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Release date:	September 2, 2016
Director:	A.R. Murugadoss
Cast: Language:	Sonakshi Sinha, Anurag Kashyap, Konkona Sen Sharma, Nandu Madhav, Lokesh Gupte, Uday Sabnis, Atul Kulkarni, Smita Jaykar, Amit Sadh, Raai Laxmi, Chaitanya Chaudhry Hindi

Dekho dekho, teacher, I did a woman-centric film. Look at me, I care about women.

Yeah yeah, I know A.R. Murugadoss and Sonakshi Sinha have not openly expressed themselves in precisely these words, but nothing encapsulates the spirit of Akira better than that breathless statement I could almost hear them making in my head as I watched this film.

Ever since the December 2012 Delhi gangrape sparked off anti-rape protests across the country, genuine feminists – men and women who are committed to gender equality – have been targeted for marketing purposes by a burgeoning mass of fakes in public life, from product manufacturers and advertisers, to filmmakers, politicians and even journalists. You have probably met some of them. You know the sort that treat their wives like handmaidens, but write glowing tributes to the women’s rights movement on FB? You know the kind of men who sexually harass their female employees, or women who look the other way when their male seniors and peers commit such crimes, yet write hard-hitting articles against sexual predators?

Akira exemplifies this trend of pretend feminism that threatens to harm a crucial cause and is perhaps even more dangerous than open misogyny.

Writer-director Murugadoss earlier ventured into Bollywood with remakes of his Tamil superhits Ghajini and Thuppakki (Hindi version: Holiday – A Soldier Is Never Off Duty). His latest Hindi film begins with anencounter involving three policemen. Among their three targets is a woman played by Sinha. The film then rolls back to Jodhpur 14 years earlier, when a younger version of Sinha’s character – Akira Sharma – witnesses an acid attack on a woman who spurned the advances of a local stalker. Akira bravely identifies the fellow for the police, and she too is soon attacked. Her father (Atul Kulkarni) enrols her in self-defence classes following the incident. A later street fight leads to her being sent to a remand home for girls.

Fast forward to the present, Akira has just enrolled in Mumbai’s Holy Cross College when she is implicated in a series of circumstances not of her creation, with tragic consequences.

In the same city, a quartet of policemen including ACP Rane(Anurag Kashyap) find a cache of cash at an accident site and decide to keep it. In a bid to cover up this crime, they commit another, then another, and another, until circumstances spiral completely out of control.

Their strand intersects with Akira’s life, as you would have guessed.

Akira is a remake of the Tamil hit Mounaguru directed by Santha Kumar. The original is about a male college student in Chennai who is pulled into a web of crime not of his making. Kumar is duly acknowledged in Akira’s credits as the original story writer while Murugadoss is credited as the adapted screenplay writer. As I drove to my neighbourhood theatre this morning to watch the film, I heard Sinha telling a radio jockey she felt privileged that Murugadoss had chosen her for his “first woman-centric film”. Therein lies the starting point of Akira’s problems: that it is a concept film. Like “Director X’s first action film” or “Actor Y’s first attempt at romance”. When a producer or director views “woman-centric” as a genre unto itself, s/he runs the risk of treating the film’s woman-centricity as a hook and a gimmick rather than seeing women as people just like men.

Murugadoss does this throughout Akira. You cannot replace a male protagonist with a woman without recognising that the change in gender could impact every aspect of your story. You cannot take violence as a measure of coolth, especially when you project your film as being realistic.

In an early scene, after she has begun self-defence training, Akira’s father is shown prompting his little girl to single-handedly take on hooligans who are harassing young women on a crowded street. Yes, you heard that right – Daddy does not deal with those goondas himself, nor does he call the cops to fight the creeps; instead, shortly after his child witnessed a gruesome acid attack, he prompts that same under-age child to walk up to a group of male adults and initiate fisticuffs with them. Does Murugadoss think this is female empowerment? Does he hope to inspire female viewers to indulge in such dangerous stupidity? Or does he just think he is being cool?

If you want further evidence that woman-centricity is just an attention-getting device for Murugadoss, note this: the film may be called Akira, but Akira is the most poorly fleshed out character in the entire story. From start to finish she remains nothing but a one-line concept: a woman who can fight as skillfully and strongly as any man. That is it. The workings of her mind, her motivations and her feelings, remain a mystery.

Frankly, the best-written character in Akira is ACP Rane, the corrupt coke-snorting cop whose drug-addled brain is never so clouded as to make him lose sight of his self-interest. The group dynamic between the four policemen too is convincing, as is the build-up of suspense.

The fun in these aspects of the film is completely diluted though by Murugadoss’ ambition to make a woman-centric film although he seems clueless about women. No kidding, the director seems at a loss about how to deliver a credible female character. So he gives her some neat fight scenes and builds her up as a Hulk-type creature who is best left unprovoked. Sinha is believable while she punches people, but a shadowy figure without substance in the rest of the film.

None of the other women – not even the often-wonderful Konkona Sen Sharma playing a pregnant cop here – fares any better. The film is co-produced by Fox Star Studios who earlier this year scored a big hit with the lovely Neerjadirected by Ram Madhvani and starring Sonam Kapoor. Neerjaworked because the heroine was a living, breathing human being, not a means to prove the studio’s or the director’s feminist credentials.

(Spoiler alert) The most exasperating, mindless part of Akiracomes in the end when the leading lady is asked to make a huge sacrifice to save Mumbai city from potential communal riots. The most vulnerable groups across the world in the matter of violence – sexual or otherwise – are women and children. And across the world, women and child victims of violence – especially sexual violence – are too often held accountable for the fate of their attackers. “She reported the rape and ended up ruining his promising football career” … “Beta, if you tell the world that chacha touched you that way, the family name will be spoilt” … “He is the only earning member of the family. If you go to the police about him, what will happen to his children and his terminally ill wife?” … “India is going through a communally troubled period. Is it not in everyone’s interests to ignore the rape by that liberal artist/editor?” I cannot reveal the specific circumstances in which Akira is asked to make a choice without posting spoilers here, but in glorifying that ‘sacrifice’, the film has taken a very dangerous position on victims of violence.

Akira ends with a dedication: “to the women who fought back.” Oh puhleeease, spare us the unthinking advice and superficial concern. Come to think of it, what else can you expect from a director whose Holidayfeatured a hero stalking the heroine and forcibly kissing her, with the unwilling woman promptly falling in love with him shortly afterwards? Seriously, spare us your fake feminism.

Rating (out of five): **

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

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/akira-review-is-this-what-sonakshi-sinha-deems-a-woman-centric-film-2988470.html

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akira_(2016_Hindi_film)

Release date:	September 2, 2016
Director:	Ruchika Oberoi
Cast: Language:	Vinay Pathak, Amruta Subhash, Tannishtha Chatterjee, Uttara Baokar, Chandan Roy Sanyal, Ashwin Mushran, Samir Kochhar, Voices of Rajat Kapoor and Manav Kaul Hindi with some English and Marathi

Island City is set in Mumbai but its premise would be relevant to any megapolis in the world. Come to think of it, the film may purportedly be about this big city or any big city, but with a tweak here and there it could fit just as well into a less imposing setting.

Ruchika Oberoi makes her directorial debut with a cinematic triptych about the robotic nature of too many lives in this world. The film covers an employee who mechanically follows a routine and his bosses’ instructions, a wife who makes a show of mourning the possible loss of a boorish husband, and a daughter who goes along with her parents’ choice of groom because she feels no other man would be interested in her and she has not even considered a life without one.

Though the urban backdrop may seem crucial to the narrative, it is not. Take away the swanky office and dictatorial organisation, and that employee could still be a worker in small-town India glad that he has a job, any job, rather than one that excites him. Take away the visual landmarks like the Mumbai trains, and those women resigned to fate could be from a small town too. And the themes could fit into pretty much any country. It is fascinating to see the manner in which those themes remain universal despite the cultural and locational specificities in this telling.

The title may suggest that this is a film about apathetic, impersonal cities. That is the more obvious subject matter, but the film is really about people who live life and live out relationships like automatons, people who are afraid to exit their comfort zones, including those for whom life in its entirety is a regret-filled compromise – unless fate intervenes.

Segment 1 titled “Fun Committee” is about corporate zombie Suyash Chaturvedi (Vinay Pathak) winning a day off from work, with a ‘fun’ schedule planned down to the last T by his office’s HR department. He is supposed to relax and enjoy himself, but if he does not comply with the detailed directives issued to him, he will be penalised by the management.

Next comes “The Ghost in the Machine” featuring a middle-class housewife called Sarita Joshi (Amruta Subhash) whose husband is in hospital hooked to life support systems. To ease the family’s tension, she purchases a TV, a distraction her despotic husband did not allow in the house. They get hooked on the tele-soap Purushottam when they receive some good news.

Meanwhile, in the city’s poorer quarters in “Contact”, Aarti Patel (Tannishtha Chatterjee) works at a printing press. She is a quiet, uncomplaining sort, but a sense of dissatisfaction with her dull existence is growing inside her when she receives an intimate letter one day.

Most viewers expect the individual strands in multi-strand films to intersect at some point. In the best films of this genre, the sub-sets can stand on their own even if the plot does not connect them. Many filmmakers feel compelled to link them, sometimes doing so to brilliant effect, sometimes awkwardly. Island City’s three tales are linked smoothly, thematically and by plot.

“Fun Committee” and “The Ghost in the Machine” are based on stories by Oberoi, “Contact” is by Siddharth Sharma. The screenplay is Oberoi’s. On the face of it, these are simple stories, yet they are filled with keen insights wrapped around existential questions. On the face of it these are oft-visited topics, but they are elevated by Oberoi’s incisive writing and her cast.

Boring ol’ Suyash is a role tailormade for Pathak who is adept at playing the common person, but that does not translate into a predictable performance. The actor lends enough nuances to his character to take him to places we are not expecting. I particularly enjoyed hearing him address a senior as “Sir”, giving the word a slight accent that made it sound comically deferential.

Chatterjee is aptly cast as Aarti in Story 3 and finds a perfect foil in the dynamic Chandan Roy Sanyal playing her egoistic fiancé Jignesh who seems comfortable with her primarily because he is convinced that she is too unattractive and unadventurous to ever draw the attention of or be drawn to another man. Sanyal is one of the finest character actors in contemporary Hindi cinema and it is a pleasure to see him in a substantial role that does justice to his charisma.

The lovely Marathi film actress Subhash, who sparkled recently in Anurag Kashyap’s Hindi film Raman Raghav 2.0, shares screen space here with the equally lovely veteran Uttara Baokar.

Acting, writing, satirical comedy and pathos – it all falls into place in their story, the most unapologetically impertinent of the lot. The juxtaposition of Sarita’s strained marriage against a TV show about an ideal husband, for instance, cheekily implies that such men can be found only in the imagination of soap scriptwriters. The relationship between the two women is especially intriguing because the filmmaker leaves us guessing about whether they are mother and daughter or mother-in-law and daughter-in-law. The old lady lives with Sarita and her husband, which, if you go by Indian custom, suggests that she is the ma-in-law. Sarita addresses her as Aai, the Marathi word for mother, though that could be in keeping with that other Indian convention, of treating your in-laws as parents. But their attachment is far removed from the antagonism stereotypically assumed to be a hallmark of all real-life saas-bahurishtas, nor do they share an unbelievably syrupy equation of the kind often shown in silly serials such as the one they are currently watching. So are they maa-beti or saas-bahu? Either way, they come across as buddies and co-conspirators with great empathy and affection for each other. This is an enjoyable instance of female bonding not seen often enough in Indian cinema.

That said, Island City is a well-woven whole. Sarita’s saga is the most overtly entertaining of the three. The other two take some time to reveal their verve, then amply reward viewer patience with the shock value of “Fun Committee” and the unexpected (tragic) twists in “Contact”.

Oberoi does not alter her seemingly laidback though assured directorial manner in any segment, but the production design by Krishnendu Chowdhury and cinematography by Sylvester Fonseca are cleverly used to give each one a distinctive look. The steely shades of “Fun Committee” lend to it a slightly surreal, futuristic feel, to go with its deliberately exaggerated swipes at corporate India and its farcical tone. “The Ghost in the Machine” is warmly lit in Purushottam and in Sarita’s house, to be contrasted with the cold colours of the hospital where her husband now lies and the flashback to the time when he was well. “Contact” has grimy shades, much like the garbage spills Aarti passes on her way to her dreary work.

Island City was premiered last year at the world’s oldest known film fiesta, the Venice Film Festival, where it won an award for Best Debut Director. The honour is well deserved. Ruchika Oberoi’s understated style, on-point writing and sense of humour are significant new additions to the Indian cinemascape. Island City is a sorrowful yet amusing, acutely observant film.

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

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

Poster, stills and trailer courtesy: Loudspeaker Media

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

Release date:	September 9, 2016
Director:	Nitya Mehra
Cast: Language:	Katrina Kaif, Sidharth Malhotra, Sarika, Ram Kapoor, Sayani Gupta, Rohan Joshi, Taaha Shah Badusha Hindi

The concept of an individual getting a glimpse of their future and coming back in time to correct the present has been repeatedly visited by Hollywood. It has not, however, been explored in contemporary Hindi commercial films so when Delhi boy Jai Varma (Sidharth Malhotra) wakes up one day after a fight with his fiancée Diya Kapoor (Katrina Kaif) to find himself fast forwarded in time and place to their honeymoon in Thailand, it is natural to expect an unconventional film.

And in the first half, that is what director Nitya Mehra’s Baar Baar Dekho is.

“With the benefit of hindsight” is how we often preface discussions about lessons learnt from our past. Imagine though having this “benefit of hindsight” in your today, in the moment, in your here and now? That is what Jai gets and for the initial one hour of the film, his confusion, his regret over his mistakes, his desperation to return and fix what he messed up, and the suspense over how this will all turn out are enjoyable. His attack of commitment phobia in the beginning is abrupt and therefore unconvincing, but excusable because what follows is intriguing for a while.

Then the curse of the second half strikes.

Mehra, who seems so assured pre-interval, seems not to know how to keep her film going. The constant back and forth is fun pre-interval, but in the second half it becomes tiresome. And with the writing just skimming over Diya’s character, Jai’s fight to keep her in his life ultimately becomes his fight, not ours.

At several crucial points in the film, Diya asks Jai why he loves her and his changing response is projected as a marker of his evolution as a person, yet not once does he ask her why she loves him. She is, after all, not conceived as a three-dimensional human, but as Jai’s sprightly childhood friend who grows up to be his sprightly adult lover, no more. The writing (story by Sri Rao, screenplay by Rao, Mehra herself and Anuvab Pal) gets so involved in the business of time travel that it invests less and less in character development, thus gradually making both Jai and Diya – especially Diya – people who are unworthy of our emotional involvement and time.

Still, the film is not without merit. Kaif and Malhotra both look stunning. She remains a limited actor, but it is only fair to say that she is becoming more at ease in front of the camera with each passing film. Malhotra is a fine actor in possession of perhaps the most sensitive pair of eyes among the Hindi film heroes of his generation. He does his best to make something of the written material at hand here.

The strong supporting cast includes the ever-reliable Sarika as Jai’s mother and Ram Kapoor as Diya’s father. Their characters get the same cursory treatment accorded to Diya in the script, which gives them very little space to display their acting chops. Both are mere devices to facilitate Jai’s story rather than being individuals in their own right. The only satellite characters written with some degree of depth are Raj (Rohan Joshi) and Chitra (the feisty Sayani Gupta fromMargarita With A Straw), but neither actor makes a mark here.

The real star of Baar Baar Dekho is its top-notch production quality. Hindi films rarely get ageing make-up right, but this one does. Mark Coulier, Natasha Nischol and the rest of the prosthetics and make-up team (along with the lighting and camera departments) deserve kudos for their work on Malhotra and Kaif. The film has been shot in Scotland, India and Thailand, and cinematographer Ravi K. Chandran turns every frame into a work of art, starting with that early moment when a tree fills the screen, the camera casually moves behind it and then returns to give us our first view of a young Kaif leaning against it. Spectacular.

The songs are unobtrusively woven into the narrative. Kaala chasma accompanying the closing credits has foot-tapping appeal, but it is not half as hot within the film as it is as a standalone video.

For a film that aims at being a philosophical commentary on living in the present, focusing on the small joys of life and not resting your entire existence on a future you do not know, Baar Baar Dekho ends up being very limited in its exploration of this point and others. In fact it needs to be said that it is not half as rebellious as it seems to consider itself. Certainly it is unusual to see a Hindi film in which a hero apologises to his fiancée/girlfriend/wife (Sultan too did that recently – surprise surprise); it is just as unusual to see a husband point out that his career decisions affect his wife as much as they affect him and he has no right to make up his mind about some things without consulting her. Yet ultimately, a man who could not bring himself to accept financial support from his wife’s father at the start ‘evolves’ into a man who still feels the need to underline his role as the provider who will set up a studio for his artist wife without pa-in-law’s monetary help. And in the end, the film becomes less about throwing ourselves completely into our present (good point, point taken) and more about underlining the essentiality of marriage as the natural goal of any romantic relationship. So what’s new?

Sadly then, Baar Baar Dekho does not have the courage or the questioning mind we saw in Shakun Batra’s Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu (2012) though both are Karan Johar productions.

Early in this film, Jai tells Diya that he wants more from life than their marriage, he wants a career which is unlikely to take off if he ties himself down to her. Because we see evidence all around us in real life that marriage ends or slows down most women’s professional journeys, we never discuss the possibility of it being a hurdle in the way of a man’s professional dreams. After all, most wives follow their husbands wherever they are transferred, manage the home and children so that he can bag that next promotion and that next pay hike, and let their own ambitions take a backseat? It was curious to see a man expressing a fear we usually expect from a woman. This was an idea worth exploring but falls by the wayside as the film trundles along to a socially acceptable conclusion that would please a conservative audience.

If I had the power to go back in time and any power over Team Baar Baar Dekho, I would cajole or bully them into rewriting the second half of their script. In the present though, in the here and now, this is a film that starts off well but fails to sustain itself.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	141 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/baar-baar-dekho-review-katrina-kaif-sidharth-malhotras-film-fails-to-sustain-itself-2997788.html

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

Release date:	September 8, 2016
Director:	Priyadarshan
Cast: Language:	Mohanlal, Nedumudi Venu, Samuthirakani, Anusree Nair, Vimala Raman, Baby Meenakshi Malayalam

A bright young policewoman draws a connection between several seemingly unrelated ‘accidents’ in different parts of Kerala. Elsewhere a blind man is the only ‘eyewitness’ to a murderer’s escape from his crime scene. Priyadarshan’s Oppam brings together these two parallel threads to give us a thriller that starts off with immense promise but is gradually pulled down by its weak writing.

Sometimes though, even one positive element could make a film worthwhile, and when that element is Mohanlal in full flow, it is tempting to pretend that the film’s follies do not exist.

It so happens that Oppam has several more positives that sustain it for a while before you wake up to its minuses. There is that other Malayalam film legend Nedumudi Venu in a supporting role as a judge with a troubled past. It would take courage for any young actor to choose to share film space with these two greats but Baby Meenakshi does it with conviction and confidence as she plays the judge’s young ward with a tragic background, never once crossing the line from smart to over-smart or cute to irritatingly precocious as child actors often do.

Frankly, just watching Mohanlal playing a blind man without a single misstep and without caricaturing his character’s disability is worth the price of a ticket. Add to that a couple of memorable songs by the young composer group 4 Musics and cinematographer N.K. Ekhambram’s imaginative visuals of the film’s already breathtaking setting – Kerala – and as a viewer I found myself willing the film to be as good as the sum of these parts.

The long opening sequence alongside the credits, with M.G. Sreekumar singing Chinnamma adi for Lalettan’s character Jayaraman on a packed boat as it sails down an extensive expanse of clear water with lush greenery on all sides is to die for. The infectiously rhythmic Chinnamma adi and that later song picturised on Lalettan and Meenakshi, the more serenely melodic Minungum minnaminuge,are my earworms for the weekend.

Jayaraman is a lift operator in a posh apartment complex and every resident’s favourite Man Friday. One of the occupants of the building is the former Supreme Court judge and retired Chief Justice of the Kerala High Court, Justice Krishnamoorthy (Nedumudi Venu) who is ridden with guilt at the memory of what he fears might have been a wrong conviction he handed down many years back. He entrusts Jayaraman with his secret and the care of a child he is bringing up (Nandini played by Meenakshi). When Jayaraman is later accused of a crime, he is forced to solve the case himself while struggling to save his own life and Nandini’s from a serial killer.

When the suspense saga initially unfolds, it is both disturbing and exciting. Mohanlal and Nedumudi Venu lend gravitas to the grim situation they find themselves in. Priyadarshan combines Ekhambram’s generous use of a wide-angle lens and low angle shots with the clarity in the sound design and the background score to conjure up an ominous atmosphere in the housing complex and elsewhere. The tension is further heightened by our worries for the kind-hearted Jayaraman. There are also some well-conceptualised red herrings scattered about to distract us from what is really going on.

All this is effective despite some needless interludes that spoil the flow such as an unfunny comedy track involving Mamukkoya, awkwardly handled interactions between the locals and Sikh families in Moorthy Saar’s building, and a loud Punjabi-Malayalam song that rivals the worst we’ve been seeing in wedding-obsessed north Indian films since Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayengeearned big money in the 1990s. There is an absolutely unnecessary, almost puerile scene in which Jayaraman gets an expression of romantic interest from the building’s freelance housemaid played by Vimala Raman, who of course looks 2-3 decades junior to Mohanlal. Apparently no mainstream Malayalam hero’s ‘hero-ness’ is complete unless we are provided evidence that he is attractive to at least one woman young enough to be his daughter.

Oh yes, and if we are to go by a very pointed conversation about age in Jayaraman’s home, we must believe that he is in the vicinity of 40. Considering that Mohanlal is 56 and looks well above it, this is a laughable aside.

Still, the first half of Oppam is absorbing. (Caution: spoilers ahead) By the second half though, it becomes clear that the mystery at the heart of the film has little heft and there is only so much that intimidating atmospherics can do to save a feeble screenplay.

Too many scenarios are contrived to take the story forward. For instance, why on earth would an old man who fears for his life remain in his flat when the entire building has deserted their homes to attend an event? Considering his connections in high places, why does he not seek police protection for himself and his ward from a potential murderer?

I get that Jayaraman is fiercely independent despite his blindness, that he has a heightened sense of hearing and smell which makes him an extraordinarily gifted individual. I am willing to buy into his Superman-like multi-tasking abilities and strength: he is a lift operator in the evening, runs a shop during the day, plays the violin and piano, sings masterfully, does social work, and is a skilled fighter. Let experts on music, martial arts and visual impairment analyse that. What is hard to digest though is that an intelligent man like him would choose to confine himself within a near-deserted school building with a child who is being targeted by a serial killer, instead of escaping from there.

I get that the murder of an influential individual would place pressure on the police to quickly solve the case, and I get that in such circumstances police have been known to frame innocents simply to make a show of closing the file, but why would a colleague who has a seemingly credible theory about the homicide not share her concerns with the team right at the start before they get so deeply embroiled in their framing efforts that they would not be interested? I get that police departments in India are overworked, poorly trained, lack resources, lack inter-jurisdictional cooperation and are ridden with corruption, but is the Kerala Police so stupid that they do not sense a serial killing when the killer leaves behind a signature plus there is a glaring link between all the victims, and only one woman in the entire force notices?

Oppam might still have survived all this, but its fatal flaw is that it is needlessly stretched after the murderer’s identity, his motive and his next target are revealed, and he discovers that target’s location. Samuthirakani as the villain Vasudevan is suitably enigmatic and menacing at first, but suffers from zero characterisation. That threatening finger and the raucously laughing silhouette are more silly than scary. The needlessly elongated final 45 minutes become boring and almost inane after a point. The climax features a couple of chilling moments, but they are not enough compensation for the director’s transparent effort to manipulate us by over-extending it.

Oppam is technically polished, visually appealing and features a fantastic performance by Mohanlal. It is also pointlessly long-drawn-out and after a while, pretentious in its effort to scare.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	152 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/oppam-review-mohanlal-is-fantasic-in-this-over-stretched-priyadarshan-thriller-2998790.html

Posters courtesy:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oppam

Release date:	September 8, 2016
Director:	Jeethu Joseph
Cast: Language:	Prithviraj Sukumaran, Divya Pillai, Neeraj Madhav, Jayaprakash Vittal, Pasupathy, Balachandra Menon, Kishore Sathya, Anson Paul, Tony Luke Malayalam

It is hard to believe that the man who made Drishyam and Papanasam made this film too.

Oozham– It’s Just A Matter of Time is directed by Jeethu Joseph who has been the toast of the national film circuit since the release of Drishyam starring Mohanlal in 2013. That film was so finely crafted, well-written, well-acted and entertaining that it was appreciated by both audiences and reviewers, including those who criticised Joseph for not acknowledging what they believed was his inspiration, the Japanese novel The Devotion of Suspect X. The Malayalam Drishyamwas remade in four Indian languages, and Joseph himself helmed the Tamil remake Papanasam with Kamal Haasan, arguably an even better film than the first. How do you go from that to this? How do you go from Drishyam to Oozham in a span of just three years? How?

Everything about this one is embarrassingly shoddy, from the shallow script that would look bad on a junior school kid’s CV to the heavy-handed dialogues, the dreadful acting by some of the supporting cast and indifferent production quality. Prithviraj is no doubt sincere in his effort to lend believability to his role as an anguished son and brother out to avenge an injustice, but it is hard to forgive him for not having sensed a non-starter while reading the script.

Oozham’s screenplay saddles the actors with the most absurdly gauche lines ever written in English for a Malayalam film – lines so bad that they immediately reminded me of another Mollywood disaster from recent months, Uday Ananthan’s White starring Mammootty and Huma Qureshi. It is hard to believe that someone has actually matched Mammukka’s Prakash Roy telling the heroine of Whiteon her birthday, “I never wanted to be the first person to wish you, neither the last. But I wanted to be a person to wish you.”

The conversations in Oozham are conducted in a mix of Malayalam, Tamil and bombastic, grammatically poor English. The corrupt industrialist Wilfred Marquez (Jayaprakash Vittal), for instance, glares at a hired hand and bellows, “How dare!” at him, because I suppose the pronoun “you” at the end of that sentence would have required too much of an effort. He does this twice, not once – yes, I counted.

Now excuse me while I fall off my chair laughing at the mere memory of these absurdities.

(Pause, while the writer picks herself off the floor.)

Okay, so where was I? Oh yes, Oozham. Surya Krishnamoorthy (Prithviraj Sukumaran) is home on a break from his job in the US to spend time with his family – his father Krishnamoorthy (Balachandra Menon) who is a health department official in Tamil Nadu, his mother Subbahlakshmy and sister Aiswarya. Soon after, tragedy strikes them and the family of Krishnamoorthy’s friend, the honest top cop SP Parthasarthy (Kishore Sathya).

Investigations by Surya, his friend/adoptive brother Ajmal Mohammed (Neeraj Madhav) and Parthasarthy’s sister Gayathri (Divya Pillai) lead them to the corrupt industrialist Wilfred Marquez. This sets them off on a trail of revenge which they execute with equal parts professionalism and idiocy. The trio’s foolishness matters not, since Wilfred, his sons Edward and Andrew, the explosives expert they hire for their security (Anand Chathuranga a.k.a. Captain played by Pasupathy), the entire staff of their Rs 5,000 crore company and the Police are all even more foolish.

Surya is adept at bomb making and heads the operation. Ajmal/Aju is a cyber specialist. And Gayathri is a specialist in squeezing herself into a short tight skirt and tight sleeveless top to attract the playboy Andrew. Because you cannot expect a girl to know about bombs and cyberspace, I guess?

As an American crime show junkie, this film made me want to scream in exasperation at the tackiness of the proceedings and Team Oozham’s lack of even a skeletal knowledge of criminal investigations and procedures. Forget that, this film lacks an understanding of simple questions relating to computers and the social media. These days I am watching Season 13 of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit (SVU) starring Mariska Hargitay – one of my all-time favourites – and I would like to apologise to the makers because I grumbled to a friend this week that the quality of the writing in SVU has declined since Season 1. I apologise because SVU exists on the same planet as Oozham and I was still finicky enough to fuss about it.

Now excuse me while I bow my head in contrition.

(Pause, while the writer observes a moment of silence.)

It is hard to believe that the man who made Drishyam and Papanasam could come up with this tripe. In one scene, a senior cop stares at a laptop trying to figure out how to get past the screen saver. I kid you not, he does not seem to know that clicking a key could make it disappear.

Okay, let us put that down to poor police training with new technology. After all, women victims of cyber crimes in the far more moneyed West have reported being asked pre-kindergarten-level questions by police personnel in their local precinct.

But can someone explain how a supposed tech wiz like Captain is not aware of the basics of a digital search? In one unintentionally comical scene, Captain sees the hero’s name written as “Surya Krishna Moorthy” in a file. He searches for “Soorya Krishnamoorthy” on Facebook, finds no one – of course, since a misspelt name on this social networking site will not throw up the person you are looking for – and immediately gives up.

Why, Jeethu Joseph, why?

Now excuse me while I go off to weep in solitude over this sorry moment in Malayalam cinema.

Rating (out of five stars): 1/2

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

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/oozham-review-whats-a-fine-actor-like-prithviraj-doing-in-this-shoddy-film-2999764.html

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

Release date:	September 9, 2016
Director:	Sohail Khan
Cast: Language:	Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Arbaaz Khan, Asif Basra, Seema Biswas, Amy Jackson, Nikitin Dheer, Jas Arora, Paresh Ganatra, Jackie Shroff Hindi

Freaky Aliis as slim as Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s waistline, and carries none of the weight associated with his roles so far. No doubt it is a pleasure to see this remarkable artiste not being grim or eccentric, as he has been in most of his high-profile parts so far, but the joy of watching him let his hair down as the lead in a comedy is vastly diluted by this film’s lack of substance.

The potential of the actor in this particular genre smacks us in the face in the hilarious opening minute when Siddiqui, as small-time underwear salesman Ali, rattles off a string of selling points of the chaddis he is peddling without seeming to take a moment to breathe. It reminded me of vada vendors at southern Indian railway stations crying out “vadai vadai, uzhunna vadai, parippu vadai, thaiyr vadai, vadai vadai” without a pause. Within moments though, Ali makes an ageist wisecrack that is crude but stops short of being offensive. Next he spews insults at an obese child wanting to buy an undie for his Superman suit. And the warning bells ring.

These are not warning bells of fanatical over-sensitivity or political correctness for the heck of it, but a reminder that intelligent humour is hard to do. Either the writer is specifically targeting less demanding audiences, or he lacks the imagination to pull off a two-hour movie without resorting to lazy quips drawing on prejudice. Such limitations are highly likely to show up in the plot too. Fingers crossed that they don’t.

Now that I have watched the entire film, I can confirm that in fact they do. Freaky Ali’s storyline is thinner than a potato wafer and that laptop that pegs its marketing spiel on Kareena Kapoor’s figure. To be fair to writer-director-producer Sohail Khan (whose star elder brother Salman Khan presents this film), Ali is punished by the storyline for his ageist utterances and fat jokes. Those cracks give way though to ‘jokes’ so steeped in misogyny – for which characters are rewarded not punished – that “sexist” is too mild an adjective for them. The film also fails to add anything to the early points it makes.

After trying his hand and failing at underwear sales, Ali shifts to hafta vasooli– collecting protection money from local businessmen on behalf of a notorious gangster. His partner in crime is his friend Maqsood (Sohail’s other brother Arbaaz Khan). Meanwhile, his adoptive mother (Seema Biswas) thinks her son is in “the garments business”.

All Ali wants is to make her happy and proud of him. One day Kishan (Asif Basra), who is a caddie at a posh golf course, spots Ali casually striking some balls while on a hafta vasooli visit to the club. Kishan sees sporting potential in Ali and offers to train him. Golf means money and respectability so Ali grabs the chance, and soon becomes a national-level force to reckon with in less time than it took Sultan to become a world-beating wrestler.

Okay, forget that swipe at Sultan’s believability. Films such as these demand a suspension of cynicism from the viewer, and as a masala movie addict I gladly submit to their demands if they offer solid material on other fronts. The problem with Freaky Aliis that once you are over the novelty of seeing Siddiqui in a light-hearted role and nailing the body language of a golfer at play, you realise there is little going for the film apart from him. Once a point is made about class snobbery directed at a poor man who enters a sport of rich people, you realise the film has nothing more to say. Besides, too many distractions in the form of songs, silliness, repetitive and intermittently distasteful humour take away from the goal of conveying the point that immense character and grit – not financial wealth alone – are what go into making a great sportsperson.

Early on we learn that Ali’s Hindu adoptive mother brought him up as a Muslim because she found him outside an Islamic holy place and assumed his biological parents were Muslim. Why has this gradually come to be seen as a secular imperative? Would it have been intolerant on her part to bring him up as a Hindu? If she had been Muslim and found him outside a temple or church, would it have been intolerant to bring him up as a Muslim? Unthinking liberalism, I say. Religion is not a genetic trait, it is a belief system that parents pass on to their offspring like all values, and expecting someone to bring up their adoptive child in the religion of its biological parents makes as little sense as expecting a hardcore capitalist to bring up an adoptive child as a Communist because its birth parents were Communist.

This is just an aside. Freaky Ali’s undoing is its superficial writing with clichés piling up in the run-up to a dated climax. Of the cast, Basra and Arbaaz are sweet, Dheer as a hapless giant is likeable, Biswas is miscast since she looks too close to Siddiqui’s age and Amy Jackson has little to do but be svelte. Siddiqui is spot-on. It is sad though that he agreed to a running ‘joke’ that involves his character and Maqsood assuming that the women officials at a tournament venue are all on duty to sleep with the men – because what else can smart women in Western outfits do?

The film’s attitude to women is further revealed by the graph of Megha (Jackson) who gives up being the arrogant golfing champion Vikram Rathore’s manager to become not Ali’s manager but his aimless arm-candy-cum-girlfriend. Was it inconceivable to Khan that a woman could be his hero’s manager?

Frankly, expecting this film to get this is expecting too much. After an initial promise of unrelenting humour, Freaky Ali’s only strength is Siddiqui’s talent. It is worth remembering that the cute, huggable, goofy golfer at the centre of this film is played by the same guy who played that creepy, sadistic serial killer in Anurag Kashyap’s excellent Raman Raghav 2.0 just months back. That said, even the gifted Siddiqui cannot save Freaky Ali from its own flimsiness.

Rating (out of five): *

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

Postscript: Another aside. Liverpool native Amy Jackson who plays Megha in Freaky Ali is a virtual unknown in Bollywood, but she has somehow convinced the UK press that she is “one of Bollywood’s biggest stars”. A 2014 article headlined with those exact words appeared not on a marginal media platform but on a website run by the well-regarded British online newspaper The Independent. Here it is, have a good laugh: http://tinyurl.com/j5fjo2n The Independent’s write-upquotes Jackson speaking to TheMail on Sunday tabloid. No sane person expects quality journalism from MoS, but it is disappointing to see such poor research from The Independent.

Posters courtesy: imdb.com

(Abhay Kumar’s Placebo was premiered at the Mumbai Film Festival 2015. I saw it shortly afterwards at the Dharamsala International Film Festival where I also interviewed Kumar. This article was published on Firstpost on November 16, 2015. The film has since travelled to various parts of India and the rest of the world.)

THE INSIDE MAN

After going undercover at Delhi’s All India Institute of Medical Sciences for two years, filmmaker Abhay Kumar delivers a disturbing documentary that dismembers traditional notions of excellence and self-worth

By Anna MM Vetticad

“Right-handed AIIMS doctor clears UPSC with left hand” – from the mass of news stories that have crowded the media in the past year, you may perhaps remember this one. Dr Sahil Kumar, we learnt from The Times of India’s report in July, “lost fine motor movements in his right hand after it got brutally jammed in a window” but displayed remarkable resilience over the months that followed, transforming himself from a right-hander to a left-hander, ultimately clearing his final year medical college exams, later cracking the UPSC and being accepted in the Indian Foreign Service.

The story behind that story though has been unveiled only this month. The source is not a newspaper but a film by Sahil’s brother. Abhay Kumar’s Placebo had its India premiere – to a very positive response – at Mumbai’s Jio MAMI fest followed days later by the just-concluded Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF).

Still from Placebo

Placebo is set in the rarely-probed innards of the intimidatingly competitive AIIMS (Delhi’s All India Institute of Medical Sciences), but it is not about one college alone. It is about high-pressure academic environs, depression that leads to violence, suicides in institutions of higher learning, a lack of support systems and an apathetic administration. It is about a society that encourages youngsters to make the most important decisions of their lives unthinkingly based on what others want, it is about geniuses wracked with self-doubt and families that do not want us to think for ourselves.

The year was 2011. Sahil had, in an inexplicable explosion of fury during a fight on the AIIMS campus, smashed his right arm into a glass window. The episode left his then 25-year-old elder sibling Abhay confused and distressed. What could possibly have prompted a seemingly stable final year student at India’s most prestigious medical school to inflict such severe wounds on himself, leading to a potentially career-destroying disability?

While Sahil underwent surgeries and undertook his own journey to recovery, Abhay discovered an alternative coping mechanism. Unknown to AIIMS authorities, he embedded himself among the students to shoot the goings-on at the institute and record interviews with those who were willing and able to speak on camera.

The plan was that he would stay with them for a few months. The project took on a life of its own though, as the proposed six months turned into two years and almost 1,000 hours of footage. The result is the feature-length documentary Placebo, which combines intimate conversations with fly-on-the-wall observations all tied together by the use of some decidedly surreal animation.

Filmmaker Abhay Kumar speaking at
the Lycée Notre Dame De Sion Istanbul

Placebo begins with an intentionally misleading dual tone, Abhay’s staid voiceover forming a sharp contrast to the ramblings and/or frivolous banter of four interviewees (Sahil among them).The film parallelly chronicles developments at AIIMS during this timeincluding a students’ protest and – quite chillingly – three suicides on campus.

As the narrative progresses and the boys settle into their role as subjects of a camera’s gaze, they reveal deeper and deeper secrets, occasionally even turning accusatory and borderline aggressive towards the filmmaker. This is when Abhay turns the lens on himself, providing us with among the most devastatingly grim, introspective and nakedly honest sequences in the film.

The narrative raises micro and macro-level questions, some vocalised by characters in this real-life story, some not, many going beyond the particular challenges of being at the country’s most sought-after school of medicine.

If you have gained admission to AIIMS, you are probably used to being ranked first in your class in school. How do you cope with joining a group of students as brilliant as you? If you do not continue to stand first among them, does that mean you have become second best or average overnight?

Who do you discuss this problem with, considering how ridiculously minor it would seem to ordinary folk outside those hallowed walls?

How do different people cope with stress? Specifically here, instead of mollycoddling Sahil while he was recuperating, why did Abhay choose to pick up a camera and hang out at AIIMS?

In doing so, was he neglecting his brother and running away from a challenging state of affairs?Has he exploited his brother’s misfortune to make a self-serving film or did he hope that his work would help Sahil to confront his own demons and aid in the healing process? Perhaps it is he – Abhay himself – who needs to heal. Perhaps this film is primarily for those of us like him who have known the helplessness of watching a loved one’s decline and wondering if we did enough to stop it.

These are questions viewers would do well to first answer for themselves before addressing them to the filmmaker. Over lunch at a rooftop restaurant in McLeodganj-Dharamshala, Abhay dwells at length on two other points raised by audience members at the DIFF screening. One asked why Placebo does not discuss caste-related strains at AIIMS. Another wanted to know why all four interviewees were men, thus possibly conveying the impression to unknowing viewers outside India that AIIMS does not have women students.

Frankly, these two questions take a rather narrow view of the film. Placebois not an all-encompassing journalistic documentary which must perforce try to tackle every conceivable what, where, when, why and how; it is a deeply personal response to a trying situation and it should be evident to any viewer that: (a) in a gender-segregated scenario, the institute’s women’s hostel would have been far more inaccessible to a male filmmaker than the men’s hostel; and pursuing women students could clearly have led to problems since he was there without the administration’s permission (b) while caste and gender issues would certainly play a role in these students’ lives, and while women and reserved caste students do find their way into the narrative – via a stray remark here, a visual there, a name that comes up elsewhere – this film is not about caste and gender, it is about a stressful academic world. Why stop at asking about caste and gender then? What about divisions caused by class, religion, sexual orientation, language and region? The point is, dealing with every single social equation at the institute would require a separate and very different film.

Still, politely asked questions always merit answers. Here are Ajay’s.

About caste: “Caste is definitely an issue, but it needs a more balanced point of view than mine. A film about caste politics should not be subjective like mine.”

About women: “I had to shoot with what was available to me. The sort of access I was looking at was simply not possible infiltrating the girls’ hostel. I tried talking to some of them during the protests because that’s where they came out to the boys’ hostel, but they were just not comfortable being on camera.”

About the choice of interviewees: “Most people at AIIMS were not comfortable. I interviewed many more subjects including those from OBCs and lower castes, but it was a matter of who was willing to open up, give me time, talk about things. There are clear patterns indicating why each interviewee in the film was chosen. It was unrelated to caste or economics. Sahil is there because of the accident, K because he punched a glass window too, K introduces Chopra to the camera and Sethi is so child-like in how he looks at the world, so for me these four represented the archetype of students in our academic environment – the rebel and anarchist, the middle-class guy who wants to do something because his parents want him to, the guy obsessed with American pop culture and this bigger dream, and Sahil who is very average and doesn’t know what he’s doing. They represent for me a vast landscape of students.”

At one point, Placebo seems so intent on slamming AIIMS’ indifferent administration that it appears to be gravitating towards absolving students of any contribution to their college-mates’ worries, especially when one of them is shown pontificating about a social vacuum left by the ban on ragging and the need for more interactions between seniors and juniors to defuse tensions on campus. That is a passing thought though since the film goes on to unflinchingly dwell on the students’ own flaws. In a particularly unnerving scene, a boy struggles to recall even the face of another who committed suicide during the course of the making of the film.

Placebo has been on the international film festival circuit for a while now. The young director tells us he deliberately delayed the premiere in India till after his four interviewees had graduated, to protect them from any possible action at the institute. Even now, he lets on, “AIIMS does not know the film exists.” When the authorities inevitably find out, they are unlikely to be pleased at the picture they present.

Placebo, however, should not be reductively labelled a sting operation on AIIMS. It is an illuminating and highly disturbing docu feature that takes off from an acutely private starting point, then goes on to tell a story that could belong to anyone. This is why rather than aiming for a multiplex release (which would automatically raise his profile) or television (where Censorship is inevitable), Abhay wants to travel with it to festivals and educational institutions across India so that it becomes a tool “to start a conversation”.

AIIMS in this film is but a metaphor for an impending implosion among the human statistics populating institutions of higher learning and excellence in India. It is about students in mental turmoil, even agony, teetering on the precipice of self-destruction, and being pushed over the edge by a mindless, heartless, soulless system.

Original link:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/placebo-review-this-documentary-on-aiims-shows-us-the-grim-reality-of-medicine-in-india-2507802.html

Photographs courtesy:

https://www.facebook.com/PlaceboTheFilm/

Release date:	September 16, 2016
Director:	Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury
Cast: Language:	Kirti Kulhari, Taapsee Pannu, Andrea Tariang, Amitabh Bachchan, Angad Bedi, Vijay Varma, Raashul Tandon, Tushar Pandey, Dhritiman Chatterjee, Piyush Mishra, Mamata Shankar, Mamta Malik Hindi, English

Every sleazy hand that ever groped you, every insulting conjecture ever made, every lascivious remark ever thrown at you, every lewd gesture, every leering eye, they may all come to mind as you watch director Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury’s Pink. This is a film about male privilege, prejudice, sexual violence, and the many systems that support them.

The starting block of Pink is a rock show on the outskirts of Delhi where Minal Arora (played by Taapsee Pannu), Falak Ali (Kirti Kulhari) and Andrea Tariang (a character who shares her name with the actress playing her) meet Rajvir Singh (Angad Bedi), Dumpy a.k.a. Raunak Anand (Raashul Tandon) and Vishwajyoti Ghosh a.k.a. Vishwa (Tushar Pandey). Falak already knows Vishwa. They get chatting. The women accept an invitation to drinks and dinner at a nearby resort. Things go awry when Rajvir mistakes their sociability for sexual availability and forces himself on Minal. She resists, he gets aggressive, in a state of panic she smashes a bottle on his head.

This opening incident is revealed through a smart narrative device between the opening and end credits that tests our own biases as viewers in the he-said-she-said game that ensues.

The film is about Rajvir’s quest for revenge with the help of his friend Ankit Malhotra (Vijay Varma), the girls’ quest for justice, and society’s interpretation of the meaning of consent.

At a time when sections of upper-class Delhi and Mumbai seem disturbed by the action taken in the Tehelkaand Mahmood Farooqui rape cases, and coming from an industry that continues to make light of heroes molesting heroines in the guise of courtship, Pink is a huge milestone simply by virtue of its choice of theme. Mainstream Hindi cinema persists in perpetuating the notion that it is okay for a man to read a woman’s “no” as “maybe”. Just weeks back, director Ali Abbas Zafar (Mere Brother Ki Dulhan, Gunday, Sultan) told me in an interview: “There are two ways of stalking. One way is ugly, one way is politically correct.” For such an industry to make a film taking an undiluted position that a “no” from a woman means “no” is in itself a reason to celebrate.

What goes against Pink though is an occasional self-consciousness, an overt awareness that it has been created to send out a message on women’s rights – an awareness that begins with its cliched title (pink for girls, blue for boys, you know) and ultimately leads to some overly dramatised courtroom episodes that cross the border into almost ridiculous, self-defeating territory.

It is the film’s good fortune that those scenes arrive very late in the day. Until then and after they are through, there is plenty in this film that makes it worthy of our time and discussions, from the many significant nuanced arguments it takes up in the matter of violence against women to the top-of-the-line performances of the three talented female leads and the four men playing their antagonists. Chowdhury’s heart is in the right place and that in itself is worth toasting.

Pink smoothly packs multiple debates into a single compact film: how society judges single women, the pre-conceived notions about women not staying with their parents, the assumption that if women receive male visitors at home then they must be promiscuous, the social definition of “provocation”, the stereotyping of women from certain communities, the manner in which patriarchy paints men as helpless victims of their hormones, the gentle reminder that patriarchy could not survive without the collusion of at least some women and the reminder too that feminists may well be men (a kindly landlord who refuses to buy into gossip about his female tenants, the watchful neighbour, the sympathetic lawyer, the considerate judge).

Pink also delivers a slap on the face of status quo-ists who are alarmed at the tiny gains made by India’s women’s rights movement in recent years. The whispers are no longer whispers, as panic-stricken men anxious about a potential loss of millennia-old privilege paint pictures of hordes of women filing false cases of violence and discrimination against helpless men in a world rapidly switching to female dominance. Pink has something to say about all this and more.

Half the battle is won for the film because Chowdhury’s clarity of thought is complemented by his smashing cast. Pannu is relatively new to Bollywood but an established star of Kollywood and Tollywood. Kulhari has done a few Bollywood films, but none so far have been box-office successes. Both women have already proved that they are extremely natural performers. They live up to that track record in Pink (though Pannu needs to work on her enunciation of “coward” which was jarring in the film considering that the rest of her diction was well-suited to a presumably public-school-educated Punjabi girl from Delhi).

Andrea Tariang is a welcome addition to the Mumbai cinemascape. Firstly, it is a joy to see a Hindi film that actually features a character from Meghalaya – Bollywood tends to pretend that the North-east of India does not exist. It is such a relief to see the character being played by an actor from Meghalaya, unlike Mary Kom that avoided risking a newcomer from Manipur, instead having a Manipuri Mary Kom played by a part-Punjabi-part-Bihari-part-Malayali Priyanka Chopra since she is an established star. Most important: Tariang is good.

The lead trio’s perfect chemistry is the bedrock of this film, as is their demeanour. They come across as real-life friends and real-life middle-class working women living in south Delhi.

This would not have been possible without the credible characterisation and effortlessly flowing Hindi-English dialogues by writer Ritesh Shah. His screenplay also does full justice to the four villains of the piece and all four actors are excellent. Varma and Bedi merit a special mention for the conviction with which they convey seething arrogance and male entitlement. Those clenched jaws, their sneeringspeech, the way one of them snarls “aisi ladkiyon ke saath aisa hi hota hai” (this is exactly what happens to such girls) capture their furious resentment towards women who dared to say no and now dare to ask questions. These are not creepy-looking fellows. That would have been the lazy casting choice to make. They are, in fact, exceedingly attractive. It is not their looks but their words and deeds that make them both scary and slimy.

Every tiny satellite role in Pink has been carefully cast, though my pick of the supporting players are Mamta Malik as investigating officer Sarla Premchand and veteran Dhritiman Chatterjee as the judge – they are both superb. Megastar Amitabh Bachchan plays Deepak Sehgal, a “manic depressive” retiree who re-dons his lawyer’s robes to fight for the women – his is the only awkwardly written role in the film and it shows in his slightly affected performance.

This is where Pink falters. It is not set up as a song-dance-and-dishoom-dishoom saga in the Damini mould, so you do not go to court expecting “dhai kilo ka haath” kind of dialoguebaazi. Pink does not head off completely in that direction through Sehgal, but it is certainly not as true-to-life in its judicial proceedings as you might expect from the treatment up to that point.

(Spoiler alert)In a film that gets so much else right, it is especially infuriating to watch that ridiculous scene in which Sehgal badgers one of his own clients to reveal intimate details of her sexual past in a crowded courtroom. Women’s rights movements worldwide have fought – are fighting – long and hard to end such intrusive, suggestive interrogations of women victims by defence lawyers. To have such behaviour from a woman’s own lawyer be projected as a clever legal move is bizarre.

Just as bizarre is the scene involving a woman victim claiming that she accepted money for sex, though she did nothing of the sort. Why did she make this false ‘admission’? Because she wanted to drive home a complex point that a woman is well within her rights to withdraw her consent once it is given. Even if you accept that a beleaguered, frustrated woman might speak impulsively when harassed in a witness box, it is unthinking of the film to suggest that she was being brave and intelligent not brainless. Really? That is an intelligent move in a system already stacked against women? Gimme a break. (Spoiler alert ends)

This is why in some ways I missed Rituparno Ghosh while watching Pink. No contemporary Indian film I have seen has as effectively and believably captured the torture a woman victim of violence is subjected to incourt in the way Ghosh’s Dahan did. These instances of melodrama in Pink’s courtroom scenes are absolutely unnecessary since there is so much drama intrinsic to the situations anyway.

For the most part though, Pink maintains a realistic tone. Chowdhury seems to have a clear vision of what he wants to say and how. The air of tension he builds around the three women is almost palpable. It is tension that rights-conscious women can identify with as we live out our lives so constantly on edge that we ourselves may not notice our own instinctive actions and gestures of self-preservation – the fact that many of us avoid making eye contact with male strangers in public places especially in a culture of gender segregation where men tend to misconstrue affability, the manner in which our arms reflexively go up to cover our torsos in crowded spaces, the way we plan our safety while planning our schedules.

It is hard, therefore, not to be moved by the trauma and humiliation of Minal, Falak and Andrea who have to justify their life choices, their clothing choices and their tiniest moves before the world because one of them defended herself against an influential man who tried to rape her. Its flaws and that title notwithstanding, Pink is a powerful film.

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

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

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/pink-review-amitabh-bachchan-teams-up-with-a-smashing-young-ensemble-in-this-powerful-film-3006604.html

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

Release date:	Kerala: September 9, 2016. Delhi: September 16.
Director:	Sidhartha Siva
Cast: Language:	Kunchacko Boban, Master Rudraksh Sudheesh, Nedumudi Venu, K.P.A.C. Lalitha, Muthumani, Suraj Venjaramood, Mukesh, Sudheesh, Anusree, Aju Varghese, Musthafa, Irshad, Cameos: Biju Menon, Parvathy Ratheesh Malayalam

“When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.” This extract from Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist published in 1988 has been repeated so often, in private conversations and on public platforms, in works of art and speeches, that like Mozart’s music, many of us may be familiar with it even without knowing the source and author.

Bollywood buffs will recall Shah Rukh Khan’s character delivering this speech in Farah Khan’s Om Shanti Om (2007): “Itni shiddat se maine tumhe paane ki koshish ki hai, ki har zarre ne mujhe tumse milaane ki saazish ki hai. Kehte hai, agar kisi cheez ko dil se chaaho toh poori kaaynaat use tumse milaane ki koshish mein lag jaati hai.” Dear readers who don’t know Hindi, in a nutshell these words mean exactly what Coelho said.

The new Mollywood film Kochavva Paulo Ayyappa Coelho is a tribute to – and an endearing interpretation of – this oft-quoted gem from the Brazilian writer.

Director Sidhartha Siva’s film is about a diehard Coelho fan in the remote Kerala countryside who cites The Alchemist as often as the average Malayali man flips the edge of his mundu and tucks it into his waistband. The likes of Ajay Kumar a.k.a. Kochavva (played by Kunchacko Boban) are not uncommon in small towns and villages – golden-hearted unemployed people-pleasers who so enjoy serving the community, doing odd jobs, helping whoever needs help and being well loved as a result, that they forget to set the basics of their own lives in order.

In the mornings Kochavva teaches the local children to swim, in the evenings he is their cycling coach. He is the guy who can be depended on to help your family during a festival, a wedding or a funeral. Pressing errand to be run? Ask Kochavva. Emergency situation? Call Kochavva. How does he earn a living? Who knows? Not he.

In that same village lives little Ayyappa Das (Master Rudraksh Sudheesh) whose sole goal in life is to fly on a plane. Each time he is close to doing so, fate intervenes. And then the universe conspires to unite Ayyappa’s dream with Kochavva’s vision. The film is about what happens when the twain meet.

The best of children’s cinema worldwide works well for adults too. Kochavva Paulo Ayyappa Coelho (KPAC) may seem like a film for kids but it does not take their intelligence or ours for granted. It is packed with positivity and wise lessons clearly spelt out for the young ’uns, yet it serves up enough depth to challenge their intellect and keep grown-ups simultaneously engaged.

In aiming for its primary audience, it may occasionally dole out some broad brush strokes – such as the portrait of the village as an idyll and rural folk as almost uniformly good souls – but its intentions are so noble that this is not a criticism at all.

KPAC does not rely on its story’s appeal alone to keep audiences in their seats. It is a technically refined film with some nice camerawork by Neil D’Cunha (though it could have done with better lighting in a couple of scenes shot on the balcony of Ayyappa’s house), picturesque locations, songs that while not being earth shattering are still well suited to the mood of the narrative and some amusing dance choreography involving a bevy of mundu-clad, leg-flashing men.

Boban is the film’s producer and we are reminded at the start that this is his 75^th film as an actor. The decision to act in KPAC is a master move since on the face of it it may appear that a star has chosen to take a backseat to a child (a seeming act of courage, supreme confidence, even benevolence some would say), but that is not actually the case. One of the most impressive aspects of KPAC is the fine line Siva walks in his writing and direction to ensure that though Ayyappa is his narrator, neither character overshadows the other at any point.

Such subtlety is not unexpected from the man who made 2015’s Ain, winner of the National Award for Best Malayalam Feature Film. That film was about a purposeless, intellectually slow village laggard. Maanu from Ainwas innocence personified, but as different from Kochavva as chalk is from cheese.

This brings us to an important point raised in KPAC. Kochavva is professionally goalless, yet it is clear that he has it in him to be otherwise from the concerted manner in which he sets off to help Ayyappa realise his dreams. In a state wracked with unemployment, there are too many young men out there with misplaced hopesof marrying their lovers irrespective of whether either partner has a known source of income – as if households can be run on love and sexual chemistry. Kochavva is one such fellow. Fortunately, the film does not romanticise this aspect of his character, reminding him instead that he needs to get practical about the business of living.

Perhaps this point could have been further underlined, but at least it is raised, unlike so many other films that do not seem to bat an eyelid about such matters. Considering that so much thought has gone into the messaging in KPAC, it is doubly disappointing that the film unexpectedly chooses to take a misogynistic – even if passing – stand on household duties. Describing the context of that statement would involve spoilers, so I’ll leave it at pointing to a highly regressive lament by a husband in the story who clearly subscribes to the view that home management is a woman’s job rather than a shared responsibility. Et tu Sidhartha Siva?

This passage strikes a highly discordant note in an otherwise uplifting film. It is the reason why book and film consumption by children has to be accompanied by conversations with parents who could provide a much-needed counterpoint to the prejudice we see even in the most well-loved classics, the most entertaining contemporary works.

And entertaining KPAC certainly is. Boban is in fine fettle as the guileless, literarily inclined Kochavva. His amiable screen persona – likeable yet not overpowering in a larger-than-life kind of way – makes him the right fit too for this role.

Rudraksh Sudheesh – whose father, actor Sudheesh, also has a small part in KPAC – is a talent to watch out for. The scene stealer though is the sweetheart playing his kid cousin Ambili.

The character that had me choking on my popcorn with laughter was Susheelan played by the inimitable Suraj Venjaramood. He is the closest you get to a villain in this sanitised film – a mischief maker rather than a frighteningly evil man. Comical drunken louts have been done a million times in Indian commercial cinema, but I tell ya no one can do drunk quite like Venjaramood. He is an intoxicant unto himself.

The film’s cast is a veritable role call of Malayalam cinema’s pre-eminent character actors. The venerable Nedumudi Venu and K.P.A.C. Lalitha play Ayyappa’s grandparents with a loveable charm that comes as naturally to them as breathing comes to the rest of us. Then there is Irshad as Ayyappa’s father, Maniyanpilla Raju as Kochavva’s girlfriend’s dad, Mukesh as a kind stranger in Bengaluru and Biju Menon in a tiny cameo of the sort that films have when they know viewers are already enjoying a game of spot-the-star. Musthafa who played Maanu in Ain makes a small yet memorable appearance as Ayyappa’s uncle.

Hats off to Kunchacko Boban for backing Kochavva Paulo Ayyappa Coelho, which will no doubt attract far more eyeballs because of the star association. It deserves every iota of attention it gets. A pity that it has been released outside Kerala without English subtitles considering that it has the potential to resonate beyond language barriers.

If you make a trip to a theatre to watch KPAC, make sure you are in time to catch the opening credits that play out against an animation-cum-live-action introduction by Ayyappa. Barring one jarring note, this is intelligent cinema for children and their chaperones. KPAC is a darling film.

Rating (out of five): ***

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	147 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/kochavva-paulo-ayyappa-coelho-review-kunchacko-boban-backs-intelligent-cinema-for-children-3008426.html

Posters courtesy:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kochavva_Paulo_Ayyappa_Coelho

IT’S NOT “REGIONAL”, DAMMIT, IT’S “INDIAN”!

Next time you say the words “regional cinema”, remember the many political insinuations, the propaganda, lies and myths built into this loaded term

By Anna MM Vetticad

I hate the term “regional cinema”. There was a time when I only mildly disliked it, but as time passes I find myself unable to ignore the implications of those two seemingly innocuous words.

For a start, “regional cinema” suggests that there is such a thing as a “national cinema” of India, just as the term “regional language” used for languages other than Hindi suggests that Hindi is our “national language” though it is not.

I was reminded of the impact of these constant insinuations in the oddest way by the reader reaction to this column a few months back. Well, actually, it is not as odd as it is telling. I devoted a recent instalment of Film Fatale to the manner in which Hollywood has, for years now, been tapping multiple markets across this country by dubbing their films in various Indian languages or subtitling them, while a majority of Indian film producers still do not make an effort to target audiences outside their home states.

Although the immediate news pegs for the write-up were the release of the National Award-winning Tamil film Visaaranai and the Marathi blockbuster Sairat this year, I clearly stated that the points being raised “apply equally to Tamil, Hindi, Telugu and India’s smaller industries”. Yet, curiously enough (or perhaps, unsurprisingly?) almost every response from readers I received on the social media assumed that my discussion was about the need for subtitling films in languages other than Hindi – what they described as “regional cinema” – to take them beyond their domestic audience.

The inference is clear. The assumption that Hindi is spoken and understood in every corner of India has been so drilled into our heads, that we often miss a contrarian point even when it is spelt out for us in black and white. It is equally unthinkingly assumed that Hindi cinema is the primary choice of cinema for people in all Indian states, with films in their own mother tongues coming in second. Neither claim is true.

This column then is an examination of that loaded cinematic term “regional cinema”, the political propaganda, myths and lies built into it.

Myth 1: That Hindi is India’s national language. It is not.

Contrary to popular belief, Hindi is not India’s national language. No language has been given that status by the Indian Constitution. It was decided early on by the authors of the Constitution not to impose a single language on the entire country as a “national language” with all the political and patriotic connotations intrinsic to that label, until such time as the country was willing to accept one. Instead, under Article 343, Hindi and English were anointed the official languages of the Union – read: the languages in which all Central Government work would be done – while leaving each state to choose its own official language in which state government business would be conducted.

(Note: The Constitution does not use the term “national language”, it does however use the term “regional languages” to denote the official languages of all states including Hindi.)

How then has the “Hindi is our national language” fiction been circulated so effectively? The answer lies in a mixture of propaganda, political games, media ignorance, casualness towards facts and on the positive front, the soft diplomacy of the Hindi film industry.

The Constitution enjoined the Centre to make efforts to popularise Hindi. Independent of this instruction, Bollywood has beautifully and non-aggressively generated goodwill for the language outside the Hindi belt, quietly managing to popularise it among populations that do not consider it their mother tongue. This alone would have been perfectly acceptable, but other insidious efforts have been and continue to be made in favour of Hindi through deliberate misinformation campaigns and political aggression that have vitiated the language debate.

For instance, in classrooms across this country it is not uncommon for Hindi teachers to tell young students that Hindi is India’s national language. Politicians too routinely repeat this falsehood, as I recall BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra doing last year on a TV show where we were fellow panelists. From his silence when I corrected him, I gathered he was aware of the truth but chose to speak an untruth on a public platform anyway.

As it happens, the news media further spreads this lie, either due to their own poor research or because there are propagandists within its (our) ranks too. In 2009, for example, when Samajwadi Party MLA Abu Azmi was assaulted by Maharashtra Navnirman Sena hooligans in the Assembly because he insisted on taking his oath in Hindi, not Marathi, some newspersons spoke of an attack on the “national language”.

This fib has been repeated so often in the 69 years since Independence that it has now become a Goebbelsian truth for large swathes of the population. In a 2005 interview, film star Aishwarya Rai famously misinformed US talk show host David Letterman that Hindi is India’s “national language” and fuzzily implied that all Indian cinema is Bollywood.

Myth 2: That most Indians are Hindi bhashis. They are not.

What is the big deal, you ask? You mean apart from the importance of facts? The big deal is that politics and egos have blinded us to our amazing diversity. It is not Hindi but an imposition of Hindi that raises hackles in a country where Census figures have shown that 59 per cent of the population lists Constitutionally recognised languages other than Hindi as their mother tongue. For the record, Hindi has become an umbrella term for many languages dismissed as “dialects”, which makes even this figure misleading.

Since India is trotting along fine without a designated “national language”, why alter a harmless status quo?

The term “regional cinema” emerges from this context. India is the world’s largest producer of films. Unlike its closest competitors in terms of volume, the United States and Nigeria, India is also unique in that it is home to multiple thriving film industries in different languages that have survived the cash-rich American film industry i.e. Hollywood’s marketing muscle. This is a massive achievement and should be a matter of pride for Indians, yet the so-called ‘national’ media usually ignores all our cinema other than Hindi i.e. Bollywood.

I say “national media” for the English media, since English is the only language not specific to any Indian region. This media is primarily headquartered in Delhi and Mumbai. Hindi is a language of Delhi, Mumbai is the centre of Bollywood. Combine the convenience of proximity with biases, and you may see why most of them behave as if Bollywood is India’s largest (or only) film industry.

This media largely recruits professionals specialising in Hindi cinema, firstly because many of these organisations tend to have a north India bias, and second, since Hindi film specialists are more easily available in Delhi and Mumbai than those who write prolifically on other Indian industries.

Unfortunately, many Hindi cinema experts imply through their words that Indian cinema is primarily or entirely Hindi. Using the terms “Indian cinema” and “Hindi cinema” / “Bollywood” interchangeably as if they are synonyms is also standard practice. Then there are those labouring under the misconception that Hindi is India’s “national language”, who believe it is okay to ignore what they consider secondary film industries. Other industries are thus relegated to the status of “regional cinema”.

To be fair, Hindi films do have a wider, pan-India reach and the Hindi industry has marketed itself better than its compatriots. The other side of that coin, though, is that even if a non-Hindi industry wishes to market itself, the ‘national’ media is rarely interested. The primacy of Hindi cinema is now a self-perpetuating myth. As the media ignores other cinema, it plays a role in expanding Hindi’s audience, an audience size it then uses to defend further ignoring other Indian cinema.

The only non-Hindi film to get as much coverage as Hindi films in recent years has been 2015’s Telugu blockbuster Bahubali– not so much because of its mega scale that was unprecedented in India, but because the iconic Bollywood producer-director Karan Johar backed the Hindi dubbed version. Since 2007, when the ‘national’ media suddenly discovered during Sivaji’s promotional period that Rajinikanth was perhaps India’s highest-paid star, this Tamil film legend too has been extensively covered– but again with a certain them-and-us attitude, often with a condescension directed at “the other” because of his trademark fantastical stunts on screen and bizarre levels of fan adulation off screen. The ‘national’ media usually covers Rajini as exotica, rarely with any degree of seriousness.

Myth 3: That the Hindi film industry is India’s largest film industry. It is not.

The selective coverage of Indian cinema by the ‘national’ media cannot be explained away by volumes. According to the Central Board of Film Certification’s annual report for 2014-15, the language in which the maximum number of films was certified for the given year was Tamil, followed closely by Hindi and then Telugu. This was not unusual at all. For years, Tamil, Hindi and Telugu have been neck-and-neck in terms of number of films produced.

In a country that makes 2,000-plus feature films each year, an individual film journalist cannot possibly devote equal attention to all film industries. Hopefully, open-minded editors reading this column will see it not as an indictment but as a call for organisations to hire specialists. Just as BJP, Congress, Left and so on are separate beats in political journalism so also Tamil, Hindi, Telugu, Malayalam, Bengali, Marathi and so on should be separate beats for the news media in the country that is the world’s largest producer of films.

At the very least, media platforms should hire separate critics for each of our three largest industries. Until that happens, the least that we as individual film journalists can do is to not imply through our writings that the Hindi film industry is India’s only or largest or most significant industry.

A good start would be to flush that awful term “regional cinema” down a bottomless drain.

(A shorter version of this article was published in The Hindu Businessline’s BLink on September 10, 2016.)

Link to the shorter version of this column published in The Hindu Businessline:

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/watch/its-not-regional-dammit-its-indian/article9085970.ece

Previous instalment of Film Fatale: Bollywood and the Art of Avoiding Facts

http://annavetticadgoes2themovies.blogspot.in/2016/08/inaccuracies-in-bollywood-historicals.html

Related Link: Film Fatale: It’s Not Just Bollywood, Stupid!

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/watch/its-not-just-bollywood-stupid/article7561938.ece

Photo captions: Stills/posters from (1) Kabali (2) Bahubali

Photographs courtesy:

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

(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baahubali:_The_Beginning

Release date:	September 23, 2016
Director:	Leena Yadav
Cast: Language:	Radhika Apte, Surveen Chawla, Tannishtha Chatterjee, Lehar Khan, Riddhi Sen, Mahesh Balraj, Chandan Anand, Sumeet Vyas, Adil Hussain Hindi

Writer-directorLeena Yadav’s Parchedcomes to Indian theatres after a year-long run on the international film festival circuit starting with its global premiere at Toronto 2015. In terms of storylines, Parched– co-produced by Ajay Devgn, no less – is to impoverished women of rural India what last week’s much-acclaimed release Pinkis to educated, middle-class urban Indian women: both films are about the physical dangers, prejudice and discrimination women face in contemporary society, and the consequences of rebellion.

Parched revolves around three friends in a Rajasthan village. Rani (Tannishtha Chatterjee) has been a widow for years now. When he was alive, her husband used to beat her mercilessly. Now she has an old mother-in-law to take care of and a wayward son Gulab (Riddhi Sen) who she is anxious to marry off. Lajjo (Radhika Apte) is childless, chatty and married to a sadistic alcoholic. The women of the village have begun earning money through their handicraft skills, a development that causes insecurity and anxiety among the men.

Bijli (Surveen Chawla) is the one bright spark in their miserable existence, an erotic dancer and sex worker in a local entertainment company who might traditionally be viewed as the most enchained of the lot, yet speaks her mind more often than Rani and Lajjo would dare. In the presence of others, these two are cowering, simpering creatures who never question their lot. In their time together though and especially when they are with Bijli, unfettered by abusive hands or social scrutiny, theyare unrecognisable: lively women who speak freely of sex, love, lust, their hopes and dreams.

The most interesting part of Parched is its sense of humour, which rears its head unexpectedly in the midst of bleak circumstances. When the women are laughing together, cracking jokes about their bodies and their men, they make you smile. How, you wonder, can they find it in themselves to forget for even a second, the horrors that await them back home? Yet they do. And you cannot but love them for that miraculous ability.

Equally telling are the moments when they turn on each other. Rani’s harshness towards her under-age daughter-in-law Janaki (Lehar Khan) and a flash of anger directed at Bijli in one scene are reminders of how women participate in the patriarchy that dehumanises and subjugates them.

Chatterjee is efficient as Rani, Apte is a live wire and Chawla is a revelation. The supporting cast too is dotted with interesting actors though young Khan and Sen deserve a special mention for their sure-footedness. Elevating the film by several notches is Oscar-winning cinematographer Russell Carpenter who bathes Parched in warm flames and bright sunlight by turns, paying equal attention to the beauty of the landscape, the colourful attire of its inhabitants and the lovely faces of the sensuous women at the centre of the story.

Yet Parched is a curiously unsatisfying experience. The issues it highlights – domestic violence, marital rape, child marriage, male entitlement – are the sort that would naturally draw empathy from a considerate viewer. Why then is it not as gripping as might be expected?

The answer lies in the fact that Parched shares more than a theme with Pink, it also shares a weakness: an extreme awareness of being a film created specifically to send out a message about women’s rights. This awareness was evident in the trite titling of Pinkand in the needless layers of drama laid on thick in the courtroom scenes. Both elements were far removed from the naturally flowing sensitivity of the rest of the narrative. Pink worked, nevertheless, because its self-consciousness was not all-pervasive, and because it got so completely under the skin of its brilliantly acted female protagonists that their battles became our battles.

Parched is rarely able to get past its mindfulness of being a film with a message, thus failingto lose itself in a story of real people with real, heart-wrenching problems. There was a scene in Kanu Behl’s Titlilast year, in which a man reaches out to his new bride in a tiny bedroom of the hovel they share with his family, and she wrestles with him wordlessly, determined to resist his carnal overtures while he seems equally determined to claim the body he considers his right. It is a scene that gives me goosebumps of fear at the very memory of it. I cannot think of a single moment in Parched that as effectively made me feel the pain these three women feel. Instead, I found myself in the role of a concerned bystander, not an absorbed, involved viewer.

The problem is with boththe direction and writing by Yadav who earlier helmed Shabd and Teen Patti. Apart from the detached nature of the storytelling, there are too many contrivances thrown in for effect. A nameless, faceless caller seeking a telephone romance appears to have been introduced for no reason other than to give the target of his affection the chance to reject him at a later stage. The final scenes juxtaposed against Dussehra celebrations in the village take a cliched, superficial view of the Ramayan’s good-vs-evil battle, apparently forgetting long-standing discussions on the mistreatment of Sita, among other things.

The film is also rather literal in its definition of “escape”. If good folk vacate every space where they face resistance or exploitation, what is left behind? Does escape necessarily mean a physical exit, and is such an exit even possible for most people?

Parched also seems designed to appeal to a foreign film festival crowd that might buy into a dose of good ol’ Indian exotica. Nothing exemplifies this better than the handsome, dhoti-clad mysterious stranger of the film (played by Adil Hussain)who makes love to women with his words and hands, driving them to otherworlds of ecstasy. That the credits identify him as “mystic lover” is amusing, a label no doubt coined to conjure up visions of The Land of the Kama Sutra as India was known before the anti-rape movement grabbed headlines in recent years, a culture where women may experience unbounded sexual pleasure far removed from spousal savagery.

There is a problem with that imagery though. It is a fantasy. Just like the film’s climax, which may be written to draw cheers, but is too conveniently wrapped up, too rushed and too far removed from reality to match the tone of the early scenes in Parched.

This determination to pointedly dole out lessons to an audience can be the death knell of any film. The primary purpose has to be to tell a story. If you are a socially sensitive storyteller, the lessons will automatically follow. Listing out the lessons first and then building a story around them is not filmmaking; that approach is better suited to moral science classes, protest marches, newspaper columns and seminars.

Radhika Apte’s laughter and Surveen Chawla’s dynamism are a pleasure to behold in Parched. The women’s hesitant exploration of each other in forbidden areas is riveting, as is the vein of comedy in each of them. The film is only episodically engaging though. In its entirety, Parched left me thirsting for much much more.

Rating (out of five): **

CBFC Rating (India):	A
Running time:	118 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/parched-review-radhika-apte-surveen-chawla-sparkle-in-a-well-meant-but-self-conscious-film-3016674.html

FOOTNOTE ON SUBTITLING:

Interestingly, Parched has been released with English subtitles across the country, including the Hindi belt. We watched a subtitled version at the press preview, so I checked with the producers to be sure that this is how all of India will see it.

This is a very impressive and progressive move by Team Parched, considering that most Hindi filmmakers seem to be labouring under the misconception that Hindi is spoken and well understood in every corner of India, which it is not. To release a Hindi film with English subs even in Hindi-speaking states is an acknowledgement of how much our people travel for work, especially to the political capital, which happens to be in the Hindi belt. Kudos.

The subs are of good quality to boot. When I occasionally glanced at them, I did not spot any grammatical or spelling errors, and the translations were as accurate as translations of film dialogues can be. Good job.

Subtitles contribute to a culture we should all be aiming for: one where Indians in India routinely watch all Indian films across languages, not just our own mother tongues.

Regular readers of my blog will know I have written extensively on this subject this year. Here are some relevant links for new visitors:

The Diary of a Frustrated Indian Film Buff:

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

It’s Not “Regional”, Dammit, It’s “Indian”!

http://annavetticadgoes2themovies.blogspot.in/2016/09/the-politics-of-term-regional-cinema.html

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

Release date:	Kerala: September 14, 2016. Delhi: September 23.
Director:	Jude Anthany Joseph
Cast: Language:	Rajini Chandy, Bhagyalakshmi, Suraj Venjaramood, Lena, Aparna Balamurali, Vineeth Srinivasan, Vijayaraghavan, Rajeev Pillai, Dharmajan Bolgatty, Cameo: Lal Jose Malayalam

An ill-tempered old woman makes life hell for her son, daughter-in-law and grandkids, until she meets a person who looks past the raspish surface and finds the human being it camouflages.

Jude Anthany Joseph’s Oru Muthassi Gadha (OMG,meaning, A Granny’s Mace)is the story of a muthassi (grandma) and an unlikely friendship that transforms her. Joseph made his directorial debut with the 2014 romcom Ohm Shanthi Oshaana (OSO). Comedy is his preferred genre, as is evident from the light-hearted veneer he uses in his second film to raise many crucial questions about attitudes to age and ageing – not questions of the superficial, populist kind.

In 2003, Bollywood scored a hit with Baghban starring Amitabh Bachchan and Hema Malini as a couple neglected by their grown-up children. The film’s black-and-white worldview virtually canonised the parents, tarred all their kids as uniformly, irredeemably evil, deified the patriarchal family set-up through rose-tinted glasses and romanticised the idolisation of the husband.

Baghban played to the gallery with two notions widely propagated in the public sphere in India: that all mothers and fathers are great, and that all children ought to care for their Mums and Dads. Umm… What about paedophile Dads, or Moms who remain silent about such abuse? What about parents who discriminate between girls and boys, who bully and manipulate children over their professional and marital choices? What about the millions who have kids not out of affection for kids but as a social obligation or as insurance for their old age? What about the extreme conservatism of Baghban’s parents? Or the boorishness of OMG’sMuthassi?

Mollywood’s latest offering is braver, more sensible and subtle than Bollywood’s Baghban or the public discourse on parent-child equations. Joseph does not resort to one-sided blame games. He does not, for instance, waver in portraying Muthassi’s nastiness yet reminds us too of those who think that taking care of parents means just sharing a home, feeding and clothing them, without quality time and conversations anywhere in the picture.

Despite the seriousness of the preceding paragraphs, make no mistake about this: OMG is a breezy film. Joseph’s penchant for the funny bone is complemented by his cast. The very pretty, ultra elegant debutant RajiniChandy plays Muthassi (whose name, by the way, is Leelamma). Chandy, 65, was reportedly found through auditions of seniors who responded to Joseph’s ad. Good choice considering her confident performance that belies her lack of experience.

Veteran dubbing artiste Bhagyalakshmi plays her bête-noir-cum-buddy Susamma. This charming actress metamorphoses from a huggable granny to an authority figure in a jiffy, even dancing unselfconsciously to a song in which she is joined by the feisty Chandy.

Of the supporting cast, a special word must go to the lovely Suraj Venjaramood as Muthassi’s son Siby, Lena as his wife Jean, sweet Aparna Balamurali as their daughter and the hunky Rajeev Pillai as her boyfriend. Balamurali also plays young Muthassi, a casting move that works because of clever styling. Not so effective is the decision to have Vineeth Srinivasan playing the young Muthassi’s college mate – the poor chap is incongruous in a pre-degree classroom.

Still, OMG is a well-packaged product. Shaan Rahman’s up-tempo background score and songs provide a fitting (even if not memorably melodic) backdrop to the story. And DoP Vinod Illampally delivers many picturesque views of Kerala, though I must confess I would have loved to see more close-ups – and atypical ones at that – of the two leading ladies’ fetching faces.

This is also where the narrative falls short. It looks at a bigger picture throughout, and is entertaining while it does so, but does not get sufficiently intimate with Leelamma or Susamma.

That said, Joseph has shown himself to be an interesting risk taker with OMG. He has gone from casting young stars like Nivin Pauly and Nazriya Nazim in OSO to centering a film around two elderly unknown faces playing women who are decades past the age when Indian cinema loses interest in the female half of our population. (Aside: OMG’s story idea is credited to Pauly.)

This film veers away from stereotypes in other areas too: such as the ma-in-law-daughter-in-law relationship that is troubled yet not the stuff social lore and cinema are made of, or Siby and Jean’s partnership. This is that rare mainstream Indian film which does not see humour, spousal subjugation or a talking point in a man who shares the domestic workload with his wife.

It is also a relief when a filmmaker relies on his sharp wit rather than prejudice, mindlessness and slapstick tomfoolery to create comedy – not counting a father in OMG implying that his teeny tiny chit of a son is too turned on to see straight in the presence of his teeny tiny chit of a classmate (the Dad’s language is not as crude as mine, the thought is); a woman attributing her fondness for alcohol to the fact that she is Syrian Christian, thus blithely perpetuating one of Mollywood’s favourite stereotypes; and a young man’s stammer being used as a joke.

Thankfully, these are fleeting moments of indolence from a writer-director who otherwise displays an uncommon ability to poke fun at social groups without furthering hate, clichés or harmful biases. A fine example is that uproarious scene in OMG in which a bunch of people mimic a Charismatic Christian prayer meeting. Elsewhere, the manner in which a character is routinely referred to in terms of his community and not by his name is a stark reminder of how even seemingly good folk in India openly reveal their suspicions of “the other” – like the “saala Bihari hai kya?” (are you a damned Bihari?) taunt so casually thrown around in Delhi.

This is a film that compels us to think while we laugh. It does so largely without preaching. By the time it does deliver a sermon – in a terribly contrived scene featuring a pointless cameo by director Lal Jose – I was in a forgiving mood since I had enjoyed so much that had gone before.

OMG’s heroines are older than most of us, but we could all learn from their journey. During a discussion on Muthassi’s pre-degree, you realise she is barely in her 60s. Age, health and finances are on her side, yet she has so far depended on others to steer her life and generate happiness for her. What stopped her from making her own road, except the conviction that she is someone else’s responsibility and not her own? OMG raises questions we Indians are not socially permitted to ask. I doff my hat to Joseph for asking them and having a lark while he is at it.

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

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

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/oru-muthassi-gadha-review-fun-frolic-and-common-sense-with-two-feisty-grandmas-3019396.html

Footnote on Subtitles: OMG’s subtitling team repeatedly translates “thalla” as “old hag”. No doubt “thalla” (which literally means “mother” in Malayalam) can be a pejorative term, but it is not sexist like “hag”. I remember Pretham subtitling “Ammachi” as “you old hag”. “Ammachi” is a respectful form of address for a mother or any elderly woman, but was used sardonically in Pretham. Dear subtitlers, next time try “old woman”. It far more accurately captures the degree of derision in “thalla” and in “Ammachi” in that context.

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

Release date:	Kerala: September 10, 2016. Delhi: September 23.
Director:	Sundardass
Cast: Language:	Dileep, Vedhika, Aju Varghese, Renji Panicker, Thesni Khan, Hareesh Perumanna, Cameos: Vinaya Prasad, Siddique Malayalam

Few Indian stars can do ludicrousness quite like Dileep. The Malayalam film actor is in full flow in director Sundardass’ Welcome to Central Jail in which he plays a habitual prison-goer constantly seeking excuses to get himself arrested. Weird? You see, he feels at home behind bars since his parents died in custody, and he finds himself bereft of love in the outside world.

Then one day he falls for local photographer Radhika (Vedhika) and in her, finds a reason to value freedom. A murder follows, leading to a second half in which comedy shares equal space with suspense, corrupt politicians, policemen who are on their payrolls and extreme bloodshed.

All’s well as long as Dileep’s Unnikuttan indulges in inoffensive, over-the-top antics. After all, everything about his character is unapologetically caricaturish and crying out not to be taken seriously.

Fair enough. I giggled each time Unnikuttan refers to the jail as his tharavadu(ancestral home). There are plenty of laughs to also be had from the banter between the hero and a prison superintendent played by Renji Panicker, an inmate played by Hareesh Perumanna and a friend played by Aju Varghese. These portions work on the strength of the actors’ comic timing, energy levels and some well-thought-out silliness.

Sadly though not surprisingly, cliched juvenility, sexism and squirm-worthiness too are par for the course in Welcome to Central Jail. In one scene a man’s wig is accidentally lopped off in public and ice creams fly around. Yawn. There are bawdy references to female breasts, Unnikuttan describes a policewoman’s bottom in detail and as an afterthought makes a wisecrack about her male colleague’s rear. Cringe. But when a dwarf falls into a food container, you have to wonder how low-IQ and insensitive a viewer must be to find humour in a disability.

It gets worse.

Writer Benny P. Nayarambalam couches rape ‘jokes’ in concern. There is a pointed conversation between Unnikuttan and two cops – one of the few sobre exchanges initiated by the protagonist – in which he expresses his revulsion for rapists and a belief that imprisonment is a kindness to them. Yet, other mentions of rape are made in a deliberately comical tone. Guess Team Central Jail knows their audience. You should have heard the sniggers in the hall where I watched the film, when a character casually tells Unnikuttan to next time make arrangements for a longer prison sentence with a rape or murder charge.

I could tell you more about Welcome to Central Jail. I could tell you that Dileep’s dance moves to the film’s title track – part of a stage show by the prisoners – are hilarious. I could discuss the amusing contrast between his gawkiness and Vedhika’s lissome grace as they groove to the song Sundaree. I could reveal that Welcome to Central Jaillifts from the Pink Panther theme for the background music to a break-in scene. I could critique the gruesome violence in two long-drawn-out scenes that come as a shock in the middle of a UA-rated comedy. Or I could say what I really want to say.

And what I really want to say is that I am tired of stars who sacrifice not just intelligence but decency and humanity too while wooing the lowest common denominator in the audience for box-office success. Absurdity is acceptable as fun, but not when it descends to callousness.

Rating (out of five): *1/2

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	152 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/welcome-to-central-jail-review-dileep-plus-absurdity-plus-sexism-couched-in-concern-3019430.html

Posters courtesy:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welcome_to_Central_Jail

Release date:	September 30, 2016
Director:	Neeraj Pandey
Cast: Language:	Sushant Singh Rajput, Rajesh Sharma, Kumud Mishra, Anupam Kher, Kiara Advani, Disha Patani, Bhoomika Chawla, Neeta Mohindra Hindi

Hagiography or biography? Creators of biopics often struggle to decide between the two. M.S. Dhoni: The Untold Story has different problems.

In skirting the most questionable aspects of cricketer Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s life, in sidestepping all controversies involving him and the BCCI through his reign, and in avoiding any mention of corruption in India’s sporting establishment, the film ends up attributing its protagonist’s trials almost entirely to fate, personal finances and heartbreak. The result: M.S. Dhoni is so lacking in energy and verve for the most part, that you have to wonder whether there is no mid-path between over-dramatisation and flatness.

Born in Ranchi to lower middle-class parents, Dhoni – Mahi to family and cricket fans – has gone on to become one of the game’s most successful players and team captains. It goes without saying the journey to this place has not been easy. It never is, not in any arena, not even if you are the child of a millionaire in a country that lays out the red carpet for sporting talent. In Mahi’s case, there are the added burdens of economically humble beginnings and the fact that India can be hell for anyone who wants to make a career on a sports field.

Our celluloid Mahi’s concerns are far more mundane. A government office fails to forward a letter in time, he misses a flight, a member of a selection committee tries to push someone else’s name over his for no apparent reason – while all these could well be possible, and that unforwarded letter is believable, the film fails to effectively convey the blood, sweat, tears and toil that must have gone into making Mahi the icon he is today.

Writer-director Neeraj Pandey’s latest work suffers primarily from his seeming determination to play it safe. Making Dhoni out to be an apolitical, all-round nice guy would have been a compulsion since the film is co-produced by the cricketer’s long-time friend and business associate Arun Pandey. Presenting a sanitised view of the BCCI and flitting over serious internal issues must have been necessary too since Dhoni is still in active sports and would obviously not want to offend his bosses with a film he has backed to the hilt through its promotions.

But what the bejeezus prompted the muting of even Virender Sehwag’s name at a selection committee meeting? Was this a Censor Board decision or a choice made by the filmmaker? The producer’s rep has not yet responded to an email query on this point, but even if the muting was sought by the Censors, it fits in with the overall, ultra-careful tone of the narrative.

M.S. Dhoni: The Untold Story stars Sushant Singh Rajput as one of cricket’s brightest living stars. It begins with Mahi preparing to take the field at the 2011 Cricket World Cup. Before going deep into the game, it rewinds to a hospital on the day of Mahi’s birth and then follows his story in a linear fashion until it returns to 2011.

In the first half, the film does a good job of capturing the intimacy and sweetness of social interactions in small-town Ranchi, the warmth in Mahi’s pocket-sized home and the dreariness of life as a ticket inspector for a man whose dream is to play cricket, in contrast to his middle-class Indian father’s ultimate dream of a government job for his son. When Mahi lifts off in international cricket though, M.S. Dhoni dips.

With diplomacy being the storyteller’s main concern, post-interval it almost feels as if Mahi’s career milestones are being mechanically checked off a list. At this point, the film starts getting repetitive. Cricket match on. Enter: stressed out father (Anupam Kher) watching TV, mother at prayer in the room’s pooja corner, sister (Bhoomika Chawla) and brother-in-law cheering before a television in their home, tense mentors watching separately in their respective homes, friends watching at a shop. These scenes are amusing at first, but after a point and even when the parties get together, serve no purpose other than to add to the film’s inordinate length of 190 minutes along with numerous scenes of real-life matches into which Rajput is inserted.

The actor gets Mahi’s demeanour and a cricketer’s body language right. We already know he is capable of that from his fantastic film debut in Kai Po Che. After the exit of child star Zeeshan who plays a junior Mahi, Rajput also metamorphoses brilliantly from a physically slight youngster to a strapping adult over time in M.S. Dhoni, a result of excellent teamwork between him and the make-up, styling and camera departments.He is interesting too when playing happy, flirtatious or mischievous. In moments of sorrow and anxiety though, he falls short.

This inadequacy becomes particularly glaring when he shares screen space with the two stand-out members of the film’s impressive supporting cast: Rajesh Sharma and Kumud Mishra playing Mahi’s first coach and his first patron respectively.

Their junior by many years, young Kiara Advani steals the show from right under Rajput’s nose when she enters the picture as Mahi’s girlfriend Sakshi who becomes his wife.

It would be unfair thoughto judge Rajput by M.S. Dhoni. He was electric in Kai Po Che and deserves the benefit of the doubt in a film that ends up as an insipidPR exercise for the real Mahi.

The writing is occasionally even unthinking. At the hospital where Mahi is born, there is confusion over whether Pan Singh Dhoni’s wife gave birth to a girl or boy. In another country this could have been an acceptable moment of mirth about a nurse’s inefficiency. In boy-obsessed India and its sub-set – boy-obsessed Bihar – where male infants are sometimes stolen from hospitals, you wonder if a point is being made, and then realise that it is not. This is one among several superfluous scenes in the film.

I also did not understand the need to fictionalise Sakshi as being a complete stranger to Mahi when even a non-cricket fan like me has read that they were schoolmates. And why do we not get to see interactions between Mahi and cricketing legends Sourav Ganguly, Sachin Tendulkar and Virender Sehwag beyond file footage of matches? Yuvraj Singh (played by a well-cast and well-styled Harry Tangri) gets some space, but only very little.

Whatever.

Through M.S. Dhoni, there are flashes of humour and pleasant touches that show us what might have been if Pandey had not been constrained. My favourite moment is in the treatment of a friendly Pakistani gentleman who allows Mahi the use of his phone, without drums beating to announce his nationality and tackily link it to his goodness. He is there not as a harbinger of cross-border amity or discord as we see in most Hindi films, but as a regular person. I also enjoyed the way the filmquietly addresses the challenge of being an ordinary young woman in a conservative society romantically linked to one of the country’s most famous men.

Overall though, the screenplay lacks insights and depth. M.S. Dhoni: The Untold Story starts off well but does not seem to know where to go from there.

If Neeraj Pandey needed to be this careful, perhaps he should have manufactured a bottle of antiseptic instead of making a film.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	190 minutes

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

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/m-s-dhoni-the-untold-story-review-sushant-singh-rajputs-film-is-insipid-pr-for-mahi-3028346.html

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.S._Dhoni:_The_Untold_Story

Release date:	October 7, 2016
Director:	Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra
Cast: Language:	Harshvardhan Kapoor, Saiyami Kher, Anuj Choudhry, Art Malik, Om Puri, Anjali Patil, K.K. Raina, Iteshyam, Anuja, Shourya Pratap Singh Shekhawat Hindi

Once upon a time there was a man called Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra who lived in the Enchanted Forest of Imagination and Splendour.

One day, Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra decided to make a film on the Punjabi folktale of Mirza and Sahibaan, setting it in present-day Rajasthan.

It was a story of love, faith, hope and betrayal, rocks and hard places, Scylla and Charybdis, devils and deep seas. It was a story that lent itself to the kind of epic scale and magnificence that Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra was known for in the Forest and the many lands of Far Beyond.

And so Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra went about gathering the best team in the Forest for his film. He roped in Dadasaheb Phalke Award-winning stalwart Gulzar for the screenplay and lyrics.

And Gulzar did not let him down with the songs. He wrote with wistfulness, of a little boy mooning after a girl, of a woman torn between her family and her lover.

In the Village on the edge of the Forest there lived a Critic. She was filled with hope for Mirzya for she thought Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s Rang De Basanti released in 2006 was one of the best Hindi films of the 21^st century, and though some folk in the Village said his Bhaag Milkha Bhaag in 2013 was over-wrought, she did not agree with them.

When Gulzar’s words for Ek Nadi Thi, put to tune by the formidable Shankar Ehsaan Loy, sung by the Nooran sisters and K. Mohan, rose up from the screen, a feeling of warmth enveloped the Critic. “Ek nadi thi dono kinaare / Thaam ke behti thi / Ek nadi thi… / Ek nadi thi koi kinara chhod na sakti thi” (There was a river who embraced both her banks / There was a river… / There was a river who could not leave either of her banks). A picture began to paint itself.

It was clear that Shankar Mahadevan, Ehsaan Noorani and Loy Mendonsa had poured their soul into Mirzya. The melodies, the instrumentation, the choice of voices – it was oh so beautiful.

Most beautiful of all was Daler Mehndi, whose full-bodied rendition of that evocative title track got the Critic’s pulse racing each time.

In the same Forest there lived a cinematographer called Pawel Dyllus, who bathed Mirzya’s present in burnished tones and the blazing sun, while drenching the past in a dreadful steely gray. Pawel Dyllus’ canvas was large, and every frame was a museum piece, not counting some close-ups of the lead actress Saiyami Kher in which her make-up was screaming out at the viewers – a folly indeed.

The music, the lush landscapes and shadowy interiors, Mirzya’s art design and narrative structure were designed to build up a haunting atmosphere. There was foreboding in the air. Great sorrow would befall these people – the Critic knew that, not only because everyone in the Village had read of Mirza and Sahibaan, but because she sensed it in the air of the Forest.

Mirzya was related as a fantasy fable, juxtaposing the ancient saga of Mirza and Sahibaan against the contemporary account of H.R.H. Prince Karan, his one true love Soochi – daughter of a top policeman in Rajasthan – and the stable boy Adil. There was much promise in this idea.

But Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra made a big mistake. He strayed from the Path of Golden Rules, he did not chide Gulzar for writing a screenplay with many strong pillars but no rooms, for constructing a fascinating frame with no interiors, for outlining characters that could have been interesting if only he had filled in his lines with colour and life. Perhaps that was not possible. After all, Gulzar, as the people of the Village well know, is a legend.

There were moments when the Critic thought, “Ah, this looks and sounds so good. Maybe soon the life blood will flow?” And she waited, and waited, and waited. But it did not.

No doubt Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra had aimed his film at intelligent, well-read Village dwellers. He infused it with literary references, but mostly with the words of an old English wizard called William Shakespeare. Then though, he doubted the knowledge of the Village people and felt driven to mention the names of Wizard William, Romeo and Juliet, just in case the Critic and her Village did not quite get it.

It was a film with few dialogues. In the Enchanted Forest, words are precious. Yet Mirzya squandered away its limited number of spoken lines with clunky writing. Such as when a father and a fiancé pun on the word “samaan” (property, possession, thing, stuff) to refer to the woman they love and the luggage she has brought home from her travels.

Now in the roles of Mirza and Adil, Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra had cast young Harshvardhan Kapoor (son of actor Anil Kapoor, brother of Sonam Kapoor, nephew of Sridevi Kapoor and producer Boney Kapoor, cousin of Arjun Kapoor and Ranveer Singh). Harshvardhan was a debutant so sweet of countenance, with eyes of such boyish innocence, that the Critic wanted to reach out and embrace him, and whisper, “Come child, I will protect you from this film. For it does look like you could be better employed.” Some scenes hinted at a fluid face of a million possibilities, but for some reason Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra had given him an under-written role. He had little to say, the camera rarely dwelt upon his face and in his one big moment in the film, when he filled the screen and turned around to look at a figure of treachery, he deadpanned.

Saiyami Kher fared no better playing Sahibaan, but as Soochi, she got enough space to display her smart personality and innate pizzazz. Saiyami Kher, so the Village crier said,was the granddaughter of Usha Kiran, an actress of yore, and the niece of Tanvi Azmi.

Oddly enough, the central character written with most empathy was neither of these two, but Prince Karan. And actor Anuj Choudhry stepped up to the challenge, making a mark despite the frigid film within which he found himself.

Moral of the fable: all the packaging and grandeur in the world, all those artistically writhing bodies doing a sexual dance as a backdrop to Mirza-Sahibaan and Soochi-Adil-Karan, all those pretty costumes and young actors with potential, Shankar Ehsaan Loy and Daler Mehndi, they all add up to nought if the heart of your story does not beat.

Early on in Mirzya, a character quotes a moonstruck Romeo’s monologue on Juliet: “She speaks yet says nothing.” It is an unwittingly apt description of this film. It speaks, yet says nothing.

Ah that Wizard William, he whose works in which you will find passages relevant to every given situation all these centuries later.

The Critic thought: all is not lost, for in Harshvardhan Kapoor, Saiyami Kher and AnujChoudhry, Mirzya has presented to us, three newcomers who may give the people of the Village great pleasure in the coming years; and forgiveness ought to be offered generously to the man who made Rang De Basanti.

So the Critic embraced that thought and slept peacefully that night, remembering that in the Village and in the Forest in every tale, they always all lived happily ever after.

Rating (out of five): **

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	129 minutes 45 seconds

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

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/mirzya-review-saiyami-kher-harshvardhan-kapoors-sweetness-is-squandered-in-a-frigid-film-3039128.html

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

Harshvardhan Kapoor & Saiyami Kher’s photograph courtesy:https://www.facebook.com/Mirzya/

HEY, RIGHT-WINGERS, LEAVE THE ARTS ALONE

The post-Uri demand for a boycott of Pakistani actors calls for a crucial debate. One rider: let’s ditch the cliches in the current liberal discourse on freedom of expression.

By Anna MM Vetticad

So a once-popular singer — I will not sully this column by naming him — has expressed his ‘nationalism’ by tweeting thus about Bollywood director Karan Johar’s association with Pakistani actor Fawad Khan: “Another #lovejihad .. Mehbooba #KaranJohar is in depression ..pak lover fawad ditched bechari Mrs @karanjohar khan” (sic). The comment is designed to mock Johar for his assumed sexual orientation and for a brush with ill-health that he discussed in a recent interview.

Homophobia and inhumanity are apparently the new measure of patriotism in India.

This salvo was fired just days after the Indian Motion Picture Producers’Association (IMPPA) called for a ban on Pakistani artistes and technicians in response to the recent terror attack on Uri that killed 20 Indian soldiers. IMPPA’s decision came shortly after the right-wing Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) reportedly issued an ultimatum to Pakistani artistes to leave India within 48 hours.

It is not this column’s contention that people do not have a right to their boycotts. The question under discussion here is the right of individuals and organisations to coerce others into following suit.

IMPPA, for instance, should not curb filmmakers who wish to work with Pakistanis, MNS should be punished for acting as an extra-Constitutional authority, and its veiled threats of violence ought to be condemned. Hindustan Times reported on September 23 that the party has “kick-started protests against Karan Johar’s film Ae Dil Hain (sic) Mushkil as it stars Pakistani actor Fawad Khan... MNS vice-president Shalini Thackeray said wherever shooting for films or tele-serials with Pakistani actors was on after the deadline, MNS activists would go and stop them.” Anyone who knows their track record knows what that means.

Let us be very clear about one point: freedom of expression includes the right to boycott artistes you are politically  opposed to for reasons unrelated to their work, however illogical, irrational or even foolish your approach might be. Unfortunately, liberals in India have become so used to violence-prone religious and political bodies targeting art over the years, that now every critical response to art or an artist is being mindlessly described as an attack on freedom of expression. It is not.

Since abuse, personal attacks,  threats and violence against artists are second nature to fundamentalists, it has become a reflex action for liberals to cry “free speech” in response to every move involving artists, even non-violent moves, by extreme right-wingers. This has brought the discourse on free speech to an all-time intellectual low in recent years, following the mainstreaming of fundamentalist forces in Modi’s India.

So when the Hindutva brigade uninstalled the Snapdeal app in droves to protest brand ambassador Aamir Khan’s observations on intolerance in India, some liberal journalists went to the extent of dubbing their campaign “commercial terrorism”. Actually, for a change, these right-wingers were acting within their rights. Their indifference to Aamir’s concerns was inconsiderate, and their communal epithets for him were repulsive, but they did have a right to boycott brands he endorses. All pressure tactics cannot be deemed coercive and the word “terrorism” should never be used lightly.

This unthinking stance by liberals has harmed the very causes they seek to uphold. And so it was that when some writers opted out of the Bangalore Literature Festival 2015 because one of the festival organisers had, among other things, decried the award wapsi campaign, the writers were dubbed “intolerant” by the same media. “Intolerant”? Because they exercised a democratic right to withdraw from an event?

I am not getting into a debate here on the value of India-Pakistan cultural exchanges. Our artistic ties have played a role in maintaining goodwill among the citizenry even when political forces have tried to breed hate, but that is a separate discussion. This column is simply a reminder that each of us should be free to non-abusively, non-threateningly, non-violently protest – in political, social and cultural matters – in whichever way we deem fit, and that neither IMPPA nor MNS should impose their choice of protest on us.

I love my soldiers, but I do not know how they gain if we reject Fawad Khan. This is a talented actor who, though a foreigner, made a remarkable contribution to India’s social evolution this year when he played a gay man in Shakun Batra’s uncommonly sensitive Kapoor & Sons, a role that had been rejected by several Indian stars. When I asked him about it in an interview in June, Fawad said: “By not doing such films we simply shut it (homosexuality) away rather than trying to understand it... Besides, with the kind of difficulties we’re facing as a global society where we’re having trouble getting along, if anything this is just more love in the system rather than adding conflict.”

This is the man you wish to shun because terrorists murdered our soldiers? The argument that he has not made a statement on Uri hardly holds water since Indian film artistes usually stay silent on political issues, and those who have spoken up – like Aamir – have been harangued for doing so by the same ideological group largely behind the demand for a comment now from Fawad.

So let us make a deal: feel free to deprive yourself of Fawad or any other Pakistani artist you choose, just make sure you do not bully the rest of us into doing so too.

(This article was first published in The Hindu Businessline’s BLink on October 8, 2016.)

Link to column published in The Hindu Businessline:

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/watch/hey-rightwingers-leave-the-arts-alone/article9196949.ece

Previous instalment of Film Fatale: It’s Not “Regional”, Dammit, It’s “Indian”

http://annavetticadgoes2themovies.blogspot.in/2016/09/the-politics-of-term-regional-cinema.html

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

Release date:	October 7, 2016
Director:	Vysakh
Cast: Language:	Mohanlal, Kamalini Mukherjee, Jagapati Babu, Lal, Suraj Venjaramood, Kishore, Namitha, Makarand Deshpande, Siddique, Master Ajas Malayalam

Three weeks before Bollywood biggies Ae Dil Hai Mushkiland Shivaay release on the same day, Mollywood is dealing with its own Clash of the Titans. The Mohanlal-starrer Pulimurugan comes to theatres on the same weekend as Thoppil Joppanfeaturing Mammootty, and fans of both Ms are vying with each other to make their respective idol’s film a hit.

This perhaps explains why, in a packed Gurgaon hall where I watched Pulimurugan, several rows were taken up by zealously cheering, committedLalettan fans who clapped, yelled out appreciative remarks, gave repeated standing ovations through the film, whistled and early in the opening scenes, screamed out their raucous support for a little kid on screen because they knew he would grow up to be good ol’ ’Ettan.

Fortunately, unlike manymalefan packs I have witnessed in the past, they did not pass creepy comments about the women in the film.

Pulimurugan is similar to such adoring viewers – it is loud, it merits attention to the extent that it is entertaining, and it needs to be called out when it is crass (which, sadly, it often is).

Director Vysakh’s latest spiced-up venture comes to theatres shortly after Priyadarshan’s Oppamwhich starred Mohanlal as a blind man falsely accused of a crime. That film, despite its flaws, was credible andsoothing to the senses in comparison. It would take a hardcore Lalettan admirer to ignore his expansive frame here as he battles human-eating tigers in a forest in Kerala. When it’s The Lord of Mollywood Vs TheLord of the Jungle, what does a star devotee care?

Pulimurugan, as the grown-up Murugan is known, is willing to sacrifice everything to protect his people, because they gave him shelter when he and his infant brother were orphaned. The root cause of his animosity towards the big cat is the killing of his father at the hands of one such beast. Now an adult, he is a legend of sorts among the local populace although the Forest Department is constantly on the lookout for him.

The title – derived from the hero’s nickname – literally means Big Cat Murugan / Wildcat Murugan / Leopard Murugan. There are many clashes in this film, all of them involving the hero, of course, though none with leopards: clashes between Pulimurugan and tigers, between him and the authorities, him and his beloved but short-tempered wife, and ultimately, between him and the human villains of the story.

The film is set almost entirely in jungles, thus giving cinematographer Shaji Kumar plenty of opportunities to rob us of our breath with the visuals he lays out on screen. I particularly loved the rock formations that were in evidence throughout.

Even more striking than those pillars of the wild, the green of the trees, the blue of the skies, the crystal clear waters and the ominous air of the forest though are those tigers that populate Pulimurugan. Stunt director Peter Hein (who has earlier worked on Bahubali, among other action blockbusters) joins forces with Kumar and Lalettan to deliver breathtakingly exciting shots of battles between the film’s hero and those mighty striped creatures (not computer-generated animals alone, a real tiger too was used, as I’ve gathered from reports). The SFX work on these extensive passages is also impressive. This is the main selling point of Pulimurugan.

Of course the use of a live animal in a film raises complex ethical questions that should ideally prompt a debate on the issue. While there is not enough space in this review to dwell on the matter, the fact too is that there is no space for complexity or nuance in Pulimurugan.

The hero kills tigers when they strike at humans, but there is no discussion in the film about the human-animal conflict – and no, Mister Vysakh, that passing sentence uttered by actor Lal’s character, about why he will not kill a cobra from which he just saved a friend, is not enough. And no again, “discussion” does not mean you should have made a documentary – serious commentary is possible even in a commercial fiction feature, unless your goals are strictly low-brow.

Perhaps this criticism amounts to expecting too much from a film in which there is a running joke about a man whose defining trait is that he peeps into bathrooms when women are bathing. The only thing that distinguishes Pulimurugan from Mammootty’s recent ode to misogyny, Kasaba, on this front is that the vulgarity here is authored by a character other than the leading man. It is worth mentioning though that the fellow in question (played by Suraj Venjaramood) is a dear friend of the protagonist and is positioned as a good guy.

Ewww!

As usual, Mohanlal’s character in Pulimuruganis married to a woman played by an actress young enough to be his daughter (Kamalini Mukherjee). To further assure audiences of his virility, he pats her butt at one point, there is innuendo galore involving him and another character bedding their wives, and for those of us who have the audacity to note that a stupendous actor has physically let himself go over the decades, there is a young, busty, midriff-flashing woman (Namitha) who leers at him and is open about her desire to mate with him.

All this in a film that has been generously awarded a U rating by the Censor Board.

So yeah, the SFX are good, the tiger fights are thrilling and oddly enough, even in a film where he is required to be OTT, Mohanlal manages to eke out moments of meaning. It is hard to resist those speaking eyes despite the cacophony that surrounds him.

But the combined strength of Lalettan, the tigers, the suspenseful action and the humour when it is not crude is not enough to drown out the loudness and crassness of Pulimurugan.

This one I guess is for the forgiving Mohanlal fan or action enthusiasts who are willing to close their eyes to a lack of refinement and sensitivity.

Rating (out of five): **

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	161 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/pulimurugan-review-the-lord-of-the-jungle-vs-mohanlal-lord-of-mollywood-vs-crassness-3041112.html

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

Release date:	October 7, 2016
Director:	Johny Antony
Cast: Language:	Mammootty, Mamta Mohandas, Andrea Jeremiah, Kaviyoor Ponnamma, Salim Kumar, Renji Panicker, Alencier Ley Lopez, Suresh Krishna, Akshara Kishor Malayalam

Here’s a quick question for the pan-India film buffs among you: What do Mammootty comedies, Akshay Kumar comedies and Prabhudeva-directed comedies in all languages have in common?

Answer: Each one merges with the other until an indefinable cinematic haze floats around in the ether of the mind; each features some cheap jokes plus some genuinely good humour cashing in on the hero’s natural comic abilities, with the proportion varying from film to film. Heroines are usually marginal to the proceedings in these films, their function is to be pursued and loved – if not outrightly molested – by the hero, and they are played by much younger actresses indistinguishable from each other due to the general indistinguishability of their roles. The hero invariably inhabits an unapologetically patriarchal world. He or his cohorts make prejudiced pronouncements ranging from borderline sexist to criminally misogynistic, sometimes also targeting other marginalised groups. And ultimately he marries a woman.

Director Johny Antony’s Thoppil Joppan is on the relatively inoffensive side of this spectrum – emphasis on the word relatively, considering that the context is Mollywood where rape jokes are staple fare, the most prominent of the lot this year having come in Mammootty’s own Kasaba. The setting and situations in Thoppil Joppan are deeply patriarchal, of course, but it does not venture far into ugly territory.For the most part then, it is silly fun and oh so forgettable.

In short, yet another generic Mammootty comedy.

The Malayalam superstar is the film’s titular hero, a kabaddi-playing, middle-aged/elderly, unmarried alcoholic. As a young man, Joppan was in love with a woman called Annie (Andrea Jeremiah) who he lost when he left home to make his fortune. Ever since, his mother (Kaviyoor Ponnamma) and siblings have tried to get him married but failed because no woman they set him up with compares to his Annie in his eyes.

Many years and bottles of booze follow, before his heart does a little somersault for Dr Maria (Mamta Mohandas).

Never mind the romantic elements in the story. This film has two primary purposes. One, to provide a showcase for Mammootty’s comic timing, which it does effectively. Two, to draw attention to his imposing personality and remind us of how attractive he is, which it does distastefully by getting the women in Joppan’s life to gravitate towards what the writer considers ‘inadequate’ men (for instance, a woman he falls for hooks up with a physically challenged man, a circumstance that invites harsh swipes from Joppan and gang).

Let’s not mince words about this: Mammukka looks odd as always playing a boyfriend to actresses 30-plus years his junior, the angle about him being a senior singleton in successive films is getting tired, and those wisecracks about his character’s age do not neutralise the women-specific ageism in the casting. To be fair to him though, his comic timing remains faultless and he retains the ability to tickle the funny bone, a job for which writer Nishad Koya’s screenplay here gives him sufficient material.

There is much stupidity and hypocrisy all around mashed into this mix with some actually laugh-worthy episodes. In the theatre where I watched Thoppil Joppan, some people went into paroxysms of mirth because a young woman whose family proposes marriage to Joppan turns out to be fond of the bottle herself. Apparently it is okay for a man to be a drunk, but a woman swilling alcohol is hilarious and unacceptable. Unsurprisingly, Joppan is shocked and rejects her.

At 65, Mammootty remains a megastar of Malayalam cinema in particular and Indian cinema as a whole. It is a pity that instead of providing incentive to Mollywood’s comedy writers by biding his time till an intelligent script comes his way, he is willing to settle for passable fare. Thoppil Joppanis kinda amusing in large parts while it lasts, but so unmemorable that just hours after having watched it, I am already struggling to recall the plot and the gags.

C’mon Mammukka, would you not at least now consider quality over quantity? Or is it wrong to expect nothing short of rousing fare from you?

Rating (out of five): **

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

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/thoppil-joppan-review-yet-another-generic-mammootty-comedy-3041764.html

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

Release date:	October 14, 2016
Director:	Sanjeev Sharma
Cast: Language:	Manoj Bajpayee, Aditi Sharma, Kay Kay Menon, Vijay Raaz, Aparshakti Khurana, Nitin Bhasin, Jatin Sarna, Vipul Vig, Annu Kapoor, Anupam Kher, Lushin Dubey Hindi

There is a moment inthe short film Taandavthat went viral on Youtube early this year, in which a policeman watches a video of himself doing a frenzied dance in full uniform on a Mumbai road. His face melts into a confused mix of amusement and embarrassment. Manoj Bajpayee is nowhere to be seen in that middle-class, middle-aged Maharashtrian cop.

In Aligarh, which was released three weeks later, when a reporter asks Professor Shrinivas Ramchandra Siras of Aligarh Muslim University about his male lover, the old man looks away shyly, withdrawing further into his slouching figure. Manoj Bajpayee is nowhere to be seen in that gray-haired academic in an ill-fitting suit.

And now, on a moonlit night in the darkened corridor of an Old Delhi haveli, a shalwar-clad Pappi stands with his foot on a balcony railing as he peers into the courtyard below. He is an intruder in a wealthy home, his thin body alert yet comically poised for flight, and in one brief shot he conveys everything that his character is: all bluff and bluster and limited guts. Manoj Bajpayee is nowhere to be seen in this foul-mouthed small-time crook either.

Bajpayee’s defining quality as an actor – the ability to lose himself in the people he plays – is a highlight of the week’s Bollywood release, Saat Uchakkey. Like Pappi, director Sanjeev Sharma’s film too is cracked, colourful, crude, intentionally loud and insanely over the top. Everyone in the story is slightly if not completely nuts, the actors are so unaffected that they come across as non-actors drawn from these streets by casting director Vicky Sidavv, and the filmmaker seems to be having a blast as he takes us through chaotic and crowded Purani Dilli.

Saat Uchakkey revolves around the amoral Pappi’s keenness to get rich quick and marry his girlfriend Sona (Aditi Sharma). He is not alone in his desire to cut corners in life. His partners in crime are keysmith Haggu (Nitin Bhasin), metalsmith Khappe (Aparshakti Khurana), knick-knacks seller Babbe (Jatin Sarna), a gambler called Ajji (Vipul Vig) and the multi-talented petty criminal Jaggi (Vijay Raaz). They are the seven roguesof the title.

In the first half, Sandeep Saket’s screenplay draws neat, well-defined sketches of each of the seven in addition to their bête noir, the local policeman Tejpal (Kay Kay Menon) who is smitten by Sona. When this disparate group comes together, they are hilarious and hold out a promise of brilliance. When John Jacob Payyapalli’s camera snakes its way through the bylanes of the old city, it entices us into their world. The opening scenes in a mental institution, the presence in the story of the hypnotist/fraud/mad man Bichchi (Annu Kapoor), the art design and the beautifully shot scenes in a dungeon in the second half give the film an interesting mystical-mythical air.

It takes more than a great concept though to make a great film, and at some point Saat Uchakkey loses itself in self-indulgence. The abuses that flow off the vile tongues of these bizarre people, for instance, are initially believable. As time moves on though, too many ugly words feel like they have been forced into the dialogues for effect – as it happens, to jarring effect.

Nothing illustrates this better than Pappi’s use of kutiya (bitch) as a term of endearment for Sona and her unblinking response. Yes, the street lingo of India’s capital is often steeped in profanity, but it becomes easy to tell when abuse comes naturally to a character in this film and when the writing is saying, “Hey, see how clever I am. Be impressed with my use of invective. I’m so smart and outrageous, no?”

The spoken lines (credited to director Sharma) are a metaphor for Saat Uchakkey as a whole: energetic, side-splittingly comedic and convincing at first, revved up and raring to go, but failing to lift off in its entirety. I confess I spent a considerable part of this film giggling to myself and enjoying the performances of the wonderful lead cast, but I also left the theatre with a feeling of incompleteness.

Saat Uchakkey clearly aspires to rise above absurdity for absurdity’s sake, but the writing is not strong enough to pull off the depth it is aiming at (as is evident from that scene in which a divine being appears to the seven central characters). God is as crazy as us humans and/or possibly a figment of our imagination; s/he is what we want her/him to be and/or is playing games with us, we are told. Point taken. Now take it further, please.This is a film that could have been a lot more than it ends up being – it obviously wants to be more.

To be fair, Saat Uchakkey stands out for its excellent casting, excellent acting and – when it is not self-conscious – excellent humour. Now if only that had been enough...

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

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

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

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/saat-uchakkey-review-great-cast-led-by-manoj-bajpayee-but-the-film-could-have-been-more-3050914.html

Poster courtesy: Culture Creations

Release date:	October 21, 2016
Director:	Shivaji Lotan Patil
Cast: Language:	Soha Ali Khan, Vir Das, Deepraj Rana, Vineet Sharma, Lakhwinder Singh, Baby Anika, Baby Arohi, Sezal Sharma, Daya Shankar Pandey, Aksshat Saluja Hindi and Punjabi

X happened. Then Y. And then Z. Director Shivaji Lotan Patil’s 31^stOctober is nothing more than a parade of facts about the anti-Sikh riots that followed the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards on October 31, 1984. It is a perfect example of a film on a sensitive issue completely bereft of imagination and subtlety.

31^stOctober stars Soha Ali Khan and Vir Das as Davinder Singh and Tejinder Kaur, a happy Sikh couple living with their three children in West Delhi. She is stern but loving, he a virtual saint. She feeds him and argues with him about his excessive goodness. He walks an extra mile for his Hindu neighbour. Everyone is nice to everyone and the world is all sweet and honey and sugar ‘n’ spice ‘n’ all things nice until Beant Singh and Satwant Singh shoot Indira at point-blank range.

The story opens on the morning of the PM’s murder and everything in the early scenes is an in-your-face set-up for what is to come. So, when we see Davinder run out of blood pressure meds, we know he will later be weak without medication in the middle of the pogrom. Since one of his little sons repeatedly asks him about the significance of a Sikh’s long hair and turban, we know at some point they will be driven to shear their heads to hide their identity from mobs.

As if the lack of nuance is not bad enough, 31^st Octobersubjects us to mediocre production quality, third-rate dialogue writing and bad acting. An array of terrible extras are rolled out for the bit parts and even for significant satellite roles. Two irritating girls are cast as the lead couple’s sons. Sezal Shah is unbearable as a shy young Sikh woman gazing googly-eyed at a camera-wielding NRI. She cannot act for peanuts. Others are worse – so bad in fact, that peanuts look profound in comparison.

I’ve always enjoyed watching Vir Das on screen, but his facial expressions in 31^st October make me wonder whether what I have liked so far has been the suitability of his personality to comedy, the genre that has dominated his filmography so far. This film is not funny, it is not meant to be funny, and his expressions seem incongruous on the riot victim Davinder whose Hindu friends put their lives on the line to save him and his family. Soha Ali Khan does a fair job of his wife Tejinder who witnesses horrors that no human being could possibly recover from. Although her Punjabi accent slips on occasion, she makes their interactions tolerable.

The supporting cast contributesgreatly to this film’s overall air of tackiness. The only two who rise above the mediocrity surrounding them are the always-reliable Deepraj Rana and Vineet Sharma, playing men who risk everything so that Davinder, Tejinder and their kids might live.

31^stOctober is based on the experiences of a Devender Pal Singh Sachdeva and Tejinder Sachdeva. The credits call it “a tributeby (producer) Harry Sachdeva”. In truth, this film does them an injustice. The Sikhs who were targeted after Indira’s death from her bullet wounds, deserve a better homage than this. What the producer and his director have put together instead is a disservice to a community that is still being denied justice by the authorities 32 years after humanity died on the streets of India’s Capital.

In the moments preceding the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in the US during World War II in Michael Bay’s 2001 Hollywood film Pearl Harbor, pretty little girls with golden curls are shown playing together in slow motion against a picturesque backdrop. This is the kind of offensive stupidity that distinguishes cliched films on violence from the ones with depth. If those children were not picture perfect, would their fate be less tragic or Japan’s actions less condemnable?

31^stOctober slathers bowlfuls of treacle on to the ordinary Sikhs who are attacked by rioters. Why? Would the butchery have been any less inexcusable if the victims had not been uniformly fantastic people, kind, gentle and dedicated to the service of others? In one scene, the suggestion that some Sikhs celebrated after Mrs Gandhi’s killing is brushed aside. Why? Does the filmmaker realise that by not acknowledging this element in the ugliness that pervaded Delhi following her assassination, he unwittingly implies that individuals who lit candles and distributed sweets that day could rightfully be seen as a justification for the slaying of innocent Sikhs?

Glossing over uncomfortable facts does more harm than good to survivors, even when you do so to please and appease them. Human beings do not have to be flawless or belong to a flawless community to deserve the right to live, to not to be robbed, to not be sexually violated, to not be forced to witness the brutalisation of their loved ones.

This kind of self-defeating storytelling plays into the hands of people like that chap in the hall where I watched this film who turned to another during the interval and said: “Ab agar ek qaum ko lagega ki voh kuchh bhi kar sakta hai, toh doosra qaum badla lega hi.” (Now if one community thinks they can do anything, then the other is bound to take revenge.)

There are many people like him in the world out there who are filled with hate. They are among the million reasons why the human species’ history of massacres needs to be chronicled repeatedly by cinema. Thousands of Sikhs were slaughtered, raped and driven out of their homes in the riots of October-November 1984. Their story needs to be told with delicacy and intelligence, not with the sloppiness and hollowness that are the hallmark of 31^stOctober.

Apart from the fact that actors styled to resemble Congress politicians H.K.L. Bhagat, Jagdish Tytler and Sajjan Kumar are shown engineering the riots, there is littleworth noting in this film.

Rating (out of five stars): 1/2

CBFC Rating (India):	A
Running time:	102 minutes 18 seconds

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

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/31st-october-review-a-hollow-sloppy-film-on-the-1984-anti-sikh-riots-3063868.html

Poster courtesy: Epigram Digital PR and Magical Dreams Productions

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REVIEW 427: OPPAM

REVIEW 428: OOZHAM – IT’S JUST A MATTER OF TIME

REVIEW 429: FREAKY ALI

ARTICLE ON DOCUMENTARY SET IN ALL INDIA INSTITUTE OF MEDICAL SCIENCES (AIIMS) / PUBLISHED ON FIRSTPOST

REVIEW 430: PINK

REVIEW 431: KOCHAVVA PAULO AYYAPPA COELHO

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REVIEW 432: PARCHED

REVIEW 433: ORU MUTHASSI GADHA

REVIEW 434: WELCOME TO CENTRAL JAIL

REVIEW 435: M.S. DHONI – THE UNTOLD STORY

REVIEW 436: MIRZYA

BOYCOTT OF PAKISTANI ACTORS / FILM FATALE: COLUMN PUBLISHED IN THE HINDU BUSINESSLINE

REVIEW 437: PULIMURUGAN

REVIEW 438: THOPPIL JOPPAN

REVIEW 439: SAAT UCHAKKEY

REVIEW 440: 31ST OCTOBER