Mrighdeep Singh Lamba’s Fukrey is the story of four youngsters who, needing money for various reasons, end up at the mercy of Bholi Punjaban (the awesome Richa Chadda), a shady operator who announces her predatory instincts with animal-print clothing. Her magnificence needs many mirrors – as in her gym. (Her SINDERELLA tattoo, though, is a too-clever touch in these surroundings.) The other women in the film are equally strong. Neetu (Vishakha Singh) breaks off a relationship when she sees it going nowhere (her boyfriend is too weak to snap the threads himself), but when he’s in trouble, she pays his hospital bills and packs off a cop who threatens him. Even Priya (Priya Anand), who’s not nearly as empowered as the others, manages to teach her boyfriend Hunny (Pulkit Samrat) a lesson. He’s just a silly braggart, boasting about French kissing a non-existent girlfriend, and she forces him to grow up.

The men – the fukrey – are, by contrast, weak. They’re weak in studies (needing tutoring by women). They’re weak in ambition, preferring crooked shortcuts to striving (which at least Neetu definitely does). And they’re weak in survival skills. Even the smarmy Pandit (Pankaj Tripathi), who likes to position himself as a do-it-all, proves more speaker than doer. At some level, Fukrey is a Priyadarshan movie (remember those comedies of desperation he used to specialize in?) or a Farhan Akhtar bromance (he’s one of the producers) filtered through a feminist lens.

But if that description makes Fukrey sound like all subtext and no fun, perish the thought. This is an exotic beast, some kind of high-minded low comedy. It’s centered on the Freudian conceit of interpreting dreams (always with lots of animals) – only, the interpreter is an underachieving school kid who faces the prospect of a third year in Class XII, in a Hindi-medium school. (When his best friend – Butt-head to his Beavis – speaks English, his response is, “Bob Christo ki aulad!”) This is the kind of film where Hum honge kaamyaab is transformed into a gay-liberation anthem. This is also the kind of film that foists the line “Teri kismet tere haath mein” on a urinating boy. At times, the boy who dreams those dreams comes across like an idiot savant. At other times, he’s just an idiot. A scene of torture at the hands of Bholi Punjaban includes running backwards on a treadmill. And yet, this absurdity doesn’t preclude genuine crises – like a paralysed father needing expensive hospital care, or another father facing the loss of his business through no fault of his own.

Lamba’s achievement is that – despite length and pacing issues – this mix doesn’t result in whiplash for the viewer, and the reason is the rootedness of the milieu. Instead of putting quotation marks around the high concept (the way, say, Aiyyaa did), Lamba lets his story play out in the most unremarkable “Dilli” neighbourhoods, amidst the most unremarkable “Dilli” people. The pocket of boy’s school uniform has a small tear on a side (a detail that made me recall days when fountain pens would go mysteriously missing). Boys ride bicycles as women, in flats above, spray their heads with water from freshly washed clothes. People in crowded buses casually overhear (and even insinuate themselves into) conversations. And when things threaten to get too unremarkable, too day-to-day, too ordinary, a low-rent impresario whips a devout crowd into a frenzy by staging the story of the mother goddess as a pop-spectacle, with actors costumed as lions and peacocks.

These splashes of local colour keep us laughing. The tacky board by the side of a bus stop that proclaims: “For love marriage contact…” The too-familiar query upon sighting someone after a long while. (“Kahin gupt rog nahin ho gaya?”) The departure for a rave party in… a scooter with a sidecar. The mistaking of the most innocuous actions for Love, even in the direst of situations. The view of college as some kind of gauzy heaven, like peasants who’ve stumbled into a tony country club. The running gag between Lali (Manjot Singh) and the man outside the gurudwara who speaks in non sequiturs. And, best of all, anything said or done by Choocha (an uproarious Varun Sharma, who looks like he just might grow up to be Rajesh Sharma). Just watching his wide-eyed narration of his dreams is worth the price of admission. Even the tough-as-nails Bholi Punjaban cannot control a smile when he speaks – about, say, being born (literally) eons ago.

What’s missing is the sense that something is at stake. Rather, we see what’s at stake, we know it, but we don’t feel it as the film progresses. The scene where Zafar (Ali Fazal) is forced to take his paralysed father’s urine sample should have hurt like crazy – this is, after all, the lowly butcher who wanted his son to pursue his musical dreams. But Zafar’s tears aren’t ours. For a comedy of desperation, we begin to feel – after a while – that there is too much comedy, not enough desperation. But these people, these 4 idiots, are so incapable of doing anything right that their cluelessness becomes enough of an emotional mooring. We just want them to save their skins. Because, despite everything (including the fact that Zafar is a bit of a wet blanket), they’re so nice. When Lali’s girlfriend dumps him, he swears that he’ll have his revenge by parading in front of her eyes a hotter piece of arm candy – but when the time comes, he simply smiles at her and waves. He’s the kind of guy who can’t bring himself to charge customers at his father’s dhaba. How can he bring himself to break her heart?

Copyright ©2013 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

When the superlative soundtrack for Delhi-6 was used at a level subservient to the narrative, there were rumours about AR Rahman’s dissatisfaction. The composer is going to have no such issues with Raanjhanaa, where the songs (heightened by masterful lyrics) are employed as vital, montage-filled conduits to the characters’ emotions (Aise na dekho…), and as bridges over troubled waters. The musical sequences take over storytelling duties from the songless stretches, and the film feels like a unified whole. We never have to make that reality-based leap we do in some other films during the song stretches – no suspension of disbelief is needed. There’s very little synchronized choreography, and the locations are remarkable because of how unremarkable they are. These songs aren’t items – they’re just a more heightened, stylised form of the narrative. Raanjhanaa isn’t the first film to use songs in this fashion (Omkara springs to mind), but – and if only in this regard – it’s certainly one of the finest.

The story is where some serious suspension of disbelief is required. On the surface, Raanjhaana is similar to Tanu Weds Manu, the director Anand L Rai’s earlier (and first) film. Here too, we have a love triangle, with an intriguingly flawed woman at the centre. Both films are lovingly detailed with local colour and humour. (My favorite bit here involves a wedding band, whose sleeping members, when roused, instantly slip into Aaj mere yaar ki shaadi hai, like a reflex action honed over decades.) And Rai continues his fascination with film songs of a certain era by working them into the narrative – there it was Kajra mohabbat wala; here we have Saamne yeh kaun aaya. But Raanjhanaa, despite opening with the title song of Aashiqui, is not exactly a love story. There’s love in this story, the scary kind that involves razor blades and slit wrists and forgetting that it’s one’s wedding day – but this is essentially a story of atonement, of washing away one’s sins, and that’s why it needed to be set in Benares, by the Ganges. Attaining mukti, the film says, isn’t simply the consequence of lowering yourself into these sacred waters. You have to work at it, taking in stride the hostility of the people around you, the way Rajesh Khanna did in Dushman.

But that angle will have to wait. At first, it’s the Selvaraghavan oeuvre that we’re reminded of. In an instance of love at first sight – naturally – a dark-skinned Tamilian boy (Kundan, played by Dhanush) falls for the fair “north Indian” girl (Sonam Kapoor’s affecting Zoya), who’s far above his station. He’s the guy her family calls on to serve Rasna and Rooh Afza to guests, and to replace gas cylinders. (The latter situation results in one of the film’s funniest moments.) She’s educated. She’s committed to causes. And she’s casual. Her actions aren’t deeply premeditated, invested with meaning. If she wears the anklets that Kundan picked out for her, it’s because she likes them and not because she’s trying to send him a coy message, and if she embraces him – a lot more than we can digest, especially after she comes to know about his feelings for her, about him – it’s because she likes him, not because she loves him. When she smears Holi colours on his forehead, she’s just getting into the spirit of the festival – but he reacts as if touched by God. He’s wanders about in a divine trance. Even Kundan’s friend (the terrific Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub) knows what Kundan doesn’t, when he says, “Mohalle ke laundon ka pyaar aksar doctor aur engineer le jaate hain.” Zoya is destined for someone who’s at the receiving end of those glasses of Rasna and Rooh Afza.

We enter classic Tamil-cinema territory when Kundan begins to stalk Zoya. When he approaches her and reveals his feelings, she slaps him. And again. And again. Fifteen slaps later, she agrees to meet him, not because of his love for her but because of his “consistency,” his dogged determination – and this consistency, this refusal to take no for an answer, is what some would call stalking. (When, following Zoya, Kundan lands up in Delhi, a friend asks, “Ab kya?” What now? But he’s just being… consistent.) Raanjhanaa reminded me of other Tamil films as well, especially the ones with dysfunctional love stories. When Kundan, standing outside Zoya’s house, attempts to jog her memories (she’s forgotten about him after being away for eight years), his sad-clown miming harks back to Kamal Haasan in Moondram Pirai, and when an angry Zoya, fed up with her family’s matchmaking, asks her mother if she wants to see her settle down with a “Kundan jaisa jaahil,” I thought of the scene in Aboorva Sagodharargal when the vertically challenged Kamal Haasan is mocked by his mother. And the flashbacks with Abhay Deol were reminiscent of both Mouna Raagam and Aayidha Ezhuthu.

We think that Kundan’s “consistency” will wear down Zoya’s resistance, and that she’ll fall for him – but we gradually realise that the Dhanush-Sonam pairing makes perfect sense. This isn’t about lusting after and lassoing the “other” – fair-skinned, educated and English-speaking, as we often see in Tamil cinema – but about pursuing the unattainable. And along these lines, when the film, in its second half, takes a very different, unexpected direction – ardour gives way to activism; the Holi colours of Benares give way to stark Che Guevara posters on the JNU campus – I was left with mixed feelings, torn between admiration for what was being attempted and frustration that a film dealing with such serious subject matter had chosen to take an audience-friendly approach, showcasing its protagonist as someone you just can’t help loving. (Kundan is like a puppy. At one point, he crouches like a canine outside Zoya’s home.) Slowly, the heinousness of his “crime” begins to feel like a distant memory, an afterthought, as we begin to question Zoya about her inability to appreciate this charmer, as if it’s her fault. She’s even made to apologise for rejecting his conciliatory overtures, through cups of tea. A blatant kind of hero-centeredness creeps in, and there isn’t enough of a buildup to Zoya’s big decision (and her subsequent political sacrifice). Another problem is that the two halves of the film are so different in tone – the first half is intense, saturated with love and loss and hurt and obsession and rage, and the post-interval portions are cool, contained. Why this schism?

The people around Zoya and Kundan are unconvincingly drawn. I was never able to wrap my head around the actions of the character played by Abhay Deol, who just doesn’t seem the kind of person who’d do what he does in Benares. (His portions are the weakest in the movie.) Bindiya (Swara Bhaskar) is a cipher too. She makes overtly sexual passes at Kundan, whom she loves and wants to marry, but even when he tells her he loves Zoya, she participates in a charade that will help Kundan’s chances with Zoya. At times, she appears as deluded as he is. When Zoya laughs at Kundan, he thinks it’s because she’s shy, and Bindiya, even after being rejected, seems to hold on to the idea that Kundan is hers. Seeing him spit up blood in the hospital is when she realises he’s no longer “her Kundan” – the truth is that he never was her Kundan. In a sense, she’s as much a stalker of Kundan as Kundan is of Zoya, but she has very little screen time to flesh out this arc. These choices don’t derail the film, which never fails to keep us invested in what happens next, but they make us wonder how much better things could have been if Abhay Deol’s character had taken a more principled stand in Benares (the way he does in Delhi), and if Bindiya had had the sense to move on.

Dhanush does his best to hold it all together. It’s not a stretch by any means (for that, you’ll have to seek out Pudhupettai or Aadukalam), but it’s still a beautifully modulated performance. It helps that Kundan such an author-backed character, whose every move is calculatedly crowd-pleasing. The reason behind the “I Miss You” card. The “You forget me” moment. The devastated drive into the Ganges. The reimbursement of the cost for apples. The contrast between him and the “intellectuals” at JNU. And best of all, the way he convinces Zoya’s dad that someone else may be right for her. Dhanush couldn’t have asked for a better part, a better launch. We take to him instantly. But Tamil viewers may miss the edge that makes his persona so divisive. At first, there is enough of the creepiness we’re used to, which we’re both attracted to and repelled by, but gradually this is sanded away and the character becomes cute, almost too much so. One can only hope that this isn’t a step towards becoming a cuddly hero – not that there’s much on that frame to cuddle.

Copyright ©2013 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

In a recent interview, Neil Nitin Mukesh, the star of Shortcut Romeo, had this to say about the film’s relation to its Tamil original, Thiruttu Payale: “The films are not similar except for a few nuances… The characters and the scale are completely different.” He must have been talking about the Shortcut Romeo he’d have liked to make – not the one he’s ended up making, under the crushing direction of Susi Ganesh. A few kinks have been ironed out. The romance between Suraj (Mukesh) and Sherry (Puja Gupta) has been fleshed out, and we no longer wonder about this con man’s sustained change of heart. And we have to give this to Mukesh: the original film did not feature the hero’s fight with a dozen snarling Masai warriors, and it most certainly did not make room for a dewy-eyed duet where the hero made clear his feelings for his heroine by crooning “Main shola, tu Coca-Cola.”

The tragedy of the Tamil film wasn’t that it was bad, but that it was based on great material and yet ended up bad. The story of a young man who hatches a scheme to blackmail a multimillionaire had – at least on paper – such great twists, such a chilling end. (Of course, you couldn’t ask why he didn’t end up with a bullet through his head, courtesy a paid assassin.) The film was – again, on paper – a morality tale infused with the spirit of noir. But it looked as if it had been shot on a teenager’s weekly allowance, and the pace of an already overlong narrative was horribly slackened by songs and a comedy track. A remake is usually a way to take care of the things that did not work earlier, but Ganesh is too busy having his African extras shake their buttocks to the accompaniment of lines like “Uska pichwada permanent vibration mode pe hamesha hota hai.” That sounded like bliss compared to the complaints of my own backside, at having to endure these shenanigans all over again.

Copyright ©2013 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Responding to a movie, sometimes, is like tuning a transistor on a stormy night. It takes a while to catch the exact frequency – and when I found myself shifting in my seat during Ghanchakkar, I thought, at first, that this was the reason. I thought that my antenna hadn’t yet fully tuned into this not-easily-classifiable film. At times, this is a farce, with horny villains stripped down to their underwear. At times, this is a rambunctious comedy with a set of running gags – about the culinary skills of the heroine, about her loud dress sense, about an oddball who prefers to purchase groceries late at night, about a clingy mother. At times, this is a heist-gone-wrong thriller, infused with the mechanics of a detective story, including a mystery caller. At times, this is a black comedy, where a man can meet his end by means of a fork and a banana peel. And at times, this is a quasi-existential drama about someone who’s slowly losing his mind, beginning to suspect his friends, his wife, even himself.

But at some point, I just threw up my hands and tuned out. Raj Kumar Gupta is a tasteful filmmaker with an eye for colourful detail (a security guard at an ATM licking clean a matka kulfi) and the archly droll moment. (My favourite was the one with a housekeeper named Ramesh.) But he cannot rein in the various dimensions of the story, and the film feels like it’s stuck in a loop. Like the director’s Aamir, Ghanchakkar is about a man (Sanju, played by Emraan Hashmi) who’s yanked around endlessly. Vidya Balan, as Sanju’s wife Neetu, has very little to work off, so she lets her clothes do all the acting. Rajesh Sharma and Namit Das do their best to liven the proceedings, which, given this loony material, should have been a lot more fun. By the fifth reference to Neetu’s unfamiliarity with a salt shaker, we’ve had enough. And the film keeps changing its tone till the very end, which is shockingly gruesome given how it all began. I felt cheated – not because I dislike twists, but because rug-pulling is an art, and here it felt like a stunt.

Copyright ©2013 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

It’s an odd turn of events when a web page whose accuracy is suspect can fill you with more insight about a person than a painstakingly mounted three-hour movie. In possession of but the most generic facts about the Flying Sikh, I looked up the Wikipedia entry and found this: “As of 2013, he is the only Indian male athlete to win an individual athletics Gold in Commonwealth Games… He is married to former captain of Indian Women Volleyball team, Nirmal Kaur… Despite the lack of an Olympic medal, Milkha Singh’s achievements are hailed because of the circumstances under which he achieved them as well as the lack of infrastructure and resources in independent post-colonial India.” That, right there, is a great story. The union of two people from two spheres of sport, bookended by two bits of perspective – first, a single man’s exceptional achievement in a country of crores, and second, what this meant to a new nation thirsting for freshly forged heroes, once the heroes of the Independence movement had passed on.

Save the winning of the medal, none of this is in Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s Bhaag Milkha Bhaag. There’s always something happening, but very little perspective on why this man’s life demanded to be made into a movie. We didn’t face this issue with Paan Singh Tomar, the story of another athlete from a newly minted India. He too joined the army, discovered a sporting talent (and the fact that this talent would ensure good food; Milkha, similarly, loves milk, which he gets glassfuls of after he opts to run), and preferred to run barefoot rather than with shoes with spikes. But each major race gave us insights into Tomar’s psyche, while also showcasing his character quirks. Milkha Singh (a hardworking Farhan Akhtar) comes across, simply, as an affable god-fearing bloke – and affable god-fearing blokes are the hardest to put on screen. The very niceness that makes them wonderful to be around is deadly for drama. We need to feel the drive, the dedication, the sacrifices, the madness even that it takes, in a ghee-loving country, to consecrate one’s body to the pursuit of athletic excellence. We see a lot of this. We feel none of it.

I felt nothing for Milkha when his family (which includes Art Malik with a fantastic beard) is massacred. I felt nothing when he returned to his village and wept, and he was reunited with an old friend. (I had a hard time remembering who this old friend was.) I felt nothing for his romance with Biro (Sonam Kapoor). I felt nothing when he lost, and when he won races. A film like this should whip you into a frenzy, and here I felt I was at the receiving end of a life in bullet points. This happened. Then that happened. Then this happened. And then that happened. The glue that holds it all together, unifying these various happenings into a single remarkable life, is absent – and this loss is all the more acute because of Mehra’s mode of operation. His filmmaking may be state-of-the-art, but he is a resolutely old-fashioned filmmaker in the best sense: he loves the rhythms, the dramatic devices of pre-multiplex Bollywood, and he’s not afraid to trot them out in the service of his stories.

Bhaag Milkha Bhaag has capital-S sentiment, involving a sister (Divya Dutta) who springs Milkha from jail with money obtained from selling her earrings. There’s comic relief in an army recruit who speaks in a high voice. There’s a villain (marked with the villainous name of Sher Singh Rana) who sneers at Milkha’s dreams of wearing the India blazer – and their subsequent competition, with Milkha running barefoot and Sher Singh with fancy shoes, carries the charge of Naya Daur playing out on a racetrack. Some of the performances are ripely theatrical. Dalip Tahil, who plays Nehru, seems to be auditioning for Bharat Bhushan’s role in Jahan Ara, declaring national holidays with the sense of happy entitlement that made kings shower gold coins on the court poet. The musical cues, too, are unapologetically old-world. A sarangi wails when Milkha is reunited with his sister after the Partition, and Milkha’s recurring Zanjeer-like nightmare, involving a horse and triggered by the cry “bhaag Milkha,” is thickly layered with terrifying sound.

This prime purpose of this hyper-emotional style of filmmaking is to make us feel – all this emotion is the glue. That’s why, in the older films, we don’t complain about how inorganic the individual elements are – they come together not logically (in the head) but emotionally (in the heart). And when that doesn’t happen, we begin to question the use of those tropes, like in the Biro interlude, where we’re shown that Milkha stopped his illegal dealings when she hauled him up. In an older film, her words would have stung like a whiplash and that hurt would have been held on to, but here, the moment is never brought up again and all we experience is yet another iteration of the ‘wayward man reformed by the love of a good woman’ cliché. Another ill-used masala-movie trope is the one when a child transforms into an adult in the midst of an activity that defines him. After Partition, in a refugee camp, Milkha drifts into a group of delinquents, and they steal coal from trains. One instant, Milkha is a boy, being chased by someone who’s caught him stealing, and the next, he’s a man – he’s Farhan Akhtar. This is a great hero-introduction shot – the only problem being that we’ve already been introduced to the hero. The film begins with the 1960 Rome Olympics, where Milkha’s loss dashed a nation’s hopes, and this later shot of boy-becoming-man feels redundant.

That, really, could be said about a lot of this long movie. (Pawan Malhotra, who plays Milkha’s coach Gurudev Singh, utters the film’s truest words: “Yeh kahaani bahut lambi hai.”) The portions in Australia, for instance, where Milkha has a fling with a local named Stella (Rebecca Breeds), feel out of place in this narrative because if we’re hewing to old-world values (in filmmaking if not in life), then the loss of Biro would not have resulted in Milkha’s sleeping with another woman, leave alone a western woman., especially in the 1950s. Why not linger on this uncharacteristic development (for an Indian male of the time, who’d have nursed a heavy heart through a couple of Rafi numbers) instead of just casually throwing it in our faces? Throughout Bhaag Milkha Bhaag, we are rarely inside Milkha’s head. After winning all those other races, why did he fail in Rome? Surely the metaphor of running as a way of fleeing past horrors was at play earlier too, and when he was able to conquer those emotions, why not in Rome? These are beats that need dwelt on, and the subsequent shame, scored to the cries of an angry nation (a newspaper headline goes, The Great Indian Tragedy), doesn’t register either. We’re meant to see how Milkha worked his way out of this hole and steeled himself for a sporting event in Pakistan, the home of all his Partition-related horrors, but the film, with its flashbacks, keeps looping back on itself and this clean narrative hook is lost.

One way to make a sports movie is to draw from the Rocky template. One underdog. One sweet girlfriend. One gruff coach who ladles out tough love. One big fight. But Mehra is after a sprawling epic, and the constant back-and-forth of the narrative blurs the clean emotional lines and erodes our investment. The scenes in the past (like Milkha being unafraid to run on hot sand) don’t inform the future, and there’s no buildup to the last race. (Some lives deserve the epic treatment. Maybe this one didn’t?) And it doesn’t help that scenes just go on and on, with a framing device that revolves around three men who set out on a train to Chandigarh in order to convince Milkha to participate in that event in Pakistan. You think, once they finish the backstory and meet the man, something will happen, something dramatic to justify the need to show their setting out on this journey in the first place – but there’s no payoff. They have tea at Milkha’s and tell him, baldly, that the Prime Minister wants to meet him. Where’s the drama of his decision-making, the pull between wanting to serve the nation and save himself from the past? A telephone call from the Prime Minister’s office would have sufficed.

The sporting sequences are equally adrift. All the training – the really important stuff, like improving stamina – seems to happen in the second half, so we’re left with the question if it was just dumb luck and constant running practice that helped Milkha win those earlier races. (It clearly wasn’t, but the film makes it look that way.) There’s the feeling that Milkha Singh began to take running seriously only after the failure at Melbourne, because earlier, the races are used for entertainment – for comedy (his discomfort with spiked shoes looks like learning to walk in high heels) or drama (a stone that pierces his foot is inflated to a big metaphor about obstacles that need to be overcome). Small moments are suffused with Enormous Significance. The scene where Milkha Singh, after that humiliation at Melbourne, walks up to his coach and indirectly indicates his desire to do better is so drawn out and laden with import that at any moment I thought I’d begin to hear conch shells.

None of Mehra’s earlier films have ended up so conventional, so dull, so like an earnest Hollywood Oscar-bait production from the 1950s. The technical values are top-notch – water has never swirled so beautifully in a brass bucket – but Mehra doesn’t use the songs as well as he did in Rang De Basanti and Delhi-6, and the characters all come from tired old moulds. (Compare Divya Dutta’s low-caste waste-collector and Pawan Malhotra’s crude businessman in flashy shirts, in Delhi-6, to the stereotypes they’re forced to play here.) The only acting moment where I sat up was when an exhausted officer at the refugee camp, after Partition, snaps at Milkha, and then, when he looks up and sees it’s just a boy, his tone softens. Mehra’s earlier films were filled with these down-to-earth and human moments. Here, there’s the stifling sense of watching something exalted, with more manipulative slow-motion running than in Chariots of Fire. Early on, when an injured Milkha Singh runs, his bandages, which unravel midway, flap in the wind like flags. He’s not won a single race, and he’s already a marble monument.

Copyright ©2013 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

In Nikhil Advani’s D-Day, Rishi Kapoor plays India’s most wanted man as a fleshy gangster with a stick-on moustache and pink sunglasses – a jowly Buddha set loose in a Boogie Nights bar. My first impulse was to giggle, and my second was to set about answering the question, Why is Rishi Kapoor, who was so chilling as the villain in Aurangzeb, so out of place here, as if dressed up as Dawood Ibrahim for a Bollywood-themed NRI party? Could it be the fact that we never see his eyes, and that one of his opponents is played by Irrfan, whose unconcealed face, with its myriad emotions, steers his character right into our hearts? You need all your weapons when Irrfan is on the other side, and when the windows to your soul are tinted in Rooh Afza shades, you’re disarmed right there. What a film this might have been had there been an antagonist to rival the protagonist – and yet, it speaks of Advani’s skills that he still manages to pull together a fairly gripping thriller.

D-Day is Hindi cinema’s answer to Munich, Zero Dark Thirty, Argo… all those films where committed professionals, patriots all, risk everything for the sake of their nation. Only here, there’s no significant politics at play. This is simply a high-minded masala movie – all we’re asked to care about is the capture of Iqbal Seth and his return to India. (He’s in Karachi, under the army’s watchful eye; there goes the Pakistani box office.) The set-up is terrific. In a long stretch propelled by constant cross-cutting and a throbbing score, we see Wali Khan (Irrfan) and his cohorts – Rudra (Arjun Rampal), Zoya (Huma Qureshi) and Aslam (Aakash Daahiya) – sneak into the wedding of Seth’s son and attempt to abduct the big man himself. They almost succeed, and at one point, Rudra has Seth staring into the barrel of his revolver. “Trigger kheench, maamla mat kheench,” snarls Seth, but their mission is to bring him back alive, and Rudra hesitates. That split second proves costly, and the quartet, subsequently, finds itself disowned by India, hunted by Pakistan. Best laid plans, etcetera.

After that first half-hour or so, the film turns somewhat slack, saddling its professionals with hints of a personal life at stake. At least the subplot with Wali Khan and his family, wife (a superb newcomer named Shriswara) and young son, has direct bearing on the events, but the other episodes are just filler, meant to make us feel more for these characters, when their dangerous mission is itself fodder for more than enough feeling. Zoya, it turns out, has a husband stashed away somewhere, but she barely seems to register the fact – we begin to feel that the character may have been served better without a backstory. (Though this detour does result in the film’s funniest moment, when he calls to wish her on their anniversary just as she’s unpacking bombs.) And Rudra’s army-honed toughness is softened when he falls for a prostitute (Shruti Hassan), and don’t you know it, they have matching scars – a crescent-shaped cut runs across her cheek, and the skin over his stomach is maimed by what looks like a stab wound. What is it about these films that rootless men always fall for streetwalkers with hearts of gold?

But I readily forgave Advani his clichés, if only because he takes that biggest of clichés – the sad song that plays after the loss of a loved one – and spins gold from it. The picturisation of Alvida is a revelation, and it’s possibly the most inventively staged song sequence since the shootout in Agent Vinod. As the survivor follows a trail of gruesome clues, the tragedy is reenacted in front of his eyes – and she looks into his eyes – as we cut back (a bottle is broken on her head) and forth (he steps on shattered glass). The action scenes aren’t as anywhere as imaginative, but they serve their purpose, even if the logistics (and sometimes the chronology of events) are puzzling. (For four wanted people, they sure get around enemy territory with ease, commandeering vehicles and weaponry.) D-Day, finally, is yet another showcase for Irrfan, and I cannot think of too many actors, offhand, who can pull off his brusque admission that he’s in no state to think about other people’s troubles. It’s not a wail, a mere statement of fact. An honest performance can go a long way in plugging a movie’s holes.

Copyright ©2013 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Anand Gandhi’s Ship of Theseus is the closest we’ve gotten in a while to cinéma vérité. The close-up of an impaired cornea. A snatch of circumstance, that there’s no one back home in the Middle East to donate eyes. A voice-enabled computer. Cigarette butts on an ashtray balanced on a copy machine. Aliya (Aida Elkashef), a photographer and the owner of that eye, roams about a bazaar, climbs stairs, spends time with a Gujarati family, goes home. A gallery. An exhibition. An interview that reveals how Aliya lost her vision. Ambling on the road, she hears sounds and enters the backyard of a modest home – she takes pictures of ducks. At home, she mocks her boyfriend – Vinay (Faraz Khan) – when he describes the photograph to her, referring to the “gable” in the sloping roof of that modest home. She heads someplace in a taxi, hears an argument on the roadside, asks the driver to stop, and takes pictures of the sound that captivated her. She slices vegetables, listens to Vinay describe this image, rejects it, and gets into an argument – spectacularly written and enacted – that may be one of the points of this film.

Vinay dismisses Aliya’s rejection of the photograph, saying that you don’t have to be conscious about your art, you can be intuitive. This, of course, isn’t just a statement about photography but about all art, including cinema, and the suspicion that Gandhi is plumbing his feelings, his experiences, his doubts, is deepened when this question comes up: Is Aliya’s work being celebrated because it’s intrinsically good, or because she’s blind? Or, to extrapolate this to Gandhi, are we celebrating Ship of Theseus, the film, or the fact that something like this got made in the first place in our cultural climate? In the second story – the film is a triptych – a monk named Maitreya (Neeraj Kabi) says, “We are all blind men trying to perceive the elephant.” Isn’t that the philosophy that drives the art-film audience? And talking about a poster that protests animal killing, a cause to which he is much committed, Maitreya suggests that they cut down on sentimentality and focus on people’s reason. Is that Gandhi talking about what needs to be done in Indian filmmaking? He even seems to anticipate reactions from a section of the audience, when a youngster labels Maitreya’s ramblings as “intellectual masturbation.”

The latter phrase certainly describes some of Ship of Theseus, particularly that title, that clanging proclamation of deep significance. It’s easily the worst thing about the film, and one can only hope that filmmakers, henceforth, will not feel compelled to impress on us the weight of their accomplishment by reducing their films to Grecian metaphors. I, for one, have no wish to see The Sword of Damocles (the thriller with imminent danger at every turn), Scylla and Charybdis (the love triangle where our hero falls for the daughters of rival gangsters), or The Augean Stables (aka the inevitable remake of Inquilaab). When Krzysztof Kieślowski could sum up the human condition with just the names of colours, and when Ingmar Bergman, that most solipsistic of storytellers, could condense a lifetime of frustration with the Big Guy up there into, simply, The Silence, there’s something profoundly annoying with a title that needs to be explained at the beginning of the film, like a sacred key handed to us so we can unlock the ensuing mysteries.

Then again, who can fault the overreaching of a filmmaker who got his start with saas-bahu soaps? That title may well be a grenade tossed on his past – though seeing Ship of Theseus, it’s hard to believe he had that past in the first place. This is a genuinely challenging film, a genuinely rewarding film – not least because it makes us question the nature of film itself. The title refers to the paradox that questions whether an object that has had its components replaced remains the same object, but the bigger paradox may be this: Is it still cinéma vérité – whose techniques are geared towards observing, being a fly on the wall – if you’re staging events through a meticulously scripted narrative, whose off-handedness only seems unscripted? Gandhi achieves an exquisite balance between a teeming external world (Alia being taken aback, at an intersection, by Mumbai’s swarms of people and traffic) and the quiet interiors of life (Maitreya eating an orange, carefully depositing pips into the rind), but it’s impossible not to wonder, as we always do in a certain kind of film, how much detail is too much detail. How many tracking shots of Maitreya’s purposeful strides do we really need to sit through?

The three segments transpose the titular paradox to human beings who need (or have undergone) organ replacements – an eye, a liver, a kidney – and the resulting transformations, both external (in the case of Alia and Maitreya) and internal (in the case of a stockbroker named Navin, whose story forms the third episode), are best brought out in Alia’s story. After surgery, she comes home and finally sees her work. She finally sees those pictures of ducks, that home with the “gable,” the men arguing by the roadside, and we sense her confusion without a word being said. Having had a “component” replaced, is she still the same person? The shot that closes her story is quietly epiphanic. As she sits on a makeshift bridge, crippled by indecision (and perhaps more of a “cripple” than she was earlier), Gandhi mounts her picturesque surroundings – a gushing river beneath her feet, snowy mountains in the distance – on a frame. We get closure, even if she doesn’t.

The subject is heavy, but Gandhi’s treatment (except in the second segment) is surprisingly light – it’s as if all the ponderousness went into that title and the film, therefore, was freed from having to keep a straight face all the time. Some moments make you laugh out loud, like the one about a beleaguered labourer who, first, just wants his kidney back – it was stolen when he was admitted for an unrelated surgery – but changes his mind when he receives a financial windfall. And when a suffering Maitreya is asked if the soul exists, he says curtly, “Pata nahin,” that he doesn’t know. But his story, which follows Alia’s, is a comedown. (The paradox, here, rises from the monk’s dilemma: if he is to live, he needs medication that’s obviously been tested on animals.) A predominantly visual film now turns verbal, with a series of compelling (and entertaining) philosophical arguments between the monk and a young lawyer named – cough, cough – Charvaka (Vinay Shukla), and I could never shake off the feelings that I was listening to a series of missives from the director’s brain, which seems to have regressed to flashbacks from the college days, when the question of whether or not it’s a worm’s destiny to be crushed could sustain several rounds of rum. (This worm, incidentally, makes an appearance in Alia’s story as well – but if a worm has its narrative purpose refashioned, is it still the same worm?) The actors, here as elsewhere, are wonderful, but they never convince us that they aren’t mouthpieces for someone else’s ideology. When Woody Allen, playing a part in one of his heavier films, stammers through existential questions, we sense the character – here, we sense the director.

The wordless portions work far better, like the shot by of Maitreya by the sea, staring into the vast unknown. (A shot of that worm being surrounded by hustling shoe-clad feet is another beauty.) Gandhi finds his footing again in the third segment, with superbly staged silent comedy, most notably during a search for someone’s house which seems to be in the midst of a labyrinth, as real as it is metaphorical, mirroring this film’s questions which loop back on themselves. (This time, too, there’s a central argument, between Navin and his activist grandmother, that provides a bit of perspective.) The last shot is a gem. We don’t see it coming, but when it does, it seems inevitable. A film sprung from the idea of organ donation – someone dies, another person lives; it’s, in a sense, a rebirth – closes with images of a womb-like cave. What would Ship of Theseus have been if Gandhi had trusted his visuals more? But then, he probably wouldn’t be the same filmmaker.

Copyright ©2013 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

I wasn’t overly enamoured by Manish Tiwary’s first film, Dil Dosti Etc., but it at least served as a calling card, an indication that interesting things could be in store. But his follow-up – Issaq, based on Romeo and Juliet – is a vile mess. Tiwary takes the Vishal Bhardwaj route and finds flavourful local equivalents – Mercutio becomes Murari, Verona becomes Varanasi – but the comparison stops there. The leads (Prateik Babbar, Amyra Dastur) have zero presence, and they’re directed to perform outlandishly. Scenes are staged in an overripe style that makes it unclear whether we’re supposed to be laughing at or with the characters, like the Naxal played by Prashant Narayanan, whose minions wear paper masks modelled after his face. And somewhere in there, a water gun during Holi celebrations is treated as a phallic symbol. By the time Tiwary unleashed a “joke” involving Tansen, Bhagat Singh, Kishore Kumar and the Rani of Jhansi, I’d had enough. What blight through yonder window breaks!

Copyright ©2013 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

What’s more depressing than a comedy whose idea of a joke is a housewife, an aspiring sophisticate, exclaiming “Oh my Gods”? The fact that said comedy – Shashant A Shah’s Bajatey Raho – features actors like Vinay Pathak, Ranvir Shorey and Dolly Ahluwalia, that marvellously tipsy mother from Vicky Donor. Every performer has to, at some point, bow before the reality of pay cheque roles, but still, it must be galling to put oneself through a Khosla ka Ghosla rip-off with none of the charm and wit. The tragedies of small people (conned by big shots and now seeking restitution through means fair or foul) are usually foolproof when it comes to making us care, but the con games, here, are so outré that the film quickly veers into some kind of fantasyland. But if you go, be sure to stick around for Pathak’s pop-bhajan performance at a religious gathering. He pleads, Paise ki rain kar de, Door ye pain kar de… O meri shera waaliye… It’s a wonder he didn’t include, among these wishes, mukti from this movie.

Copyright ©2013 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Rohit Shetty’s Chennai Express is something of a first: a “North Indian” film where South Indians, however caricatured, come off better. As the story begins, we’re introduced to the token North Indian – Rahul, played by Shah Rukh Khan. His parents are dead, and he lives with his grandparents, who raised him and ensured that, thanks to a successful family business, he’ll not want for anything. And, when this doting (if also suffocating) grandfather passes on, how does Rahul repay his debt? By making a plan with friends to hang out in Goa – where he’ll most likely get laid – instead of honouring the grandfather’s last wish, which is to have his ashes dispersed in the holy waters of Rameswaram. Rahul’s grandmother (Kamini Kaushal) tells him that she cannot trust anyone else with this task, and yet, he lies to her, orchestrating the elaborate charade of booking a ticket on the titular train, and when, at the station, she says it doesn’t go to Rameswaram, he cooks up another lie on the spot, all the while planning to hop off at the next stop and join his friends. Worse, wherever he goes, he keeps forgetting about that urn of ashes.

And when, due to circumstances (otherwise known as masala-movie screenwriting), he ends up in Tamil Nadu and Kerala, he’s lost. He mocks the locals who converse in languages that sound funny to him, but they have the last laugh. They may speak accented and grammatically incorrect Hindi, but they do speak the language (sometimes Marathi too) – and if they found themselves stranded in the North, they would have no problem getting around. (When, finally, Rahul attempts a speech in Tamil, it sounds like he’s gargling with marbles – all you can do is laugh.) In addition, the South Indians are hospitable. They are considerate about the repercussions of their actions, as when Meenamma (Deepika Padukone) tells Rahul that if they make a run for it, then the villagers who gave them shelter will never help elopers again. They care about family. (They wouldn’t forget about an urn of a relative’s ashes that came into their custody.) They’re stronger, better built, and sometimes (as in the case of Sathyaraj, who plays Meenamma’s father) as fair-complexioned as Rahul is. And they’re good in a crunch. When Rahul gets lost in a forest, he has to depend on Meenamma to guide him to safety. Viewed through the prism of gender stereotypes, she does the man’s job, while he’s content — at least for a while – to set afloat little lamps in a pond, surrounded by smiling housewives.

Given that Shah Rukh is, by far, the hero who’s embraced his feminine side the most, he’s a perfect fit in this part. It’s been a while since he did pure comedy – reveling in the kind of silliness we saw in Baadshah, the Farah Khan outings, and the Chandni Chowk portions of Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham – and Chennai Express gives him (and his game heroine) plenty of opportunity to cut loose. Even the death of the grandfather is presented as a well-timed gag. After all, as Rahul says, why mourn the demise of someone who’s lived long enough to see the country pass from the AIR era to the age of Twitter? An episode that has Meenamma acting possessed is a hoot, as is the communication between hero and heroine via corny rewordings of popular songs. But an equal number of gags stop short of hitting bull’s-eye. Shetty has become known as a director of blockbuster comedies, but he seems incapable of shaping anything but the most basic kind of humour. There’s a fantastic (in concept) bit with a little person who speaks in guttural clicks, but it results in smiles rather than laughs. And the “meet me in the store room” scene, which promises all sort of confusion between various couples, isn’t developed to its fullest. Shetty settles for an easy finish.

The surprise, though, is that Shetty proves far better with romance. He should really be doing love stories. After a sluggish start, Chennai Express – which, if you must know, is about Rahul and Meenamma finding out that opposites (namely, North and South) attract – really gets going around interval point, when the leads find themselves in an idyllic village with nothing to do but flirt and perhaps fall in love. The gags work. The songs work. (Kashmir main tu Kanyakumari, on screen, is a joy.) And Shah Rukh and Deepika settle into a great groove. Seeing these sweetly lighthearted portions, it becomes clear that the problem with Shetty’s earlier films lay, to a large extent, with the leading man. Ajay Devgn is an impressive brooder, and given the right kind of dramatic part, he can put on a show – but a loose comedian he isn’t. The reason Bol Bachchan and Chennai Express work(ed), at least in parts, is due to the casting of actors far more at home with the silly stuff.

That’s why the closing portions of Chennai Express are all wrong. Suddenly, we see Shah Rukh go all macho on us – this is where a Devgn would have been effortless – and the prolonged brutalities that ensue have no place in a film like this. (There’s a reason Manmohan Desai never got all realistic and bloody about violence in his 1970s phase, which was essentially lighthearted, and which is what Shetty apparently wants to emulate.) Couldn’t they have found a funny way to appease Meenamma’s father – instead of that ridiculously melodramatic speech – and have Rahul walk away with her? Still, given the material, Shetty does more right than wrong – the film could have been called Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa. (And special thanks for having the Tamil actors speak Tamil, instead of going all “Madrasi” on us.) Shetty fashions a Shah Rukh Khan showreel, borrowing bits from his greatest hits, and gives us an unfettered avatar of the star that the star himself has seemed somewhat ashamed, of late, to embrace. Who knew that this quintessentially North Indian performer would rediscover himself in the South?

Copyright ©2013 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Milan Luthria’s Once Upon Ay Time In Mumbai Dobaara! isn’t so much a sequel as a retread. Like the earlier film, this one centers on the relationship between a mentor and his protégé. There, the name of the zeitgeisty hit on the marquee was Bobby; here it’s Mard. Here, too, the gangsters spend more time attending to (and obsessing over) matters of the heart than the business they’re supposed to be in. (This film is actually a love triangle.) The city of Bombay, there as here, remains a she, a siren who beckons with untold temptations. There’s an actress here reminiscent of the character Kangna Ranaut played in the predecessor. She, too, falls for a gangster, has a shooting session disrupted by an irate and frustrated man, and ends up in a hospital. And then there are the deliberate invocations – strains of Pee loon in a song here, or the scene where that actress, accepting an award, tells the audience, “Bas dua mein yaad rakhna.” This request to be remembered in one’s prayers was a signature of the slain gangster that Ajay Devgn played in the earlier film, his “goodness” represented through his all-white attire. The part of his slayer, Shoaib Khan (always clad in black, befitting the quintessential “bad” gangster), has passed from Emraan Hashmi to Akshay Kumar.

The biggest similarity between the films, however, is that the actors feel out of place in this milieu. Luthria is attempting something ambitious here (as he did in the earlier film) – he wants to conflate the glamour of Bombay cinema with the grit of Bombay’s underworld. (Why these films allude to Mumbai in their titles, instead of Bombay, is a mystery.) And so we have Shoaib Khan gradually (and dramatically) emerging from the shadows, individual aspects of his face and body highlighted until the whole package is revealed in the “hero introduction shot.” The younger Aslam (Imran Khan) actually refers to himself as if he were a hero. We see him first when he jumps onto a running train, and when a passenger remarks he could have died, he says that he’s just made his entry and there’s a while left before “the end.” (“Abhi to meri entry huyi hai. ‘The end’ aane mein bahut time hai mere dost.”) And film references abound. The changes in the city are noted through the passage of heroines, from Kum Kum to Kimi Katkar, and there’s even a gangster’s girlfriend named Mona.

This stylised universe needs actors with heft and swagger. They need to own the purple prose that erupts from their mouths. The problem with today’s heroes is that they cannot do rhetoric. They distance themselves from what they’re saying by playing it cool, as if they’re in on how retro-chic these lines are – the pauses, the inflections are all wrong. We don’t believe for a minute that these words are coming from inside these people, from inside their heads – they seem to come off a teleprompter. (At least Akshay Kumar is old-school enough to give this a game try. Imran Khan is horribly miscast. It’s painful to watch him go through the paces of a song that harks back to a hit from Amar Akbar Anthony, flitting uncomfortably between a Muslim character and a caricatured Muslim. ) And when they both fall for Jasmine (Sonakshi Sinha), the constant posturing, the constant faux-poetry makes the film look like Chaudhvin Ka Chand dragged kicking and screaming into the underworld. It’s not pretty.

Jasmine is the film’s weakest character. For the longest time, it’s never clear if she’s flirting with Shoaib and Aslam or if she’s just being friendly. We never see her becoming the great love that the story demands, the kind of love that will make sworn enemies of friends. At first, Shoaib is shown to be a womaniser, a cad who’ll not just proposition another man’s wife but instruct her about the colour of the undergarments he wants to see her in. And we just don’t see this animal being tamed by someone as colourless as Jasmine. (Sonali Bendre, playing an older love in a handful of scenes, makes a far better impression. You want to see her love story.) This failure is significant because, the romance apart, there’s little else in the film. The business with a rival gangster (Mahesh Manjrekar, who seems to live in front of a projector playing clips from Prem Chopra movies) is so underdeveloped that whenever he makes an appearance we have to remind ourselves that he exists.

Luthria stages a couple of competent action sequences, along with some enjoyable masala moments. (The one in which Shoaib walks into a police station reminded me of a similar scene in Public Enemies, another film that was as much about gangsters as it was about the movies.) But he doesn’t get anywhere close to, say, Gangster, whose tightrope walk between love and a life lived on the edge (each informing the other) remains unmatched in recent cinema. The directors from the Mahesh Bhatt stable know their way around the darker side of desire – the emotions of the drunk, the despairing, the dispossessed – and they know how to shape characters that are real yet just this side of larger-than-life. Other filmmakers venturing into these waters come off as posers, substituting art direction and period clothing for genuine feeling. We hear Kaate nahin katte on the radio and we see a poster of Pataal Bhairavi and we know it’s the 1980s, but had one of the Bhatt boys made this film, it might have felt timeless.

Copyright ©2013 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Things happen so easily in Prakash Jha’s Satyagraha. The story is about the efforts of an Anna Hazare-like elder (Daduji, played by Amitabh Bachchan) to tackle systemic corruption in a small town named Ambikapur, and at one point, a formerly corrupt policeman steps up to a microphone and declares he’s turning over a new leaf. At another point, an industrialist (Maanav, played by Ajay Devgn) writes away his crores because he doesn’t want to be labeled a corrupt capitalist. Does the policeman feel a twinge of fear that his former bosses – all-powerful politicians – may unleash their fury on him and his family? Does Maanav hesitate, just for a minute, before giving up everything he’s worked for all his life? Or take the student leader Arjun (Arjun Rampal), who becomes part of Daduji’s movement. What does he do elsewhere? Does he have friends, family? Does he down the day’s frustrations with a drink or two? More importantly, why does he affiliate himself with Daduji’s cause?

The answer, of course, is that the screenplay asks him to. Over the years, Jha has become the kind of filmmaker who gathers huge stars and a ripped-from-the-headlines premise and does little else. The scenes are loose. Characters aren’t developed – their traits, instead, are marked out for us with a helpful highlighter. (An underling approaches the journalist played by Kareena Kapoor with a sleazy story and she refuses to look at it. Ergo, she’s a principled newsperson, who won’t do sensationalism.) Other characters – like a doha-spouting mendicant named Transformer Baba – are introduced with a great flourish, but then they have nothing to do, nowhere to go. And despite a flabby running time of 150-odd minutes, Jha seems to be in a tearing hurry. Maanav hacks into a government computer and finds all the information he needs in a matter of minutes. Later, he frets that Daduji is missing – the next second, he’s exactly where Daduji is. Who can take any of this seriously?

The tragedy is that we want to take this seriously. We want filmmakers to grapple with headlines. We want inquiries into (and reflections on) what’s happening around us. What we don’t want is lazy manipulation, with the soundtrack bursting into strains of Raghupati Raghava Raja Ram every time we’re meant to register something profound. (Jha goes all out to paint Daduji as the new Gandhi. We see him walk with support from two young women, and he even exclaims ‘Hey Ram!’) The refrain Raghupati Raghava Raja Ram finds its way into a song as well, and it’s staged so indifferently that we have wonder why Jha insists on following the commercial Hindi-film model when his heart is so clearly not in it. This song comes about when people are at a low point, and you only have to think back to O Paalanhaare from Lagaan to see how such a song sequence should be filmed. There, the music was a balm on our frayed nerves – we were as involved in the plight of the characters as they were themselves. Here, we reach for a non-existent fast-forward button.

Copyright ©2013 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

It’s impossible to take seriously a hero who’s groomed as perfectly as Ram Charan is in Apoorva Lakhia’s remake of Zanjeer. The super-buff, gym-toned physique is probably the least of the problems. God forbid we catch sight of a thatch of chest hair or the hint of love handles, even given the punishing schedules of police officers. (Ram Charan plays ACP Vijay Khanna.) But this grooming extends to a meticulously sculpted stubble and teeth that are so dazzling, so white, so uniform that you half expect him to blow into a cupped palm and turn towards you with a thumbs up. And that hair. It’s been teased into a quiff, and not a strand slips, not even when he’s moving faster than the wind, flattening hapless opponents. And he smolders like a model, the lower half of his face tapering into a perfect triangle. There’s not a line on that face, not when he’s happy, not when he’s sad, not when he’s playing (gulp) videogames with his BFF Sher Khan (Sanjay Dutt).

None of this would matter in a trifling rom-com, where a good-looking hero can get away with just looking good. But this airbrushed aura is fatal in a red-blooded action film. This is not to say that the earlier Zanjeer is some sort of sacred classic. Like most films from an earlier era, it can stand some tweaking. The fights, for instance, look staged and silly, and they could benefit from today’s advances in tech-aided choreography. The Hindu-Muslim-Christian brotherhood (represented by Amitabh Bachchan’s Vijay, Pran’s Sher Khan, and Om Prakash’s D’Silva) is a charming 1970s conceit that would look a tad too cutesy in the more complex and fractured world we live in today. And the knife sharpener appears to have vanished off the face of the planet (along with the ten-paisa coin she collected per knife sharpened), and the heroine, today, needs to find something else to do. But the emotional beats are rock solid, and they need no improvement.

Lakhia, bafflingly, jettisons most of these emotions – though the barebones of the story is the same. (An orphaned Vijay settles scores with the man who killed his parents.) The earlier Zanjeer came in a more moral age, where actions had consequences. Vijay’s father was a crook who worked in a ring that manufactured adulterated medicine and alcohol, and his daughter died from this very medicine. So he turned good, and because no good deed goes unpunished, he ended up killed. In the remake, Vijay’s father is an utterly honest man – so there’s no divine-retribution drama. And because the adulteration is now with petrol and diesel, which burn a hole in the purse but don’t quite kill, there is no human-scale drama either. We no longer have the angle of the grieving father who seeks revenge because his sons brought home a bottle of (adulterated) booze on Christmas Eve and died soon after. These screenwriting decisions dragged the common man into the picture, and he’s lost in this abstract good-versus-evil tale that replaces grit with gloss.

We begin with a Bond-style opening credits number, and we end with something right out of an Indiana Jones movie, with the hero faced with water gushing into a tunnel. And though it’s a good idea to withhold the mystery behind Vijay’s recurring nightmares – the older film, narrated chronologically, laid this out for us at the beginning – the revelation, when it arrives, packs no punch. The sequence is stylised, like the murder of Bruce Wayne’s parents in one of the Batman movies, and it registers more as cinematography than tragedy. (Other blatant inspirations include the baseball bat scene from The Untouchables, and the action sequence in the men’s rest room in True Lies.) Maybe Lakhia wanted to make a stylish action thriller – but why choose this material, which brings with it so many associations? Why invoke the earlier film with similarly named characters and with refrains from Bindu’s Dil jalon ka song worked into the number performed by the modern-day Mona Darling (poor Mahie Gill)? Why have the new Teja (Prakash Raj) watch a clip featuring Ajit, his villainous counterpart from the older film?

This has got to be one of Prakash Raj’s worst performances, but let’s not judge him too harshly. After all, look what he has to work with: blow-job jokes and clothes that appear to have survived an explosion at the paint factory. But his ineffectiveness is coolly eclipsed by that of Priyanka Chopra, whose heroine is a rich daddy’s girl from New York. She’s come down to India to attend the wedding of a… Facebook friend, and at this hallowed event, she thrusts her pelvis at the camera and belts out a song declaring that she belongs not to the people from Mumbai or Delhi but to those who have the most money. (I kept praying she’d find an excuse to skip the rest of the film, say, the golden anniversary celebrations of the parents of someone she just started following on Twitter. No such luck, alas.)

There’s a little thesis waiting to be written on heroines then and heroines now in hero-oriented cinema. The older Vijay was jailed on trumped-up charges. When released, his desire for a normal life with Mala made him decide to give up his quest for revenge. He even brokered a truce with Teja. But his innate need to fight the good fight kept rearing its head and it frustrated him (occasioning the film’s finest speech) and Mala, eventually, told him to go after Teja. She realised that Vijay could not be the man she wanted him to be unless he destroyed the villain who’d made him the man he had become. She made the decision as much for her sake as his. It’s too much to expect Priyanka Chopra’s Mala to do this much. (When she exhorts Vijay to go fight, it comes across as a petulant whim.) But she isn’t even allowed to be chased by the bad guys the way the heroine in the older film was. There was an element of danger in the older Mala crossing the train tracks, hiding in an empty coach and finding her way to Vijay’s house, seeking refuge. The new Mala conveniently runs into Vijay, mere seconds after the chase begins. Like many moments in this movie this one gives the feeling that, at some point, the entire unit just gave up, took the money and ran.

The most frustrating aspect of this Zanjeer is the cynicism on display, as if the audience would show up just because lines like “Yeh police station hai, tere baap ka ghar nahin” are reproduced. These lines were just seasoning. The meat came from Vijay’s core. All that analysis about the angry young man being birthed in Zanjeer was in a way short-sighted. That construct could be glimpsed in Sunil Dutt in Mother India, Dilip Kumar in Gunga Jumna, and even the Dilip Kumar of Mughal-e-Azam, who waged war with perhaps the greatest (and most unyielding) “establishment” of all: the Emperor. But those angry young men were from a more peaceful and poetic time (in the country as well as cinema), and the reason we acknowledge Bachchan as the angry young man is that he was the first hero who felt genuinely angry. His films felt violent – physically, verbally, emotionally – in a way those earlier films never did. The only anger in this Zanjeer comes from the audience.

Copyright ©2013 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

First-generation NRIs, especially those in the US, will often sigh that they belong nowhere. Used to the comforts of the West, they cannot return to India, but thanks to their innate Indianness, they don’t feel they belong there either. The characters of Maneesh Sharma’s Shuddh Desi Romance are something like that. They express disdain for arranged marriages. Gayatri (Parineeti Chopra) goes as far as saying that the nation’s lies and double standards are exposed in these unions. And yet, they haven’t fully learnt to handle live-in relationships. They see the point, the convenience, but old habits die hard, and when Gayatri’s live-in boyfriend Raghu (Sushant Singh Rajput) learns about her exes, one of whom was a dolt who was a little too free with his hands (“dimaag chalta nahin tha, haath rukte nahin the”), his face falls. He doesn’t say anything, but you can hear the wheels in his head turning: Was he a better kisser? A better lover? Did she do things for him that she won’t do for me? You see where a lot of this is coming from in an early speech, where he says that women have, um, desires too, but there’s a little pause in that acknowledgement. He hunts for the right word, the least offensive word, before he lands on… armaan.

These contradictions are painfully funny. Raghu is okay with Gayatri’s smoking and he regularly steps out to buy cigarettes, but when a “neighbour uncle” speaks of her past, he becomes his father, his grandfather – he cannot help poking and prying. The title may be a tongue-in-cheek allusion to the fact that this sexually liberated story is anything but a shuddh desi romance, especially given that this isn’t the metros we’re talking about but (comparatively) small-town India. It’s the kind of place where everybody knows everybody else. (After ordering two plates of gulab jamuns, Raghu tells the waiter that he’ll pay him the next day. You can’t imagine this happening in a Café Coffee Day.) But this isn’t the small-town India we know from earlier films – here, being ditched at the altar isn’t the end, simply a new beginning. These folks seem to be in a hurry to make up for lost time. The graffiti on a bathroom wall reads “pyaar do pyaar lo,” and a bride makes out with an electrician on the day of her wedding. Still, they realise that there’s nothing that really binds these relationships, no family to protect you, no society to answer to. All this freedom comes at the price of not knowing how long it’s going to last.

With Bittoo Sharma in Band Baaja Baraat and the characters Ranbir Kapoor plays for Ayan Mukerji, we’re seeing a new kind of Hindi film hero, desi men who are really children and who (are forced to) grow up in the presence of the strong, decisive women around them. Raghu is the latest in this relatively short line. Tara (Vaani Kapoor), whom he starts dating at one point, actually tells him, “Tum sachmuch bachche ho.” He’s a kid, and she cannot stop smiling while looking at him, despite his propensity to say and do the most awful and inopportune things (which, really, is what a kid does). Raghu’s career, too, is all over the place. He’s a registered tourist guide, but we often find him faking it as a member of a wedding procession or else selling overpriced bandhni dupattas to gullible American tourists. He tells the first one that these dupattas are made by Iraqi orphans, and after a while, when the script turns full circle and deposits us back at this scene, he hoodwinks another tourist by invoking orphans from Afghanistan.

Jaideep Sahni’s script is filled with such echoes. (We also get an echo from Maneesh Sharma’s Band Baaja Baraat when we see pigeons at the opening of both halves of the film. Someone should ask him what this is about.) The characters go around in circles; the events follow suit. At the theatre I saw the film in, some people got restless with this seemingly adrift quality, but as much as you want to scream to the characters “Make up you bloody mind,” you realise that the film is about those who cannot make up their minds. (We’re meant to be frustrated by their indecisiveness.) The stuck-in-an-endless-loop nature of the writing is essential. (One step forward, one step back, one step forward, one step back…) If the events were too driven, too focused, we’d be seeing a different movie, with an entirely different set of characters. And sometimes, these echoes result in laughs. In one of the film’s most riotous scenes, Raghu and Gayatri, in turn, assume an overly casual air and try to find out – from Goyal (Rishi Kapoor, enjoying himself in a hugely entertaining performance) – more about the person they’re living with but not married to. We recall this scene as Gayatri complains later, “If you’re in a stage of the relationship where you’re washing this man’s undies and he’s enquiring about your past, is he worth it?” And we want to say, “Well, you were asking about him too.” So much for her contention about double standards.

The way these characters are shaped, shaded is beautiful, and there are terrific individual moments with the leads. (All of them are very good, especially Rajput, who gives a touchingly awkward performance befitting an awkward character.) Raghu snaps at a bus conductor when he’s packed off by Tara, but he bursts into a smile and apologises when he sees that she’s written down her number for him on a currency note. First, we think Tara is a cool customer because her reaction when a calamity befalls her is to ask for a cold drink – but later we realise what she was really doing, what was really going through her mind. Speaking of cold drinks, it’s a sight when Raghu asks for one at a wedding. He’s so tentative, so hesitant – that this flake ends up being something of a Casanova (or “Kamdev Ji” as Goyal hilariously puts it) is one of the film’s great jokes.

What doesn’t work as well is the overall narrative. The relationship between Raghu and Gayatri progresses so quickly it’s almost comical. One moment, they’re cautiously pecking each other’s lips, and the next she’s shaving her legs in the bathroom as he lathers his face. It’s easy to see why he says “I love you” so quickly – that’s very much in character with his need to say and do the “right” thing, often without thinking about consequences. (He does something similar with Tara when he decides he needs to apologise for hurting her.) But I didn’t see this chap as someone who’ll steal a quick kiss when the girl seated beside him in a bus reaches across to get her bag. (He’s a child, yes, but still…) With Raghu and Gayatri, it’s easier to see what drives them apart than to sense what brings them together. Of course, love knows no sense or reason, but when someone has been burnt as much as Gayatri has been in her past relationships, there’s the sense that she’s moving too fast. She says as much, but then gives in to this man who does almost nothing to convince her that this time things will be different. This looks odd, given the flintiness with which she approaches life (and love), insisting, for instance, that she’ll give no discounts for a job she’s doing for Goyal, who’s something of a mentor. Odder still – with this writer and director – is the show-and-tell:  a lot of what’s meant to be inferred from this story is blurted out by the characters to the camera. (“We often run after things once they slip from our grasp,” and so forth.) And for a film that strives to be so subtle, some of the contrivances are graceless – like the ride to the station that initiates the eventual confrontation between Raghu and Gayatri. (The priest in the back seat, though, is very funny.)

Allow me to trot out a theory, that Sahni’s scripts work best when handled by forceful and unsubtle directors, people who are the exact opposite in terms of sensibility. His writing is a little too clean and neat – every t crossed, every i dotted – and it needs a touch of unruliness. The films of his that I’ve enjoyed the most are Company and Aaja Nachle, the former a thrilling genre exercise whose unruliness came from a filmmaker who isn’t afraid to show off, and the latter a “minor film” whose unruliness came from its Bollywood star-vehicle clichés, which Sahni surmounted beautifully. With almost all of Sahni’s other works, there’s something missing, and I think that something is energy. When a subtle writer’s work is filmed by a subtle filmmaker, maybe we end up with too… understated a product. A little brashness isn’t out of place in a love story, and Maneesh Sharma found that quality in Habib Faisal’s screenplay for Band Baaja Baraat. (Faisal also co-wrote Salaam Namaste, another film about a live-in relationship.) While I was relieved that this love triangle did not involve a scene where Tara and Gayatri ended up fighting over Raghu, I couldn’t help wishing that they didn’t seem so much in control of their emotions, always saying the right things, the wise-beyond-their-age things (though Tara has a spot-on line about how we remember the times we stopped being in love rather than the times we started). We don’t need sad songs in the rain, but surely some messy emotion isn’t too much to ask for in such a tightrope-walking romance.

Copyright ©2013 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

For all the talk about taboo-breaking, the humour in Indra Kumar’s Grand Masti is at the level of a bunch of schoolboys stifling giggles when the teacher refers to the Taj Mahal as one of the world’s greatest erections. I went in expecting elaborately orchestrated grossness, a desi Farrelly brothers’ movie, and all I got was a college named Shri Lalchand University of Technology of Science. (You can see what that acronyms to.) Later, when a bombshell in a two-piece bikini asks a drooling man the time, he ejaculates, “Bra panties. I mean, barah paintees.” Given the non-stop wordplay, it’s a miracle they retained the “R” in the title. The film’s most obscene development, though, is its insistence that Vivek Oberoi, Ritesh Deshmukh and Aftab Shivdasani are college-goers. The story has them getting married and returning to campus for a reunion that promises much naughtiness, but the film is so toothless – or maybe we should say limp – that, by the end, they see the error of their ways and don’t end up cheating on their wives. It’s like going to a strip club. You can look but you can’t touch.

Copyright ©2013 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

It’s easy to fall for Naseeruddin Shah’s performance in Ahishor Solomon’s John Day. He plays the eponymous common man, an everyman (no accident that his name sounds like John Doe). It’s the kind of part we identify with and root for at once, and our sympathies are abetted by Shah’s looks. He’s jowly. A little paunchy. He looks like the frumpy bank employee he plays. He’s us. Randeep Hooda, on the other hand, looks like a rakish movie star. He’s young, fit. He has to work harder to make us care for him, especially given that he’s playing a bad cop (named Gautam). He walks away with the movie. It probably helps that, unlike Shah, he’s still at a stage of his career when a performance from him can surprise us.  Just watch his cocky demeanour crumple when he learns that the man he’s interrogating is a child molester – sadness falls on his face like a cloud covering the sun. Even the smaller things he does beautifully, like the feral look he throws at a man he may be about to kill.

It’s rare enough that we get two excellent performances in the same movie – but John Day has a third. Vipin Sharma plays Shinde, a cop who got into the line because he saw Zanjeer as a kid. He wanted to be an honest policeman, he tells Gautam, but somewhere along the way, without realising it, he turned corrupt. The revelation isn’t sentimental – it’s matter-of-fact. All these years later, Shinde is not going to get teary-eyed about things that cannot be undone, and it’s right that Sharma holds back. And when he attempts a double cross, he makes us laugh. The audacity of the situation and the eventual hopelessness are so tragic that the only response is to acknowledge the ridiculousness of it all.

The actors make John Day worthwhile. The film is reportedly ripped off from the Spanish thriller Box 507, but from the looks of it, that was, in turn, inspired by the convolutions of Chinatown. Like the latter, we have here a crooked real-estate deal that morphs into a deadly affair, and this film too could probably benefit from a second viewing, where, knowing the plot, we can see how everything comes together. Then there’s Tabassum (Elena Kazan), who’s as much damaged goods as the Faye Dunaway character (though she also brings to mind Parveen Babi in Deewaar). John Day travels a well-trodden path, but the mood is tense, ominous. The director knows how to build and sustain atmosphere. A chase involving lots of shadows and set to Silent Night – it’s Christmas-time – is beautifully done. We’re constantly invested in what happens next.

The problem arises when John Day turns vigilante. Shah is good enough an actor to make us see that his hand shakes when he fires a gun, or that he’s winded after a long chase, but it’s a little hard to swallow this ordinary man, a senior citizen, overcoming a number of thugs almost single-handedly, with just a smattering of help from well-connected people. The director wants us to see that there’s as much Gautam in John Day as there is John Day in Gautam – he keeps paralleling their lives; for instance, a tender scene between John Day and his wife (Shernaz Patel) follows one between Gautam and his girlfriend Tabassum – but it’s far easier to accept the human aspects of Gautam than the animalistic facets of John Day. We can see Gautam knee-deep in brutalities, but when John Day does something similar (and bloody) it looks far-fetched and silly.

This violence is to put out the point that man is the most dangerous animal, and there are other philosophies at play, most of them espoused by the gangster played by Sharat Saxena. He’s as touched by tragedy as John Day is, as Gautam is, as Tabassum is – and these swirling undercurrents add resonances to a story that, on the surface, is just a crime drama, a police procedural enacted by an ordinary man. There’s a lot of sadness in this film. Not the superficial kind, where we see actors weep, but the kind that suggests deep wounds left behind by life. The story is set in motion by events surrounding John Day’s daughter, and she seems a normal, well-adjusted kid who adores her father, but later – almost casually – we’re made aware of the dysfunction in this relationship, and it’s hard not to think the about inadvertent cruelties parents inflict on children. That’s harder to take, sometimes, than outright bloodletting.

Copyright ©2013 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

In a village that’s beyond idyllic, Savitri (Padmini Kolhapure) – who’s beyond virtuous – dreams of making her son Vishwas (played as a grown-up by Shahid Kapoor) an honest policeman. Vishwas, however, dreams of becoming a movie star, a hero. In school, a teacher tells the class that the Himalayas lie to the north of the country, and when he asks Vishwas what’s in the south, the boy says Rajinikanth. He loves his mother, but he cannot see why he should grow up to be a cop when, in the movies, he can be a cop as well as an engineer, as well as a don… The lies, at first, are small. He goes to a police recruitment camp and pretends to be physically unfit. But then he goes to Bombay, where virtue won’t get you a square meal, and he’s forced to confront situations that demand bigger compromises on his soul.

Taken one way, this is the stuff of drama. Taken Rajkumar Santoshi’s way, this is high comedy. Santoshi seems to be in a happy place now. Phata Poster Nikhla Hero harks back to Andaz Apna Apna with a snatch of Yeh raat aur yeh doori (playing on the radio) and with a gag fashioned around Salman Khan (the punch line, involving Aamir Khan, is killer) – but this film is, in essence, a sequel in spirit to Ajab Prem Ki Ghazab Kahani. (We first see Shahid Kapoor as he gives a demo of this film’s title, smashing through a poster of Ajab Prem…) The expected slapsticky ingredients are there – outrageous 007-style gadgets; a bubble-gum chewing villain (Saurabh Shukla), with a henchman named RDX and a boss who calls himself Napoleon – and all of it is animated by a Tom-and-Jerry score. But what sets these films apart is a real sweetness, an innocence – there’s nothing cynical or calculated.

It’s the innocence of a long-ago India, a long-ago Bollywood. (People say things like “Log aag baboola ho jaayenge.”) I cannot think of another filmmaker, in these times, who will develop the character of the hero’s mother on par with the heroine (Kajal, played by Ileana D’Cruz). The roothna-manana song plays out not between Vishwas and Kajal, but between Vishwas and his mother, and when he’s caught in his lies, we waste no time on scenarios involving a hurt and angry Kajal – it’s Savitri’s hurt and anger that matter. And that’s because the older films always revolved around a strong moral core. Even the silliest of them was keenly attuned to the sense of right and wrong, a life conducted in deference to a higher power. (When Vishwas’s name appears in the papers, Savitri finds out about it through someone who stumbled into the news item when he went to the temple.)

There’s a reason Vishwas’s early life in Bombay is so devoid of struggle. He instantly finds a place to stay. He instantly finds a mentor in a failed writer (a hilarious Sanjay Mishra). He instantly gets to audition for a hotshot director (Tinnu Anand) and gets selected. It’s like a fairy tale. And that’s because the real struggle lies ahead, in acquiring that moral lesson, doing right by his mother and by the conventions of once-upon-a-time Hindi cinema. Of course, all this narrative detailing, all this conceptual heaviness, is carefully tucked away behind a scrim of silliness – and the film’s first half is a joy. There’s a sense of Shammi Kapoor – Vishwas, at a nightclub, is threatened by a gun; his legs begin to wobble; this transforms into a dance and, then, a fight – as well as the lost-and-found capers of Manmohan Desai, whose films were filled with heroes going astray and being drawn back to the moral core of the mother.

I was especially taken by the brilliant Tu mere agal bagal hai song sequence, which doesn’t just burst out of nowhere – as songs do these days – but is set up organically, in a way that the glamorous picturisation has a context. When Vishwas falls for Kajal, his mentor warns him that she’s one of those snooty high-society types who’ll set her dog on him – and the song positions Vishwas and assorted blue-collar types (dhobis, Koli fishermen, road-construction workers) around Kajal and her rich friends. The other songs, though, with the exception of the song about the mother, belong in another movie. They’re the kind where the leads in couture clothes pose artily in desolate surroundings, as if Antonioni had overseen a Vogue cover shoot.  The action sequences, too, with their exaggerated wire-fu stunts, aren’t from the world of this movie. They’re too modern. But Shahid Kapoor holds it all together – his high-energy performance powers the story past these pitfalls.

But something strange happens in the second half. It’s meant to be as funny as what came before, but a development involving slain cops kills the mood – it’s like biting into a lemon in the midst of a dessert course – and the film never recovers. Also, it’s never a good idea, in such films, to have very high stakes when it comes to the villain’s plans. We don’t want to be faced with the prospect of millions dying. That’s too much real life to take in the midst of all this blithe artifice, unfolding someplace that exists only in the movies. Santoshi tries to make it fun. Stopping the deadly device doesn’t involve codes or passwords or red-wire-blue-wire confusion – there are just two giant buttons to activate and deactivate the thing. But this isn’t enough. The film slips into a strange zone, somewhere between earnest masala (Savitri’s tears, and so forth) and a deliberate deflation of those earnest masalas (Kajal conspiring to help Vishwas).

Still, I’ll be happy to see Santoshi continue in this vein. We see so many comedies done so sloppily that it’s a pleasure to see one made by a real filmmaker, who takes all this very seriously.  Despite some unfortunate choices, Phata Poster Nikhla Hero isn’t a lazy movie. Behind the laughs, there’s always something deeper – if not a spot-the-film-reference challenge, then a solid rooting of the film’s themes, like the fact that Vishwas wants to become a hero and is confronted with various types of actors, including a hammy friend who just may be the funniest priest in recent times. Vishwas puts on a performance in front of his mother, the villains, a police chief – and key events are even replayed on a television set, reinforcing the sense of being up there on the screen. A scene at a shooting spot seems a one-off, until we see it being paralleled in a flashback, life imitating movies imitating life imitating movies… Does a comedy need all this? Probably not. We really only care about the laughs. But what Santoshi’s making aren’t just comedies. They’re reverential homage. They’re tongue-in-cheek throwback. They’re a love letter to the movies. They’re utterly one-of-a-kind.

Copyright ©2013 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

And once again, the marketing misleads us. The trailer for The Lunchbox pretty much gives away the story, which is about Ila (the superb Nimrat Kaur) and Saajan Fernandes (Irrfan Khan) exchanging notes through the lunch dabbas she packs for him and falling in love. Watching the cutesy clips in the coming-attractions segment, I was led to expect a heartwarming and lightweight rom-com, like You’ve Got Mail or its marvellous inspiration, The Shop Around the Corner. After all, the surface is all gooey and rom-commy. There’s that premise, first, about two lonely people finding companionship. Ila’s neighbour, Deshpande Aunty,  is the BFF character, doing double-duty as fairy godmother. Her cooking tips enhance Ila’s efforts to impress her husband (Nakul Vaid) who stares at the TV during dinner. (The much older Saajan, during dinner, prefers to read a book.) And there’s the whole arc about the curmudgeon finding love and beginning to love life again. As his relationship with Ila blossoms, Saajan gives up smoking, learns to tolerate the bratty neighbourhood kids, and invites a colleague (Shaikh, played by Nawazuddin Siddiqui) to share his lunch. With all this, The Lunchbox does seem to be the film the trailer promised.

But the director Ritesh Batra is after something else altogether – and it’s not just in the way he shoots, with long takes, without much cutting, leaving the actors free to enter and exit the frames. (A rom-com would never tolerate such “naturalism.”) Saajan – who’s a little too cutely named – is a widower. Ila’s husband, on the other hand, might as well be dead. He barely notices that his wife can still fit into the clothes she wore during her honeymoon. Saajan’s days are filled in crammed buses and trains, and in an office whose ordinariness is crushing. (There are no computers; just files everywhere.) Ila cooks, cleans, washes clothes – the ordinariness, the routine, of her life is equally crushing. Saajan has no friends. He has his lunch all by himself. Even the colleague beside him doesn’t seem to speak to him. Ila’s only friend appears to be the much older Deshpande Aunty, who lives upstairs and who never comes down. She’s just a voice. These are sad lives, and the communication between Saajan and Ila reveals itself to be equally sad. They’re so desperate to talk to someone, anyone, and they settle for scribbling stray thoughts into a note folded into a lunch dabba. Saajan says, “I think we forget things if we have no one to tell them to.” This is what the film is about. Try selling that in a trailer.

The Lunchbox is a fascinating mix of fact and fiction, documentary-like realism and flights of poetic whimsy. As the film opens, we see life-as-is, in and around Mumbai’s train stations – trains rolling in, passengers clogging the platform, little boys polishing the shoes of office-goers, and, most relevantly to this story, the full circle of the dabbawala’s day, from picking up lunch at home to loading it on a train to delivering it at the office, where a peon makes sure that the dabbas reach the right person. (That, despite this, Ila’s dabba ends up with Saajan instead of her husband is one of the conceits – or contrivances – we have to take for granted. When her husband tells Ila that the aloo gobi was good, when she made something else, wouldn’t she express instant surprise or shock? Wouldn’t she tell him, “What do you mean… aloo gobi?” But then, there would be no movie.) Batra takes us into the trains, where we see people singing devotional songs and chopping vegetables and offering their seats to older-looking men. The relationship between Ila and Deshpande Aunty, with them shouting to each other, is recognizably prosaic and middle-class. And the scenes in Saajan’s office leave us in little doubt about what it must be like in there (and what it must have been like for him to spend 35 years in there).

The romance is set against this realistic core. This isn’t just the romance between Saajan and Ila, but also the romance in the language in their letters, the romanticizing – if you will – of their loneliness. She writes in Hindi. He writes in starched English. (With Shaikh, though, he speaks in Hindi.) At first, his letters are as out-of-sync with social norms and graces as he is (and is there anyone better than Irrfan Khan at portraying alienation?) – he tells her, bluntly, that the food was too salty, and another time he says the food was so spicy that he had to have two bananas, which are “good for motions.” But gradually, he remembers what it’s like to talk to someone, and he hits his stride. In one profoundly moving letter, he writes about a man who paints the same thing every time, but in every painting, there’s just a little bit that’s different. He could be talking about his life.

Ila’s letters are equally evocative. And Batra does something magical here, literally. When Ila writes about a ceiling fan that stopped when the power went off, Saajan looks up at the fan over him, and it stops. The other fans in the office are on. Is this… magic? Magical realism? Is this part of the same cosmic conspiracy that caused her dabba to land up at his desk? This becomes a motif. Ila and Saajan may be separated by distance, but – like in the scene with that fan – his life spills over into hers, and hers into his. Urchins on his train sing Pardesi pardesi jaana nahin and Mera dil bhi kitna paagal hai – the songs are carefully chosen; they’re both strangers, pardesis, and the latter song is from a film that has his name as its title – and she hears these songs playing on Deshpande Aunty’s tape recorder. He waves at what appears to be a fly in front of his face, and she, at home, repeats this action. He’s stalled in traffic because a woman jumped off a terrace, and she hears this news on the radio. She finds her grandma’s recipes in a dairy, and he finds his wife’s old videocassettes, with recordings of old TV shows. And they both find themselves with a line that states that, sometimes, the wrong train can help you reach the right destination.

Saajan hears this line from Shaikh, a smarmy young go-getter who’s going to replace him when he retires in a month – and, slowly, The Lunchbox becomes the story of two relationships. The first, of course, is the one between Saajan and Ila, and the second, between Saajan and Shaikh, is more affecting because it’s less sentimental and manipulative (even if this manipulation, in the case of Saajan and Ila, is done very classily). At first, Saajan seems to resent Shaikh, who’s everything he’s not. Saajan is punctual, disciplined, courteous, aloof – Shaikh is the opposite. But gradually, as we learn more about Shaikh, we warm to him, as Saajan does. (It helps that Siddiqui, with apparent effortlessness, delivers the film’s best performance. Khan is excellent, but he’s begun to effect a bit of Meryl Streepish fussiness in his acting. We sometimes catch him “acting.”) Shaikh knows as much about loneliness as Saajan or Ila, for he grew up an orphan. And we see that that blustery, over-obsequious self he presents to people is probably something he’s developed over time, to get along with people. He gets the film’s best arc, transforming from an annoying little fool (at least in our eyes) to a man who ends up with some much-deserved happiness, even if it comes with a scooter plastered with roses.

The missteps are few. Some of the poetry is a tad too precious. People can’t be writing and speaking like this all the time. A bit about Bhutan didn’t work for me at all, and a scene with Ila’s mother (a miscast Lillete Dubey), after her husband’s death, rings false. It’s wonderful when she says, at first, that she’s hungry and she craves parathas. It’s such a naturally odd response to a tragedy. But then she states that this is such an odd response to a tragedy, spelling out what we have already registered. The character comes across far better in her only other scene, a ruthlessly practical scene (with no poetry), where she slyly hints to Ila that she’s going to need money for her husband’s monthly medical expenses. The shifting dynamics are pitch perfect. First Ila keeps offering money, and her mother keeps refusing (while sighing melodramatically that had her son been alive, this conversation wouldn’t have been necessary), but then, when the mother accepts the offer, Ila is dumbfounded, as if she realises she’s been played.

These other characters breathe some much-needed air into the central romance, which, after a point, could have become a little claustrophobic. I wish something more had been done about Ila’s suspicion that her husband is having an affair. As with the revelation that he enjoyed her “aloo gobi,” here too she doesn’t seem to react much at all. But the biggest misstep is the end, which should have come after the scene at the restaurant where Ila and Saajan plan to meet. We see what she does. We see what he does. That’s all that’s needed to close this story (with a lovely line about letting one into your dreams) – but Batra, suddenly, seems to want to live up to that trailer, and we get all rom-commy again, with missed connections and what not. Except, it’s all quite sad, and this delicate film cannot bear the weight of these labored contrivances. For a second, my heart stopped, thinking there was going to be one of those railway-station climaxes. Thankfully, no. Then again, that could have been the movie the trailer promised.

Copyright ©2013 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

And the law of averages catches up with Ranbir Kapoor. In Abhinav Kashyap’s Besharam, he plays a car thief named Babli, though what he’s really playing is another iteration of the character that appears to be defining him on screen. At the beginning of the film, we see Babli making off with a car – he’s accosted by cops and he doesn’t sweat it. He bobs his head like a character in a Saturday Night Live sketch, and later, when he glimpses a gun, he picks it up and begins to shoot, oblivious to the moral implications, the consequences of what he’s doing. It all seems to be a game, like the football he plays with kids in the orphanage he was raised in. Like Sid and Kabir, the characters Kapoor played in Wake Up Sid and Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani, Babli needs to wake up – and this will be achieved, as in those films, when he falls in love with a woman who’s also a grown-up.

The little twist in the character is that Babli is completely obnoxious – or as the title refers to him, he’s shameless. In a running gag, various women – and it’s always women, a neighbour in a terrace, a lady at a birthday celebration, the heroine (Tara, played by Pallavi Sharda) – keep calling him besharam, and he is shameless, the kind of chap who brings a flower for the girl he’s fallen for and, when she refuses it, gives it to her mother, saying it’s for her. Babli comes off worse when we look at him through Tara’s eyes. When he suggests going on a road trip, she asks her mother, “What if he rapes me?” This question, it is safe to say, has never occurred to a Hindi-film heroine, and it is to Kapoor’s credit that he plays this creepy and disgusting character with great gusto and physical energy. (Truth be told, he’s too much of a chocolate boy, too wholesome and endearing a hero, to make us think he’s really creepy and disgusting, but then who’s going to fund this film with an ordinary-looking hero, who looks like he may actually rape the heroine?)

And it is to Kashyap’s credit that, at least in the early portions, he allows his film to get as creepy and disgusting – in a humorous manner, because, of course, Babli is essentially a child – as its protagonist. Babli, half asleep, rams his morning wood into the hip of his roommate (Titu, played by Amitosh Nagpal). He stuffs Titu’s sock into his crotch, for “padding,” so he can make a better impression on women. His declaration of love to Tara incorporates a vasectomy scenario. He even participates in an utterly gratuitous shower scene where he keeps giving the audience glimpses of his arse crack. The most shameless scene in the film, however, belongs to Inspector Chulbul Chautala (Rishi Kapoor) – he’s married to Head Constable Bulbul Chautala (a screechy Neetu Singh) – whose relief from constipation is documented with near-scientific rigour. We hear not only the rrrip,  but also the plop.

At some point, I began to think that this is how I’d describe Besharam to someone: “Imagine Mr. India transformed into a road movie while Anil Kapoor kept adjusting his crotch!” It isn’t a stretch to spot the Mogambo-lite villain, played by Javed Jaffrey, who follows his forebear’s footsteps, terrorizing all those little orphan children. And you can round off the similarities with a Calendar-like sidekick in Titu, and a career-minded heroine who hates the hero (before falling for him). This film, too, embraces slapstick with fervor. The action sequences are as likely to feature fearsome rocket launchers as a portly old man who simply takes a deep breath and blows the villains away. And a chase, mid-way, transforms into a love story – between dogs, as Tujhe dekha to yeh jaana sanam plays on the soundtrack. (And so that things don’t get too cutesy, we still stick to the “shameless” agenda when Babli pees all over the memory of that number. He literally relieves himself in a mustard field, filled with all those pretty yellow flowers, while singing that song.)

But while all this sounds great on paper, something goes wrong in the transition to screen, starting with the songs. Kashyap proves, once again after Dabangg, that he loves the old-time song situations. There’s the establish-the-hero song. There’s the hero-and-heroine-face-off-at-a-wedding song. There’s the whole-neighbourhood-joins-the-hero-as-he-expresses-his love song. There’s the heroine-sees-the-hero-for-who-he-really-is-and-falls-for-him song. There’s even a mela song. But not a single tune (from Lalit Pandit) stands out, and these generically filmed music videos become exhausting to sit through. And the all-crucial relationship between Tara and Babli just isn’t convincing. (One of the film’s too-clever conceits is to pair this besharam with a woman whose last name is Sharma.) The actors strike no sparks together, and without that, we never see why such a class-conscious woman would fall for this slob, especially after what he puts her (and her brand new Mercedes-Benz) through.

The scene where she begins to fall for him is especially galling because the film stops being shameless, starts being sentimental. Suddenly, we have Babli tearing up, clasping his hands, and asking her to give him a chance. This is the problem when you cast big-name heroes in these parts – you can never let your movie be as shameless as it should be. The other mistake is casting this hero’s real-life parents – that’s a gimmick that might have worked in a more conventional film, one whose hero was an adorable orphan, but here, with this abrasive orphan, it blunts the edge. Besides, when you cast all these Kapoors, you have to milk it for all it’s worth. (It’s like how Sanjay Leela Bhansali had to feature a dance number with both Aishwarya Rai and Madhuri Dixit in Devdas.) And Kashyap can’t resist tipping a hat in salute to the Kapoors. Rishi Kapoor’s fuddy-duddy nature is acknowledged through a hit from Sangam. Ranbir Kapoor’s vehicle is named Rockstar. Rishi Kapoor dances to a song from Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani. Maybe all this on-screen masturbation is just one more manifestation of this film’s shamelessness.

Copyright ©2013 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

When a crusader’s life is distilled to its bullet-point core – owing to the inevitable considerations of running time in cinema – we are often left with insufferable idealists. It’s almost always too much one-note saintliness to take over the course of a couple of hours. We want to hang a halo on these noble souls, but we don’t want to sit through movies about them, their every good deed underlined by stirring violins. Hansal Mehta’s Shahid – note how the name, by sheer coincidence, sounds like shaheed, martyr – gets around this problem with a terrific piece of casting. Raj Kumar Yadav has the bearing of an enthusiastic schoolboy, and when he smiles, his face contorts with unbounded glee, as if he just got a gold star from a teacher. And this boy-scout earnestness livens up the character of Shahid Azim, the lawyer and human rights activist who was assassinated in 2010. We’re not seeing, as we usually do, a film about a man who has dedicated his life to fighting injustice, but one about a kid who’s just begun to dedicate his life to fighting injustice. This clears the cobwebs from the saga-of-a-great-man clichés and makes all the difference.

And Shahid is really just a kid when the film begins. He’s studying hard for his second-year college exams, when he is arrested and thrown into jail because he spent some time – post the 1992-93 Mumbai riots – training to be a militant in Kashmir. (This part of his life isn’t explained very clearly.) And behind bars, Shahid undergoes a different kind of schooling. Most crucially, he learns that if you want to change the system, you have to be a part of it. And so he studies to become a lawyer, a part of the legal system, and after being released, he sets up a small practice devoted wholly to helping people like him, ordinary citizens who were plucked off the streets and locked up simply because – as he puts it – their names happened to be Zahir or Faheem and not Matthew or Donald or Suresh. He wants to help those who cannot help themselves, and those who cannot help belonging to a minority community that, as a fellow-prisoner observes, “no one gives a shit about in this country.” He begins to defend the accused in a series of terror attacks in Mumbai, courting the derisive nickname “jihaadiyon ka Gandhi.”

Are his clients really innocent? Mehta, daringly, puts this question into the mouth of a prisoner, who asks Shahid, “Do you think I’m a terrorist?” But the film doesn’t attempt an answer. And it doesn’t need to. We see things from Shahid’s point of view, and because he sees these men as innocents, we do too. A journalist asks him why he’s doing what he’s doing, and instead of having Shahid respond, the film cuts to a scene where Shahid is orchestrating the meeting of one of his clients with his little girl. At another point, Shahid goes to the house of another client and spends time with his aged father and newborn son. One may argue that, with the exception of characters like Ramanathan (Shahid’s friend and colleague), the Hindus here are mainly uncouth cops or unreliable witnesses or unfeeling prosecution lawyers or else part of a lynch mob setting Muslims on fire, while the Muslims – mostly – are loving family men. But Mehta doesn’t seem to be after political correctness so much as emotional affect. Shahid isn’t a polemic but – in the tradition of our cinema – a deeply humanistic drama. The film makes us think, but more often, it makes us feel.

We feel for Shahid’s brother Arif (Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub), who’s sick of being the go-to guy for his family, when he wants to branch off and lead his own life. We feel for Shahid’s wife Mariam (Prabhleen Sandhu), who wants a husband who’ll be at home in time for dinner and who will notice that their son has been running a fever for a week. In one of the film’s best exchanges, after she asks him to give up a case, he reminds her that she advised him, once, to soldier on. She replies that he wasn’t her husband then. The simplicity of this admission strips away any hint of selfishness. And we feel for Shahid, who sets about the impossible task of doing right by everyone. He wants to free his clients, whom he appears to treat like family. And he wants to prove to his mother (Baljinder Kaur) that the woman he’s married is a burqa-wearing conservative. (Mariam isn’t – and another way the Muslims in this film differ from the stereotypes we usually see is that they don’t speak as if auditioning for bit parts in Pakeezah; they slip casually into a mix of Hindi, Urdu and English.)

The casting is excellent – a special nod to Kay Kay Menon, who does wonders with a cameo role – and the actors are aided by a screenplay that does something near-miraculous. Mehta loads his narrative with hoary staples from the Bollywood Screenwriter’s Manual – a shy romance, comic interludes, threats over the phone, courtroom theatrics, saas-bahu friction, motherly love, marital tensions – and, one by one, he makes these tropes seem newly minted.  The scenes in court, in our films, are usually presented as high-powered games of tennis, the ball being whacked back and forth – in turn – between grunting opponents, but here, it’s like kabaddi. Everything seems to be happening at once. The judge asks the accused questions of his own and walks out while the prosecution and defense lawyers are still bickering, with overlapping dialogue that makes it impossible to follow any argument completely.

This, we feel, is what it must really be like, and this impression is furthered by the film’s unobtrusive technique (save a few fussy fade-outs at the end) – the hand-held camera, the natural lighting, and the reliance on ambient sound instead of a background score (which is mostly minimal). Shahid feels real, and Mehta, to his credit, doesn’t force-fit Azmi’s story into the arc of an all-encompassing biopic, which might have made the film look dramatic and too obviously shaped. It settles for being an impressionistic portrait of a man trying to find himself and his place in the world. And we see that he never quite did. When Shahid works for someone else, he wears a tie (no one else in the firm seems to be wearing one), but when he establishes his own law practice, he loses the tie. We think he finally knows who he is. We think he’s learnt to be his own person. And then we get the scene where the prosecution lawyer all but accuses him of being a terrorist. Shahid loses his composure and exposes himself to the extent that he seems as shocked as we are at discovering how much it still hurts, how much easier it would be if he were Matthew or Donald or Suresh.

An edited version of this piece can be found here.

Copyright ©2013 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.