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REVIEW 360: BAJIRAO MASTANI

December 18, 2015, 9:24 pm
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Release date:
December 18, 2015
Director:
Sanjay Leela Bhansali
Cast:



Language:
Ranveer Singh, Deepika Padukone, Priyanka Chopra, Tanvi Azmi, Vaibbhav Tatwawdi, Milind Soman, Mahesh Manjrekar, Raza Murad
Hindi-Marathi


Bajirao Mastani is almost everything the world has come to expect from a Sanjay Leela Bhansali film. Almost. It is a ravishing spectacle, the costumes are lush, the jewellery dazzling, the sets extravagant, the cinematography brilliant, the frames painterly, the lead cast more gorgeous than you would imagine human beings could be. For this alone, it is worth watching.

There is more to it than that though. The director’s latest film is told as a fable about the love between the 18th century Maratha warrior Peshwa Bajirao I and his second wife Mastani. The tone is trance-like and dreamy even when it is operatic and melodramatic, like a whisper passed down through generations and swirling about somewhere in the mists of a distant, mythical time.

This is an interesting narrative choice considering that the two lead characters are in fact historical figures and their romance is not an apocryphal story. It is a choice (made no doubt with the goal of not offending any community or angering historians) that permits the storyteller to be poetic, to fictionalise and dramatise to his heart’s content, even while staying as faithful to history texts as it is possible while chronicling the intimate lives of public figures.

Bajirao is a skilled soldier, a great leader and Peshwa (prime minister) to Chhatrapati Shahu of the Maratha Empire. Mastani is the valiant daughter of Bundelkhand’s Maharaja Chhatrasal with his Muslim queen Ruhaani Bai. Since Bajirao is already married when they first meet during the course of one of his battles, he returns home alone to his much-in-love wife Kashibai. But Mastani pursues Bajirao and they later marry.

The film is about the two simultaneous battles subsequently fought by one of the greatest warriors known to this country, the first one to expand the Chhatrapati’s empire and the other to gain acceptance for Mastani among his family. 

From the start it is evident that Bajirao Mastani is Bhansali’s ode to K. Asif’s Mughal-e-Azam, the folktale about the love between the Mughal crown prince Salim (later to become Emperor Jehangir) and the slave girl Anarkali. Yet, it is unlike that iconic 1960 film, or its precursor about the same legend, Nandlal Jaswantlal’s Anarkali (1953), or even the story of the prince’s father Akbar’s political-romantic alliance with his Rajput Hindu wife Jodha Bai recounted by Ashutosh Gowariker in Jodhaa Akbar (2008). The difference from these three memorable films lies in the fact that Bajirao Mastani doesn’t deify its pivotal romance by making it seem like its central male character is committed to just one woman or by brushing aside uncomfortable questions about male infidelity and the fleeting nature of this particular hero’s feelings.

Bhansali doesn’t evade this tricky territory, instead giving Kashibai a crucial scene in which she asks Mastani about the reliability of Bajirao’s heart that is set on one woman at one time, another at another time and who knows who next. Mastani clearly has no answer besides her own affection for him. She does not bat an eyelid when Bajirao impregnates Kashi without feeling conflicted about his emotions or actions. And she does not see his relationship with her as faithlessness towards Kashi who he describes as not just his wife but also his friend.

While the film makes it hard for us to be out-and-out angered by Bajirao’s hypocrisy, it certainly calls out the hypocrisy of his family and advisers who, as he points out, would have been willing to accept Mastani as his concubine but not his wife.

Equally special is the way the film negotiates Hindu-Muslim equations. Many of today’s Hindutvavaadis hold up the 17th and 18th century Marathas as flag-bearers of a Hindu Rashtra, as antagonists of Muslims and as a people who fought off “Muslim rule” in what they believe is “Hindu India”. Bhansali’s starting block with this film is in itself a position against their interpretation of history since he chooses to tell the story of a Maratha’s love for a Muslim. He takes it further with the Peshwa’s open declaration that his battle with the Mughals is restricted to his desire to extend the Chhatrapati’s territory and has nothing to do with their religion.

These then are the most fascinating aspects of the film: the unromanticised envisioning of Bajirao as a good man with shades of grey; the refusal to sidestep a first wife’s pain even if her husband is the film’s hero, and his relationship with his second wife is what folklore has placed on a pedestal; and the telling ambiguity about who is opposing Mastani out of affection for Kashi and who out of disdain for her being Muslim.

These elements are further augmented by the excellent principle cast – Ranveer Singh as Bajirao, Deepika Padukone as Mastani and Priyanka Chopra as Kashibai – supported by a bunch of talents, most especially Tanvi Azmi as Bajirao’s formidable mother.

Though Kashi gets less screen time than the titular characters, Priyanka makes the film as much her own as theirs, shining with grace, poise and restraint each time she comes on screen. She also slips comfortably into the role of a Maratha woman, tweaking her body language to fit the part and going well beyond the crutch of that sparkling nose ring and those lavish outfits.

The camera is occasionally distracted by Mastani’s luminous beauty, but Deepika still manages to lend depth to her character. She also reminds us of her penchant for action in one of the film’s best scenes, in which she single-handedly fends off a group of attacking swordsmen.

To stand out in the presence of these scintillating ladies takes some doing, but Ranveer achieves precisely that, reaching into himself for this character to deliver his best performance till date. In a break from the assembly-line uniformity of most male bodies in Hindi films these days (and his own over-muscled torso in the otherwise-lovely Ram-leela) he also gets his body right for the role. Hard though it is, with Bajirao Mastani he actually makes us forget that boy who stormed into our lives as the fabulous Bittoo who did “binness” on debut in Band Baaja Baaraat.

The use of language in the film too is neatly done. I’m not an expert on Marathi but the dialect that these characters speak blended with Hindi flows with natural ease. Thankfully, none of the actors is ‘doing an accent’. Instead, their speech is nicely nuanced in its intonations.

If Bajirao Mastani falls short of being what it might have been despite these positives, it is for two reasons: the songs (Bhansali’s compositions are a let-down); and the smattering of self-indulgent scenes that slow it down especially in the post-interval portion, with spectacle subordinating all else. Like the unwell Peshwa’s elongated, feverish hallucinations; or when Bajirao swishes and swings a chuttuvaal in each hand and barges solo into an enemy force. This whip-like sword with a flexible blade is used in Kalaripayattu, the martial art form from Kerala in which Ranveer trained for this role, and the actor looks amazingly at home with it. But the scene itself is no less silly – despite the more stylised presentation – than Sunny Deol single-handedly taking on the entire Pakistan Army with a hand pump in Gadar.

This is also what ails the relatively pretty-sounding song Pingafeaturing both leading ladies. The women dance impeccably yet the focus is so much on the look that the feel is lost. That electricity Bhansali conjured up in the Dola re duet between Madhuri Dixit and Aishwarya Rai in Devdas (2002) is missing here, and Pinga ends up looking like a me-too and an also-ran.

In the rest of the songs, the choreography is heart-stopping, the dancers energetic or elegant as required, but the tunes are unremarkable. This is why Deepika’s dance to Deewani Mastani in the luxuriant Aina Mahal looks stunning yet does not match up to a number that it is evidently paying tribute to: Mughal-e-Azam’s Pyaar kiya to darna kya in which Anarkali challenged Akbar through words, music and dance in another unforgettable hall of mirrors.

Still, there is more to love than lament in Bajirao Mastani. Note the scene in which a mob of shadows seems to march towards the Peshwa before the camera raises its head from the floor and we realise that they come from a band of purposeful Brahmins. Note the many other scenes in which diyas, mirrors and silks shimmer like liquid gold. Note too Bajirao’s secularism, his reminder to us that all religions preach love yet love has no religion, his open defiance of the clergy, Mastani’s courage and passion, Kashibai’s dignity despite her limited choices, and that lovely moment of bonding between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law.

Despite its shortcomings then, this is a brave and beautiful film – beautiful to look at, beautiful in its position on religion, brave in its take on history, brave in its unwillingness to paint religious groups or its primary characters as black or white.

Bhansalified history, as it turns out, makes for good cinema.

Rating (out of five): ***

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


This review has also been published on firstpost:

Photograph courtesy:https://www.facebook.com/bajiraomastani/


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REVIEW 361: DILWALE

December 18, 2015, 10:26 pm
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Release date:
December 18, 2015
Director:
Rohit Shetty
Cast:




Language:
Shah Rukh Khan, Kajol, Varun Dhawan, Kriti Sanon, Varun Sharma, Mukesh Tiwari, Pankaj Tripathi, Sanjay Mishra, Boman Irani, Johnny Lever, Vinod Khanna, Kabir Bedi
Hindi


There’s something about age that does wonderful things to people. Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol have always had great on-screen chemistry, but the 22 years that have passed since they were first seen together in a film have added an unfathomable, heart-wrenching element to their pairing. Team Dilwale should send up a prayer of thanks for this saving grace, because this is the first time the two have been called upon to carry a film through on the strength of nothing but – absolutely nothing but – that chemistry.

If you draw a sketch of the basic plot points of Dilwale, you will see the promise there. How the lead pair meet, the misunderstanding that leads to a parting of ways and the seemingly improbable circumstances that reunite them are all believable and potentially entertaining. The problem with the film though is that the threads used to weave these plot elements together are so disparate, so jumbled and so loosely put together, that the result is a bland, lifeless film.

Rohit Shetty, whose previous works could be accused of many things, but never a lack of energy, seems to have fallen asleep – perhaps with boredom? – in the director’s chair while making this film. That is one possible explanation for the lackadaisical nature of the storytelling from a man who in the past has given us Chennai Express and Singham (yeah yeah, I know it’s terribly unintellectual to say so, but I enjoyed both). All those cars careening about the screen cannot compensate for what feels like his own lack of interest in this project.

Dilwale suffers from limp writing and unenthusiastic direction. Even its clichés and stereotypes are too dull to be infuriating – like that distasteful and decidedly unfunny scene in which Johnny Lever pretends he is about to assault Kajol’s character; or the disappointingly medieval mindset which makes the film’s writer think, even in the year 2015, that there can be nothing more terrible than ladkiwaalewho want their daamaad to live with them after marriage; or the regressive, populist monologue about the high cost of dating women these days by Varun Sharma’s character, while his girlfriend stands by unquestioningly, clearly never having heard of going Dutch on a date; or Sanjay Mishra’s character who forever spouts nonsensical rhymes in conversations, such as this one addressed to his sister: “Bol mere ghar ki laado, Rolex Rado.”

Hain?

All this fades into insignificance though each time SRK looks at Kajol. Not the clean-shaven, supposedly younger version of Shah Rukh in the film, but the older, wiser, bearded man whose role acknowledges his age with dignity and grace.

When he gazes at her or even just throws her a fleeting glance, and those eyes we’ve been seeing now for almost 27 years brim over with love and longing, tedium recedes into the background. It is a look that makes you want to reach out and hug him, to reassuringly pat him on the shoulder, to tell him that all will be well, to scream out the truth so that she realises that it was all just a misunderstanding.

The return of the Kajol-SRK pairing five years after My Name Is Khan was supposed to be this film’s USP. As it turns, it is the film’s OSP – only selling point.

Shah Rukh in Dilwale plays a gangster in Bulgaria called Raj Randhir Bakshi a.k.a. Kaali. Between shootouts and car chases during the course of his underworld activities, he meets Meera Dev Malik (Kajol) and they fall in love. A tragedy causes them to split up. When the film opens, the story has fast forwarded to the present in Goa where Raj runs a car modification workshop with his younger brother Veer (Varun Dhawan) who, at some point, falls in love with a pretty restaurateur called Ishita (Kriti Sanon). As you can imagine, circumstances cause Meera to return to Raj’s life.

Dilwale’s primary characters are surrounded by a bunch of comedians who are occasionally amusing (Mukesh Tiwari and Pankaj Tripathi are hilarious in a scene in which they try to cover up Raj’s past in the face of Veer’s probing questions) but mostly not.

Varun is sweet but really needs to give that cutesy dialogue delivery a rest. Kriti is given little to do, which is a pity because she has a striking, intelligent screen presence and was perhaps the only one worth watching in Tiger Shroff’s debut filmHeropanti.

Even the songs by Pritam are, for the most part, a damp squib. The music director redeems himself though with Gerua (in Arijit Singh & Antara Mitra’s voices) from which Amar Mohile borrows several bars for his background score. Both serve to play up the SRK-Kajol hotness to searing effect.

SRK himself is magnetic and charming as the older Raj. He should seriously consider keeping that beard forever. Kajol is radiant, pretty and, with much less screen time than the hero, effective, though she should seriously consider junking those awkward high heels in future. It also feels sad to see how much she has whitened her skin from what it was when she began her career (he seems to have done likewise, though to a lesser extent).

There is not much in the writing of Dilwale that could help these two recreate the sparks that flew between them in their earlier films, but they do radiate warmth for each other, a warmth that wafts off the screen and floats about the air in a sigh-inducing fashion. Each time Shah Rukh and Kajol are together in a frame, you can almost forgive Dilwale for everything else that it ought to have been but is not.

Rating (out of five): **

CBFC Rating (India):

U/A
Running time:
165 minutes 

This review has also been published on firstpost:
http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/dilwale-review-even-shah-rukh-kajol-chemistry-cannot-save-this-disappointingly-boring-film-2552178.html

Photograph courtesy:https://www.facebook.com/DilwaleTheFilm
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NAANU AVANALLA…AVALU, TRANSGENDERS IN FILMS & MAINSTREAM SOCIETY / COLUMN PUBLISHED IN THE HINDU BUSINESSLINE

December 21, 2015, 6:13 am
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SHE, HE, THEM AND US

Sanchari Vijay’s sensitive performance as a transgender in the uplifting Naanu Avanalla...Avalu ought to be seen by mainstream audiences outside Karnataka
By Anna MM Vetticad


The audience breaks into applause as the central figure on screen snubs a self-righteous stranger on a train.

The actor in question is Vijay, but not thatVijaywhose face is plastered all over Tamil Nadu. The character in question is the film’s lead, yet not the now-cinematically-cliched Angry Young Man for whom such wolf-whistle-worthy dialogues are usually written in India. As she dispenses her lines to an antagonistic fellow though, viewers cheer the way they usually do for mega-starrers filled with song ‘n’ dance, melodrama and bombast.

I look around me, pleasantly surprised by this reception for the Kannada film Naanu Avanalla…Avalu (I Am Not He…She) in a large hall at the International Film Festival of Kerala in Thiruvananthapuram. Although festival crowds are often more open-minded than most, I was expecting some degree of conservatism and discomfort in response to this film about a transgender called Madesha/Vidya. Quite to the contrary, the audience here reacts with positivity and plaudits.

Director B.S. Lingadevaru’s Naanu Avanalla…Avaluis the story of Madesha, born a boy in rural Karnataka. He is a bright student but his peers are too busy mocking his effeminate demeanour to appreciate his classroom acumen. As he grows older and becomes more aware of himself, he begins to feel like a woman trapped in a man’s body. In a journey that takes him from his village to Bengaluru, Pune and Cuddappah, Madesha earns an MA degree and joins the hijra community living on the shadowy margins of society, ultimately asserting a female identity complete with women’s clothes, the name Vidya and castration (termed “nirvana” in her circles). She then experiences discrimination in her quest for a mainstream profession.

The film is about Vidya’s refusal to let this social bigotry force her into a life of begging and sex work. It is about her determination not to allow the chauvinism of others to dictate her life choices. Except for one difficult sequence dealing with the unhygienic conditions in which castrations are conducted underground, this is a truly uplifting film. What makes it even more so is the realisation, in its closing moments, that Naanu Avanalla…Avalu is drawn from a true story, the autobiographical I Am Vidya: A Transgender’s Journey by Chennai-based NGO worker and theatre activist Vidya a.k.a. Living Smile Vidya.

Naanu Avanalla…Avaluearned two National Awards this summer: Best Actor for Kannada theatre artiste Sanchari Vijay’s restrained performance as Madesha/Vidya, far removed from the caricaturish portrayals of transgenders in Indian mainstream cinema; and Best Make-up. The film has also been screened at the Indian Film Festival of Melbourne in August and the International Film Festival of India, Goa, in November. It got a limited theatrical release in Karnataka on September 25. It ought to be seen by mainstream Indian audiences outside Karnataka too.

The public tends to assume that films with such subjects would be boring, heavy and/or hard to watch. In truth, the lasting memory from Naanu Avanalla…Avalu is of Madesha’s smile when he realises for the first time that there are others like him out there, and of Vidya’s compassion, spirit and fire.

Such as the scene mentioned in the opening paragraph, that flash of controlled temper she displays on a train during her brief tryst with mendicancy, when a passenger dismisses her as being uneducated and too lazy to work hard for a living like everyone else. Vidya openly challenges him, pointing out that she is, in fact, a postgraduate who society is unwilling to employ.

These are scenes so commonplace in parts of India that we barely notice — hijras seeking alms, hijras barging into weddings to sing, dance and demand money, hijras blessing newly-weds and new-borns. Yet, transgenders are a rare sight in the mainstream. Shabnam Mausi being elected to the Madhya Pradesh Legislative Assembly for 1998-2003, dancer-actor-activist Laxmi Narayan Tripathi appearing on the reality show Sacch Ka Saamna in 2009 to dispel myths about hijras, and the Supreme Court’s landmark 2014 ruling recognising transgenders as the “third gender” have all been uncommon developments.

Over the years, mainstream cinema has lampooned anyone who does not conform to traditionally accepted notions of gender or at best has treated such persons as a source of comedy and little else. Films like Mahesh Bhatt’s Tamanna (1997), with actor Paresh Rawal playing a pivotal character who is a hijra, have been unusual.


Vijay’s National Award for Naanu Avanalla…Avaluhas come in a year in which the media has reported other significant milestones: Madhu Kinnar was elected India’s first transgender mayor in Chhattisgarh’s Raigarh Municipal Corporation this January, and last month, the Madras High Court paved the way for K. Prithika Yashini to become the country’s first transgender police sub-inspector.
For the most part though, India’s transgenders remain an object of ridicule, contempt, discrimination or, at the very least, apathy.

Even the well-intentioned among us usually sweep away such issues into rarely visited nooks and crannies of our minds where they are unlikely to give us a pang of conscience or an attack of basic human decency. Naanu Avanalla…Avalu drags every discomfiting question out of those dark corners into the light, compelling us to confront them and our own role in perpetuating prejudice by, if nothing else, turning a blind eye to it.

(Anna M.M. Vetticad is the author of The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic. Twitter: @annavetticad)

(This column was first published in The Hindu Businessline newspaper on December 19, 2015)

Original link:
http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/watch/she-he-them-and-us/article8000655.ece

Photo caption: Sanchari Vijay as Madesha/Vidya in scenes from Naanu Avanalla…Avalu

Photographs courtesy: MD Niche Media Consultants

Previous instalment of Film Fatale: http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/watch/chemmeen-marks-a-golden-milestone/article7899728.ece
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50 YEARS OF CHEMMMEEN / COLUMN PUBLISHED IN THE HINDU BUSINESSLINE

December 28, 2015, 11:21 am
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JINE CHEMMEEN NAI VEKHYA

Fifty years since Chemmeen’s release, could we please ponder over why more Indians outside Kerala have not seen this landmark National Award-winning film?
By Anna MM Vetticad

The story goes that Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai wrote Chemmeen in eight days. But even a lifetime is not enough to process this 1956 novel by the legendary Jnanpith-winning Malayalam writer, or its film adaptation from 1965.

I was introduced to Chemmeen early in life although as a child growing up in Delhi in the pre-DVD, pre-Internet era, non-Hindi cinema was always difficult to access. It is a measure of the success of Hindi language politics in our country that it was (and still is) hard to learn to read and write our mother tongues — unless that mother tongue is Hindi or English — if we attend school anywhere other than in the state of our origins.

Sadly, as a result, I still cannot read or write Malayalam, and though I have read Anita Nair’s English translation of Thakazhi’s book, I have not yet read the novel in its original language (I will, some day). My parents, fortunately, ensured that Malayalam was extensively used at home, so I speak it with confidence and understand it well enough. I am telling you all this to help you fully appreciate the circumstances in which I was introduced to this screen epic by Doordarshan.

Set in a fishing community in Kerala, Chemmeen revolves around a lower-caste Hindu fisherman’s daughter Karuthamma (played by Sheela), her love for the Muslim fish trader Pareekutty (Madhu), and her subsequent marriage to the Hindu fisherman Palani (Sathyan).

Never before or since has the ocean been so beautifully captured on screen as a benevolent yet fearsome creature. In Chemmeen, the waters of Kadalamma (Mother Ocean) are intrinsically linked to a belief among fisherfolk that Her largesse is tied to the sexual conformism of women in their society and that She would swallow up a man whose wife was unfaithful to him while he was at sea.

Years after watching the film, I read that Thakazhi was criticised in his lifetime by rationalists who felt his book perpetuated superstitions. To me though, even as a child, Chemmeen was an indictment of society’s determination to curb a woman in every conceivable way including using the fear of divine retribution and linking her family’s fate to her morality as defined by society.

Karuthamma is ridden with guilt all her life and is treated as if she cheated on her husband, when all she did was have feelings for a man long before she even knew of Palani.

Chemmeen is also about how the threat of ostracism and the fear of religion/nature are used to restrict people’s choices; and how superstitions can be a weapon to those who do not necessarily buy into these delusions but will cite them when it suits their convenience, as “the devil” might “cite scripture for his purpose”.

In Chemmeen, Karuthamma’s people seem not to care so much about her affair with Pareekutty until her father’s rivals get jealous when he purchases a new boat and nets. Likewise, when women in Palani’s neighbourhood feel threatened by her success at selling fish, they initiate a boycott of her, claiming to be concerned about how her morals could affect the entire community.

Thakazhi’s story is so layered, that it seems to be speaking of the times we live in as much as about eras gone by. Note for instance that the Hindu in his story is the heroine, not the hero. What point might that literary decision make to today’s ‘love jihad’ campaigners who object to mixed marriages mostly if the girl in the relationship is from their community? Note too that the fisherfolk in Chemmeenmake no mention of a woman’s fate if the husband cheats on her.

The brilliant book was supplemented by the film’s team of geniuses. Director Ramu Kariat’s collaborators included Hrishikesh Mukherjee as an editor, Salil Chowdhury as music director and Manna Dey as a singer, making Chemmeen a rare, truly pan-India project.

Why then is this National Award-winning film barely known outside Kerala? Several factors are at play here. First, Malayalam cinema has not promoted itself across India as well as Hindi. Second, the Malayalam industry’s defeatist attitude on this front is compounded by the fact that it has lower budgets (ergo, lower marketing budgets) than India’s three richest industries: Hindi, Tamil and Telugu. Third, a mix of political propaganda and irresponsible journalism has led to false notions that Hindi is India’s national language, that the Hindi film industry i.e. Bollywood is India’s largest industry and rightfully deserves more attention than the rest.

Which came first, the poor marketing or the misconceptions, the misconceptions or media indifference? It’s hard to tell, but there is no doubt that if Chemmeenwas a great Hindi film marking its golden jubilee, it would have been universally celebrated by the so-called ‘national’ media across India rather than almost entirely on Malayalam platforms and southern-India-based English outlets.

That Chemmeen is not better known to Indian audiences outside Kerala is the country’s loss as well as the film’s. Allow me to borrow an old Punjabi saying to let off steam on the subject: Jine Lahore nai vekhya o jamya-e-ni (if you have not seen Lahore you have not lived). Jine Chemmeen nai vekhya…

(Anna M.M. Vetticad is the author of The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic. Twitter: @annavetticad)

(This column was first published in The Hindu Businessline newspaper on November 21, 2015)

Original link:
http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/watch/chemmeen-marks-a-golden-milestone/article7899728.ece

Photo captions: (1) Sheela and Madhu as Karuthamma and Pareekutty on the cover of Chemmeen’s music album (2) Sheela as Karuthamma on the poster of Chemmeen

Photographs courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemmeen


Previous instalment of Film Fatale: “It Matters, Naseersaab”
http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/watch/it-matters-naseersaab/article7742604.ece
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KAMAL HAASAN INTERVIEW / A SHORTER VERSION APPEARED IN MAXIM

December 31, 2015, 1:34 am
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“Freedom of expression in India has always been under threat…”

He is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest living actors of Indian cinema. Kamal Haasan is also an unrelenting experimentalist and multi-tasker. Through a six-decade professional journey that began for him as a child, he has worked in over 200 films – as a writer, producer, director, actor, dancer, choreographer and singer, primarily in Tamil films with occasional forays into Telugu, Malayalam and Hindi. In this exclusive interview, the legend looks back on what has been, in his own words, “a very charmed life”.

By Anna MM Vetticad


Your Tamil film Papanasam and the Hindi Drishyam are both remakes of the Malayalam film Drishyam. They have all been hits. Are pan-India audiences more similar in their tastes than we realise?

Yes, because we have a common mythology. And for thousands of years, Kashi, Rameshwaram and for half the time Ajmer have all been part of our landscape. Gandhiji was one of the few people who understood our ethos and that India has a collective consciousness. So that can be put to good box-office use.  (Laughs)

Ek Duuje Ke Liye(1981) is a great example. It started off as a Telugu film (Maro Charitra). Producers were emboldened to try it in Hindi with a new pair of actors because despite being in Telugu and not being dubbed, it did two-and-half years in Chennai. They were so astounded by the success that they decided to make it in Hindi with very few changes, like shifting the location to Goa from Vizag. And it was an equally big hit in Hindi. In fact, it became the biggest hit in (his long-time collaborator and mentor) director Mr K. Balachander’s career and mine too.

You released the Tamil film Dasavathaaram (2008) in dubbed Telugu and Hindi versions. You made Vishwaroopam(2013) simultaneously in Tamil and Hindi. Considering the national ethos we just spoke about, why don’t more Indian filmmakers dub their films into at least a couple of other Indian languages?

Dubbing takes away the essence of the language and makes the film more foreign than a foreign film. I would rather that we put subtitles in Hindi or another language and release it across.

Okay then, why don’t more Indian filmmakers release their films with subtitles?
They should. They should do it with English subtitles for a metro audience, but fortunately I have a better thing and I’m trying to constantly do that. I’m going to be doing more double versions now in Tamil and Hindi. Vishwaroopam 2 will be made in both languages.

I’m assuming shooting a film in more than one language is slightly more expensive so why don’t more filmmakers release with subtitles across India or do dubbed versions?

Actually not. No Hindi filmmaker can match the price at which we can make a Hindi film when you amortise it with two films. Vishwaroopamwould cost Rs 80 crore to make just in Hindi, but you have two films for that price.

So financially, what you’re doing is more practical?

More practical. Only thing is with my earlier films something or the other went wrong. For instance, there was a ban on Vishwaroop and they tried to buckle me in, and I tried DTH and the theatre guys were upset and didn’t cooperate. But just because of a few mistakes, a sound business solution need not be left aside. The problem with Dashavtar (2009), the Hindi dubbed version, is that it was released a year later. If you do it together the momentum is national. The need to see the film is fuelled by national publicity. Bahubalicashed in on that.

It has become standard practice for big Hollywood action adventures to be released in India in dubbed Hindi, Telugu and Tamil versions apart from the original English. Are Indian filmmakers slow to tap into markets beyond their traditional audiences?

Ya, very very slow. I credit Hindi cinema for at least making it a little broader. It started with Bengali. Thanks to a few people or probably one man called Satyajit Ray, they went out and pushed their films. Hindi cinema has broadened its market. Tamil and Telugu cinema are waking up 2-3 decades later. Even when Ek Duuje Ke Liye was a hit, people thought twice about making a double version when we could amortise the cost. I never understood why, because it’s a win win. I thought it was laziness, and not knowing the market. I have so far done 23 double films. Thoongaavanam (2015, Cheekati Raajyam in Telugu)is my 24th. I have vast experience of succeeding and a few of them failing. So you’re talking to a man who has benefited from this.

You’ve tried various experiments over the years. You tried to release Vishwaroopam directly on television before taking it to theatres but you faced considerable opposition…

That is because I am part of this industry, so whatever I do is considered to be a turncoat kind of a thing. But if not me someone else will do it. I looked at it because it’s a great opportunity to do films differently. As a matter of fact I’m constrained by the size of my stardom in the matter of the kind of movies I can do. I have to bloat a film to fit me which would not be necessary at all if I have these kinds of smaller venues open to release my films. I would then do smaller films too.

Theatre owners objected to Vishwaroopam coming out on TV first. Is there greater unionisation…?

Cartelisation.

Is there greater cartelisation of elements within the Tamil film industry than elsewhere, because it does appear that in Tamil Nadu it is easier for associations and organisations to put a huge amount of pressure on individual film makers?

That’s because politics and the film industry have been very close. They’ve learnt bad habits from each other. Andhra somehow managed to pull itself out of these clutches and stay as a business entity. Tamil Nadu unfortunately has become a cocktail of both.

Is the problem you faced with Vishwaroopam to do with the fact that powerful politicians in Tamil Nadu own TV channels, and therefore control the film industry in many ways?

It is true that there are two. Both parties own TV channels and you have to be careful when you make the third choice. You don’t wanna hurt anyone. The industry could do without that.

Isn’t it suffocating for you?

Absolutely.

At the time of Vishwaroopam’s release, you had said you want to leave the country.

I meant it.

Why did you say that?

Because of the general apathy to an artist. And it does not come from the audience. The audience either respects or disrespects according to the output, they applaud or simply decry the man for lack of performance. That’s a fair deal and they’ve been very kind to me for the past three decades. My exasperation is because the industry is a very unfriendly place for artistes. People who will come out and help are limited in numbers.

Isn’t that a huge irony, considering that the industry depends on artistes?

Is it not tragic rather than irony? It’s tragic. It’s all about business. Rather than celebrating a man who is going beyond the call of duty to make his work excellent, they ridicule him. The audience appreciates actors for having tried beyond. The industry simply wants you to shut up and behave, like in George Orwell’s Animal Farm. If you’re a pig, why do you wanna fly?

How do you deal with the frustration? Over the years, it does appear that you have ended up focusing a lot of energy not on the creative aspects of your work but on these battles.

That is why I said I’d like to leave this place, because it’s a waste of time. As a matter of fact even the time that I spend on marketing my films is a waste. I should be doing workshops imparting whatever I have learnt through my years, and making films. Instead I am trying to just duck the blows that come my way and they’re not blows I deserve either.

You said you wanted to leave the country but you did not of course...

(Laughs) Well it’s been too short a while since I said it, to know if I meant it. I might say it again. I hope I don’t have to.

Going back to your point that you sometimes feel constrained by your stardom because you have to bloat a project to fit you. Can you elaborate on that?

Yeah, sometimes I’m told not to make a small film. I ask why. I’m told: it will shrink your market, then they’ll say that’s your size. That’s not true. Papanasam, for instance, is a very small film which is not my market size at all. But I still did it.


But Papanasam is a remake of a Mohanlal-starrer. He’s a huge star in Malayalam. Why do you consider it a small film?

But it is a small film. A big Malayalam star can do that. In the Malayalam industry, Mammooty can do Mathilukal (1989) with Adoor Gopalakrishnan and next a big commercial entertainer. Mohanlal could do a small film like Namukku Parkkan Munthiri Thoppukal (Vineyards For Us To Dwell In, 1986) and then do a huge film. That’s allowed in Malayalam. Because it’s a small industry, the money spent is smaller, so people churn out more number of films. Mohanlal and Mammooty have to keep working on films. They come out with fantastic quality and subjects, of course. Nowhere else in India will you find so much variety within a small state. Point is, it’s nothing extraordinary if you go and do a small film in the Malayalam film industry.

But in the Tamil industry if you do a small film?

It’s dangerous, almost suicidal. You will never find Rajinikanth attempting anything like that.

But has your career path not gone down a road which is different from his as a result of which you can experiment more and take more risks?

I have kept that facility at great peril. The pundits said don’t do it, this is dangerous. I went ahead and did it, because I wanted that freedom. I was willing to fight for it and they’ve been kind.

They? As in, the audience?

Yes, they have not ditched me. If they do then I am finished because then the pundits would’ve been right. They stood by me, they have been my only strength. That’s why I continue with this. They are the only reason why I have stayed back. When you ask me the question (laughing): why have you not gone, you’re still here? The only reason is the audience, not the industry.

You’re in your sixth decade in films. What do you do to ensure that you don’t get bored and you don’t take your own audience for granted?

I have never taken my audience for granted because I am one of them. I never take myself for granted.

How do you see yourself as your own audience?

I still like to see Kamal Haasan perform and not the same kind of roles. I don’t look at myself as a trademarked John Wayne or MGR. I want to see myself in different attire, different moods. I also write, so there’s quite a variety still to be done.

It’s very easy to take it for granted because mine is a very charmed life. It will be wrong to say I suffered. I met the right kind of gurus at the right time without any endeavour from my part. So there’s all the possibility of taking it for granted. But I have not.

If I take my success for granted, I’m taking my audience for granted. Because where does the success come from? It’s not because I know I’m excellent, it’s them accepting that I am excellent, that’s where the success comes. I might think I’m the greatest actor in the world, but what if nobody else agrees that is the case? That is the tragedy I’ll die with. It has happened to good actors. I’ve seen many talented guys, many of my peers whose names you won’t even know, who were equally talented or even better who never got to see the light of day. They died either alcoholic or anonymous. Those are not wake-up calls, but they were quite stark reminders of what could have become of me, so I never took it for granted.

So your success from a combination of talent, hard work, discipline and good luck?

Good luck, yeah I could say that. But I’ve never shunned hard work and never never took it for granted. So I never believed in luck that much. Probably because my life is so charmed that you don’t have to believe in luck. I have a funny saying that there is nothing called luck for those who deserve it. It’s like that. Mine is a very happy life if you look at it. I can’t design a better one for myself. I might put in a little tragedy to make it more fizzy.

You mean, if you were to make a film on your life?

Yeah yeah, it is quite a pleasant one as far as the professional side of things are concerned. As I told you I met the right gurus at the right time, and not just one. Once might have been an accident or chance. I kept meeting them again and again and again. I don’t know whether I had humbled myself to meet them or they just found me. Over various stages of my career I found these people reaching out to me and helping me.

Your life story is worth telling, is it not?

I’m not a mirror, I’m a box and I’d like to keep it closed

You will not write your autobiography?

No. What is the purpose of writing something which is so dishonest?

Because you won’t tell the truth?

You can’t, because so many people are alive, they wouldn’t like it either. It’s better that I leave the lies to others.

Vishwaroopamwas briefly banned in Tamil Nadu. This May, Vishwa Hindu Parishad called for a ban on Uttama Villain. This is happening more and more in our country? Do you think free speech is under threat?

I think politicians found that their manifestos are not helping acquire fame and attract attention, so they’ve turned to such shortcuts. Otherwise I don’t see a reason. There’s nothing at all they could have been so angry about with Uttama Villain– now the film has released they look silly.

Is freedom of expression more under threat now than when you were starting out in films?

It has always been under threat by moral policing but now with the media it becomes easy for everyone to make a noise. So the brawls are looking bigger, but actually they’re not battles at all. They’re actually scuffles and frivolous scuffles.

Male actors of the present generation have become far more body conscious than in previous generations. What do you think of young male stars going shirtless to display their well worked out gym-toned torsos?

It’s like hairstyles at one time, dancing at one time, now this is the fad. But that will not yet complete an actor. Good health is universal. Everyone should have a good and healthy body. How many muscles you should see on the outside is a question of aesthetics. Among the bodybuilding community, the beefcake look is getting out of fashion. They’re now looking at slim, wiry, very muscular beautiful bodies. So it’s changing with time.

So within filmdom also you think it will change?

It will definitely change. I think I always admired a good physical form.  From the time of Da Vinci, Greece and Rome there has been admiration for good bodies. Some actors have been lazy and not taken care of themselves but I thought Kirk Douglas was well built for his time. He was not a bodybuilder but he was built well. All the actors who played Bond had a fairly good musculature – not enough to win Mr Olympia but they were there.

Name a Tamil male actor from a previous generation who was similarly fit.

Without a doubt, for his time, M.G. Ramachandran. I became a gym enthusiast because of MGR.

Does being a dancer help you maintain your body?

Yes, but the body you saw in Abhay or Aalavandhan (2001) comes only from exercise.

As we grow older, achieving that kind of a body becomes slightly more difficult. What are your fitness mantras?

I work out. I never used any protein shots. I’ve eaten protein, which in itself is wrong. I’ve taken so much protein to build my body, which I learnt later was unnecessary, but I’ve never taken any of these booster shots or animal stacks or any of those things. That is very commonly used now to get a quick body. Any good nutritionist or physical culturist will tell you that you can’t get that kind of musculature overnight without resorting to these kind of drugs. Otherwise you will have to spend 6-7 hours in the gym every day. Most guys don’t do that kind of exercise.

So you’re saying most youngsters today who display really heavily muscled bodies are using these supplements?

Quick fixes.

Why did you never do it?

I never saw this as the only route to success, so my health was very important for me. I wanted to live a little longer and not get instant results. Above all I had someone like Mr KB (K. Balachander) supporting me so I thought I had a long career ahead and I didn’t want to support it with cortisone.

Are young actors who opt for such quick fixes being irresponsible role models?

I’m sure by the time they are ready to die with kidney disease, good medicines would have been found for kidney troubles. But these medicines will affect them. They will get a heart attack or kidneys will fail. This is not wishing them bad, this is just warning them.

So are they being irresponsible role models?

No, they’re irresponsible to themselves to begin with. If one or two are not using these quick fixes, I congratulate them.

At the Habitat Film Festival in Delhi this May, in reply to a question from the audience about when you will act with your daughters Shruti and Akshara, you said you are waiting for them to become actors, right now they are busy being stars. What does that mean?

(Laughs) Actor and star are different things. Star is something you can be by luck, a good actor you have to be by hard work. Shruti wants to be both, I don’t know what Akshara would be.

But is it also not destiny that you’re born with the talent?

No, I don’t think so. You aren’t born with it. I wasn’t born with talent. It was inculcated into me by gurujis and my family. Ilayaraja was not born with music, he acquired it later on.

Do you see yourself as an actor, a star, or both?

I started off as a technician. I had scant regard for both actors and stars. But then Mr Balachander foisted (laughs) this new armour on me and I think I became a little more invincible than I would have been if I’d just been a technician. He gave me this financial armour called stardom.

So if you want to be a producer, director etc, is it a huge advantage if you’re a star? 

Absolutely. It’s not hubris, but  the confidence you find in my voice comes from that advantage. 

Many people consider K. Balachander’s Apoorva Raagangal (1975) your big breakthrough. Do you?

Apoorva Raagangal was one of my important films but I think my breakthrough came when Balachanderji made Manmatha Leelai (1976) and then Maro Charitra (1978) after that. He kept making films only with me.


Was the breakthrough then the fact that he decided he wanted to work with you?

Ya he decided, I had no choice in that. I was a nobody. He sort of discovered me and sometimes I suspect he could have invented me. (Laughs) Because I didn’t believe I could or I wanted to even be an actor. He brought it about and he kept on. We made 36 films together.

You said your original ambition was to be a technician. You mean a director?

Ya, a filmmaker. He asked me one day when I was 19, “So what are your plans?” I said, “I’m not even ready to discuss my plans with you, Sir.” He insisted, so I told him I wanted to become a director like him. To which he said: “That you will. You have the capacity to become that, but what you have inside you is something not many do. With training you can become a director, no amount of training can make the star that you are going to be. You’re going to be a phenomenal actor, don’t lose sight of that. Build a house, become rich and then think of making films.” And that’s what I did.

That’s amazing practical advice.

And I took it. That’s even more practical of me. (Laughs)

(A shorter version of this interview by Anna MM Vetticad appeared in the September 2015 issue of Maxim magazine)

Photographs courtesy: 
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dasavathaaram
(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papanasam_(film) 
(3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoongaa_Vanam
(4) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uttama_Villain
(5) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ek_Duuje_Ke_Liye

Note: These photographs were not published in Maxim
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THE annavetticadgoes2themovies AWARDS: BEST INDIAN FILMS OF 2015

January 3, 2016, 11:21 am
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Before the film awards calendar takes off in our country, come lists by film critics of their choice of Best Films from the year gone by. This is mine. Keep in mind that this is a compilation of best Indian films released in 2015 from among those I watched; it covers fiction features in all languages, not documentaries.

Feel free to disagree – civilly, of course. After all, IMHO – as we say in this age of acronyms – the whole point of watching films is the fun of arguing over them with friends afterwards.
Here you go then: my list of Best Indian Films 2015.

BEST FILM:

Winner: 

Ottaal (The Trap) / Malayalam 

If Alfonso Cuaron had decided to set Gravity in Kerala’s backwaters, Ottaal is what it might have been.

Veteran director Jayaraj’s film revolves around a bright-eyed little boy called Kuttapaayi, his relationship with his grandfather who is a duck keeper, and their bond with nature. It is the sort of film that can overwhelm you with its awareness of the immensity of Creation, a reminder of the little dots that we are – tiny yet significant – when seen in the context of the expanse of the universe. It is about innocence lost and exploited, a child cruelly plucked out of his placid surroundings to be chucked into the country’s labour force, as an allegory for the havoc humans wreak on the natural scheme of things.

Kuttanad is so scenic that an amateur could point a cellphone camera in any direction and capture loveliness, but cinematographer M.J. Radhakrishnan takes this handy beauty to another level altogether through his lens, delivering poetry in motion and stillness on screen. The unspoilt, untouched feel of the film is further enhanced by the effortlessness of the non-actors playing the leads, Ashanth K Sha as Kuttapaayi and Kumarakom Vasudevan (a fisherman in real life) as the old man.

Ottaal is derived from the 19th century Russian short story Vanka by Anton Chekhov. The film is so rooted in its surroundings, that few viewers would have figured out the foreign literary source if the filmmaker had not credited it. The acknowledgement is a reminder though that its rootedness is accompanied by a certain indefinable timelessness and placelessness that lends itself well to this universal theme.

After all, every age has had its enemies of innocence and harmony. Chekhov found them 130 years ago in a shoemaker’s establishment in Moscow. Jayaraj found his in the 21st century, stealing from the wetlands of Kuttanad. Beautiful.

(For a related article by the author, click here)

First Runner-Up:

Court / Marathi with Hindi, English, Gujarati


Court is debutant writer-director Chaitanya Tamhane’s slap in the face of India’s judicial processes, layered with insights about caste, class and gender.

A sewage worker in Mumbai dies and instead of investigating the terrible work conditions that led to his end, the government cries suicide, charging an inconvenient Dalit activist-singer with performing an inflammatory song that allegedly incited the poor man to take his own life. The bizarre yet believable story is augmented by an excellent cast and unobtrusive, supremely confident direction.

Imagine an Indian lower court being transposed to a non-sensational, non-gossipy Bigg Boss housewhere cameras stay switched on for 24 hours to record the proceedings– that is howincredibly realistic Courtis. Tragic, thoughtful, touching.

(For the author’s original review of Court, click here)

Second Runner-Up:

Kaaka Muttai / Tamil 


A deceptively simple film about a couple of slum children in Chennai, M. Manikandan’s Kaaka Muttai is as sad as it is curiously uplifting. The pivotal characters – as lovable as two little humans can get – nickname themselves Chinna Kaaka Muttai (Crow’s Egg Jr) and Periya Kaaka Muttai (Crow’s Egg Sr) after their unusual eating habits that see them stealing from birds’ nests. When a swish pizza outlet opens up right next to their slum, they begin craving those slices of cheese-laden promise that they have seen in television advertisements.

Their food quest sets off a chain of events that casts a spotlight on the horrendous class divides in our megapolises where hovels abut high-rise prosperity, luxe malls, homes and eateries, where the welfare of the poor is a mere tool in the hands of a city’s power-brokers.

Iyshwarya Rajesh is impeccable as the boys’ composed, hard-working mother. The little ones themselves, J. Vignesh and V. Ramesh, are cute as buttons and good actors to boot.

Kaaka Muttai is one of the sweetest, most charming commentaries on poverty, hypocrisy, self-respect and the human spirit that you will ever see.

Third Runner-Up:

Dum Laga Ke Haisha / Hindi 


A reductive description of Dum Laga Ke Haisha could be this: a good-looking boy, forced to marry a fat girl, mistreats her because he is repelled by her weight and his own inability to withstand family pressure. But being reductive would go against the very essence of writer-director Sharat Katariya’s marvelously uncommon film, which refuses to limit its heroine to her physicality. Sure, she is the antithesis of the stick figures that crowd today’s cinema and catwalks, but she is also a brand ambassador for resilience, education, aspirations and a sense of self-worth. Yes, her husband’s response to her proportions is a pivotal point of the film, but neither she nor the director’s gaze defines her by it.

Adding to the entertainment quotient of Dum Laga Ke… is its tribute to the music and dance of 1990s Hindi cinema, especially through the hero’s love for Kumar Sanu. In this context, the choreography in the final song is particularly enjoyable, as is actor Ayushmann Khurrana’s ability to transport us back two decades through his moves.

Debutant Bhumi Pednekar as the central character and Ayushmann as her under-confident spouse, shine despite being surrounded by a cast of very strong supporting actors. Their performances, like the film’s narrative, are pitch perfect.

(For the author’s original review of Dum Laga Ke Haisha, click here)

THE CONTENDERS:

5: Talvar / Hindi

This fictionalised account of the Aarushi Talwar-Hemraj murder case, almost-documentary-like in its storytelling style, is chilling in its take on how the system could consume ordinary citizens to cover up its mistakes. Meghna Gulzar’s direction partnered by auteur Vishal Bhardwaj’s flawless writing throws new light on a double killing that rocked this nation in 2008.

There is a commendable matter-of-factness to the Rashomon-style narrative, which offers multiple accounts of the crime and its investigation, variously portraying the parents as guilty or innocent of the murders. The detached tone is sustained throughout, barring a few moments in a strand that holds the parents guilty, in which Neeraj Kabi indulges in some seemingly deliberate, farcical acting when he, as Aarushi’s father, discovers her body.

That being said, there is no doubt about who the film sides with and where it stands. Some people see this as a lack of objectivity. Since when did objectivity come to mean not having an opinion?

Talvar offers the sort of unrelenting, meticulous scrutiny given to the case by the few responsible journalists who covered it noiselessly in the midst of the cacophony unleashed by the rest of the media. It is a film about the gaping gulf between co-existing social classes, about the inherent problems in India’s criminal justice system and about news professionals gone berserk.

The stellar cast is led by Irrfan Khan who is, in a word, brilliant.

6: Pathemari / Malayalam

When he is at his best, Mammooty has the ability to reach into our weeping bosoms, tear out our hearts and rip them to tiny, tiny shreds. This is precisely what he does in Pathemari.

Director Salim Ahamed’s emotionally gripping film has the veteran playing Pallickal Narayanan, a man who spends 50 years of his life slaving away at menial jobs in Dubai to make life better for his family back home. The kudumbamdoes not know his struggles and for the most part, remains indifferent to his suffering.

As much as this is a film about immigrants, it is also about how patriarchy saps men of so much in its bid to dominate social power structures, to retain power and wealth in male hands. The film begs the question more people ought to ask: Why, oh why, do men fight so hard to preserve a back-breaking, potentially life-destroying system where they are the primary breadwinners of a family and women the care-givers? 

Though it wouldn’t have hurt the story to reduce the halo around Narayanan’s head just a tad bit, so much can be forgiven considering the emotional heft Ahamed achieves in this film. My heart broke for Pallickal Narayanan when I watched Pathemari. It aches now each time I think of him. What more can you ask of a film?

(For a related article by the author, click here)

7: Drishyam / Hindi and Papanasam / Tamil

When Malayalam director Jeethu Joseph made the Mohanlal-Meena-starrer Drishyam in 2013 (considered by many to be an uncredited adaptation of the Japanese novel The Devotion of Suspect X), it seemed unlikely that anyone would better it. And then someone did. Twice in 2015. One of those someones is Jeethu himself.

Director Nishikant Kamat’s Drishyam improves upon the lovely original with a casting touch here and an acting moment there, in what is a legit Hindi remake of the Malayalam film. This is the story of two socially divergent worlds colliding, a crime of self-defence and an absolute genius of a cover-up. The architect of the whitewash is a small businessman in rural Goa (Ajay Devgn) who is out to protect his wife (Shriya Saran) and daughters from a police investigation.

The differences between the Malayalam and Hindi versions are barely discernible yet unmistakable. The wife here is portrayed as a stronger woman. As the film rolls along, she progresses from being a mere participant to the man’s partner in his plan. There is more liberalism too in their traditional household and their conversations with each other. Besides, the reduced age difference between the lead actors here automatically makes her appear more like his equal than his ward.

This Drishyam is, without a doubt, one of the best thrillers ever to emerge from the Hindi film industry.

Papanasam is Jeethu Joseph’s own Tamil remake of his Malayalam film. Starring veterans Kamal Haasan and Gautami – both superb – it released just weeks before the Hindi film. Although it is more faithful to the original’s conservatism than the Hindi film, the one element that puts it on an equal footing with the Bollywood interpretation is the central casting.

Unlike his contemporary Mohanlal, Kamal here is not acting with a woman who looks and is young enough to be his daughter. The generational proximity between him and Gautami makes theirs automatically come across as more of a partnership than the senior-junior dynamic between the leads in Malayalam, even though both stories feature conformist patriarchal set-ups.

The lead couple’s raging libido too gets an unspoken new dimension in the Tamil film because of the casting. Rarely are stars of Kamal’s seniority shown lusting after wives played by actresses their age. Equally rare are actresses in their 40s portraying women who are openly sexually active. The 14 years that separate Kamal and Gautami is not a small difference, but it is still a refreshing change from the two- and three-decade age gaps between him or his male peers and actresses they romance in commercial Indian cinema.

This unexpected progressiveness is somewhat marred by the completely needless couple of references to rape – however passing they may be – in Papanasam. It is a good thing that those distasteful few seconds whiz by towards the beginning of the film, before Papanasamsettles down into being what it is meant to be: a socially perceptive, edge-of-the-seat suspense saga. That it could hold the attention of even a critic who had already seen two versions of the same story on screen, is a measure of its extreme effectiveness.

(For the author’s original review of the Hindi Drishyam, click here)

8: NH10 / Hindi

A brave, gritty thriller cum social exposition that marked actress Anushka Sharma’s debut as producer. Set in the part of Haryana that is just adjacent to Delhi’s posh suburban sibling Gurgaon, NH10 is a terrifyingly revelatory film.

There are worlds within worlds in this country, and just off the arterial National Highway No. 10 is a world where a professional woman in non-traditional clothing zipping past in an SUV with a husband she chose for herself is no less than an alien from outer space. It is this misogynistic space that Meera accidentally enters one day in Navdeep Singh’s tautly directed, breath-stoppingly told NH10.

The outstanding satellite cast is headlined by Darshan Kumaar whose second screen outing here shows him up to be a remarkably versatile talent. His first was as Priyanka Chopra’s low-key, supportive husband in 2014’s Mary Kom.

Anushka is a worthy fulcrum, inhabiting her character with a vengeance that her more bubbly roles have not necessarily allowed. Explosive and memorable.

(For the author’s original review of NH10, click here)

9: Piku / Hindi

An entrepreneur with a short temper, her father who is obsessed with his bowels and his beti, and an exasperated cab company owner – this odd trio forms the focus of the very unusual Piku. It is a risky film that pays off.

How often do we see a mainstream film anywhere in the world filled with poop humour that is ridiculous but not yucky, distasteful or immature? This is director Shoojit Sircar’s latest team-up with writer Juhi Chaturvedi. In Vicky Donor they pulled off an unexpectedly sensitive film about a sperm donor in which, as storytellers, they knew precisely what not to say to avoid being icky. This time they roll out a ream of potty jokes that do not diminish Piku’s gentle heart, its progressive, feminist core or its courage to speak up about a hugely taboo topic in this country, selfish parents.

Amitabh Bachchan is delicious as an affectionate stereotype of Bengalis, not a contemptuous caricature. Deepika Padukone as the titular heroine is her usual easy self before the camera. And Irrfan should now be anointed The Other King Khan.

Seriously. At least in the Hindi film awards scenario, it might be safe to permanently reserve a slot for him on annual nominations lists. That Piku, without warning, serves up crackling yet comfortable chemistry between him and Deepika is a testament to their talent as much as the intelligent writing.

I did long for some moments of quietude between the father and daughter in the film, but compensation for that grouse comes in the form of the many mellow conversations between the girl and Irrfan’s character.

One of the nice things about Shoojit is the manner in which he has generously ensured that Juhi has been equally celebrated for the successes of Vicky Donor and Piku. Theirs is a writer-director match made in heaven. Inshallah, for the sake of good cinema, may they work together repeatedly in future.

(For the author’s original review of Piku, click here)

10: Killa / Marathi

This has been a good year for films on children. What makes Ottaal, Kaaka Muttai and Killa stand out is that they are not condescending towards the little ones at the centre of their stories and they do not thrive on precociousness.

Killa is about a boy struggling with the loss of a much-loved father and the simultaneous pain of moving to a new town. It is a lyrical, slow-moving, ruminative film filled with moments of deep, deep affection and empathy between Chinmay, played by young Archit Deodhar, and his gutsy mother (Amruta Subhash).

The fine acting is complemented by Avinash Arun’s lovingly composed frames. This is Avinash’s first film as director, although he already has an impressive CV as a cinematographer that includes Nishikant Kamat’s Drishyam (No. 6 on this list) and the much-lauded Masaan that is not on this list only because 2015 has been such a wonderful time for quality Indian cinema that there has been a rush of films to choose from. Killa– written by the director’s FTII junior Tushar Paranjape – is one of the little gemstones in the year’s accumulated wealth.

This article has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/firstpost-reviews-our-take-on-the-best-indian-films-of-2015-2568868.html

Photographs courtesy:

(1)    Ottaal poster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottaal

(2)    Still from Court: Parull Gossain Associates

(3)    Kaaka Muttai poster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaaka_Muttai

(4)    Dum Laga Ke Haishaposter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dum_Laga_Ke_Haisha

(5)    Talvar poster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talvar_(film)

(6)    Pathemari poster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathemari

(7)    Drishyam poster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drishyam_(2015_film)

(8)    Papanasam poster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papanasam_(film)

(9)    NH10 poster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NH10

(10)  Piku poster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piku

(11) Killaposter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killa_(film) 
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REVIEW 362: WAZIR

January 8, 2016, 2:16 am
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Release date:
January 8, 2015
Director:
Bejoy Nambiar
Cast:



Language:
Amitabh Bachchan, Farhan Akhtar, Manav Kaul, Aditi Rao Hydari, Seema Pahwa, Guest appearance: John Abraham
Hindi


It is ironic that Wazir feels like a quickie at the writing desk. I say ironic because at the premiere in Delhi, producer Vidhu Vinod Chopra announced that it had taken 6 years to write this film; and director Bejoy Nambiar further informed the audience that the seed of the story had been conceptualised by Vinod 35 years back when Bejoy was a one-year-old.

Oddly enough, despite all the time spent on it, the cornerstone of the script is a shunya. (Warning: some people may consider what follows a spoiler.) Here is a fundamental point: if you are so evil and conscienceless as to be capable of multiple murders and also capable of murdering your only eyewitness’ only confidant, why would you risk letting that eyewitness herself live? She is, after all, a ticking time bomb.

I asked my companion at the preview this question. She replied: the murderer needed the eyewitness alive to keep alive his pretence of being who he is. Counter: no he did not; once he had established that pretence, the eyewitness could very well have slipped on a banana peel, fallen down a flight of steps, been struck by a fatal disease or been the victim of any similar carefully contrived ‘accident’ or ‘natural cause’. (Spoiler alert ends.)

Poof! There goes your entire edifice.

Readers won’t understand the full import of the previous three paragraphs until after watching the film. Point is, the basic premise of this political thriller is ill conceived and hollow.

That is a crying shame, because Wazir features some important positives.

This is a story of two parents connecting over a shared loss. Farhan Akhtar plays a dutiful Delhi policeman called Daanish Ali mourning his child’s death and the strain this places on his relationship with his wife, the Kathak dancer Ruhana (Aditi Rao Hydari). Amitabh Bachchan is the chess guru, Pandit Omkarnath Dhar, whose daughter died tragically.

Although Wazir falls flat on its face as a thriller when you consider the question posed earlier in this review, it does work in other departments.

First, its initial half hour is energetic without being hurried, neatly handled, taut and very very poignant. The remarkably well-filmed shootout in that portion is especially worth mentioning. Bejoy, he of Shaitanand David fame, is good at this stuff. Remember the exquisitely executed sequence of chaos and gunfire set to the classic song Khoya khoya chand in Shaitan?

Second, fatherhood and husbandhood, not of the authoritarian variety, but of the emotionally invested kind, are not adequately covered by mainstream Hindi cinema. It is therefore both moving and refreshing to see the exploration of Daanish and Omkarnath’s agony, and the manner in which they lean on each other for solace.

There is more to men than bombast and fisticuffs, you know, Bollywood. Men can express feelings without screaming and delivering speeches. Men can love without being stalkers and pests. Men ache for their wives. Men too cradle their babies in their arms and hold them to their bosoms. Men have bosoms. Men feel hurt. Men weep.

In this context, Farhan is a particular joy to watch as Daanish. His character is brimming with emotions yet the actor’s performance is restrained. As it happens, he looks lovely too.

Amitabh – in a departure from his immersive turn in his last screen outing Piku– unfortunately chooses to play Amitabh Bachchan rather than a character in Wazir. Still, one of the high points of the film is seeing him in the closing song shot on the two male leads in a recording studio, when you cannot help but be aware that you are witnessing a legend at work, relaxed in the company of a younger artiste and enjoying himself so thoroughly while he is at it.

Aditi has little to do beyond look great and look vulnerable in the film. She does both well, but the woman who starred in Delhi 6, Yeh Saali Zindagi and London, Paris, New York deserves better. Manav Kaul, an otherwise excellent actor, suffers the worst of the film’s writing, playing a politician called Yezaad Qureshi with glaringly obvious motivations.

The grand surprise of the film, the titular character, is nicely acted by Neil Nitin Mukesh. Why on earth does this young star not do more films?


As for the rest, well, Wazir has polished production values, very attractive art design, pretty – even if too many – songs and it briefly travels to a state that we ought to see more in our films, Jammu and Kashmir.

Considering that Vinod is the producer of Lage Raho Munna Bhai (one of the best, most cerebral commercial Hindi films ever made) and 3 Idiots (one of the Mumbai film industry’s biggest box-office successes till date), and considering that his co-writer here is Abhijat Joshi, who has been a co-writer on Lage Raho, 3 Idiots and PK, the glaring plot loophole in Wazir is thoroughly disappointing. It is disappointing too that the truth about the film’s third father-daughter relationship can be seen coming from a mile. Both elements combined make the second half of Wazirfar far less intriguing, intelligent and engaging than the first.

Still, Daanish’s quest for the Wazir makes for an interesting ride. The selling point of the film though, is the bonding between Daanish and Omkarnath, two grieving fathers, two husbands in pain. We need more of that from Bollywood.

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

CBFC Rating (India):

U/A
Running time:
103 minutes 

This review has also been published on firstpost:
http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/wazir-review-amitabh-bachchan-farhan-akhtars-endearing-relationship-overrides-the-films-flaws-2575792.html

Photograph courtesy:
Poster 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wazir_(film)
Poster 2: https://www.facebook.com/OfficialWazirTheFilm/


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REVIEW 363: CHAURANGA

January 9, 2016, 12:52 am
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Release date:
January 8, 2015
Director:
Bikas Ranjan Mishra
Cast:




Language:
Soham Maitra, Tannishtha Chatterjee, Sanjay Suri, Riddhi Sen, Ena Saha, Dhritiman Chatterjee, Swatilekha Sengupta, Arpita Pal Chatterjee, Anshuman Jha
Khortha (a dialect of Maithili)


There’s understated and then there’s virtually unstated.

Writer-director Bikas Ranjan Mishra’s Chauranga is so low-key that it comes across as an unfeeling drama even though the screen is, at all times, busy with multiple pressing concerns.

This film’s lack of emotional pull is inexplicable at one level because the story covers issues that would tug at the heart of any individual with an iota of conscience and sensitivity. In a village in north India lives a little Dalit boy called Santu (Soham Maitra) who longs for an education. His elder brother Bajrangi (Riddhi Sen) is studying at a boarding school in the city. Santu, on the other hand, spends his days  gazing down from a treetop at a pretty girl (Ena Saha) passing by on her two-wheeler, on her way from school to home.

Santu is unmindful of the dangers of his crush on an upper-caste girl. Meanwhile, his mother Dhaniya (Tannishtha Chatterjee) is having a clandestine affair with the girl’s father, the local strongman Dhaval (Sanjay Suri).

Also in this potent mix written by Bikas are Dhaval’s hapless wife Nidhi (Arpita Pal Chatterjee), his clueless mother (Swatilekha Sengupta) and a creepy priest (Dhritiman Chatterjee) with a sexual penchant for little girls and beasts. The plot is crying out to be felt. The fact that it fails to move has to be attributed to Bikas’ direction and the central casting.

It is one thing to portray the casualness with which caste is practised, lived and accepted in this setting, but quite another to not flinch while doing so. When a couple of high-caste boys coolly throw a Dalit kid into a well to punish him for straying into a temple, it should have been a chilling moment. A man’s hand over a woman’s mouth while they have sex in a haystack, to prevent her orgasmic moans from reaching the world, is a brilliant metaphor for the gagging of women and Dalits. Yet, in both instances, the actors involved are expressionless to the point of being unnaturally so. It is as if the director instructed them to freeze their faces to convey depth.

There appears to be no other explanation for these performances because, for instance, we know that when he is at his best, Sanjay has the ability to pull at the heartstrings in a way that few others can. This, after all, is the man who played Nikhil in the pathbreaking, soul-stirring, soul-searching 2005 Hindi film My Brother Nikhil directed by Onir, his co-producer on Chauranga.

The casting of the female protagonist though is the film’s biggest mistake. Tannishtha may well be a regular on the festival circuit but the harsh truth is that she does not have a strong screen presence and there has been a tiring sameness to her performances in all her recent films. She has had the good fortune of bagging a string of strong roles in her career, but her idea of what some people might call minimalist acting is boring beyond a point. The last time I remember being genuinely moved by her on screen was over a decade back in Florian Gallenberger’s Bengali language German production Shadows of Time, and then too, now that I look back, I realise it was the powerful story and tragic role that got to me, not her performance.

In the case of Chauranga, the director also needs to explain why he has taken the trouble to cast the heroine of one of Satyajit Ray’s best-remembered films – Swatilekha Sengupta from Ghare Baire (1984) – and then squandered her away. For most of Chauranga, the veteran’s face remains in the shadows, and I found myself squinting at the screen to be sure that it was indeed her I was seeing and not someone who looks like her.

The only member of the cast who ekes some poignancy out of this lifeless film is Arpita as the suffering wife. As for the children, Riddhi as the older brother has evident potential, but who is to say for sure that the leading little man Soham does not? If the energy that the director achieves on screen in the last five minutes had permeated Chauranga in its entirety, perhaps the boy would have delivered something more than his sweet face.

At the end of the film, I found myself dying to know how Onir would have directed this film with a slightly tweaked cast. This is, after all, a story that desperately needs to be told. It just needs to be told better.

Rating (out of five): *1/2


CBFC Rating (India):

A
Running time:
86 minutes

This review has also been published on firstpost:
http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/chauranga-review-a-low-key-film-that-tells-a-story-that-needs-to-be-told-but-doesnt-tell-it-well-enough-2576338.html

Photograph courtesy:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chauranga


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AJAY DEVGN INTERVIEW / A SHORTER VERSION APPEARED IN MAXIM

January 9, 2016, 8:56 pm
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“India’s biggest superstar, Rajinikanth, moves around without hair & doesn’t care. But on screen he’s completely different. You just need to be right on screen”

Ajay Devgn is in a happy place right now. His last film Drishyamwas a hit. His co-production Parched was premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival 2015. And he is currently working on his most expensive film till date as a producer, Shivaay, which he is also directing and acting in. It’s enough to get him talking although, as he says in this exclusive interview, he does “not like to talk too much”.
By Anna MM Vetticad

Congratulations on the success of Drishyam. Before the release you had described it as a small film. How did you arrive at that categorisation?
Thank you so much. I called it small only in terms of the budgetary requirements of a film of that nature. A family drama with very strong content but without action scenes, locations and songs is a small film budgetwise, not contentwise. You can’t expect a Rs 200 crore business from it. The masses are not ready to accept it in a way, so the business is slow. If the costing of such a film is in control it’s easier for it to succeed financially. Such a film won’t easily get a great opening but of course in terms of content it may be bigger than many of my other films, which is why it lasted in theatres for so many weeks, a phenomenon that is unheard of in this day and time when the trend is for films to be over and done with after two weeks. 
Outsiders assume that the industry sees a film as big or small based on whether the star in the film is big or small. So you’re saying that’s not true?
Yes. It’s always based on the content and its budgetary requirement. Of course when you cast a star, that star comes with a certain price so the budget becomes higher. As a star then you have to decide how much you should be taking for such a film. 
Kamal Haasan told me in an interview, “I’m constrained by the size of my stardom in the kind of movies I can do… Sometimes I’m told not to make a small film. I’m told: It will shrink your market.” Does this happen to you too? 
Yes, all stars have these pressures. A lot of people who are not very sensible and who are just business-driven tell you you should not do small films because the industry expects a certain kind of collection from your film. I tell them, “Look, it depends on what I feel like doing.” Sometimes you want to do a content-driven film. They told me this before Drishyam but the film attracted the kind of audiences who have not seen Hindi films for years because of the word of mouth it received for its content. It’s not that in the first week it did great business and then it dropped. It just remained steady for weeks on end. So in the eyes of the audience, the film is not small and the actor has become bigger. 
But these so-called trade people always say, you should do bigger films because your image is larger than life. I agree my image is larger than life and I knew that a certain kind of audience,  which is technically my audience, I would say the masses, will not come for Drishyam because they don’t want to see Ajay Devgn getting beaten up. 
If you look at it literally your character may have been getting beaten up in the film, but in truth he beats everyone including the system without raising a fist.
This is what I kept saying in my interviews, that the character is not weak, he is much stronger than a Singham because he fights with his brains, not his hands. That is why I think the film has worked. A certain kind of audience which likes just action and high drama hasn’t come in for sure, we do face that problem as stars, but it’s not very difficult to break it. 
See, in any industry people will tell you that the right way to do things is how other people did it and made it. But you find your own path and when you succeed, those same people turn round and say, “We always knew this film would work.” 
So in that sense, does stardom give you more freedom or does it place more constraints on you? 
Both. It gives you more freedom in the sense that you can do big films that are also not bad cinema. Nowadays a balance between great content and big action is what works big time all over the world. Like Iron Man. Even Bond is not the same Bond who was at one time just about gadgets. They’ve made even Bond very real. Big entertainers these days need to have sensibilities that go with today’s times. A star can afford to do such big films. 
Is it true that you’ve taken a year-long break from acting to prepare for your next film Shivaay?
Kind of, yes, except for 40-45 days of shooting for Drishyamin between. 
Why did you feel the need to take this break? 
I needed to prep for Shivaay because I’m directing it myself. It’s a difficult film to make. We’re shooting in very difficult terrain. The kind of action and drama it has requires a lot of detailing. There’s huge action in the Balkans in minus 15 degrees temperature. It is not easy preparing for it. 
So you acted in Drishyam,which is an understated thriller. You are producing, directing and acting in Shivaay,which is abig-budget commercial venture. And you’ve produced Parched,which was screened at the Toronto International Film Festival 2015. That’s a lot of departments of filmmaking and a lot of genres of films. What kind of mix are you trying to achieve in your career right now?
I think a good-cinema mix. Shivaay is a commercial film but it has strong content too. That’s the path I’m taking. That is the only way to show the world we make films that have brilliant content and are technically strong. Russell Carpenter, the cameraman of Titanic, has done Parched. We could afford him only because he cut down his price for passion, for the script. There too they do some films out of passion for the project and some for the money. That’s what I’m trying to do too. 
What is your personal style? 

If I attend a function where it’s not compulsory to wear a tie, I would not. (Laughs) I would wear something like jeans and a jacket. I’m in that zone where I want to be comfortable. I’m not much into suits and things like that.
  
Would you agree that even looking casual can take a great deal of effort?
It does. The bottomline is that if you stay fit anything sobre works on your body because it falls right. Even the most expensive clothes won’t suit you if you don’t have a toned, fit body. 
Has your attitude to style and styling changed over the years?
I have everything in my cupboard, but you know what I wear when I go off to shoot in the morning? Shorts or jeans, a T-shirt and my chappals. Because I’ve to go there, dress up for the film, pack up and come back home (laughs) so I don’t really care about what I wear. 
Have you not become more style-aware after you married Kajol? 
She’s never bothered. (laughs)
She’s also been known as someone who is not overly conscious of how she dresses. Would you agree that that typifies her style?
Ya, she is also casual about it. 
Is it possible for a person to be a film star in this day and age without being at least slightly conscious of their style and styling?
You are conscious only when you are in front of the camera. That’s why you have designers and others to dress you up according to the character. Apart from that I don’t think it makes any difference. Look at the biggest superstar in the country, Rajinikanth. He moves around without hair and he doesn’t care. But when he comes on screen he’s completely different.  
Then why are so many stars so conscious of what they wear on red carpets and at other public appearances? 
They want to compete and I’m not saying it’s wrong. It’s good to dress well. If I’m walking on a red carpet I would be also wearing something decent, I just wouldn’t be very very conscious and going mad over what to wear. I guess for some there is an insecurity too as a result of which they feel they have to look good all the time. I just feel that once people have accepted you and like you, they like you the way you are. You just need to be right on screen. 

Your daughter is 12, an age at which today’s parents have to be vigilant about the use of gadgets and the Internet because of all the information out there. How are you handling that?
We’re trying our best. It’s very tough because they have access in school and at home, and there’s wi-fi everywhere. We have blocked a lot of things, we talk to her and – touchwood – she does understand what she should and should not be seeing but the fact is that at 12, today’s kids know as much as we knew when we were 25. You can’t change that. All you can do is explain to them what is right and wrong. You can’t sit on their heads for 24 hours looking at what they’re doing on their laptops, computers and telephones. So the best way is to talk it out. 
So is the key then to be the kind of parent they feel they can always speak to? 
Yes, and that’s what my daughter does. Even if she sees something stupid, she would come and tell me that she saw something by mistake or she went to the wrong site. She’s very sensible that ways. Talking really really helps. And talking not at the age of 12, you need to start at the age of five or six.
But in most Indian families, if a child told her parents that she ended up seeing something she knows her parents wouldn’t want her to see, parents would say “tumhe aisi cheezein nahin dekhni chahiye (you shouldn’t see such things)” and end the conversation. 
But you need to explain to them why. If any parent today thinks that at the age of 12 or 13 your child does not know what sex is and how they were born, they are just shutting their eyes to facts. Kids know everything these days so it’s better that before they come to know from outside in a different manner and in a negative manner, you talk it out with them. 
You have Twitter and Facebook accounts. How comfortable are you with the social media?

Not great. I try to do a little bit of whatever I can, but I’m not very active. 
Is that a reflection of the kind of person you are, who tends to want to keep to himself? 
Ya ya that is the kind of person I am. I do not like to share too much, I do not like to talk too much, I don’t have anything to say when I have nothing to say. (laughs)
When stars first started taking to Twitter and FB, many from the older generation felt the social media is killing stardom as we know it because it destroys the mystique once considered essential to stardom. What’s your take on that? 

I also somewhere believe in that. That is another reason why I maintain a distance. 
Do you absolutely have to be on the social media to be successful these days?
Not really. I don’t believe that. 
In that case, considering the kind of person you are, why are you making the effort at all? 
Some things are required for film promotions because film promotions have gone haywire. It’s also a means through which fan clubs can stay connected to you. Earlier there were letters and fan mail, but things have changed. So if you are on social media, it makes them happy. But I’m not there to say, “Okay I just had a shower and just now I’m out doing this and that.” You will see one tweet from me in 2-3 days. So for instance, if they all wished my son a happy birthday I was moved and I thanked them. 
Do you consider yourself tech-savvy?

Where technology about films is concerned, if you talk about CGI or how to operate a camera, I can beat anybody hands down. But where computers or other gadgets are concerned, I’ve never bothered. 
Why not? 
I have enough on my hands. So if there’s something that I don’t know how to do on my I-Pad, I ask my daughter, “Can you do this for me?” (laughs)
Do you learn more from your failures or successes?

Both. And from other people’s failures and successes. Sometimes a film has worked but you know there was something wrong with it, so you tell yourself it should not happen again. Every day you learn. Even when it comes to films for which I’ve got national awards or people have appreciated my work, I don’t want to watch myself. I feel like, what shit work I’ve done yaar, I could have done it better. So I get embarrassed. 

What did the box-office fate of Action Jackson (2014) and Himmatwala (2013) teach you?

To follow your heart. In the past, when on the first day of shooting I’ve realised a film is not going the way I thought it would, I have not stopped the film there itself because it harms the producers. I don’t know if I can do it in future, but I would like to. Because I do realise in the first one or two days whether the film is going to work or not. That’s also why I’ve become very wary. I’m done with these kinds of mediocre films, doing films for the sake of doing films. That’s why I’m doing films like Shivaay, Parched and Drishyam. Now I’m doing films I really believe in and for which I don’t have to depend much on others.
But when you read the scripts of Action Jackson and Himmatwala were you convinced? 
With Himmatwala (a remake of the 1983 film of the same name starring Jeetendra and Sridevi) I was convinced in the sense that Once Upon A Time In Mumbaai (2010) had worked big time so I thought the director of Himmatwala (Sajid Khan) is going to the same zone. I thought he’s picking up the base from the original and he’s going to make it contemporary. But on the first day of shooting, looking at the way he asked me to perform and the way he put up the set, I was like, “Why are you doing this?” and he said, “Let people see what was made in the ’80s” and I was like, “Okay we’re screwed ya.” I won’t blame anybody much for Action Jackson because just as we were about to start shooting we came to know that our script completely resembles Dhoom 3 which was about to release in the next three months. So I delayed the film by a month, they started reworking the script, I still wasn’t happy but the set was put up and it was costing money to the producer, so I went ahead and did it. There I wouldn’t blame Prabhu (director Prabhudheva). 
What about the fact that he made you dance a lot in Action Jackson? 

I kept telling him that people do not expect this of me, but he had this issue that “Okay I want to show the world that I can make you dance”. (laughs) 
Is it just that people don’t want to see you dancing or that dancing is not your strength?

It is not my strength. I also got a lot of flak for Rascals(2011) from people who told me very nicely: “Look, we don’t expect vulgarity from you. We like to see you in films like Gangaajal (2003), Singham(2011) or clean comedies like Golmaal (2006). We connect with you not as a star but as a person who’s just right on screen.” That was when I decided not do anything vulgar or which kids can’t watch. That is also when I realised that I should not try to be somebody else, I should be me because that is what people like. That’s where I knew an Action Jackson was going wrong because I knew people don’t like to see me dancing, they would like to see me doing what I’m good at. So now I follow that. That’s why I did Drishyam.  
You seem to have great clarity about your strengths and weaknesses. Where does that come from?
From being honest to yourself? 
When you are a big star, do you not get surrounded by people who are…
I never let them. My second line after “from being honest to yourself” was going to be, and from knowing why people are around you. You should know why people are around you, what they want and why. If you are sensible enough to know what is not working but they’re saying it’s working, that means they’re lying to you. You should know who are the right people and who are the wrong people. I think I know. I have a lot of people around me who are very honest and critical about what I do. They don’t have to bother if I’ll feel bad or good. If you see me on film sets, I would be sitting alone, I wouldn’t have 20 people surrounding me and chatting because I don’t have time for that. If the shot is done and I have time, I go to my van and do my own thing. From the beginning I’ve been very grounded that way. I give my father (action director Veeru Devgan) the credit for this, because when I’ve visited him I used to go on the sets and I’ve seen all this happening to other stars. I understood from my father, so I’ve never let that happen to me. 
So one of the rules of stardom for you is no sycophants, no chamchas?
Ya. That is how it has always been. 
Give me more rules of stardom from your book. 
(Long pause) I don’t know. I don’t even think of myself as a star. I mean I just get up and go for work, as insecure as anybody else.
Maybe that’s one of the rules?
Ya, maybe that’s one of the rules. Even today, after 25 years of being in films, before giving a shot I don’t know if I’ll be able to pull it off. That insecurity helps you to grow. 
And? 
And always be aware of what is happening in the world around you. That too will help you to grow, and to know when you’re being fooled and when you’re not. 
(A shorter version of this interview by Anna MM Vetticad appeared in the November 2015 issue of Maxim magazine)
Photographs courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/AjayDevgn/ 
Note: These photographs were not published in Maxim 

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REVIEW 364: CHALK N DUSTER

January 15, 2016, 4:51 am
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Release date:
January 15, 2015
Director:
Jayant Gilatar
Cast:




Language:
Shabana Azmi, Juhi Chawla, Divya Dutta, Sameer Soni, Aarya Babbar, Girish Karnad, Richa Chadha, Zarina Wahab, Jackie Shroff, Cameo: Rishi Kapoor.
Hindi


When a film’s centrepiece is a nationally televised quiz contest, you would expect it to be finicky about facts. Researchers and academics will hopefully verify the answers provided in that in-film contest, but before it rolled around I had already lost faith in Chalk N Dusterafter a scene in which one character insists on speaking Hindi, saying, “Hindi hamari rashtrabhasha hai (Hindi is our national language)”. Err… False! India does not have a “rashtrabhasha”. 

How can you make a film on education without doing your homework?

This faux pas is not the only problem with Chalk N Duster (CND), which has its heart in the right place but is pulled down by its mediocrity and its blinkered, uni-dimensional vision.

CND is set in a private school where a bunch of sweet people devote their lives to their students. The teachers are all uniformly good – some almost saintly – human beings. No mention is made here of teachers who are lazy, apathetic or deliberately teach badly in school so that children are compelled to hire them as private tutors. No mention is made either of monsters who dangle kids by their pigtails, bang little girls’ heads on walls and victimise students they dislike.

It is not this review’s contention that good teachers like the ones in this film do not exist. They do. Sadly, they are not in a majority. In fact, the outstanding ones – sincere, diligent, intelligent, kind, skilled, effective like Vidya Sawant of Chalk N Duster– are definitely in a minority.


If this was a film only about one particular teacher, a paean to its protagonist would have been acceptable. But CND positions itself as a thesis on the education system, and in its black-and-white worldview, all teachers are flawless, no questions asked, no arguments brooked, full stop.

The story is of Vidya (Shabana Azmi) and her young colleague Jyoti Thakur (Juhi Chawla) at Kantaben High School, Mumbai. Enter: Cruella de Vil. Kamini Gupta (Divya Dutta), the new principal, sets out to make Kantaben sought after among the city’s rich and famous. Towards this end, rather than firing the present employees, she harasses them in the hope that they will choose to quit. The film is about how Jyoti rises in protest when a gross injustice is meted out to Vidya.

Despite the ham-handed writing, Shabana and Juhi lend some emotional resonance to Chalk N Duster with their innate acting abilities and warm on-screen chemistry. Sadly, their endearing younger-woman-older-woman friendship is overshadowed by the film’s all-pervasive ineptitude.

So keen is CND on its no-teacher-can-be-faulted line that it slams Kantaben’s administration when it pulls up a teacher for being just four minutes late, but later hints at her being a habitual late-comer. Is it wrong to demand punctuality from teachers? What does that even mean?

CND is particularly amusing in its stereotyping of Kamini. The evil witch without any redeeming qualities is a single woman. She says “main bhi akeli hoon” in a discussion about a widowed teacher and her son, but with no specifics offered and no child in sight, one is left to assume she is one of those things our films still seem to consider so dreadful in women: a spinster or worse, a divorcee, and a childless one at that. She is the only woman with short hair among the main characters and in one close-up of her head, we see that she even colours it red. I was almost expecting the director to round off the cliché by showing her smoking, drinking and sleeping with her boss ’cos, you know, in the world according to Bollywood that’s what ‘bad girls’ do.


Her singleton status is sought to be emphasised by Vidya and Jyoti’s loving relationships with their supportive spouses, played by the very likeable Girish Karnad and Sameer Soni. How often does a Hindi film show a husband apologising to his wife for a mistake? That too happens here.

Unfortunately for CND, these two couples are not its focal point, India’s education system is, and in that discussion, it suffers from an absolute lack of nuance. Jyoti is right when she speaks of the low salaries teachers are paid in India, but other troublesome questions are left out. How, for instance, does it impact the profession when women are encouraged to be teachers not because of their own inclinations but because “yeh ladkiyon ke liye sabse acchha profession hai (it’s the best profession for girls)” since teachers’ timings and holidays coincide with their children’s timings and holidays, and they tend to be back home before their husbands? Do most men who like teaching veer towards universities because of the better pay, considering that they are expected to be their family’s primary, if not sole, breadwinners? Does this not deprive schools of many able men who might otherwise have opted to be schoolteachers?

Too much else is wrong – silly, actually – with Chalk N Duster. Such as that tacky, awkwardly choreographed song BODMAS. Jackie Shroff hamming the part of a rival school owner is a poor caricature of himself. The bright spark in the supporting cast is the immensely dignified Zarina Wahab as Kantaben’s ousted principal Shastri. The casteist stereotyping intrinsic to the choice of surnames for the two principals is inescapable though.

It is a mark of Bollywood’s extreme gender bias that the likes of Shabana and Juhi must, more often than not, compromise on quality if they wish to play heroines. These remarkable women deserve better than this clumsy, even if well-meaning, film. So does the teaching profession.

Rating (out of five): **

CBFC Rating (India):

U
Running time:
131 minutes 

This review has also been published on firstpost:
http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/chalk-n-duster-review-the-endearing-juhi-shabana-relationship-is-overshadowed-by-the-films-flaws-2585898.html

Photographs and trailers courtesy: Sony Pictures India
Trailer 1:https://youtu.be/FtcubOnXgZk
Trailer 2:https://youtu.be/p9TGagd542Y


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REVIEW 365: AIRLIFT

January 24, 2016, 1:21 am
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Release date:
January 22, 2015
Director:
Raja Krishna Menon
Cast:



Language:
Akshay Kumar, Nimrat Kaur, Purab Kohli, Kumud Mishra, Prakash Belawadi, Feryna Wazheir, Inaamulhaq
Hindi


Airlift is Argowith a split personality, songs and questionable fidelity to facts.

Raja Krishna Menon’s film is loosely based on the true story of how Indians were evacuated from Kuwait after the Iraqi invasion in 1990. When the going is good, the film is very good, but it is intermittently confusing, as though two directors made it: the first one understood that this subject required realistic treatment slightly removed from the conventional Bollywood film; the second entered the picture after it was completed and spoilt the tone in places by adding loud songs, needlessly heightened the pitch of the romance between the hero and his wife, and ended with a splash of stretched-out, flag-waving patriotism.

These add-ons qualitatively diminish an otherwise well-handled film that is unusual on the Bollywood firmament, the sort rarely headlined by a star of Akshay Kumar’s stature in this industry. Our hypothetical Director 2 should have respected the audience’s intellect a little more.

Airlift draws on an episode in our history that most other countries would have tomtommed from the rooftops if it had been their success story. Not so in India where filmmakers dread touching recent history because of the national penchant for bans and violence towards creative works we disagree with. According to a 2014 report on scroll.in, after Saddam Hussein’s forces overran Kuwait in August 1990, the Indian government evacuated “more than 110,000 citizens from Iraq and Kuwait via an airlift that included nearly 500 flights. The operation is the largest civilian evacuation in history… Eventually, Air India would fly 488 flights over 59 days, carrying 111,711 passengers”. The film puts it at 1.7 lakh Indians in a joint operation between Air India, Indian Airlines and the Indian Air Force in coordination with – and this is the film’s big flaw – a single fictional Indian bureaucrat and a single fictional Kuwait-based Indian.

For the most part, Airlift is a focused, no-nonsense narrative. Imagine a life of wealth and comfort being destroyed in one day because a foreign army invades the foreign country you have chosen to call home. That’s what happens to Ranjit Katiyal (Akshay), a construction tycoon living with his wife Amrita (Nimrat Kaur) and little daughter in Kuwait when Saddam’s forces drive into the streets, bombing buildings and randomly firing their weapons.

We discover early on that money is Ranjit’s preferred language, that he views India with disdain and calls himself a Kuwaiti. He is not, however, a superficial or entirely cold-hearted character as a more formulaic writer might have made him out to be – he may be a tough-as-nails businessman who barely knows his company’s employees, but he dotes on Amrita and their kid and has a warm equation with his driver Nair. At some point, he becomes the moving force behind the effort to get all his fellow Indians out of Kuwait.

The dominant tone of Airlift is realistic, and that’s what makes it work. Ranjit and Amrita are believable characters. His transformation from a me-centric chap to a fellow caring for strangers does not come through a melodramatic turning point. We just witness a natural, convincing progression towards that person. Amrita’s initial cynicism about his newly discovered heroism could have been used to paint a stereotype of the wicked witch of the marital world, the evil wife holding back a golden-hearted man, but the film gives her too shades of grey.

Equally subtle is Airlift’s take on NRIs. They are not all Mr Bharats from the Manoj Kumar School of Hyper-Nationalism, nor are they exaggerated, hyper-westernised cardboard cut-outs of the kind Saira Banu played opposite him in Purab aur Pachhim(1970). These are real Indians, rich, poor and middle-class, that you will actually bump into in the Middle East.  

Akshay delivers a controlled performance for the most part. When he does raise his pitch it is in those over-stated moments which are a departure from the film’s otherwise under-stated nature. Such as that song at the opening party or that scene in which Ranjit suddenly acquires a vintage Akshay Kumar swagger before breaking into Bhangra with a horde of desison getting their first bit of good news about a possible evacuation.

Uff.

Nimrat is excellent, keeping herself in check even when the director has Amrita gazing at Ranjit in loverly fashion while walking in slow motion with a lurve song playing in the background.

Compensation comes in the form of their on-screen compatibility and Akshay’s hotness in a beard. After SRK in Dilwale last month, it is such a pleasure once again to see a senior male star acknowledging his age with visible lines and gray hairs showing on his face. Akshay in Airlift even briefly takes off his shirt to uncharacteristically reveal a thick mop on his chest – and whaddyaknow, it’s salt ‘n’ pepper. There is a time and a place and a certain kind of film for flashing muscles and a smooth, nicely shaven chest; this film is not that place.

Mind you, Akshay is still acting with a woman 15 years his junior, but going by Bollywood’s standards of sexist ageism, it is a small mercy that that figure is not 20 or 25. Equally a relief is that this fantastic actress from The Lunchbox has not been relegated to the sidelines as Akshay’sheroines usually are. Nimrat’s is certainly not an equal role to his (when will that day come, Mr Kumar?) but it is substantial and significant.

In a film filled with interesting satellite actors and interesting characters, Inaamulhaq sticks out like a sore thumb playing an Iraqi major. This is an artiste who was so memorable as a Pakistani smuggler of pirated Hindi film CDs in 2014’s Filmistaan. In Airlift though, his character is one-dimensional, his acting caricaturish.

The stand-out performance among the supporting cast comes from Purab Kohli as Ibrahim, a man desperate to find the bride he lost in the melee of the war. He is restrained, intense, likeable and – this I have not thought of him so far – sexy. What is it with some men and beards?

Kumud Mishra too leaves a lasting impression as Sanjeev Kohli, an initially indifferent Joint Secretary in the Ministry of External Affairs who later becomes Ranjit’s greatest ally in India.

The treatment of characters like Kohli is Airlift’s strength – the film’s babus and refugees are at no point tarred with one brush, either as saints or simpering idiots or satan.

Airlift is somewhat ungracious though towards the actual characters in the real-life drama that took place in 1990. The then Foreign Minister in the United Front government, I.K. Gujral, had received a lot of flakfor a meeting he held with Saddam after the invasion of Kuwait which culminated in that now infamous photograph of a hug between the two leaders. Politics and diplomacy are always tricky ground and while Saddam’s actions were no doubt condemnable, the fact is that Gujral’s visit paved the way for the evacuation detailed in Airlift. The film, however, shows a minister involved expressing helplessness due to his government’s instability. This injustice to the Central Government of the time is inexplicable.

There is also the question of why Airlift does not model its protagonist/s specifically on one of the actual people in that entire episode. Those mentioned in various articles include M.P. Mascarenhas described by scroll.in as the person who “organised the operation, as the airline’s (Air India’s) regional director in the Gulf & Middle East”. The text on screen at the end of the film mentions a couple of individuals involved, namely a “Mathunny Matthews” and a “Vedi” (that’s right, not even the courtesy of a full name given) without explaining who they were or what exactly they did at the time. Why create a fiction when you could bow to real-life heroes? Why conjure up a name if theirs could have been used? Could it be because a Ranjit Katiyal is who Akshay can play; or because the normative Indian in Bollywood’s eyes is a dashing, upper-class, upper-caste, Punjabi Hindu male, the rest – women included – being exceptions?

This would have been a better film if it had been fairer to the people whose story it was telling.

Still, with all its flaws, Airlift is head and shoulders, eyebrows and hairline above the last film in which Akshay ventured into India’s foreign affairs, the amateurishly written Baby. This one manages to build up a sense of urgency around the evacuation effort, gets us to feel for its characters and reminds us that the worst of times can bring out the best in ordinary folk. It would be great to see Akshay backing more films like Airlift and Special 26(2013). This is the best that he has ever been.

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

CBFC Rating (India):

U/A
Running time:
125 minutes 

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/airlift-review-this-is-akshay-kumars-best-ever-but-the-film-hasnt-been-fair-to-the-real-life-heroes-2596696.html

Poster courtesy: Sterling Media


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REVIEW 366: KYAA KOOL HAIN HUM 3

January 24, 2016, 2:03 am
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Release date:
January 22, 2015
Director:
Umesh Ghadge
Cast:







Language:
Tusshar Kapoor, Aftab Shivdasani, Krishna Abhishek, Claudia Ciesla, Gizele Thakral, Mandana Karimi, Shakti Kapoor, Meghna Naidu, Darshan Jariwala, Sushmita Mukherjee, Guest appearances: Riteish Deshmukh and Gauhar Khan
Hindi


Kyaa Kool Hain Hum 3 should inspire the Censor Board to introduce a new rating to the existing lot: J for Juvenile. Seriously, A for Adults Only is an insult to all those over-18s in this country with an iota of maturity and common sense.

Tusshar Kapoor and Aftab Shivdasani play buddies Kanhaiyya and Rocky in this, the third in the Kyaa Kool series. Kanhaiyya, son of industrialist P.K. Lele (Shakti Kapoor), is thrown out by his Dad for messing up at work. His quirk, since everyone must perforce have an identifying quirk in such films, is that his eyeballs get locked whenever he sees the colour red, giving him the appearance of a squint. Rocky is… well no one really bothers to tell us anything about him beyond the fact that he is Kanhaiyya’s friend.

The two take off for Bangkok where Rocky says a certain Mickey (Krishna Abhishek) has offered them a “hand job” in his business. Slip-up alert! He meant to say “a job which requires us to lend him a hand in his business”. So clever, na?

When the boys land in Thailand, they realise their friend is a producer of, ahem, adult films although he insists he is not doing “porn ka kaam” but “punya ka kaam” (applause again, please!) since his earnings are pumped into considerable philanthropic work. The residents of Mickey’s palatial home-cum-studio include a transgender actor, another who is gay and perennially semi-nude, a method actress who gets so engrossed in her roles that even her normal off-screen conversations are conducted in gasps and moans (Gizele Thakral) and another (Claudia Ciesla) who keeps going off into a trance to feel up her own body.

The setting and the latter two characters in particular have the potential for a rip-roaring laughathon. Besides, Krishna has good comic timing and KKHH3 reveals a funny bone in the Polish-German model-actress Claudia, whose calling cards in India right now are the ‘item’ number Balma in 2012’s Akshay Kumar-starrer Khiladi 786 and her appearance on Season 3 of the reality show Bigg Boss. Sadly, the writer-director team of KKHH3 loses the plot even before they’ve laid it out, recycling clichés and taking it for granted that nonsense cannot be intelligent, that rhyming words are somehow funny and that repetition is in itself a joke.

So a female porn star is known as Mary/Meri Lee, the surname Lele becomes a predictable source of merriment, a man mistakes his own foot in bed for an erection (How? Could he not feel his own body?) while another refers to a buxom woman as “boobsurat”. Yawn. Think of something new, people. Then there are meaningless inside jokes playing on the words “masti” and “grand masti” (you know, the titles of those films featuring Aftab and guest star Riteish Deshmukh). Yawn. And of course there are self-referential wisecracks about “ekta” (unity). Yawn, yawn. How often will we hear that in a film produced by Ekta Kapoor?

No doubt Ekta and her colleagues will argue, as they always do, especially if a film goes on to earn big money at the box office, that critics are too serious and incapable of enjoying comedy. Nonsense! Heard of Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Sai Paranjpye, Golmaal, Chupke Chupke, Chashme Buddoor, Yes Minister,Yes Prime Minister, stand-up comedy, Pushpaka Vimana, Kamal Haasan, Govinda, David Dhawan at his best,Anil Kapoor, Sridevi, Madhuri Dixit, Mrs Doubtfire, Robin Williams, Billy Crystal, Ellen DeGeneres, Riteish when he is not giving himself short shrift, Seinfeld, Friends, Two Broke Girls, The Big Bang Theory,Mohanlal, Jagadeesh, Jay Leno, John Oliver, Jimmy Kimmel, Aisi Taisi Democracy, Poochakkoru Mookkuthi, Priyadarshan, Paresh Rawal…you really want a longer list? May I confess too that I thoroughly enjoy Anees Bazmee and Rohit Shetty when they are not taking us for granted?

No doubt too we will be told, as we always are, that this is what the public wants. Well, this member of the public would humbly submit that it is possible to be light-hearted, ludicrous and downright stupid to let your hair down, without being infantile.

Even within this series, the first Kyaa Kool Hain Hum (2005) was fun because there was a freshness to it, an impertinence that cocked a snook at ultra-conservatives, even if it pandered to those very conservatives with its many stereotypes,. The follow-up film, Kyaa Super Kool Hain Hum, was boring, offensive and icky. KKHH3 is not even trying. Maybe it’s our fault that, as an audience, we made its predecessors hits. As with politicians and the media, so it is with cinema – I guess we get the films we deserve. What next? Kya Super Stupid Hain Hum?

Rating (out of five): ½ star

CBFC Rating (India):

A
Running time:
125 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:
http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/kyaa-kool-hain-hum-3-review-this-film-doesnt-even-try-but-maybe-its-our-fault-for-watching-its-prequels-and-making-them-hits-2596968.html

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyaa_Kool_Hain_Hum_3

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REVIEW 367: MASTIZAADE

January 28, 2016, 11:25 am
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Release date:
January 29, 2015
Director:
Milap Milan Zaveri
Cast:




Language:
Sunny Leone, Vir Das, Tusshar Kapoor, Asrani, Shaad Randhawa, Suresh Menon, Sushmita Mukherjee, Guest appearances: Riteish Deshmukh, Gizele Thakral
Hindi


I spent much ofmy morningstruggling to distinguish between Mastizaade and last week’s release,Kyaa Kool Hain Hum 3. This is not a comment on the genre (both are what are called “adult comedies” by those who have a low opinion of human adults). No, this is a comment on the carbon copying of content and lazy casting. Here’s a sampler:

KKHH3 featured Tusshar Kapoor as one of its two male leads. Mastizaade too has two heroes of which one is played by – let’s chant the name together – Tusshar Kapoor.

In KKHH3, Tussh was called Kanhaiyya Lele, a surname that is meant to be funny to practitioners of Hindi slang. In Mastizaade, Sunny Leone plays twins Lily and Laila – wait for it, wait for it, wait for it – Lele!

KKHH3 had a cameo by Riteish Deshmukh. Mastizaade has a cameo by Riteish Deshmukh.

KKHH3 included gags using the words “masti” and “grand masti” as an ode to the titles of the film series starring Riteish. One of Mastizaade’s heroes describes Riteish’s character as a chap with whom they have done a lot of “grand masti”.

Sushmita Mukherjee – best known to Hindi screen audiences as Kitty from the old Karamchand TV shows – was a horny elderly woman in KKHH3. In Mastizaade she is an elderly sex addict.

Starling Gizele Thakral had a supporting role as a porn star with a breath-laden style of speaking in KKHH3. In Mastizaade she has a guest appearance as a busty banker with a breathy voice. Her make-up artist’s pride in her handbag-sized, pursed-up lips is evident in both films.

Hoo boy, I just dozed off making that list for you.

As it happens, KKHH3 and Mastizaade are both written by the same team: Milap Zaveri and Mushtaq Sheikh. Milap has also directed this film. It takes a special kind of courage to lift your own ideas, recycle them and spit them out at the audience within a span of just one week.

To be fair, their wandering eyes have not spared their colleagues’ works either. Mastizaade is filled with situations and character traits familiar from numerous other raunchy Bollywood comedies of the past two decades, right down to a scene in which Tusshar and Vir Das are spotted in an awkward position where they appear to be – but are not – boinking each other and a horse. Remember the man with the mannequin in the first Kyaa Kool Hain Hum film?

In short, you can see most of this film’s jokes coming from a mile away. Oh… I said “coming”. Giggle giggle.

So anyway, Mastizaade is about two sex-crazed men called Sunny Kele (Tusshar) and Aditya Chothia (Vir Das) – yeah yeah, we get it, we’re supposed to notice the names. During the course of their perennial search for action, they meet and fall in love with Lily and Laila. Lily wears saris, big glasses and has a stammer (because, you know, speech defects are so amusing, no?) while Laila wears tiny skirts and tops, does not wear glasses and does not stammer.

Two spokes in the wheel of true love appear in the form of Lily’s fiancé and Laila’s disinterest in matters of the heart. Sunny is shocked that Laila views him in precisely the way he has viewed every woman in his life so far: as a sex object. He wants more. He wants love. In the midst of all those boobs, butts and crotches, here is the element that could have made Mastizaadesomething more than a piece of assembly-line nonsense, but the writers barely graze this plot point a couple of times before moving on to their pre-kindergarten-level antics.

It is not that the film is an absolute zero. Mastizaade’s potential is evident from a scene in which both ladies decide to make their respective declarations of love for the heroes, and another in which Riteish as Baba Gasm mindf***s a bunch of female devotees. Besides, Vir and Riteish are blessed with the sort of comic timing and natural charm that help them occasionally rise above even terrible scripts like this one. Oh look… I said “rise”. Tee hee hee.

Sunny Leone, whose acting was disastrous in her first Bollywood outing, Jism 2, is clearly not a lost cause. In Mastizaade, we get glimpses of the comedian she might be some day in a film that is not as singularly focused on her humungous bosom as this one is.

Earlier this month, large sections of the media, the film-viewing public and even the film industry stood up for her when a senior journalist appeared to be moralising, during the course of an interview, about what he seemed to consider her shameful past as a porn star. His tone during that conversation was inexcusable, but it would be just as nice to see Sunny stand up for herself, and refuse to be reductively viewed as nothing more than a pair of very large breasts in a film.

There’s nothing wrong with artistic, aesthetic objectification. Cases in point: Michelangelo’s statue of David in Florence and Priyanka Chopra dancing to the song Ram chahe Leela in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Ram-leela. Mastizaade, on the other hand, objectifies Sunny and every other female character, in a dehumanising fashion. Your turn to speak up now, Sunny.

In case you are among those who do not mind misogyny or LGBT stereotyping (Suresh Menon plays a thoroughly over-the-top, caricaturish gay man in this film), you might still wonder why Mastizaade thought it fit to have the two heroes getting violent with a wheelchair-bound, paralysed man and flinging him down a flight of stairs.

Insensitivity is not Mastizaade’s only problem though. In fact, some people might consider this quality a film’s selling point. So no, Mastizaade’s problem is its absolute lack of originality and boring repetitiveness.

The characters in this story speak in rhyming sentences almost throughout. The double entendre seems to be drawn from pubescent schoolboys just beginning to discover the female mammary glands and cursed with particularly low IQs. Besides, what can you say about a film that has not one, but several women and a man drooling over Tusshar Kapoor, with Sunny’s Laila Lele even describing him as “hot”? Come to think of it – that is a pretty original thought. Good one, Team Mastizaade!

Rating (out of five stars): ½ star 

CBFC Rating (India):

A
Running time:
108 minutes 

This review has also been published on Firstpost:
http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/mastizaade-review-vulgarity-isnt-the-biggest-problem-in-this-sunny-leone-film-lack-of-originality-is-2603862.html

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastizaade
Film still:https://www.facebook.com/MastizaadeFilm/

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REVIEW 368: SAALA KHADOOS

January 28, 2016, 11:30 am
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Release date:
January 29, 2015
Director:
Sudha Kongara
Cast:


Language:
R. Madhavan, Ritika Singh, Mumtaz Sorcar, Nassar, Zakir Hussain, M.K. Raina, Baljinder Kaur, Kaali Venkat
Hindi



The rise of the underdog is a favourite theme in sports films. Yet, Saala Khadoos manages to tell us something more than we thought we already knew.    

R. Madhavan here plays Adi Tomar, an ill-tempered retired boxer whose career in the ring was ruined when his corrupt coach conspired to end it. Now a coach himself, he discovers a cantankerous young fish seller from the slums of Chennai and sees in her a potential world champion. Ezhil Madhi (debutant Ritika Singh) is destined for greatness, but to get there she must first overcome her extreme poverty, an alcoholic father, family tensions, her own foul temperament, her self-destructive impetuosity, politics in Indian sports and sexual harassment.

Saala Khadoos is a Hindi first for director Sudha Kongara who made her screenwriting debut with the National Award-winning English film Mitr, My Friend (2002). This latest venture was shot simultaneously in Tamil as Irudhi Suttru.

Half her battle for this film has been won with the casting. Ritika is a professional kickboxer, which explains why her scenes in the ring seem so effortless here. She is also a natural before the camera, and – this is especially disarming – not obviously conscious of her sweet face.

Ritika is not the only one who looks like a real person rather than an actor in the film. Mumtaz Sorcar playing Madhi’s elder sister Luxmi, Baljinder Kaur and Kaali Venkat as her messed-up parents from a mixed marriage all appear as if they were plucked out of a Chennai shanty and planted in Saala Khadoos.

Leading them ably in a role far removed from the wimp he plays in the Tanu Weds Manu films is Madhavan. Adi is constantly on edge when he is not in the midst of a self-induced explosion and Maddy plays him just right. His frustration, bitterness, irritability and anger come across as believable at all times, rather than exaggerated for effect.

Besides, he looks incredibly cute with that beard and fluffy, wild hairdo, which is quite an achievement considering that he is the bloody groucho of the film’s title.

Among the high-profile supporting players are Nassar as junior coach Pandian in Chennai who has a love-hate relationship with Adi, M.K. Raina as Adi’s supportive senior back in Delhi and Zakir Hussain as Dev Khatri, the predator who authored our hero’s exit from the ring and is now targeting Madhi. The veterans ace their roles in a film brimming over with talent.

In terms of performances then, the natural progression of events in the sporting arena, the execution of its boxing scenes, production design and locations, Saala Khadoos has an authentic feel to it. It falters on other fronts though. The film could have done without so many songs. The volume of those numbers and, in places, the background score should have been lowered. And the romantic angle, needless as it is, required better handling.

In a country where mainstream cinema is populated with heroes who have been known to play screen teens when they’re in their 30s and 40s, where Madhavan himself at the age of about 38 played a college kid in 3 Idiots, no doubt it is a pleasure to hear Adi tell Madhi, “Main tere baap ki umar ka hoon,” when she professes her love for him in her typical rough-hewn fashion. The film would have been served better if that element had not been introduced in the first place though, or having brought up the point, if the story had at least just left it at that.

Some of the beauty in Chak De! India (2007) – one of the best Hindi sports films ever made – came from its absolute clarity that hockey coach Kabir Khan (Shah Rukh Khan) does not get romantically involved with players Preeti Sabharwal (Sagarika Ghatge) and Vidya Sharma (Vidya Malvade) at least as long as we are with them on screen. After all, every male and female lead do not necessarily have to fall for each other, and it was such a joy to see a film acknowledge that two people of the opposite sex can be something to each other other than lovers. Saala Khadoosleaves most things unsaid on that front in its finale, but even the hint of things to come dilutes the story it is trying to tell.

And a crucial story this is. The insidious manner in which officials pursue their personal agendas through India’s sporting federations is widely known yet more shocking with each telling. The story of a player-coach team blossoming amidst institutional muck, Saala Khadoos rises above the ordinary with its detailing, including the turns in Madhi’s relationship with her sister, the scenes with her parents, Dev Khatri’s chilling shenanigans and the vulnerability of women in particular in this exploitative system. The film’s many impactful satellite characters stay on in the memory even as Madhi throws her last, very very satisfying, well-aimed punch.

So yes, it needed to tone down its pitch in places and stay more focused, but there is so much to recommend Saala Khadoos. The fact that it is a sports film is reason enough to pop open the champagne since the genre is too rarely visited in Hindi cinema. As with most such films, the final outcome in the ring is not hard to predict here. The journey to that moment though is emotionally engaging and, after a point, nerve-wracking enough to draw cheers of delight. Adi and Madhi are worth investing in. That’s what makes this film worth watching.

Rating (out of five stars): ***

CBFC Rating (India):

UA
Running time:
109 minutes

Hindi poster courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/UTVMotionPictures/
Tamil poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irudhi_Suttru


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FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION AND THE RIGHT TO DISS HOLY COWS / COLUMN PUBLISHED IN THE HINDU BUSINESSLINE

January 30, 2016, 11:04 pm
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THE RIGHT TO OFFEND

Unless we agree that freedom of expression must include the right to offend, our society will continue to routinely bow to bigots and punish artists

By Anna MM Vetticad



January has been tough on lovers of the arts. As the first month of the new year draws to a close, fans worldwide are still mourning the loss of David Bowie, Alan Rickman and Glenn Frey in quick succession. These legends were admired in India too, but we here have our own personal losses to mourn: among them, Rajesh Vivek, Mrinalini Sarabhai, Kalpana, and — the most heartbreaking of them all — the death of common sense and a sense of humour.

Though the connection is not obvious, Mumbai-based comedian Kiku Sharda’s recent arrest came to mind as I read a moving tribute to Rickman in The Guardian. It cited this quote from the late thespian: “Actors are agents of change. A film, a piece of theatre, a piece of music, or a book can make a difference. It can change the world.”

Contrast this with Sharda’s obsequious apologies to those offended by his mimicry of the Dera Sacha Sauda (DSS) chief, a man who calls himself Saint Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh Ji Insan. DSS has been variously described as a spiritual organisation, a cult and a racket. Insan co-directed, wrote and starred in a horrendous ode to himself called MSG: The Messenger in 2015. MSG2 too came out last year. It is while lampooning these lampoon-worthy films and Insan that Sharda allegedly caused “outrage” to “religious feelings” (quote marks indicate the language of the IPC’s Section 295A).

We have long been a nation of nutcases in the matter of freedom of expression. What makes Sharda’s arrest arguably the final nail in the coffin of free speech is the sub-abysmal quality of the entity he derided.

Seriously, anyone who has seen the MSG films could be forgiven for assuming that the ‘Saint’ was begging to be mocked by comedians, cartoonists, critics and the citizenry at large. How else is one to react to a ‘guru’ who encases his stocky frame in multiple multi-coloured, sequined, flashy, body-hair-baring outfits on screen? How is one to respond when he sings the words, ‘Without you any other, never never…/ Forever you are my heartbeat/ Another name is beat my heart, never never’?

The argument parroted in all such cases is that freedom of expression cannot extend to the right to “hurt religious feelings”. But what does that phrase mean? Who, for instance, decides a legitimate measure of “hurt”?

Earlier this month, I was on a television debate about the Sabarimala shrine’s practice of keeping out women in the 10-50 age group. A representative of the holy place held that opponents of the tradition are trampling upon religious freedom. The same point was made this week about women’s protests against being barred from the Shani Shingnapur temple in Maharashtra’s Ahmednagar district. The “hurting religious sentiments” contention in the Kiku Sharda-‘Saint’ Insan incident could well be extended to feminists criticising Sabarimala and Shani Shingnapur. Question: does my freedom of expression end where your freedom of religion begins?

Please note that this column is not advocating free speech absolutism. Clearly, civilised discourse requires reasonable restrictions. Since this debate is being dragged down the gutter of low intellect by right-wingers, it is best to spell out the exceptions in black and white: critiques are fine, abuse is not, so you may say “X indulges in sensationalist journalism” but not “Journalist X is a ****ing bitch who should be raped” (this is a sample from Twitter); deliberate falsehoods are unacceptable; so is rumour-mongering (of the kind we saw when mischievous SMSes were circulated in 2012 about possible violent attacks by Muslims against people from the North-east in south India as revenge for the killings of Muslims in Myanmar and Assam); also not allowed should be clearly identifiable threats of violence or calls to violence.

Beyond this, anyone objecting to the words of others should feel free to spread awareness about their objections through all available non-violent means. Write a blog, hold a seminar, sit on dharna in protest.

As a society we constantly bow to bigots and snub artists because we cannot agree on a point that should have been a given by now in 21st century India: that freedom of expression must include the right to offend. Because “offend”, “hurt”, “feelings”, “religious sentiments” and other such cliches are intangibles that can be put to dangerous use to stifle all inconvenient debate

If as liberals we do not dig our heels in on this matter, we will routinely find ourselves in situations like the present one, where a comedian is arrested for ridiculing one of the worst Hindi films in history, simply because the hero happens to be a guru to some.

We are already a society in which the Alan Rickmans among us — actors, directors, writers and other creative people who do not take lightly their power to influence — are abused, threatened, even killed when they act as “agents of change”.

You may be tempted to see this as a misplaced comparison since Kiku Sharda is no Alan Rickman, no Aamir Khan, Shah Rukh Khan, Salman Rushdie, MM Kalburgi or Govind Pansare either, and his show on ‘Saint’ Insan can by no yardstick be considered high art. It does not matter, because the mindset that seeks to suppress them all is the same: an attitude that certain issues, institutions and people are holy cows.

Freedom of expression has to include the right to diss all holy cows.

(This column was published in The Hindu Businessline on January 30, 2016)

Original link:
http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/watch/the-right-to-offend/article8163470.ece

Photo captions: (1) Kiku Sharda (2) & (3) Poster and still from the MSG films

Photographs courtesy:
(1)    https://www.facebook.com/Kiku-Sharda-928412420574926/
(2) & (3) https://www.facebook.com/MSGTheFilm/

Previous instalment of Film Fatale: She, He, Them and Us
http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/watch/she-he-them-and-us/article8000655.ece
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LGBT PORTRAYALS IN BOLLYWOOD / PUBLISHED IN MAXIM

February 2, 2016, 9:47 pm
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Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender & An Evolving Bollywood
By Anna MM Vetticad
(This article was originally published in Maxim magazine’s August 2014 edition)

“Oh, Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo?” For millions of Indian bibliophiles, these words conjure up images of a pretty Caucasian teen on a balcony, as a young man looks longingly at her from the courtyard below. Transpose that to an Indian setting and the latest visual etched in popular imagination is of Deepika Padukone, eyes sparkling with a new-born passion, while a muscular, moustachioed Ranveer Singh gazes up at her in Ram-leela (2013).
Now imagine another scenario. Imagine on that verandah a man being gazed upon by his male lover. Or the fellow below replaced by a woman. After all, Romeo and Juliet is not a metaphor for heterosexual love, but forbidden love. And is there a love more forbidden today than love between two people of the same sex?
Enter Ekta Kapoor. The news that she may produce a gay version of Romeo and Juliet elicits both curiosity and caution. Kapoor’s reputation as a flag-bearer of desi conservatism in melodramatic tele-soaps raises concerns about whether the film will spoof the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) community or be a progressive, thoughtful take on homosexual love. The fears are legitimate since Hindi movies at large have long responded to same-sex liaisons with sniggers or, perhaps at best, silence.
“A sensitive Hindi film where a gay person is not being marked out as gay, where gay people are treated like straight people, is rare,” says Sanjay Suri who co-produced director Onir’s landmark 2005 film, My Brother Nikhil, and starred in it as a gay swimmer with AIDS.
Sensitivity reared its head again this year with Abhishek Chaubey’s Dedh Ishqiya. Neither is it an issue-based film designed for a niche market, with homosexuality as the “issue,” nor does it mock its lesbian characters to tickle the audience. In fact, the indication of their sexual preference is so understated that India’s morality brigade — those who denounce same-sex love as a vice of the wild white West — probably didn’t notice.
“I was sure there would be no protests against Dedh Ishqiya,” says Chaubey, “because the kind of idiots who protect their sanskriti (culture) through protests over a film are the kind of idiots who will not even get that angle in this film.”
Rewind to the scene in which Khaalujaan (Naseeruddin Shah) and Babban (Arshad Warsi) are being held captive by Begum Para (Madhuri Dixit-Nene) and Muniya (Huma Qureshi). As the ladies play hopscotch, the camera quietly shifts to the wall where their shadows fall, and we watch as their game turns to frisky jostling before a fleeting moment when silhouettes intertwine.

In 1996, Deepa Mehta’s Fire had sparked off violence from agitated right-wing groups for its far more patent and protracted depiction of lesbianism. By telling an Indian story, Fire gave the discourse on same-sex love in India a new impetus, despite being an Indo-Canadian production by an NRI director. Hindi cinema, by then, had already delivered abundant LGBT portrayals — some overt, most covert, some sympathetic, some prejudiced, some well-fleshed-out, most not.
Anupam Kher played what was arguably mainstream Hindi cinema’s first openly gay man in living memory in 
Mast Kalandar (1991). Pinkoo’s screaming effeminacy, a clingy tendency towards straight men and their revulsion, made him a caricature, as was the norm. Yet, he also defied the norm by not being a minor player or a mere distraction from the main plotline, and by being frank about his obvious interest in men. In showing Pinkoo spurning a man who unabashedly pursues him, the screenplay also gave him agency and contradicted notions that all gay men are romantically desperate.
At one point in Mast Kalandar, an unexpected flash of IQ in the writing leads to some genuine — and layered — hilarity when Pinkoo sings a line from the song Aadmi hoon aadmi se pyaar karta hoon (I’m a man who loves men) from the 1970 Manoj Kumar-starrer Pehchan. The original, of course, was sung to exemplify an innocent villager’s love for humanity, not men in particular.
While most gay men in commercial cinema have been cartoonish like Pinkoo, at least some allusions to homosexuality have been amusing without being scornful. In Silsila (1981), a bathing scene featuring buddies Amit (Amitabh Bachchan) and Shekhar (Shashi Kapoor) added a sub-text to their relationship with humour. The two are showering together when Shekhar slyly chucks a bar of soap on the floor. Amit jocularly refuses to pick it up, prompting both to burst out laughing. Shekhar adds: “Remember in the hostel bathroom, too, no one wanted to pick up the soap?”
Romances between women have 
been less common in mainstream Hindi cinema. In 1983’s Razia Sultan, Razia (Hema Malini) is shown with her lady-in-waiting (Parveen Babi) who sings to her and draws a feather over their faces to hide a kiss, while two attendants exchange meaningful glances. The clandestine nature of the relationship and even its representation — and Razia’s possible bisexuality — are all illustrated by the fact that the song is about her male lover (Dharmendra) who she is visualising right then.
Hijras or transgender persons are the most neglected LGBT group in Hindi cinema. Over the years, they’ve occasionally appeared as entertaining asides in songs or other brief scenes. Mahesh Bhatt’s Tamanna (1997) is unusual for the centrality of its hijra character. So was the well-written part of Maharani, played by Sadashiv Amrapurkar in Sadak (1991). Though it was the principal villain’s character, it had a real-world edge, then a rarity.
Saleem Kidwai, co-editor with Ruth Vanita of the book Same-Sex Love In India, takes us back to his first memory of a Hindi film with an LGBT character. The black-and-white Manzil (1960) starred Mehmood as a paanwala who befriends the hero, Raju (Dev Anand). One day when Raju leaves the paan shop with a female admirer, the paanwala is singing “Jaao, hato, kaahe ko jhooti banao batiya.”“This is 
a disappointed man singing about his attraction for another man,” says Kidwai.
“Then, of course, there’s Dosti,” he adds. “It was the 1960s, I was entering my teens, and I could relate to those guys. I could see how a situation like that could have been sexual. These things are so coded that only people looking for those messages could have gotten them.” This is where we enter tricky territory. Dosti is the 1964 classic from Rajshri Productions, about a friendship between two physically challenged teenagers. Assuming that they were gay seems bizarre at one level. Besides, Rajshri is too conventional to countenance such non-conformism.
Yet, Dosti comes up repeatedly in conversations with chroniclers of Hindi cinema’s homosexual — or bisexual — history. So do most films based on the once-frequented dosti-yaarana formula: Sangam (1964) with Raj Kapoor and Rajendra Kumar, Anand (1971) and Namak Haram (1973), both starring Rajesh Khanna and Bachchan, Sholay (1975) with Bachchan-Dharmendra, and numerous others. You could see this interpretation as an over-reading of those films never intended by the writer, with all that searingly intense boy bonding merely proving mainstream Hindi cinema’s penchant for over-statement. The analysis could also be seen as emerging from a conservative school of thought that cannot fathom an intimate same-sex relationship sans a romance. Alternatively, you could see homo-erotic undertones as a possible logical explanation for those powerful (usually male) friendships involving utter devotion to a degree that goes beyond what’s accepted in the average non-romantic tie.
Vanita says: “I’ve shown these films to my students here (at the University of Montana, the US), and all of them commented on the fact that the men are singing romantic songs to each other like Diyejalte hai(from Namak Haram) and the songs from Dosti. If you played those songs without knowing that a man is singing to a man, it sounds like a man is singing to a woman. The way they look into each other’s eyes while singing, put food into each other’s mouths, all these gestures have meaning within the economy of cinema. My students say, and I agree, that in Hollywood you have the buddy movie but buddies don’t behave in this intense romantic way.” Vanita further cites songs featuring cross-dressing women as a cinematic device used to represent same-sex eroticism for the audience.
Not everyone takes kindly to such deconstruction. Saif Ali Khan was reportedly so enraged by LGBT rights activist Ashok Row Kavi’s take on the sparks and suggestive exchanges between him and Akshay Kumar in 1994’s Main Khiladi Tu Anari, that he reportedly went to Kavi’s home and hit him.
As you may have already gathered, this is an unending debate. For many present-generation cinema-gazers, though, the starting block for deliberations on LGBT films is megahit producer-director Karan Johar. An old-fashioned Kantaben’s suspicions of hanky-panky between Shah Rukh Khan and Saif on the sidelines of Johar’s 2003 production Kal Ho Naa Ho, preceded Dostana’scentral theme of straight men pretending to be gay in 2008, loosely inspired by the Hollywood comedy I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry. In 2012, Johar directed Student of the Year, starring Rishi Kapoor as a gay school principal.

These films have received both condemnation and commendations. The book, The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic, quotes National Award-winning filmmaker Onir slamming KJo without naming him. “It’s absolutely okay not to do films which have gay characters but 
at least don’t do the opposite where you harm your own community,” he says.
“As long as you’re making jokes where you are laughing along, fine, but if you’re laughing at all the time? Not funny... Very often, Hindi mainstream films have over-the-top trans-dressers as gay characters. The only representation is that, and you’re always laughing at. At the end of the day, the word that the audience goes back home with is ‘Ma ka whatever bigad gaya’... India as a society is not homophobic. You see men walking hand in hand all over the place. But now, suddenly, it’s ‘Oh dekh, Dostana ja raha hai.’ (See, there goes Dostana.)” The reference above is to Dostana’s song Mada laadla bigad gaya(Mother’s darling son has been spoilt).
Johar’s response is uncharacteristically acerbic: “Onir was born to be upset. He just wants to be upset all the time. If you want to be offended, you can be offended by the opening of an envelope. Dostana did more for the community than My Brother Nikhil. There are gay people who came out to their parents after Dostana. Yes, it has a light-hearted tone suited to commercial cinema, but it brought the discussion into the mainstream and many more people saw it than My Brother Nikhil, so I feel I’ve contributed tremendously.”
Dostana’s director, Tarun Mansukhani, adds: “Don’t people see that while John and Abhishek pretend to be gay in the film, they don’t play effeminate? I know I’ve to still stay on the borderline and say, ‘Let’s pretend they are gay’, so that audiences at least come in. Next step could be, ‘Maybe they’re actually gay. Who knows?’ But you can’t have that next step till you take the first.”
Support comes from unexpected quarters. Purab Kohli, who played the hero’s lover in My Brother Nikhil, laments the fact that commercial films use LGBT persons as comic relief, but also acknowledges: “It’s a light way of conveying a point. Dostana was funny, but at the same time one very important thing happened in it, which was Kirron Kher as the quintessential Indian mother, saying, ‘Hey, my son is gay and I’m okay with that.’ That’s bold for a commercial platform.” It’s only fair to also point out that even the over-the-top gay templates Johar sometimes uses are drawn with far more dignity than the LGBT caricatures in so many films, where limp-wristed, womanly men debase themselves to entertain.
Director Madhur Bhandarkar has featured at least one LGBT person in almost all his films. His marginal gay characters have been camp clichés, and the lesbian encounter in Heroine was terribly contrived. His 2008 film, Fashion, merits praise, though, for its delicate depiction of a lavender marriage (a male-female marriage in which at least one partner is not heterosexual, with the arrangement shielding the homosexual person in the relationship from social scrutiny). On the other hand, the heroine’s gay friend in Page 3 adhered to the social stereotype of gay men as sexual predators. So did the boy who seduced his female friend’s husband in the short film Johar contributed to the omnibus volume Bombay Talkies in 2013.
For a legally and socially ostracised people, is it better to be represented negatively or not at all? “Negative characters at least prompt a discussion,” says Kidwai. “Caricatures are not good, but if we wait for that perfect gay character to emerge, we’ll be waiting a long time. There’s a whole journey where lots of rubbish will be produced before a full-fledged gay character grows.”
Casting challenges are one reason for Hindi cinema’s LGBT caricatures. “Actors feel they can pass off caricatures as fun. But even smaller actors fear a serious gay role will spoil their image,” Bhandarkar explains.
“This just shows how little India has moved because even when I
 did BOMgAY, no actor was willing to take that part,” says actor Rahul Bose. BOMgAY is Riyad Vinci Wadia and Jangu Sethna’s 1996 short feature, believed to be India’s first gay film. More recently, Bose played a gay man going to extreme lengths to stay closeted in Onir’s I Am (2011).
Despite her background as a top commercial star, Juhi Chawla was liberal enough to play a gay man’s sister in My Brother Nikhil, and to co-produce I Am. Yet she frankly admits she’d hesitate to play
 a lesbian woman. “I’m a little shy of any kind of intimacy on screen,” she explains. Would she refuse even if there were no sex scene? “Perhaps. Because I cannot imagine having a relationship with a woman. It’s not natural for me. I don’t say it’s not natural for others. I accept it of others. I may say no because I can’t understand it and don’t know how to portray it.”
So when will mainstream Hindi cinema deliver leading and supporting LGBT characters played by major stars in commercial films, in which their gender and sexual orientation are not a source
 of jokes or the fulcrum of the plot? Not anytime soon, going by this assessment from actor Imran Khan, who starred in a satirical video in 2013 lampooning homophobia in India: “Hollywood is so open that in a film like Mean Girls, targeted at children, they have a gay character among the leads and they show that you should respect this person. Archie Comics recently introduced a gay character. If Tinkle were to introduce a gay protagonist, India would come to a standstill, politicians would shout that we are corrupting our youth, newsstands carrying it would be burnt down, the writer and artists would be killed. In the West, if a gay character is stereotyped, it is remarkable and people point fingers. For us, it’s remarkable if a gay character is treated fairly.”
This is not to say Hollywood does not stereotype. It does. But it offers sensitivity too, far more than Hindi cinema. Clearly then, a Brokeback Mountain from Mumbai, or a big-budget My Brother Nikhil produced by a moneyed studio, could be a while in coming. Small beginnings, though, have already been made.
Photographs courtesy:
(1)    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Brother…Nikhil
(2)    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dostana_(2008_film)
(3)    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_(1996_film)

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REVIEW 369: GHAYAL ONCE AGAIN

February 5, 2016, 7:22 am
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Release date:
February 5, 2015
Director:
Sunny Deol
Cast:






Language:
Sunny Deol, Narendra Jha, Tisca Chopra, Shivam Patil, Aanchal Munjal, Diana Khan, Rishabh Arora, Om Puri, Soha Ali Khan, Manoj Joshi, Nadira Babbar, Abhilash Kumar, Harsh Chhaya, Sachin Khedekar
Hindi

Ghayal Once Again marks the return of Sunny Deol as one of the best-remembered characters he has ever played on screen. Ajay Mehra from 1990’s Ghayal, directed by Rajkumar Santoshi, preceded the signature “dhai kilo ka haath” Sunny held up in court as a lawyer in Santoshi’s Damini (1993). These two films gave the actor the two National Awards of his career and were a source of much viewing pleasure, even to some among us with increasing reservations about flaring nostrils, red eyes and yelling in the midst of flying fists.

The sequel to Ghayal– directed by Sunny himself – seems to be the star’s effort to do a balancing act between an emerging audience with changing tastes and his own traditional following. It works for a considerable part of the film; but after a while it is neither here nor there and it all goes downhill.

The hero himself enters the frame 15 minutes into the proceedings, in a scene that is surprisingly low key in comparison with the many grand entries Sunny has made on screen in the past. When it is hinging itself on action alone, Ghayal 2 is effective, even when you cannot but be aware of the improbability of it all.

Sure there is silliness along the way, plenty of over-the-top action too, but it is nothing that we have not willingly swallowed in the past from Hollywood action adventures such as the MI, Die Hard, Indiana Jones and Bond series, all of which demand a suspension of disbelief from viewers. Admittedly too, there are spots of tackiness elsewhere, especially when the writers are trying too hard to be youthful and cool (such as a completely superfluous song and dance sequence involving the four kids at the centre of this story, or another where they hang out with the grandfather of one of them). Yet, not counting the needlessly extended ending where schmaltz is injected into what should have been some good old-fashioned, absurdly unapologetic dishum-dishum, Ghayal Once Again’s stunt sequences are fun.

In Ghayal, Ajay went on a rampage to execute a treacherous villain (Amrish Puri) for preying on his businessman brother (Raj Babbar). After the events of that film, he spent 14 years in jail and on his return, has been running a corruption-hunting media platform called Satyakam with the support of good-hearted souls he met in prison and a wide underground network of concerned citizens. The pivotal plot point of Ghayal 2 emerges when four students unknowingly shoot a video of a crime being committed by a powerful individual and decide to hand it over to Ajay.

The opening quarter hour of the film, which includes black-and-white flashbacks to the previous one, are deceptively calm. The chases that follow are nail-bitingly suspenseful, even though it makes no sense that not a single soul stops to help the children or Ajay, despite the latter’s evident popularity among the public. Besides, when blood-thirsty goons go on a rampage in a Mumbai mall, how on earth, in this day and age does it come about that not a single eye-witness manages to clandestinely shoot their violence and upload it somewhere?

No doubt police, politicians and a pliant or scared media have in real life colluded to cover upcrimes committed by influential individuals. Those though did not happen before the eyes of thousands of witnesses. The initial murder in the film occurs in a private space and is hidden in a believable fashion. That part of the screenplay is convincing. But the effort to abduct the children and to punish Ajay for helping them, are both done so publicly that the silence of the onlookers is ridiculous.

Really? Not one person steps forward? Not even a few seconds of the bloodletting surfaces on Youtube or any other online space? Not even one media house, not even a marginal off-mainstream platform or unknown blogger, has the courage to report these very openly conducted goings-on on the roads, malls and trains of Mumbai? Really?

It is a measure of the effectiveness of the film’s well-paced action choreography that these chase scenes manage to keep even a cynic on edge despite this.

The script’s bigger failing though is that it skims over too many characters without giving them enough flesh. The murderer had particular potential because of his lack of redeeming factors, but we get to know little about him beyond the fact that he is a spoilt brat. Of the quartet who set out to expose him, you may remember Aanchal Munjal as the young artiste who played Kajol and Arjun Rampal’s child in We Are Family (2010). She and Shivam Patil – Anushka and Rohan here – are worth watching out for.

The execution of Ajay’s relationships in Ghayal 2 are too reliant on fan affection for Sunny and nostalgia for the first Ghayal. Sunny’s acting too remains dated,with every emotion over-stated and over-done.

There is, however, another note-worthy dynamic at play here. It is interesting to see an omnipotent industrialist (Narendra Jha, nice) and his wife (Tisca Chopra) torn between their conscience and their natural parental instincts when they recognise the potential for evil in their offspring; a wealthy father’s arrogance tempered by paternal fears; a mother who is shocked at the wrongdoings being committed in her presence yet does not stop them; another (Nadira Babbar) who points out to her son that it is the job of a parent to cover up a child’s mistakes, not his crimes.

This and the film’s well-executed chases are dragged down by its stupid improbabilities, its lack of focus, too many loose ends and oh yes, those bad white extras. When one of them tells Sunny in the end to drop his gun and follows that up with a laboured, “Now we are going to beat you up with our bare hands,” I laughed out loud. It reminded me of cars reversing with twangy, recorded voices warning bystanders, “Attention please, this car is backing up.” What is it with Bollywood producers that they will hire a helicopter for a grand finale but will not spend on above-average Caucasian actors for incidental roles or invest in good writing?

The name of Ajay’s newspaper in this film is no doubt a bow to Dharmendra’s 1969 film Satyakam in which Deol Senior played an idealist struggling against a corrupt world. That classic deserved a better-thought-out tribute than this one.

Rating (out of five stars): **

CBFC Rating (India):

UA
Running time:
126 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:
http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/ghayal-once-again-review-sunny-deol-and-the-sequel-are-disappointing-and-dated-in-equal-measure-2614220.html

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


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THE annavetticadgoes2themovies AWARDS: BEST HINDI FILMS OF 2015

February 6, 2016, 10:56 pm
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Let’s get this out of the way first: Thank you for the gratifying rush of questions in response to my Best Indian Films list published earlier this month. The most common of the lot was, “When will you give us your Best Hindi / Telugu / Tamil / Malayalam Films?”

A separate list for each language industry, in a nation that produces a couple of thousand films a year, is humanly impossible to do for a single journalist. This is why critics have areas of expertise, just as political reporters have beats. I will certainly give you a compilation though from the industry that has been my field of focus for years now, Hindi. So here it is, (oh how I love saying these three words) on popular demand, my list of Best Hindi Films 2015.

BEST HINDI FILM:

Winner:

Dum Laga Ke Haisha


Imagine a sensible film steeped in common-sense messaging sans sermons. Imagine a romantic drama in which the heroine is overweight yet the director views her through a lens that can see beyond her girth. Imagine such a film being light-footed rather than heavy and dull. Imagine that film being made by a production house that is as commercially inclined as they get.

You don’t have to trouble your imagination if you have seen Yash Raj Films’ Dum Laga Ke Haisha (DLKH), writer-director Sharat Katariya’s sweetly low-key film set in the Haridwar of 1995. DLKH is about a boy with low self-esteem and no achievements (Ayushmann Khurrana) who is compelled by his family to marry a smart, feisty, educated girl (Bhumi Pednekar) despite his objections to her plus-sized physique.

Bhumi was the find of 2015. Impressive though he was in his debut Hindi film Vicky Donorin 2012, Ayushmann truly arrived as an actor with this one, completely losing his own personality in his character. Together with one of the best supporting casts of the year, the two youngsters delivered an appealing coming-of-age love story far removed from the high decibel levels Bollywood too often resorts to in its bid to attract mass audiences. 

Anu Malik’s gentle tunes for DLKH are perfectly suited to the overall tone of the film, none more so than the prettily melodious Moh moh ke dhaage. When lyricist Varun Grover writes“Tu din sa hai, main raat
/ Aa na dono mill jaayein shaamon ki tarah (You are like the day and I the night / Come, let us meet as they do in the evening)” you could almost read this blossoming love as a metaphor for the increasing melting of boundaries between what is deemed mainstream and art cinema by one of India’s largest film industries.

DLKH is not just enjoyable and well made, it is one of many turning points for Hindi cinema witnessed in 2015.

(For the original review of Dum Laga Ke Haisha, click here)

First Runner-up:

Talvar


Recounting a real-life crime in a feature film is never easy. When the case is as recent and as controversial as the Aarushi Talwar-Hemraj murder, it is a massive challenge.

Director Meghna Gulzar is clearly up to the task in Talvar, a fictionalised, documentary-like feature about the double homicide committed in 2008.

Irrfan Khan headlines the film’s talented cast relating the botched-up probe into one of 21stcentury India’s most high-profile criminal cases.

Although Talvar narrates various versions of the killings and the investigation from differing viewpoints, painting the parents innocent and guilty by turns, it has its own stance too: that the messed-up Indian criminal justice system can be vindictive towards citizens to cover up its own inadequacies, that the police’s pre-historic social prejudices colour their work, that the financial and cultural chasm separating co-existing socio-economic classes has volcanic implications, and that when it is at its worst, the news media can destroy lives.

Despite its evident position on these issues, Talvar remains firmly focused on facts. In a cinematic landscape now used to Ram Gopal Varma and Anurag Kashyap’s more dramatic gangster flicks, Meghna’s choice of storytelling style makes this a landmark crime film.

Second Runner-up:

Drishyam


If you thought – as I did – that it would not be possible to improve upon director Jeethu Joseph’s Malayalam film Drishyam (2013), you thought wrong. The Hindi retelling by Nishikant Kamat is as suspenseful as the original, yet minor tweaks make it an interesting, thoughtful remake.

This is the story of a crime and its incredible cover-up. The author of that brilliance is a small-time businessman in small-town Goa, protecting his family when their relatively uneventful life takes a dramatic turn. His combatant in the case is the state’s Inspector General of Police (Tabu).

Even given the traditional patriarchal set-up in both films, with the male protagonist as protector-provider and his spouse as stay-at-home mother, the Hindi version still manages to be less socially conformist than the first film. The noticeably lower age difference between the lead couple here (Ajay Devgn and Shriya Saran) in contrast with Mohanlal and Meena in the Malayalam film and the slightly less conservative conversations between them, makes this a nuanced adaptation rather than a carbon copy.

Ajay wisely chose to play the central character as a more stoic fellow than Mohanlal did, thus pre-empting acting comparisons with a stalwart.

None of this, of course, would matter to those who have only seen the Hindi Drishyam, which stands tall even when it stands alone. In the universe of thrillers, this film is uncommon in the way it builds up a sense of urgency despite its unhurried pace. Good and evil are not black and white notions here. And in the end, the mystery lies not in whodunnit (we already know that) but in how – and if – they will get away with it, because it gets us to care.

(For the original review of Drishyam, click here)

Third Runner-up:

NH10


Anushka Sharma broke new ground by turning producer with NH10. She is not the first, but she is among the few female producers in this country. When the moneybags are almost all men, the male gaze is bound to dominate a nation’s cinema. If more such enterprising women emerge across states, in time more meaty roles for Indian actresses will follow.

This milestone, however, is not what recommends director Navdeep Singh’s NH10. What marks it out cinematically is its grippingly told saga of civilisational clashes between adjacent worlds whose inhabitants are often oblivious to – even disinterested in – each other’s existence.

Anushka in this film plays a city-bred professional living in the city of Gurgaon, a suburb of Delhi located in Haryana. Tragedy comes visiting when she and her husband (Neil Bhoopalam) stray into rural Haryana. What follows is a petrifying mix of extreme gender biases, caste prejudice and violence.

NH10 is filled with fine actors, but the discovery of the film is Darshan Kumaar’s versatility. In his turn as a murderous villain here, it is hard to spot the soft-spoken husband from 2014’s Priyanka Chopra-starrer Mary Kom.

Actress Anushka is already doing well for herself in Bollywood. What a splendid start this is though for producer Anushka.

(For the original review of NH10, click here)

THE CONTENDERS:

5: Piku

Who in Bollywood would choose as their film’s hero a physically and behaviourally constipated old man?

Answer: director Shoojit Sircar and writer Juhi Chaturvedi who earlier teamed up for Vicky Donor, a film with sperms and semen as its focal point yet – wonder of wonders! – not a single ewww-worthy joke.

Piku brings together Deepika Padukone playing a short-tempered entrepreneur from whose name the film draws its title, Amitabh Bachchanas her crotchety septuagenarian father with tummy troubles, and Irrfan Khan as Rana Chaudhary, a taxi company owner who finds himself thrown between them on an unplanned road trip.

Toilet humour is a dominant element in the film, yet it does not veer towards being a juvenile crapfest of the kind you might expect from Hollywood’s Farrelly brothers or Bollywood’s Team Kyaa Super Kool Hain Hum. This in itself is an achievement. Even more commendable is the manner in which the comedic stream – unrelenting, unpredictable and hilarious – takes nothing away from the family and friendships around which Piku revolves.

The starting block of the story is Piku’s relationship with her testy Baba, but what envelopes later reels in warmth and tenderness is the developing, as-yet-undefined bond between the young lady and the older Rana. Who knew electricity could flow between Deepika and Irrfan? It does.

If you must visit a stereotype, do it the Shoojit-and-Juhi way, laughing with the Bengalis through the Big B’s Bhaskor Banerjee, rather than at them as most habitual community cliché users do.

The unexpected bonus here is Moushumi Chatterjee playing Piku’s maternal aunt. The pretty veteran was a firebrand in 2013’s Bengali film Goynar Baksho. Is she choosing to act less or is male-obsessed Indian cinema not offering her enough worthwhile parts?

For this and so much else, bless you Piku!

(For the original review of Piku, click here)

6: Masaan

If half a film could be featured on a list, then debutant Neeraj Ghaywan’s Masaanmight have been my No. 1. Vicky Kaushal’s brilliant turn as an educated, professionally ambitious boy from a traditionally low-caste family, in love with a poetry-loving upper-caste girl played to charming effect by Shweta Tripathi is affecting in ways that no words can explain.

The direction of this portion of the film is assured, the writing (by Varun Grover) impeccable, the acting perfect. Apologies for sounding dramatic, but whenever I think of those two innocent, ill-fated lovers, I sigh and my heart breaks into a million pieces, only to heal itself with the memory of Vicky’s smile.

This boy is God’s gift to womankind and to acting.

Less engaging is the other half of Masaan featuring Richa Chadha and Sanjay Mishra as a troubled father and daughter. Individually they’re powerful characters, together though their relationship lacks something in its execution. Still, her strength, her sexual experimentation, the authorities’ response to it, her spirit that refuses to be subdued even through a traumatic phase and her determination to escape her suffocating environs are compelling to say the least.

Most moving though is the film’s spotlight on clandestine relationships and this excruciating question: how do you mourn the loss of your beloved when no one else they love knows you were together or is likely to think you had a right to be?

There goes my wretched heart again.

(For the original review of Masaan, click here)

7: Titli

This one too is a directorial debut. If Masaanis muted and poignant, Kanu Behl’s deceptively titled Titli(meaning: butterfly) is distressing and in places, difficult to watch.

This is a story of a violence-prone, car-jacking threesome of brothers and their instinctive bonding. The youngest (Shashank Arora)– named Titli because his late mother had been hoping for a daughter when he was born – is planning his escape from the nest when his elder siblings (Ranvir Shorey and Amit Sial) get him married to tie him down. The new woman (Shivani Raghuvanshi) in their so far all-male home comes armed with a fiery disposition and a secret.

Despite the appearance of a boys’ club, Titli is a stinging, unspoken condemnation of patriarchy. Ranvir delivers a career-best performance and Shivani is simply superb.

The detailing in the depiction of Delhi – her sociology and geography – is commendable. 

Interestingly, Kanu’s co-writer on Titli is Dum Laga Ke Haisha’s director Sharat Katariya. What a dream year it must be in which you can showcase your versatility with two vastly contrasting films within a span of just a few months. Equally a cause for celebration is that Yash Raj Films co-produced Titli, an unusual project for a studio closely identified with flying chiffons, acres of tulip and mustard fields, spotlessly made up women and immaculately turned out men.  

These developments and the emergence of distinctive new voices like Neeraj and Kanu could well be reason enough for history books some day to single out 2015 as a watershed year for Hindi cinema.

(For the original review of Titli, click here)

8: Margarita With A Straw

Hindi films centred around persons with disabilities have too often concentrated on the disability rather than the person. Margarita With A Strawis different. Shonali Bose’s film stars Kalki Koechlin delivering a remarkable performance as a woman whose cerebral palsy does not define her. Able backing comes from the ever-dependable Revathy playing her Aai.

Laila Kapoor is talented, sociable, sexually adventurous and wheelchair bound. Who would have predicted that such a woman could ever be the heroine of a cheery Hindi-English film from a once-formula-driven industry? In the not-too-distant past, she would in all likelihood have been placed in a dismal or melodramatic, high-strung film. This is not that kind of venture.

For the most part, Margarita…is realistic in its portrayal of Laila’s physical constraints even while remaining positive at all times. Is the sunshine too much? Just occasionally it does seem so, but in a cinematic scenario that more often than not appears to assume that those with physical challenges must lead all-round depressing lives, optimism makes for a pleasant change.

(For the original review of Margarita With A Straw, click here)

9: Dil Dhadakne Do

It is weird that Anil Kapoor has received Best Supporting Actor noms in this awards season, because Zoya Akhtar’s Dil Dhadakne Do (DDD) is one of those rare Hindi films with an ensemble cast. Clearly Bollywood award givers have not evolved as far as the industry has.

Anil in DDD plays business tycoon Kamal Mehra who is determined to keep up the appearance of a happy marriage with his wife Neelam (Shefali Shah). He bullies his son (Ranveer Singh) over his career inclinations while failing to recognise the evident entrepreneurial talents of his daughter (Priyanka Chopra) who, as it happens, is stuck in a loveless marriage. High drama occurs on the high seas when the Mehras take off on a cruise to celebrate Kamal and Neelam’s wedding anniversary in the company of their high-society ‘friends’.

The allure of DDD lies in its honesty about families. Nobody is as perfect as Sooraj Barjatya’s clans suggest. Kamal is an adulterer whose hypocrisy is exposed by his children. The easy route to the portrayal of Neelam would have been to excuse her as a helpless victim. Instead the storyteller refuses to accept her pretence that she did not know of or could have done nothing about her husband’s affairs.

The highlight of the film though is the brother-sister bond. It is a measure of Priyanka and Ranveer’s considerable acting talents and the quality writers they are working with that they could switch from playing such believably close siblings to the sexual chemistry between their characters in Bajirao Mastaniwithin the same year.

DDD is highly entertaining and makes several points that mainstream Bollywood would usually not dare to make: that most human beings are flawed, some flaws are worth forgiving but some are not, most families are flawed, some are worth fighting to preserve while some are not. Take that, Mr Barjatya.

(For the original review of Dil Dhadakne Do, click here)

10: Bajrangi Bhaijaan

In a national context where “religious sentiments” are more prone to getting “hurt” with each passing day, Bajrangi Bhaijaanis one of the most cleverly handled films on communal amity you will ever see. Director Kabir Khan pulls at every conceivable heart string with his story of a Pakistani Muslim child called Shahida (Harshaali Malhotra) who encounters the Hanuman bhakt Bajrangi (Salman Khan) when she gets lost in India. Bajrangi is a man with a golden heart yet many prejudices derived from his background, but that tiny girl could melt a glacier. And she does.

His efforts to return her to her family across the border coupled with the intrinsic commentary about India-Pakistan and inter-religious harmony, could be seen as an enterprise in courage in a country that just months earlier was battling fundamentalists’ demands for a ban on PK and threats of violence. The film soldiered on anyway, getting an entire nation to fall in love with a Pakistani tot and getting Bajrangi – a committed vegetarian and a devout Hindu from a family affiliated to the Sangh Parivar – to sing and dance to a song with lyrics that go “Thodi biryani bukhari
/ Thodi phir nalli nihari
/ Le aao aaj dharam bhrasht ho jaaye (Bring on some biryani / Bring on some meat preparations / Never mind my religious restrictions today)”.

Salman is his usual self in Bajrangi Bhaijaan, a star aware of his charisma. There is more to Harshaali than her irresistible cuteness – the kid can act. She is a scene stealer along with a man who walks on to the screen half way through the story and walks away with the film, Nawazuddin Siddiqui.

I confess the play-it-safe ending almost ruined the film for me, being such a contrast to the refusal to mince words even while avoiding treading on touchy toes until that point. Yet in the denouement, perhaps to assuage the feelings of those Sangh members and acolytes who were offended by PK, the film has the Muslim child yelling out the words “Jai Shri Ram” repeatedly whereas a reformed Bajrangi merely makes a gesture towards Allah hafiz but stops short of saying the words. Ah well, sadly, such is life. We cannot blame artists alone for being overly cautious when we have repeatedly failed to protect them from the wrath of communal goons.

Bajrangi Bhaijaan is intelligent, sensitive and fun.

(For the original review of Bajrangi Bhaijaan, click here)

A Version Of This Article Was Published In Two Parts On Firstpost on January 18 & 19, 2016:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/dum-laga-ke-haisha-talvar-nh10-the-best-hindi-films-of-2015-2588432.html 

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/piku-dil-dhadakne-do-bajrangi-bhaijaan-top-contenders-for-the-best-hindi-film-of-2015-2588412.html

Related article: Anna M.M. Vetticad’s Best Indian Films 2015

http://annavetticadgoes2themovies.blogspot.in/2016/01/the-annavetticadgoes2themovies-awards.html

OR

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/firstpost-reviews-our-take-on-the-best-indian-films-of-2015-2568868.html

Photographs courtesy:

(1)    Dum Laga Ke Haishaposter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dum_Laga_Ke_Haisha

(2)    Talvar poster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talvar_(film)

(3)    Drishyam poster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drishyam_(2015_film)

(4)    NH10 poster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NH10

(5)    Piku poster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piku

(6)    Masaan poster: https://www.facebook.com/MasaanTheFilm

(7)    Titli poster: Yashraj Films

(8)    Margarita With A Strawposter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margarita_With_A_Straw 

(9)    Dil Dhadakne Doposter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dil_Dhadakne_Do

(10)  Bajrangi Bhaijaanposter: https://www.facebook.com/BBThisEid


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WHITNEY HOUSTON OBITUARY / PUBLISHED IN FORBES

February 11, 2016, 2:24 am
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MOMENTS IN TIME: A TRIBUTE TO WHITNEY HOUSTON
Her voice soared above all the rest

By Anna MM Vetticad
(First published in Forbes India’s March 16, 2012 issue)

In one of the most touching homages paid to Whitney Houston since her passing away, Beyonce Knowles wrote: “So many of my life’s memories are attached to a Whitney Houston song. She is our queen and she opened doors and provided a blueprint for all of us.” And thousands of miles away, here in India, my friend Arijeet wrote on my Facebook wall: “First MJ, then Whitney. Slowly unplugging from the 1980s and our wonder years.”

She was America’s sweetheart. African Americans in particular and women musicians may well have claimed her as their own. But really, Whitney Houston belonged to us all. There was The Voice, the incredible range, the charisma, the innocent smile that travelled all the way up from her lips to the crinkled corners of her eyes … but beyond all that there was the impact she had on our lives.

Beyonce is right, I thought as I sat down to write this piece: “So many of my life’s memories are attached to a Whitney Houston song…” I was a confused, unhappy schoolgirl when One Moment in Time was released. “I’ve laid the plans, now lay the chance, here in my hands,” was a prayer and a message of hope. “My finest day (was) yet unknown,” some years later when, during the tension-ridden recruitment season at my journalism institute, I remember suddenly stopping while walking down some steps with a bunch of classmates, and loudly belting out I Will Always Love You to soothe our taut nerves. Like Michael Jackson, Whitney was a constant companion during my student days as an urban Indian. But when the history books are written, MJ is likely to be remembered as a multi-faceted package: singer, dancer, stage performer, all-round entertainer. Whitney, on the other hand, let just her singing do the talking.

“God gave me a voice to sing with,” she once said, “and when you have that, what other gimmick is there?” But she didn’t merely sing a song. She seemed to feel it with every cell in her being, with such intensity that her searing rendition of The Star Spangled Banner could inexplicably stir feelings of patriotism towards America even among foreigners.

Church choirs in India, with their blend of hymns in English, Hindi, Malayalam, Tamil, Punjabi and other languages, have little in common with the choirs in the West. Except the faith. But having spent many years of my childhood and adolescence as a chorister, I can tell you what any devotional singer of any religion might: that there’s a point beyond which you can’t fake it.

So I read, with fascination, Whitney’s description of singing in her church in Newark, New Jersey, as a little girl. She said she was so scared that she shut her eyes and sang. “When I opened my eyes, it was like the Holy Spirit had come to the church. People were just shouting and happy and praising God,” she recalled in an interview.

She carried that passion into all her music, singing even love ballads with the fervour you’d expect in a religious composition, as if she was drawing them from the very depths of her soul. It’s perhaps that force of feeling that transported her all the way to Indian cityscapes with her very first album, Whitney Houston (1985), captivating us here with its robust romantic melody Saving All My Love For You, the more tender All At Once and that anthem for dignity, Greatest Love Of All. “No matter what they take from me / they can’t take away my dignity” could have been as much about a black child growing up in Harlem as about a Dalit in India, or any woman anywhere in the world asserting her independence.

Some saw the universality of her style as the popification of her black church roots. It’s what gave her pan-American – and global – appeal, but it also drew flak from some African Americans, who felt she played down her origins to appeal to the white market. Well, white folk were not the only ones responding to her accessible-yet-rooted sound. Urban Indians from the 1980s all the way up to the turn of the century were humming One Moment In Time, I Wanna Dance With Somebody, Where Do Broken Hearts Go, I Will Always Love You, I’m Every Woman and I Have Nothing.

As I write this, a memory floats into my mind, of my younger sister in the early 1990s, preparing for a prestigious inter-school singing contest. Why did she pick One Moment In Time?

“You know the way she would modulate, ‘Giiiiiive meeee’?” Rosanna replies, singing those words by way of explanation. “I enjoyed the challenge of getting that right. And of course those words meant something special.”

That’s the essence of why Whitney worked worldwide. She was not easy to emulate, but hers was not an unreachable sound either; you could be a kid in Newark or New Delhi, you would still feel the yearning in “Give me one moment in time / When I’m more than I thought I could be / When all of my dreams are a heartbeat away / And the answers are all up to me.”

It seemed, to those of us who were watching her, that Whitney must have had many such moments in time. The commitment to her words and the conviction in her voice suggested that she had her head on her shoulders and her soul still in that church of her childhood. But as the 1990s gave way to the 21st century, the clean girl of American pop metamorphosed into a self-confessed drug user and a not-infrequent public spectacle, a personification of everything that could go wrong with celebritydom.

Destiny’s golden girl was now Destiny’s distraught child. Reports of her bizarre behaviour, weakened voice and cancelled concerts filtered in even to India, a country where we’re not used to public meltdowns by A-listers. For us, Whitney had become more a happy memory of the 1980s and 1990s than a present-day star. Wasn’t that disloyalty, a reader asked me on Twitter the other day? The answer isn’t easy. Is it a fan’s duty to catch a falling star and buy tickets to mediocre shows? I think not.

But I suppose loyalty does mean playing down the follies, waiting to exhale at the posthumous release of her final film Sparkle, remembering the best of Whitney. Since her death, the Indian press has been filled with tributes celebrating arguably the greatest voice of all.

There she is on TV right now, telling a journalist: “I just want to be remembered for my music.”

(The writer is on Twitter as @annavetticad)

Original link:
http://forbesindia.com/article/recliner/moments-in-time-a-tribute-to-whitney-houston/32384/0

Photograph courtesy:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitney_Houston 


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REVIEW 370: FITOOR

February 12, 2016, 1:42 am
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Release date:
February 12, 2015
Director:
Abhishek Kapoor
Cast:





Language:
Tabu, Katrina Kaif, Aditya Roy Kapur, Mohammed Abrar Sheikh, Tunisha Sharma, Aditi Rao Hydari, Rahul Bhat, Lara Dutta, Akshay Oberoi, Cameo: Ajay Devgn
Hindi


Abhishek Kapoor set himself a tough task when he decided to adapt Great Expectations for a Hindi film. His chosen text is the most challenging of Charles Dickens’ classics: it is dreary, gloomy and depressing despite the final crumb offered in the form of a happy ending.

The original is the story of the wealthy Miss Havisham who is so shattered when her groom does not turn up for their wedding, that from that day forward she remains dressed in her bridal finery, keeps her home decorated as it was for the celebrations and lets her wedding cake lie rotting on her dining table. She gives vent to her bitterness towards her cheating lover by training her foster child, an orphan called Estella, to break the hearts of men. Pip – the hero and an orphan himself – is smitten from the moment he meets the little girl. The book travels with them into their adulthood, which is marred by the manner in which old Miss Havisham has affected the young woman’s ability to love.

Abhishek – who earlier made the lovely Rock On!! (2008) and Kai Po Che (2013) – transposes Dickens’ saga from 19th century England to present-day Kashmir. Miss Havisham becomes the handsome Begum Hazrat (Tabu), reclusive resident of the lavish haveli Anjuman; Estella is her daughter Firdaus Jaan Naqvi (Katrina Kaif), who is sent off to study in England – a mandatory move in most of Ms Kaif’s films, designed to explain her accent; and Pip is Noor Nizami (Aditya Roy Kapur), brother of a poor local handyman’s wife, who grows up to become a famous artist.

Though faithful to the book, Fitooris a not a carbon copy. Thankfully not, since Miss Havisham is Dickens’ most troubling female character, epitomising the ‘neurotic, frustrated, eccentric spinster’ stereotype or that oft-visited cliché of the evil, destructive witch in European fairytales perpetuated through generations of misogyny by artists and society as a whole. This film avoids the lure of the striking, haunting imagery Dickens used to represent her. There is no worm-eaten cake lying in a cobweb-ridden hall in Abhishek’s version, no ugly old lady in a decaying gown, and the mansion is far from decrepit. Quite to the contrary, Anjuman is still rich and beautiful, and the child Noor is smitten from the day he first sets foot in it when his brother-in-law is summoned to do some odd jobs at the house. 

He is as enchanted by Firdaus, the cold, distant, well-turned-out girl-woman who rides a horse on those sprawling grounds and mocks him for his poverty. She is, to him, the unreachable star, an enigmatic creature whose allure lies as much in her aloofness and snobbery as it does in the hand of friendship she condescendingly extends towards him at one point. She moves away. They grow up. They meet again. He is now a grown man in love.

If you can tolerate the extreme sexism in Dickens’ portrayal of Miss Havisham, Great Expectations is actually an ideal choice for contemporary Kashmir. In Fitoor, the Noor-Firdaus love story is not just about gender relations or social disparities. Hazrat does have a reason to hate men, which is revealed much later in the film, and Firdaus at one point does refuse to hook up with Noor, harshly telling him, “Shaadi do darjon ke beech hoti hai (A marriage can only take place between two people of the same class),” but Abhishek and Supratik Sen’s writing takes it beyond that.

In their vision, Hazrat is a metaphor for an older generation in Kashmir, justifiably embittered by the actions of the state but unjustifiably plotting to bequeath that bitterness to their children, denying them their own pursuit of happiness, going so far as to encourage them to sleep with the enemy in their quest for revenge against the Indian state. Yet the state is not a homogeneous entity. It is not just scheming members of government. It is also made up of people, soft, gentle, in love and longing to be loved.

The new generation is, of course, represented by Firdaus; the heterogeneous state, both by the man who jilted Hazrat (played by Akshay Oberoi) and sweet, sweet Noor.

So far so good, except that Abhishek and Supratik appear not to have trusted viewers to get the point without being spoon-fed. Their interpretation is robbed of much of its depth by their needless decision to bestow dark red hair – not a natural Kashmiri colour – on Hazrat and Firdaus. Come to think of it, it’s silly. The interplay of their dyed tresses and auburn, autumnal Chinar leaves – an eternal symbol of Kashmir – is so literal that it makes me want to shake a fist at Team Fitoor in exasperation. C’mon, we got it! You should have trusted us.

This might have been forgivable if it weren’t for the casting of Firdaus. Katrina is woefully inadequate in Fitoor, trying to convey Firdaus’ sorrow and confusion with expressionlessness. To make matters worse, her screen companion through much of the film is an actress who has the ability to eke out feelings from a log of wood. This is not Tabu’s best, but in a role that could have been easily over-played and caricatured, she elicits some degree of empathy even for her decidedly unlikeable character. Aditya as Noor is efficient, but that’s about it.

It is hard to comment on the supporting cast since they are all playing very limited characters. The only exception is the adorable Kashmiri child actor Mohammed Abrar Sheikh who, as little Noor, fits perfectly into the setting. This is not to endorse the belief some film buffs hold that only Kashmiris should play Kashmiris and so on (this subject demands a long discussion for which we do not have space here), but it shows a casualness towards detail when the child playing Noor has a precise Kashmiri accent but Aditya speaks differently.

The film’s technical embellishments are all in place. Anay Goswamy’s visuals are impressive without being overwhelming, the costumes are attractive, and the music by Amit Trivedi (songs) and Hitesh Sonik (background score) is adequate within the context of the film.

Tabu’s makeup artist deserves kudos for lending age to her face intelligently, rather than with standard Bollywood crutches such as thick spectacles and white hair on unchanged skin.

The production design is well thought out, travelling from Anjuman’s wintry insides to the fiery warmth of the spaces Noor occupies in Delhi and London, as he swings between hope and despair. His striking art works and the scenes in which he creates them are among Fitoor’s high points.

The dialogues are inconsistent though. While many are lyrical, there are weirdly suggestive undertones (clearly unintentional) in a reformed terrorist, once helped by little Noor, telling the now-grown-up chap: “The memory of the phiran you gave me has kept me warm through many nights.” Err, didn’t the filmmaker replay that line to himself before retaining it in the film?

This, however, is a mere aside. Fitoor’s primary problem is that it fails to conjure up the sort of passion that it should have and could have with less literalness and better central casting. Perhaps we have been spoilt by Vishal Bhardwaj’s brilliant Haider(2014), another Hindi adaptation of an English literary classic transported to Kashmir. Fitoor certainly can’t be accused of the laziness with which Wazirrecently scraped the surface of the state’s agonising reality, but it also lacks the wealth of meaning and emotional resonance of Haider.

There is a bomb blast in the film at a crucial point – the build-up to it is so underplayed that the explosion comes as an absolute shock. It is one of Fitoor’s most memorable, most effective moments, yet the occurrence fails to inform the later actions of those personally affected by it. Therein lies Fitoor’s defining flaw: it is inconsistent in dealing with the political context of its chosen geographical setting.

The pain, the rejection, the searing desire for revenge, the all-conquering power of love – none of it is adequately conveyed in this film which, by the time its final scene rolled around, left me as cold and detached as Estella’s heart was when she first met Pip.  

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

CBFC Rating (India):

U
Running time:
131 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:
http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/fitoor-review-katrina-aditya-are-inadequate-no-great-expectations-from-this-valentines-day-film-2623326.html

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

Anna MM Vetticad,Anna Vetticad,Indian cinema,Bollywood,Hindi cinema,Fitoor,Abhishek Kapoor,Tabu,Katrina Kaif,Aditya Roy Kapur,Aditi Rao Hydari,Lara Dutta,Ajay Devgn,Charles Dickens,Great Expectations

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