

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

Release date:	July 6, 2018
Director:	Rucha Humnabadkar
Cast: Language:	Ali Fazal, Rajit Kapur, Omi Vaidya, Melanie Kannokada Hindi and English

It is almost embarrassing to have to review a film like this one. For Here Or To Go? feels, sounds and looks like the result you would get if someone handed a lot of pocket money and a camera to a not-so-bright kindergarten student. We all tend to be generous in our critiques of children’s work, but the dilemma here lies in the fact that director Rucha Humnabadkar is not a kid. Time for some tough love then, I guess?

For Here Or To Go? is the story of San Francisco-based software engineer Vivek Pandit (Ali Fazal) who is in a state of professional and social limbo because his US visa is on the verge of expiry. Vivek is surrounded by friends and acquaintances who are in immigration No Man’s Land, and the film is a call to Indians living abroad to not waste themselves on countries that are not particularly anxious to have them, when their own homeland would benefit greatly from their return.

Maybe there is a story there that needs to be told, but Humnabadkar is certainly not the person to be telling it. I would like to delve in detail into the directorial and writing nuances here, but unfortunately there are none. Often in the narrative you can see how the creator of this shipwreck may have thought she was being profound, such as in a conversation in which Vivek’s colleague Lakshmi (3 Idiots’ Omi Vaidya) finally reveals to his friends what was revealed to viewers early on, that he is gay, or when another friend, Amit (Amitosh Nagpal), speaks of the humiliation of flunking high school because of his poor English.

No doubt all this is meant to draw our sympathy for the social outcaste, but the film is too bad for it to matter. That it expects us to feel bad for its over-smart hero who was too cocky to treat his visa renewal with urgency is a bit much, especially when he goes all mawkish over a girl who changes her mind about being in a relationship with him when he tells her – after sleeping with her – that he may not be around in the US, which is her home, much longer.

In the midst of all this rambling around, senior actor Rajit Kapur plays a US-based business tycoon who is writing a book on why all Indians should go back home. I know there is a great intellectual point sought to be made through his boring ruminations, and again through the incomprehensible conversation he has with his daughter about a life-long misunderstanding between them, and the fact that three women in Vivek’s life are called Shweta, but I didn’t go searching for the meaning of any of these because they are poorly expressed and this film is such a waste of time. Nor will I strain myself too much to find out why Kapur agreed to be a part of it.

To describe For Here Or To Go? as mediocre would be a compliment. It is a pathetically written, terribly edited and directed film in which the dear young leading man gives it more of himself than it deserves. It must be a measure of Fazal’s struggle to get a foothold in filmdom that he has graced this whaddyacallit with his presence. It is infuriating to know that talented people like him and so many promising directors and writers have to fight so hard to make it, while others get funds to churn out full-length cinematic travesties like For Here Or To Go?.

The sweet boy from Fukrey deserves better than this non-starter.

Rating (out of five stars): 0 stars

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	1hour 45 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/bollywood/for-here-or-to-go-movie-review-ali-fazal-starrer-is-pathetically-written-terribly-edited-and-directed-4681111.html

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

Release date:	July 6, 2018
Director:	Roshni Dinaker
Cast: Language:	Parvathy, Prithviraj Sukumaran, Ganesh Venkatraman, Maniyanpilla Raju, Manoj K. Jayan Malayalam

She is a star and he an acting aspirant when they first meet on a film set. They bond instantly. Against them though stands not their difference in stature but her impending marriage to a business tycoon.

Despite the clichéd characterisation of the three lead players in this plot – as Brooding Princess, Charming Pauper and Wealthy Villain – it becomes possible to buy into their story because of the chemistry shared by the actors playing Tara and Jay who fall in love while in Lisbon on a shoot.

Parvathy and Prithviraj first drew viewer attention as an on-screen couple with the raging blaze between their characters Kanchanamala and Moideen in the 2015 blockbuster Ennu Ninte Moideen. Here in My Story, that fire is less wild and more a simmering flame, an aching vibe, making Tara and Jay the kind of pair you want to shake your fist at and say, “C’mon, do the deed. You know you want it.” And you want to see them hold hands, be comfortable in each others’ arms and grow old together, because you know in your heart that they want that too.

Whether or not any of this happens in My Story is for you to find out. Either way, the attraction between the two central characters is the saving grace of a film marked by otherwise unconvincing writing. Shankar Ramakrishnan’s screenplay and costume-designer-turned-debutant-director Roshni Dinaker’s vision, which help the actors in conjuring up the sparkling Tara-Jay equation (because chemistry is never a result of good acting alone), fail in chalking out the motivations for their actions in the film’s second half.

Firstly, Ramakrishnan makes Jay too likeable for his decisions regarding Tara to be credible. The graph of Jay’s regret defies believability too. And Tara’s fatalism is just not enough to justify her ultimate unblinking choice involving Jay. It is hard to be specific here without giving away spoilers, so make of this what you will, or re-read this paragraph after you watch the film to get what I am saying.

Maybe this screenplay needed to cook a little further before being transposed to the screen. Because it is clear that Ramakrishnan has a mind worth exploring. It is such a pleasure, for instance, to see him have his heroine make the first move in a romance, even sexually, without putting up signboards to draw our attention either to this point or the fact that they are not married when they sleep together.

It is nice too that Dinaker and her cast are not coy about sex as films by the Malayalam industry a.k.a. Mollywood continue to be. Not that those scenes are explicit or long, but it is just a relief that the actors are not awkward and the camera does not shift away to flowers or birds or props beside them when their lips meet or when their bodies slide to the floor. Nothing yet beats Aishwarya Lakshmi and Tovino Thomas in bed in Aashiq Abu’s wonderful 2017 film Mayaanadhi, but that is a separate discussion.

Dinaker also manages to build up an atmosphere of yearning post-interval, which perhaps is why it is particularly sad that My Storydoes not have the writing heft to back its charismatic stars, the lush camerawork by Dudley and Vinod Perumal, and Shaan Rahman’s appealing soundtrack. The cinematography team is equally efficient while capturing narrow bylanes in the Portuguese cities of Lisbon and Viseu, that dingy club and that glitzy theatre, as in their frames of the heroine and hero and vast expanses of European countryside.

In a double role, Parvathy does a better job of Tara than of Tara’s daughter Hema, possibly because the former is more plausible. Hema has been conceptualised as one of those painfully stereotypical youngsters who is cool in ways that commercial Indian cinema finds cool – perennially bubbly and energetic to an extent that you find rarely outside films and played a million times in this decade by actors ranging from Nithya Menen in Mani Ratnam’s Tamil film O Kadhal Kanmanito Shraddha Kapoor and Aditya Roy Kapur in OK Kanmani’s Bollywood remake Ok Jaanu.

Parvathy gives her Tara dignity and engaging interiority though. She also cracks the look of both, aided greatly by the wardrobe Dinaker has created for her.

Prithviraj is elegantly grey – and sexy – in his older avatar, and is not bad either as Jay’s conflicted, occasionally goofy younger version. Special kudos to him for being willing to play a kinda senior chap at 35, while his 50- and 60-something male colleagues are still busy chasing their youth in films.

These are far from being brilliant performances or Parvathy and Prithviraj’s best, but it is their pairing that saves My Story from its contrivances and makes it worth watching, if at all.

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

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

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/my-story-movie-review-parvathy-prithvirajs-chemistry-somewhat-saves-this-film-from-its-contrivances-4686041.html

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

Release date:	July 13, 2018
Director:	Shaad Ali
Cast: Language:	Diljit Dosanjh, Angad Bedi, Taapsee Pannu, Vijay Raaz, Danish Husain, Kulbhushan Kharbanda Hindi

You do not have to be a sports buff to enjoy a good sports biopic. There is something about the blood, sweat, tears and toil poured into any sporting arena that holds out an impossibly irresistible allure for filmmakers and audiences – perhaps because the boxing ring, the wrestling mat, tennis courts and running tracks mirror all life’s struggles off the field within that limited physical space, even when you know nothing of the technicalities involved. Now imagine that starting block advantage combined with a deeply inspiring true saga of the sort on which Soorma is based.

Director Shaad Ali’s new film is about the life of Indian hockey player and Arjuna awardee Sandeep Singh, whose rise to the international circuit was interrupted by a freak accident. Singh’s incredible grit led to his recovery from a potentially career-ending injury. He went on to lead India to victory in the Sultan Azlan Shah Cup in Malaysia in 2009, and was part of the Indian team that qualified for the Olympics in 2012after a drought.

As commercial Bollywood veterans might point out, iss kahaani main drama hai, emotion hai, romance hai, naach-gaana hai aur twist bhi (this story has drama, emotion, romance, song ‘n’ dance and a twist) – in short, all the ingredients that tend to please conventional audiences. And in the first half, Ali (who earlier directed Saathiya and Bunty Aur Babli) and his co-writers Suyash Trivedi and Siva Ananth mine each of these elements to come up with an entertaining mix.

Sandeep a.k.a. Sunny, as they portray him, is a rebellious kid who abandons hockey out of anger towards a violent, bullying coach but returns to it nine years later – as a still rebellious somewhat immature adult – to impress a pretty girl. Harpreet is a gifted hockey player who aspires to represent India in the game. As their romance and Sunny’s training progress, he evolves as an athlete but is jolted out of his immaturity as a human being only by that life-altering calamity.

So far so good, pre-interval. Diljit Dosanjh is cute as Sunny. The popular singer-turned-actor manages to capture the mischief and silliness of a young man who is fixated on the woman he loves and simultaneously unaware of his rare talent. Taapsee Pannu’s athletic frame is perfectly suited to her role as Harpreet, and she occasionally manages to get to the heart of her character’s passion for her game and affection for Sunny although she is written with far less depth than the male protagonist.

Before the break, the scenes of their training are convincing and the matches Sunny plays, thanks to Chirantan Das’ clever camerawork and Farooq Hundekar’s keen editing, are utterly gripping. As someone who does not care a fig about most sport, I found myself cheering each time Sunny scored a goal and willing him to win. This, to my mind, is the ultimate test for the depiction of any sport in cinema.

Shankar Ehsaan Loy’s songs – though not on a par with their brilliant soundtrack for Meghna Gulzar’s Raazi earlier this year – fit well into Soorma. I particularly enjoyed the unapologetic Bollywoodness in the way the music directors and Ali use the hook “padhariye padhariye” in a musical interlude to celebrate Sunny’s early successes.

Against this backdrop, Soorma also brings us the heartwarming bond Sunny shares with his elder brother Bikramjeet Singh (Angad Bedi) who is a hockey player and his mentor. Bedi is really good here, as he always is, but I am tired of watching him only in supporting roles, when all I can think of each time I see him is: when on earth will his industry realise that this man is leading man material? This is an actor who fills the screen with his presence, is handsome, hot and can act till kingdom come as we know from Pink, Dear Zindagi and even F.A.L.T.U.What are you waiting for, Bollywood?

Back to this film, the hockey matches continue to be well shot and the gentlemen’s acting continues to be effective even in the second half, but the film itself becomes far less exciting for two very obvious reasons. First, it completely fails during Sunny’s recovery from his injury. And second, the portrayal of the Sunny-Harpreet relationship is oddly awkward, as though the writing team was trying to be clever and philosophical about the whole affair, but could not quite get it.

What makes the real Sandeep Singh’s journey so unique is the manner in which he managed to physically and mentally lift himself up from an incapacitating disability. Yet for some reason, instead of entering his mind through that part of the film, Ali & Co decide to step back and observe him completely from the outside. So from a distance we watch hospital processes playing out as a song plays in the background, but we do not get an insight into Sunny’s internal struggles during those passages – unlike the preceding well-handled scenes when he first realises that his career may possibly have been destroyed by a casual but cruel turn of events.

The path to his rehabilitation centre is immersive. From the moment he gets there though, Soorma becomes superficial.

To make matters worse, Harpreet in the second half suddenly becomes a spare wheel in Sunny’s tale, with motivations that come across as flimsy and somewhat stupid. The result is that the excitement is lost and the narrative becomes insipid.

Sunny’s own motivations also become pretentiously lofty when he returns to hockey. Initially he played for Harpreet, then to win over her family, and finally out of commitment to India. At no point is he shown playing out of unbridled enthusiasm for hockey. While there is something very endearing about the goal of “India khelna hai” (I want to play for India) that is almost a refrain in Soorma, and it is obvious from interviews with many great sportspersons that playing for the country is a massive high, it is hard to believe that that alone could push an individual to unprecedented heights if love of the sport itself does not drive them, irrespective of what their additional compulsions may be. Other sports films by Bollywood have understood that well. The biopics Bhaag Milkha Bhaag and Mary Kom did. Anurag Kashyap’s fantastic Mukkabaazdid too, just this year. And with a vastly different tale to tell, Tigmanshu Dhulia’s excellent Paan Singh Tomar strode into the heart and mind of its hero to ensure that his journey, joy and pain become ours as much as his.

Soorma (which means “warrior”) does that to a certain extent, but just when it needed to give us an inside view of Sandeep Singh’s life, it inexplicably decides to become an aloof observer. Since I did not know about this remarkable man before watching this film (sorry, sports buffs, but that is the truth), I am glad I did. But it is a pity that Ali and his team manage to draw us into the pages of his world only up to a point but mess up the most important chapter. Diljit Dosanjh and Angad Bedi are always worth watching, but the film should have been a lot more than what it ends up being.

Rating (out of five stars): **

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	2 hours 11 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/bollywood/soorma-movie-review-diljit-dosanjh-is-lovable-in-a-biopic-thats-not-as-inspiring-as-the-true-story-it-draws-on-4730811.html

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

Release date:	July 13, 2018
Director:	Ajoy Varma
Cast: Language:	Mohanlal, Nadhiya Moidu, Parvatii Nair, Suraj Venjaramoodu, Nassar, Dileesh Pothan, Megha Mathew Malayalam

Survival tales are great material for cinema. A courier service employee marooned on an uninhabited island after a plane crash, a truck driver consigned to a coffin while alive, an adventurer trapped by a boulder in a deserted canyon – each of their stories has been turned into a compelling film, in a genre that has often paid solid box-office dividends worldwide. Following in the footsteps of the likes of Cast Away (US/2000), Buried (Spain/2010) and 127 Hours (UK-US/2010) comes Malayalam cinema’s Neerali.

Mohanlal here plays Sunny George, an incorrigible womaniser who is juggling a couple of affairs when his pregnant wife goes into labour in another city. To reach Molykkutty (Nadhiya Moidu) before the birth of their twins, he takes a lift from Veerappan (Suraj Venjaramoodu) who is headed in the same direction in a sturdy pick-up truck. Somewhere along the way Sunny wakes up bleeding as their vehicle sits precariously balanced at the edge of a mountainside with a sheer drop of hundreds, if not a few thousand, feet below them.

Director Ajoy Varma’s Neerali – also spelt Nieraali in the trailer – is filled to the brim with tension on behalf of its beleaguered protagonists. I could feel fingers of fear closing around my heart as I watched Sunny struggle to figure out a means of escape.

The film’s first half is marked by confident writing and execution. Neerali’s weak spot surfaces in the second half. The best survival films inspire admiration with the ingenuity their central characters display while getting themselves out of seemingly hopeless situations. Sunny has not a single brainwave that works. The excitement offered by the circumstances in which he finds himself would have been elevated by multiple levels with at least one stroke of genius or incredible feat of human endurance that gets him out of there, but it never comes. So, there is plenty of reason to be terrified along with Sunny throughout Neerali, but no particular reason to be awe-struck by him in the end.

This is particularly disappointing because Saju Thomas’ screenplay is imaginative in the way it builds up curiosity around the manner in which Sunny and Veerappan got stuck in this quagmire and creates suspense around their potential predators. It weaves in interesting insights into human behaviour and some asides on Kerala society, such as the reference to inter-faith romance and the voice of the sermonising Charismatic Christian preacher floating in from the distance. However, the insertion of Sunny’s father (Nassar) into the story seems forced, as does the philosophical significance of the title (which means “octopus”). The early mention of Sunny’s vertigo is later left unexplored. Above all, Neerali fails to come up with an inventive clincher, the sort of wow moment that would have made Sunny a worthwhile hero.

Neerali is also afflicted by the same ailment that has dogged most Mohanlal films for too long: the tendency to trivialise women. Women, we are told, are like salt shakers: sometimes you get no love at all out of them and sometimes too much comes pouring out. Like scores of other commercial Indian films, in this one too marital infidelity is portrayed as a charming – and normal – trait in a male character, excusable as long as he always returns to his socially sanctioned companion, his wife.

That one of the women Sunny fools around with (Parvatii Nair) is pointedly described as a Bombayite underlines another prejudice evident in some Malayalam films (and in Kerala society): that the urban woman who is an outsider is fair game.

This being a Mohanlal film, of course each of the actresses with whom he is shown to have a relationship looks eons younger. The women he has flings with are both played by artistes who are, characteristically, three decades his junior.

Usually in the superstar’s films, despite all these problematic areas, his acting shines through. Mohanlal the actor in Neerali though comes bearing a massive distraction. His face seems somewhat frozen and obviously altered, but it is hard for an inexpert eye to be sure whether the reason is excessive under-eye make-up or badly executed prosthetics or inexplicable lighting or some other “enhancing tool” (to borrow a phrase Bollywood’s Anushka Sharma used a few years back when she was lampooned for a glaring lip job). Whatever it is, it subtracts from a great thespian’s performance.

Mohanlal being Mohanlal, when his eyes do speak at Sunny’s lowest point, the world stands still in Neerali. For the most part though, his performance here is overshadowed by Venjaramoodu although the latter is given far less to do by the script.

While the maudlin song in the end needlessly stretches Neerali, the rest are placed such that they enhance rather than obstruct the narrative. A couple of shots inside the car while it is on the move appear to have been taken within a studio and look tacky, but for the most part, Santosh Thundiyil’s clever camerawork contributes to the ominous air of the film and in establishing the magnificent vastness of the landscape on which these two minuscule beings are stuck. This and some sure-footed direction are the reasons why Neerali, for all its flaws, is gripping through every second that it remains with Sunny and Veerappan in and around that ill-fated vehicle.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	2 hours 8 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/neerali-movie-review-mohanlals-latest-is-a-mix-of-thrilling-suspense-inventiveness-that-fizzles-out-and-casual-sexism-4741101.html

Visuals courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neerali

Release date:	July 20, 2018
Director:	Shashank Khaitan
Cast: Language:	Janhvi, Ishaan, Ashutosh Rana, Kharaj Mukherjee, Shridhar Watsar, Ankit Bisht, Ishika Gajneja Hindi with some Bengali

Sairat– Nagraj Popatrao Manjule’s critically acclaimed Marathi blockbuster of which Dhadakis an official remake – was a film about love across caste divides, chilling and entertaining in equal measure. What made it unique on India’s cinematic landscape was that though it placed the gravity of casteism firmly at the centre of its narrative, it was an unapologetically commercial film with a determination to be viewed as mainstream and massy, complete with glossy packaging, striking visuals and Ajay-Atul’s fantastic, cheerful songs. It was as unequivocal about its caste concerns and its focus on a romance between a poor low-caste boy and a wealthy upper-caste girl in rural Maharashtra.

Dhadak (Heartbeat) seems to have completely missed the point of its source material.

The star-crossed lovers in writer-director Shashank Khaitan’s Hindi version of Sairat are Parthavi Singh and Madhukar Bagla. When they first meet they are immature college kids in Udaipur but are soon catapulted into maturity by the hard knocks of life. Her father is a powerful and unscrupulous Rajasthan politician and hotelier, her mother a silent sidekick in the marriage. His parents run a small restaurant in the same city. She is a spoilt brat. He is an obedient son who assists his Mum and Dad at work.

The two have already caught each other’s eye when the film opens. Madhukar’s father becomes aware that something is going on between them, and warns his son against persisting down that path because “voh oonchi jaati ke log hai” (they are upper caste). His fears are well founded as Parthavi and Madhukar learn when her family finds out about their relationship.

Within the constraints of the commercial space where nuance is often viewed as a minus point, Sairat managed to abound with detail about the girl’s family, the boy’s friendships, their differing circumstances and most of all, caste. Dhadakis bereft of detail from start to finish in almost every aspect of its game.

Why, for one, bother to make a film about an inter-caste romance if you are afraid to discuss caste? It is almost bizarre but true that when Dhadak’s finale is past, you realise that this shameful Indian reality was the elephant in the room Khaitan did not address, as though by doing so his candyfloss and popcorn would acquire a bitter taste. That is as weird as revisiting Anand and not mentioning death, or deleting trade unions from a Namak Haraam remake.

Dhadak’s trepidation – or is it apathy? – is in keeping with the attitude of post-1980s Bollywood, in which filmmakers have virtually ignored the existence of India’s lower castes. Their blinkered vision has led to three decades of films in which the world has revolved around Brahmins, Kshatriyas and the occasional Vaishya, while oppressed castes have been erased from the picture. In the matter of representation in scripts, Bollywood has a lot to learn from its counterparts in Marathi, Tamil, Malayalam and Telugu cinema.

The aversion to a scrutiny of caste takes on ridiculous proportions though when a Marathi film that was entirely about a caste-ridden social landscape fraught with danger is remade in Hindi but the remake not only does not specify the boy’s jaati, it references the subject just in passing, and has absolutely nothing to say about the intricacies of human equations in these tricky settings.

To further sanitise itself, perhaps because the poor are deemed too dirty and too much of an inconvenience when you know only how to create fluff, the poverty-stricken background of Sairat’s hero is scrubbed out of the frame and replaced by lower middle class parents for Madhukar in Dhadak. (Possible spoiler alert) Likewise, when Archi and Parshya escape their village in Sairat, they begin a new life in a filthy slum in Hyderabad, but in Dhadak instead their struggles are transported to a scruffy but not-a-slum block of matchbox-sized apartments in Kolkata. (Spoiler alert ends)

Perhaps it is too much to expect sensitivity and inclusion from a director whose last film – Badrinath Ki Dulhania starring Alia Bhatt and Varun Dhawan – romanticised, sympathised with and justified a leading man’s violence towards the heroine, going so far as to have her exonerate him and blame herself for his actions.

Badrinath was disturbing. Dhadak, on the other hand, is just plain hollow. Even as a conventional rich-girl-poor-boy romance, it fails miserably, because of the superficially written bond between the lead pair. The first half is devoted to their aankhon hi aankhon mein ishaara ho gaya style love affair filled with stolen glances and perilous rendezvous, but barely a conversation. There is no depth in their characterisation that might help us understand their willingness to risk life and limb for each other later on.

One of the problematic aspects of Sairat was the writing of the girl as a clichéd heroine who initially plays fast and loose with the hero to test his commitment to her, a couple of times knowingly putting him – and herself for that matter – in great jeopardy. In fact, the big turning point in the plot, the moment her family discovers that they are together, is a result of this behaviour. Not surprisingly, Khaitan gets the woman-as-a-tease part of Sairat down pat.

That, however, is all that he manages to capture from Archi and Parshya’s blossoming affection. In the original, time and thought are invested in acquainting us with Archi’s intrinsically fiery nature, and the way she is indulged by her otherwise imperious Dad. It is because we know how much he dotes on her that his subsequent viciousness has the impact it does. It is because we know what a firebrand she is that her subsequent decisions become believable. In Dhadak, these elements too are sketchily written, as are the pair’s struggles in their new life away from their parents.

What works in Dhadak are Madhukar’s early scenes with his friends (played sweetly by Shridhar Watsar and Ankit Bisht) which inject humour and verve into the proceedings. The snapshots of life in Kolkata in the second half too are interestingly done, and in fact far more insightful than the time spent in Udaipur. And this being a Dharma Productions undertaking, it is filled with resplendent visuals, of course. Vishnu Rao’s cinematography beautifully captures Udaipur in all its delicious glory by day and by night. Rao’s camerawork has already got me planning my next trip to the city, since my last time there was far more rewarding than the trip to the theatre for this vacuous film.

Ajay-Atul’s music was fabulous in Sairat, and is unarguably the best thing about Dhadak too. But the lack of a deserving screenplay to wrap itself around robs it of some of its charm, and I say that even of the heartstoppingly good Yad lagla which has been reworked as Pehli baar with Hindi lyrics by Amitabh Bhattacharya and still in the voice of the wonderful Ajay Gogavale.

This brings us to Dhadak’s much-hyped newcomers Janhvi and Ishaan, she the debutant daughter of pan-India screen legend Sridevi and producer Boney Kapoor, he the half brother of actor Shahid Kapoor and son of Neelima Azeem. Charisma can come through even when it is burdened by faulty writing. Sadly, Janhvi lacks personality and delivers a colourless performance as Parthavi. Ishaan is kinda cute, but he too does not yet possess the screen presence to make a mark in this lacklustre scenario.

In a poorly scripted joke directed at Kangna Ranaut last year, Dhadak’s producer Karan Johar, actors Saif Ali Khan and Varun Dhawan had stood on a stage and chanted the words “nepotism rocks”. No man, Karan, it does not, especially when it means giving big-banner, high-profile breaks to youngsters who would not have got a toe in the door in mainstream Bollywoodif it were not for their connections.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	137 minutes 54 seconds

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/dhadak-movie-review-janhvi-ishaan-are-so-so-in-an-insipid-sairat-remake-that-is-afraid-to-discuss-caste-4781021.html

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

Release date:	Kerala: July 13, 2018. Delhi: July 20, 2018.
Director:	Anjali Menon
Cast: Language:	Prithviraj Sukumaran, Nazriya Nazim Fahadh, Parvathy Thiruvothu, Maala Parvathi, Ranjith Balakrishnan, Atul Kulkarni, Devan, Roshan Mathew, Darshana Rajendran, Santhosh Keezhattoor Malayalam

“Coach Ashraf was the first person to ever pass the ball to me,” Sophie tells Joshua, on a gray day up in the mountains of southern India. She is a rebel who has been paying a price for her self-respect, and is grabbing a moment of solace here with an old friend.

Joshua is young like her, but his shoulders are slightly hunched under the crushing burden patriarchy places on men. “Actually, I was the one who passed the ball to you,” he corrects her shyly, before acknowledging that the coach had asked him to do so.

A lesser filmmaker may have framed this brief dialogue such that it cries from rooftops, “See this, viewers! See how socially conscious I am!” Producer-director-writer Anjali Menon though leaves us to make of it what we wish. Read it, if you will, as an exchange of inanities between two people hesitantly picking up the frayed threads of a precious relationship snuffed out in its infancy. Or read in it thoughts left unspoken – by a woman remembering a mentor who backed her when she took the reins of life in her hands as a child, and by a man who may still not grasp the magnitude of that moment but is glad he was in it anyway.

Koode uses words sparingly. Menon even cheekily stresses the risks involved in this creative choice during the early banter between Joshua and his sister Jenny, when he laughingly takes a swipe at her incessant chatter and she shoots back: “If even I don’t talk, this will become some kind of award-worthy art film.”

Jenny is what conformists might call “comic relief” in an otherwise intentionally languorous narrative. But to speak in terms of formulae would be a disservice to this lyrical film. Koode is a remake of Sachin Kundalkar’s Marathi venture Happy Journeyin which a sister who has barely met her brother while she was alive appears to him after her death. Kundalkar is credited with the story and Menon with the screenplay and dialogues of Koode. In the Malayalam retelling, Joshua is the older sibling who was sent off to work in the Gulf at 15 since he was floundering at school and the family desperately needed cash to treat baby Jenny’s congenital, life-threatening condition.

The film opens with an adult Joshua (Prithviraj Sukumaran) returning home on receiving news of Jenny’s death. From the moment we first meet him, his entire being seems enveloped in a halo of sadness. It soon becomes clear that Joshua has long resented his family for destroying his youth. He is now resigned to a future of loneliness but Jenny (Nazriya Nazim Fahadh) comes back and will have none of that. Joshua is the only one who can see her, and she tries to help him see beyond his fatalism and bitterness. Whenever she is on screen, she lifts his spirits and Koode’s melancholic air.

Parvathy Thiruvothu plays the schoolteacher Sophie, who was kind to Joshua when they were classmates and on whom he had a teenaged crush. In a bow to Happy Journey, the coach they love is played by Atul Kulkarni who was the lead in the Marathi original.

“Koode” means “with” or “in the company of”. It is a word not usually seen on its own. By picking it as the name of her film, Menon therefore seems to be reminding us that solitude is one of life’s many acceptable possibilities and that relationships are worth having not to fulfill social obligations but when they enrich us. The title is perhaps rooted in Gandhi’s favourite hymn Abide With Me, a Christian funeral anthem of sorts, a Malayalam version of which, Koode parkaan, can be heard playing after Jenny’s passing.

So much is said without being said, about fleeting acts of consideration that can alter lives, about how a patriarchy that overtly stifles women also covertly smothers many men, about the consequent silence around male child sexual abuse and the social opprobrium a divorcee in a small town faces, about how financial independence gives women the courage to opt out of suffocating relationships, and about the very human fear that we are or will be forgotten when we are not physically around our loved ones.

Menon does it all in a film that is almost dreamy in its tone, with bursts of energy and sunshine provided by Jenny and sections of the soundtrack. Raghu Dixit’s background score and the songs – by Dixit and by M. Jayachandran – move smoothly from languid to lively, depending on the mood of the narrative. Having listened to the music in a loop since watching Koode, I am not yet sure ofits standalone appeal for me independent of the film, but within the landscape of Joshua, Jenny and Sophie’s story, it is a great fit.

The atmospherics of Koode would have been impossible without its spectacular camerawork. Kerala and Tamil Nadu, where it was reportedly shot, are nature’s gift to every gifted cinematographer, but DoP Littil Swayamp serves us beauty even in grubby pictures. From that breath-stopping opening shot of a group of men at an oil refinery to dreary desert sands to a wealth of greenery to the actors’ speaking faces, everything is an opportunity in his hands. He makes particularly good use of repeated aerial shots that, apart from visual magnificence, provide some perspective on the lead trio’s place in the larger scheme of things, which further serves to underline a point Jenny makes about focusing on the here and now since the past is gone and we know not what comes next.

Parvathy has the most challenging role in Koode since she has the least dialogues and the least screen time of the three leads. I felt vaguely dissatisfied with the limited space given to this interesting individual, but the actor makes it work, imbuing Sophie with both a sense of intense dejection and a fire that marks her out as a contrast to Joshua: he is mostly battling inner demons, hers are external.

The writing and Nazriya’s acting often cutesify Jenny, but it is possible to explain this away as the fallout of her being a sickly, much younger, possibly pampered child around whom her whole family’s existence revolved as long as she was around. Though this sort of hyper-bubbly girl is too familiar a sight in commercial Indian cinema, Nazriya’s charm is hard to resist. Besides, Jenny provides a necessary foil to the despondent Joshua.

The fulcrum of Koode of course is the scripting of Joshua and Prithviraj’s brilliance. He turns his eyes into bottomless pools of sorrow while playing this broken man, every line and angle of his physique embodies the pain Joshua carries inside him, and yet whenever he is with Jenny, the actor manages to lighten up and transition into an attractive young man who has not, after all, forgotten how to laugh. It is a pleasure to see this fine artiste so absorbed in a character, especially because Mollywood often taps his stardom in films undeserving of his immense talent.

Of the top-notch supporting cast, Ranjith Balakrishnan stands out for his sympathetic performance as Joshua’s auto mechanic father. I did not quite get the cameo by Sajitha Madathil as a teacher whose initial harshness towards the unwell Jenny is not consistent with her later actions. On the other hand, Devan is cast well in one of the film’s nicest satellite parts, as Jenny’s father who is, to overturn a cliché, the man behind this gutsy woman.

Anjali Menon is best known among serious cinephiles outside Kerala for her direction of the blockbuster Bangalore Days (2014). Critically acclaimed though it was, I confess I am not thoroughly sold on it. Sure I enjoyed it for the most part, but I found Dulquer Salmaan’s briefly stalkerish behaviour and the othering of Nivin Pauly’s girlfriend problematic, as was the faux youthful hipness of some elements in the film. I fell in love with her work actually with Ustad Hotel (2012), which she wrote but did not direct. The trivialisation and othering of DQ’s European girlfriend was troubling there too, but it was a barely-there reference barring which the film was a gem.

Koode’s vastly different storytelling style proves Menon’s versatility. It also tells us that she is a mistress of the unsaid. There are no banner headlines in this film so watch it carefully or you may just miss that hand sliding down a body where it ought not to be, a man in a conservative world reacting without judgment to a younger woman’s sexual curiosity and adventurousness, a girl in a position in which we tend to expect boys in music troupes, or the flash of a realisation that a woman at a steering wheel in a vehicle in which a man is also a passenger is a rare sight in an Indian production.

I might have preferred it if the concluding scenes involving Joshua and Sophie’s stories had completely abjured social conventions or been left to the imagination, but that is a marginal quibble in a film that is, in its entirety, a near spiritual experience. Anjali Menon’s Koode is a sharply observant, occasionally humorous, emotionally stirring piece of cinema.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	2 hours 35 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/koode-movie-review-anjali-menon-weaves-prithviraj-parvathys-brilliance-nazriyas-charm-into-a-mystical-experience-4791031.html

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

Release date:	July 27, 2018
Director:	Tigmanshu Dhulia
Cast: Language:	Mahie Gill, Sanjay Dutt, Jimmy Sheirgill, Chitrangda Singh, Deepak Tijori, Kabir Bedi, Deepraj Rana, Soha Ali Khan, Zakir Hussain, Nafisa Ali Hindi

“Jab naam ke alaava kucch bacha na ho toh naam ko bacha bacha ke chalna chahiye (When you have nothing left but your name, you would do well to fiercely protect that name),” says a nautch girl to an arrogant aristocrat in Saheb Biwi Aur Gangster (SB&G) 3. The effect is lost in translation, but in Hindi this is the kind of zinger written and delivered without sounding self-conscious and bombastic that made Saheb Biwi Aur Gangster (2011) and its sequel, SB&G Returns(2013), such fun to watch. Five years after Jimmy Sheirgill, Mahie Gill and Irrfan Khan crackled and popped on screen in Tigmanshu Dhulia’s second film of the series, comes the third.

Sheirgill and Gill remain the saheb (master) and biwi (wife) of the title. The gangster played by Khan is gone, of course, and in his place arrives Sanjay Dutt, a once charismatic superstar with a sensitive face who has, in the past decade, allowed himself to become a listless, lumbering giant barely able to move a limb or a facial muscle.

It is evident from the opening scene that Dhulia intends to make this Dutt – the star, not the character he plays – the centrepiece of his enterprise. And so we are treated to several minutes of the man, yet unnamed, playing Russian Roulette with a parade of hapless fellow humans in a London nightclub called House of Lords. His invincibility is underlined by the Baba Theme track which goes – I exaggerate not – “Dekho dekho dekho dekho dekho dekho dekho dekho dekho dekho dekho aaya / He’s the Baba, he’s the Baba, he’s the Baba / le aaya tera baap.”

As every Bollywood buff knows, these lyrics allude to Dutt’s infantile real-life nickname, which serves to stress his public image of an overgrown, golden-hearted baby who is too innocent to know what he is doing when he messes up. There is not an atom of fierceness in the teddy-bear-like sobriquet, so using it in this film makes no sense since he plays a royal with a reputation for ruthlessness and violence here.

This is the first hint of Dhulia’s seeming disinterest in this project, which appears to have been slapped together to give everyone on the team something to do. In SB&G3,we are back with Aditya Pratap Singh (Sheirgill), member of a former princely family trying to retain some significance by having a political career in a post-Independence India that no longer recognises royalty and titles although the families themselves hold on to “His Highness”, “Yuvraaj”, “Kunwar” and other dregs of an era long gone. Aditya has been away in prison, while his first wife Madhvi (Gill) honed her own skills as a politician and his second wife Ranjana (Soha Ali Khan) honed her passion for alcohol.

Uday Pratap Singh (Dutt) is the son of another royal family of Rajasthan, whose ties with his father (Kabir Bedi) and brother (Deepak Tijori) are strained. Uday is in love with the beautiful dancer Suhani (Chitrangda Singh).

As with the earlier two films, here too someone is lusting after someone he ought not to be eyeing, several players in the story are bitter, and some are planning revenge on those they resent or hate. Given that two-thirds of the principal cast is the same, you would think that this is a safe formula, but nothing is foolproof in the absence of solid writing.

Except for a couple of clever dialogues like the one quoted in the first paragraph, and Madhvi, the rest of the lines and characters are barely developed and lack spark. Madhvi’s actions in her first few scenes are laugh-out-loud hilarious and cheeky, which is exactly what we have come to expect of this volatile creature who is unapologetic about her sexual appetite and her anger towards Aditya. Sheirgill is sincere as always, but suffers because Aditya’s graph lacks fizz. Still, the structuring of their first scene together on a terrace is a reminder of how effective SB&G and SB&G Returnswere because Dhulia was evidently committed to both.

Here, the writer-director makes the mistake of forgetting that the volcanic nature of the first two SB&G films came from the gangster entering the Aditya-Madhvi relationship. Irrfan Khan and Randeep Hooda (who was in Part 1) are among Bollywood’s finest actors. Dutt is an able actor who gave up trying a long time ago. In the absence of an explosive third angle in this triangle, the story moves along mechanically with a handful of somewhat interesting turns but no major plot point worthy of a gasp.

Too many characters hang loosely around, including Aditya’s loyal lieutenant Kanhaiya (still played by Deepraj Rana), Kanhaiya’s impactless daughter and that lukewarm girl Aditya has lukewarm sex with out of the blue, as though someone suddenly remembered, “Yaar, there was lots of great sex (uncommonly explicit by Bollywood standards) in the first film. Yahaan bhi kucch karna chahiye, nahin?”

The editing, which was such a strong point of the first two films, is lackadaisical here. The music is run-of-the-mill unless you insist on counting the brief use of the gorgeous classic Lag ja gale. And the sound design and editing in a fight scene involving Uday in his father’s palace is slapdash enough to draw the attention of even an inexpert ear.

To be fair to the film, it does manage to summon up an eerie atmosphere of foreboding through its background score by Dharma Vish, along with DoP Amlendu Chaudhary’s low-lit frames and Dhananjoy Mondal’s production design in the corridors and gloomy rooms of Aditya and Madhvi’s palace. And Gill does still manage to make Madhvi a character deserving of a viewer’s emotional involvement. The film could have been so much more than the passably entertaining fare that it is if Dhulia and his co-writer Sanjay Chouhan had spent more time polishing up her story and fleshing out the multiple characters around her, including Uday, rather than leaning on Dutt’s stardom for support.

Sanjay Dutt is not Salman Khan whose films may often lack depth and sensitivity, but who absolutely has to be credited for being completely invested in his fandom and in maintaining himself. Sanju Baba has rested on his laurels and his natural charisma for too long to be trying his hand at this stage at those self-referential lines and inside jokes that seem to resonate so well with Salman fans (even if they are now boring to critics and non-fan audiences). Here he tries a Salman on the viewer when his character says: “Zindagi ka mazaa humne bahut kam liya hai. Ab waapas lauta hoon. Zindagi bhar ka mazaa loonga (I have not lived life to the fullest so far. Now I am back. I intend to enjoy a lifetime of happiness).” Coming as they do on the heels of the indulgent biopic lovingly crafted for him by his good friend, director Rajkumar Hirani, that has been a box-office blockbuster, these lines brim with Dutt’s desire to make a comeback in the public eye. He has a right to that ambition, but why was a filmmaker capable of such lovely works as Haasil, Paan Singh Tomar and Raag Desh, unable to see that the actor lacks the fire to hold up a weak script?

The first two Saheb Biwi Aur Gangster films were gratifying action-and-vengeance-packed rides. This one is just okay.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	A
Running time:	2 hours 20 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/saheb-biwi-aur-gangster-3-movie-review-sanjay-dutt-is-stiff-but-mahie-gill-lends-spark-to-a-fading-franchise-4833651.html

Poster courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/SBG3Film/

Release date:	August 3, 2018
Director:	Akarsh Khurana
Cast: Language:	Irrfan, Dulquer Salmaan, Mithila Palkar, Amala Akkineni, Kriti Kharbanda Hindi with English

As mix-ups go, this one is weird. A man loses his father in an accident but the body delivered to him is of the mother of a woman in another state. Avinash Rajpurohit was not fond of his Dad, but duty calls and he agrees to meet the lady to exchange coffins somewhere between Bengaluru where he lives and her home in Kochi. A few hundred kilometres separate the two cities but Avinash travels a lifetime on that journey he makes with his friend Shaukat and a young woman called Tanya who joins them along the way.

Writer-director Akarsh Khurana’s Karwaan is a quiet film. Apart from the tragedy that kicks off the narrative, nothing much seems to happen here yet a lot does. It is a story of rumination and awakenings, and as in life, here too, such things rarely happen with drum rolls and bugle calls.

Karwaan has made news for two reasons so far: because it has been released even as Bollywood actor Irrfan battles a debilitating illness and because it is the first Bollywood film featuring Mollywood heartthrob Dulquer Salmaan, DQ to his fans. The news now is this: Irrfan and DQ live up to their formidable reputations here, and are both absolute dears in this sweetly understated road flick.

Irrfan’s Shaukat is a garrulous fellow, exceedingly old fashioned in many respects and for the most part, immensely funny. “For the most part” because I felt uncomfortable with the humourisation of his racist attitude towards a white couple he encounters. I know I know, some of you will say white people do not need the protection of an Indian film critic, but excuse me for pointing out that othering is not okay even when directed at powerful communities, though of course I am not equating it with racism towards the marginalised. As for that cliched old defence, “this is just a portrayal of reality”, the answer is: of course conservatives do exist in the real world, but this is the only point in Karwaan where the storyteller’s own tone condones the character’s obnoxious behaviour. This is particularly jarring because in another area of his life, Shaukat proves to be a remarkably progressive fellow and challenger of an appalling status quo.

That discomfiting scene apart, Shaukat is amusing throughout. And Irrfan’s dialogue delivery is a killer as always. His is the more striking character of the two leads, butDQ rises to the challenge of playing the less obviously likeable Avinash, a role that on the surface also appears less challenging.

The promotions of Karwaan have hopefully given Bollywood viewers an idea of exactly how big a deal this young man is in Mollywood. His matinee idol looks, excellent acting and discerning choices have catapulted him to the top of his profession in just six years. Add to this blend his fluid personality, and you get the perfect package for superstardom across industries. His career path indicates that he may well get there considering that at 32 he is already a dominant force in Mollywood, has made his mark with a handful of films in Kollywood, and this year has forayed into both Tollywood and Bollywood.

DQ brings to Karwaan the attributes that have made him such a perfect fit in Mollywood, a film industry that pushes the envelope far more than India’s Big Three, Kollywood, Tollywood and Bollywood. He is handsome but not self-conscious, and in Karwaanas in all his works, he conveys the impression of being unaware of his hotness, which is such an attractive quality in a star, such an essential quality in a true actor and so crucial to his unobtrusively gripping performance as the self-effacing Avinash, forever held back by his internal turmoil and bitterness. Besides, his commitment to his work is evident in his Hindi accent, which is unbelievably good for a man who has never lived in the Hindi belt.

While the twomale leads are more prominent in the story, Mithila Palkar holds her own in the presence of these established actors, playing the feisty teenaged Tanya. Kriti Kharbanda is luminous in a small role. Why do we not see her more often in Bollywood? And Amala Akkineni brings dignity and warmth to her cameo in a way only a beloved veteran can.

That said, the initial part of the writing of her character is one of Karwaan’s flaws. She sounds laboured while conveying grief in telephone conversations with Avinash, and the manner in which she entrusts her child to a complete stranger is bizarre, to say the least.

So yes, Karwaan is far from perfect. The first half feels insubstantial. Considering that this is a road film, I sorely missed glimpses of the cultures of the places the lead trio pass through. A Hindi film in this setting requires a suspension of disbelief anyway because Hindi is not the lingua franca of southern India, but the stray Malayalam dialogues and lyrics in Karwaan give it a natural feel. Dialogue writer Hussain Dalal also makes the wise choice of mixing Hindi and English in equal parts in Avinash’s lines, which gives them an easy flow. That said, it bothered me that the storyteller is so accepting of Tanya’s dismissive attitude towards the language of her home city – I get that north Indian supremacism has led to a situation where Hindi bhaashis travelling to other parts of India tend not to make an effort to learn the local languages, and in that sense Tanya’s arrogance is realistic, but the implied okaying of her arrogance by the film is troubling.

(Possible spoiler ahead)Karwaan is also casual about facts in its reference to the Islamic practice known in common parlance as instant triple talaq, which was banned by the Supreme Court last year. The discussions around this development have all related to men divorcing their wives by uttering the words “talaq talaq talaq” but there is little awareness about women’s right to do likewise. This fleeting portion of Karwaan is clearly meant to be uplifting to liberal women viewers, but good intentions notwithstanding, because the issue is complex the scene is bound to create confusion or generate misinformation. It could easily have been snipped out without disrupting the narrative, yet was not, which suggests a deliberate prioritisation of populism over other concerns. (Spoiler alert ends)

In another fleeting reference, Karwaan would have done well not to suggest an equivalence between a man making a move to hit a woman and that woman’s intrusive impertinence towards him. The film could have also done with better editing to tighten a fight scene involving a bunch of bit part actors.

I wish these issues had been ironed out, because Karwaanoverall is a heartwarming little film. For one, it is unusual in the way it does not deify parents but reminds us that like all human beings, they too come in a range of good, bad and ugly. “Logon ko haq jamaana aata hai, rishtaa nibhaana nahin (People know how to exercise their rights, not abide by relationships),” says a character when discussing parents who are jerks.

The film offers a nuance not often seen in Hindi cinema or Indian cinema at large, when it speaks of a generation gap between youngsters separated in age by perhaps a decade. It also does not see a romance as essential in every relationship between two attractive people of the opposite sex, though it acknowledges that such sparks are a possibility. And it takes a brave stand on domestic violence.

Karwaan’s effectiveness lies in the fact that it rises above its pre-interval indolence. Critics often speak of “the curse of the second half” afflicting so many films that start off well and then fizzle out. Karwaan is the opposite. It revs up post-interval, not merely in terms of actual physical events and encounters, but in the character graphs. What remains consistent from start to finish is cinematographer Avinash Arun’s inventive, expansive frames. My favourite of them all involves a low angle shot of DQ reading a paper framed against a backdrop of thick green trees.

As someone who has followed Dulquer Salmaan’s career from the beginning, I confess I was apprehensive when I realised that the Akarsh Khurana directing his first Hindi film is the same gentleman who helmed a fizzled-out firecracker called High Jack starring Sumeet Vyas earlier this year. Khurana is the only one who can tell us what went wrong with that film, because my fears were misplaced and he is in fine fettle in Karwaan.

As for DQ, his talent was evident from his Mollywood debut in 2012 but his more recent works like Kali, Kammatipaadam and Solo – an anthology in which he played four roles in four separate stories– have elevated him to a higher plane by offering gigantic proof of his versatility. Kammatipaadam also indicated his willingness to risk films with sensitive themes and an off-mainstream tone and, more important, his readiness to submit to a director who did not allow his stardom to overshadow the project although his presence could be counted on to raise its profile. Karwaanis not a bone-crushing beauty of the sort that Kammatipaadam was, but here too we have a director and star collaborating to give a script priority over all else.

As a Mollywood buff I obviously hope that DQ remains rooted – allow me to play on the title of one of his Malayalam films – in the neelakasham, pachchakadal and chuvanna bhoomi (the blue sky, green sea and red earth) of his home ground. As a Bollywood buff though, I am thrilled to welcome him to a new fold in the company of the delightful Irrfan and the charming Ms Palkar.

“Ae mohtarma yu na sharma / main aashiq hoon koi creep nahin / ae husn pari, you don’t worry / meri shayaribhi zyaada deep nahin(Hey lady, I am a suitor, not a creep / Hey beautiful, don’t you worry, my poetry is not very deep),” goes a song in Karwaan sung by Papon, with music by Anurag Saikia and lyrics by Khurana. The words mirror the simplicity Karwaan aspires to, though it must be said that the film’s unassuming demeanour camouflages considerable depth.

At one point, a character in this film explains that he is not sure whether Person X was a good guy but it is clear that he was not bad, which in itself is quite something in this day and age. There can be no more appropriate a description of Karwaan: it is not earth shattering, but it is not bad at all. Which is another way of saying it is an intelligent, funny, thoughtful film and a pleasant experience.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	2 hours

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/karwaan-movie-review-dulquer-salmaan-and-irrfan-are-absolute-dears-in-a-sweetly-understated-road-flick-4884551.html

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

Release date:	Kerala: July 27. Delhi: August 3, 2018.
Director:	Vishnu Narayan
Cast: Language:	Tovino Thomas, Tito Wilson, Sharanya R. Nair, Chemban Vinod Jose, Leona Lishoy, Jins Baskar, Shalu Rahim Malayalam

It’s not what you are thinking. Maradona is not a sports flick. The title comes from the name of the small-time criminal played by Tovino Thomas in this new Malayalam film release.

Maradona and his friend Sudhi (Tito Wilson) are on the run from a bunch of brutal hitmen led by a fellow called Martin (Chemban Vinod Jose). While one of them holes himself up in a hotel room, the other finds refuge in the Bengaluru home of distant relatives (Leona Lishoy and Jins Baskar). Stuck in that flat in a high-rise building in a massive housing complex, Maradona at first experiences intense loneliness, a foreign feeling that drives this callous man to seek out fresh relationships in an alien world.

Hundreds of kilometres away, in Kerala a senior politician is preparing for a crucial election. His son Aravind (Shalu Rahim) lies in a hospital with a life-altering head injury, and silence around the boy’s condition is of essence for the neta’s career. He is, however, determined to find the people who reduced his child to this state.

As debutant director Vishnu Narayan takes his time to unveil the events that brought matters to this pass, he centres his screenplay around Maradona’s coming of age.

The story of Maradona by Krishna Moorthy has been modelled somewhat on the lines of Aashiq Abu’s Mayaanadhi (2017), which also starred Thomas. That film was about a gangster on the run who is desperate to convince the woman he loves to remain in her relationship with him. It was soulful, poetic and convincing.

Narayan and Moorthy manage to marginally replicate Mayaanadhi’s tonal quality, but their plot is not as credible. They operate on the premise that human warmth can change the worst of men for the better. Fair enough. However, for one to believe that Maradona evolves because of the friendships he finds unexpectedly in that impersonal ocean of apartments, it was essential for the film to establish that his earlier life was bereft of all such bonds. But it is not. It is clear from the start that Maradona and Sudhi are joined at the hip and willing to risk life and limb for each other. What then is the difference between that equation and the ones that develop in the present day in that housing compound? The answer: nothing apparent.

Maradona expects us to buy into the hero’s conversion simply because it tells us he is converted. But why should we? He was a jerk a moment before he metamorphosed into a non-jerk, good co-existed with evil within him (read: his great love for Sudhi versus his nastiness towards the rest of humanity) a moment before he became an all-round Mr Nice Guy, but with an unconvincing in-between the metamorphosis is just not believable.

What works in Maradona is the protagonist’s chilling behaviour in his before story filled with acts of meanness and violence that, significantly, do not involve bloodletting. Nothing betrays the hardness of a human heart better than harshness towards kids and harmless house pets – through Maradona’s behaviour towards child and beast, Messrs Narayan and Moorthy establish the man’s utter amorality.

Thomas is wonderful in those scenes. He is also a good casting choice because his urbane outward appearance and natural charm make you want to like his character until the narrative reveals how unlikeable he is.

(Spoiler alert) Aside: that said, unless Team Maradona is intentionally taking a pro-vegetarian stand, you have to wonder what they were thinking, or if they were thinking at all, while equating Maradona’s other acts of cruelty with a scene in which he captures a bird for food. Is eating meat the same as physically hurting a child or tying a dog’s mouth shut because it is disturbing your phone conversation? Really? (Spoiler alert ends)

When Maradona’s transformation to selfless goodness does happen, it is signalled by another scene involving birds that is melodramatic and in-your-face to the point of being silly. This is one of only two instances of overstatement in the film and a needless break from the otherwise subdued tone that is its most attractive feature. The other instance comes when a person the leading man has grown to love simply disappears. There is a heightening of tension when this occurs. (Possible spoiler ahead) The person offers no excuse when she resurfaces, making her disappearance an obvious contrivance intended to manipulate the viewer, unless Narayan and Moorthy are deliberately resorting to the women-are-teases stereotype. (Spoiler alert ends)

All is not lost though. I loved Sushin Shyam’s ominous background score for Maradona, and Sabu Mohan’s art direction, especially the film’s colour scheme. Conventional cinema tends to equate the big city with inhumanity while painting the countryside as an idyll where innocence and decency dwell. Narayan turns that trope on its head by setting Maradona’s goriest scenes in thickly vegetated seemingly remote locations while placing the central character in an urban jungle as he journeys towards self-discovery. The forest where men are seen being beaten to pulp is a delicious deep green, the brick-and-cement cluster where Maradona becomes a better man is a soothing, ice-cream-like lime green.

Often in that urban agglomeration, Maradona is shown standing on a balcony or a terrace rooftop from where cinematographer Deepak D. Menon pulls out further and further and further, until the man is a disappearing dot on the camerascape. It is a captivating device that elevates Maradona’s atmospherics and thoughtful air – until it gets repetitive.

As the titular character, Thomas is the fulcrum of Maradonaand justifies every second of screen time given to him. The young actor is growing with each film. Tito Wilson is excellent but gets too little space here. Hopefully it will not take long for Mollywood to realise that U-Clamp Rajan from Angamaly Diaries is hero material.

Sharanya R. Nair who plays Maradona’s neighbour Asha has an interesting screen presence, but it is worth asking why film after film in Mollywood persists in casting newcomers as female leads instead of seeking out established names as they do for male leads. Leona Lishoy – who appears as Nadiya, in whose house Maradona takes shelter – is an example of a woman actor with an impressive on-screen persona who is repeatedly given character roles and supporting parts because for decades now, Mollywood has rarely allowed women to build up substantial filmographies as leads.

That is a separate discussion and one worth having. For the moment though, let’s talk about Maradona, a gangster flick with a difference that is mildly engaging but fails to live up to its own promise.

Rating (out of five stars): **

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	2 hours 28 minutes

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

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/maradona-movie-review-tovino-thomas-adds-layers-to-a-mildly-engaging-film-that-leaves-its-promise-unfulfilled-4890981.html

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

Release date:	August 3, 2018
Director:	Rohith V.S.
Cast: Language:	Asif Ali, Lal, Madonna Sebastian, Siddique, Saiju Kurup, Adish Praveen, Sreenath Bhasi, Aju Varghese Malayalam

What happens after we die? The answer has fascinated religionists, philosophers, literateurs, ordinary women and men for centuries, irrespective of what scientists say. The latest to take up the matter is writer-director Rohith V.S. whose Iblis is about emotional connects from the afterwards.

When a man loves a woman, when a child loves a parent, when subjects love a monarch, does the force of that love have the power to hold the dead back among the living? Rohith examines the question in this film for which he has authored the story while Sameer Abdul has written the screenplay and dialogues. To establish the theory they propound, the two take us to an obscure place in Kerala where most adults are in fancy dress, death shadows the residents and there is constant talk of akkara (the other side) and ikkara (this side).

In this fantastical village lives Vyshakhan who has been pre-occupied since his childhood with the mystery of where human beings disappear when their last breath ebbs out of their bodies. Having bombarded his grandfather Shreedharan (Lal) with questions for years, Vyshakhan (Asif Ali) retains his fascination for the subject into his adulthood. In another sphere of his life, the young man moons over the lovely Fida (Madonna Sebastian), his childhood friend who is now the object of his unrequited love. Also in the picture is Jabbar (played by Siddique), an inveterate liar who claims to have a connection with the dead though he does not.

Large parts of the village look like something out of The Arabian Nights, and colourful puppets are a permanent fixture in the background. These attractive accoutrements are not sufficient to hold up Iblis though, weighed down as it is by its scattered screenplay.

Clearly Rohith is charismatic enough to rope in a bunch of capable actors, established and new, for Iblis (including the arresting young Madonna Sebastian from Premam), and he has the ability to inspire these artistes to throw themselves into their performances with gusto. Lal in particular rises above the weak writing, as Bhavana did in Rohith’s first directorial venture released last year. However, as with that one – Adventures of Omanakuttan, also starring Asif Ali – in this one too itis apparent that he has struggled to flesh out what was an essentially interesting idea.

“I wasn’t there that morning / When my Father passed away / I didn’t get to tell him / All the things I had to say… …I just wish I could have told him, in the living years,” goes the song from the English pop group Mike + the Mechanics that has resonated with listeners across the world since its release in the 1980s. We often hear people express remorse for not having conveyed their true feelings to a loved one in her/his lifetime. The Living Years was a note of regret from a son mourning a father who is no more. But what if you realise you love someone only when they are gone? Alternatively, is it possible to develop feelings for a person after they pass away? And if so, is it too late for you? These questions raised by one character’s journey in Iblis are fascinating.

The thoughtful concept and the unexpected moments of humour in the narrative (such as in Aju Varghese’s minuscule but striking cameo) suggest that some day Rohith might write and direct a good film. That day is not here yet though. Iblis could have been a neat little children’s fantasy comedy with appeal for adults too. Sadly, the inability to expand a smart idea into an effective screenplay ensures that this film fails to lift off at all.

Rating (out of five stars): 1/2

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	2 hours

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

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/iblis-movie-review-asif-ali-lal-after-life-fantasy-is-a-clever-concept-ruined-by-a-scattered-screenplay-4895811.html

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

Release date:	Kerala: July 20. Delhi: August 3, 2018.
Director:	Shafi
Cast: Language:	Bibin George, Hareesh Perumanna, Kalabhavan Shajon, Prayaga Martin, Vijayaraghavan, Indrans, Vishnu Unnikrishnan, Sunil Sukhada Malayalam

In most ways, Oru Pazhaya Bomb Kadha (An Old Bomb Story) works off a musty template. Two young men who are lifelongfriends – check. A pretty heroine whose sole role in the plot is to exist so that the hero can fall in love with her – check. A villain with no redeeming qualities – check. Also in the mix are an unwell father whose treatment the hero must pay for, and regular comedic interludes with zero relevance to the story that are placed there for what formulaic filmmakers consider compulsory comical relief.

But then director Shafi threw the entire darned template out of the window and under the stomping feet of a herd of rampaging elephants when he cast Bibin George as the leading man of his film. George is a successful TV comedy writer and artiste in Kerala, and co-writer of the big-screen sleeper hit from 2016, Kattappanayile Rithwik Roshan. What makes him an unconventional choice for a hero is the fact that he was afflicted by polio at the age of oneand makes no effort to mask his very visible physical challenge. In that sense, his presence in the film is uplifting and a landmark moment in Indian cinema.

To assess Oru Pazhaya Bomb Kadha from this angle alone would be condescending though. The actor himself is unlikely to consider it a favour, going by a recent interview in which he said: “I loved the process of writing… because when I write, people will only judge me for what I have written, not my physical abilities. I felt that I should bring smiles on their faces than that sympathetic look.” (sic)

Oru Pazhaya Bomb Kadha is the tale of best buds Sreekuttan (Bibin George) and Bhavyan (Hareesh Perumanna). The two have been crudely nicknamed “one-and-a-half and one-and-a-half” by locals, Sree because he has only one healthy leg, and Bhavyan due to his daily minimum alcohol consumption.

Sree has always been keen that his disability should not define him. He has been encouraged in this by his father Mohanan (Indrans). He financially supports his family – consisting of Dad and a sister – by working at an auto mechanic’s shop.

Misfortune strikes when Sree and Bhavyan have a run-in with a senior policeman (Kalabhavan Shajon). Floating around in the background is Shruthi (Prayaga Martin), a mysterious visitor to their town who attracts Sreekuttan’s attention from the moment he sets eyes on her. The bomb in the title enters the fray late in the day.

Bibin George brings a sincerity of purpose, even if not acting brilliance, to the film. And occasionally, Perumanna’s comic timing is well utilised in scenes of unapologetically silly humour. Most important is the fact that Shafi does not use George merely as a source of jokes on the sidelines of the narrative, as filmmakers in the past have done with actors who have disabilities. Sreekuttan is placed firmly at the front and centre of the storyline, and does everything a conventional commercial Indian film hero does – sing, dance, fall in love, fight – which is a good thing at one level, but also what makes Oru Pazhaya Bomb Kadha an assembly-line product that belongs to an era long gone.

The title is unwittingly apt. Exemplifying the pazhayaexecution of a pazhaya text is the way two recurring motifs are used only to elicit laughs, their contribution to the plot being zilch. First are phone calls from Bhavyan’s grouchy brother-in-law, second is his screechy mother’s constant quarrels with their gangster neighbour. The latter is particularly painfully grating. Both are summoned up every few minutes, apparently in an effort to lighten the mood, though the banshee and the don have the opposite effect.

There is no logic to so many of the proceedings, but they are thrown in anyway because they have been a fixture in zillions of films before this one. For instance, Shruthi is kind and looks mortified when her friend makes cruel comments about Sreekuttan one day. Yet, she is later shown apologising to Sree for mean remarks she says she passed. But… but… but she did not... Well, never mind. Because a heroine who emotionally traumatises the hero until she finally acknowledges her love for him is mandatory in formula films, I guess the writers felt driven to weave this senseless scene into the screenplay.

That Shafi is a Bollywood fan is evident – boringly so – from the clichéd and repeated references to Hindi films in Oru Pazhaya Bomb Kadha, starting with DDLJ’s Tujhe dekha toh yeh jaana sanam in the background when Sree and Shruthi first meet. Yawn.In the midst of this all-round lack of originality, Vinod Illampally’s quality camerawork and the beautiful singing of Moovandan manchottil kandappa thotte, changil kudungiya pennaana– by Vineeth Sreenivasan for Sree – stand out.

The overall standard of cinematography in Mollywood is high, and Illampally is a master craftsperson. He outdoes himself though in this otherwise drab film with a long shot of a solitary Sree brooding on a bridge surrounded by natural splendour and an innovative use of an aerial shot in which Sree and Bhavyan are seen seated on a vast expanse of rock.

Illampally’s frames, the milestone that has been crossed with George’s casting as a protagonist and the actor’s conviction alone may have held up the film if it were not for the niggling concern I cannot set aside, that the scenes of violence involving Sreekuttan are somewhat exploitative. Then of course there is the flimsy parallel track about Maoists from Uttarakhand, and the film’s inexorable length. Considering that the plotline does not contain a single molecule of novelty, I cannot think of any reason why Oru Pazhaya Bomb Kadhawas stretched to nearly two-and-a-half hours. Yawn.

Rating (out of five stars): *

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	2 hours 27 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/oru-pazhaya-bomb-kadha-movie-review-the-casting-of-bibin-george-is-a-milestone-for-indian-cinema-but-oh-what-a-stale-film-4910331.html

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

Release date:	August 10, 2018
Director:	Kamal Haasan
Cast: Language:	Kamal Haasan, Andrea Jeremiah, Pooja Kumar, Shekhar Kapur, Rahul Bose, Jaideep Ahlawat, Waheeda Rahman, Russell Geoffrey Banks Hindi

(Note: This film was shot simultaneously with the same cast in two languages, and has been released as Vishwaroopam II in Tamil and Vishwaroop II in Hindi. Here is my review of the Hindi version, Vishwaroop II.)

When Kamal Haasan is good, he is so good that he has the ability to transport the viewer to another realm. From a boy in a forbidden relationship in K. Balachander’s Apoorva Raagangal (1975) to the country bumpkin in love with the only educated girl in his village in Bharathiraja’s 16 Vayathinile (1977), and the bitter, brooding, idealistic unemployed youth whose scintillating chemistry with the great Sridevi scorched the screen in Balachander’s Varumaiyin Niram Sivappu (1980), over the years he has invested himself in some wonderful roles in wonderful films – mostly in Tamil, some in Telugu – with directors who had a significant point to make.

There is not enough space here for an exhaustive list of Haasan’s best works, but it will remain one of life’s eternal questions why this artistic giant has wasted so much of the past 30 years on gimmicky films instead of devoting himself entirely to the raw, soul-searching performances he is respected for – the sort you will not find in his latest venture.

Vishwaroop II is the Hindi version of the Tamil Vishwaroopam II, both of which were shot simultaneously with the same actors and are a follow-up to 2013’s Vishwaroopam/Vishwaroop. In the previous film, Wisam Ahmad Kashmiri (Haasan) is leading a double life in New York, as a Kathak teacher who is, in reality, a RAW agent. Nirupama (Pooja Kumar) is bored of her marriage of convenience with this older man until she discovers his truth. Wisam’s encounters with the Al Qaeda terrorist Omar (Rahul Bose) end in the latter’s escape.

Vishwaroop II spends a considerable part of its pre-interval portion recounting what happened in Part 1. This proves to be a drag for those who have seen that film, and while I cannot speak on behalf of those who have not, the flashbacks are so sketchy that I do not see how they could have served the purpose for which they are placed there.

Anyway, in the present day, Wisam, his young protégé Ashmita (Andrea Jeremiah), Colonel Jagannath (Shekhar Kapur) and Nirupama once again run into Omar who is out for revenge against Wisam while also planning a cataclysmic event in the UK that would put 9/11 in the shade. Somewhere between saving the world and himself, Wisam manages to woo his wife and bond with his mother (Waheeda Rahman).

Vishwaroopam II is too ordinary to be worthy of a detailed critique. It makes a fleeting mention of Islamophobia, but in a month that has given us Anubhav Sinha’s brilliant Mulk, that argument, though reasonably well made, is too marginal to merit a discussion. I suppose you could say the crux of the film is to remind us that Haasan at 63 has still got what it takes to be a hero in an all-out commercial film, but all the gravity-defying stunts in the world cannot mask the superficiality of this storyline, the mundaneness of its thriller elements, the lack of a spark between Haasan and Kumar, Ashmita’s irritating effort to imply that she is romantically involved with Wisam(towards which end she even makes a distasteful reference to rape) or the all-round tackiness of the production quality.

For all its failings, at least Vishwaroop had its slick art design (in that dance studio in New York and in Omar’s hideout on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border) going for it, in addition to memorable choreography by Birju Maharaj and impressive fight scenes. Here, the fake studio backdrops at certain places are so glaringly obvious that I wanted to weep at the thought of a legendary thespian even bothering with this project. Yes, I get that Indian films are made at a milli-fraction of the budget available to Hollywood, but so many of our cinematic works look technically rich, including several in Haasan’s own career, that this excuse does not cut ice.

The mediocrity extends to the story, the storytelling, the research, the music and the sound design. In a scene in an assisted living facility, a nurse is shown almost pestering an Alzheimer’s patient to dip into her memory. Even someone with a basic knowledge of Alzheimer’s Disease will tell you that that is an absolute no-no. Elsewhere, in a closed room supposedly in the UK, horns can be heard blaring loudly and incessantly outside – the sound designer appears to have forgotten that constantly honking is a congenital Indian disorder and that the streets of Britain are far calmer than ours. The entire cast’s acting is unremarkable, and the women in particular are mere appendages to Wisam. Jeremiah is attractive and agile while walloping a villain, but does not have enough such scenes in the film.

The low point of Vishwaroop II is the terrible singing of a number titled Tu srotu haiby Haasan, Kaushiki Chakraborty and Karthik Suresh Iyer. While Haasan shouts in places to camouflage his struggle to sing, Chakraborty and Iyer screech when the pitch goes high.

Sadly, Haasan has no one to blame but himself for this misadventure since he is the producer, director and writer (the dialogues for the Hindi version are by Atul Tiwari).

I love Kamal Haasan. I do. I was a kid when I cried for his character Raja as he assured his best friend that he was not in love with her in Ramesh Sippy’s Saagar(1985), one of the few Hindi films he did that I thought deserved him. I laughed till I died at his antics in the dialogueless Pushpak Vimana (1987). And just recently, when he stepped into Mohanlal’s role in Papanasam (2015), the Tamil remake of the Malayalam blockbuster Drishyam starring Lalettan, he did indeed remind us that he still has what it takes to play the leading man in an all-out commercial film without the crutch of a double role, a triple role, 10 roles, a lover who looks young enough to be his child, a heavy use of prosthetics or excessive reliance on an action director that have been the USPs of too many of his films from the 1990s onwards. All he needs to do is stay as nicely physically fit as he is now, rely on his tremendous acting talent, pick dependable directors and solid scripts. Maybe someone needs to write a mystery thriller on why the iconic Kamal Haasan does not get that.

Apart from the shock value of the extreme violence it features and a vital statement about fundamentalism-versus-education, Vishwaroop II has nothing new to offer. It is a scar on Haasan’s filmography and a dead bore.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	2 hours 21 minutes

Footnote about the Censor rating: A UA rating makes no sense considering the nature of the violence in the film. Among other disturbing visuals, Vishwaroop II shows us repeated close-ups of gory wounds, daggers piercing eyes and necks, and a lingering shot of a man whose throat has just been smashed with a fist. While you cannot help but wonder whether it helped the film that the Censor Board chief is its lyricist, to be fair, this rating is in keeping with the hypocrisy of India’s film rating system which has for long now deemed violence, sexual innuendo, sexism, extreme misogyny including rape jokes and casual assaults on women in male-centric, big-banner commercial projects UA-worthy, while explicit depictions of sex between consenting adults are usually given A (Adults Only) certificates. More recently, with Veere Di Wedding, we saw the CBFC stamping an A rating on women just talking about sex and masturbating.

For more on this, you could read my column headlined “Consistently Inconsistent” written in 2015 – nothing has changed since then:

https://annavetticadgoes2themovies.blogspot.com/2015/05/indias-film-censorship-system-film.html

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

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/vishwaroop-ii-movie-review-kamal-haasan-wastes-himself-in-an-extraordinarily-ordinary-thriller-4934631.html

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

Release date:	August 15, 2018
Director:	Reema Kagti
Cast: Language:	Akshay Kumar, Kunal Kapoor, Amit Sadh, Sunny Kaushal, Vineet Kumar Singh, Mouni Roy Hindi

Chak De! India is arguably the gold standard for any contemporary Hindi film hoping to use sport as a showcase for this country’s complex multi-cultural landscape. Gender politics, a factious nation’s religious and regional tensions, and the inevitability of inter-personal rivalries in a team game all found a place in Shimit Amin’s fabulous 2007 film about the Indian women’s hockey team at the turn of the century finding its oxygen under a new coach, yet it appeared not to strain a nerve to sermonise. Chak De! is a hard act to follow.

Director Reema Kagti’s Gold sets itself on the same playing field – hockey, this time for men – but shifts its gaze to a period stretching from 1936 pre-Independence India to the first Olympics we played after the British left our shores. India, as we know from history texts, dominated world hockey for several decades back then. Cobbling a team together for the 1948 Olympics was a challenging task, however, for a fictional team manager called Tapan Das (Akshay Kumar), Partition having robbed us of many of our finest sporting talents. In this scenario, Tapanda battles his own alcoholism and a cynical hockey establishment, in addition to the parochial and class divisions within the team to get free India a gold, not so much for sporting glory and self-realisation but to take revenge on our former colonisers.

In the tradition of several Akshay Kumar films of the past 3-4 years, Kagti – who earlier made the neatly irreverent Honeymoon Travels Pvt Ltdand the wonderfully mellow Talaash– goes full throttle into loud, chest-thumping nationalist territory for Gold. If a point has to be made, it is spelt out not once but repeatedly. If a personal experience has to be a source of inspiration for a brainwave on the hockey field, the dialogue from the earlier moment must be replayed, on the assumption perhaps that viewers are not bright enough to get the hint from the proceedings on screen. If two characters are going to be at war in the dressing room, then their potential clash is announced through a long song during which the visuals stress and re-stress and further stress their class differences, just in case the audience did not quite get it from the initial indicators of one chap’s evident aristocratic background and the other’s evident lack of it. And when the national anthem plays in a scene that is truly and unexpectedly moving, the emotional resonance of the turn of events that preceded it is not deemed enough, the film’s patriotic fervour has to be underlined with a fluorescent marker in the form of one man – you can guess who – shouting Vande Mataram.

It is hard to understand why a filmmaker as gifted as Kagti could not see that there is melodrama and great beauty intrinsic to the story of a newly Independent and poor nation winning a hockey Olympic gold for the first time under its own flag. The failure to recognise this is Gold’s Achilles heel. Kagti does manage to weave some moments of quiet into the larger tapestry of overstatement she is working on – such as that scene in which the team first realises they will be ripped apart by Partition, or the dynamics in the bar fight which almost destroys Team India, or the warmth between the former teammates turned rivals from India and Pakistan at Olympics 1948, and most of all the two hockey matches that dominate the closing half hour. These are the passages in which we get to see what Goldcould have been if it had not underestimated its audience or been overly anxious to cash in on the raucous, aggressive patriotism dominating the current national discourse.

Kagti has saved her best for Gold’s last 30 minutes, during which, despite all the film’s follies, I found myself cheering for the Indian team and welling up with emotion for them.

Of the cast, Sunny Kaushal and Amit Sadh play the only hockey players who are well fleshed out in the writing. The excellent Vineet Kumar Singh takes on the role of Imtiaz Ali Shah, captain of the undivided Indian team, giving his character far more heft than the screenplay affords. Unfortunately for the film, these men are sidelined in favour of Akshay Kumar’s Tapanda – of course – who is foregrounded throughout. Kumar gets the most screen time as manager-cum-talent-scout-cum-coach-cum-everything to the team, but delivers an awkward, uninspired performance in which his effort to be Bengali overshadows all else.

The oddest part of Gold is the fictionalisation of the hockey players who in reality won India golds at the 1936 and 1948 Olympics.Dhyan Chand and his colleagues are all part of sporting legend in India, yet for some reason, instead of using the names of these men who did us proud and bringing their characters to life, we get made-up names and characters based on their experiences instead in Gold. Yelling out Vande Mataram on screen can hardly compensate for this disservice to these giants from our past.

Gold has its occasional redeeming moments, but for the most part it just skims the surface of a landscape once examined with such depth by Chak De! India.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	2 hours 33 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/gold-movie-review-akshay-kumar-starrers-penchant-for-overstatement-overshadows-its-few-moments-of-moving-quiet-4965851.html

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

Release date:	August 15, 2018
Director:	Milap Milan Zaveri
Cast: Language:	John Abraham, Manoj Bajpayee, Manish Chaudhary, Aisha Sharma, Amruta Khanvilkar Hindi

A violent vigilante out to clean the system by extra-legal means, a corruption-ridden police force, two good men with contrasting approaches to justice, a parent shamed in his prime, a son determined to restore his father’s reputation – we have seen variations of these elements in so many Hindi films in the 1970s and ’80s (some memorable, some terrible) that no amount of efficient direction is likely to have saved this film from its own triteness. As it happens, director Milap Milan Zaveri is also the writer of Satyameva Jayate, so he really has no excuse behind which to hide for this travesty he has subjected us to.

Satyameva Jayate begins with the back-to-back gruesome murders of two corrupt Mumbai policemen. A mysterious hooded figure (John Abraham) oversees both. The audacity with which these crimes are committed calls for the investigative skills of supercop Shivansh Singh (Manoj Bajpayee) who has a reputation for unflinching honesty in a deeply dishonest force.

Because the writing lacks imagination yet aspires to be both smart and profound, Shivansh makes an inexplicable leap of the imagination to arrive at a link – I will not tell you what – between the killings and the words “Satyameva Jayate” (truth alone triumphs) that are engraved on the national emblem. The handful of interesting surprises that the plotline does throw up are all confined to the first half. Thereafter, everything recedes into the background in the face of the film’s high-decibel soundtrack and dated, oh so dated, feel.

The repeated referencing of Lord Shiva and the juxtaposition of gory Moharram visuals against one of the killings lacks novelty. The only point at which the use of religious motifs in the film works somewhat is when the Destroyer of the Hindu Trinity finds a companion in the call of the muezzin, but here too the all-round loudness puts everything else in the shade.

At first when a character tells a cop, “Ab tujhe aisi maut maaroonga ki tu iss janam mein jalega lekin dard agle janam tak chalega(I will give you the kind of death the pain of which will last into your next lifetime)” it seemed like we were in for some fun 1970s/’80s-style dialoguebaazi, but it is one thing to revisit an old, enjoyable trend and quite another to Xerox it without an iota of innovation.

If by now you are expecting to hear that Manoj Bajpayee’s acting is the one bright spot in Satyameva Jayate then your optimism is misplaced. The usually stoic Bajpayee does not outshine the script as might be hoped in normal circumstances. Instead he – tragic but true – overacts. Earlier this year, Neeraj Pandey served up a strangely vacant thriller called Aiyaary, and Bajpayee had managed to find something within himself for his performance even in that film. In Satyameva Jayate though, he seems to have given up on life. While he is passable through most of the narrative, he hams to embarrassing effect in the climax.

Abraham, on the other hand, underacts no differently here than in most of his recent films, but he looks handsome as always and is repeatedly seen in bicep-baring ganjis, so I guess there is a redeeming factor after all.

Amruta Khanvilkar, who was so impactful in a small but substantial role in Raazi earlier this year, is completely wasted in an insignificant satellite part in this film. Debutant Aisha Sharma, on the other hand, plays an important character who gets hardly any time on screen. She has a noticeable personality and very distinctive voice, so it would be nice to see what a better director might get out of her in a better film some day soon.

Milap Milan Zaveri is an established Bollywood writer whose credits include the screenplays he co-wrote for the box-office hits Grand Masti (2013), Housefull (2010) and Heyy Babyy (2007), and his directorial venture Mastizaade (2016)in which Sunny Leone’s bottoms and breasts had starring roles. From objectifier of women in these films, he switches to defender in Satyameva Jayate, providing confirmation of what feminists have said for decades: that men who speak of protecting women rather than supporting us should not be encouraged or trusted. Among the many clichés in this film are lines pedestalising women that are thrown at a potential rapist. Ho hum.

Satyameva, the truth alone, shall be told in this review. To say the film is shrill is an understatement. In fact, it is deafening both literally and in its tone. Abraham even gets a Sunny Deol moment when his screams rupture a tyre that has been placed around his torso to imprison his arms. To describe Satyameva Jayate merely as tired would be a kindness. In fact, the writing and execution are both exhausted, making it an exhausting viewing experience.

Rating (out of five stars): *

CBFC Rating (India):	A
Running time:	141 minutes 11 seconds

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

Release date:	August 24, 2018
Director:	Mudassar Aziz
Cast: Language:	Sonakshi Sinha, Jassie Gill, Jimmy Sheirgill, Piyush Mishra, Aparshakti Khurana, Jason Tham, Cameos: Diana Penty and Ali Fazal Punjabi, Hindi, Urdu and a spot of Mandarin

Happy Bhag Jayegi was the sleeper hit of 2016, a comedy revolving around an Amritsari bride who runs away from her wedding to marry the man she loves, but lands up in the home of a stranger – a Pakistani politician – by mistake. Diana Penty was luminous as the eponymous leading lady of that film, which, despite its insubstantial plot and flagging second half, managed to be funny all the same. She reprises her role in a cameo in Happy Phirr Bhag Jayegi even as it diverts its gaze to another Punjabi girl called Harpreet a.k.a. Happy, this one played by Sonakshi Sinha.

Writer-director Mudassar Aziz appears to have taken the feedback on his previous venture to heart. Happy Part 2 not only remains largely amusing if you can excuse a few waning patches here and there, the writing of its characters and the plot also have more substance than Part 1. Of course it is a parade of non-stop nonsense, but how does it hurt to get a fit of the giggles in a film that yet does not insult your intelligence and heads off in directions that Bollywood rarely bothers with, especially in comedy?

For a start, it is nice to once again meet a heroine not helplessly hanging around waiting for a man, any man, to bachao (save) her when she is trapped in trying circumstances. This Happy is a combustible woman and like that Happy takes matters into her own hands when the going gets tough.

There’s more where she came from. How often do we get to see a Hindi film featuring a turbanned Sikh as a major character without the screenplay being packed with Bhangra and cries of “balle balle”, without the guy in question being loud and boisterous, and sans sermons about Sikh valour or traditions of service to others? Representation should not be about pedestalising minority communities, but about acknowledging their existence in big and small ways without feeling compelled to create a shindig around an individual’s religious or ethnic identity.

So yeah, we have Khushwant Singh Gill (played by the very likeable Jassie Gill) who is recruited to Happy’s team in a foreign country, without so much as a balle balle or a lecture about Sikhism. Then there is the Lahori cop Usman Afridi (Piyush Mishra) and the Amritsari thug-politician Daman Singh Bagga (Jimmy Sheirgill), carryovers from HappyBhag Jayegi, still sparring over Urdu and Pakistan in a still engaging and still inoffensive fashion. Yeah, a Pakistani character who is not belittled or demonised in this era of crude, in-your-face nationalism that India is passing through and Bollywood is pandering to. Imagine that.

The trickiest part of Happy Phirr Bhag Jayegi is that it is set in China, which would have been an excuse to make lazy racist jokes in most Bollywood films, but not here. Aziz walks a fine line – a clever line – by allowing his characters to be racist as they would be in real life, while using their prejudice to throw a spotlight on the “all Chinese look alike” attitude of the average insular Indian who resorts to the dismissive umbrella labels “Cheeni” and “chinky” for people of the entire geographical region extending from our own north-eastern states all the way to Japan. Happy Phirr Bhag Jayegi’s humour incorporates consequences that the primary characters suffer for their insularity and ignorance. This is done mainly through the medium of the gangster Chang played by Jason Tham.

None of this is spelt out in black and white, nor is the normalisation of a gay romance in a brief passage that eschews Dostana-style jokes completely. In a film where you least expect it, we are thus reminded without anyone overtly saying so, that homosexuals, cross dressers, Pakistanis, the Chinese, Punjabis and women – groups that are usually stereotyped in Hindi cinema – are all just regular people.

Happy Phirr Bhag Jayegi could still have done with more work on its writing and direction – the songs (barring the remix of the appropriately chosen classic, Mera naam Chin Chin Chu) are ordinary and feel superfluous, there are places in the narrative where the energy dips (which is inexcusable in a comedy), the manner in which a fellow called Fa in Shanghai is introduced seems to suggest that he will be a significant player among Happy’s allies but then he inexplicably disappears for most of the film, and the sidelining of Diana Penty’s Happy feels like such an opportunity lost considering the spark this underrated, under-utilised actor showed in the first Happy.

Truth be told, I was really looking forward to more scenes with Sinha and Penty together, because though Sinha is the bigger star, Penty has the charisma to match. Where she does get screen spacein Happy Phirr Bhag Jayegi, Penty gives us evidence of her innate verve, which adds to the disappointment on this front.

Sinha’s filmography so far has been dominated by crass big-banner ventures often trivialising sexual harassment and starring major male stars, in which she played the hero’s lover who could have been played by any other marginal female star. She has underlined her ability to be more than just a vapid sidelight and in fact to carry a story on her shoulders in films such as Lootera, Noor and Ittefaq. Happy Phirr Bhag Jayegi gives her the chance to tap her comic timing and she does so with gusto, leading the charge in an ensemble cast of gifted actors. Piyush Mishra is as hilarious as he was last time. Sheirgill gets more opportunities here to mine his flair for comedy and is good too. And Gill is, without question, hero material.

Happy Phirr Bhag Jayegi is not without flaws, but they are overshadowed by the absence of references to farts, poop and animal backsides, homophobia, misogyny and other ugly biases that have repeatedly reared their heads in the kind of comedies Sinha herself has been a part of over the years. Pleasant and engaging is an option in this genre – thank you, Mr Aziz, for knowing that.

Note: This is not a Hindi film. The dialogues are a mix of Punjabi, Hindi, Urdu and a spot of Mandarin (I think), with Punjabi dominating the conversations but not so much that a non-Hindi speaker would be lost.

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

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

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/bollywood/happy-phirr-bhag-jayegi-movie-review-sonakshi-sinha-leads-charge-with-gusto-in-a-pleasantly-silly-comedy-5034911.html

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

Release date:	August 31, 2018
Director:	Amar Kaushik
Cast: Language:	Raj Kummar Rao, Shraddha Kapoor, Aparshakti Khurana, Abhishek Banerjee, Pankaj Tripathi, Atul Srivastava Hindi

In the town of Chanderi in Madhya Pradesh, there is a popular myth about a female ghost known as Stree who haunts the community and abducts men, leaving nothing but their clothes behind. She is not as rigid as you might think though – if you write “Oh Stree kal aana (oh woman return tomorrow)” on the boundary wall of your home, she actually complies, and returns the next day, only to be confused once again by the persistent instruction.

This literate, obedient, stupid spook and the equally dimwitted townsfolk are the subject of director Amar Kaushik’s Stree written by Raj Nidimoru and Krishna DK (credited as Raj and DK) who have so far directed the brilliant yet unassuming, highly under-recognised Shor In The City (2011) and the wacko zombie comedy Go Goa Gone (2013) with Saif Ali Khan, among other films. If you have seen Shorand GGG you might understand why and how the crazy idea for Stree might have come to Raj and DK. These gentlemen are clearly not interested in the straight and wide path. Ergo: when they do horror, don’t go expecting Bhoot. So if GGG was nutty and over the top, with Stree they have managed to be nutty, hilarious, ridiculous, scary to the point of being terrifying in places, feminist, secular and political in various ways, wistful, and just all-round rollicking fun. Did I say hilarious? Ya well, let me say it again.

Kaushik has scored big with the writing served to him, and just as well with the casting, which is as close to perfection as it can get. Raj Kummar Rao is outstanding as Vicky, the young tailor who scoffs at his community’s belief in paranormal mumbo jumbo until he becomes convinced that he is Stree’s object of desire. The man we see here seems born to do comedy. I had to pinch my arm to remind myself that he is the same actor who played the lead in Shahid, Citylights and Newton. If Rao is not one of Indian cinema’s most versatile talents, then New Delhi is the capital of France.His crackling dialogue delivery is matched moment for moment by Aparshakti Khurana and Abhishek Banerjee’s career-making performances as his cowardly buddies, and Pankaj Tripathi’s genius in his role as the local know-it-all. While these four keep the fire in the film blazing with their flawless comic timing, Shraddha Kapoor is suitably intimidatingly nice, sweet and intriguing as the woman they feel harbours a secret.

While I spent much of Stree giggling uncontrollably, there were moments when I thought the proceedings on screen would give me a heart attack. That is an unusual combination to achieve, and Kaushik deserves all kudos for it. The primary reason why Streeis so effective though is that it does not caricature the people of Chanderi – they are as real and foolish and prejudiced and good as most human beings are, and could well be you or me with less sophistication. One twist in the film’s closing moments feels superfluous and one conversation during which a significant point is being made feels a tad bit self-conscious about its messaging, but so much that is said and done in Stree hits the nail on the head and smashes it right through the wood, that I don’t feel inclined to be finnicky here. That said, a film that mocks gender bias and ridicules misogyny so pointedly could have done without the blatant objectification of a woman (with no equivalent objectification of a man) in the kind of song and dance routine that Bollywood calls “item number”. Hopefully Messrs Raj, Krish and Kaushik will think about that when they make their next film together, because it is the only bow to convention in this otherwise outrightly unconventional film.

Stree is like a blind date that turns out well – a tryst with the unexpected filled with exciting surprises. It is a thought-provoking laughathon-cum-spookathon, and one of the most unusual Bollywood films of the year so far.

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

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

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/bollywood/stree-movie-review-raj-kummar-rao-co-are-a-hoot-shraddha-kapoor-is-nicely-intimidating-in-an-unusual-horror-flick-5083851.html

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

Release date:	September 7, 2018
Director:	Nila Madhab Panda
Cast: Language:	Tathastu, Ranvir Shorey, Pauli Dam, Aryan Preet, Kumud Mishra Hindi

Once upon a time in Gurgaon, a little boy did not want to do his daily morning business by the rail tracks with the other residents of his slum. So he lobbied his mother and father for a toilet in their house, and dreamt of a spotlessly clean, neon-coloured room where he could relieve himself each day without turning this intensely private part of his routine into a social exercise. Mom, who worked in an agarbatti factory, supported him, but churlish Dad, a cycle-rickshaw driver, could not see beyond his own ambition to graduate to an autorickshaw.

The moment Halkaa (Relief) opens, you know of course the answer to the question: will they live happily ever after? This is not necessarily a problem, since the end is not all that counts – the journey matters. You also know from the beginning that the film is not striving for an overly realistic tone. Mirroring the shiny new shauchalay of Pichku’s fantasy and his mother’s perfectly manicured nails at the tips of her long and slender, pretty fingers, the film adopts a beamingly positive tone from the start, offering us a determinedly sanitised, sweetened, cutesefied view of the deprivations the child suffers and the hovel he inhabits.

This approach would have been fair enough if the rest of the narrative had depth. After all, writer-director Nila Madhab Panda is the man who gave us the equally cheery-in-trying-circumstances I Am Kalam(2011), a rewarding saga – insightful in the ultimate analysis – of an impoverished orphan keen to get an education, and last year’s unapologetically dismal, poignant environment film Kadvi Hawa (Bitter Wind). So it makes sense to keep an open mind and invest in Panda since there is no telling where he might take us through Pichku’s story. Sadly, the investment does not pay off this time.

Over and above all its weaknesses, what hampers Halkaa most is its superficial writing. The story is credited jointly to Panda and Nitin Dixit, the screenplay and dialogues to Dixit. The film has a cause, and appears to have assumed that overt messaging supplemented by the tiny leading man’s darling appearance and Shankar Ehsaan Loy’s mildly engaging songs are enough. They are not.

Halkaa starts off reasonably well – Pichku’s attempts to steer clear of the railway line near his colony are funny, and young Tathastu who plays Pichku is nice. As the narrative rolls along though, it becomes clear that the screenplay has no depth, several plot twists feel contrived and too many plot elements seem borrowed from other children’s films, including I Am Kalam (most especially the poorly written rich child who watches Pichku and his gang from a distance, and ultimately befriends the hero). And so, Tathastu ends up relying too much on his innate charm to strike a chord with the audience since the writing does not give him the substance on which to hang his performance.

Ranvir Shorey, who was so brilliant in Kadvi Hawa, is the best thing about this film, playing with gusto the unlikeable, insensitive father who is utterly impervious to and confused by his son’s concerns. There’s only so much even he can do though with this limited storyline.

Kumud Mishra is wasted in a badly conceptualised role. Pauli Dam as Pichku’s mother is glamourised in the most incongruous fashion for this setting. I am not saying there are no good-looking women in slums, I am pointing out that it is impossible to be a slumdweller and such an industrious factory worker with never a hair out of place or at least a spot of chipped nail polish.

From the Bhoothnath films to Taare Zameen Par, I Am Kalam, Chillar Party, Bajrangi Bhaijaan, Dhanak and Dangal, several Hindi films of the past decade have scored big with talented child actors. Casting directors such as Mukesh Chhabra and Honey Trehan have turned the discovery of gifted under-18s into a high art form. Halkaa has not toiled enough on this front. While Tathastu is certainly huggable and may perhaps deliver a better performance in a better film, and Aryan Preet who plays his friend Gopi is a charming fellow handicapped by flimsy writing, there are no excuses for the rest of the kiddy gang. The wealthy boy from a swish school struggles to emote. And not one of the remaining bachcha party in the slum is as arresting as that firecracker called Harsh Mayar from I Am Kalam or that other firecracker called Hetal Gada from Nagesh Kukunoor’s Dhanak.

The simple aspirations of innocent children have been a happy hunting ground for many talented filmmakers in the past. As recently as 2015, Tamil director M. Manikandan turned the longing of two Chennai slumkids for a slice of pizza into the marvellous Kaaka Muttai (Crow’s Eggs), which won National Awards at home and accolades abroad. India’s problem of open defecation was the theme of Bollywood director Shree Narayan Singh’s Akshay Kumar-Bhumi Pednekar-starrer Toilet: Ek Prem Katha (2017), which unfortunately became a propaganda vehicle for the ruling party. It is the Tamil film industry a.k.a. Kollywood – again – that should get the credit for making one of the country’s most mature films on the subject: the National Award-winning political satire Joker (2016). Halkaatries to be a children’s satire, but flounders from the word go.

Great films are born of great screenplays. This one sounds more like an ad advocating the use of toilets stretched to a 114-minutes-long feature and including some of the most blatant product placements ever seen on screen. It means well, but good intentions and a wide-eyed hero are just not enough.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	114 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/halkaa-movie-review-potty-training-gets-sanitised-and-superficial-this-is-toilet-ek-flimsy-katha-5127141.html

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

Release date:	September 7, 2018
Director:	Sajid Ali
Cast: Language:	Tripti Dimri, Avinash Tiwary, Parmeet Sethi, Benjamin Gilani Hindi

The ancient Middle Eastern folktale of Laila and Qais (a.k.a. Majnun/Majnu, The Obsessed One,The Crazed One) is so deeply embedded in the Indian cultural consciousness that it has been adapted by filmmakers in various languages right from the silent era. In this latest retelling, writer-director Sajid Ali – whose famous siblingImtiaz has co-written the film and is its presenter – chooses contemporary Kashmir as the setting. Laila and Qais are the children of warring families. When they meet accidentally one night, the attraction between them is instant. Both youngsters have poor reputations within the community, but they are undeterred. Following in the footsteps of decades of Hindi film heroes and heroines, she feigns disinterest in him even while leading him on, and he stalks her until she declares her feelings for him.

This is the Ali brothers’ take on how Laila and Qais came together. If you have read various versions of the story or seen any of the films, then you know the gist of what follows. (Spoilers ahead only for Laila-Majnu virgins) The enmity between their fathers forces the lovers to split up, and the separation drives Qais insane. (Spoiler alert ends)

The biggest plus point of Sajid Ali’s Laila Majnu is its young lead pair whose acting confidence and screen presence bely their lack of experience. Besides, the chemistry between them is electric. Tripti Dimri is pretty and imbues her Laila with an edge that makes the character’s constant flirtations with danger believable. Avinash Tiwary possesses the kind of charisma that makes conventional prettiness seem dull, which is why he can pull off a conversation in which the hero tells the heroine that he works hard to appear smart since he is not good looking. His role is better written, but that is not the only reason why it is impossibleto look away from him when he is on screen. If you have seen him in last year’s Tu Hai Mera Sunday, you know he possesses that X Factor that transcends roles and films. While I would like to see Dimri again to figure her out fully in a project that gives her character the writers’ undivided attention – which is what Tiwary gets in Laila Majnu– my mind is made up about him: Tiwary is, without question, star material.

The film’s other major positive is its music by Niladri Kumar and Joi Barua, and the way Sajid Ali has incorporated their songs in his narrative. I am in love with the closing number, O Meri Laila – the melody, the energy, the orchestration, the singing by Atif Aslam and Jyotica Tangri, the cinematography in that passage, the choreography, and especially Tiwary’s completely unselfconscious dancing.

That said, the primary excitement in watching any adaptation comes from noting the manner in which a story we already know has been reinterpreted with a fresh vision. The decision to place this Laila Majnu in J&K holds out so many possibilities, but the screenplay remains largely immune to the politically charged atmosphere and the specific social milieu of the state. The conservatism and gender segregation that stand in the way of the two lovers could have been set in any other part of India, and the wedge between their parents could have been transposed to any corner of the country with a tiny tweak here or there, so why bother in particular with Kashmir? I could not help but wonder what Vishal Bhardwaj would have done with this material.

Exasperating though this aspect is, what is truly troubling is the fact that the Alis have resorted to the woman-as-a-tease and the male-suitor-as-a-stalker clichés that were once a fixture in Bollywood but that many contemporary filmmakers now abjure. Not only does this triteness reveal a dangerous inclination for gender stereotyping, it is also, frankly, boring. I mean, seriously, how much longer must we contend with writers whose idea of romantic sparks is a girl pretending not to like a boy although she does, or a boy being obnoxious to win her affections? Do such writers think couples absolutely have to be jerks with each other on the road to falling in love?

In that sense, sadly, this Laila Majnu has in fact regressed in comparison with the 1976 Hindi film in which Ranjeeta and Rishi Kapoor played the star-crossed lovers. Those two were friends who actually had warmconversations instead of playing nasty games with each other. There was a genuine fondness between them. With these two it feels like they are simply sexually attracted to the forbidden fruit. Considering what ass****s they both are, you have to wonder if they actually like each other, and if yes, why?

The stereotypical portrayal of the initial part of Laila and Qais’ romance seems to have emerged from a strong conviction that love can and does blossom in this fashion (shades of which we saw in Imtiaz Ali’s Rockstar), that confused and intentionally confusing women do need the firm guiding hand of a male lover who knows his mind and bullies/intimidates her on to the right path. In one scene, as Qais watches a brooding Laila through binoculars, he expresses confidence that she is thinking about him and adds this analysis of the workings of her mind to his companion, “Nadaan hai bechaari. Usko kya pata?” (The poor girl is ignorant. What does she know?) What indeed can a woman possibly know about her own innermost thoughts?

She is still acting pricey when he articulates the stereotype in black and white to her: “You are a girl, you will play games. I am a boy, I will bear it all. Finally, you will give in.” In a society where men in real life routinely stalk women in the belief that women want a man to be “persistent” with them and that women say no when they mean yes, in a society where such stalkers have been known to throw acid on the faces of women who have rejected them, it is scary and heartbreaking that such lines have come in a film presented by one of Bollywood’s leading lights who once gave us Geet from Jab We Met. Maybe Laila Majnu should have been titled How To Reinforce The Widely Held Notion That Young Women Are Out To Toy With The Feelings of Helpless Men.

Misogyny and lack of originality are a lethal combination. The clichéd manner in which Laila and Qais’ relationship is established makes it hard to buy into their later devotion to each other. Qais’ ultimate descent into hell is marked by some excellent acting from Tiwary, but by then it is too late for the film. Personally, I found myself more intrigued by Laila’s equation with her emotionally manipulative father than with her boyfriend.

Dear Sajid and Imtiaz, from the space in your minds where that came from, why could you not have thought up a more credible, imaginative adaptation of Laila Majnu? Why?

Rating (out of five stars): **

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

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/laila-majnu-movie-review-avinash-tiwary-is-star-material-but-why-riddle-an-epic-with-bollywood-cliches-5134381.html

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

Release date:	September 7, 2018
Director:	Fellini T.P.
Cast: Language:	Tovino Thomas, Samyuktha Menon, Saiju Kurup, Suraj Venjaramoodu, Surabhi Lakshmi, Shammi Thilakan Malayalam

Theevandi revolves around a nicotine addict in rural Kerala who seems set to smoke his life away when the central action in the story begins. He is hardly the sort of person you would expect as the protagonist of a mainstream comedy – unless you are a regular viewer of Malayalam cinema, in which case you know of course that the slice-of-life genre, unconventional subjects, unlikely heroes and occasionally, heroines, are now standard practice in this film industry.

Bineesh Damodaran runs through so many cigarette packets in a day, that he has earned the nickname “Theevandi”, literally meaning “train”, the allusion being of course to a burning and/or smoke-producing machine. He’s the kind of guy who might advise a fellow smoker to “tell St Peter at the Golden Gate, that you hate to make him wait, but you just gotta have another cigarette”, as “nicotine slaves” did in the old American country music number Smoke! Smoke!Smoke! (That Cigarette).

Theevandi occupies itself with the question: will our boy ever be free of his dangerous habit, especially now that it is affecting the woman he loves who loves him but hates his stinking smoker’s breath, and his politically ambitious brother-in-law? Bineesh’s family and the entire village are agog with wonder since they have watched him puff his health away from his schooldays.

Theevandi stars the thinking woman’s Romeo, Tovino Thomas, as Bineesh. He is unemployed but occasionally helps in the family’s small business, never allowing his idleness or work to interrupt his romance with cigarettes. Thomas brings heft and unassuming charm to his performance, in a role that is more light-footed than his acclaimed screen outings last year in Mayaanadhi, Godha and Oru Mexican Aparatha.

Newcomer Samyuktha Menon is poised and self-assured while playing his girlfriend. Devi is a government employee who clearly has her act together while Bineesh does not. Thomas and Menon make a sweet couple.

The rest of the cast are a mixed bag. Suraj Venjaramoodu as Devi’s father and Saiju Kurup as Bineesh’s brother-in-law are competent as usual, but Surabhi Lakshmi as their political party’s secretary blatantly over-acts.

The first half of Theevandi is sustained by its comedic vein, the chemistry between the leads, and curiosity about where director Fellini T.P. and writer Vini Viswa Lal could possibly take this theme. The genteel satire here is rudely interrupted though by a woman jokingly threatening to pour acid on her boyfriend’s face – a remark that is treated with stunning casualness in the script – and visuals of her slapping him repeatedly that are used as a supposedly humourous refrain in their relationship. This violent motif mars the picturisation of the lovely song Jeevamshamayi.

Too many Malayalam films are blasé in their portrayal of intimate partner violence inflicted on women by men. Women form a majority of victims in real life too, but that cannot justify nonchalance towards a reverse situation: a woman hitting or threatening a man ain’t cute or funny, Messrs Fellini and Lal. The mindlessness of this aspect of the writing is most glaring in a scene in which Devi slaps Bineesh in the absence of witnesses at her home, but seconds later, when he slaps her back her furious family pours into the room to slam him. This is just the kind of scenario around which MRAs wrap their victimhood – “she got away with it, but look how they condemn the paavam man,” etc.

These interludes are particularly jarring because the rest of Theevandi, whatever its other weaknesses may be, remains doggedly breezy.

Much of the genius of the contemporary middle-of-the-road Malayalam cinema that film buffs across India so admire lies in observant writing, those multiple characters who are memorable even if they get hardly any screen time, the insights into life in smaller communities, and the ability to rib a people for their follies without caricaturing them. There is hope in Theevandi before the interval andespecially in that trippy scene in which Bineesh attempts to set a Guinness record with his smoking, but that tone does not last.

And so, while Theevandi is a job well begun, as it saunters along from the interval onwards it appears that the writer does not quite know how to take his concept forward. After a point, Lal seems not to have a clue how to handle Bineesh’s addiction, fails to arrive at an appropriate mix of comedy and gravitas to deal with it, is unable to lend any depth to the many smaller characters surrounding Bineesh and Devi who seemed promising initially, and resorts to clichés and long shots of Bineesh’s community instead of the intimate close-ups that have made the likes of Maheshinte Prathikaaram and Angamaly Diaries so memorable.

A considerable part of the first half of Theevandi is genuinely funny. And the attractive combined presence of the ever-reliable Mr Thomas and young Ms Menon keep the film running even when the writing runs out of steam. In a choice between “good”, “bad”, “ugly” or “okay” to describe this film, I am going with “okay” then.

Rating (out of five stars): **

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	2 hours 24 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/theevandi-movie-review-tovino-thomas-romances-the-cigarette-in-a-well-begun-but-half-done-political-satire-5143001.html

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

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