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Nothing Humourous About It

Despite a marked increase in feminist viewers and activists speaking up against sexist jokes in Hindi films, the truth is that the audience and media continue to have a high tolerance level for patriarchy, misogyny and sexism on screen

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In all the thunderous anger and support that Kabir Singh attracted this summer, another star-led Hindi film passed under the radar of most feminist viewers. De De Pyaar De, released just weeks earlier, had Ajay Devgn playing a 50-year-old called Ashish introducing his 26-year-old girlfriend Aisha to his estranged wife Manju (Tabu).

One of the film’s scenes shows Aisha obtusely comparing Manju to a “puraani gaadi” (old car) while Manju likens her to a high-maintenance “nayee gaadi” (new car). This is not the first sexist joke in the film: the morning after their maiden meeting, Aisha sniggers over the possibility that she could have been raped by Ashish when she was passed out – of course she does not call it rape, she cheerily asks why he did not do her when he had the chance, which gives him the perfect moment to slip in a swipe at rape survivors, “I do not give women the opportunity to cry rape using the pretence of having been unconscious as their excuse.”

Perhaps director Akiv Ali’s De De Pyaar Deescaped a stormy reaction while Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s Kabir Singh did not because Ali is less overtly virulent in his animosity towards women, wrapping it around a sedate-looking hero who is never shown assaulting women, unlike Kabir. Much of the misogyny in De De Pyaar De is also strategically written into dialogues spoken by the women themselves.

That said, the brouhaha over Vanga’s film may give cheer to north India’s women’s rights activists, but a celebration would be premature as is evident from the box-office success of Kabir Singh and the comparatively muted criticism of De De Pyaar De. Both developments point to the fact that despite a marked increase in demands for accountability from Hindi filmmakers since the anti-rape protests that followed the December 2012 Delhi gangrape, the truth is that the audience and media continue to have a high tolerance level for patriarchy, misogyny, sexism and sexist humour including rape jokes on screen.

After all, the audience that was vociferous about Kabir Singh has been far gentler on Luv Ranjan, co-producer of De De Pyaar De, who has built his entire career on humourising hatred for women in his directorial ventures Pyaar Ka Punchnama (2011), Pyaar Ka Punchnama 2 (2015) and Sonu Ke Titu Ki Sweety (2018).

Like him, more high-profile directors too have gotten off lightly for trivialising rape in the past decade or so. The critically acclaimed ones among them include Rajkumar Hirani whose 3 Idiots, produced by the equally acclaimed Vidhu Vinod Chopra, featured a long speech in which a character is tricked into repeatedly saying “balaatkaar” (rape) instead of “chamatkaar” (miracle). The scene was positioned as the high point of hilarity in this 2009 blockbuster. In 2007’s Jab We Met directed by Imtiaz Ali, the otherwise likeable Geet (Kareena Kapoor) and Aditya (Shahid Kapoor) casually toss the word “rape” between them in scenes designed to be cute and funny. In Ali’s Rockstar in 2011, when Heer (Nargis Fakhri) and Janardhan (Ranbir Kapoor) exit a shady theatre where they were watching a low-grade film called Junglee Jawani, he chuckles as he says, “If we stayed any longer in the hall, you’d have been raped,” to which she replies with a laugh, “That’s fine, it would have been Junglee Jawani Part 2.”

It may be argued that these three films were released pre-2012, when feminist viewers were less vocal and less Hindi film critics were vehement in their opposition to sexism. The reality though is that those who speak up are still outnumbered by those who support such cinema. Even the claim that Kabir Singh’s misogyny was largely derided by critics is false – the film got plenty of positive reviews too. In fact, some of the voluble backing that sexist Bollywood has received in recent years is very possibly a backlash against the increasing space for discussions on women’s rights in the news media since 2012.

On the flip side, the very public nature of the post-2012 feminist discourse has bred film personalities who have jumped on to the bandwagon, treating feminism as just another commercially viable formula. During the promotional period of Pink in 2016, Amitabh Bachchan released an open letter to his granddaughters about the challenges they are likely to face as women. “Don’t let anyone make you believe that the length of your skirt is a measure of your character,” he wrote. Yet in 2018, Bachchan’s articulation skills betrayed him when the nation was rocked by protests against the Unnao and Kathua rapes made all the more shocking by the ruling party’s apparent support for the alleged rapists. When asked for a comment about these gruesome crimes during a press conference for another film, this one not on women’s empowerment, the superstar told reporters, “I feel disgusted even talking about it, so don’t rake it up. It’s terrible to even talk about it.”

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Bachchan’s selectiveness is greatly overshadowed though by the opportunistic feminism of Akshay Kumar whose films for nearly three decades have been hostile towards women. Kumar discovered sensitivity in the past couple of years, coincidentally after it became clear from the success of various Vidya Balan starrers and Queen that although misogyny remains a hotsell, concern for women sells too. This is a man whose voiceover in the title track of Tees Maar Khan (2010) – sadly, a film directed by a woman – featured the quip, “tawaif ki lootthi izzat ko bachana aur Tees Maar Khan ko qaid karna, dono bekaar hai” (it is pointless to try and prevent the rape of a prostitute or keep Tees Maar Khan imprisoned). This is a star whose character stalked and forcibly kissed the heroine (Sonakshi Sinha) in an extended passage presented as comedy in 2014’s Holiday. In the years since, he has been courting a different off-screen image as a family man, thoughtful father and supportive husband to a tough-as-nails feminist wife, all of which stood him in good stead by the time Toilet: Ek Prem Katha (2017) and Padman (2018) rolled around. In Toilet his character’s love for his wife prompted him to run a campaign for toilets in homes, while in Padman he played a campaigner for menstrual hygiene.

An appearance of caring lends polish to a star’s image that no amount of multi-crore collections with crude comedies can achieve. And that is how it has come about that a star who was once a flag-bearer of misogyny in Bollywood is today the face of a movement to promote the use of sanitary napkins.

This is not to suggest that there is no hope. There are, after all, many more members of the public and media calling out misogyny in Hindi cinema today than in the past. Kabir Singh loyalists have been furious with critics who they believe were silent about the Sonam Kapoor-Dhanush-starrer Raanjhanaa in 2013 yet have lambasted Kabir Singh for what they consider similar content. Raanjhanaa was, without question, deeply regressive, and if there are indeed critics who have displayed double standards in this matter, flowing with the tide as the likes of Akshay Kumar are now doing, then by all means expose them, but the optimistic take on this scenario is that at least some people have evolved between 2013 and 2019 precisely because of the voices that did not stay silent back in 2013.

As with any discussion on social and cultural evolution then, a debate on misogyny, patriarchy and sexist humour in Hindi cinema ends up being a matter of a glass half full and simultaneously half empty. The stupendous success of and parallel backlash against Kabir Singh could either cause Shahid Kapoor and Sandeep Reddy Vanga to dig their heels in further or reconsider their attitudes, but it is almost certain that those speaking up against such horribly backward cinema are bound to increase in numbers. Meanwhile, for the benefit of those yet undecided, or those who feel repelled by Kabir Singh but consider De De Pyaar De harmless fun, it is important to point out that the mindset that prompted an Akiv Ali to have one of his characters equating a middle-aged woman with a “puraani gaadi” while another makes light of a grave matter like consent, is no different from Vanga’s outlook that prompted him to humourise a hero who violates the heroine’s consent, is violent towards her and is rewarded with her love and loyalty.

A version of this article was published in The Tribune on August 18, 2019:

https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/spectrum/nothing-humourous-about-it/818360.html

Photographs courtesy:

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

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

(3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tees_Maar_Khan_(2010_film)

Release date:	September 6, 2019
Director:	Nitesh Tiwari
Cast: Language:	Sushant Singh Rajput, Shraddha Kapoor, Varun Sharma, Tahir Raj Bhasin, Naveen Polishetty, Tushar Pandey, Saharsh Kumar Shukla, Prateik Babbar Hindi

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A present-day tragedy sends Annirudh Pathak (Sushant Singh Rajput) off in search of his best buddies from his youth. They were all students at India’s most prestigious engineering college about two decades back when they joined forces to get rid of the loser tag slapped on their hostel by the rest of the institution.

Anni gathers his gang – now older and many of them balding – around his son to recount their shenanigans from back then and convince the boy that winning is not everything, that the fight counts. At first Anni’s ex-wife Maya (Shraddha Kapoor), who was also their collegemate, is cynical about this strategy to lift the child’s spirits. She changes her mind though as the group gets deeper and deeper into their story and their young listener begins to get involved with these characters, some of who once went by the names Sexa, Acid, Mummy and Bevda.

Writer-director Nitesh Tiwari had his heart in the right place when he conceptualised this project. Chhichhore (The Childish Lot) is about an India that teaches youngsters to slog, compete and celebrate victory but almost never counsels them on how to handle defeat. It is a lesson that this country and its blinkered education system, pushy parents and mindless teachers sorely require. It is a lesson that sensible parents and forward-thinking teachers have long tried to propagate. The vehicle for this messaging needed to be less shaky though.

From the word go, Chhichhore’s 3 Idiots hangover is evident. That 2009 blockbuster by Raju Hirani was not without flaws – its take on education was simplistic and one-dimensional, it cast men in their late 30s and mid 40s as teenagers, and it trivialised rape in that horrid “balatkaar” speech. For the most part though, its humour was not insensitive, and one thing is for sure: 3 Idiots had its own voice. Chhichhore is a film in search of a voice that ends up looking, feeling and sounding all mixed up.

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Too much about this film is uneven and confusing. For a start, how come the boys have aged when we meet them in the present day but Maya has not? The only change in her is that her attire and styling are less sassy and flouncy. From Western dresses and short hair the older Maya has switched to staid cotton saris, salwar suits and a boring bun. But her skin, hair, posture and gait remain unchanged. It is as if Team Chhichhore felt that unlike men, ageing women are not worthy of screen space.

Even Maya’s wardrobe and style in college are inexplicable. She has the appearance of a girl from a much earlier era than her male collegemates, perhaps the 1960s.

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Not that the men fare much better in their senior avatar. With the years added to their lives, their hairlines recede but several of them continue to have skin as supple as a baby’s bottom.

These might have been excusable glitches if Chhichhore had got its tone right, but unfortunately the narrative never quite settles into doing its own thing. Both thematically and tonally, the film is trying to be what it is not throughout, borrowing heavily from 3 Idiots in terms of mood and even plot points. And the back and forth switches between the present and the past are just not effective.

What works in Chhichhore are the sports contests which do have an air of suspense about them, a considerable part of the banter between the friends in their younger days, and the energetic songs Control and Fikar Not (music: Pritam, lyrics: Amitabh Bhattacharya).

Nitesh Tiwari clearly has a talent for setting up battles in the sporting arena – he proved that in his last film, Dangal, and proves it again here. The many matches in Chhichhore, the boys’ hilarious immaturity and sharp tongues are often thoroughly entertaining. And while Maya remains a shadow in the background of the narrative that is anyway largely bereft of women, it is nice to see a Hindi film set in an environment where gender segregation is the norm but the hero’s wooing of the heroine is not noxious and stalkerish.

None of this is, however, enough to sustain Chhichhore. There are too many draggy patches in between, the acting is inconsistent, and the somewhat superficial messaging adds nothing to the “what matters is that you tried” line we have heard before.

The writing of Chhichhore (byTiwari himself with Nikhil Mehrotra and Piyush Gupta) is so lacking in depth, and the direction so passionless, that it is hard to believe it is brought to us by the same person who made Dangal. Despite its sporadic bursts of humour, Chhichhore comes across as a half-hearted enterprise.

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

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

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

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/bollywood/chhichhore-movie-review-sushant-singh-rajput-ages-shraddha-kapoor-does-not-in-a-hotch-potch-with-a-3-idiots-hangover-7295001.html

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

Release date:	September 6, 2019
Director:	Kalabhavan Shajohn
Cast: Language:	Prithviraj Sukumaran, Aishwarya Lekshmi, Madonna Sebastian, Prasanna, Vijayaraghavan, Prayaga Martin, Miya Malayalam

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A song called Thalolam Thumbippennale with the catchphrase Zing zig a zig zig plays at a birthday party right before the interval of the Malayalam film Brother’s Day. With no particular relevance to either the setting (Kerala) or the characters in the story (not one of them a Hindi bhaashi), the number begins with some Hindi lines. A few minutes earlier, a group of turbaned men had appeared but not said a word in a room where the hero was meeting a friend. A large group of similarly turbaned men turn up to back an ensemble of Malayali characters as they dance wildly to Thalolam Thumbippennale with moves that mimic the Bhangra. Those background figures are presumably Sikh, although the shape of their turbans shows very poor research on the part of the director. The movie maybe Malayalam and the actors all well-known Mollywood stars, but the song resembles one of those trite, large and loud Hindi/Punjabi wedding song ‘n’ dance numbers that Bollywood would once routinely and mindlessly chuck into films, numbers that are gradually – thankfully – now getting outmoded in Hindi cinema.

That scene exemplifies everything that is wrong with Brother’s Day: it is a poorly scripted film that does not bother with detailing, it is imitative, it is packed with clichés, it is not faithful to its roots, it aspires to be something that it is not but does not do enough homework to accurately be whatever that other thing is, and it lacks finesse. Such casualness is particularly galling because actor-turned-writer-director Kalabhavan Shajohn has assembled a fantastic cast for this project.

Brother’s Day stars Prithviraj Sukumaran as Ronnie whose work in the hospitality industry brings him in touch with a wealthy and happy-go-lucky elderly gentleman called Chandy (Vijayaraghavan) and his daughter Santa (Aishwarya Lekshmi). Ronnie is devoted to his sister (Prayaga Martin). Early on he bumps into a woman who has obviously been marked out by the script as a potential ‘love interest’ (Madonna Sebastian).

A character played by Prasanna runs a blackmailing racket with several accomplices, and is a constant mysterious presence in the background.

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Multiple twists are forced into this thriller. Multiple sub-plots are thrown in to fill it out. Scenes are written and shot without much thought.

Sample this. A minor supporting character is introduced as a “Bangali” and is meant to be one of the numerous Bengali immigrants who can now be found working in Kerala – the actor playing this part, however, does nothing to camouflage his very pronounced Malayalam accent.

Or sample this. Ronnie is shown standing on a pier confiding in a friend about his tragic past. He is so heart-broken that he sobs as he speaks. She seems like a considerate woman. Yet as he finishes his story and turns to her, the camera pulls out to show her turning her back on him and walking away in slow motion in an aerial shot that is visually grand but makes absolutely no sense.

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Or this. We learn at one point that Chandy’s daughter Santa is named after another character who was dear to him. Yet the film also features a scene from her childhood in which she is shown gazing at a group of people dressed in Santa Claus costumes accompanied by a couple of nuns, all of them gazing back at her one Christmas Day. Perhaps that was meant to be artistic and profound imagery, but in truth it is kind of laughable.

This is a film about extreme violence that fails to evoke any empathy for the survivors because they are so sketchily written. In fact, it does not seem to care much about them. They are just by-the-ways as Kalabhavan Shajohn obsesses over his primary preoccupations: making his villain intimidating and hero all-powerful. Among the instruments at his disposal is what seems like a sizeable budget for cinematography, but how does it help that Kerala looks picturesque through Jithu Damodar’s camera if the storytelling is so cold? And oh god, what is one to say about that over-emphatic background score?

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The bad guy is a blackmailer, rapist and serial killer. He employs various means to ravage his victims. He is also assigned an ominous signature whistling tune and a vicious dog. Like him, Ronnie is filled with ideas for how to bash up and twist human bodies. Despite this, the action scenes come off looking limp.

Any entertainment to be drawn out of Brother’s Daycomes entirely in the first half in the banter between Ronnie and his friend Munna played by Dharmajan Bolgatty. Of course it is all silly slapstick stuff but silly slapstick stuff never hurt anyone if it is inoffensive and you are in the mood for relaxation that does not exercise your brain too much. What does hurt is to see the gifted Prithviraj Sukumaran squander his talent on the generic thriller material that follows. When that happens in a film that also under-utilises the lovely Aishwarya Lekshmi and Madonna Sebastian, it is completely off-putting. After delivering excellent performances in substantial roles so early in her career with Njandukalude Nattil Oridavela, Mayaanadhi and Vijay Superum Pournamiyum, Ms Lekshmi’s decision to be a part of Brother’s Dayeither shows poor instincts or is a measure of the limited options available to women in Mollywood.

Towards the beginning of Brother’s Day, Ronnie references the Archangel Lucifer in what is clearly a bow to Prithviraj's directorial debut earlier this year. Lucifer starring Mohanlal, another recent film with a mythological title, the Nivin Pauly-starrer Mikhael, and last month’s Tovino Thomas-starrer Kalkithat took its name from Hindu tradition, belong to a genre of men-centric Malayalam cinema characterised by intellectual pretentions that unwittingly underline their vacuousness, high-decibel music, assembly-line scripting and stereotypical camerawork designed to build up the leading men as larger-than-life creatures. The basic storylines may change but they fit a fixed template, the degree of over-statement may vary but the cinematic vision remains exactly the same. For instance, Brother’s Day does not get as raucous as Mikhaeland Kalki, and – despite its inexplicable disinterest in the impact of violence on the human beings on its canvas – it is not as nauseating as those two films either.

Prithviraj Sukumaran is a powerful male star with a multitude of choices available to him, living in an era in which a quieter, gentler Malayalam cinema is winning hearts nationwide. He has done films like Koode that have showcased his acting brilliance. And then he settles for this pointless film?

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

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	165 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/brothers-day-movie-review-prithviraj-sukumaran-does-a-less-noisy-version-of-mikhael-7302221.html

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

Release date:	September 5, 2019
Director:	Dhyan Sreenivasan
Cast: Language:	Nivin Pauly, Nayanthara, Aju Varghese, Sreenivasan, Mallika Sukumaran, Vineeth Sreenivasan, Renji Panicker Malayalam and Tamil

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“Just name one quality of Dinesh that has caused you to like him,” Shoba’s worried father quietly beseeches her. His beautiful daughter has nothing to say in response. The fact that she is supposedly in love with the Dinesh in question and this scene comes well into the second half of Love Action Drama speaks volumes about their relationship. An answer is nowhere in sight even when the end credits roll around, which speaks volumes too about the vapid writing of this film.

It takes a special effort to cast Malayalam cinema’s sweetheart Nivin Pauly and Tamil-Telugu megastar Nayanthara in the same project yet somehow end up with a flat, man-centric, immature dramedy. Actor turned directorial debutant Dhyan Sreenivasan manages that feat. You might imagine that Dhyan would be getting reams of advice at home – he is, after all, the son of the venerable veteran actor-writer Sreenivasan and younger sibling of the supremely successful actor-director-singer Vineeth Sreenivasan. His connections, genes and the star power of his lead cast are no match though for the shallow writing of this film.

Love Action Drama is a romance in which it is impossible to figure out from start to finish why the central couple are into each other or whether they are into each other at all. They say they are in love so we are forced to believe it but the writing of the bond between them is sterile. The misplaced priorities in Dhyan’s screenplay are entirely to blame. The characterisation of Shoba is sketchy at best. More time has evidently been spent styling her than writing her. The result is that Nayanthara looks stunning (although it would have helped to go easy on the oil or lotion or whatever it is that her team used to shine her arms to distraction in her introductory scene), but there is little we get to know about Shoba beyond that she is a Chennai-based Malayali who runs some sort of business, and as one man early in the film confides in another, she is that terrible F word. You know, feminist. Hawww.

Dhyan treats the female of the species like an alien race in the way a person might if he has lived in a segregated society all his life and never had solid friendships with women. In contrast, the writing of Dinesh is detailed. So is his relationship with his friend Sagar (Aju Varghese).

Shoba and Dinesh meet when she visits Kerala for her friend’s wedding. He is an alcoholic, chain smoker and layabout, in mourning since he fancies himself to be in love with the bride who is his cousin. His feelings clearly do not run very deep, considering that by the end of the wedding he has transferredhis giggly affections to Shoba.

Like George from Premam– Pauly’s 2015 blockbuster – Dinesh too is an immature guy from the beginning to the end of this journey. A film may very well be centred around a kiddish adult, the problem arises here because the film itself is kiddish. Love Action Drama is no different from Premamin the way it casually applies the word “love” to a man who saw a woman and found her hot.

Besides, Dhyan lets slip some really deep-seated prejudices masked in comedy in his film. At three places, casual remarks by his characters reveal that he believes it is a given that dark skin is ugly. And what iswith Malayalam cinema’s insistence on depicting little children in serious romantic relationships? Not funny at all, please.

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The use of language in Love Action Drama calls for a discussion. The manner in which conversations shift from Malayalam to Tamil and back is smooth and natural because of the milieu and the backgrounds of the characters. But the Hindi words “beta” (son) and “acchha” (okay) written into lines spoken by Renji Panicker’s character do not trip lightly off the actor’s tongue and end up coming across as a forced, somewhat tacky effort to offer evidence that he is Mumbai based.

Like many Malayalam music directors these days, Shaan Rahman really needs to get over his apparent belief that injecting Hindi or English songs and lines into a film’s soundtrack somehow ups its cool quotient. It is hard to understand this practice. Is it that these artists think Malayalam is not cool enough? Or do they see Hindi and English as the only possible indicators of modernity and an urban Indian setting? By all means, mix languages, brother, if you can come up with something special and it fits. What though is the point you hope to make when, in a Malayalam-Tamil film set in Kerala and TN, you kick off the narrative with a Hindi-English number titled Raathein(Nights), a word that you cannot even get your singer Narayani Gopan to pronounce correctly, which your lyricist Preeti Nambiar then follows up with amateurish lines like “setting me afire / whatever we desire / come a little closer to me” and “all I want tonight / touching you and feeling you and loving yooooouuuu”? What is the purpose of the uninventive, heard-before refrain “mere khayaalo ki malika tu” (woman, you rule my thoughts) in Varavaayi? The song that does manage a flow in its English-Malayalam blend is Kudukku possibly because lyricist Manu Manjith does not sound strained and because the amazing Vineeth Sreenivasan imbues “On the floor baby / hit it hard baby / rock the party baby / pattoolangi podi (if you can’t, then go to hell, woman)” with an intentionally over-done comedic tone that complements and therefore acknowledges the unapologetic silliness of it all, though I do worry about the simmering animosity towards the woman in these lines.

Love Action Drama works in parts when Dinesh and Sagar are hanging out together and making an ass of themselves. The effectiveness of some – not all – these scenes comes from the chemistry between Nivin Pauly and Aju Varghese, and their natural comic abilities. Varghese is of course cast incessantly as a comedian, Pauly’s filmography has offered him more variety. What makes him the star that he is is his ability to be as grave as his characters in films like Action Hero Biju and Kayamkulam Kochunni have required him to be, innocent and earnest as the chap he played in Bangalore Days and the silly fellow he was in Premam.

Love Action Drama taps his versatility with a narrative that repeatedly breaks its own mood by jumping from extreme intensity to extreme frivolity without warning often within the same scene. The switches are fun at first because they signal the writer-director’s keenness that we not take his film too seriously. Fair enough. The technique wears thin though as Love Action Drama’s lack of substance becomes increasingly obvious and it wanders about aimlessly, wanders again, then wanders some more.

Late in the film some twists are set up as obstacles in the Shoba-Dinesh relationship. As it happens, they do come as interesting surprises, but their impact is greatly diluted by the absence of conviction in the first place in the relationship that is sought to be destroyed. After having misbehaved terribly with Shoba, at one point when Dinesh begs her to take him back, she says: “Convince my father.” Convince yourselves first, ya.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	142 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/love-action-drama-movie-review-nayanthara-is-a-mere-aside-in-an-immature-nivin-pauly-dramedy-7305061.html

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

Release date:	September 6, 2019
Director:	Jibi-Joju
Cast: Language:	Mohanlal, Radikaa Sarathkumar, K.P.A.C. Lalitha, Aju Varghese, Dharmajan Bolgatty, Honey Rose, Siddique Malayalam

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I don’t suppose there is any point in pointing out to directors Jibi and Joju that packing their film with ugly ageist remarks aimed at a woman is at odds with their purported goal of batting for the elderly. Well, never mind then.

The very literally titled Ittymaani: Made In China is about a Kerala-based man called Ittymaani (Mohanlal) who was born – c’mon take a guess ... wait for it ... wait for it – in China. That tenuous connection to our superpower neighbour gives the hero and his mother (K.P.A.C. Lalitha) an excuse to occasionally chat in what I assume is Mandarin to fool their community. It also serves as a spark for a bunch of predictable jokes about Chinese goods.

In the same town lives the wealthy Plaamoottil Annamma (RadikaaSarathkumar) whose wicked wicked children neglect her. This is the sort of film that does not have time for shades of grey in its characters. And so, the aged are consigned to across-the-board sainthood and painted as unblemished innocents deserving of nothing but our adoration. Annamma’s offspring and spouses, meanwhile, are uniformly depicted as irredeemable evil louts with not a grain of decency in them.

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The hero, for his part, has a golden heart. Some of the early jokes in Ittymaani: Made in China come from his penchant for extracting a commission from anyone with whom he has a financial transaction including – shamelessly – the doctors at a hospital where he admits his beloved mother in an emergency. But fear not, people, it is not what you are thinking. By the end of the film you will learn that he is, in fact, Saint Ittymaani.

Many are the lectures delivered about the duties of the youth towards their parents. Simultaneously, the town behaves as if there is nothing more repulsive and shocking than the prospect of an elderly widowed mother marrying, especially if her groom is a younger man. The disgust at the possibility of a senior woman’s kalyanam comes not just from the jerks in the community but also from those who are portrayed as kind and open-minded. The same folk have no qualms about Ittymaani going for a pennu kaanal (meaning, to see a potential bride) at the home of a girl called Jessy Pothen who, comparatively speaking, has the appearance of a child.

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The hypocrisy is not confined to the characters in the film. The filmmakers themselves mirror the values of the regressive people they have created. Consider this. Cast in the role of the supposedly old Annamma is RadikaaSarathkumar who is just 56. While the supposedly young Ittymaani is played by Mohanlal who is 59. And the reason why Jessy Pothen looks like she could be Ittymaani’s daughter is because the actor playing her, Honey Rose, is in reality young enough to be Mohanlal’s kid.

There is a significant twist right before the interval that could have led Ittymaani: Made in China down a path of brilliance, novelty and progressiveness. However it comes to nought in the face of the story’s ageist, sexist, highly misogynistic true colours.

There are so many double standards in this self-righteous film, so many examples of narrow-mindedness, that a comprehensive listing is not possible. For one, a satellite character compares Annamma to a 1965 model Ambassador, but that is a relatively mild potshot in a narrative that has double entendre flying fast and thick in conversations and gestures. And oh yes, like a string of Mollywood ventures since the formation of the vanithamathil (women’s wall) in Kerala early this year, this one too features a random flippant remark dissing the MeToo movement.

Jessy Pothen barely utters a couple of sentences throughout Ittymaani: Made In China but she does fulfill the only purpose for which she is inserted into the plot – she looks sexy, she looks youthful and she goes moony over Ittymaani. This, as Mollywood audiences well know, is an essential requirement of most Lalettan films these days, almost as if the megastar is on a mission to prove that he is attractive to much younger and good-looking women. The Annammas of this universe may be scorned and expected to retire into the Vanaprasthashram of their lives and ultimately embrace Sanyas, but heaven forbid that anyone should eye Mohanlal from the very lens through which he and his filmmakers view women of his generation.

Rating (out of five stars): *

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	158 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/ittymaani-made-in-china-movie-review-mohanlal-starrer-steeped-in-ageism-ironically-bats-for-the-elderly-7305751.html

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

Release date:	September 13, 2019
Director:	Raaj Shaandilyaa
Cast: Language:	Ayushmann Khurrana, Annu Kapoor, Vijay Raaz, Abhishek Banerjee, Nushrat Bharucha, Rajesh Sharma, Manjot Singh, Raj Bhansali, Nidhi Bisht Hindi

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Ayushmann Khurrana, poster boy of quality blockbusters in Bollywood, has made a habit of playing men leading dual lives. In Vicky Donorhe was secretly a professional sperm donor. In Andhadhun he was a pianist indulging in elaborate fakery when his initial lie forces him to tell another, then another and another. Writer-director Raaj Shaandilyaa’s Dream Girl has him playing a man pretending to be a woman on a phone sex line.

Khurrana’s Karamveer Singh has had a talent for impersonating women from his childhood. In desperation for employment in his adulthood, the boy from Gokul agrees to work at a call centre at which women offer solace and conversations to men who dial in. In his avatar as the sexy sounding Puja, Karam makes an unexpected discovery. Although there are a few sleazy chappies at the other end of the line, a majority of his clients turn out to be decent folk desperate for company, empathy and a listening ear.

There is a message woven in there about the extent of loneliness in the modern world where social networking sites give people an appearance of having numerous friendships while in truth most struggle to find even a single considerate confidant. The overriding aspect of Dream Girlthough is its comedy. Puja’s interactions with her/his regular callers in the first half of the film are hilarious with an underlying, understated poignance despite a spot of stereotyping here and there. Karam’s world goes dramatically awry when each one falls in love with this kind, funny stranger who seems to understand them better then those they meet on a daily basis.

From the second half, Dream Girl struggles with bumpy writing. The story and screenplay by Nirmaan D. Singh and Shaandilyaa (who is a TV comedy veteran) run out of considerable steam post interval once Karam starts trying to get rid of Puja’s admirers. The team does not know how to make the point they wish to put across without getting too preachy, or how to remain funny without getting flippant to the point of being mean and offensive. And Shaandilyaa as the dialogue writer seems not to have been struck by the irony of a film being insensitive while calling on society to be sensitive to those around us.

The downhill ride begins in a scene in which Karam visits an old lady to spill the beans on her grandson, who is one of Puja’s suitors. His comments directed at the lady’s age are jarring when contrasted with the tone of the film and his characterisation until then. Karam had tossed around a couple of such throwaway lines on his first encounter with her early in Dream Girl, but they passed off in the manner of a scene featuring an actual ageist guy and the actual ageist comments even apparently good people tend to pass in real-world social interactions without realising how hurtful they are being, and also because this was not the dominant takeaway from that passage. The post-interval scene with the grandmom though is ageist from start to finish in a crude, disturbing fashion, and ends up painting Karam as a rather nasty person which he was not shown to be until then.

The writing falters repeatedly from here on. When Karam tries to get an elderly widower out of a relationship with Puja by tapping the man’s conservatism in the matter of inter-community marriages, the scene is so poorly written and confused that it seems more like he is trying to convince the guy to stay on in the relationship.

The screenplay gets repetitive in the second half, runs out of ideas and also leaves loose ends hanging. Just when you think Dream Girlhas succumbed to what critics have in the past called The Curse of the Second Half though, it picks up once again thanks to certain cast members with unfailing comic timing.

Pyaar Ka Punchnama girl Nushrat Bharucha is unableto make an impression playing Karam’s fiancee Mahi in Dream Girl. It is a measure of how irrelevant her character and that relationship are to this film, that the entire affair is pretty much wrapped up in the first half within the span of one song, the least interesting one of the lot here.The empty writing ofMahi, her grandmother and a policeman’s clichéd nagging wife shows Team Shaandilyaa’s disinterest in – or perhaps ignorance about – women. Like Mahi, Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!’s Manjot Singh too is treated likea stepney by the screenplay, although he gets to evoke at least some laughter within the limited material handed to him.

Ayushmann Khurrana is good as always in Dream Girl, especially while doing women’s voices. His accents are not consistent though. His tendency to sometimes swallow words, which has been controlled by his directors in the past, is also occasionally a problem here, and is exacerbated by the sound design of Dream Girl which allows extraneous elements to drown out the spoken word here and there. Still, Khurrana holds the film together by ensuring that Puja is amusing but never a caricature.

The ones who save Dream Girl though when the writing dips are three men playing Puja’s admirers: Annu Kapoor (Vicky Donor) as an old man whose son has been urging him to remarry, Vijay Raaz (Monsoon Wedding, Delhi Belly) as a shayari-spouting Haryanvi policeman and Stree’s Abhishek Banerjee as a diffident music fan. These smashing artistes and the Meet Bros’ largely peppy soundtrack make Dream Girl worth a visit to theatres despite its rough patches.

My favourite part of the film comes with the song Dil ka telephone, which brings these disparate fellows together. Indian lyricists often mix languages randomly without the blend contributing in any way to the development of characters in a story and the scenarios they inhabit. But when Messrs Kapoor, Raaz and Banerjee’s characters turn up with the song“Tu mera dream girl bann jaaye / I’m searching for your love” written by Kumaar, the marriage of English and Hindi is comical precisely because these are men that we know absolutely do not actually speak like that. Besides, few actors have the ability to throw themselves into a situation and convince an audience to suspend disbelief like this trio can. Shaandilyaa should thank his stars that he managed to rope them in for Dream Girl.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	132 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/dream-girl-movie-review-ayushmann-khurrana-some-excellent-co-stars-are-funny-despite-bumpy-writing-7333041.html

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

Release date:	September 20, 2019
Director:	Abhishek Sharma
Cast: Language:	Sonam Kapoor Ahuja, Dulquer Salmaan, Angad Bedi, Sikandar Kher, Sanjay Kapoor, Manu Rishi Chadha, Abhilash Chaudhary, Udit Arora, Narrator: Shah Rukh Khan Hindi and English

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On the face of it, The Zoya Factor is about an ordinary girl catapulted into extraordinary circumstances when some Indian cricketers start seeing her as their lucky mascot and she simultaneously becomes romantically involved with the team captain. There is more to this Hindi-English film though, as there was to the bestselling English novel by Anuja Chauhan on which it is based.

Director Abhishek Sharma’s The Zoya Factor stars Sonam Kapoor Ahuja as Zoya Solanki, a junior copywriter in a top-notch advertising agency. Zoya hates cricket but her father (Sanjay Kapoor) and elder brother (Sikandar Kher) are as mad about the game as the rest of the country. Her sibling, Major Zorawar Solanki, once considered her lucky for his street cricket team because they would win each time she ate breakfast with them before a match. Zoya recounts this story to national-level players while on an ad assignment with them, setting off a chain of events that results in her being deemed their good-luck charm as India goes into the World Cup.

While the public and media go bonkers over this overnight star, on a parallel track Zoya and team skipperNikhil Khoda are falling in love.

The Zoya Factor by Anuja Chauhan worked because it used a giddy romance and an intentionally over-the-top tale of superstition to place the spotlight on the ridiculousness that is Indian cricket fandom, the latter ultimately becoming a metaphor for so much that is wrong with India as a whole. If you are among those inclined to consider the story improbable and exaggerated, just look around you at the mumbo jumbo pervading our lives and espoused even by public figures, ranging from fear of mirrors breaking and cats crossing our paths to the insistence on entering an important venue with this foot first and not that.

The film adds to the nuttiness with an understated layer of dismay at the hyper-deshbhakti now dominating the Indian public discourse that was not yet our reality when the book was released about a decade back.

The result is a largely entertaining swipe at superstition and a non-preachy endorsement of hard work over irrational gimmicks. The Zoya Factor does not always have its act together, but it is never less than crazy fun.

Curiously enough, where the film does not hit home is in the writing of its heroine. If it is called The Zoya Factor, you would expect it to be focused on Zoya, yet the character is given little depth and expanse in the screenplay by Pradhuman Singh Mall and Neha Sharma, which is a particularly disappointing turn of events considering that Chauhan herself gets an “additional screenplay” credit. Like many Hindi film writers, this team too sidelines their female lead as the narrative rolls along, instead pivoting The Zoya Factor’s second half primarily on Nikhil Khoda, his colleagues and desi mania.

It does not help that at first Sonam overdoes Zoya’s ditsiness. She gets better as the character appears to mature, becomes a tough-as-nails businesswoman in a fit of fury and glams up for good measure, but by then Zoya has taken a backseat to Nikhil in the narrative. Still, coming as it does after Neerja, Veere Di Wedding and Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga, this role feels like a step back in her filmography.

Since The Zoya Factor’s writers and director have chosen to invest more in Nikhil Khoda than in Zoya, they were wise to cast Dulquer Salmaan as their hero. DQ, as he is known to his fans, is already a superstar in the Malayalam film industry and has also ventured into Tamil and Telugu cinema with great success. His unassuming handsomeness, acting versatility and instinct for good scripts have earned him a huge audience following, box-office success and critical acclaim since he debuted in 2012. Along with stars such as Fahadh Faasil, Nivin Pauly and Parvathy Thiruvothu, this has made him one of the flagbearers of the ongoing Mollywood renaissance led by directors such as Aashiq Abu, Anjali Menon, Dileesh Pothan and Lijo Jose Pellissery. irrespective of their shortcomings, his two films in Bollywood so far – Karwaan and now The Zoya Factor– reflect the same desire to be commercially viable without being conventional that has been the hallmark of his career path till now.

Dulquer is incredibly likeable as Nikhil Khoda, complementing his good looks and astonishing proficiency in languages (very impressive Hindi diction, Mista!) with an easygoing acting style so charming that I found myself drawn into even the film’s cricket matches despite being – like Zoya – a cricket hater. (Aside: it is disturbing to see all-round nice guy Nikhil getting slightly rough with Zoya in a scene in which they have a showdown. This happens in passing but merits a mention in a society that tends to normalise intimate partner violence in real life.)

The film overlays its themes with a sense of humour that is hard to resist even when it is being unabashedly silly. A guest appearance by Anil Kapoor proves to be a hoot. And when the going gets grim in Zoya and Nikhil’s lives, a nameless faceless commentator clearly modelled on Navjot Singh Sidhu belts out a steady stream of Sidhuisms, exulting over a “vaahiyaat (horrid) ball” that turns into a six, packing his remarks with cultural and current affairs referencing, an unrelenting flow of similes and rhymes such as, “Saare manjhe khiladi ho gaye out, India is going to lose no doubt” (words to that effect). A big shabaash to Anant Singh for his writing of the commentary, which is voiced by Sahil Vaid and Singh himself.

Despite the light touch, make no mistake about this: this film means serious business. In an era when several significant Bollywood personalities have chosen to turn pro-establishment and sing hosannas to the present government and its boss, it takes courage to mention any opposition netawith respect, but The Zoya Factor does – right at the start. In an era when the mob is gradually being normalised, Zorawar cautions Zoya about pedestalisation by those who, as he puts it, are capable too of setting her on fire in the name of “deshbhakti”.

“Shraddha” and “desh” later trip off the tongue of an individual who is willing to sell his soul and his desh for personal gain. In this troubled era that The Zoya Factor inhabits, director Abhishek Sharma does not do any of the thingsseveral of his industry colleagues have been doing in films peddling an aggressive nationalist agenda through sports and/or war.

So yes, The Zoya Factor trips up on a very crucial front, but where it works, it works well, being funny and thoughtful all at once, in addition, of course, to being an opportunity for over two hours of DQ gazing.

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

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

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/the-zoya-factor-movie-review-sonam-dulquer-starrer-is-a-fun-but-faltering-swipe-at-hyper-deshbhakti-and-superstition-7373811.html

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

Release date:	Kerala: September 6, 2019 Delhi: September 20, 2019
Director:	P.R. Arun
Cast: Language:	Rajisha Vijayan, Suraj Venjaramoodu, Niranj Maniyanpilla Raju, Maniyanpilla Raju, Muthumani, Tini Tom, Nisthar Sait, Sona Nair Malayalam

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“Each bicycle I have owned has been a loan my father has taken, each medal we earn is to pay back loans to our families, our people and banks.”

These moving, profound, poetic yet practical words are the highlight of a speech delivered by national cycling champion Alice Varghese to a small community gathering in her home town Kattappana in Idukki district. At this point in the first half of the film, it seems that this young woman – wise beyond her years yet charming in the way she copes with the uncertainties of youth – is the protagonist of the new Malayalam release Finals. She is dynamic, she is an achiever and she fights enough battles to make her a captivating heroine in a full-length feature. As long as she and her coach/father are the centre of the action, it is smooth sailing for Finals.

Writer-director P.R. Arun seems not to have recognised that he has a good thing going with his initial focus on Alice, her widowered parent Varghese’s and her clashes with a corrupt state sports establishment, Varghese’s single-minded devotion to his only child, her blossoming romance with her life-long friend Manuel, and the callousness of a system and a society that threaten to throttle talent every step of the way. As the many turns on Alice’s path play out, Arun has a firm grip on his narrative, never allowing its appeal to lag despite the languid pace that only serves to underline the contrast between her busy career and her beloved, visually beautiful, sleepy birthplace. Her heart is in Kattappana but the world is the stage she aspires to be on.

The storyline and storytelling during this phase – bolstered by Sudeep Elamon’s gasp-inducing cinematography and Kailas Menon’s melodic song Parakkaam (Let’s Fly) in Yazin Nizar and Latha Krishna’s voices – are engaging enough to overshadow occasional glitches such as the awkwardly cast and written cameo of a Sikh sporting official/coach in north India.

And then at the halfway mark, something strange happens. A dramatic twist of fate alters Alice and Varghese’s lives forever, but instead of staying with the girl through a potentially riveting thereafter, the narrative virtually discards her and from then on suddenly becomes about Manuel and Varghese.

It is tempting to wonder – arguably uncharitably – whether this happened because Manuel is played by the film’s producer Maniyanpilla Raju’s son Niranj and that Daddy wanted a platform to showcase Niranj Mon’s talent. More likely though is the possibility that Alice’s future was just too challenging for Arun, that he actually did not know what to do with her after the interval, and so he chose the easier option in which she is done and dusted and vacates the spotlight to the two gentlemen.

This is not to say that Niranj lacks charisma or that Manuel is an unworthy hero (neither is true) but that Finals lacks focus. If it is meant to be a film about Alice, Varghese and Manuel, then there is just no excuse for why Manuel is so marginal pre-interval or why Alice becomes next to irrelevant post that. Besides, in the second half, the languor that initially served the narrative so well becomes a camouflage for limited substance. The volume of the background score too is used to fill in much blankness, over-stressing every single emotion, every challenge, every tear, every sigh and every breath to wearying effect.

Niranj Maniyanpilla Raju needs a script with greater heft to pull off a second half that rests largely on his shoulders. He does the best he can, but considering that even a seasoned artiste like Suraj Venjaramoodu (playing Varghese) is stretched to breaking point as the script starts wandering all over the place, perhaps the youngster deserves a long rope before we judge him too harshly here. Point to be noted: he does have a pleasant chemistry with Rajisha Vijayan.

Going by the text plates in the end, Finals seems inspired by a real-life sportsperson. The big regret following a viewing of this film is that it squanders its early gains headlined by Rajisha. The actor has grown noticeably as she has journeyed from her performance as a child-womanin Anuraga Karikkin Vellam (2016) and a woman-child in this year’s Juneto the woman that she is here. She does not deliver Alice to us in mere broad brush strokes, but pays equal attention to both the bigger picture and the little details – like that fleeting absent-minded cracking of the knuckles as she addresses a gathering.

The most endearing aspect of the leading lady’s performance is the manner in which she juggles her character’s maturity with the inevitable hesitation that comes from her awareness of her limited life experiences. My favourite scene in Finals is the one in which she seeks her father’s counsel before making a move in her romance with Manuel. Her matter-of-fact question to Varghese and his unflinching response convey, within seconds, their closeness, her openness to advice from Dad and his common-sense approach to parenting. There is warmth, believability and sweetness in that scene. This then is what Arun fritters away as he pretty much washes his hands of Alice through the second half of Finals. The road to cinematic ordinariness is paved with persons who had good concepts that they struggled to flesh out, especially well-meaning men who find the idea of a strong woman appealing but don’t quite know how to deal with one.

Rating (out of five stars): **

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

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/finals-movie-review-rajisha-vijayan-sparkles-till-the-narrative-sidelines-her-and-wanders-away-with-itself-7379161.html

Poster courtesy: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10019402/

Release date:	September 27, 2019
Director:	Ramesh Pisharody
Cast: Language:	Mammootty, Vanditha Manoharan, Athulya Chandra, Manoj K. Jayan, Suresh Krishna, Mukesh, Siddique, Innocent, Dharmajan Bolgatty, Hareesh Kanaran, Sunil Sukhada, Kochu Preman, Salim Kumar, Anoop Menon Malayalam

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Ganagandharvan is not about a man called Ullaas (played by Mammootty) who is a gaanamela singer. Ullaas’ story is just an excuse in this film to paint men as victims of feminism and the laws designed to protect women from sexual exploitation.

Ramesh Pisharody betrays a disdain for women and condescension towards them even before courtroom battles commence between an evil femme called Sandra and hapless paavam Ullaas. In a scene that casually reveals the writer-director’s patriarchal worldview, a bunch of male friends are gathered at Ullaas’ house to discuss legal options available to him. Ullaas’ bandmate Titto (Manoj K. Jayan) is in the kitchen trying to make tea for the guests. Among them is the father of the budding lawyer Anamika who is herself present. Dad is trying to convince Ullaas to hire her. When Titto emerges to express an inability to find the tea leaves, Daddy turns to Anamika Mol – not to Ullaas who you would think should know where everything is kept in his own house, but to Anamika – and asks her to prepare the beverage for all of them as though it is the most natural thing in the world for her in particular to do so. She obeys wordlessly, magically finds the tea leaves (I suppose because every woman is born with a tea-leaf-spotting chromosome) and emerges with a tray for the men. Having fulfilled what the filmmaker clearly deems her designated feminine duty, she proceeds to wax eloquent about the various sections of the Indian Penal Code that Sandra could deploy to take revenge on Ullaas for perceived wrongs.

The kitchen saga in this scene is so pointed and so detailed – Titto is actually shown looking for tea leaves, Anamika is actually shown making tea – that Pisharody is clearly making a statement through it: that this woman, who is fully capable of filling what is socially perceived as her pre-ordained womanly role despite having a career outside the house, shares his views on the twisted nature of feminism; that being a woman professional is acceptable just so long as you know your place and stay in touch with your congenital domestic skills; that every woman is biologically tuned to make her way around household jobs in the way the uterus is biologically tuned for pregnancy, noses breathe and hearts beat.

The patriarchal, anti-feminist, misogynistic messaging of Ganagandharvan is the primary purpose of its existence, and Ullaas is Pisharody’s instrument of choice.

Ganagandharvan revolves around nice guy Ullaas, a singer whose goal of becoming a film playback singer remains unfulfilled. He now spends his days performing at weddings and other public and social functions. His wife Mini (Vanditha Manoharan) loves him but is frustrated with his lack of progress. His daughter has zero respect for him.

When he is approached with an extraordinary request to help Sandra (Athulya Chandra), he gets sucked into a vortex of circumstances and misunderstandings fuelled by what the film describes as society’s and the legal system’s pro-women bias. Various women from Anamika to a “feminist judge” are used as mouthpieces for Pisharody’s propaganda conveyed through sarcasm and a fake concern for women with genuine issues. And Sandra, a character written with an utter lack of nuance, is used to repeatedly say things like, “Njaan oru pennalle, law endoode nikkyu ollu” (I am a woman so the law will stand with me). To underline her horridness she is shown slapping a man after hitting him with her car and justifying her obnoxious behaviour with the dictum that attack is the best form of defence.

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This review does not intend to suggest that laws sensitive to women’s concerns have never been misused. No law or system in this world can escape at least some degree of misuse, but so-called Men’s Rights Activists exaggerate the minuscule percentage of such episodes in the context of women-related laws – ignoring the humongous scale of violence and discrimination against women worldwide – to demonise feminism, feminists and systemic considerationfor women.

Mollywood presents Ganagandharvan just a fortnight after the release of the insidious Bollywood film Section 375, which operates on the same premise. Such films are a backlash against the increasingly vocal nature of contemporary feminism, which has the benefit of platforms such as the social media that were not available to earlier generations of rights warriors.

The screenplay’s low IQ is exemplified by a character who is worried when a new judge takes over Ullaas’ case. “The new woman judge is a feminist,” he says, “till date she has never ruled in favour of a man.” Yawn. Boring. Seriously how little intelligence must you have to parrot this clichéd line about feminism? If you believe a movement for gender equality is anti-men, then one has to assume that you believe all men are anti-equality.

Pisharody’s failure lies not only in his status-quoist, antagonistic ideology, but in his inability to tell a story well. Considerable time is spent on establishing Ullaas’ family, his musical background and lost dreams in the first hour of Ganagandharvan, but all this becomes irrelevant once he is trapped by Sandra. There is no answer to why Pisharody and his co-writer Hari P. Nair did not plunge straight into the Ullaas-Sandra track.

This is not the only time-wasting writing choice they make. A parade of characters played by well-known character actors appear and disappear in Ganagandharvan without contributing much to the narrative, apart from providing some comic relief. At first they are funny – the sub-plot involving Ashokan, for one, certainly merits a few laughs. Then though, these bit parts become tedious as they needlessly stretch the film’s length, the humour clashes with the grim storyline and it becomes clear that even these comedians are being used to further Pisharody’s cause.

The character played by Suresh Krishna works as long as the film appears to be a slice-of-life saga set within a musical troupe. When it metamorphoses into a legal drama, he becomes completely superfluous and the supposedly grand revelation involving his all-white attire is downright silly. Salim Kumar turns up for a few seconds simply to insinuate, with a purported wisecrack, that domestic violence laws are routinely misused by women. And the sudden appearance of Anoop Menon in a climactic twist is just plain stupid. Tacky writing all around.

There is really no point in asking: what were you thinking, Mammootty? Because Mammootty, our beloved Mammukka, screen legend, actor par excellence, he who also chose to star in sensitively handled, quality cinema like Peranbu (Tamil) and Unda (Malayalam)just this year, has done far worse by women in his decades-long career in a slew of films that make Ganagandharvanlook humane in comparison. At least here we are spared the posing around, the bizarre trademark focus on his sunglasses, shoes and gait in the midst of grave plot developments, or his own character spewing venom at women. The tragedy of Ganagandharvan is that Mammootty actually acts well in the film, but theempathyhe evokes for his character sticks out like an oasis in what Tagore might have described as a “dreary desert sand of” a dead screenplay and flat performances by the female leads Vanditha Manoharan and Athulya Chandra who are dealt badly written roles and are young enough to be his granddaughters anyway.

Perhaps nothing in Ganagandharvan should come as a surprise considering that Pisharody and Nair co-wrote last year’s Panchavarnathatha which wasdull andpointless. That film, starring Jayaram and Kunchacko Boban, was not fixated on building animosity towards women in the way this one is, but it did make light of intimate partner violence. Team Ganagandharvan too features a man casually telling a woman that considering the way she behaved with Ullaas, he should at the very least have slapped her once, to which she seems to agree. Apparently the only thing more natural than the female human’s ability to find tea leaves in a kitchen is the right of a male human to hit her if she bugs him.

Rating (out of five stars): 1/4

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

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/ganagandharvan-movie-review-mammootty-in-a-convoluted-ode-to-men-as-victims-of-feminism-7420671.html

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

Release date:	October 2, 2019
Director:	Siddharth Anand
Cast: Language:	Hrithik Roshan, Tiger Shroff, Vaani Kapoor, Ashutosh Rana, Anupriya Goenka, Soni Razdan, Arif Zakaria Hindi

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It is a good time to be a woman Bollywood viewer. No, revise that to woman, man and anyone else who likes hot-looking dudes. Because we live in an era when we know without question that if a film stars Hrithik Roshan and Tiger Shroff, then irrespective of how the screenplay pans out, it will deliver pay-off in the form of dance jugalbandis between these two, thrilling physical stunts and at least one of them shedding his shirt to flash a perfectly worked out torso.

And so it is with War helmed by Siddharth Anand whose directorial credits include Salaam Namaste, Ta Ra Rum Pum, Bachna Ae Haseeno, Anjaana Anjaani and Bang Bang.

Dance duet in War featuring the male leads: check. To the song Jai Jai Shivshankar.

Thrilling stunts: check. From start to finish.

Shirt removal: check. At 11.38 a.m. on my watch, during a 9 a.m. show. Yes, I measured the wait. Plus, if women are your preferred sex, then FYI the first shot of Vaani Kapoor in the film has her in a two-piece swimsuit. And throughout the young lady’s scenes, the tailoring department is sparing in its use of fabric for her.

Don’t judge me. When you invest time and money in a film, and it turns out to be deeply problematic, a viewer is compelled to eke out a return on investment. And if you are going, “Hawww, how can you call yourself a feminist and talk like that?”, may I request you to click on this hyperlink?

War is in some ways an exciting action thriller starring Tiger Shroff as Khalid Rahmani, an Army officer assigned to nab his former mentor, Kabir (Hrithik Roshan), who has now inexplicably gone rogue. On the road to their final confrontation, there are high-speed chases, bloody fisticuffs, impossible acrobatics, impressive gadgets, pretty men and women, stunning locales in Italy, Portugal, Australia, India and elsewhere, and some well-conceived twists. One twist can be seen coming from a distance, but the rest are admittedly unpredictable. One character’s questionable actions seem to have been completely forgotten in the end, but for the most part the screenplay remains consistent. Despite War’s evidently large budget, at least three sequences look plastic and pretending to have been shot on location, but even this is forgivable because the overall visual content is breathtaking. My pick of cinematographer Benjamin Jasper’s frames is a night-time view of a Delhi Metro train whizzing past this city’s famed giant Hanuman statue – the Metro is now a Bollywood staple but no one has shot it quite like this yet.

The overall excitement in the screenplay compensates for these flaws and the inordinately loud background score, especially if you are in an indulgent mood having accepted that in most departments Waris conventional Bollywood. This is the sort of film in which Vaani Kapoor’s introduction comes in a stereotypical song and dance passage highlighting her looks while Kabir gazes at her, because what else is a heroine for but to be looked at, loved and provide a motivation for the hero’s actions rather than being herself in the thick of things? This is the sort of film in which a rambunctious, colourful song and dance routine on elaborate sets follows right after an emotionally intense scene because a certain kind of Bollywood cinema wants to be in a position to tell the viewer that isme action hai, drama hai, comedy hai, emoshun hai, naach-gaana hai aur romance bhi, and narrative rationale be damned. War is the sort of film in which, right in the middle of a bone-crunching battle amidst ruins in Tikrit, Kabir and Khalid pause for a spot of dialoguebaazi, which is of course silly but also amusing in the way commercial Indian films of any language tend to be when they pointedly ask viewers not to take them seriously.

All in all then, War could have been a suspenseful, eyecatching, entertaining ride. But for its politics. Behind the guns, gloss and glamour, what this film is is a painfully condescending ode to Muslim loyalty to our vatan, an ode that is particularly cynical and offensive considering that the past five years have been marked by unprecedented Islamophobia in India.

There was a time when Hindi cinema was replete with positive stereotypes of Muslims, and liberal commentators (Muslim and non-Muslim) should be held to account for not pointing out that excessively syrupy portrayals of a particular community – the golden-hearted fakir, the golden-hearted tawaif, the golden-hearted all-sacrificing friend or stranger – was also a form of othering that needed to be called out. They failed to recognise that glowing stereotypes are very likely to have been over-compensation for closeted prejudice. The turn of the century brought in a steady trickle of films in which Muslims were thankfully portrayed as regular people, good, bad and ugly. But in the past five years, as open expressions of hatred have become increasingly socially acceptable, Bollywood has cashed in on prevailing Islamophobia with an equally steady trickle of tacky, historically dishonest films such as Padmaavat, Kesari and Kalank, or even the more polished but just as insidious Batla House. War does not fall into the same category as these four aforementioned films. Weirdly enough, the team of War seems to mean well. But the writing (story by producer Aditya Chopra and Anand himself, screenplay by Shridhar Raghavan and Anand) operates on the “unn logon ke beech bhi kuchh achhe log hotey hai” (there are some good people among them too) attitude that one gets from fence-sitting majoritarian bigots in the real world.

Messrs Chopra, Anand and Raghavan, if you think you were doing India’s already beleaguered Muslim community a good turn with War, please step back for a moment, take a deep breath, give yourself some distance from it and maybe, just maybe, you may realise how patronising your film is.

Khalid Rahmani is the character being put through an agni pariksha in the film. Some may argue that the denouement serves the purpose of holding a mirror up to a cynical audience, reminding viewers of their own prejudice. It does not work that way though because the film itself reeks of a loyalty test.

Hrithik Roshan is the film’s greatest asset. He is gorgeous, the salt and pepper look suits his gracefully aging face beautifully, and despite occasional over-wrought emotional histrionics he does a decent acting job. But the nasal, throaty dialogue delivery that has been his signature so far is so overdone here that it is sometimes hard to decipher the lines he speaks.

Tiger Shroff is an excellent dancer, has a fabulous body and an overall likeable screen presence, but acting is not his talent. In a film where he spends most of his time bashing up people, that might have been tolerable if it were not for his laboured attempt at pronouncing Urdu words. What was the diction coach doing?

Vaani Kapoor has a limited role but her Naina gets one of the film’s most promising lines. Words to this effect: “Not every Indian is a soldier, not every Indian is out to save the country. Some of us are just fighting to give our little child a simple, good life. These are the battles being fought by ordinary Indians.” Kapoor is effective to the extent that she can be in a small role, but Naina’s proposition remains unexplored.

All the film’s pluses and minuses fade into the background though in the face of its (unwittingly?) troubling politics. Khalid is a metaphor for India’s Muslim community, and when one person at one point offers what he sees as proof of the young man’s patriotism followed by “Isse bada saboot kya ho sakta hai uski vatanparasti ka?” (What greater proof can there be of his devotion to the nation?), the condescension just shoots through the roof.

“The war is still on,” says a character in the closing moments. Take his word for it: there will be a sequel. Next time, Team War, stick with the mindlessness and skip the misplaced, poorly thought out profundities, please?

Rating (out of five stars): **

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

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/war-movie-review-hrithik-tiger-starrer-runs-a-loyalty-test-for-muslims-under-cover-of-an-exciting-action-drama-7440501.html

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_(2019_film)

Release date:	October 11, 2019
Director:	Shonali Bose
Cast: Language:	Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Farhan Akhtar, Zaira Wasim, Rohit Suresh Saraf Hindi

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In a defining scene in The Sky Is Pink, a well-meaning woman offers Aditi and Niren Chaudhary a shoulder to cry on. The couple has just lost their 18-year-old daughter Aisha, so when their friend says she understands their pain because she is going through the same thing, you assume she too has lost a child. But no, her family is instead coping with the death of a parent who was, at 73, as the lady puts it, too young to die.

You would imagine that it must take a particularly stupid or insensitive person to equate the passing away of a teenaged child and a septuagenarian parent. But the Chaudharys’ friend is neither stupid, nor insensitive – she is a reasonably intelligent, affectionate woman reduced to making meaningless remarks in the face of their heartbreak. Which makes her simply human.

Because one of the most human of all reactions to another person’s grief is to fill silences with mindless sentences. There are no absolutely appropriate words to say when death comes visiting, and so people tend to get awkward and say terribly inappropriate things.

Writer-director Shonali Bose is perhaps better equipped than most to respond to a fellow human being coping with the death of a child, having herself known this tragic loss, as the closing text on screen reminds viewers. This, as much as her natural talent as a storyteller, may explain why Bose rarely puts a foot wrong with the emotional graph of The Sky Is Pink, an uncommonly calm, collected, non-sappy take on the life and death of a girl born with a rare congenital disorder.

For a start, Bose – who earlier made Amu and Margarita With A Straw– and her co-writer Nilesh Maniyar go down an unconventional path by making their film not about the little girl, although the life of a bright kid cut prematurely short is brimming with potential to tug at the heartstrings. Instead, they pivot their story on her mother and father,their romance, their marriage, their decision to have Aisha against genetic odds that they are aware of, their journey as parents of a kid who they know they are likely to outlive, and the abiding love that keeps them going.

Having made this uncommon choice, Bose and Maniyar go a step further by packing The Sky Is Pink with sunshine.

Based on a true story, the film is narrated by Aisha herself, a dead Aisha who lets on right at the start that she is speaking to us from beyond the grave. This is a narrative decision that at first threatens to go all cutesy on listeners as the girl introduces her family by her nicknames for them: Moose for her Mama Bear, Panda for her Papa Bear, and Giraffe for her brother Ishaan. The filmmaker may argue that this is how the real Aisha would have spoken, but the jury is out on that one since videos of her speeches available online suggest otherwise. Aisha persists with these names throughout the film, which is occasionally irritating, but never so much as to overshadow the incredibly moving story she recounts in anotherwiseincredibly moving fashion.

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Where the narrative might have been well served by extending itself is in the side effects of Aditi’s pre-occupation with Aisha. The Sky Is Pink dwells at length – and very well – on how Aditi’s obsessive approach to the care of her unwell daughter affects her marriage, causes her to get aggressive with medical professionals and justifiably strict with household help. But she is never less than likeable to anyone in her circle, not even to her frightened but loyal staff, and that is hard to believe considering the nature of her fixation on Aisha even as it is portrayed in the film.

Perhaps this was inevitable. The film is, after all, based on the real-life Chaudharys’ own memories and records, which means it is largely their account of themselves.

Another aspect that remains untouched is class privilege. At the start of the journey with Aisha, Aditi and Niren are a struggling middle-class couple who have to scrape cash together to travel to London for their infant’s treatment, but in a little over a decade Niren has sped up the corporate ladder and they are the occupants of a posh farmhouse on the outskirts of Delhi. This rise in their fortunes is shown to solely affect their ability to afford costly treatments for Aisha, and nothing else – not their attitudes, not their equations with others or each other, nothing.

In a speech she delivered in her avatar as a motivational speaker towards the end of her life, the real Aisha herself had expressed awareness of the advantages she enjoys as a result of her family’s considerable wealth. The Sky Is Pink could only have been enriched by showing conversations at home that caused Aisha to be so self aware at such a young age or by delving into the flip sides, if any, of their improved financial circumstances.

This is not to suggest at all that the film paints the Chaudharys as flawless creatures – no it does not. However, an exploration of these points could have given the film even more depth than it already has.

And depth it certainly does have. The non-linear narrative is structured in such a way as to keep The Sky Is Pink from becoming a maudlin affair. With editor Manas Mittal’s swift, clean cuts, a tempered use of music and Aisha’s determinedly non-mushy yet realistic narration, Bose manages to maintain a fine balance of emotions till the very last scene, bringing home not just what must have been the real Chaudharys’ goal of giving their daughter and her healthy brother as normal a household as possible, but also reminding the audience that our world is filled with laughter in the unlikeliest of places. I confess I was reduced to a sobbing mess at various moments in the film, but never because of any schmaltzy manipulations by the filmmaker.

The only other point where the film gets too cute – other than its persistence with “Moose”, “Panda” and “Giraffe” – is with the closing text. Hearing Aisha speak through The Sky Is Pink is pleasant and life-affirming, but continuing to use her words even after she has breathed her last on screen in a beautifully directed scene and even after her last rites comes across as a shot at cho-chweetness that is a departure from everything else in The Sky Is Pink.

I also felt slightly uncomfortable at the overt effort to draw viewers to Aisha’s online presence, through the text in those final minutes directing us to catch her on YouTube.

The back and forth in time gets slightly taxing at a couple of places (and I spotted at least one factual error in the timeline – a clothing brand shop shown to exist in Delhi before the brand’s stores were launched in India), but these creases are quickly smoothened out in each case, and the shifts in time always serve to keep the film even toned.

The Sky Is Pink is as thoughtful with its sidelights as it is with its central themes. At a time when India’s religious minorities are under siege, the film unexpectedly discusses a conversion without resorting to the stereotypes that propagandists have sought to perpetuate for decades. In a film industry that once inexorably portrayed Christians as quasi-foreigners, the passing image of a sari-wearing Christian nun in The Sky Is Pink is such a refreshing reminder of reality. (Wonder why Bose persisted with the stereotype in the nun’s language though. “Mother Mary tumhara pain samajhti hai,” the woman tells Aditi. Bollywood seems oblivious to the fact that a Hindi-bhaashi among India’s Christians would actually have said: “Maata Mariam tumhara dard samajhti hai.”)

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One of many pathbreaking elements in The Sky Is Pinkis its willingness to bring up that A word that Bollywood at large abjures and Ali Abbas Zafar’s Sultan just recently avoided mentioning: abortion. It does so with the same courage Bose showed in focusing on the sexuality of a woman with a severe disability in the lovely Margarita With A Straw. Abortion is discussed in The Sky Is Pinkwith the open-mindedness of a genuine pro-choice liberal, that rare individual who does not pass judgement either on a parent who considers terminating a pregnancy or a parent for whom that is just not an option. Stand up and take a bow please, Shonali Bose. Take a bow too, Aditi and Niren, for not getting Ms Bose to skip this subject, although you must have known that you would very likely be judged for it by people on both sides of the ideological aisle.

As Aisha’s illness takes the Chaudharys from Delhi to London and back, Priyanka Chopra Jonas’ remarkably controlled performance as tiger mom Aditi gives the film a stillness that belies the constant turmoil unfolding on screen. Chopra Jonas’ simmering restraint is well matched by Farhan Akhtar’s solid turn as Mr Dependability, Niren.

Zaira Wasim as Aisha injects her character’s bio with a cheeriness that is never over the top. And Rohit Suresh Saraf delivers a mature performance as her brother Ishaan. Although The Sky Is Pink is primarily the story of Aditi and Niren, the writers manage to bring the children alive on screen, imbuing their canvas with warmth sans the resentment one might expect when one kid requires so much attention from the parents. While some may find it hard to believe Ishaan’s devotion to Aisha, the other way of looking at it is that not everyone reacts to the same situation in precisely the same way. And perhaps the Chaudharys did indeed manage not to neglect Ishaan despite the demands made on their time by Aisha’s health. If you know a beloved sibling is bound to die an early death and if your parents were wise enough to include you in their daily battles, perhaps you too would find it in you to not grudge your little sister the spotlight in your house.

Large passages of The Sky Is Pink are swaddled in sorrow, as you might expect, but the film’s stand-out quality is its commitment to its positivity. Without seeming to try too hard, it is funny, believable and heart-wrenching all rolled into one. Death in the storyline is as inevitable as it is for all of us in real life, but what this film does is to celebrate lives well lived.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	149 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/bollywood/the-sky-is-pink-movie-review-priyanka-chopras-restraint-defines-a-moving-uncommonly-calm-take-on-grief-7475941.html

Photographs courtesy: Treeshul Media

Release date:	Kerala: September 27, 2019 Delhi: October 11, 2019
Director:	Anvar Sadik
Cast: Language:	Vineeth Sreenivasan, Aparna Das, Indrans, Basil Joseph, Deepak Parambol, Delhi Ganesh, Sree Lakshmy, Hareesh Peradi, Nandini Sree Malayalam

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Writer-director Anvar Sadik’s Manoharam clearly aspires to belong to the category of Malayalam films earning nationwide acclaim in recent years for the realistic, clean fun they offer and their ability to draw profound social insights from both mundane and extraordinary circumstances. Manoharam ain’t no Kumbalangi Nights, Thanneermathan Dinangal or Uyare, but it is, in its own way, nice.

Nice – now that is a word that heroes in romance novels have often feared, interpreting it to mean: “you are sweet but there is no spark between us.” Like the men their heroines have described as “nice”, Manoharamis likeable, entertaining and harmless, but also unremarkable and unmemorable.

Vineeth Sreenivasan plays Manoharan a.k.a. Manu, an artist in the village of Chittilancherry in Kerala’s Palakkad district. Manu is gifted but lacks self-belief. He earns a living painting hoardings and wall adverts, and is floundering when this film kicks off as digital printing threatens to kill his traditional craft. In a misguided attempt to stay relevant and to simultaneously exact revenge on a local guy called Rahul (Deepak Parambol) for an insult, Manu decides to launch a flex printing unit.

His friend Prabhu (Basil Joseph) backs him in this enterprise, as does Varghesechettan (Indrans) although the latter is not convinced of the efficacy of their plan. The situation gets complicated when the computer software professional Sreeja (Aparna Das) enters the picture.

Vineeth Sreenivasan is aptly cast and convincing here as an under-confident Everyman. It helps that unlike several of his films, Manoharam does not try to build him up as a hottie that girls are falling for left, right and centre. His Manu is surrounded by a motley crew of colourful characters, all played by dependable actors.

Basil Joseph is sweet as Prabhu. It is always a pleasure to see the wonderful Indrans in a substantial role because there is never a role to which he does not do justice. Deepak Parambol as Manu’s long-time bete noir Rahul transitions smoothly from jerk to not-a-bad-guy-after-all in a small part that proves to be a good showcase for his talent.

Aparna Das gets a comparatively weakly written role but looks and plays Sreeja effectively. And Sree Lakshmy with the teeniest amount of screen time as Manu’s mother walks away with the film in that one brief passage in which she tries to convince her son to have faith in himself. “Ninte kazhivaa ninte vazhi. Athu ninne chadikyilla (Your ability is your way forward, it will not let you down),” she tells him in Manoharam’s best executed scene.

Sadik, who earlier made Ormayunde Ee Mukham, does a good job here of creating this typical Kerala village of busybodies, well-wishers and doomsayers. The film is simple but thoroughly entertaining up to a point, and occasional glimpses of Manu’s artwork are worth the price of a ticket. Once Sadik has established his protagonist, the supporting characters and the setting though, he fails to inject his narrative with the zest and depth that could have taken it to another level.

The somewhat clichéd treatment of the leading lady by the screenplay exemplifies Manoharam’s hesitation (or is it incapability?) to stray too far from the beaten track. In this universe occupied by so many commercial Malayalam films, women are viewed by the hero and his supporters not as human beings who fall in love, but as unemotional creatures who cruise the world until they find a man whose prosperity impresses them enough to drop anchor beside him. As a result, Sreeja is never seen as “one of us” but always a “them”, a member of the half of the human species that Manu considers desirable but will not fully understand and can never fully trust at least until that thaalimala is tied.

In another area though, Sadik proves to be different from most of his colleagues. Contemporary Malayalam cinema tends to place Hindi on a pedestal above Malayalam (as does the average Malayali, whether consciously or sub-consciously is hard to tell) and to behave as if Malayalam is a language a non-Malayali would not possibly speak or want to speak. In a nice little touch in Manoharamthough, when Sreeja’s friend does what most Malayalis in Kerala do, that is, when she spots a migrant worker and struggles to ask him for directions in her broken Hindi without even checking to see whether he might know Malayalam, he replies in Malayalam withevident irritation at her assumption that he does not know the local language.

It is these observations that Manoharam needed more of to elevate itself beyond what it already is. That said, I could think of far worse ways to spend two hours of my life. Manoharam is nice albeit tame. Nice is good. Nice is pleasant and likeable. Nice is, well, nice.

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

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

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

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/manoharam-movie-review-vineeth-sreenivasan-plays-a-struggling-artist-in-a-nice-though-tame-film-7490881.html

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

Release date:	Kerala: October 4, 2019 Delhi: October 18, 2019
Director:	Lijo Jose Pellissery
Cast: Language:	Chemban Vinod Jose, Antony Varghese, Sabumon Abdusamad, Santhy Balachandran, Jaffer Idukki Malayalam

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Jallikattu is the sort of film that gores its way into the brain and rips right through pre-conceived notions of what constitutes cinema.

As alive as the beast being hunted on screen through most of its crisp one-and-a-half hours running time, the film pulsates with an infectious, unrelenting energy that is both exhausting and exhilarating, enervating yet invigorating.

It is violent, but – a distinction that populist filmmakers like Sandeep Reddy Vanga (Arjun Reddy, Kabir Singh) refuse to acknowledge – it is not a celebration of violence. Far from it. It is also one of the most intriguing, beautifully impertinent works to emerge from Indian filmdom this year, brought to us by one of contemporary India’s most intriguing, beautifully impertinent filmmakers.

Lijo Jose Pellissery’s Jallikattu is set in a remote Kerala village where a buffalo goes berserk on escaping an attempt at slaughter by local butchers Antony (Antony Varghese) and Varkey (Chemban Vinod Jose). The beast runs amok through fields, plantations and human habitations, spurring the men of the community to give chase. This happens in the aftermath of a young man exacting revenge on another in a seething rivalry over a woman they both lust after, a local policeman getting violent with his wife, and other conflicts that continue to play out while the buffalo wreaks havoc on people’s bodies and property.

Jallikattu is written by R. Jayakumar and S. Hareesh, based on the short story Maoist by Hareesh. The title is drawn from the highly controversial, bloody sport popular in Tamil Nadu, in which bulls are released into human crowds that are challenged to physically subdue the creatures. Pellissery and his colleagues turn that description on its head as the men in their film mine their basest instincts to defeat the buffalo. Many of them simultaneously use this battle as a camouflage for and an outlet to vent other simmering internal struggles, such that it becomes hard to distinguish between the four-legged animal and the primitive, feral bipeds hot on its heels.

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In this charged atmosphere, men do not merely speak, they shout, scream, growl and almost spit words out at each other and at the women in their lives. When one such brute attacks a woman (played by Santhy Balachandran), he buries his head in her body, hissing and snarling like a predator hungry for meat. She resists vehemently, but her subsequent calm conversation with him about a mundane matter is a chilling metaphor for the normalisation of sexual violence in our society and the manner in which women condition themselves to gather their wits about them in the face of male bestiality because of the frequency with which they are subjected to such savagery.

Jallikattu remains focused on the ferocious male of the species, but not without reminding us in the briefest of scenes that women themselves may appear calmer but are not above running a dagger through other women whose choices they resent or condemn.

Pellissery’s narrative plunges into action from the get-go, using the rhythm of the human breath, the flaming red of the title, the activity at a crowded meat shop, random banter and seemingly extraneous sub-plots to create an electric sense of anticipation before the animalruns riot.

Renganaath Ravee’s sound design intermittently draws drumbeats from every available element in the ambient audioscape, ranging from the laboured inhalations and exhalations of an old man, knives striking animal flesh, the buffalo’s hooves and the mob in its wake. Prashant Pillai’s music cuts in at intervals to inject further adrenaline into the proceedings. Combined with Deepu Joseph’s brisk editing and Gireesh Gangadharan’s unapologetic though non-exploitative cinematography, this gives Jallikattu a narrative flow so unyielding that it would take one of Varkey or Antony’s meat cleavers to slice through the tension that hangs thick in the air.

Pellissery has built a reputation as a non-conformist since his debut almost a decade back. 2017’s Angamaly Diaries and last year’s Ee.Ma.Yau. earned him a well-deserved cult following nationwide. He has a unique ability to ask uncomfortable questions through cinema that nevertheless yields unbridled entertainment. Jallikattu is as much a courageous socio-political essay, a gutsy cultural critique that is unafraid to tap religious iconography and an allegory for the devolution of men over the ages, as it is an exciting, hormonally charged thriller.

Men giving in to their most primeval urges make for a horrifying spectacle. Yet, as in life, in Jallikattu too it is fascinating to watch their inability to spot the self-destructive turn they take in their bid to dominate women and the planet.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	96 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/jallikkattu-movie-review-lijo-jose-pellissery-presents-audacious-eye-popping-take-on-masculinity-and-our-savage-species-7523161.html

Visuals courtesy: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8721556/

Release date:	October 18, 2019
Director:	Swapnesh K. Nair
Cast: Language:	Tovino Thomas, Samyuktha Menon, Santhosh Keezhattoor, Salim Kumar Malayalam

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I doubt that Lijo Jose Pellissery would have expected amusement as a reaction to Jallikattu, yet halfway through Swapnesh K. Nair’s Edakkad Battalion 06, I found myself laughing out loud at the contrast between this film and Pellissery’s new release that I had watched just hours earlier. Jallikattu strides purposefully towards the many points it wishes to make, Edakkad B06 waffles on and on. Jallikattu is trim, Edakkad B06 is flabby. Jallikattu has clarity of thought, Edakkad B06 wanders about in a confusing state. Most important, you may like or dislike, agree or disagree with Jallikattu, but you have to admit that it is pointed and sharp. Edakkad Battalion 06, on the other hand, is as dull as hell.

The chasm separating these two films getting to theatres across India on the same day is a perfect illustration of how Malayalam cinema has for long swung wildly between extremes in terms of quality.

Edakkad Battalion 06is set in a small town in Kerala where Captain Shafeek Mohammed of the Indian Army is home on vacation from a posting in the strife-torn north. Here he comes up against a bunch of no-good youngsters drifting through life and gets acquainted with the drug menace plaguing local youth. His passing concern grows into greater involvement in the problem when he learns that someone close to him is an addict.

The first visual of Tovino Thomas as Shafeek is preceded by a long-winded introduction to multiple characters in the story accompanied by sketches of the actors playing them. You might imagine that this will then be a busy film with each of these seemingly interesting men and women playing a significant role in the plot. Curb your imagination, dear reader, because the team of this film lacks it.

That intro – like so much else in Edakkad Battalion 06– could have been shaved off without particularly impacting the film beyond reducing its length. Because when the narrative is rolled out, none of these characters is treated with any depth. Not even Naina Fathima, a teacher who has made a mark while working with differently abled students, and is played by Samyuktha Menon.

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Thomas and Menon had sparkled and shone together as a screen couple in Theevandi. Her role in Edakkad Battalion 06is so small, so generic and so marginal, that she can do little to lift it beyond the ordinary despite her good looks and undeniable charisma.

Menon could have been replaced by any random pretty woman without the change making an inch of a difference to this film, since the only purpose she serves here is to look nice, and give the male lead a woman to fall in love with, while Naina’s profession sets the stage for a dramatic rescue by our hero early in the narrative and later for some children with disabilities to be dragged into what must rank as one of the most offensively emotionally manipulative, nauseatingly mushy, poorly written film endings ever seen.

The plot of Edakkad Battalion 06 feels like a contrived stringing together of disconnected sub-plots. Shafeek’s interactions with his extended family, his romance with Naina, his work as an Armyman in a terrorism-stricken state and his confrontation with drug peddlers back home do not flow smoothly from one to the other, nor is any of these elements written with any detail. As a result when they are thrown together they feel like an odd, bland mishmash.

Women actors in most film industries, and in Malayalam cinema more than most, have limited choices, but male stars wield considerable clout, so while Menon could be let off lightly, Thomas should certainly be held accountable for his decision to pick this sub-par script. The charming young actor’s filmography so far is packed with sweet, gentle cinema. Even when he did the horrendous Kalki earlier this year, it was possible to guess his reason for having chosen it: an evident desire to be catapulted into the biggest of big leagues in Mollywood although he is already a major star. What could he possibly have seen in Edakkad Battalion 06 though? The search for the answer may well inspire a mystery writer.

If you deign to check the credits of this soporific film, you may be startled to discover, as I was, that it has been scripted by P. Balachandran whose writing credits include the stupendous Kammatipaadam. A trough following a crest in a wave is a natural phenomenon, but can science please explain how Edakkad Battalion 06 could possibly follow Kammatipaadam from the same writer? Seriously, how?

Rating (out of five stars): *

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	111 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/edakkad-battalion-06-movie-review-tovino-thomas-and-samyuktha-menon-are-re-paired-for-a-lame-ode-to-notsurewhat-7525951.html

Visuals courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/EdakkadBattalion06official/

Release date:	October 25, 2019
Director:	Tushar Hiranandani
Cast: Language:	Taapsee Pannu, Bhumi Pednekar, Vineet Kumar Singh, Prakash Jha, Sara Arjun, Himanshu Sharma, Pawan Chopra, Kuldeep Sareen, Navneet Srivastava, Nikhat Khan, Shaad Randhawa Hindi

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If Saand Ki Aankh had been fiction, chances are it would have been dismissed as “improbable” and “typical Bollywood masala”. We know this about the truth yet keep forgetting: it is not just stranger than fiction, it is gutsier, funnier and more adventurous, as this gloriously entertaining film reminds us.

Saand Ki Aankh is based on the lives of sisters-in-law Chandro and Prakashi Tomar who first picked up a gun in their 60s and have gone on to become multiple-medal-winning shooting champions. Now in their 80s, the Shooter Daadis of Uttar Pradesh’s Johri village have riddled glass ceilings with bullet holes and paved the way for more women (including Prakashi’s daughter Seema who is an international champ in the sport) to step out of their homes in a state otherwise notorious for gender discrimination and violence.

Two quick points before diving deep into this review: first, Saand Ki Aankh is smashing good fun, as are Taapsee Pannu and Bhumi Pednekar playing the feisty leads; second, however impressive the two actors may be, the casting of young women to play old women subtracts from the impact of the film by placing a question mark on the team’s commitment to its own messaging. This is an industry in which director Rajkumar Hirani and producer Vidhu Vinod Chopra cast a then 44-year-old Aamir Khan, 39-year-old R. Madhavan and 30-year-old Sharman Joshi as teenagers in 3 Idiots as recently as 2009, where male superstars for decades have continued to play youth while in their 50s in reality, but women actors beyond their mid-30s are/have been routinely discarded, which is why it hurts so much that even in a progressive film such as this one, women artistes in their 60s have been deemed unworthy of playing women in their 60s.

It is possible to enjoy Saand Ki Aankh and find it inspiring, yet be aware that, however giant a leap it may be for womankind, it is but a small step towards a day when a Bollywood producer might put their money on a project with a Ms Pednekar and a Ms Pannu playing the younger Chandro and Prakashi while the Tomars’ 60-plus avatars are played by a Neena Gupta and a Ratna Pathak Shah (my dream cast for this film) or Shabana Azmi, Hema Malini, Rekha or any one of the numerous talented and gorgeous women who currently grace Hindi filmdom in supporting roles. For the record, this is exactly how the men in the story have been cast: the young Tomar husbands are played by young actors, whereas older actors play them in their later years.

Now that I have let off steam about this disappointment, let me tell you what a rollicking ride Saand Ki Aankh is.

The narrative opens in the late 1990s on the first occasion when Chandro (Pednekar) and Prakashi (Pannu) deceive their husbands and leave their village for a shooting tournament. The story then flashes back to the ’50s when Prakashi enters the household as a bride. She and Chandro instantly connect. Their friendship carries them through a dreary existence that includes unendingwork in the fields and at home, pregnancy after unwanted pregnancy (unwanted by the women, while their men do not care either way just so long as they get to have sex and sons), and the resentment they harbour against their spouses whose occupations are restricted to impregnating their wives, selling crops the wives have harvested, pocketing the money and lording it over the women.

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Plenty has been reported about the Tomars in the media. Theirs is a fascinating tale calling out to be made into a film. Saand Ki Aankhis directed by debutant Tushar Hiranandani whose 15-year filmography as a writer covers a spectrum of comedies ranging from the misogynistic Great Grand Masti to the pleasant Atithi Tum Kab Jaoge. He does not do to this film what Hindi cinema has long assumed should be done to all women-centric narratives: he does not make it a weepie, nor write a male ‘saviour’ into the Tomars’ saga, nor turn the women into violent avenging angels of the sort that have crowded mainstream films about rape survivors from Zakhmi Aurat to Mom.

Saand Ki Aankh (written by Balwinder Janjua and co-produced by Anurag Kashyap) is hugely funny and uplifting, yet it never makes light of the grave risks Chandro and Prakashi took while travelling for competitions initially without informing their regressive, restrictive menfolk. In that sense, Hiranandani maintains a perfect tone as he takes us on this rip-roaring ride, deep into a fire that patriarchy could not douse.

The conservative men in the film are not caricatured, they are ridiculed in a cleverly understated fashion. The women do find support among some men in the family, the village and beyond, but Saand Ki Aankhfortunately does not belong to the Akshay Kumar and Salman Khan School of Cinema that has yielded films like Mission Mangaland Tiger Zinda Hai in which fictional men appropriated the real-life achievements of real-life women to give these male superstars larger-than-life roles of the sort they covet. The Daadis’ coach, for instance, is a well-rounded, neatly written character, but at no point do Janjua and Hiranandani paint him as a knight in shining armour ‘rescuing’ the women from their fate: if there is any rescuing to be done, the women do it themselves. He is at all times portrayed as a darling, a visionary and an ally, but never a saviour.

Sudhakar Reddy Yakkanti’s cinematography, Devendra Murdeshwar’s editing and Vishal Mishra’s delightfully buoyant music are designed to ensure that the coach is not allowed to steal Chandro and Prakashi’s thunder. Who the camera lingers on, who gets those lionising low-angle shots, who the editor and director end each scene with – these choices go a long way towards establishing the supremacy of one character over another in a narrative. With its carefully considered decisions in these departments, Saand Ki Aankhleaves us in no doubt that Chandro and Prakashi are its protagonists, period.

Hindi film soundtracks have for a while now been toplined by men. Even in last year’s otherwise forward-thinking Veere Di Weddingin which women dominated the storyline, men inexplicably dominated the music (including with a song in which the female leads lip synced to Badshah’s voice). In Saand Ki Aankh, women rule the songs all the way down to the celebratory number running over the closing credits.

As important as all this is the choice of narrator. Most Bollywood films have men, preferably men with booming baritones, introducing and recounting stories, the unspoken implication being that a voice of authority must perforce be male. Saand Ki Aankh opts instead for a little girl (Sara Arjun), the very one for whose sake a 60-something grandmother picked up the gun in the first place.

Ms Arjun – award-winning star of the Tamil film Deiva Thirumagaland the Malayalam Ann Maria Kalippilaanu– does full justice to her role as a diffident kid who sprouts wings under Chandro and Prakashi’s watchful eyes. She along with the consistently wonderful Vineet Kumar Singh (Bombay Talkies, Mukkabaaz) playing the Daadis’ coach, director-turned-actor Prakash Jha as their older brother-in-law and sweet little Himanshu Sharma (Dear Dad) as a hapless pawn turned advocate for the heroines’ cause, form part of Saand Ki Aankh’s large and able supporting cast.

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Given the task of playing women double their age, Pannu and Pednekar come up trumps in their turn as cheery, fire-breathing warriors. They manage this despitethe inconsistent make-up and lighting, which, among other things, leaves their hands youthful forever.

While the two actors occasionally slip up in their gait and posture as old women, they look so confident as shooters that it is as if they were born to wield fire-arms (I will defer to language experts to assess their accents in the Hindi-Haryanvi dialect spoken in this film). Pannu and Pednekar have sharp comic timing, they play off each other well, and it is as much to their credit as the director’s and writer’s that neither star lures the spotlight away from the other, instead delivering equally finely tuned, sensitive performances.

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TV serials in languages across India are filled with nasty women scheming against other women. While women are no doubt often women’s enemies, it is just as true that the entertainment media and the popular public discourse tend to downplay the backroom alliances that women have formed for centuries in their bid to survive back-breaking patriarchy. Saand Ki Aankhstands out as a fine illustration of women who look out for each other, not just in Chandro and Prakashi’s life-long friendship but also in their quiet understanding with the other women in that massive joint family.

The only truly problematic patch in the narrative comes at a party thrown by an erstwhile royal family to which the Daadis are invited. A clash of cultures is inevitable at their maiden encounter with champagne, forks and finger bowls, but instead of being merely amusing, the storytelling here briefly gets patronising towards them for the first and only time in the film. Thankfully this rough spot passes soon enough.

Saand Ki Aankh’s often exuberant facade belies its thoughtful nature. As much as they are means of repression, the ghungats worn by the leads, like the veils in Lipstick Under My Burkha, also become means they use to escape repression. I was not comfortable with a character justifying the forced sterilisations of men undertaken during the Emergency, but the women’s bemused reaction to this autocratic move serves as a striking comment on how the oppression of the oppressor could unwittingly benefit the oppressed.

Saand Ki Aankh has all the pizzazz that its name, which is explained within the film, suggests it will. Even in its most comical moments, it is deeply moving because the women are fighting for rights that no human being should ever have to demand: the right to dream, the right to make their own decisions, the right to just have a good time. Watching it is to set off on an emotional rollercoaster of reactions, running the gamut from delirious joy at the heroines’ achievements to anger on their behalf, fear, laughter, tears and whoops of celebration.

Since the MeToo movement spread across India last October, an ugly generational divide has emerged among feminists, with some seeing no irony in directing ageist taunts at “older feminists” and refusing to acknowledge the contributions of those who have battled before us. Precisely a year later, Saand Ki Aankh is a timely reminder that no matter what our differences may be with them, we all stand on the shoulders of the Chandros and Prakashis of the world who endangered themselves to crash through closed doors so that you and I may now walk through them unscathed.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	149 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/saand-ki-aankh-movie-review-taapsee-pannu-and-bhumi-pednekar-are-smashing-good-fun-as-ups-inspiring-shooter-daadis-7546451.html

Photographs courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/RelianceEnt/

Release date:	October 25, 2019
Director:	Mikhil Musale
Cast: Language:	Rajkummar Rao, Boman Irani, Mouni Roy, Sumeet Vyas, Amyra Dastur, Gajraj Rao, Manoj Joshi, Abhishek Banerjee, Paresh Rawal Hindi

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For a country that is virtually a baby producing machine, we are oddly hesitant to talk about sex outside our bedrooms, and there too, very often not.

It took Hindi filmdom several decades to evolve beyond showing flowers and birds nudging each other in parks as a stand-in for human couples. But in the past 10-plus years, there has been a gradual attitudinal shift as Bollywood has finally acknowledged that girls and boys take off their undergarments while, err, doing the deed (Pyaar Ke Side Effects, 2006), that some couples need sperm donors to help them conceive (Vicky Donor, 2012), that erectile dysfunction is a thing (Shubh Mangal Saavdhan, 2017), women menstruate (Padman, 2018), women masturbate (Veere Di Wedding, 2018), sexual dysfunction and venereal disease are a thing too (Khandaani Shafakhana, 2019). Who knew Bollywood had it in them?

The latest in the tiny trickle of Hindi films with a plot pivoted on sex and sexuality is the Rajkummar Rao-starrer Made In China, based on the book of the same name by Parinda Joshi. Rao here plays a Gujarati youngster forever on the lookout for a new business idea. Raghuveer Mehta’s entrepreneurial efforts keep flopping, but he remains undeterred. Then one day in China, he receives a proposal to market an aphrodisiac in India. The catch is that its main ingredient is illegal.

Revise that: Raghu’s primary challenge in this matter turns out not to be that he has to sell in the grey market, but that his product occupies a grey market in the Indian mindspace where taboo subjects are stashed away. This calls for ingenuity on his part and leads to some comical and occasionally bizarre situations.

Before the film gets to Raghu’s business experiments though, there is a death. That, in fact, is how Made In China begins: there is a death in Gujarat and the prime suspects are Raghu and his business partner, the sexologist Dr Vardhi played by Boman Irani.

From the start, it is evident that director Mikhil Musale is aiming at being a thriller with a message and a certain whimsy. He gets his look and feel right with the aid of some atmospheric production design, cinematographer Anuj Rakesh Dhawan’s moody, low-lit frames, boisterous songs and a particularly memorable, ominous zithery background sound that brings to mind buzzing insects.

There are places at which the narrative gets funny too. Very very funny. A scene in which Dr Vardhi gives a sex talk to a conference of adults who were expecting something else is an absolute hoot without once resorting to icky or immature double entendre. But considering that Rao and Irani are in fine fettle here, Made In China surprisingly feels at all times like a film that is about to lift off but never quite takes flight.

A large part of this is due to the tonal and logical inconsistency in the narrative. There is, for instance, no explanation for Raghu’s cheery attitude during his interrogation by the investigating authorities, an off-kilter element that particularly impacts Made In Chinabecause it is a running thread throughout the film.

There is no explanation either for why Raghu hides his latest business from his wife with whom we are led to believe he has a close and non-traditional relationship. As evidence of this, they have been shown swilling alcohol together, sharing a cigarette (both points are very high on Bollywood’s list of Things Liberal Women Do) and discussing her orgasms. She also supports him unflinchingly in the face of his family’s contempt for his many failures. Yet somehow he is too ashamed to tell her that he is producing and peddling an aphrodisiac, and her reaction when she learns the truth ends up justifying his fears. If this is meant to be a comment on the superficiality of contemporary liberalism, it is not convincing.

Made In China also drags in long stretches. When Rao and Irani are not together on screen, the storytelling lacks spark, which is disappointing considering that the supporting cast is full of actors with proven talent. Even an overly-made-up, forever-dressed-to-the-nines Mouni Roy as Raghu’s wife Rukmani brings a certain panache to her performance, but how convincing can an actor be when her lavish wardrobe and perfect face distract so completely from her claims of financial struggles?

At one point, Raghu gathers this wisdom from a character played by Paresh Rawal who ends up being his businessguru:“The customer is a ch*****,” says the man. The epithet is muted but since it is heard as often as prepositions and conjunctions on the streets of north India, it is understood that viewers know the word he repeatedly mouths and Raghu dutifully echoes – that’s part of the joke, of course. It is tempting to play on their vocabulary and accuse Musale of making a ch***** of his audience, but that would be off the mark because there is an interesting concept somewhere in this film that has been lost in execution.

Made In China fails to hit the bull’s eye because it sorely needed an evening out of pace and tone, depth of characterisation and detailing in the plotline. The best thing about it are Rao and Irani who are a pleasure to watch even in this middling affair.

Rating (out of five stars): **

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

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

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/made-in-china-movie-review-rajkummar-rao-conjures-up-a-certain-whimsy-but-in-a-half-done-film-7553431.html

Photograph courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_In_China_(2019_film)

(These are transcripts of Anna M.M. Vetticad’s video reviews aired on Rajya Sabha TV on September 1, 2019.)

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Hello and welcome to this new film review segment in Colours of India. My name is Anna M.M. Vetticad.

On this show we are celebrating the great diversity of Indian cinema. And so today, I will speak to you about the Tamil film Super Deluxe and the Malayalam film Thanneermathan Dinangal.

Super Deluxe is directed by Thiagarajan Kumararaja and has a large cast packed with stars.

This is a film with a multi-strand narrative. Its four strands – or sub-plots if you prefer to call it that – are connected in unexpected ways.

The first strand features an unhappily married couple played by Samantha Akkineni and Fahadh Faasil. The two are trying to get rid of a corpse without being caught.

The second strand is about a little boy awaiting the return of a father who abandoned him years earlier. When the Dad finally comes home, it turns out that he is now a trans woman who goes by the name Shilpa.

Shilpa is played by Vijay Sethupathi.

The third sub-plot involves a group of teenaged boys off to watch a porn film in secret.

The fourth stars Ramya Krishnan as a woman who works in porn films.

Super Deluxe has a beautifully balanced tone. On the one hand it is extremely funny. On the other hand it is extremely sensitive while dealing with serious subjects like compatibility in marriage, the marginalisation of the LGBT+ community, sexual violence and the hypocrisy of men who want their OWN mothers to be devisthough they take OTHER women lightly.

I could not relate much to the switch to fantasy towards the end of the story about the porn-watching boys, but there is SO MUCH to love in this film.

The performances in Super Deluxe are top-notch. The one that has got most attention since its release is Vijay Sethupathi playing a trans woman. Now in an ideal world, TRANS actors would play TRANS characters. Indian cinema has not yet got to that stage, with rare exceptions like last year’s Malayalam film Aabhaasamwhich starred the trans actor Sheetal Shyam. What we have in most of our films is MALE actors playing trans characters. Till we get to a more evolved stage in our casting, it is worth pointing out that a major male star playing a trans character seriously risks denting his ‘macho’ image in our patriarchal society. So this too is perhaps worth celebrating as a baby step forward since our society prefers to pretend that the trans community does not even exist.

One of the most moving aspects of Super Deluxeis the little boy Raasukutty’s absolutely non-judgemental response when he finds that the man who fathered him is in fact a woman.

Raasukutty is my personal hero. And his non-judgemental mother is my heroine.

Super Deluxe is now streaming on Netflix.

It is funny, it is brave, it is thought-provoking, and frankly, it is an act of social rebellion as much as it is a film.

**** ****

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Thanneermathan Dinangal literally means Watermelon Days. The title comes from the large quantities of watermelon juice that the hero consumes at the food kiosk next to his school. He goes there on a regular basis to pour his heart out to his gang of friends.

Mathew Thomas plays the teenaged hero Jaison who is struggling with multiple teenaged problems. He is in love with his classmate Keerthy, played by Anaswara Rajan, who is not interested in him. He is being tormented by the school bully. He is struggling with exams. And as if life is not tough enough, a new teacher starts picking on him and him alone.

Thanneermathan Dinangal is sweet without being sugary.

The lead actors are cute without being overly cutesy.

And although it is hilarious, it does not trivialise the problems of teenagers.

In fact the beauty of this film is that it plays out so naturally that it feels as if real people allowed the filmmaker to place cameras around their homes and school to capture what is going on in their real lives.

This is a thinking comedy. In a country where we are used to commercial cinema showing men stalking women that they like and portraying that stalking as a legitimate form of courtship, Jaison and Keerthy from Thanneermathan Dinangal hold out a lesson for filmmakers. In fact one of the most striking aspects of this film is a young girl telling a young boy that she likes him BECAUSE he did not pester her when she turned down his romantic overtures.

Thanneermathan Dinangal is one of those rewarding films that is thoroughly enjoyable and also has a very important point to make.

**** ****

Link to the video of these reviews aired on Rajya Sabha TV:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZi5KLZxkLw&list=PLFC6213A60D4CBE00

A longer review of Thanneermathan Dinangal by Anna M.M. Vetticad was published on Firstpost on August 11, 2019:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/thanneermathan-dinangal-movie-review-franky-from-kumbalangi-gets-an-omana-padam-all-his-own-7144191.html

Photographs courtesy:

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Deluxe_(film)

(2) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10551608/

(These are transcripts of Anna M.M. Vetticad’s video reviews aired on Rajya Sabha TV on October 13, 2019.)

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Hello everyone, today I’m reviewing two films that are complete contrasts in terms of content and storytelling style. Both are big star vehicles though.

First, Syeraa Narasimha Reddy in which Telugu superstar Chiranjeevi plays Uyyalawada Narasimha Reddy who led an uprising against the British East India Company in the mid 1800s. This was before the 1857 revolt. To emphasise this point, his story is recounted here by Rani Laxmibai of Jhansi in a speech with which she hopes to inspire HER men to fight the British.

In flashback form, Laxmibai takes us through the life of Syeraa Narasimha Reddy, one among several once-powerful rulers in the Telugu heartland who are being stripped of their power by the British.

The common people are reeling under the back-breaking taxation policies of the British, when the hero sets out to unite his fellow rulers and the farmers against these foreigners.

Woven into the narrative is also his romance with the classical dancer Lakshmi, his relationship with his wife, song and dance routines shot on a gigantic scale, and endless action scenes.

What is nice about Syeraa Narasimha Reddy is that it tells the story of an anti-British rebellion from southern India. The popular discourse in large parts of India tends to focus on the contributions and achievements of North Indians, not just in India’s freedom struggle but in all matters. In this context, Syeraa Narasimha Reddy is significant. But it squanders away that plus point with the WAY it tells its story.

As it turns out, the primary goal of this film is to underline Chiranjeevi’s star stature. More effort has been invested in creating a spectacle rather than in writing in-depth characters. Reddy is built up as a saintly He Man with superhuman strength and yogic powers. He is projected as SO INVINCIBLE, that his ultimate defeat seems unconvincing even though it is spelt out as a historical fact.

To give the film scale, Chiranjeevi is surrounded by multiple major stars from Tamannaah to Nayanthara, Sudeep, Vijay Sethupathi, Amitabh Bachchan, Anushka Shetty and ... well, the list is long. Except for Tamannaah and Bachchan to some extent, the others are given short shrift by the screenplay.

This story has huge potential for social insights, but director Surender Reddy is too busy lionising Syeraa Narasimha Reddy and Chiranjeevi. Therefore the film offers us little understanding of the class and caste struggles involved. Realism and facts are not a priority in this revisionist historical drama.

As far as technical aspects go, the lavish production design and costumes are eye-catching, but the special effects are of confusing quality. Some night-time scenes are wonderfully impressive, but some scenes are surprisingly mediocre. The SFX in that long passage involving bulls, for instance, is embarrassingly tacky.

The overall tone of the narrative is loud, rubbing every point, every message in our faces.

For hard-core Chiranjeevi fans, perhaps there is some pay off here since their favourite star dominates the film in a role designed to overshadow all else on screen. That apart, Syeraa Narasimha Reddy is a generic, uninspiring film that lacks soul.

**** ****

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Now on to writer-director Vetrimaaran’s Asuran.

From the moment he grabbed the spotlight with Aadukalamearly this decade, Vetrimaaran has made his own road. With Asuran he offers a stellar redefinition of Big Cinema in the Indian context.

There is a tendency in our country to assume that if a film revolves around caste or exploitation of any form, then it cannot take on the trappings that give mainstream Indian cinema its larger-than-life feel. With Asuran, Vetrimaaran walks a fine line to ensure that his hero is projected as a giant among men without trivialising the struggles of a marginalised community or making him appear so unconquerable that his defeats become hard to swallow.

Dhanush plays Sivasamy whose impoverished family is engaged in a feud with a powerful land-owning family in the area. Initially, Sivasamy comes across as a pacifist. His sons are frustrated with his keenness to avoid violence. Later though, he introduces us to his defiant past and the havoc his defiance wreaked on those around him.

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Dhanush’s remarkable physical transformation is not the only indicator of the passage of time in Asuran. His is a richly detailed character that evolves too as the story runs along. Even when he metamorphoses into a roaring lion on screen, his brilliant acting, the direction and the writing ensure that he remains believable.

Although Sivasamy is the central figure, the screenplay works hard to develop the characters of his wife Pachiammal, two sons, brother-in-law and antagonists. The excellent supporting cast does full justice to the writing. But none of the stars overshadows the film’s story or messaging.

Malayalam superstar Manju Warrier in particular deserves to be singled out for her deeply felt, relatable performance as Pachiammal in a film that marks her Tamil debut. She is so good, that you have to wonder why even progressive filmmakers like Vetrimaaran tend to think in terms of male-centric stories.

That said, Asuran uses a conventional genre – the male-centric action drama – to tell an unconventional story.

It is violent, but it does not endorse violence.

It uses episodes of loudness to take us to a point of stillness and calm.

In short, Asuran is lovely.

**** ****

Link to the video of these reviews aired on Rajya Sabha TV:

https://youtu.be/pSOv1xEiXcw

Photographs courtesy:

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sye_Raa_Narasimha_Reddy

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

Release date:	November 1, 2019
Director:	Tarun Mansukhani
Cast: Language:	Sushant Singh Rajput, Jacqueline Fernandez, Boman Irani, Pankaj Tripathi, Vibha Chibber, Sapna Pabbi, Vikramjeet Virk Hindi

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So it is here at last: the first direct-to-Netflix release by Karan Johar’s Dharma Productions.

Produced by KJo, written and directed by Tarun “Dostana” Mansukhani, starring Sushant Singh Rajput and Jacqueline Fernandez, Drive is a thriller that follows the tried-and-tested pattern of a heist within a heist within a heist. Film industries across the world have explored this genre to fun effect. India’s Hindi film industry a.k.a. Bollywood proved that it has the chops for wheels-within-wheels-within-wheels crime back in 1978 with the iconic Don starring Amitabh Bachchan, more recently with Abbas Mustan’s Racein 2008 and the SRK-Farhan Akhtar Don films in 2006 and 2011.

The very least you would expect after seeing the poster, the credits of Drive and reading its summary is that it would deliver spadefuls of excitement, pretty people in pretty clothes and swish special effects. Well, lower those expectations right away.

Sure, Rajput and Fernandez look hot in the film, both have tremendously fit bodies, and if you think back on the story, the original concept probably had the potential to become a slick cops-and-robbers drama. At first it does seem like Drive might prove to be an entertainer but the narrative, like the special effects, steadily declines as the film progresses. The SFX are overall sodownmarket thatit is hard to believe Drive comes to us from Dharma, whose signature for at least two decades has been glossy visuals.

Not that anything else in the film is of high calibre. Well suited to the SFX are the generic storytelling style, the overall ordinary production quality, inconsistent audio, a stand-out acting loophole and glaring lack of logic that, among other things, translates into Delhi roads – notorious in reality for their traffic jams – obligingly emptying themselves out to accommodate high-speed car races and chases at all times of day and night.

The reason why Drive is set in India’s capital city is because a robbery is being planned in Rashtrapati Bhavan. The primary players in this game are a group of car racing aficionados, an outsider who infiltrates their inner circle, a criminal known simply as King – you know, like Don in Don– and corrupt bureaucrats.

The opening race in Drive is reasonably well done, the song ‘n’ dance that follows is kinda nicely choreographed by Adil Shaikh, and Jacqueline Fernandez has some cute moves in it. From then on it is a downhill descent.

Gaping gaps in the plotline recede into the background in the face of ordinary car chases that routinely look plastic and an embarrassingly low-brow extended climax that feels like the work of an entry-level animation student. Lightning McQueen’s universe appeared more real than the vehicles and roads in several of this film’s scenes.

Much has been made of the fact that a portion of Drive was filmed in Israel, making it the first Bollywood venture to be shot there. The media has reported that the film was also partly funded by that country’s government. The true mystery here is why the Israeli sarkar thought this film would be a good ad for them in India. Be assured that what Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna is to New York City or Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara is to Spain, Drive is absolutely not to Tel Aviv. At best the city is treated like the geographical equivalent of an ‘item’ number chucked mindlessly into a bad Bollywood film – it springs up out of the blue and it has no relevance whatsoever to the storyline.

In the face of such mediocrity, analysing the screenplay almost feels pointless. But a job is a job, so consider this. Without giving anything away let us just say the only way the masterplan revealed in the climax of Drive could possibly have worked is if no one in Rashtrapati Bhavan’s entire security department checked a critical character’s ID carefully for several days.

Granted that this point arises only in retrospect, and granted that this person could have had the world’s top creator of fake IDs backing them, so instead consider this question that comes up quite early in the film. (Some people may consider this paragraph a spoiler) The loot could not have been where it was unless other critical characters managed to easily beat the security system in the Indian President’s residence for what must have been months, if not years. If you have visited Rashtrapati Bhavan and experienced the tight restrictions in place in the complex, you would know how ridiculous this is. How the crooks aced the system is never explained, we are simply expected to accept that they did because we are told so. (Spoiler alert ends)

Or consider this. Person X says in the end that they were expecting to be deceived by Person Y. But in an earlier scene when X realised they had been double-crossed by Y, the facial expression – clearly visible in close-up – is one of shock and not at all “oh well, I knew this was coming”.

Or this. In a key scene in Drive, a quartet of cars zips through an airport runway and the occurrence seems not to be a blip on the radar of Air Traffic Control (ATC), the local police or the news media at that point or for the two months that the story continues. This writing laziness is intentional – having ATC, the police and press notice the breach would have been too much of an inconvenience since it could have meant the kingpins of the gameplan being discovered before the writer wanted them to be, you see.

Or consider this. Snazzy cars with the words “Delhi Police” emblazoned on them zoom about the city, offering evidence of how little the team of Drive knows the reality of the capital’s ill-equipped force.

As for the acting, well, Pankaj Tripathi does lend a Pankaj Tripathi touch to his character, but really, how is one to seriously and fairly critique the performances in such a film?

For a moment let us set aside thoughts of the cast though, and Johar, Netflix and Israel. Let us take that moment to mourn the fact that this sub-standard action flick has been made by the same director who gave us Dostana, which, notwithstanding its resemblance to a Hollywood film, was, in its own way, pathbreaking in the Indian social context. From Dostana to Drive is such a fall.

Rating (out of five stars): 1/2

CBFC Rating (India):	None
Running time:	119 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/drive-movie-review-sushant-and-jacquelines-prettiness-and-an-under-par-heist-come-wrapped-in-awful-sfx-7588511.html

Photograph courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive_(2019_film)

Release date:	Kerala: October 4, 2019 Delhi: November 1, 2019
Director:	Jibu Jacob
Cast: Language:	Biju Menon, Anaswara Rajan, Aju Varghese, Sarjano Khalid, Pauly Valsan, Vijayaraghavan, Sreelakshmi, Cameo: Anu Sithara Malayalam

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An openly misogynistic film. Sub-conscious misogyny from a filmmaker who actually considers himselffeminist. Or closeted misogyny from a filmmaker publicly faking feminism.Aadya Rathri fits into one of the above three slots. Which one, is the question.

Aadya Rathri or First Night is headlined by Biju Menon, a fine actor whose inconsistent filmography shows a seeming lack of discernment. Just this year he was the lead in the darling Sathyam Paranja Vishwasikkuvo shortly after Mera Naam Shaji, which was so viscerally antagonistic towards women that it was unnerving. Menon’s new film purportedly puts across the message that a woman’s assent should be given primacy over all else when families, brokers and communities seal marriage deals. The catch is that the road to that life lesson is lined with sexist humour and a trivialisation of marital rape – not just by the character who is reformed in the end, but in the tone of the film itself. And that’s not counting the ageist casting in Aadya Rathri.

Menon here plays Manoharan, a marriage broker who doubles up as a moral policeman to terror-struck couples in the village of Mullakkara. When the film cuts from his youth to the present day, he has been arranging marital alliances for 22 years and boasts of a 100 per cent success rate. His arch rival Thresiamma (Ee.Ma.Yau’s Pauly Valsan) has been gunning for him for as long as he has been in the business. His big test comes when he is called upon to find a match for Aswathy Ramachandran a.k.a. Achchu (Anaswara Rajan), a college-goer from a prominent family.

A bulk of Aadya Rathri is devoted to the hurdles Manoharan must cross to find a husband for Achchu. The film meanders considerably, but swatches of humour keep it going till the interval, and well, Menon has the ability to evoke laughter with just a twitch of a muscle, a twinkle in his eye or a word. Post-interval though, none of this is enough.

The leading man’s innate acting skills and immense charisma combined with a moral position taken by the film towards the end cannot possibly compensate for all its narrative weaknesses, the under-utilisation of a fine supporting cast, lack of novelty in the treatmentand confused politics.

Despite running barely over 2 hours, Aadya Rathri feels too long. It does not help that a couple of its songs spring up instead of blending smoothly into the proceedings. And a conventional fable-like, moral-of-the-story structure cannot work if storytellers unwittingly reveal their deep-seated illiberal true colours from the start.

In an episode right after the credits, a bride tells Manoharan’s sidekick that she is not yet ready because the beautician has not arrived although the hour of her wedding is closing in on them. He finds the beautician doing up her mother’s face and makes a terribly ageist comment about Mum. Filmmakers when confronted with questions about such scenes often argue that they are merely depicting a reality, not glorifying it. In this case that would amount to claiming that a sexist character was portrayed cracking a sexist joke to illustrate the regressive nature of the society in which this story is set. No excuses please, there is no ambiguity here – that scene is designed as comedy.

Marital rape too is tapped as a source of amusement in Aadya Rathri, except that it is not considered rape at all. A man incessantly impregnates his wife against her will, but when she complains about the creep, Manoharan says: How can I stop a man from expressing his love for his wife? Ugh. Again, such a scene could well have been set up to throw light on the meaning of consent in sexual relations, but the narrative here is too light-hearted for it to serve that purpose. In fact, the flippant tone of that scene in which a woman with a swollen belly is shown struggling to juggle her expanding body, children of varying ages and her housework, is disconcerting to say the least.

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And then of course there is the casting. Considering the massive age differences between male superstars and their female romantic leads in most commercial Malayalam cinema, I was dreading the possibility that sweet little Anaswara Rajan from Udaharanam Sujatha and Thanneermathan Dinangal would be shown here as the nearly 50-year-old Menon’s girlfriend or wife on screen. Thankfully, thatdoes not happen, but Aadya Rathri’s idea of age-appropriate casting is to make her, a 17-year-old with a child-like face, the potential bride of Kunjumon P.P., the character played by Aju Varghese who is 34 in real life. That scene in which Kunjumon fantasises about Achchu romancing him feels weird.

And get this: Achchu and Kunjumon were once schoolmates and are about the same age.

Sexism and misogyny are not Aadya Rathri’s only characteristics. Kunjumon is repeatedly fat shamed. Bangalore’s youngsters are viewed through the lens of clichés that conservatives reserve for societies where gender segregation is not the norm. And Aadya Rathri is not even committed to its regressive views. It wants to be seen as progressive. The tonally patchy narrative fails at both.

In a scene early in Manoharan’s journey, as he watches a bedroom door close on a traumatised woman on the first night of her forced marriage to a sexual pervert, it is apparent that it has begun to dawn on him that what is happening is not right. Yet 22 years later, the same Manoharan tells a pregnant woman that her horny husband’s sexual aggression is, in fact, an expression of love. Huh? Character graphs and consistency in characterisation seem to be alien concepts to this team.

This is disappointing because director Jibu Jacob’s last film, Munthirivallikal Thalirkkumbol, though completely accepting of a patriarchal social structure, did take some progressive forward steps, and was certainly not so poorly written. Writers Sharis-Jebin, on the other hand, have lived up to their track record as the team behind the bizarre, mixed-up 2018 film Queen that was supposedly anti-rape. Do us a favour, gentlemen. Stop claiming to care and try genuinely caring instead.

Rating (out of five stars): *

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

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/aadya-rathri-movie-review-biju-menon-anaswara-rajan-starrer-is-all-mixed-up-about-marital-rape-7596481.html

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

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