annavetticadgoes2themovies

Release date:	May 6, 2016
Director:	Rajesh Pillai
Cast: Language:	Manoj Bajpayee, Jimmy Sheirgill, Divya Dutta, Kitu Gidwani, Prosenjit Chatterjee, Parambrata Chattopadhyay, Nikita Thukral, Vishal Singh, Amol Parashar Hindi

The road to cinematic achievement is lined with films that made it to the interval mark and then were ruined by their own contrivances. Traffic is a case study in what not to do with your story after the half-way post.

Based on a Malayalam screenplay by Bobby and Sanjay, which led to the well-received 2011 film of the same name, this remake is adapted for Hindi viewers by scriptwriter Suresh Nair with dialogues by Piyush Mishra and Prashant Pandey. The late Rajesh Pillai directed both films.

Traffic is inspired by a real-life incident from 2008 in Tamil Nadu that was reported in the news media. The story of the Hindi film version, as far as can be told without spoilers, is this: A 12-year-old girl called Riya, daughter of filmstar Dev Kapoor (Prosenjit Chatterjee) and his wife Maya (Divya Dutta), is struggling for her life in Pune. Meanwhile, newbie journalist and road accident victim Rehaan Ali (Vishal Singh) is on a ventilator in a Mumbai hospital. Doctors have virtually given up hope for him. His parents (played by Kitu Gidwani and Sachin Khedekar) agree to donate their son’s heart to save Riya. With time running out for her and all flights grounded due to poor visibility, the organ must be transported 160km by road in 150 minutes.

Anyone who knows the madness of Mumbai will understand what a near-impossible task that is. Constable Ramdas Godbole (Manoj Bajpayee) steps up to make the impossible possible with the support of his boss, Joint Commissioner of Police (Traffic) Gurbir Singh (Jimmy Sheirgill). As you would have figured from the trailer, Godbole and his companions are making good time when their vehicle disappears.

The rest of the film is spent figuring out what happened to them and whether they ultimately reach Pune before it is too late for Riya.

This should have been a no-frills thriller woven around a story of basic decency and humanity. The human element is well handled in the first half leading the way to what should have been a suspenseful second half. Those early gains are frittered away though by the desperation to be a film with a message.

Traffic’s USP is the manner in which relationships and power equations between characters are established: the father who is brusque with his son even though he loves him, the young man whose feelings for a woman are unaffected by socially prescribed barriers, a mother who rises above her own grief to recognise the pain of another woman, the arrogance of a celebrity even in the face of personal tragedy, influential people who pull strings undeterred by the human life at stake and a police constable seeking redemption in the eyes of his daughter after a high-profile bribery scandal.

All these points are effectively driven home without being trumpeted from a rooftop. The moment loudness overtakes subtlety though, the impact of the film is sadly diluted.

An early sign of this tendency comes when a doctor lectures JCP Singh about doing his duty and taking a risk to save a life. Police personnel make for convenient scapegoats in any given situation because they are unpopular figures in public perception in India, but the truth is that Singh’s concerns are valid and yet bombastically brushed aside by the self-righteous doc. As it happens, no one asks him if he would have made that call for a non-VIP patient.

Still, the first half of the film offers sufficient compensation for that brief scene of populistoverstatement. The second half, however, fails to sustain the tone.

You may have noticed, without this review rubbing it in, that the child needing a transplant in this story has a Hindu name and her potential donor’s name is Muslim. Audiences are not fools and can be left to draw whatever conclusion they choose without the point being underlined, then circled with a red pen and further highlighted with a bright yellow marker.

Having initially assumed that viewers are intelligent and sensitive to our social reality, Team Traffic later succumbs to an inexplicable urge to idiot-proof their film.

Firstly, the reason for the disappearance of Godbole’s vehicle comes across as being contrived to introduce a message about how everyone deserves a second chance in life. Next, the entire inter-community component overshadows everything else in the film’s second half with its in-your-face messaging, as golden-hearted Muslims clear hurdles in Godbole’s path while a song discusses Allah and maula, declaring that religion and God are both the problem and its solution.

Also thrown into the mix for good measure is a well-meaning Christian briefly gone astray and doing penance for his misdeeds. The only thing left was for them to put a turban on JCP Singh’s head and have him deliver a sermon on Wahe Guru. Thankfully, that does not happen, though the closing credits are accompanied by another musical reminder about communal amity.

It is clear that in this film’s mindscape – as it is with most mainstream Hindi cinema – minority community members are strategically placed in stories with the specific purpose of putting out some sort of lesson, not because they just happen to exist within the country’s population.

Between the overt secularism of Godbole’s experiences on the road and the repetition of the moral of the story in the final song, the film gets back on track with a brief scene involving Rehaan’s grieving parents and his girlfriend Aditi. That fleeting interaction is heartbreaking.

In fact, the two most moving scenes in Traffic feature low-key, low-volume phone calls: Maya Kapoor speaking to Mrs Ali, Dr Ali reaching out to Aditi. Divya Dutta, Kitu Gidwani and Nikita Thukral (as Aditi) are particularly wonderful through these moments, making the film their own despite the presence of the ever-dependable Manoj Bajpayee and Jimmy Sheirgill in much larger roles (both men are effective too).

If you have known the death of a loved one, you will understand how excruciatingly hard it is to let go. The only thing worse than the anticipation and fear of loss is loss itself. The feel of cold, lifeless flesh that will never be warm again is like a knife through the heart. Drama is intrinsic to these situations and to the larger, multi-cultural Indian reality, without the crutch of high-decibel songs or explicit moralising. If Team Traffic had understood that, this could have been a great film. As things stand, it is an uneven, unsatisfying ride.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	104 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/traffic-review-needless-messaging-spoils-this-manoj-bajpayee-starrer-2768456.html

Photograph courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_(2016_film)

Release date:	May 6, 2016
Director:	Anthony and Jo Russo
Cast: Language:	Chris Evans, Robert Downey Jr, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Holland, Elizabeth Olsen, Paul Bettany, Don Cheadle, Anthony Mackie, Paul Rudd, Chadwick Boseman, Jeremy Renner, Sebastian Stan, Emily VanCamp, William Hurt English

Captain America: Civil War is a fun though somewhat forgettable film, but for one completely memorable, hugely entertaining, utterly paisa vasool element. The name’s Parker, Peter Parker.

You have to wonder whether this is the result Marvel Studios was looking for when they decided to introduce a teenaged Spiderman into the ongoing series of money-spinning films from the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Civil War’s hero is supposedly that great-looking, sexy, “enhanced” individual, Steve Rogers a.k.a. Captain America, played by that great-looking, impossibly sexy actor Chris Evans. Yet it is obvious that writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely ran out of ideas to sustain a third solo venture for Cap.

The result is a film that should more appropriately have been titled Captain America Vs Iron Man (with a very special appearance by Spidey).

The richness of 2011’s Captain America: The First Avengeris missing here despite the presence of a multitude of superpeople. The film’s themes of power, control and accountability are interesting, but they are not explored with much depth. The special effects are top notch though.

Captain America: Civil War travels toLagos with some members of Marvel’s Avengers team: Steve Rogers, Natasha Romanoff / Black Widow, Sam Wilson / Falcon and Wanda Maximoff / Scarlett Witch. There they prevent the theft of a biological weapon but in the bargain end up killing innocents when Wanda uses her telekinetic powers to divert a bomb blast into the sky but accidentally destroys a nearby building.

When they get back home, the US Secretary of State informs them that 117 member countries of the UN have joined hands over the Sokovia Accords that will set up a body to oversee their work as Avengers. Tony Stark / Iron Man is willing to submit to supervision, since he still blames himself for the destruction caused by the robot Ultron in the film Avengers: Age of Ultron. Steve, on the other hand, is suspicious of governments.

The group splits over this disagreement. Tony recruits a hitherto unknown Peter / Spidey on his team, while Clint Barton / Hawkeye returns to help Steve’s group.

The film is about the result of this rift.

From the word go it is clear that in Captain America: Civil War, MCU is keen to counter the well-justified charge that it is a predominantly male white universe. Sadly, nothing much changes, despite the presence of three blacks (all men) and two women (both white) in the film’s population of nearly a dozen superpeople. This is what happens when you approach the issue of representation as an obligation in response to criticism rather than out of conviction. And so in Civil War, as with all the other MCU films, white men continue to run the world while blacks and women are charitably permitted to play their sidekicks.

That being said, the half-hearted attempt at representation leads to an over-crowded film with short shrift being given to most characters. Natasha, who is played by the incredibly charismatic Scarlett Johansson, is still on the margins. Her purring voice lingers on long after each of her fleeting appearances, which is a reminder that she – the character and the actress – deserves so much more than to be a satellite player in someone else’s world.

Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen) and Vision (Paul Bettany) have some interesting moments together. It’s nice to see Wanda’s character developing because she has such Hulk-like potential in the way she struggles with the consequences of her abilities. Sam Wilson / Falcon (Anthony Mackie) and War Machine / James Rhodes (Don Cheadle) are dull though. And Black Panther / T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) remains a shadowy figure on the sidelines throughout, which is criminal considering how iconic the Panther is in American superheroverse.

The stand-out supporting character backed by solid writing in this film is Spiderman (or should we call him Spiderman-boy) with his exasperating youthfulness, garrulous charm and hilarious fascination with the superpowers he is just beginning to understand. He is an absolute hoot. So is the rest of the Avengers’ bemused reaction to him. It helps that actor Tom Holland is a find.

Spidey is one of Civil War’s two highlights. The other is the account of Tony’s childhood, given through two well-executed flashbacks that are perfectly placed in the film.

Oddly enough, Captain America as the central character gets a lot of screen space but little heft. At the end of the day, the sharpest memory of him in this film remains a visually spectacular fight between him and Iron Man towards the end, and an earlier scene in which he physically prevents a chopper from taking off with the strength of his bare arms. Oh man, what arms! No doubt Chris Evans is gorgeous, and when Tony Stark says he is tempted to punch in Cap’s “perfect teeth”, you know there are few stars better suited to that description. But he is also a fine actor and it seems such a waste that his own story does not lift off in this film.

Take Tony and Spidey out of Captain America: Civil War, and what you get is a series of well-paced, well-choreographed fights with a sliver of a story. A pity because it has so many elements that, if tapped, could have made it way more than just an enjoyable but generic superhero film.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	U/A
Running time: MPAA Rating (US):	147 minutes PG-13 (for extended sequences of violence, action & mayhem)
Release date in US:	May 6, 2016

Related article by Anna MM Vetticad: “Boys will be boys and girls will be afterthoughts: The hyper-masculine world of superhero films”

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/boys-will-be-boys-and-girls-will-be-afterthoughts-the-hyper-masculine-world-of-superhero-films-2703822.html

Photograph courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_America:_Civil_War

Release date:	May 13, 2016
Director:	Tony D’Souza
Cast: Language:	Emraan Hashmi, Prachi Desai, Nargis Fakhri, Lara Dutta, Kunaal Roy Kapur, Rajesh Sharma, Manjot Singh, Gautam Gulati, Kulbhushan Kharbanda Hindi

For an industry that has avoided biopics through most of its existence – fearing lawsuits, thin-skinned fans, a national penchant for idolatry, violent reactions to political hot potatoes and also, perhaps, its own limited investment in research – Bollywood has certainly taken to the genre with a vengeance in recent years. After the money-spinners Bhaag Milkha Bhaag (2013) and Mary Kom(2014), comes Azhar just months before the celluloid biography of M.S. Dhoni.

Tony D’Souza’s film takes on the story of arguably the most controversial sportsperson of 20^thcentury India, a figure first revered and later reviled, former Indian cricket captain and batsman Mohammad Azharuddin. An opening disclaimer tells us that this is “not meant to be a biopic” of Azharuddin but a “fictionalized dramatic representation of incident(s)…for entertainment purposes only” (for full text of disclaimer, see footnote).

The claim is amusing – as is the use of incomplete names throughout, probably on the advice of the producers’ lawyers – since the film is about a Hyderabad-born Indian batsman jiske “naam mein hi Mohammad hai” but who is popularly addressed as Azhar, who came from humble beginnings, made his international cricket debut in the 1980s, hit a century in each of his first three Tests, was married young to a woman called Naureen, captained India, hit headlines not just for his on-field achievements but also for his affair and subsequent marriage to an actress called Sangeeta and was banned for life by the country’s top cricket body on charges of match fixing, with the ban being set aside by a court nearly a decade later.

Not a biopic? Okay.

The shy boy who fumbled his way through interviews, who still swallows more words than he lets out of his mouth, yet managed to charm a high-profile, glamorous star from 1980-90s Bollywood (Salman Khan’s ex-girlfriend Sangeeta Bijlani, no less), is without doubt fascinating even to a non-cricket fan. That he had a scintillating career before he was disgraced makes him a troubled icon even now for cricket maniacs. Azharuddin had once famously said he was victimised by the cricketing establishment because he is a minority community member, which makes him highly relevant in the current socially and politically volatile atmosphere (note: he later apologised for the remark).

The film fails in its treatment of all three aspects of Azhar’s life.

While his initially hesitant and then comfortably boring relationship with his first wife is well established, it skims over his liaison with his second wife. In fact, Sangeeta remains a distant creature throughout, a woman he seems to have fallen for primarily out of sympathy when he realises that glamour dolls have feelings.

More disappointingly, Azhar does not even touch upon the potential communal angle, an element that was handled with such delicacy and beauty in Shimit Amin’s Chak De! India(2007) starring Shah Rukh Khan.

The film truly does itself in though by inexplicably serving up very little cricket. Even the worst screenplay might have been lifted by some suspenseful on-screen matches, but Azhar remains a sports film sans the sport.

What we get instead is a half-baked, half-hearted attempt to declare Azharuddin innocent of match-fixing charges. Even if the job of discussing the nitty-gritty of the case is left to cricket experts, this question is bound to strike even a layperson: if indeed the BCCI (not mentioned by name) had framed Azhar back then, what were its motivations?

By not even bothering to address that point, the film lets down the man whose reputation it appears to be trying to redeem in the public eye.

Azhar’s tepid pace and cursory writing are not its only follies. Nargis Fakhri bobbed her head through her debut Bollywood film Rockstarin 2011. Five years later, her performance as Sangeeta relies entirely on her hotness to tide over her awkwarddialogue delivery and inability to handle serious emotions.

A further let-down comes in theordinary execution of her big moment in the film: the resurrection of the hit song Oye Oye (Gajar ne kiya hai ishara) from the 1989 blockbuster Tridevwhich starred Bijlani. The success of that number is the only memorable element in the former actress’ indifferent filmography, yet the choreography and remixare so lukewarm that you have to wonder why the filmmaker even bothered with it.

Though Fakhri is a poor choice, there are others in the cast who are not.

It is easy to take Emraan Hashmi lightly considering that through most of his career he has played pretty much the same character – the romantic rascal – with varying storylines. He revealed his acting chops though in Dibakar Banerjee’s Shanghai (2012). Here, he does not manage Azhar’s bumbling speech but nails the walk and, more important, gives the cricketer a certain vulnerability that is hard to resist even when all else around him in the film collapses.

Prachi Desai too has played more or less the same character through her short career: a simple, innocent, pretty young thing. There’s more to her character and her performance in this film though. Her Naureen is controlled, her heartbreak believable.

In a small role as Azhar’s Naanujaan, Kulbhushan Kharbanda is a loveable presence as always. Rajesh Sharma delivers a chameleon-like performance as the slimy bookie M.K. Sharma. Manjot Singh too makes a mark in a brief role as a turbanned batsman-turned-commentator modelled on Navjot Singh Sidhu. Without making a laboured over-the-top effort, he does a good Sidhu impression.

Lara Dutta and Kunaal Roy Kapur get to play lawyers in some of the most boring, poorly written court scenes seen in a Hindi film in a while. Despite flashes of effective humour in Kapur’s equation with the presiding judge, it is impossible to get past the dreariness of the overall treatment, the lack of content in most of their arguments, the fakeness of the set and Dutta’s excessive makeup. After the depth of the Arshad Warsi-starring legal drama Jolly LLB (2013) such courtroom mediocrity is hard to bear.

A scene in the latter half of Azhar indicates the promise of Azharuddin’s story. Now hated by the fans who once adored him, Azhar is forced by his lawyer to inaugurate a gym to keep up the appearance that life is going on as usual. The owner of the gym though turns out to be an obnoxious fellow who thinks he owns Azhar since he has paid for his time.

This moment harks back to one of the nicest scenes in the recent SRK-starrer Fanin which we saw the boorishness of an industrialist towards a major movie star. Away from the spotlight, the rich and the famous often deal with heartburn, heartbreak and humiliation to get to where they are and stay there. Mohammad Azharuddin’s rise and subsequent fall from grace were as public as it can get. What the film should have given us, but does not, is a detailed, insightful view of what went on behind the scenes and why.

Azhar is a superficial look at the life of one of the most enigmatic and intriguing sporting stars this country has ever seen. It is an opportunity lost.

Rating (out of five): **

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

A version of this review has been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/azhar-review-this-emraan-hashmi-starrer-is-an-opportunity-lost-2779976.html#disqus_thread

Footnote: The following is the full text of the disclaimer carried at the start of the film:

Disclaimer:

This Film is inspired from various stories/incident(s) based on life and times of Mr.Mohammed Azharuddin and is not meant to be a biopic. It is neither a documentary nor a biography of any character depicted in the Film.

The story, timelines, events and the characters depicted in this Film have been fictionalized and no scenes are meant to be construed to represent a true or accurate recreation of the actual incident(s) that may have transpired.

This Film attempts to present a fictionalized dramatic representation of incident(s) pertaining to the life and times of Mr. Mohammed Azharuddin mostly published and available in public domain, for entertainment purposes only. Any event shown in the Film should not impute any innocence or guilt on the part of any of the persons/characters represented in the Film.

This Film does not intend to hurt the sentiments and/or malign the image, reputation of any person, body and/or corporate in any manner. Any resemblance or similarity to any entity(ies), incident(s), and/or person(s), whether living or dead, is purely coincidental and unintentional.

Photograph courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azhar_(film)

Release date:	May 13, 2016
Director:	Tanuj Bhramar
Cast: Language:	Arvind Swamy, Himanshu Sharma, Aman Uppal Hindi and English

Half your battle is won even before you shoot a single minute, if your film marks the return to the Hindi screen of sweet Arvind Swamy, he who Hindi film-goers remember so well as the hero of Roja (1992) and Bombay (1995). The Tamil star had become popular among Bollywood audiences too with his roles in those two Mani Ratnam blockbusters, both of which were superhits in their Hindi dubbed versions.

Swamy took a break from films in 2000. In the 16 years since, he reportedly started multiple businesses, injured his spine and paralysed a leg in an accident, got back on his feet and along the way did a couple of Tamil films. The memory of him on the Hindi filmscape remains.

Writer-director Tanuj Bhramar’s Dear Dad, therefore, enjoys a lot of goodwill from the word go. It really is a pleasure to see Swamy on screen after so long, aged gracefully and actually trimmer around the middle than he once was. More to the point, he is still charming and still a fine actor.

Dear Dad is about a long-married gay man coming out to his teenaged son. Swamy plays Nithin Swaminathan, husband to Nupur (Ekavali Khanna), Appa to Shivam (Himanshu Sharma) and his little sister Vidhi. Nithin and Nupur were buddies as kids, Nithin mistook friendship for romance and they married, after which the children came along and, well, life happened.

This being India, Shivam does not exactly do a jig of happiness on discovering the truth about his Dad. Not that a kid in the world’s more liberal societies is likely to react positively on finding out that his beloved father, husband of his beloved mother, has never been interested in women.

If his relationship with Mom is based on (what you see as) a deception, what else has he been lying about? It is an inevitable question bound to confound even the most open-minded child.

With an attractive lead actor and an interesting premise, you would think the deal is sealed. Sadly, Dear Dad proves yet again that no film is greater than the writing on which it is based. And the script of this one – despite the uncommon starting point – is flimsy, to say the least. This is a pity especially since it comes in the same year as the wonderful Kapoor & Sons and a riveting performance by Manoj Bajpayee in the inconsistent Aligarh, both of which dealt with LGBT themes in different ways. Dear Dad is well begun but not even half done.

First, the manner in which the truth about Nithin’s sexual orientation is revealed to us and to Shivam is abrupt and poorly conceptualised, as though the team wanted to get it out of the way early on but did not know quite how to go about it.

Second, the film glosses over the effect the revelation had on Nupur. Sure this is a father-son drama, but it has an incomplete feel to it as a result of the decision to sideline the mother’s trauma and Nithin’s own dilemma about her considering that he is obviously very fond of her.

Third, a farcical interlude with a regressive medicine man interrupts the otherwise low-key tone.

Fourth, the cast is a mixed bag. Swamy is nice, of course, and Sharma’s natural ease before the camera belies his lack of experience. Bhavika, who plays his baby sister, is incredibly cute. And the very attractive Aman Uppal does a neat job as the hunky hitchhiker Aditya Taneja, who the duo pick up on a road trip from their Delhi home to Shivam’s Mussoorie school. Uppal too is a natural actor – hot to boot – who we will hopefully see more of in future films.

The rest of the supporting cast is inadequate though. A couple of them are even tacky. It is as if the producers ran out of money after a point and had to make do with amateurs.

Mukesh G’s cinematography on the Delhi-Mussoorie drive is eyecatching, even though his aerial shots of those winding mountain roads get repeated after a point. Financial constraints again?

Still, the understated camerawork and art design match the director’s realistic approach to Dear Dad. Unfortunately, the story by Gadadhari Singh is not fleshed out. There are occasional sparks though, such as the sensitively handled encounter with Aditya, which is the most memorable part of the film, and a frank conversation about homosexuality between Nithin and Shivam.

Son: So are you attracted to all men?

Dad: Are you attracted to all girls?

Putting that first question in a child’s mouth is an intelligent way of pointing out the juvenility of the assumptions straight people make about gay people. The fact that you are attracted to people of the opposite sex does not mean you are drawn to every member of the opposite sex, no?

Now if only there was more where that came from.

Dear Dad is well intentioned but once it sets off on its journey, it does not seem to know where to go. It is pleasant, brave and fresh to begin with, plus it is great to see a Hindi film with a Tamilian character at its centre yet not creating a big hoo-ha about that fact, which makes it unique on multiple counts for Bollywood. That being said, there is just not enough of anything in the film and only so much the endearing Arvind Swamy can do for it.

This one goes into my file of what-might-have-beens along with a photo of Swamy and a sigh.

Rating (out of five): **

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	90 minutes

Photograph courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dear_Dad_(film)

Release date:	May 20, 2016
Director:	Omung Kumar
Cast: Language:	Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Randeep Hooda, Richa Chadha, Darshan Kumaar Hindi and Punjabi

Once upon a time there was Sunny Deol’s dhai kilo ka haath, which uprooted a hand pump to scare off the entire Pakistan Army. Today there is Aishwarya Rai Bachchan’s index finger.

To be fair, Sarbjit is not the unrelenting screamfest that Gadar was, but Deol’s film came to mind as the former Miss World held up her famous slender digit to intimidate an armed Pakistani security official. She did this right after delivering a loud speech to a Pakistani mob about how Pakistanis stab us Indians in the back while we bravely fight them face to face. As expected, the gun-bearing Pakistani meekly moves aside, and she proceeds to grandly walk past him as only Indian movie stars can when up against the dreaded dushman from across the border.

This embarrassingly tacky, populist scene of high-decibel, chest-thumping patriotism is the low point in a film that never quite takes off anyway.

August 25, 1990: a farmer from Bhikhiwind village in Punjab crosses the India-Pak border in an inebriated state, is mistaken for a terrorist and jailed in Pakistan, returning 23 years later in a coffin after he is allegedly murdered by fellow prisoners.

The true story of Sarabjit Singh Atwal is a tragedy of gargantuan proportions that is enough to move a rock to tears. Yet director Omung Kumar somehow manages to make a curiously unmoving film out of this inherently heartbreaking story.

A large part of the reason for this is the writing by Utkarshini Vashishtha and Rajesh Beri, which places Sarabjit’s sister Dalbir Kaur rather than Sarabjit at the centre of the plot. This might have been an acceptable writing choice if they had focused on the nitty-gritty of this brave woman’s battle to free her brother. Instead we get broad brush strokes which induce a sense of detachment rather than involvement with this real-life crusader and her unfortunate sibling.

The writing is not the film’s primary problem though. The primary problem is the casting of Aishwarya Rai Bachchan as Dalbir. Try as she might, the actress cannot get under the skin of her character. She does not have the look or the body language of a Sardarni from rural Punjab, but her effort to get there shows in every studied gesture, every laboured expression, every step, every word spoken, until that effort becomes so distracting that it eclipses all else in the film.

This is particularly unfortunate because the rest of the cast is formidably gifted, but the entire project seems designed to ensure that they do not overshadow the central star. Rarely has Bollywood witnessed such a self-defeating approach to filmmaking.

Despite this, Randeep Hooda – one of the industry’s most under-rated talents – shines as Sarabjit to the extent that it is possible given the limited writing. His physical transformation from a healthy, happy-go-lucky young farmer and wrestling enthusiast to a scrawny, ragged, filthy prisoner is remarkable, a combination of his own scary dedication (he reportedly lost 18kg for the role), SFX and his makeup artist Renuka Pillai’s ability to understand the requirements of a character. In his skinny body and decrepit face here, it is hard to spot the actor’s naturally sexy persona or the hot physique he has happily displayed in earlier films.

Commendably though, Hooda does not use the bodily makeover as a crutch. His performance is greatly handicapped by the fact that the camera rarely dwells on his face when it is in the light in India, and in the shadows in his Pakistani prison we see his countenance with clarity pretty late into Sarbjit’s running time. Further diverting attention from him, quite senselessly, are pictures of the real Sarabjit on posters and placards being held up by campaigners in the film – serving to repeatedly remind the audience that the guy we see on screen is someone else.

Hampered in so many ways from so many directions, Hooda still immerses himself in the role, making it possible to sometimes forget that he is but an actor playing a part.

Richa Chadha as Sarabjit’s wife Sukhpreet is mostly on the margins, but in the one scene where the spotlight is firmly on her, she sparkles. The situation is a confrontation between Sukhpreet and Dalbir. Without raising her voice even a single notch, without seeming to try at all, Chadha delivers the only scene in the entire film in which I found myself crying.

Darshan Kumaar is the new chameleon of Bollywood. As the zealous Pakistani lawyer Avais Sheikh who takes up Sarbjit’s case he is a far cry from the heroine’s soft-spoken, supportive husband he played in Mary Kom (2014) or the frightfully evil fellow he was in last year’s NH10.

Omung Kumar debuted with Mary Kom in which, despite the grievous offence of casting Priyanka Chopra as a Manipuri woman, he pulled through on the strength of Saiwyn Quadras’ solid script, Chopra’s acting talent and his own firm directorial hand. Here though, he seems scattered and star-struck. It is as if he zeroed in on a star and built a film around her. Big mistake.

When you watch Sarbjit, you must accept it as a given that the makers believe Sarabjit Singh Atwal and his family’s version of events, not the Pakistani authorities. The reason why that is okay is because the film is not pretending to be a journalistic exercise telling all sides of the story; it is open about its stance that it is a feature recounting one side of the story. Besides, unlike the Akshay Kumar-starrer Airliftreleased earlier this year, the fictionalisation here does not amount to outright, blatant lies revolving around a protagonist who never existed in reality.

The news occurrences in Sarbjit are more or less faithful to Indian media reports, with certain self-serving omissions such as the real Sarabjit’s reported admission to a Pakistani judge that he was involved in cross-border liquor smuggling (not spying and terrorism) or the controversies surrounding the real Dalbir. Even if these exclusions were to be excused as cinematic licence, the problem remains that this film fails to flesh out the people at the heart of this true story.

Statistics flashed on screen right before the end credits inform us that there were 403 Indians languishing in Pakistani jails and 278 Pakistanis in Indian jails as on July 1, 2015. Like Sarabjit, they are not mere numbers, they are living breathing human beings, many of whom (though not all) are innocent victims of the long-running political enmity between India and Pakistan.

Sarbjit is a lesson in how not to tell their story.

Rating (out of five): **

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

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/sarbjit-sarabjit-aishwarya-rai-bachchan-randeep-hooda-richa-chadha-2790936.html

Poster courtesy: Team Celeb Studio Talk

The Diary of a Frustrated Indian Film Buff

Hollywood has tapped India’s non-English viewers for years, but domestic industries remain half-hearted in their bid to reach viewers outside their home states

By Anna MM Vetticad

This is not so much a column as it is the diary of a frustrated, furious Indian film buff.

March 2016: I note that Marathi director Nagraj Manjule’s Sairat will be in theatres in April. The wait for his second film began the day his first – the much-acclaimed inter-caste relationship saga, Fandry– was released in 2014.

April 29: Sairat is here and as usual, bookingwebsites and newspaper listings do not specify whether it has subtitles. I do what most viewers clearly cannot – I phone Manjule, who confirms it has English subs everywhere outside Maharashtra.

April 29 evening: I am at a PVR for another film, so I decide to book a ticket for Sairat. I am cautious as always since there have been occasions when I was informed by directors and senior multiplex chain staffers that a film was subtitled, only to find no subs when I watched it. So I double check with the booking counter executive. Sairat is not subtitled, he replies.

I tell him what the filmmaker told me. No subs, he insists. Could he ask a senior? Please? None is available, he says, adding that if a show of the film were on at that moment, he would have dashed in to verify this himself. Bizarre. He should not have to do that, I say.

Could you return tomorrow, he asks? No, I cannot spend an entire hour on another day driving all the way here and back, for information that should be on his computer right now. Time is not a joke.

I ask for a phone number I can later call. He manages to locate a senior and confirms that this hall is indeed showing a subtitled Sairat. Whew! I book, after 30 minutes wasted over this inexplicable inefficiency.

April 30: I am moved by Sairat’s inter-caste romance with its remarkably light touch despite the grim subject. I recall the previous day’s casual multiplex employee and wonder, for the nth time in my life, why it takes such an effort to be a committed viewer of films across Indian languages.

Rewind to February: Tamil director Vetri Maaran’s Visaaranai is out. I’m still drowning in my love for Kaaka Muttai, the film about two little Chennai slum dwellers that he produced last year, and I have been looking forward to this one. Again, no mention of subtitles anywhere. I am swamped with work so I avoid the rigmarole of calls to Maaran and so on.

May 8: I catch a subtitled Visaaranai at Delhi’s Habitat Film Festival. I am floored by this gut- wrenching story of police torture. It has just won the National Award for Best Tamil Film. It deserved Best Film. Sadly, most of India does not know that.

Over a decade since Holly wood made it standard practice  to release Hindi, Tamil and Telugu dubbed versions of all their  big-budget, sci-fi/fantasy action adventures and thrillers simultaneously with the English originals, India’s industries are still waffling in their efforts to reach out to audiences outside their home states.

Bahubali’s well-strategised pursuit of a pan-India viewership in 2015 was unusual. S.S. Rajamouli’s film was made in Telugu and Tamil, dubbed in multiple languages and aggressively marketed across the country, not just in southern India or to Telugu expats. Result: Rs 500 crore domestic gross collections, the highest ever for an Indian film (source: forbes.com).

That said, Bahubali was inherently mass-oriented. Many makers of low-budget, niche and/or indie projects say crowds are unlikely to flock to dubbed versions of their films, and their natural viewers tend to prefer subtitles over dubbing anyway.

Fair enough, then subtitle. And if you do, let the world know you have!

May 16: Exasperated by this long-running problem, I phone Maaran to vent some steam. My questions to him apply equally to Tamil, Hindi, Telugu and India’s smaller industries.

First, is subtitling expensive? Answer: the cost of subtitling the average Tamil film is about Rs 50,000.

Not a forbidding figure, which makes you wonder why all Indian films are not subtitled outside their home territories. The clichéd response from producers is that collections beyond a film’s traditional audience are minuscule.

Most producers lack the vision to see that subtitling makes their films accessible to non- traditional audiences, which could translate into their stars becoming more familiar and thus more attractive to audiences and producers outside their home turf over time, which in turn would lead to more inter-regional exchanges of acting talent, more pan-India audiences for all Indian films and ultimately, a better spread of all languages outside states in which they are usually spoken. Unless you reach out to others, how will you reach them?

As puzzling as those who do not subtitle their films are those who do. If you made the effort, you are obviously interested in new markets. Why then would you not let the public know your film is subtitled? 

“It is a simple matter of communication,” says Maaran, “but most exhibitors (theatre owners) don’t do it and distributors don’t push them since they are targeting the diaspora. Any non-diaspora audience that comes in is a bonus. What can producers do?”At least talk to them, please.

It is hard to believe that distributors have to move mountains or spend millions to convince exhibitors, e-booking sites and listings collators to merely mention that a film is subtitled. It is hard to fathom unenterprising exhibitors, since every ticket sold benefits them. And it is hard for a tormented film buff to understand why common sense does not prevail.

(This article was first published in The Hindu Businessline on May 21, 2016)

Original link:

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/watch/the-diary-of-a-frustrated-indian-film-buff/article8624902.ece

Previous instalment of Film Fatale: Wherefore Art Thou, ‘Madrasis’?

http://annavetticadgoes2themovies.blogspot.in/2016/03/community-stereotyping-in-bollywood.html

Photo captions: Posters from (1) Sairat (2) Visaaranai

Photographs courtesy:

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

(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visaranai

Release date:	May 20, 2016
Director:	Bryan Singer
Cast: Language:	James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Oscar Isaac, Nicholas Hoult, Sophie Turner, Rose Byrne, Tye Sheridan, Olivia Munn, Evan Peters English

The first hour of X-Men: Apocalypse holds out thepromise of fun, if nothing else, of the kind we have had with the best films of the series so far. It is filled with self-deprecating humour and pathos, rich in reminders that superhuman abilities are a double-edged sword for those on whom they are bestowed.

The central antagonist, En Sabah Nur / Apocalypse, has the ability to embed his enemies in walls and reduce human beings to dust. His first encounter with people here is as wolf-whistle-worthy as the introduction of a villain in a superhero flick ought to be.

A continent away, the tour of Magneto’s personal life is poignant and beautifully shot, even if not terribly original. And across the Atlantic, sparks fly between the younger mutants.

There is much to recommend then, not counting of course the ridiculousness of an army of men and women being named X-Men, not X-People. Their christening comes at the end of the film and sounds even more jarring here than it usually does because the task of announcing the name to the troops has been sneakily given to a female character – it seems like a strategic directorial and/or writing decision to silence feminists, but ends up highlighting the series’ innate sexism.

The downslide begins well before that point though.

The second half of X-Men: Apocalypse is a damp squib in comparison with the first hour. In terms of storytelling and SFX gimmicks, it feels as if once they allow us into En Sabah Nur’s bag of tricks, Magneto’s home and heart, Team Apocalypse does not know quite what to do with either of them. And so, while the rest of the X-People… note: yeah, that’s what they will be collectively called henceforth on this blog, except in the film’s title… As I was saying, while the rest of the X-People zip around the world, the pace slackens each time Nur and Magneto get more than a few moments on screen.

This of course is disappointing considering that Magneto – a sometimes-bad-sometimes-not mutant with the ability to generate and manipulate powerful magnetic fields – is played by the charismatic Michael Fassbender who reminds us in those well-handled opening scenes that he has so much to offer as an actor. It is almost scandalous that he is wasted thereafter.

The fizzling out of the fizz in Apocalypse is particularly surprising since it marks the return to the franchise of director Bryan Singer whose X-Men (2000) and X2: X-Men United (2003) have been the best of the lot so far. Perhaps his over-rated X-Men: Days of Future Past was a sign. Apocalypse is the ninth in the series and Singer’s fourth. It is the least interesting instalment.

The story initially takes us between Egypt and the US in the 1980s. In Cairo, Nur (Oscar Isaac) rises from a long deep sleep, while in Westchester County, New York, the telepathic paraplegic Professor Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) runs his school for the specially gifted a.k.a. mutants. Xavier remains a pacifist who is keen to bring Magneto to the good side, but Magneto’s bitterness and grief make him a prime target for Nur’s fear-mongering and human-bashing.

Nur believes that humanity was lost during his centuries-long absence, while he lay entombed alive by his enemies from his previous avatar. He now wants to re-shape the earth to suit his worldview, which sounds grand, though to be honest the details are more like wannabe mumbo-jumbo. Nur is not merely a megalomaniac who believes he is God. He is God. To set the world right, he must find four lieutenants (the Four Horsemen, a reference drawn from the last book of the Bible, The Apocalypse of St John The Apostle a.k.a. The Book of Revelation). While the sub-plots via which he locates them are entertaining enough, at least two of them turn out to be such lacklustre creatures that you have to wonder why he bothered with them at all.

The four are: Psylocke, Storm, Angel and Magneto himself. Psylocke’s energy blade and actress Olivia Munn’s swagger have potential, but she can do little in the face of the sketchy writing and her colleagues’ lifelessness. Their dullness is the starting point of the film’s undoing.

Storm’s ability to control weather is as fascinating a superpower as any, yet the characterisation of this mutant has been consistently insipid throughout the series. Watching Alexandra Shipp at work in a role earlier played by Halle Berry is all the evidence you need to know it is not Berry’s fault alone that Storm has been such a bore in all the films so far. It’s the writing, stupid!

The mutants ranged against them (some are younger versions of seniors seen in earlier films) are certainly a more appealing lot, though the film is so over-populated that only three truly stand out: Evan Peters playing Peter Maximoff / Quicksilver who can move faster than time, Tye Sheridan as Scott Summers / Cyclops from whose eyes pour out destructive beams of fire and Sophie Turner (Sansa Stark from Game of Thrones) as Jean Grey / Phoenix who struggles to control her telekinetic powers. For the record, Peters is way more memorable as Quicksilver than Aaron Taylor-Johnson as the same character in last year’s Avengers: Age of Ultron(2015).

The showstopper of this film is a scene involving Quicksilver with a delightful revisitation of ’80s pop group Eurythmics’ Sweet dreams are made of this. That the idea is borrowed from a previous X-Film is forgivable since it is still so amusing. What is inexplicable though is its placement, right in the middle of an intense scene of mass destruction, like a comical interlude involving Asrani or Keshto Mukherjee during gory dishum dishum between the hero and the villain in a 1970/80s formulaic Bollywood film.

The mutants whose potential is frittered away in the over-crowding are Nicholas Hoult as Hank McCoy / Beast, Kodi Smit-McPhee as Kurt Wagner / Nightcrawler and the always-nice-to-watch-yet-wasted-here Jennifer Lawrence playing the shape-shifting Mystique.

Perhaps the problem is that there have been too many X-Filmsalready and they have all been making so much money that the producers rushed into this one. There is certainly a great deal of mindlessness in the way X-Men: Apocalypse confuses the introduction of multiple characters for excitement. En Sabah Nur and his Four Horsemen are such anti-climactic villains. For someone who is supposed to be God, Nur seems pretty helpless in the face of the combined force of the good mutants, and at least two of his soldiers seem to look on more than join him in battle.

As criminal as the under-utilisation of Fassbender and Lawrence is the cursory treatment of themes that made the first two films so relevant: prejudice, fear of the other, a celebration of heterogeneity. Many viewers consider the X-Films a metaphor for homophobia. In a post-9/11 age, they could be seen too as a metaphor for Islamophobia. A year in which Donald Trump could well become the next President of the most powerful nation on the globe is a year crying out for a solid, well-thought-out X-Film,not this generic affair. Bryan Singer, how could you?

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

CBFC Rating (India):	U/A
Running time: MPAA Rating (US):	145 minutes PG-13 (for sequences of violence, action and destruction, brief strong language and some suggestive images)
Release date in US:	May 27, 2016

Related article by Anna MM Vetticad: “Boys will be boys and girls will be afterthoughts: The hyper-masculine world of superhero films”

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/boys-will-be-boys-and-girls-will-be-afterthoughts-the-hyper-masculine-world-of-superhero-films-2703822.html

Photograph courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Men:_Apocalypse

Release date:	May 27, 2016
Director:	Ram Gopal Varma
Cast: Language:	Sandeep Bharadwaj, Sachiin J. Joshi, Usha Jadhav, Lisa Ray Hindi

Ram Gopal Varma’s new Hindi film Veerappan would have been better served by the title Killing Veerappan that he gave to his Kannada film on the late forest bandit that was released earlier this year. The name might suggest otherwise but Veerappan is not a biopic of the notorious sandalwood and ivory smuggler who eluded the police of two states for over two decades. It is, instead, a documentary-style portrait of Veerappan as seen through the eyes of the Special Task Force set up to capture him, while they work towards achieving their goal.

One of the most notorious criminals in recent Indian history, Veerappan’s life no doubt is rich fodder for a filmmaker. And R.D. Tailang’s script has all the ingredients that could make for a great film. That it is not is a result of three factors: the overly loud background music that overpowers everything else in the film, the casting of Sachiin Joshi as the policeman who led the operation to nab Veerappan and Lisa Ray playing the wife of a slain policeman.

The decision to keep the score at a screeching level is inexplicable since the story itself does not scream. Besides, SandeepBharadwaj playing Veerappan does a very convincing job and does not for a moment raise the decibel levels of the film, although it might have been tempting to caricature a criminal who was famous for his massive handlebar moustache. Bharadwaj does his version of a Kannada/Tamil accent in Veerappan’s Hindi, but he does not let that overshadow the rest of his performance, as a lesser actor might have. His styling as Veerappan too is very very impressive.

The music might still have been forgivable, but Joshi’s expressionlessness and Ray’s excessive expressions are too much to take. Joshi of course is the film’s producer (his wife Raina’s name appears in the credits though), so RGV most probably did not have a choice with him. But what accounts for the casting of Ray? Her limitations are further underlined by the fact that in many scenes she is placed opposite the very natural Usha Jadhav playing Veerappan’s wife Muthulakshmi.

The film’s deficiencies are most unfortunate because in its pluses we get a glimpse of the old Ramu that we all once knew and loved, the man who gave us pathbreaking gangster and crime flicks such as Shiva, Satya and Company. For instance in Veerappan, it is interesting to see the subtle ways in which RGV plants seeds of doubt in viewers’ minds about the ‘truth’ as it is recounted by the police. The God complex of the lead policemen too is unbridled and not softened up for the viewers’ palate or in the interests of political correctness. The action is well-handled, completely not Singham-style, formulaic, over-the-top Bollywood but realistic and believable as it might have happened in real life (barring a hilarious overhead shot of Joshi on elevated ground scanning the surrounding area for Veerappan – the man is such a bad actor that he cannot even stand correctly).

That being said, the difficult terrain in which Veerappan operated is remarkably captured by Aniket Khandagale’s camera in a way that is intended to overwhelm us, to remind us of how challenging itwould have been for the police.

In certain aspects of storytelling then, this is a film that cannot be ignored. It is however hard to get past the poor acting by Joshi and Ray and that overly loud background score. I kept imagining this film in my head with the same director, but with music at a lower volume, starring Adil Hussain or Kay Kay Menon and Tabu in the roles played by Joshi and Ray. What excellent co-stars they could have made to the very talented Sandeep Bharadwaj. Too late for that of course.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	A
Running time:	125 minutes 27 seconds

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/veerappan-review-flashes-of-the-old-rgv-peep-out-despite-the-loudness-2801876.html

Related link: Anna M.M. Vetticad’s interview with Ram Gopal Varma on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/satya-to-veerappan-watch-ram-gopal-varma-talk-about-cinema-censorship-2801654.html

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veerappan_(2016_film)

Release date:	May 27, 2016
Director:	Anu Menon
Cast: Language:	Kalki Koechlin, Naseeruddin Shah, Rajat Kapoor, Arjun Mathur, Suhasini Maniratnam Hindi

Considering the grim subject and setting – the intensive care unit of a luxe hospital in Kochi – Waiting is a surprisingly pleasant and positive film.

Anu Menon’s second directorial venture has the same lightness of touch and natural storytelling style she brought to her debut in 2012’s London, Paris, New York starring Aditi Rao Hydari and Ali Zafar. Yet this film is as different from her first as night is from day and Tara is from Shiv.

Tara and Shiv are Tara Deshpande-Kapoor (Kalki Koechlin) and Professor Shiv Natraj (Naseeruddin Shah) in this Hindi-English-occasionally-Malayalam (subtitled) film Waiting. They ought, henceforth, to be an accepted metaphor for strangers who really “get” each other.

She is a feisty, often foul-mouthed, occasionally unthinking though always well-meaning, impatient, impetuous, flashy, attractive, young, recently married woman. Her husband Rajat has just been in a near-fatal accident that sends him into a coma.

Shiv’s wife of 40 years, Pankaja, has been in a coma for eight months. He is a spirited yet sobre, prim and propah, meticulous, kind, staid old man and theirs has been a happy marriage.

Tara is well off. Shiv has taken on back-breaking debt to pay Pankaja’s medical bills.

The two meet in the waiting room of the Kochi hospital where their respective spouses lie in an Intensive Care Unit. As they bond over their grief, fears and difficult decisions, they form an unlikely friendship that transcends age and backgrounds.

He does not know what Twitter is; the discovery that he has been married for four decades elicits an incredulous “oh fuck” from her. Here is what they do have in common though: they both adore their spouses.

It is the simplest of premises drawn from a challenging phase in Menon’s own life. Under her direction aided by a strong script she has co-written with James Ruzicka, it turns into a warm, telling commentary on love, family, generation gaps, inner strength and basic human goodness.

The film is not only about two grieving individuals though. Central to the plot is the fact that Tara is more alone than she might otherwise have been in this tragic scenario, because she has been plucked out of her home city Mumbai and planted in a new milieu where she has no friends and does not understand the language. Kochi is busy and buzzing in comparison with other Kerala towns and cities, yet not as much as India’s biggest metropolises; it is large enough to offer the kind of high-end hospital where Rajat is being treated, but not as crowded or frenetic as Chennai and Bengaluru in a way that might be familiar and comforting to a lonely Mumbaikar.

The hustle and bustle of daily life can sometimes be used to drown out the voices in our heads. In relatively languorous Kochi, Tara does not have that option.

In such a place, away from her family and social circle, it is but natural that she would turn for comfort to a local who is also somewhat of an outsider: Pankaja is a Malayali, Shiv is not. Being a retiree gives him enough time to be devoted to his comatose wife while also offering a shoulder to cry on to Tara who initially strikes him as an inexplicable drama queen.

If you go looking for dramatic twists, you will not find them here. Waiting is not that kind of film. It does, however, throw a bunch of questions at us. When we pray for a bed-ridden loved one’s longevity, are we doing it for them or for ourselves? Is it selfish to long for their survival irrespective of the quality of life they may have? If you pull the plug on someone you love, are you giving up on them?

Waiting does not spoonfeed us responses to these questions as universal truths. It leaves us to find our own answers while its protagonists find theirs.

Shah and Koechlin complement the film’s non-preachy and realistic tone. There is a natural rhythm to their acting and the chemistry between them is unmistakable.

Tara is the kind of woman who thinks nothing of making her husband’s evidently conservative colleague squirm by asking him if Rajat was sleeping with a business associate. Koechlin’s achievement is that she makes her character appealing despite her brashness.

Shah is charismatic as ever. Although his pupils appear strangely dilated in some close-ups, those shots do not happen so often as to be distracting. The actor does not resort to over-statement at any point although there are plenty of scenes where he could have. Even when Shiv gets frantic about Pankaja, care is taken not to reduce him to a caricature of an eccentric old man. His is a seemingly effortless and moving performance.

The film features several well-written supporting roles. National Award-winning Tamil-Telugu-Malayalam actress Suhasini Maniratnam and Arjun Mathur are so likeable in cameos as Pankaja and Rajat that you can well imagine a spouse pining away for months and years for them.

Actor Krishnasankar as the junior doctor Ravi and Rajeev Ravindranathan playing Girish from Rajat’s Kochi office are interesting choices. It is nice to see the film’s Malayali characters being played without the usual Bollywood ‘Madrasi’ stereotyping.

Rajat Kapoor walks a fine line as the neurosurgeon Dr Nirupam Malhotra, making him a man who is hard to dislike although he is painfully practical in a way that some people might consider heartless, even egotistical. I did not entirely understand why he had to be a Punjabi though – this is not to suggest that there are no Punjabi doctors in Kochi, but that the lack of locals except in supporting, subordinate positions is curious. Except for this and a somewhat contrived, needless revelation Shiv makes to Pankaja at one point, the rest of the film flows as smoothly as the backwaters that briefly appear on screen.

Waiting is about some of the toughest decisions life can throw at us and about an unusual, heartwarming friendship. It is both sad and amusing, believable, well acted and very well told.

Rating (out of five): ***

CBFC Rating (India):	A
Running time:	99 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/waiting-review-naseeruddin-shah-and-kalki-koechlin-shine-in-a-lovely-film-2801552.html

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_(2015_film)

Release date:	May 27, 2016
Director:	Pavan Kirpalani
Cast: Language:	Radhika Apte, Satyadeep Mishra, Ankur Vikal, Yashaswini Dayama Hindi

Bollywood has a lousy track record with horror films in the past couple of decades. Most makers of spookfests and mind benders in Hindi have, for what seems like the recent forever, tried to manipulate audiences with screeching sounds, sudden camera movements and other clichés.

Phobia has no time for such low-brow nonsense. Director Pavan Kirpalani’s third film is a heart-stoppingly frightening thriller that refuses to take the viewer for granted. His first, Ragini MMS in 2011, was flawed but proved that he was cut out for the genre. Phobia is simply brilliant in the way it rolls up to the multiple massive surprises in the end. This is seriously scary, seriously intriguing stuff that, as it happens, features a career-defining performance by Radhika Apte.

The film begins with wickedly chosen clues. Franz Kafka’s words, “A cage went in search of a bird”, appear on screen before the camera closes in on a painting. Next we meet artist Mehek Deo (Radhika Apte), surrounded by what seem like friends and admirers at her exhibition while she narrates a story about a cat and a weird old man and gently ribs a chap called Shaan (Satyadeep Mishra). Everything in that apparently innocuous scene is crucial to what follows.

Soon after, Mehek is sexually assaulted and develops agoraphobia, an anxiety disorder that leads her to fear leaving her home. Shaan, her some-time lover and full-time friend, takes her away from the flat she occupied with her sister with whom she shares a tense relationship, to a friend’s apartment since he is sure solitude will cure her. He does not, however, anticipate the creepy neighbour (Ankur Vikal) and the diary of an ex-tenant who went missing, which start preying on Mehek’s mind. What follows is a hair-raising parade of visions, violence and then gore.

Satyen Chaudhry’s design of the rented house is crucial to the panic building up in Mehek’s mind and the anticipation mounting in ours. The air of decaying prosperity, the walls bearing paintings with darkened human figures that could easily be mistaken for mirrors in which we are possibly seeing a reflection of someone watching Mehek from behind – it is all very spooky.

Jayakrishna Gummadi’s camera occasionally changes vantage points so that we sometimes watch the proceedings as outsiders and sometimes right beside or behind Mehek, hoping to see what she sees. His work, Vivek Sachidanand’s sound design and Karan Gour’s background score never once make us conscious of how they are working to play around with our heads.

Fully backing the talent backing him, the director builds up a sense of foreboding from the very first shot. He occasionally relieves the tension with a genre cliché – a bathtub, a musical timepiece, a peephole, a character opting to enter an eerie place though we as viewers are smart enough to know it probably houses a ghost – possibly to convince us that since this is familiar ground, we are well prepared for what comes next. In one scene, a knife is conveniently left in the vicinity of a patient with a grave psychological ailment. As it turns out, a cliché is not a cliché and a loophole is not a lazy loophole if what you saw is not what you think you saw.

There are brief passages of humour in Shaan and Mehek’s fights and when her paranoid actions border on the farcial. A formulaic filmmaker trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator might have used such scenes to mock Mehek and mental maladies. Not Kirpalani. These interludes serve to lull our senses before – boom! – another plot twist smacks us in the nerves.

Mehek is popular, attractive and knows her mind. Watching her develop a phobia is akin to the shock you get when you discover that someone like Robin Williams suffered from severe depression. “How could a funny man be depressed?” here becomes “how could a feisty woman be afraid?” Medical professionals could explain whether the film is accurate in its depiction of agoraphobia, but this is for sure: by painting Mehek as a lively creature in that brief introduction, Kirpalani overturns the stereotypes about mental illness that so many of us harbour. Bravo!

This is truly intelligent writing all around: the story is by Kirpalani himself, he co-wrote the screenplay with Arun Sukumar, and the naturally flowing dialogues are by Pooja Ladha Surti who is also responsible for the film’s crisp, clever editing.

At the heart of it all is the wonderful Radhika Apte who is pitch perfect as Mehek. Apte has already built an impressive filmography in character roles across Indian film industries in the past decade. Her experience shows in Phobia in which she dominates the story and the camera rests on her almost throughout, without the strain showing for even a second.

She is ably supported by believable performances from the entire supporting cast. Yashaswini Dayama playing her slightly kookie teenaged neighbour is a find.

Though the film’s primary goal is to scare the bejeezus out of us, it is also filled with acute social insights. For instance, Mehek’s fear of the outside results from a sexual assault, yet in her flat she is stuck with the devil within. In that sense, Phobia is a metaphor for the omnipresence of sexual predators in a world where women are told to cover up, not step out late, not step out alone, not step into crowds, all to protect themselves, but judgmental misogynists have no answer for what is to be done about sexual marauders within homes, families, offices and among acquaintances.

Mehek’s actions in her new home are an effort to help a woman she never knew. Her innate goodness, the risks a chirpy neighbour (Yashaswini Dayama) takes for her, the lengths to which Shaan goes for her indicate the film’s non-black-&-white view of the world. When we first see Mehek, it is evident she has a wide social circle. When it comes to the crunch though, the only one by her side is Shaan. Even her seemingly loving sister turns on her with alarming ferocity when she becomes an inconvenience. Then Mehek steps up for a stranger, then a stranger steps up for her. The crowd at the party does not turn up for Mehek, but decency is clearly not dead.

Ghost flick, psychological thriller, social commentary or all the above – in the end, Phobia is what you want it to be for yourself. It is also, without question, a superbly entertaining film.

Rating (out of five): ****

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

Poster courtesy: Raindrop Media

Release date:	June 3, 2016
Director:	Farhad-Sajid
Cast: Language:	Akshay Kumar, Riteish Deshmukh, Abhishek Bachchan, Boman Irani, Jacqueline Fernandez, Lisa Haydon, Nargis Fakhri, Jackie Shroff, Chunkey Pandey Hindi

One of the formulae most often visited by Bollywood comedies is the business of assigning a distinctive quirk to major characters in a story. The writers of Housefull 3 are clearly very enthusiastic about this device since they use it rather generously in their film.

And so: Sandy suffers from Dissociative Identity Disorder, which results in the emergence of his violence-prone, self-destructive alter ego Sundi every time someone utters the word “Indian”. Teddy is congenitally confused by words, for instance saying “tawaif” for “wife”. Gangster Urja Nagre (Jackie Shroff) has a penchant for coining acronyms at the drop of a hat, such as ATM for “Ab tu marega” and WTF for “Wednesday Thursday Friday”. And the film’s three leading ladies apparently speak such poor English that they fill their Hindi speech with literal translations of popular English phrases.

Not counting the insensitivity towards a serious mental disorder, the rest are ruses that, when intelligently used and well-timed, could actually make for a good, old-fashioned, rollicking nonsense comedy. Remember Mrs Malaprop from Richard Sheridan’s The Rivals and Dogberry from Much Ado About Nothing? The problem arises because writer-directors Farhad-Sajid and their co-writer Rajan Agarwal appear to have invested little thought in their film once they came up with a quirk per character. Worse, they over-use each one till kingdom come.

The ladies, for instance, dispense so many mixed, confused metaphors that you could fill up a few pages by just listing them. Here are some that I can recall off the top of my head:

“kaamwaali gayee toh kaamwaali gayee” for “let bygones be bygones”

“bandook ke bachche” for “son of a gun”

“nimbu ki roshni se door raho” for “stay away from the limelight” and

“ghadi ke upar” for “once upon a time”.

Firstly, whatever be the solo merit of any of these lines, picture a film in which one of these comes up once every few minutes and they get progressively less imaginative with each passing moment. Second, these lines are a poor quality lift of an idea from Bol Bachchan in which Ajay Devgn’s character insisted on speaking English although he was terrible at it. His version of “don’t poke your nose…” was: “When elder get cosy, younger don’t put nosy.” It was all quite ridiculously hilarious. Farhad-Sajid, who wrote the dialogues for Bol Bachchan, seem unable to even effectively borrow from themselves in this film.

That is Housefull 3 for you, taking the audience lightly with lazy scripting, skating along instead on the charisma and goofiness of its central male star, goodwill for many of the remaining cast members and occasional patches of witty absurdity.

The story is set in London where shipping magnate Batook Patel (Boman Irani) lives with his daughters Ganga (Jacqueline Fernandez), Jamuna (Lisa Haydon) and Saraswati (Nargis Fakhri). Patel refuses to get them married for reasons we discover by the by. A fake prediction – never mind what – by a fake astrologer (Chunkey Pandey) leads the women to request their respective boyfriends to lie to their Dad.

Ganga is a doctor whose football playing beau Sandy (Akshay Kumar), also her patient, must pretend that he is a paraplegic. Jamuna is dating race car driver Teddy (Riteish Deshmukh), who is compelled to play-act blindness. And the man Saraswati loves, aspiring rapper Bunty (Abhishek Bachchan), is forced to feign muteness. A subsequent misunderstanding results in another character thinking that Sandy is blind, Teddy is mute and Bunty is wheelchair bound. The result is confounded confusion.

That is not necessarily a bad thing. Confusion can be a good thing in comedy. Now that it has been used for centuries to evoke laughter though, it takes a helluva team to extract anything more than the usual clichés from a story of identity mix-ups, lies within lies within lies and other mad muddles. The makers of Housefull 3 are not that team.

This is what comes of pointedly aiming only at viewers who are easily pleased. The first film in this series – directed by Sajid Khan – was fun despite its unabashed stupidity (possibly because of it), but it has been downhill since then. Khan directed Housefull 2and managed to extract some laughs despite the fact that it was crude and callous, featuring, among other things, a rape joke, a leering father-in-law making advances towards his future bahu, a crocodile biting Deshmukh’s bottom and a python latching on to Shreyas Talpade’s penis. Large parts of Housefull 3 are just flat.

The writing is also curiously confused and lackadaisical. For instance, when Patel introduces us to his daughters, he describes them with great pride as “sanskaari” girls, at which point all three are clad in Indian attire. Later, they are shown leaving the house surreptitiously in skimpy Western wear, to prove that they were fooling their Dad about their adherence to Bhartiya sanskriti and sabhyata. Yet in later scenes they blithely appear before Daddy in revealing Western clothing and he does not bat an eyelid, as though that plot point has been forgotten.

And oh puhleeeeeeease, do not bore us with that cliché that critics do not like light-hearted comedies, which is being fed to viewers by some producers. Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Gol Maal and Chupke Chupke, Priyadarshan’s Hungama, many of David Dhawan’s collaborations with Govinda, Abhinav Kashyap’s Dabangg… I can rattle off the names of nutty films I’ve loved. The Akshay Kumar-starrers Singh Is Kinng, Welcome, Namastey London and Desi Boyz too had plenty to offer fans of humour.

And puhleeeeeease, do not confuse crassness with political incorrectness. Two of the best American television comedies running in India right now – The Big Bang Theory and Two Broke Girls – are terribly non PC and make all kinds of jokes directed at various races, religious groups and across genders. Thing is, they know how to be irreverent without being gross or creepy. Towards the end of Housefull 3, when each of the three male leads ends up with a woman other than his girlfriend in his arms, Sandy orders them to pair up with the right woman in these words: “apne apne maal ke paas jaao yaar.”

It is a wonder why Kumar – whose goofiness is perhaps the best thing about this film – does not realise that there is a place in this world and box-office success to be earned from understated comedy. I mean, Ajay Devgn persists with the Golmaal series but he has also tried his hand at the relatively low-key, thoroughly enjoyable Atithi Tum Kab Jaoge, right? Kumar seems not to have the mindspace for something like that, although he clearly has the talent for it. Even within the arena of mindlessness and loudness, he seems to be taking his audience for granted too often with the likes of Housefull 3and Entertainment(which, incidentally, was also directed by Farhad-Sajid).

Bachchan Junior has always had a pleasant screen presence, and it is nice to see him in a film after such a long gap, but his role here has very little meat. Deshmukh is one of the best comedians in contemporary Bollywood, but he is criminally under-utilised. The three women here are treated as visual attractions and nothing else, which is disappointing because Haydon was such a live wire in Queen (2014) and Fakhri, who is limited elsewhere, revealed a funny bone and a charming ability to let her hair down in the Varun Dhawan-starrer Main Tera Hero (2014).

The only actor other than Kumar who makes somewhat of an impact in Housefull 3 is Boman Irani who lifts the film in many of his scenes. Jackie Shroff, who deserves better, is wasted.

The indolence in the writing of Housefull 3 is best illustrated by the profusion of self-referential jokes in the film. I mean, c’mooooooonnnnn, how many times are we expected to be amused by Deshmukh breaking into Marathi in the heat of a moment? Is it really laugh-worthy that he addresses his girlfriend Jenny a.k.a. Jamuna in the film as Genelia? Yawn. And how many mentions of the Bachchan family will we hear around Abhishek? C’mooooonnnnn, think of something new!

Rating (out of five): *1/2

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	134 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/housefull-3-review-a-lazily-written-flat-ensemble-film-2815258.html

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housefull_3

Anna MM Vetticad,Anna Vetticad,Indian cinema,Bollywood,Housefull series,Housefull 3,Farhad-Sajid,Akshay Kumar,Riteish Deshmukh,Abhishek Bachchan,Jacqueline Fernandez,Lisa Haydon,Nargis Fakhri

Release date:	June 10, 2016
Director:	Ribhu Dasgupta
Cast: Language:	Amitabh Bachchan, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Vidya Balan, Sabyasachi Chakraborty, Padmavathi Rao, Aarnaa Sharma, Ricky Patel, Masood Akhtar Hindi with a little bit of Bengali

If you have seen the South Korean thriller Montage, then you do not need this cautionary note: Te3n is to be watched with rapt attention. No loo breaks, no glances at your cellphone.

This Amitabh Bachchan-Vidya Balan-Nawazuddin Siddiqui-starrer is an official remake of the 2013 film by writer-director Chung Keun-Sup, who is acknowledged in the credits here for the story. The narrative of the Hindi film is firmly rooted in Kolkata where events unfold over an eight-year period.

Bachchan plays John Biswas in Te3n, an old man whose eight-year-old granddaughter Angela is kidnapped and killed in 2007. Over the next eight years, Biswas relentlessly pursues police officer Martin Das (Siddiqui) who handled his case, determined to persuade him not to give up on finding the kidnapper whose trail had apparently long gone cold.

Angela’s death had a profound impact on Das too. He handles his trauma – or perhaps tries to escape his sense of guilt – by leaving the force to become a Christian priest. In 2015 when Biswas arrives at his church with a clue to the whereabouts of the kidnapper/s, Fr Martin Das urges him for the nth time to heal rather than rake up an old wound.

Biswas is undeterred, of course. Meanwhile, Fr Das’ curiosity is piqued when another kidnapping takes place and his old friend, police officer Sarita Sharma (Balan), asks for help with the investigation because of the similarities between the two cases.

Central to the effectiveness of Te3n is its pace, which serves to build up a sense of dread and foreboding until the identity of the culprit/s is revealed. There are no high-speed car chases, screeching tyres and high-decibel shootouts anywhere in sight. This is not that kind of film. The simmering treatment is designed to unite viewers with Biswas’ frustration, to help us understand why he takes so many risks to attain closure. It is almost impossible to shake off the fingers of fear that grip the heart as heappears to repeatedly endanger himself in his quest for the truth. And when the big oh moment arrives without drumbeats and trumpeters, it is hard not to share his anguish and sense of helplessness.

The star of this film is director Ribhu Dasgupta’s refusal to step on the accelerator. Dasgupta clearly has a deep understanding of the film’s milieu and a firm handle on the solid written material at his disposal.

Suresh Nair & Bijesh Jayrajan’s screenplay favours minimalism over verbosity. So do the dialogues by Ritesh Shah. Both add to the film’s atmospherics and unyielding tension.

Tushar Kanti Ray’s cinematography complements their labours, capturing Kolkata’s chaos and colours sans clichés, lending shades of gray and a pall of detached gloom to the crowded city. It is as if, like John Biswas, for the camera too time has stood still while a bustling city hurries about all around.

The Howrah bridge, those bright yellow taxis, the immersion of Durga idols – all the familiar indicators make an appearance without screaming out that they have been dragged in to remind us that we are in Kolkata. And while none of these visual landmarks is overwhelming, there are some refreshing additions that Bollywood tends to not notice:Fr Das’ imposing church and an equally imposing imambara, both of which are crucial to the story.

Equally to the point, it is nice to see the way Ray focuses on the three beautiful faces that are pivotal to the film, without overdoing it as many DoPs have done particularly while working on Bachchan’s post-2000 films.

The detailing in the sound design by Shajith Koyeri and Tanmoy Chakraborty’s production design (especially of Biswas’ home and the interiors of the spaces from which Fr Das and Sharma operate) also play an essential role in Te3n’s very real, dramatic-yet-not-melodramatic quality. So is the action by Sham Kaushal, who is careful not to hark back to Bachchan’s invulnerable Angry Young Man avatar of the 1970s and ’80s.

Clinton Cerejo’s music is apt till thebig reveal, although it is over-used after that point, which is also when the film carries on a lot longer than it needed to. Still, there is enough humanity, believability and suspense in Te3nto put its flaws in the shade.

Beyond the gripping mysteryare some delightful elements that are unobtrusively woven in, indicating the team’s intimate knowledge of Kolkata, interest in Indian society at large and disinterest in superficiality, for the most part. For instance, minority community members are usually featured in Bollywood stories with a specific purpose: Muslims – secularism; Christians – glamour and exoticism; Sikhs, Parsis and homosexuals – comedy; Dalits – you’ve got to be kidding, they do not exist as far as most of mainstream Bollywood is concerned. In Te3n, however,a huge deal is not made of the fact that two of the three main characters are Christians, perhaps Sharma is too. And except for the irritating insistence on having them use the English words “god” and “prayer” instead of “bhagwan” and “prarthana”though they are speaking in Hindi throughout, they do not otherwise conform to the stupid Christian stereotype that dominated Bollywood till the 1990s and has occasionally reared its head since then. A song and dance is not made either of the religion of the kindly gentleman at the imambara.

The backroom team of Te3n is ably fronted by sound acting. Bachchan shrugs off the star personaand trademark mannerisms that have marked many of his post-2000 films, to deliver a felt performance, drawing us into Biswas’ grief and silent fury. Siddiqui’s subtlety as he switches from priest to policeman to priest to policeman underlines his casual brilliance. And Balan – who is inexplicably cited as a “guest appearance” in the opening credits – is as sturdy as ever, though hers is the least fleshed out character of the trio.

Thankfully too, nobody is trying to ‘do Bengali accents’ here. Seriously, accents are superfluous in such films. After all, it calls for a suspension of disbelief to buy that characters in Kolkata would operate entirely in Hindi. If we are willing to go that far, unless we never ever want a Hindi film to be set anywhere outside the Hindi belt, why would we needlessly burden actors with accents? This is one of many sensible directorial decisions that make up this film.

Te3n is not without weaknesses: it could have done with some snipping at the end, the title does not work and there are a couple of important loose ends that should have been – and easily could have been – tied up. For instance, the actions of a primary character hinge on the extreme cooperation and trust of an individual who is a satellite player in the story, but we never fully understand why and how that trust was won. You will get that sentence only after you watch the film in its entirety.

It is a measure of Te3n’s strengths that, in the overall analysis, these complaints recede into the background. It is so wonderful to see director Sujoy Ghosh who gave us Kahaani, backing this film as a producer. Ribhu Dasgupta’s Te3n is a strong, entertaining whodunit, so lovely in its sadness and so thoroughly engaging in its observations on old age, escapism, persistence, love and revenge.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	136 minutes 54 seconds

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/te3n-review-amitabh-bachchan-vidya-balan-nawaz-film-is-solid-suspense-thriller-2826374.html

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

Release date:	June 10, 2016
Director:	Deepak Tijori
Cast: Language:	Randeep Hooda, Kajal Aggarwal, Dhiraj Shetty, Mamik, Anil George, Yuri Suri Hindi

And once again, Hottie Hooda shines in a film that proves he deserves better.

Do Lafzon Ki Kahani (A Story In Two Words, a title derived from the old Hindi film song) can be summarised in one lafz: dated.

This Randeep Hooda-Kajal Aggarwal-starrer strings together many trite situations from many romantic dramas of the past. Even the two leads are clichés. He the strong, silent type. She whose chirpiness is designed to charm him, because wide-eyed, bholi-bhaali women who chatter endlessly are cho chweet and cute, na? Except that humans who chirrup and tweet sound like twits, and it is really not that cute when a seemingly intelligent adult derives life lessons from a formulaic saas-bahuHindi soap that the film seems to be mocking in the first place.

After an ominous-looking, intriguing opening scene involving a shootout and a disfigured Hooda in a Kuala Lumpur dockyard (later repeated with a shocking revelation), the film descends into syrupy, saccharine territory, giving us a hero with a dark secret and a bubbly blind woman who he falls for at first sight, enough to sacrifice his life, limbs and future to restore her vision.

Suraj (no surname) was once a boxer, but now earns his living doing multiple odd jobs. Jenny Mathias appears to be a full-time art teacher and part-time physiotherapist – I am not entirely sure how that is possible, but the poorly-thought-out physio angle is thrown in for a reason.

They meet when he takes the job of a parking attendant and she lands up to watch a soppy soap on the TV in his booth. Considering the generous size of her home, it is clear she can afford a TV. Since she was in the habit of watching that show with Suraj’s elderly predecessor, one assumes the old man was her friend, except that her supposed buddy did not bother to inform her when he retired. Why then? Perhaps because the writer could not think of a convincing way to introduce his reclusive hero to his bright, sociable – yet inexplicably friendless – heroine while simultaneously introducing us to her love for intellectually challenged teleserials?

Whatever.

There is a bit of a twist in the tale involving how their paths first crossed, but the potential of that plot point is frittered away when it too is used to further raise the film’s schmaltzy quotient.

(Spoiler alert for this paragraph) If you are a boxer and a sad-looking stranger asks you to throw a fight because your opponent, who is her husband, desperately needs the winnings for their daughter’s cancer treatment, here’s a suggestion: don’t throw the fight, offer to pay the kid’s hospital bills instead. There’s too much of this stuff and nonsense in the film. Seriously! Are we not past the era of silly, easily solvable confusions, misunderstandings and qurbani?

Little time and zero imagination appear to have been expended on the film’s writing (the kahani of Do Lafzon Ki Kahaniis credited to Girish Dhamija though it is inspired by the 2011 South Korean film Always). However, money has clearly been spent on the technical departments, especially the design, choreography and shooting of the impressively done, bone-crunching boxing scenes.But even this element and the catchy song Mujhe jeena sikha diya are not striking enough to make DLKK a film worth recommending.

In this ocean of unimaginativeness swim Randeep Hooda and Kajal Aggarwal, playing the lead couple. Aggarwal has worked across Indian film industries for several years. Her calling card in Hindi cinema (if at all it can be considered one) is a project that treated its heroine as the hero’s mandatory arm candy: Singham in 2011. Given a meatier role here, formulaic – and potentially irritating – though it is, she shows us that she is capable of much more than that. It does not hurt, of course, that she looks really pretty in minimal makeup and simple, attractive frocks. A hat tip here to Ashley Rebello and Terrence Lobo who are credited with the costume design & styling.

As for Hooda, 2016 has been a good showcase for his underrated talent, with Laal Rang, Sarbjit and Do Lafzon Ki Kahani releasing in quick succession. There is a moment in this film when a sightless girl asks Suraj what he looks like and he, the shyness and quiet pride flitting across his face, tells her that people consider him “rough and tough”. Contrast this turn as the reticent Suraj with his performance as a feisty villager who is reduced to a skeletal mess in a Pakistani prison in Sarbjitor the plucky, sexy criminal he plays in Laal Rang and you might weep with despair at mainstream Bollywood’s failure to give him substantial roles more often in better films. PS: Hooda takes off his shirt to train in Do Lafzon and, err, let’s just say that makes me very happy.

Interesting actors pop up in supporting roles in this film: Mamik, who played Aamir Khan’s brother in Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar (1992), plays Suraj’s coach Omi; and theatre actor Anil George, earlier seen in Miss Lovely, plays the owner of the club that Suraj once represented.

But even talented actors cannot save this treacle-drenched, outmoded, unoriginal affair. The lafz“love never hurts...love heals” flash on screen right in the end. It takes a really well-made film to pull off that kind of mush. Do Lafzon Ki Kahani ain’t that film.

Rating (out of five): *

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	127 minutes 49 seconds

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

Release date:	June 17, 2016
Director:	Nagesh Kukunoor
Cast: Language:	Hetal Gada, Krrish Chhabria, Vipin Sharma, Gulfam Khan, Rajiv Lakshman, Vijay Maurya, Vibha Chhiber, Suresh Menon Hindi

There is a scene in Dhanak, in which two boys are seated on a swing with Pari, the elder sister of one of the li’l fellows. She watches them with affection and mildly chides them for over-eating as they stuff their faces with jalebis. The mini gents feed each other, but it seems not to even occur to either of them to offer her a nibble.

Later, Pari sits with her brother Chotu and a child-like man. Again, the man feeds Chotu while not even asking her if she is hungry, and again, she seems not to mind at all.

It is unclear whether writer-director Nagesh Kukunoor intends us to read Dhanak this way, but his latest film is as much an unspoken comment on the male-centricity of our collective human existence, as it is an endearing road movie about two siblings journeying across a desert to meet Shah Rukh Khan.

Dhanak is the story of Pari and Chotu who live with a childless uncle and his heartless wife in a village in Rajasthan. The kids lost their parents a few years earlier, and Chotu lost his eyesight when he was four. Now eight, he is the focal point of 10-year-old Pari’s life. She selflessly showers him with love, deliberately fails in school exams – despite being a very bright student – so that they can end up as classmates, and has promised him that his vision will be restored before he turns nine on October 2 of the year in which we meet them. As it happens, Pari is a fan of Shah Rukh while Chotu is obsessed with Salman Khan

When Pari sees SRK on a poster for eye donations and later learns that the star is shooting near Jaisalmer, she runs away from home with Chotu to get her favourite Khan’s help to help Chotu.

During the risky excursion from their tiny hamlet and across the blazing Thar, they meet a motley bunch of characters who serve as a reminder of the evil that exists in this world while also underlining a fact we too often forget: that the good out there far exceeds the bad.

Kukunoor keeps his tone real and the proceedings believable through most of the film. For the most part, Dhanak is consequently both charming and insightful. Even when he stumbles occasionally, the children remain consistently loveable. And stumble he does, such as in the chance encounter with a somewhat clichéd white man (Chet Dixon), the abrupt shift in gears to a mystical realm with a soothsayer (Bharati Achrekar) and the stereotyping of the children’s hard-working aunt (Gulfam Khan) as a mild version of the evil stepmother from old fairytales while their lazy layabout of an uncle (Vipin Sharma) is viewed through a lens of indulgent tenderness.

Through all this though, the characterisation of Pari and Chotu, and the incredible child actors playing the two, remain pitch perfect. Their conversations flow naturally, their chemistry is palpable and at no point does Kukunoor try to manipulate us with precocious cutesiness as so many directors do when they are working with such young artistes.

The children are surrounded by an array of interesting supporting actors, most especially Vipin Sharma playing their uncle and the attractive Rishi Deshpande as an elderly truck driver. These are strong performers to be up against, but Hetal Gada as Pari and Krrish Chhabria as Chotu are more than up to the challenge. They were just 10 and eight years old respectively when the film was being shot, yet they do not take a single misstep. Producer Elahe Hiptoola reveals that 500 kids were auditioned in Mumbai, Jodhpur, Jaipur, Bangalore and Hyderabad to find this pair.

There is more to them than their innate, innocent charm. They were born to be before the camera. It would interesting to see what Chhabria grows up to be, since he currently has the advantage of a baby-like appearance, is of slighter stature than the girl and in the film, has the benefit of playing a bratty, chatty youngster of the kind adults are usually drawn to. She – taller, with a face maturer than her age – is a confirmed quantity though: sweet-voiced Hetal Gada is, without question, a formidable talent.

Hats off for the casting win, Team Dhanak!

Chirantan Das’ camerawork among those scorching desert sands is eye-catching. Tapas Relia’s songs are uniformly catchy and include a revisitation of the lovely old Dama dam mast qalandar in the stunning voice of Devu Khan Manganiyar.

This brings us to a concern with an element in the film’s sound quality though. The transition from conversations (and one actor’s own singing voice) to the playback song recordings is not smooth at all. This audio bumpiness is glaring even to my technically inexpert ears and occurs more than once in the film.

It was also a mistake to let Krrish Chhabria himself sing the opening line of Tujhe dekha toh yeh jaana sanam at one point while he has professional playback artistes singing for him through the rest of the film. The contrast between his regular Joe voice and the extraordinary singers who have sung playback for him is needlessly rubbed in our faces considering that Chotu’s singing ability is one of his striking qualities.

This is particularly disappointing because elsewhere it is evident that the director does care about detail: in the personal Shah Rukh story each satellite character has up their sleeve, in the lipstick mark that should not be on that coffee mug with a starring role…

Overriding any and all reservations are the two children at the heart of this film, their seeming incorruptibility and artlessness, the touching bond they share, Kukunoor’s way with children, his trademark sense of humour, and Dhanak’s faith in faith. Chotu asks Pari one day: Why do you credit X with this kindness being done to us, when Y is responsible for it? She replies: Leave me to believe what I believe, and you believe what you wish. That, ultimately, is what Dhanak is about: allowing the mind to wander where it will, seeing a rainbow (dhanak) in the night, putting your trust in who or what you will – God, miracles or even Shah Rukh Khan.

Clearly, stories of siblings and sensitivity towards physical disabilities are Kukunoor’s great strengths. 2005’s Iqbal featured a warm relationship between a deaf-mute cricketer and his supportive younger sister. That film stands head and shoulders and a whole human being above his other works. Dhanak, warts and all, is a reminder of the best that this director can be.

It is hard to say which is the star of this film: the writing of the child characters or the manner in which the director has just let them be or the child actors who play them or the fact that Chotu is not made an object of pity by the film? There’s a whole constellation twinkling at us off screen from this warmly appealing, life-affirming film.

Rating (out of five): ***

PS: So does Shah Rukh Khan make an appearance in the film? My lips are sealed.

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	117 minutes

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

Release date:	June 17, 2016
Director:	Abhishek Chaubey
Cast: Language:	Alia Bhatt, Kareena Kapoor Khan, Shahid Kapoor, Diljit Dosanjh, Satish Kaushik Hindi

Motherfucker, sisterfucker, cock, balls, nuts, asshole, madarchod, behenchod, fucker…

Once you get past the shock value of hearing those words in more than one language repeatedly on screen – yes, even more than in numerous Bollywood gangster flicks of the past 10-15 years – you will realise that all this is nothing more than what a visitor to many parts of north India will hear in casual conversations. It is hard to understand why the Central Board of Film Certification a.k.a. the Censor Board would get so antsy about invectives that are used more often than the definite article in real life; or why these abuses, which are uttered without beeps by various characters, are inexplicably asterisked out in subtitles in this primarily Punjabi, partly Hindi film.

Here is the actual objection that Punjab’s politicians and their Censor Board allies would have had: writer-director Abhishek Chaubey’s Udta Punjab minces no words about a fact that the state’s netashave been anxious to keep under wraps for years now. Punjab is facing a serious drug epidemic; common sense suggests it is impossible for so many addictive substances to be so easily available to so many people, without the cooperation of the police and the political class.

Now that we have got that out of the way, let us focus on the real problem with Udta Punjab. Sure it is great that Chaubey has chosen to highlight a pressing social calamity, but the erratic narrative style ultimately dilutes what should have been a hard-hitting, revelatory film, in the end reducing the tragedy of drugs and drug addiction to a farce.

“Ever since I saw her, I no longer feel the need to take cocaine. After a long time, a tune has begun playing in my head after I set eyes on her. I’ve got my mojo back.” – This, in a nutshell, is how Punjab-based musician Tommy Singh describes his reaction to a Bihari field worker.

Is this some kind of joke?

A self-destructive drug addict has been ‘cured’ of substance abuse because he saw a pretty face?

There is more in this film where that came from. The first half of Udta Punjab is consistently grim, deeply disturbing and, appropriately, almost docu-feature-like. The second half though is intermittently farcical and ultimately makes a mockery of the concerns it set out to raise.

Three threads play out simultaneously in Udta Punjab. One involves the artiste formerly known as Tejender Singh, now Tommy (Shahid Kapoor), whose talent and success are fuelled by his consumption of multiple drugs. The second revolves around the young sportswoman-turned-peasant (Alia Bhatt) who gets entrenched in the drug mafia when she tries to sell a stolen cache. The third is about Dr Preet Sahni (Kareena Kapoor Khan) who encounters assistant sub-inspector Sartaj Singh (Diljit Dosanjh) when his brother becomes her patient.

At first, Udta Punjab proves to be a well-researched, sharply observed, much-needed, no-holds-barred account of the extent to which the state is mired in drugs and drug-related corruption. Even if you think you know, it is shocking to see the extent of unscrupulousness of those willing to ruin an entire population and even their own families for financial gain.

The intricate web of powerful folk and minions involved in this conscienceless trade is gasp-inducing, to say the least. It is also unnerving to see the soul-shattering effect that drugs can have on individuals who might otherwise have been humans with dignity.

So far so good. Then though, as if another director or multiple directors have taken over, the film unravels. Udta Punjab’s Achilles heel proves to be an inexplicable compulsion to assign a romance to each major mainstream star in the cast. The acting too is surprisingly patchy.

In fact, this film might be a good case study to help students understand that fine acting is rarely possible without the right chemistry between an actor, a director and a script. This can be the only explanation for why Shahid – whose stupendous performance in Haider (2014) remains fresh in the memory – is convincing in the first half but goes all goggle-eyed and almost comical once he apparently gets over his love for coke and sets out to help a stranger; or why the usually dependable Kareena here seems not to know when to wipe the twinkle out of her eyes.

Besides, there is no spark at all between her and the man in whom she appears to develop a romantic interest. As a result, that entire blossoming ‘relationship’ is awkwardly handled and appears contrived. Their younger co-star, Alia Bhatt, comes off better for the most part.

Likewise, Amit Trivedi’s music is as pleasing to the ear as always – especially the foot-stomping title track – but every good song is not good enough to be stuffed into a film. Ikk kudi,for instance, is well sung by Shahid Mallya, nice as a standalone number but maudlin in this context and completely out of sync with Udta Punjab’s initial tone.

It is a mystery why this film was allowed to come undone despite the tremendously gifted individuals involved and the extreme poignancy plus conviction of the first half. To watch a woman drugged into sexual submission, to hear her captors assure a potential rapist that “she is well trained” and will therefore not attack him, to witness the depths to which drug-addled brains will fall in their desperation for a fix is chilling beyond description.

After all this, then, to have a character suggest that he has recovered from his addiction because he fell for a woman is infuriatingly irresponsible; to see the film switch between heartbreak and the male protagonist’s serio-comic behaviour is confusing.

It is hard to believe that this uneven treatment of a grave issue has come to us from the director who delivered Vidya Balan to us in all her electrifying glory in the otherwise mixed bag that was Ishqiya (2010), from the man who gave us the genteel Dedh Ishqiya(2014) starring Madhuri Dixit-Nene and Huma Qureshi.

How could you, Abhishek Chaubey?

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

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

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/udta-punjab-review-uneven-treatment-reduces-this-film-to-a-near-farce-2840198.html

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

Release date:	June 24, 2016
Director:	Anurag Kashyap
Cast: Language:	Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Vicky Kaushal, Sobhita Dhulipala, Amruta Subhash, Ashok Lokhande, Saksham Sudhija, Mukesh Chhabra, Vipin Sharma, Anuschka Sawhney Hindi

In one of the most telling scenes in writer-director Anurag Kashyap’s Raman Raghav 2.0, a man assaults his girlfriend in the presence of two policemen. The cops have been assigned as her personal security guards, to protect her from a notorious serial killer, yet they watch wordlessly when her own boyfriend roughs her up.

It is a powerful cinematic moment in a nation that has socially (and in some instances, legally) divided violence against women into categories of “acceptable” and “unacceptable”. Gangrape by slum dwellers: unacceptable. Marital rape: acceptable. Domestic abuse: acceptable. Stalking by a senior politician with the help of state machinery: acceptable. Digital rape of a subordinate by a senior editor in a five-star hotel lift: acceptable (even by Kashyap’s own yardstick, in a sense, as evidenced by one of his troubling quotes in the media). Rape of an intoxicated woman who fell off to sleep in the back seat of a cab after a late-night party: acceptable. Rape of a hard-partying drug addict who went home with a stranger at a club: acceptable.

There are many such moments in Raman Raghav 2.0, a film that purportedly tells the story of two maniacal individuals but is in fact a distressing portrait of society’s attitudes and responses to violence. This is not, as viewers would be expecting, a biopic of the notorious Mumbai serial killer Raman Raghav who was caught after a string of murders in the 1960s. This is the story of two deeply disturbed brutes, one a poor man called Ramanna, the other a policeman called Raghavendra Singh Ubbi, set in the present decade – hence the “2.0” in the title.

Each is kinky in his own way, yet one has a veneer of sophistication that helps him to move around in glamorous circles while the other is obviously crude but blends unnoticed into the streets. As the film progresses, we see how they are no different from each other and how – much as snooty wealthy folk would be repulsed by this mirror – one completes the other.

Many of Kashyap’s films so far have been about the pointlessness of violence and the manner in which our actions inevitably catch up with us. But what about the ones who get away? What about people who do not kill with communal, sexual or other motivations, but for the pleasure of it. Is every member of a rioting mob genuinely committed to the religious group they are supposedly fighting for, or truly angry about the harassment of a woman in their community by someone from the other, or paid to be there? What about those who join in for the heck of it?

Murder for the sake of murder. Murder sometimes committed in the moment. Murder committed to make way for another murder. Raman Raghav 2.0 is not, therefore, about pointlessness, but about the mindlessness in so much of the bloodshed around us.

Kashyap’s latest film may appear to resort to certain devices popular in the genre: the ominous sound of a metal pipe being dragged over a hard surface, for instance. Yet none of them is used in a clichéd, predictable fashion.

Interestingly too, though both protagonists are ferocious creatures, the portrayal of violence here is not in your face, gratuitous or exploitative. Aided in no small part by Jay Oza’s discreet camera and Aarti Bajaj’s seamless editing, we know that blood is routinely drawn and skulls are routinely cracked in this film, yet at no point do we actually see it happening. In fact, only once in the film do we get a shot of a murder victim’s face after the murder. In that scene alone is a prone body shown in its entirety post a crime.

The pacey narrative – with an eight-chapter structure – is unrelenting. Though the dialogues are smashingly effective, they do not rely on filmicmelodrama or earthiness (the most charming part of Gangs of Wasseypur 1&2) for their appeal. They are hard-hitting because of the situations and settings in which they are set.

Holding it all in place along with Kashyap’s unswerving directorial intentions is one of the best casts put together for a Hindi film in recent times. Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s brilliance is now a given. Still, considering the number of gangster and crime flicks in his short filmography, it is amazing that he has managed to reach into himself to serve us something and someone so completely different from Faisal Khan of the Wasseypur films and Liak from Badlapur. His Ramanna is eerie, scary, disgusting and yet almost elicits laughs for the matter-of-fact manner in which he goes about his bloody business.

As chalk is to cheese, so young Vicky Kaushal’s all-Punjabi, all-Mumbaikar, well-heeled, gruesome cop here is to his turn as an impoverished, emotionally vulnerable low-caste boy from Varanasi in 2015’s Masaan. Two superbly written characters, two superb performances.

The leads are all the more striking because they do not get the benefit of repeated extreme close-ups or a repeated focus on their eyes and faces in much of this film. Kaushal, in fact, wears dark glasses almost throughout and many of Siddiqui’s shenanigans are captured in long shots.

With these two in full flow and the story revolving entirely around them, you would think it would be impossible for any other character to make a mark. It is a measure of Vasan Bala and Kashyap’s excellent writing and the wonderful cast that there are others who are memorable too.

Amruta Subhash as Ramanna’s sister is in top form. It would be Hindi cinema’s good fortune if it manages to tap more into this consistently lovely Marathi actress who, among other roles, was so moving as the young, widowed mother and struggling professional in Avinash Arun’s Killa.

In a film peopled with impressive talents – including little Saksham Sudhija’s beautiful, speaking eyes – Sobhita Dhulipala as Raghavendra’s girlfriend Simmy Naidu and Anuschka Sawhney as Ankita, a sexy guest at a party, merit a mention.

Raman Raghav 2.0 does not slip up tonally at any point. From Sona Mohapatra’s velvety voice at a nightclub early in the film to that remarkable overhead shot of Mumbai city’s beautiful ugliness in the twilight, from the impeccable sound design (crucial, since this is a film in which gore is heard but rarely seen) to Ram Sampath’s background score and songs that have been quietly woven into the narrative, it is all a perfect fit.

Anurag Kashyap has been a highly acclaimed writer and director for 13 years now, but I confess I have had issues with quite a few of his films, not just the widely thrashed Bombay Velvet but some that have been showered with reviewer and fan affection. Although he has been a producer of some gems over the years, several of his own directorial ventures have felt stylistically imitative of known international auteurs, rather than being rooted in his own personality and reality. As a result, most have not matched up to the sheer genius of his debut film Paanch(which remains unreleased due to a Censor ban followed by problems with the producer), Black Friday and a darling short called Pramod Bhai 23 that appeared in the omnibus volume Mumbai Cutting. With Raman Raghav 2.0, we once again get to hear and see the son of the soil at work.

Mein tujhe kuchh bhi kar sakta hoon aur mujhe kuchh nahin hoga (I can do anything to you and nothing will happen to me), a murderer tells a potential victim at one point in the film. This is not just one man talking because he has the confidence that the system will close ranks to protect him, this is the system, the government and the elite talking.

Raman Raghav 2.0 is layered, gripping from the word go, unnerving and, in a twisted way, hugely entertaining. It is also a stinging commentary on the times we live in.

He is back, people. Anurag Kashyap is back.

Rating (out of five): ****

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

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/raman-raghav-2-0-review-anurag-kashyap-vicky-nawaz-take-a-bow-2853234.html

Poster courtesy: Phantom Films

What Viewers Want

A slow but steady trickle of low-budget, high-quality independent films is finding a space in mainstream theatres across India against all odds – and making money

By Anna MM Vetticad

In the midst of the hype surrounding big-budget Hindi ventures such as Airlift, Fanand Housefull 3, you may not have noticed that little Nil Battey Sannatajust completed a nine-week run in some cities. Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari’s directorial debut starring Swara Bhaskar, Pankaj Tripathi and Ratna Pathak Shah survived this long despite virtually no marketing. This story about a housemaid who is determined to give her daughter an education and ambition, triumphed almost entirely on the strength of rave reviews from professional critics and positive word of mouth from the audience since its release on April 22.

Several worlds away from the Agra setting of Nil Battey Sannatais the village where Nagraj Manjule’s Sairat unfolds. A Marathi film on love across caste barriers in rural Maharashtra, it was made, reportedly, on a budget of Rs 4 crore, released all India on April 29, is still going strong in theatres and with over Rs 80 crore already in its kitty from domestic turnstiles according to press reports, is among the year’s highest earning Indian films so far.

As Sairat forges ahead, the Kannada film Thithi– directed by debutant Raam Reddy – has completed seven weeks in Karnataka theatres and has been wending its way across the country. Thithi released in its home state in early May, and hit major urban centres in the rest of India on June 3 armed with strong social-media endorsements from non-Kannada film stalwarts such as Aamir Khan and Anurag Kashyap.

The availability of halls for these films and their box-office fortunes spell happy news for independent and/or small filmmakers. Clearly, a sufficiently significant pan-India viewership is interested in languages other than their own mother tongues and in the experimental winds blowing through the indie circuit across states.

Take Thithi, for instance. Who would have thought that a chronicle of the 11 days following an impoverished, senile villager’s death could result in a whimsical, tragi-comic, sensitively handled social satire? Yet, that is what Reddy’s film turns out to be, as it follows the old man’s family in the run-up to the expensive post-cremation ceremony they are compelled to perform despite the dire economic straits they are in.

This is not the kind of film that invites raucous laughter of the sort evoked by British filmmaker Frank Oz’s Death at a Funeral. Such a comedic tone would in all likelihood have been out of place considering the circumstances of the Kannada film’s protagonists. It makes sense then that Thithi is a quieter, slower film. Part of its charm lies in the fact that it does not fall into the lazy trap of romanticising poverty to evoke sympathy or being condescending towards rural India and caricaturing its inhabitants to tickle the funny bone. The other allure of the gently amusing narrative comes from the cast of non-professional actors who look and perform as if they have walked out of their real-life stories and on to the screen to simply be who they are.

Come to think of it, that is precisely what they have done. Reddy has told the press he cast his three leads – real-life residents of the Karnataka village Nodekoppalu in which the story is set – before he co-wrote the story with his colleague Eregowda who happens to belong to the place; that they observed the trio and life in Nodekoppalu prior to devising the script.

The result of his desire to dip into the real world is a smorgasbord of delightful actors – all from Nodekoppalu – and acutely observed characters. The starting block of this bitter-sweet tale is the cranky Century Gowda (played by Singrigowda), who dies at the age of 101. His uncaring, unworldly offspring Gadappa (Channegowda) wanders aimlessly around the village, showering affection on no one and nothing but his brandy and beedis. Gadappa’s financially desperate son Thamanna (Thammegowda S) wants the family property transferred in his name. The fourth generation in the picture is Thamanna’s horny son Abhi (Abhishek SN) lusting after a pretty and strong-willed shepherdess.

Despite its rootedness in Nodekoppalu, Thithi is blessed with a universality that has won hearts across the world through its seemingly simple yet complex plot and unexpected sense of humour. Last year Thithi won awards at the Locarno International Film Festival, Mumbai, Marrakech and Palm Springs. It scooped up awards in India and abroad this year too, topping it off with the National Award for 2015’s Best Kannada Film.

None of this should in any way suggest that the trials of small-budget independent cinematic ventures in India are over. Far from it. Most still struggle to make the journey from the film festival circuit to a theatrical release. Those that manage to come to theatres have a tough time getting good time slots in prime venues. Big corporates that sometimes pick them up for distribution barely promote them. And barring some individuals, the supposedly ‘national’ mainstream news media based in Delhi and Mumbai – read: the English language media headquartered in these cities – are notoriously indifferent to all Indian cinemas other than Hindi, which serves as a double whammy for non-Hindi indies.

The simultaneous success of the likes of Sairat, Thithi and Nil Battey Sannatathis year is a pointed reminder to the media, distributors and theatre owners that they have completely underestimated audience interest in small and/or indie films across languages. Moral of the story: never assume – without checking – what readers and viewers (do not) want.

(This article was first published in The Hindu Businessline on June 25, 2016)

Original link:

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/watch/what-viewers-want/article8765048.ece

Previous instalment of Film Fatale: The Diary of a Frustrated Indian Film Buff

http://annavetticadgoes2themovies.blogspot.in/2016/05/subtitling-dubbing-in-indian-cinema.html

Related article by Anna M.M. Vetticad:

Interview with Pankaj Tripathi: “Modi is the traditional Hindustani hero, Kejriwal is the common man”

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/pankaj-tripathi-modi-is-the-traditional-hindustani-hero-kejriwal-is-the-common-man-2812788.html

Photo captions: Stills/posters from (1) Thithi (2) Sairat (3) Nil Battey Sannata

Photographs courtesy:

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

(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sairat

(2) https://www.facebook.com/NilBatteySannata/photos

Release date:	July 1, 2016
Director:	Jitendra Tiwari and P. Singh
Cast: Language:	Jimmy Sheirgill, Ashutosh Rana, Sanjay Suri, Narendra Jha, Anirudh Dave, Suha Gezen, Hiten Tejwani, Eijaz Khan, Deepraj Rana Hindi

First, let us get this out of the way: Muzaffarnagar is not mentioned anywhere in Shorgul. The allusions are unmistakable though, which explains media reports that BJP MLA Sangeet Som has been raising a ruckus about this little-known film.

Som is a prime accused in the Muzaffarnagar riots of 2013. Actor Jimmy Sheirgill in Shorgul plays a fictional Ranjeet Om, an MLA from a right-wing Hindu party who engineers communal riots in the town of Malihabad – in a state ruled by a Chief Minister Mithilesh Yadav (Sanjay Suri) – to further his goal of becoming a Member of Parliament in the next election.

Som clearly does not know when to shut up though, because the fact is, Shorgul makes allusions to other contemporary political leaders and situations that could very well place the story elsewhere too. Such as the film’s slim Muslim leader Alam Khan (played by Narendra Jha) who delivers an inflammatory speech about the likely consequences of India’s Muslims rising up against the country’s Hindus, which sounds almost like a replica of the real-life speech allegedly delivered by All India Majlis-e-Ittehad-ul Muslimeen MLA Akbaruddin Owaisi in Adilabad in 2012 for which he was arrested in 2013.

All right then, that point has been addressed. Onward to the review. If you have been brought up in a secular, liberal environment, it is easy to dismiss some of the situations and conversations in this film as a figment of the writers’ minds. That scene, for instance, in which a Muslim student asks a fellow Muslim collegemate to hang out with her own people instead of Hindu friends. Improbable? Actually, not. If you have kept your eyes and ears open and looked beyond your own immediate family, you would know that such words have been – and are – routinely spoken in homes and public places across India, earlier in whispers and now increasingly openly.

The point is, the film’s story is believable. A Muslim girl called Zainab and a Hindu boy called Raghu grow up as friends. He falls in love with her but she is unaware of his feelings. When her fiancé Saleem discovers the truth, it leads to tension between all parties involved and ultimately, an unplanned act of violence that is used by Ranjeet Om to incite riots in the town.

Caught in the crossfire along with the youngsters is Raghu’s father, Chaudhary (Ashutosh Rana), a respected local leader who is constantly at loggerheads with Om.

Plausible plotline, as you can see. The execution is a different matter altogether.

Shorgul’s screenplay byJitendra Tiwariis effective in not taking sides with either community involved. Unfortunately, it takes its title very seriously and ultimately loses itself in its own din.

The film – co-directed by Tiwari with P. Singh – is noisy, lacks finesse and depth, and the political machinations are diluted to irritating effect by too many loud songs and problematic production quality.

At the centre of it all is an actress so uncharismatic playing Zainab, that it is hard to understand why two men – not one, but two – are so smitten by her as to be willing to give up their lives for her. Newcomer Suha Gezen lacks a screen presence. Making things worse is the director duo’s evident fixation with what they consider her immense beauty. As a result, she is given a lingering introductory shot and the camera gazes lovingly at her throughout.

It does not help Gezen’s case that Zainab’s suitors are played by TV starsAnirudh Dave and Hiten Tejwani who are both easy on the eye and better actors. Dave does twice resort to screaming to convey a burst of temper but there is reason to forgive him that folly in the scene in which Raghu acknowledges his feelings for his lady friend. Tejwani, who is his senior, lends a quiet likeability to Saleem.

There is also some pleasure to be derived from the performances of Messrs Sheirgill, Rana and Jha. All three manage to avoid sounding bombastic for a considerable part of the film, despite the decibel levels that surround them (not counting a verbal explosion by Rana in his final scene).

There is a not-entirely-uninteresting twist in the tale. The real mystery though is why, through Sanjay Suri’s cameo, the filmmakers have tried to place a halo around the head of real-life UP Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav.

Be that as it may, Shorgul is a perfect example of the Central Board of Film Certification’s persistent inconsistency. Despite its communal language and intense violence, the film has got away with a UA rating and, according to co-director P. Singh, a directive to remove just three words – gau, Ganga and Godhra. This seems like an act of extreme indulgence from a Board that just last month fought hard to prevent the release of Udta Punjaband had to be forced by the judiciary to let that film come to theatres with an A certificate.

It is not this review’s case that Shorgul should be banned – of course it should not be. Question is, by what yardstick does its content not merit an A (restricted to adults) rating? And why the double standards?

The lasting memory from Shorgul though is of its overall air of tackiness. The song and dance routine accompanying the opening credits should have been a sign of things to come: it features a poorly shot Hrishitaa Bhatt stuck with some of the most awkward choreography seen in a film in recent memory. Closing the brackets on the mediocrity is a ridiculous video of a wailing, weeping Zainab/Gezen filmed underwater and running alongside the closing credits, possibly to convey some deep philosophical point. It is unwittingly funny.

Between the two ends, we get an array of junior artistes with limited talent, a scar on Eijaz Khan’s neck that proves the prosthetic make-up department lacked funds and oh yes, a couple of songs with lyrics by Congress politician Kapil Sibal that are unmemorable enough to merit this cliché: his writing is nothing to write home about.

The Muzaffarnagar riots are a blot on contemporary history and the wounds from that blaze are yet to heal. It is almost criminal to use references to this human tragedy to draw audiences into a deafening,unimaginative, ordinary film.

Rating (out of five): *

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	132 minutes 47 seconds

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/shorgul-review-loud-tacky-film-on-the-not-muzaffarnagar-riots-2866476.html

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

Release date:	July 6, 2016
Director:	Ali Abbas Zafar
Cast: Language:	Salman Khan, Anushka Sharma, Amit Sadh, Anant Sharma, Kumud Mishra, Randeep Hooda, Parikshit Sahni, Meiyang Chang, Kubra Sait, Shibani Dandekar Hindi

Khoon mein tere mitti

Mitti mein tera khoon

Khoon mein tere mitti

Mitti mein tera khoon

Upar Allah

Neeche dharti

Beech mein tera junoon

Re Sultan

(Tune: Vishal-Shekhar, Words: Irshad Kamil, Voices: Sukhwinder Singh, Shadab Faridi ) 

These lyrics from Sultan’s title track exemplify what makes this film tick: the director’s ability and unabashed willingness to tug at the heart strings – tap into every available emotion in the viewer, our patriotic pride, our soft spot for the underdog – yet not overplay its hand.

Despite its bow to a number of formulae, in many other ways this is an unusual Bollywood offering.

It is, for instance, that uncommon Hindi film in which the hero offers an unqualified apology to the heroine. Rub your eyes in disbelief all you wish, but it is true: from an industry that usually derides women who do not unblinkingly forgive every manner of male transgression because after all it is “ek hi bhool” (just one mistake; read: not a big deal), this too has now happened.

From an industry that avoids giving us protagonists from minority communities without making their religion and socio-cultural milieu a focal point of the plot, where followers of Islam are usually present with the specific – no doubt, often noble – purpose of depicting political tensions or spreading a message of communal amity (sometimes to good effect, as with Bajrangi Bhaijaan, and sometimes in an exasperatingly trite fashion), where minorities almost never just happen to be because they happen to be, this here is a film where both central characters are Muslims, they have many Hindu associates and friends, yet after a point one barely notices. Not a single shot of a temple is seen nor a single call of the muezzin heard nor a single speech delivered to drive home a point, thus reminding us gently without drumbeats and trumpet sounds that minority communities need not be mere narrative devices, that majority-minority associations happen routinely without blaring announcements and that a lesson on secularism need not be stated in black and white to be heard.

These are important asides in Ali Abbas Zafar’s Sultan, the story of a wrestler who quits the sport after a personal tragedy, but returns to it for the very reason he left. Sultan Ali Khan (Salman Khan) is a popular but aimless young man in a Haryana village who helps his father run his cable TV business. One day when he sees local girl Aarfa Hussein (Anushka Sharma), who is the state wrestling champion, it is, as is often the case in Hindi films, love at first sight for him. Sultan takes up wrestling to impress her and ends up excelling. Aarfa too succumbs to his charms, but they split up not long after and Sultan retires from the arena. His return and his motivation to do so are what this film is about.

Sultan has a fair share of follies. The male lead’s immaturity is believable, but it is disappointing to see the lack of inventiveness employed in writing the early stages of the Sultan-Aarfa romance: ‘boy’ sees girl, ‘boy’ falls for girl, ‘boy’ chases girl, girl shows irritation but then they become friends and she falls in love.

What makes the courtship truly seem silly is that the ‘boy’ – a mere 30 in the first half of the film – is played by a 50-year-old star. Khan stopped looking 30 about 21 years back. The casting of a 28-year-old actress as his lover merely emphasises this point. Why, dear Bollywood, cannot 50-year-old men play 50-year-old men?

The couple’s earliest encounters are the least imaginative, most troublesome part of this film. Remember the unlettered Kalidas who, according to folklore, was driven to educate himself by the insults of his bride, and went on to become the legendary author we know? That story has been retold repeatedly down the decades in Hindi cinema, and carried over into a conviction that women do not reject the advances of men politely but always with taunts; and that there is no greater force than a woman’s contempt to drive a man to great heights.

Despite these flaws and several clichés, Sultan has an emotional core that is hard to resist. Writer-director Zafar is clever in the way he uses his actors, the innate poignancy of his story and Vishal-Shekhar’s songs to create a moving whole. Even when Jag ghoomeya is abruptly and awkwardly inserted into the narrative, the tune and words do not lose their appeal. And the very well choreographed MMA (mixed martial arts) scenes in the second half are spot on.

Since Zafar seems socially well intentioned, perhaps he might consider that at least a passing mention of the A-word (read: abortion) in the story would have given it more credibility at a particular crucial turning point. Elsewhere, Aarfa tells Sultan: Your society does not realise “beti maaroge toh bahu kaha se laaoge?” (If you kill your daughters, where will you find brides?) This is a line taken even by some women’s rights activists in discussions on female foeticide. Could everyone please note that baby girls have a right to be born because they have a right to be born, and not because they will serve a purpose in the lives of men as wives and mothers. That being said, quite unexpectedly for a Salman Khan film, Sultan has some interesting feminist elements that do not come across as being contrived to impress.

Hats off to Zafar for that and more. Hats off to Khan too for many reasons. Whatever be his acting weaknesses, he is clearly not insecure. This is a star who has the confidence to share screen space with far superior performers – Nawazuddin Siddiquiin Kick, Siddiqui in Bajrangi Bhaijaan, Anushka Sharma and the wonderful supporting cast here in Sultan.

No scene in the film better illustrates the contrast than the one in which Aarfa informs Sultan about a calamity that has struck both their lives. To watch this scene is to witness Khan struggle to summon up expressions on his face while Sharma, wonderful Sharma, is clearly living the moment. Still, this is that rare film in which Khan does not play to the gallery by talking directly to his fans throughout. Equally to the point, despite his acting limitations and the manner in which he swallows many of the dialogues here, it is to his credit that he appears to have submitted to his director in this film, that there is more to his performance than the remarkable work he has put into building his body to suit the role of a wrestler, and Zafar has managed to get the best that any director has got out of him so far.

None of this would have worked though if it were not for the manner in which the narrative is stirring when you are least expecting it. That song quoted at the start of this review translates thus into English:

The soil (of the akhara and the motherland) is in your blood

Your blood is in the soil

The Lord above

The Earth below

And between them your spirit

O Sultan.

It is not quite as rousing as Chak De! India (which was also in Sukhwinder’s voice), but it is still enough to reduce an iceberg to a pool of warm water. Happy Eid, everyone.

Postscript:’Tis the silly season as you know at India’s Central Board of Film Certification. The Censors got the producers of Sultan to cut out the words “pant mein” (in your pants) and replace them with “paas mein” (with you) in the sentence “Apni mardani ko apni pant mein daba kar rakho” (keep your manhood in your pants).

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

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	170 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/sultan-review-salman-khan-is-not-just-salman-khan-in-this-unusual-film-2877228.html

Sultan Trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPxqcq6Byq0

Sultan Teaser 2:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QuRU65DQ3w&feature=youtu.be

Jag Ghoomeya video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJlSp67uZYU&feature=youtu.be

440 Volt video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJlSp67uZYU&feature=youtu.be

Baby Ko Bass Pasand Hai video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWMTj-rejvc

Videos and posters/stills courtesy: Yash Raj Films

Release date:	July 15, 2016
Director:	Indra Kumar
Cast: Language:	Riteish Deshmukh, Vivek Oberoi, Aftab Shivdasani, Urvashi Rautela, Pooja Bose, Mishti, Shraddha Das, Sanjay Mishra Hindi

CAUTION: The content of this review may be unsuitable for children. Parental guidance is advised.

Great Grand Masti is the third in the financially successful Masti series directed by Indra Kumar and starring Riteish Deshmukh, Vivek Oberoi and Aftab Shivdasani as friends Amar, Meet and Prem, three sexually frustrated married men who are desperately in search of a roll in the hay with any and every available good-looking young woman. In the latest instalment, they are kept away from their marital beds by familial interference. Amar’s mother-in-law is a meanie. Meet’s wife has an inexplicable connection with her twin brother (who is a body builder) as a result of which her sibling gets turned on every time her husband tries to make love to her. And Prem’s sister-in-law does not realise just how hot she is.

When the men take off on a break to find some action, they encounter the spirit of a beautiful woman who is desperate to lose her virginity to one of them.

I watched the film this morning. This is my review:

Cheap – check.

Juvenile – check.

Loud – check.

Rape joke – check.

Sexism directed at women – check.

Ageism directed at women, including a scene in which old ladies are described as “baasi paav” (stale bread) – check.

An obsession with mammary glands, epitomised by a busty baifrom a town named Doodhwadi, which leads to an abundance of wisecracks about milk (eww!) – check.

Degrading objectification of women, including a song called Lipstick laga ke in which a male star drums a woman’s bum and sings about “apple jaisi booty teri” – check.

Reductive portrayal of men as being slaves of their penises – check.

Erections so large that they raise the height of a table at which a man is seated – check.

Rhyming dialogues – check.

Classism – check.

A mockery of disability – check.

Sense of sadness because Indra Kumar once directed a fun and not low-brow slapstick comedy, the Madhuri Dixit-starrer Raja in 1995 – check.

Heartbreak because Riteish Deshmukh is truly talented and one of Bollywood’s finest comedians, but seems not to consider himself too good for this crass crap – check.

Sense of sadness at the realisation that sweet Aftab Shivdasani was once a Farex baby and his career struggles have brought him to this pass – check.

Vivek Oberoi going goggle-eyed – check.

Sadness brought on by the memory of Oberoi’s fantastic debut in Ram Gopal Varma’s 2002 film Company– check.

Assembly ofdispensableactresses playing Amar, Prem and Meet’s wives, who are so summarily written that they are indistinguishable from each other – check.

Note: The only one of Great Grand Masti’s young actresses with a somewhat distinct identity is former beauty contest winner Urvashi Rautela in the role of a perennially semi-nude ghost from Doodhwadi. She seems like she just might have something to offer the world of cinema other than those football-sized breasts that the camera and costume managers of this film are so focused on, but if that is all the faith you have in your talent and screen presence, Ms Rautela, then … sigh! … the choice is yours, of course.

For the record, cleverly handled slapstick humour can be fun even for serious film buffs who may prefer a diet of Satyajit Ray and Abbas Kiarostami, but are also occasionally willing to let their hair down. Just check out the David Dhawan-Govinda combination at their best and you will know what I mean. Indra Kumar’s Great Grand Masti though, is too lazy to cash in on the comic timing of at least two actors in the cast who are capable of being a scream when given a good script: Deshmukh and Sanjay Mishra.

There is little that is different in this film except one genuinely amusing quip about female infidelity and lesbianism, which is unexpected from an industry that otherwise finds humour only in bed-hopping men while placing promiscuous women in the dock and has barely acknowledged the existence of homosexual women in this world. Surprise surprise, this particular scene is not tasteless. It proves that Kumar possesses a quality not very common among humourists: the ability to crack jokes about a marginalised group without being condescending, to laugh with people rather than at them.

He might have drawn more on that giftif he did not have such a poor opinion of his potential audience and was not aiming pointedly at the lowest common denominator. It’s a pity that he takes the easy path.And so what we get is a regressive nod to Bhartiya sanskriti and misogyny in the middle of this bottoms-and-bust fest. You see, sexually assertive women cannot but be witches and phantoms. Such women must be tamed, not satisfied. And the one thing even a horny, unfaithful Indian husband can bank upon to save him from death – or paranormal attacks – is a Karva Chauth vrat by a virtuous wife.

Medieval – check.

Hypocritical – check.

Cliched – check.

Crude – check.

Calls itself an “adult comedy” but is really directed at hormonally charged teenaged boys with a limited IQ (not the bright ones) – check.

Optimistic critic who was traumatised by Grand Mastibut still dutifully watched Great Grand Mastiin the hope that this time Kumar might have come up with something worthwhile – check.

Rating (out of five): -10 stars

CBFC Rating (India):	A
Running time:	127 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/great-grand-masti-review-crude-cliched-juvenile-check-2895192.html

Related link: Anna M.M. Vetticad’s review of Grand Masti

http://annavetticadgoes2themovies.blogspot.in/2013/09/review-223-grand-masti.html

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

REVIEW 388: TRAFFIC

REVIEW 389: CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR (3D)

REVIEW 390: AZHAR

REVIEW 391: DEAR DAD

REVIEW 392: SARBJIT

SUBTITLING & DUBBING IN INDIAN CINEMA / PUBLISHED IN THE HINDU BUSINESSLINE

REVIEW 393: X-MEN: APOCALYPSE

REVIEW 394: VEERAPPAN

REVIEW 395: WAITING

REVIEW 396: PHOBIA

REVIEW 397: HOUSEFULL 3

REVIEW 398: TE3N

REVIEW 399: DO LAFZON KI KAHANI

REVIEW 400: DHANAK

REVIEW 401: UDTA PUNJAB

REVIEW 402: RAMAN RAGHAV 2.0

LESSONS FROM THITHI, SAIRAT & NIL BATTEY SANNATA / PUBLISHED IN THE HINDU BUSINESSLINE

REVIEW 403: SHORGUL

REVIEW 404: SULTAN

REVIEW 405: GREAT GRAND MASTI