For a while, there is the indication that Anthony D’Souza’s Boss will shape up to be a solid masala outing. There’s a sense of bigness at the beginning, a reference to the events being played out on the hallowed ground of Kurukshetra, and this is followed by a stretch that combines emotion and action and a hint of mystery. An attack on the life of Big Boss (Danny Denzongpa) is foiled by a youngster who happens to be at the scene. When Big Boss asks the boy his name, he simply says, “Bhoolna chahoonga,” that he wants to forget his roots. The buildup to the hero’s entry is pretty good too. After this scene that introduces Big Boss to us, we get the scene where we meet the hero’s father (Mithun Chakraborty), who’s first seen under a portrait of Gandhi and who wears Gandhi glasses, and in case we’re still not clued into this man’s goodness, we hear his name: Satyakant. Then we meet Shiva (Shiv Pandit), the hero’s younger brother. Then we meet the villain, Inspector Ayushman Thakur (Ronit Roy). And only then does Surya (Akshay Kumar) make his appearance, in an action-comedy scene where he brings along his own music and cheerleaders.

Boss is adapted from the Malayalam hit Pokkiri Raja, whose reviews were mostly condescending – but writing for a masala movie is not easy. The must-haves are many, the scope to be different very little, and yet, if you do the same thing, you’ll be accused of having no imagination. And Boss has some good bits. There’s a flashback with a solid punch line. There’s an interesting father-son clash, with the father having to hire the older son’s services to save the younger one. There’s a funny action scene whose lines are inscribed on Surya’s torso. And there are at least two well-choreographed action sequences, the first a parkour-styled chase through high and low, and the second, a series of surreptitious moves by the sons to save their father. (So many crotches are maimed that entire generations of villainy appear to have been wiped out.)

You could even point to some unintentional comedy. Shiva says he met Ankita (Aditi Rao Hydari) at a cultural fest, where he was smitten by her eyes, and the next scene has her rising from a pool in a two-piece bikini – the audience for this movie is certainly not going to be looking at those eyes. Funnier still is the choice of love song for this duo, a rehash of the Jaanbaaz hit, Har kisiko nahin milta. (There’s another rehash, from Ghilli’s Appidi podu.) It’s a wistful song about the difficulty in finding love, and it’s strange that these two are striking poses to it – but given Ankita’s wardrobe (or lack of it), few people will be wondering about such inconsistencies. But this is nothing when compared to Satyakant’s apparent indestructibility. He survives a collision with a truck with just a plaster on his forehead.

The problem with Boss is that after the initial promise, it falls flat. D’Souza wants to keep things lighthearted, but this is not the tone you take when you begin your film with a reference to Kurukshetra and when, at the end, the hero is exhorted to become a warrior out of myth. (“Arjun ka roop dhaaran karna hai tujhe aaj…”) This sort of premise needs a lot of thunder and lightning, and without that, there’s nothing. There’s no juice in the drama – the events surrounding a rape accusation, or Ankita’s renunciation of her brother (she is, of course, the villain’s sister) – and given the weightlessness of the proceedings, the villain’s villainy (he’s the kind who’ll give a loaded gun to a bothersome child) is ridiculously overwrought. Akshay Kumar does what he can to keep things afloat, taking care of the action and the drama and the comedy, but unless you’re Amitabh Bachchan, these one-man circus shows are never a good idea.

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

The best cybercrime films play on our paranoia of a world in which our net-bound lives are constantly in peril. Any kid with talent can hack in and walk away with our secrets, our money, our very existence. The stakes can’t get higher. And Hollywood does this sort of thriller eyes closed – because all you need, really, is jangling music, an editor who can cut up the images in sync, an imaginative action choreographer, and finally, a plot that, even if it doesn’t bear close scrutiny, keeps pulling the rug from under our feet. The trick is to convey a sense of breathlessness, and Saurabh Varma’s Mickey Virus manages this only in spurts. A lot of the first half is frittered away in a conventional romance (between Elli Avram and Manish Paul, the protagonist who’s the “hacking ki duniya ka Sehwag”). Maybe these stories should steer clear from song-and-dance mush. Or maybe, one day, a filmmaker will show how these stories can be made with all the must-haves of commercial cinema and still be nail-biting. The second half is slightly better – the film surprised me with the death of a major character. Thereon, we have twists and turns, though none more astonishing than the hero setting eyes on the Maxim-cover-worthy heroine while she’s shopping for tomatoes in a vegetable market. Then again, as I said, these plots don’t bear close scrutiny…

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

All filmmakers make pacts with the devil to ease production costs. A Bond movie, say, will show M cracking open her laptop at an angle that highlights the fluorescent apple. But no one – no one – is as conscientious about product placement as Rakesh Roshan. He may shortchange his audience with regard to plotting and pacing, most of which is shockingly lazy, but to his business partners he is the very soul of integrity. Early on in Krrish 3, we have a frame whose star isn’t Hrithik Roshan but a bottle of Bournvita – it isn’t a blur in a corner, caught in the eye of a camera moving past, but part of the very, uh, mise en scène. Hrithik, playing the childlike scientist Rohit Mehra, eyes the bottle, and then gets distracted by the effort of hatching a Big Idea, and then, as if rewarding himself for his genius, he treats himself to his favourite malted drink. The scene looks like it belongs not so much in a thrilling superhero saga as a commercial for the brain-boosting powers of Bournvita.

Alas, there is little truth in advertising – for Krrish 3 shows no signs of heightened (or indeed, any) brain activity. This is a big dumb movie without the trashy thrills that we sometimes get from big dumb movies. There’s a sweet, silly scene where Rohit Mehra asks his son Krishna (the alter ego of the superhero Krrish) to fix a punctured tyre, and the camera stays on Rohit and Krishna’s wife (Priyanka Chopra) inside the car as it tilts up (while Krishna fixes the puncture) and then comes down. We don’t see Krishna, we don’t see the superhero stuff – just its effects on others who’ve lived around these superpowers for so long that they now take it for granted. Given Roshan Sr.’s penchant for overstatement, this is a surprisingly offhand moment. There’s another good bit when the villain (Kaal, played by Vivek Oberoi) flicks a wrist and surrounds himself with television cameras. This is exactly the sort of goofiness we come to these movies for.

But Roshan doesn’t do goofy – he wants grandeur, mythical grandeur. So when an airplane gets into trouble, a little boy inside pleads, “God, please help us” – and lo, Krishna himself appears. Only, this avatar answers to Krrish. Roshan plays up this conceit constantly. The villain, who plans to unleash a deadly virus on mankind, is torn between India and China, the two countries whose huge populations will ensure maximum havoc, and he picks India because we have… more gods. In the end, a resplendent Rohit assumes something of a vishwaroop and paraphrases the part from the Gita about the atma being eternal. Meanwhile, the city of Mumbai celebrates its Saviour by erecting a mammoth statue and singing God Allah aur bhagwan ne banaya ek insaan…

But Roshan doesn’t think these conceits through. When the virus finally strikes, a little girl dies in Krrish’s arms and others wail around him asking for help. Krrish finds out, in the most horrible manner possible, that despite his powers he isn’t God and he cannot save everyone – you’d think this somber realisation would occasion some finely wrought dialogue, but Roshan doesn’t address this at all. All the lines are flat, expository. The characters speak as if making presentations to especially stupid people, and the situations they find themselves in aren’t much better. We get a mutant with a tongue that flicks out like a whip, and he’s born in a supposedly dread-evoking scene where he’s coated in green jelly – and then Roshan stages a sequence where Tongue Man uses his special appendage to lick the ice cream off the cones in the hands of a number of people. How, after this, can we take this creature seriously?

How, for that matter can we take Krrish seriously? His shiny hair waves as if in a shampoo commercial, and the costume – a cross between a trench coat and an Anarkali suit – leaves us wondering what he’s going to do next, flash women in the subway or break into a kathak recital. And those creepy-looking muscles in his [insert number here]-pack… I fear the day may not be too far when an overachieving hero shows up on screen in a hundred-pack, stripping off to reveal a torso studded with flesh-coloured chiclets. And the acting is equally fussy. Hrithik, at this stage, seems incapable of playing an emotional scene without his eyes pooling with tears, and when he clenches up and speaks, a hole appears at the base of his throat that a curious kid may want to stick his finger into. Why all this huffing and puffing in a movie targeted at children?

The simplest dialogue, thus, comes off sounding like a florid aria. In an early scene (involving a Flair pen-cum prism), Rohit tells Krishna that his experiment needs the sun. It’s night, so they wait – and then, when the sun comes up, Krishna looks at the sky and says “Papa… suraj” with such tremulous awe that you think he was some kind of cave creature who has set eyes, for the first time, on this fiery orb in the heavens. There’s a halfway decent idea involving a mutant played by Kangna Ranaut (the only one who delivers something of a performance), but instead of going somewhere really interesting with this, we get a drag of a duet shot in a leftover locale from Kites. The villain’s identity, too, is a nice touch, but by then we have been sitting through a narrative that’s so drawn-out, so leaden and so derivative (the X-Men characters have been borrowed wholesale) that it’s too little, too late. Besides, who’s going to sit seriously through a climactic showdown where superhero and supervillain clash in front of a Bollywood Hungama banner?

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

Watching Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Goliyon Ki Rasleela Ram-Leela, I felt that Ranveer Singh should have played the protagonist of Besharam. He wears disreputability like a second skin, and he doesn’t play cute and ask us to love him back. He’s… shameless. In an early scene, when he begins to scale up a tree outside the home of the rival-clan girl he’s just fallen in love with (she’s Leela, and she’s played by a spirited Deepika Padukone), his friends warn him that he could end up in the wrong room. “Galat kamra ho to kya ho sakta hai?” And he grins (it’s a leer, really) and says, “Sahi kamra ho to kya kya ho sakta hai.” He’s a womaniser and he hints at what he could end up doing if it’s the right room. In a touch that’s completely in line with his character, he runs a porn-video store, and women letch openly after the impressively muscled body he flaunts at them.

As good as Ranveer is at playing this character as a physical presence, he’s even better at playing this character as per the purplish requirements of a Bhansali movie. He’s terrific while executing the hyper-expressive choreography in the Tattad tattad song sequence, which fetishises him as much as the towel song fetishised Ranbir Kapoor in Saawariya, and in the emotional scenes, his face seems to be pulling apart in some five different directions, as if he were constantly holding back something on the verge of spilling out. As we know well by now, what an actor does in a Bhansali movie is as much performance as performance art – Ram’s dance-like depiction of his might, say, by flexing his arms with a hint of pride on his face – and it fits right into a movie that opens with a group of women walking into a pointed gateway that resembles a proscenium arch.

From there, it’s just a small leap to the unshed tears that always fill the eyes of Ram and Leela, the fevered couplets through which Leela replies to her sister-in-law’s (Richa Chadda) questions, and the unkempt, matted hair on the dancers in the Nagada sang dhol song sequence. The music videos are usually where Bhansali is at his most Bhansaliesque, and some of the picturisations here are exquisite – the choreography in Lahu munh lag gaya, for instance, where the blood alluded to in the lines is represented through gulaal powder, which Leela steals from Ram’s lips. But this song is also reminiscent of Aankhon ki gustakhiyan from Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam, and we come to the major problem with Ram-Leela. Apart from a few stretches, it feels like derivative Bhansali, the work of a disciple who knows the method but lacks the madness that afflicted every frame of Devdas and Saawariya.

The memorably hermetic worlds of those films are opened out here, a little, and this milieu feels generic. We’ve seen these rich colours before in Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (which was also set in Gujarat), and we’ve heard these bhavai-styled intonations there. The difference is that this is a world filled with guns – they are amusingly displayed in stores, like plastic toys or handbags – and this reminds us of the films of Vishal Bhardwaj and Anurag Kashyap. Even the story feels second-hand. The film begins with an entirely unnecessary title card that says it is inspired by Romeo and Juliet, and while there are nods to the play – the invocation of the “rose by any other name” speech; the meet-cute at the girl’s home (during Holi festivities, as in Issaq, that other recent Romeo and Juliet adaptation); a near-rape that harks back to West Side Story (which, similarly, made a dance drama out of Romeo and Juliet) – the happenings are commonplace enough that they could have come from any Bollywood movie of the past fifty years.

Still, there’s enough to keep us mildly diverted for a while – some beautifully crafted lines (one of which includes one of Bhansali’s favourite words, gharoor, arrogance), some amiable comedy (involving an NRI suitor for Leela), the sensual imagery in Ang laga de re (the film’s best song, where Leela entices Ram with incense billowing from her palm), and a lot of rowdy energy, notably in a scene where rival parties take shots at the bottles of beer in each other’s hands. But a little before the halfway mark, the film begins to diverge from the Romeo and Juliet template, and the characters undergo such drastic transformations that I, for one, found it very difficult to wrap my head (or heart) around the remainder of the narrative. (The shock of seeing the badly placed songs, Ishqyaun dhishqyaun and, later, the item number with Priyanka Chopra, doesn’t help. The lovely Laal ishq, on the other hand, is chopped up into bits.)

Leela, at first, is as aggressive (one might say tempestuous; also, drop-dead gorgeous) as Paro in Devdas. (And her passionate scribbles of Ram’s name on her mirrors – in a Bhansali movie, there’s never just a mirror; it’s always mirrors – remind us of the torch Paro carried for Devdas in the form of an always-lit lamp.) During the Holi meet-cute, Ram comes with a water pistol, but Leela has a real gun in her hands. After they fall in love, he asks her what she’ll do if he leaves her. She pauses, turns to him and says she’ll blow his brains out. How does she go from here to the woman who, after being burned, touches Ram’s feet? Is it because she’s some sort of Sita archetype? (Other references to the epic come from Ram’s admission of vanvaas, the heroine’s “kidnapping,” and the Raavan-effigy burning during Dussehra.) But then, why does she raise her voice and rebuke him, subsequently, for what he did to her? He changes too – from a bona fide Bhansali lover who slits his wrist to a steely leader (or, like Lord Ram, a “king”) who’s apparently forgotten he has a personal life.

The latter portions are devoted to political drama – and this is a mistake. There’s not enough time, at this late stage, to make these contrivances convincing. Worse, they detract from the love story we’ve been promised and we’ve come to see. (And we’ve come to see Romeo and Juliet, not the Ramayana.) Maybe Bhansali wanted to show, for a change, how love can affect not just the man and woman at the centre but also those in the community around them – but neither aspect registers, and the Bhansali fans among us have to make do with scraps, like the bit where Ram goes to Leela’s home and acknowledges the loss of her blood with a sacrifice of his own, or the one where Leela, in front of her terrifying mother (Supriya Pathak), asks a hapless astrologer how many marriages are in store for her. What happens immediately after is shocking, and of course there’s rain outside. The clouds have to cry.

These are the moments where we get hints of the masochism that drives Bhansali’s best work. We need to see Ram and Leela suffering from self-created torments, and Bhansali, instead, gives us endless gun battles until we stop caring about who gets shot. The film goes on and on, with padded-out (and slo-mo infused) scenes like the one where a woman from Ram’s clan is chased by men from Leela’s, and at some point I began to wish for a rerun of Ishaqzaade, which did a far better job of traversing these terrains. The question remains: Just what has happened to Bhansali after the mauling he received for Saawariya? Guzaarish was limp and bloodless, but at least it felt like the work of a singular creator. Ram-Leela is so generic, it could have been made by anyone with the sense to hire a good cinematographer and art director. After a while, there’s nothing to see except the calligraphy on the curtains and the murals on the walls. Bhansali, earlier, had vision; now he just has visuals.

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

If Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Satyakam were made today, it might look like Singh Saab the Great. Here, Sunny Deol takes on the role his father did in the earlier film, the honest man disillusioned by the nation around him – and he adds some creative touches. When he catches an eve-teaser in action, he pours a bottle of water down the man’s crotch, to cool his ardour, while drawing his attention to the bottle of acid nearby. And despite being a wronged man, he seeks not badla (revenge) but badlaav (change). Some things, though, never change. Hence, in this Anil Sharma movie, a reference to Deol’s 3.5-kilo arm (a cool one-kilo increase from the Damini days), and the scene where the actor stops a speeding car with one outstretched hand. There’s a fine masala moment involving a villain (Prakash Raj) who’s performing a yagna, but we’ve seen the surrounding scenarios too often, and a few nods to Facebook and Twitter apart, Sharma isn’t interested in updating this material. The result is a dull film whose greatness lies only in its title.

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

Imran Khan made a charming debut in Jaane Tu… Ya Jaane Na, but little did we know then that that was all he could do. (Watching him try to stretch in films like Matru Ki Bijlee Ka Mandola and Once Upon Ay Time In Mumbai Dobaara!, I’m reminded of what the critic Leonard Maltin said about Patrick Swayze’s performance in Ghost, that he “runs the gamut of expressions from A to B.”) But what he can do turns out to be enough in Punit Malhotra’s Gori Tere Pyaar Mein, where he plays a Tam-Brahm named Sriram. (Like a true-blue South Indian, he doesn’t shave his chest hair.) The crux of any rom-com is how “opposite” the leads are, and Malhotra lands on a fresh and interesting premise. Sriram is a hedonist, and Diya (Kareena Kapoor Khan) is a bleeding-heart social worker. The film doesn’t judge Sriram, neither does it extol Diya. He sands her edges. He realises (as does the film) that she can be a pill to be around, and only someone as laid back as him can manage this.

For a while, Gori Tere Pyaar Mein is innocuous entertainment. In the film’s best scene, Sriram wonders aloud about their future, as they are so different, and this isn’t just a line – it results in harsh exchanges, prickly truths, drastic consequences. Sriram may be a flake, but at least he’s honest about who he is, unlike Diya, who helps others and then retreats to a life of air-conditioned luxury. This wouldn’t be problem if she weren’t so filled with a sense of her own superiority. Stung by his words, Diya heads to a village in Gujarat to do good. (Even here, she finds that her principles aren’t enough; she needs his street smarts too.) He goes after her, and when he lands up in that village, he begins to sing O Mitwa, the song from Lagaan, which is presumably the closest he’s gotten to the non-shining India. And the film falls apart.

Part of the problem is the shift from rom-com to drama, with a villain (Anupam Kher) opposed to developmental work in the village. Suddenly, there’s a little too much real life for a film as silly as this one (and at nearly two-and-a-half hours, it is too much). Malhotra‘s stabs at symbolism are embarrassing. The bridge between Diya and Sriram is represented as a real bridge over troubled waters, a rickety one that needs to be made concrete. And don’t you know… Sriram happens to be an architect, never mind that he hasn’t spent a day putting his learning to practice. We don’t go to rom-coms expecting cold logic, but even as a heart-tugger Gori Tere Pyaar Mein doesn’t quite cut it. But there are two unexpected moments, one where Sriram looks at Diya (who’s older) and notices a strand of white in her hair, and the second during a song sequence, which features fleshy, makeup-free, ordinary-looking extras from the village. In the normal world, this counts for nothing, but in the Karan Johar universe (he’s the producer), it’s practically The Grapes of Wrath.

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

There are many ways to make masala movies. You can serve them straight up, the way Prabhu Dheva does. Or you can distance yourself and refract the whole thing through a po-mo prism, the way Anurag Kashyap did in his Gangs of Wasseypur diptych. But in Bullett Raja, Tigmanshu Dhulia is after something else altogether. He wants to make a “realistic” masala movie. This put-everything-in-a-blender genre of cinema derives from our myths, and is, therefore, inevitably the stuff of far-out fantasy – but here, Dhulia asks: “What if I rooted my story in the real world, in the midst of real issues? What if I want to stage, say, Haasil, with masala flourishes, making the everyman hero something of a superman?” This is not a bad idea. The masala movie is about the only kind of commercial Hindi cinema that acknowledges the world beyond the cities, and if you can invest that kind of story with the texture, the layers that a director like Dhulia brought to Paan Singh Tomar, then we could have the best of both worlds, a movie that appeals to the audience member who wants only to be entertained as well as the audience member who wants to be entertained sensibly.

The plot of Bullett Raja is pure masala – its narrative motor is revenge. The constituent elements are pure masala too. There’s a 40-plus hero (Raja Mishra, played by Saif Ali Khan) posing as a “young man,” still looking for employment. His family includes a younger sister who exists simply to be harassed by rowdies and thus provide her hero-brother just cause for flexing his muscles. And there’s his friend and sidekick Rudra (Jimmy Shergill) – as he puts it, the “Shashi Kapoor” to his Amitabh Bachchan. And this bromance is compared to the one in Sholay, speaking of which, the leader of a gang of dacoits requests a dance by Bipasha Basu, presumably a Mehbooba-like number. Then there’s the entirely expendable heroine (Mitali, played by Sonakshi Sinha), whose character, for a while, resembles that of Etta Place in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, another bromance that had little use for a “heroine.” More masala reminders come from lines that carry the heft of myth – like the one where a villain says, “Isi roop mein lautenge aur pralay macha denge,” or when Raja says, “Brahman rootha to Raavan” – and from the action scene set around the cyclist going round in circles in a local competition, the way Manoj Kumar did so memorably in Shor, singing Jeevan chalne ka naam.

That’s the era of cinema that’s being referenced here, but there are aspects in Bullett Raja that are quite distant from that era of cinema. At the end of an action scene (nicely choreographed) at a construction site, the workers applaud as the hero bursts out of a pane of glass and walks away. (Along with that glass pane, it’s the fourth wall that’s broken here.) And instead of one extravagantly outsized villain like Gabbar Singh, Dhulia gives us a hierarchy of smaller-sized villains. There’s Lallan Tiwari (Chunky Pandey), who does some fourth-wall-breaking of his own by referring to a “filmi bandook,” the kind of gun in those earlier movies that kept pumping out bullets with no apparent need for reloading. Slightly higher up the ladder is a financier named Bajaj (Gulshan Grover), and above him we have Sumer Yadav (Ravi Kishan, in good form), who isn’t as powerful as Bajaj but commits the more heinous deed. And finally we have the shady politician Ram Babu, played by Raj Babbar. (And no, that’s not a spoiler. There’s no such thing as a “good politician” in these movies.)

New, too, is the label affixed to Raja and Rudra (even these names seem on the verge of making love) when they begin to carry out henchman-like assignments for Ram Babu. They’re not gundas, but “political commandos.” And the revenge plot kicks in because of the politics surrounding the lucrative opium fields in Uttar Pradesh. This is a more specific and low-key playing ground that the ones in the older masala movies, which unfolded in more melodramatic environments – and this specificity extends to the detailing of the characters and even the country. Raja isn’t just a generic “North Indian,” but a UP Brahmin, wearing the sacred thread. (Though the fact that this thread isn’t all that sacred is emphasised in an action scene where it is used as a garrotte.) Mitali is a Bengali, and she’s a migrant in UP like many others. Ram Babu says, “India is a country of migrants,” and when Rudra realises that the bellboy in a hotel in Mumbai is a Maharashtrian, he speaks of the number of Maharashtrians who have settled in UP.

The country (along with its masala cinema) has changed in other ways as well. The item song (performed by Mahi Gill; is this the only role she can find these days?) goes “Don’t touch my body,” and the backup dancers are all Caucasian. A “Word Power” dictionary is prominently featured in a scene just before the interval, and when Bajaj speaks in  English, Sumer Yadav reprimands him, saying he’d prefer to speak in Hindi (he goes as far in the other direction as possible, using the word “vartalap”) – but eventually, he too ends up speaking in English. And there are excursions to metros like Mumbai and Kolkata. Dhulia emphasises the provincial nature of Raja and Rudra by showing us how scared they are when flying for the first time – and yet, they fit right into posh hotels and swank night clubs. (A film from the 1970s would have used these moments to stage fish-out-of-water scenarios around these bumpkins who find themselves in the city. At least in the movies, that species apparently doesn’t exist anymore.)

With so much that’s so fascinating at a conceptual level, it’s surprising how dull Bullett Raja is – and that’s because Dhulia, in his attempts to imbue his material with layers and texture, forgets what made those masala movies work in the first place. Those films had a moment-to-moment vitality. The characters, scenes, lines had punch. Maybe those films erred too much in that direction, and maybe they forgot to be anything outside the moment, but this was a realisation we had only later, when we thought about the film as we walked out. Inside the theatre, though, we were too entertained to notice that this wasn’t adding up or that wasn’t “realistic” or reflective of how India really was. Sholay doesn’t work because it is real but because it feels real, because the characters and their motivations are worked out in ways that draw us in – and without that emotional investment, what good is a masala movie?

We can overlook the secondary characters – say, the artist who wants to join Raja and Rudra but is advised to stick to his creative pursuits. The point, seemingly, is that the dynamic duo of Raja and Rudra has made such an impression on the youth of UP, and everyone wants to be them. (We don’t really sense this.) But how does this artist pick up a gun, later on, and land up at the exact spot where Raja needs him? Is this a reference to the older films where, sometimes, things just happened, and we weren’t supposed to think about how or why? But every film defines its own levels of plausibility, and given Dhulia’s detailing elsewhere, these lapses are frustrating. This artist’s journey should have been more convincingly plotted, and his turnaround should have packed a jolt. Sumer Yadav’s cross-dressing should have provided a lot more entertainment. Rudra’s anger upon losing a friend (who takes a bullet for him) should have exploded with more charge. But, as I said, these are minor characters, minor failings, easy enough to overlook.

The bigger problem is that Raja is so randomly written. It’s no sin for a character to be both serious and light at once, but how about giving us a scene or two showing how Raja made his peace with killing people for money? A fundamental pillar of the old masala movies is the moral uprightness of the hero, or else, as with the Bachchan characters, he was an antihero (though still possessing some sort of backstory as to how he came to be so) – but here, Raja is a murderer we’re supposed to root for simply because he is the central character. There’s nothing more to him. We’re meant to laugh when he delays a killing because he wants to break the existing record for shooting from a distance. (Unsurprisingly, in this pissing contest, Rudra ends up with the ruler and the measuring duties.) But later, after tragedy strikes, Dhulia gives us the visual of Raja passing by a street-side self-flagellator. That’s presumably how much he’s hurting. We don’t buy it for a minute.

And we don’t buy Saif Ali Khan. He looks drained. Raja’s scenes with Rudra are perfunctory, and his romance with Mitali is worse. An early exchange between Raja and Mahi Gill’s item girl – he asks her her name, and she asks what he’s going to do with it; he says no girl seems to stick around long enough, and she says she’s not there for a long-term commitment either – packs more heat than the entire love angle with Mitali. She’s given a ridiculous scene where Raja discovers she’s carrying a gun, and she says she’ll do whatever he says. But for that, she needs to be around. She just vanishes for long stretches. The only person at home in these proceedings is Vidyut Jamwal, in the Shatrughan Sinha/Vinod Khanna role of good-hearted opponent. He’s no actor and he’s too lightweight (and possibly too pretty) a presence, but he gets the film’s best masala moment, an action sequence amidst dacoits. In that stretch, we see what fun Bullett Raja could have been in the hands of a less ambitious filmmaker. You can’t advertise a film with a lurid and whistle-worthy tagline, Aayenge to garmi badhayenge, and then get all thesis-paper serious about it.

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

By some freakish coincidence, we have, this week, practically the same movie we had last week – only, this one’s done the way it should be. Like Bullett Raja, Prabhu Dheva’s R… Rajkumar is a masala movie about an amoral hero who works as a henchman (along with his best buddy) and who falls in love with the character played by Sonakshi Sinha. (Is there a movie she says no to? Just curious.) This film, too, relies on the drama provided by the opium trade, and if Bullett Raja began with a shot from the end that made us think the hero was a goner, R… Rajkumar begins with a shot from the end that makes us think the hero is a goner. But R… Rajkumar has the moment-to-moment vitality that was missing in Bullett Raja. Prabhu Dheva doesn’t make the mistake that Dhulia did, trying to think too much about what he is staging. He just does the staging. He doesn’t think, and neither should we. This is the kind of movie that you either respond to viscerally, emotionally, or you simply stay away. This is the kind of movie whose review can simply read “If you like this sort of thing…”

The sort of thing that R… Rajkumar is is the Tamil-Telugu masala entertainer, like Run or Ghilli. It’s loud. It’s brash. It’s in your face (and in your eardrums). For some of us, it’s also in our blood. Some types of cinema you learn to like. You watch it and read about it and talk about it and develop a taste for it. Some types of cinema you simply have a reaction to, like an itch or a spasm – you have no control over it. You smile at something silly, like the hero and his friend making an entry into the rival gang leader’s house amidst a herd of cattle. (Would this be a Trojan cow?) You laugh – sheepishly, of course – when an old man in the burning building asks for ice water so he can have a drink. Prabhu Dheva, in the tradition of this kind of cinema, thinks not in terms of what the narrative arc of the film is but what the arc of each scene is, even if what’s happening in this scene doesn’t really tie in with something that will happen five scenes down. What’s important is the instantaneous kick. And that this film dishes out fairly well.

The problem with this kind of cinema is that it’d probably work best as a two-hour show reel of highlights and our filmmakers almost always insist on adding the extra half-hour or hour. There’s just not enough plot or characterisation to sustain these films for that long. R… Rajkumar makes that mistake as well. But at least for a while, there’s enough gonzo nuttiness to keep you amused – like a villain who likes spilling whiskey, or another one with a penchant for shiny shirts and Marilyn Monroe neckties. The director’s talent in giving “punch” to each scene is evident in the stretch where the evil Shivraj (Sonu Sood) first sets eyes on Chanda (Sonakshi Sinha). He’s taking dips in the temple pond – she is too – and as he sinks, she rises, and as she sinks, he rises. There’s just enough slow motion to alert us. It’s the turning point in the film – she loves Rajkumar (Shahid Kapoor), who works for Shivraj – and every last drop of juice is squeezed from it.

Take away this romantic track and you have the Yojimbo-like story of a drifter – Rajkumar – wandering into a village where two rival gangs are perpetually at war. (One is headed by Shivraj; the other by Manik Parmar, played by Ashish Vidyarthi.) And like the protagonist of the Kurosawa film, Rajkumar allies himself with one gang, endures a severe thrashing and ends up being helped by a friend, and here too we have a woman who loves one man and faces the prospect of leading a life with another and is treated like chattel. And from this base, Prabhu Dheva takes off and does his own thing. He Indianises the material not just with the masala treatment but also by quoting older film songs (Aji roothkar ab kahan jaayiyega and Khush rahe tu sada yehi dua hai meri) and by including emotional highs (there’s a good solidarity-of-the-small-men bit at the end) and by moving the woman further up in the chain of events. We first see Chanda as Rajkumar first sees her, in the midst of a fight between Shivraj’s men and Manik Parmar’s men. It’s love at first sight. And it’s the film’s motto as a visual: Pyaar, pyaar, pyaar… Maar, maar, maar.

This is the tone throughout. There’s an engagingly silly running gag that Rajkumar forgets everything when she sees Chanda – if he’s fighting, he just stops and stares at her. This comes full circle at the end, when he is fighting for his life and he sees her and just stops, even as the blows rain down on him. In a more elevated kind of film, this would be an exalted moment – pure love, or something like that. Here it’s just a kick, a rush of cheap (but effective) sentiment, and it’s just for that moment. But it works. The major question that hangs over R… Rajkumar is whether Shahid Kapoor is the right actor to be doing all this. He’s fine when he calls Chanda his lollipop and makes appropriate sucking noises while squeezing his lips into a kiss. (And with Prabhu Dheva being the prankster he is, lipstick marks appear on Rajkumar’s face even when Chanda kisses him from a distance.) And we’re constantly made aware of his slightness. At one point, after Manik Parmar calls him a child, Rajkumar leaps up and fastens his legs around the man’s waist… like a child.

But when he’s asked to mouth lines like “Silent ho jaa varna main violent ho jaoonga,” we don’t buy it at all. Shahid is very good in the masala-lite mode of a Phata Poster Nikla Hero, but even with his macho stubble, he looks a bit lost amidst all this industrial-strength posturing, the kind that an Akshay Kumar does so effortlessly in a Rowdy Rathore. I wish the action scenes had taken a cue from Jackie Chan’s films, where the star’s light stature is used to his advantage. He’s faster than the hulks around him, and he has an edge. But there’s no wit in the stunts here. They’re the usual compilation of broken furniture and broken beer bottles, and they go on and on. And I really wish they’d get rid of the plot point towards the end where the hero is stabbed, and we’re supposed to wonder if he’ll rise again. Is there a doubt? Can’t we find more inventive ways to enfeeble him?

But at least in the songs sequences, we see why Shahid was cast. Is there a dancer who moves as well as he does, and who radiates as much joy to the audience? Pritam supplies the film with just the kind of soundtrack it needs – catchy beats to go with the inventive nonsense-lyrics. And the madcap choreography, mostly, is a joy. In Gandi baat, the dancers register mock-disgust at the gandi baat by slapping their foreheads. In Mat maari, Chanda kicks Rajkumar in the crotch, and without missing a beat he follows up with woozy steps where his knees are pinned together. In Dhokha dhadi, during the refrain “ud gaye,” they spread out their arms and make motions like children pretending to fly a plane. And in Saree ka fall sa, a backup dancer opens a giant doorway in the middle of a desert, leaps through it and races past the leads and keeps running till he joins the extras in the background. This is another thing R… Rajkumar knows that Bullett Raja didn’t. Amoral masala-movie heroes can’t just be shooting bullets. They need to shake some booty too.

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

Kaizad Gustad’s optimistically titled Jackpot wants to be a sweat-soaked comic noir, like those stories of con artists in sultry Florida bayous, with alligators snapping around. There’s a sense of that lassitude too – the film opens with the shot of a frog that can barely bring itself to jump, and a houseboat even carries the name Laid Back Waters. The story – something about a Rs. 25-crore investment and bringing Disneyland to Goa – plays like an LSD version of the real-estate swindle from Ladies vs Ricky Bahl, and we might have been entertained had the events been told straight. But Gustad doesn’t do straight. He does fractured narratives. He does chapter titles. He does edgy art direction, like having the belt buckle on Boss (Naseeruddin Shah) match a wall hanging. He does things like having a cop sketch a nudie picture during an interrogation. And he does running gags like the one with a character who cannot help looking at the heroine’s (Sunny Leone) chest.

What he doesn’t do is put together something that can make us care. (We’re like that frog; a torpor descends on the theatre and we can barely bring ourselves to watch.) And the acting is awful. No one goes to a Sunny Leone movie because she, um, performs well, and she’s clearly been hired for the scene where she strips down to her undergarments and crawls on all fours to the camera – even so, you wince on hearing her line readings. Shah is slumming seriously here, but at least in his case there’s a possible explanation. After years of throwing himself into angsty roles, any actor would leap at the opportunity to toss out dialogue like “Risky is like whiskey” and do a Dirty Harry, bellowing out “You’re feeling lucky today?” He has one good comic scene, where he reveals that his name is Boss – and that he’s not just called that – but otherwise, he’s just along for the ride, sprawled out on a couch with two bikini-clad women at either end, one brushing his cowboy boots, the other gelling his dreadlocks. At least someone’s having fun.

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 What the F!$#, Dimple Kapadia plays Sudha Mishra, a crotchety upper-class woman, and at the beginning of the film, she just cannot stop complaining – about the roads, about the cab driver who’s taking her home from the airport, and about the man outside her home who’s just begun to relieve himself. Brandishing a knife, she advances towards him and says, “Andar daal.” I thought, then, that this would be her story, the kind of blossoming-of-a-lonely-woman-of-a-certain-age comedy we get, sometimes, from Hollywood. But she’s merely part of an ensemble. The film is about the misadventures of various people who camp out at Sudha’s house when she’s away, and the joke is that the ensuing happenings – a party, a private drag performance, premarital sex, free-for-all boxing matches – would never be approved by her. (She keeps glowering from a picture on the wall.) The director, Gurmmeet Singh, rounds up able actors – Deepti Pujari, as a naïf from Saharanpur, is quite good – but they’re let down by a series of sketches that must have sounded good on paper but fall flat on screen. Maybe on television…

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 the latest installment in an empty-headed franchise, Dhoom 3 sets its sights surprisingly high. This isn’t so much a bikes-and-babes tableau as an Angry Young Man saga (think Trishul on steroids), driven by the desire for revenge. Where the references in the earlier Dhoom films came from Hollywood capers, this one harks back to the kind of Bollywood masala – the plot twist in Akayla comes instantly to mind – where victory comes with a hefty price tag. The ending is suitably heavy. This story might have made a great drama, but by shoehorning it into the Dhoom template, the director Vijay Krishna Acharya squanders its possibilities. The movie on page and the movie on screen seem to have little in common. On page, we sense long-festering soul scars and fraternal discord and a love triangle with jagged edges – all of which would have merited the nearly three-hour running time. On screen, we see endless slo-mo posturing and a series of the most boring bike chases ever committed to film. We search in vain for the fast-forward button.

The scenarios are dull. The face-offs are flat. The set pieces are flabby, uninspired – we don’t get a single heist sequence, and the much-hyped Malang number pales in front of the eye-popping Cirque du Soleil staging of the Baawre song sequence in Luck by Chance. And the performances are all over the place. Uday Chopra and Katrina Kaif (who has a terrific dance number early in the film) appear to be in the stakes-free Dhoom zone. They’re, consequently, the easiest to take. The others in the cast are in heavy-duty drama mode, and only Jackie Shroff displays a semblance of panache. Had he been younger, he’d have been perfect for the part of the cop, which Abhishek Bachchan plays joylessly, as if his entire family had been slaughtered in the first reel. As for Aamir Khan, this film’s reason for being, he hasn’t played to the gallery like this in a while – and not in a good way. Like the rest of the film, he’s split in two, between drama and (unintentional) comedy. Where’s star quality when you really need it?

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

The first time I saw Abhishek Chaubey’s Ishqiya, I walked out having enjoyed it but not quite knowing what to make of it. At a basic level, it’s a very entertaining movie – and how could it not be, with that cast, with those dialogues, with all the care and intelligence evident in each scene? – but the whole never became more than the sum of its parts. I felt it was a lot of wit (a man who’s fated to die by a gas explosion mistakenly saying “cylinder” instead of “surrender”) and atmosphere (the grimy Gorakhpur-ness of it all) and not much else. There was also the problem of getting a fix on the genre (and therefore knowing how to respond). The setting and the score seemed to be evoking a Western. The plot seemed to be hinting at noir. And there was the sense of screwball comedy in the proceedings. Was this a serious film or a trifle? (Or both?) Was it about characters and story, or was it a winking pastiche? How invested in it were we meant to be?

But subsequent viewings persuaded me that these genre distractions are simply whitewash, and that the film is essentially a good, old-fashioned, even Bollywoodian love story. The key to Ishqiya, in my mind, is the scene where Khalujaan (Naseeruddin Shah), Babban (Arshad Warsi) and Krishna (Vidya Balan), after kidnapping a local big shot, are driving back to her home. We’re meant to be chewing our fingernails about their getting away with it, but instead of this tension, we’re left with the high emotional drama resulting from all the love in the film – Khalujaan’s high-minded love for Krishna, Babban’s earthier love for Krishna, and underlying it all, Krishna’s undying (as it were) love for her husband. (Even a comic subplot, a little earlier, revolved around the kidnapping victim’s love for his mistress.) All this love was the film’s glue. But in spit-shining each scene for maximum impact, Chaubey lost track of this overarching trajectory (we sense it coming together fully only in the end, when all these characters and all their loves converge), but watching the movie a second (or a fourth) time, we could fill in the gaps ourselves and latch on to this (romantic) narrative. (At least, that’s what I did.)

The sequel, Dedh Ishqiya – there! Again, all that cleverness in that title – is just as much a love story. And it’s a sequel in all the obvious ways – almost as if they didn’t want to tamper with a winning formula. One smallish town in Uttar Pradesh gives way to another (Mahmudabad). Here too, we have Khalujaan’s purer love (for Begum Para, played by Madhuri Dixit-Nene, who, like Balan, appears slightly miscast), Babban’s baser version of the emotion (directed towards Huma Qureishi’s Muniya). In Ishqiya, we learnt that Khalujaan’s uncle was a tabla exponent from the Indore gharana, and then we saw Babban prancing around to Dhanno ki aankhon mein in a red-light area – and this high-low contrast in the duo is evident here too. Begum Para, like Krishna, is a widow, and she too is forced to fend for herself with a combination of womanly wiles and manly… hustle. These women, of course, aren’t what they seem (why else would Dixit-Nene’s character be named after an old-time actress?), and the men, again, are reduced to chutiyum sulphates.

More similarities follow – another kidnapping plot, another request by a lovelorn Khalujaan to be called by his given name of Iftekhar, another climax with goons and guns, another early scene with Babban seeking Scheherazade-like reprieve from an early grave through the narration of a story (and it’s the same story, about a foul-mouthed parrot) – but these numerous overt similarities don’t result in sequel fatigue, and that’s because of a rather unexpected replacement: Begum Akhtar instead of Lata Mangeshkar. The parade of old Hindi songs in the earlier film has been replaced by recitations of Urdu poetry (helpfully presented with English subtitles). We’re still in Uttar Pradesh, we’re still following the same characters (who think less with their heads than with their hearts… and loins), but we seem to be in a slightly different movie, a slightly different world. This, really, is how sequels should be made, hewing close enough to the earlier film(s) so that they seem part of a cinematic continuum, and yet different enough so that we don’t feel we’re watching the same film all over again.

In Ishqiya, Khalujaan (Shah was superb there; he’s superb here) was always part of a duo, but here, separated at least for a while from Babban, he comes alive as his own person. He looks at Para and remembers her from long ago, and she could almost be (and she perhaps is) the woman from the sepia-tinted photograph in his wallet we saw in the earlier film. Her old-worldness completes his. One of the most effective scenes in Ishqiya was Khalujaan’s admission that he cannot lie convincingly because he’s a man, and when Krishna asks him what if he were a woman, he spits out, “Phir pata nahin chalta ki pari hoon ya tawaif.” The sequel has no use for this Madonna-whore dichotomy, but it continues with the conceit is that men are weaker, emotionally, than women, and here, Khalujaan is physically weak as well. He suffers from hand tremors, and an early plan to impersonate a nawab – with Babban as his man Friday – has to be changed to reverse roles. But when he sees Begum Para, he can play the nawab again. He declares that he wants to live for himself, for a change, and in this old-world setting, where time seems to have stood still, he’s back in his element – so much so that when he steps out and is seen in a Beatles T-shirt, it’s an instant sight gag.

And Begum Para is everything he could hope for in a soul mate. She’s a dancer, a disciple of Birju Maharaj. When we first see her, she’s presented like a heroine from a classical painting, gazing out of a window, while Hamri atariya pe aao sanwariya, dekha dekhi balam hoi jaye plays in the background, as if foreshadowing a future meeting on a rooftop. (And this old-worldness is contrasted with the next-gen youthfulness of Babban and Muniya, who speak of iPhones and noodle dinners.) As opposed to Ishqiya, where both men fell for the same woman, Babban isn’t even interested in Begum Para. Khalujaan’s rival, this time, is Jaan Mohammad (Vijay Raaz, in superb comic form; even the way he takes up his stance during a skeet shooting contest is hilarious), who is also present at the Begum’s swayamvar. (She’s choosing a new husband, and he has to be a poet.) As a result, in this Ishqiya too, there’s love everywhere you look. Begum Para, reading Khalujaan’s palm, declares that he has lost many times in love. A physician announces that the cure for Khalujaan’s tremors is to find himself a girl to love. And there’s even an enumeration – somewhat needlessly (and fussily) – of the seven stages of love.

Dedh Ishqiya is filled with so much wit and wordplay that listening to the dialogues alone makes the movie worthwhile. Muniya asks someone where Salim’s tea stall is, and when asked what her name is, she replies, with a deadpan, “Anarkali.” Earlier, while pulling off a heist at a jeweller’s, Babban asks for the way to the bathroom as his money is in his underwear. The puzzled jeweller asks Khalujaan how much money can one keep, after all, in one’s underwear, and Khalujaan replies casually, “Kuch chaar paanch… Do-dhaai aage, do-dhaai peeche.” A character named Noor Mohammad Italvi (Manoj Pahwa) reveals that his surname arises from the fact that his mother is from Italy; he’s asked, “Bofors wala?” A Mexican standoff ends when a recording of Humko man ki shakti dena plays at a school assembly.

But other times – during a Batman quote, or during an exchange about DNA, or when the combination to a lock is revealed as 9211, or during the umpteenth Mexican standoff – we begin to feel that the cleverness exists for its own sake. And while (in Ishqiya) Krishna’s emotional trauma, the motivation for what she subsequently does, was etched out well enough through the tragedy we saw at the film’s beginning, we don’t sense that much being at stake when, say, Jaan Mohammad stalks Begum Para. He just comes across like a routine creep, and her line about being suffocated in his presence, due to his repeated overtures, doesn’t carry the weight it should. We don’t see why she’s such a bundle of nerves. And a following scene, where her past is alluded to through a wedding album, appears incomplete. We look for more details to fill out her character – and her motivation, explained away in one line at the end, isn’t enough. Even the songs don’t help this time around. Khalujaan’s love – in the absence of a declarative number like Dil to bachcha hai ji, with its lines like Dil sa koi kameena nahin… Dar lagta ishq karne mein ji – doesn’t register as strongly.

The only song that works, both as a superb composition on its own as well as a terrific marker for whatever’s happening at that point on screen, is the soaring Dil ka diya, and as it unfolds, it appears that the emotions bubbling under the surface will finally burst through, but soon the film slips back into its con games. And that, really, is the problem with these Ishqiya movies. There’s so much to savour in them, but they never become what they could have been because the heaviness of the love stories, which are the core, are diminished by the lightness, the cheekiness, the tomfoolery in everything else. This, more than the mishmash of seemingly conflicting genres, appears to be the problem. There’s something strange and disorienting about a ruminative song from Chitralekha following a scene where Muniya explains to Babban that what they shared was just sex not love, which is then followed by a startling flashback that hints at a very different kind of love. And the same questions come up. Is this a serious film or a trifle? Is it about characters and story, or is it a winking pastiche? How invested in it are we meant to be? Once again, I walked out of an Ishqiya movie having enjoyed it but not quite knowing what to make of it.

Copyright ©2014 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Jai Ho was earlier named Mental – and that was actually a good title, given this story of Jai (Salman Khan), who, ousted from the army, seeks to do a bit of public good. And he turns Samaritan to an almost pathological degree. He restores a kidnapped infant to its parents. He helps a handicapped woman write exams, sitting beside her as she dictates answers that she cannot write herself. He stands up for a beggar, a little girl, on the road as she is hurt by a car. Even in the army, his discharge came about because he disobeyed orders in order to save children from the enemy side. And at a dinner conversation at his home, we’re told that he’s donated his eyes. Late in the film, Jai cries out that he appears to be the only one who sees that there are people around him that need help – and you could make a case that he needs a little help himself. It’s not accidental that his sanity – maansik santulan, as the film puts it – is called into question by the end. Jai does seem somewhat… mental.

This is an intriguing premise for a film – but not a Salman Khan film, and certainly not one directed by Sohail Khan. For a minute, it’s tempting to step into an alternate universe and see what Rajkumar Hirani would have made of this material, with Sanjay Dutt or Aamir Khan or Sharman Joshi playing Jai, whose zeal to help others results in a plan where the person who was helped pays it forward, helping three others, and those three help three others each, and so on. That film might have focused less on the action aspect and more on the drama, which this really is. That film might have found an organic way to unite, in the climax, all the people helped by Jai, so that each one ends up helping Jai when he needs them. That film wouldn’t have sprung on us the scene where Suniel Shetty, playing an army officer, pops up suddenly – on the road – in an armoured tank, as if it were a bike or a car.

But in this film, the one with Salman Khan, the latter scene is perhaps inevitable – and the reason it doesn’t fit in is not because it is illogical but because the film cannot make up its mind whether to be the high-minded pay-it-forward movie or the lowbrow hero-versus-villain movie. This confusion wrecks Jai Ho (which is adapted from the Telugu film Stalin. Gaudy sunglasses, Gujju stereotypes, a sappy love ballad that would have made Celine Dion hesitate, pink underwear, kidney donation, a washout of a heroine (Daisy Shah), Sana Khan breathing fire as a scheming minx with a disproportionate sense of entitlement, twocharacters without hands (one of whom can apparently climb over railings) – and in the middle of all this, the exhortation that you don’t have to be in the army or in politics to serve the nation, that one man can make a difference. How did they even think this would work?

There are a bare handful of effective masala moments – the Home Minister-in-the-circle moment, the tomorrow’s-newspaper moment, the Salman Khan-takes-off-his-shirt moment, and the moment where Jai (literally) kick-starts a vehicle. And Naman Jain – the young star of Zoya Akhtar’s short in Bombay Talkies –shows that he can camp it up with the best of them in masala mode. But the emotional moments fall flat. There is so little to root for in the film – despite such an emotional hook, of man helping fellow man – that we look for scraps that, however corny, leave us with a sense of having felt something, like the scene between a drunk and an auto driver.

The action scenes are nothing special either. In one sequence at a railway station, Salman, on a bike, finds his path blocked by an oncoming train, and he reverses and heads for the over-bridge. He goes up the stairs, drives through the bridge, then down the stairs – we should feel the bone-rattling shudder of a two-wheeler coursing past this uneven terrain, but the scene has been cut to suggest that the bike just glides up and down. There’s no effort evident anywhere. Then there are the action scenes where Jai bites an opponent’s arm and roars and slashes his fingers across a cheek, leaving behind marks like those by a claw. Finally, we get the line, this film’s conceit: Aam aadmi sota hua sher hai. The common man is a sleeping tiger. I can’t vouch for the tiger bit, but as the film went on, this common man was definitely close to sleeping.

Copyright ©2014 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

At the beginning of One By Two, the screen is halved… one by two. Only, we don’t know it’s a vertical split screen. Someone with a camera is going around recording guests at party, and she calls out to Amit (Abhay Deol), who turns around and breaks into silly dance moves. By his side, Samara (Preeti Desai, who has one of those long, lovely Iberian faces we usually encounter only in Almodóvar movies) begins to dance too. He turns and moves towards her, and then we realise that he’s moving towards someone else, another girl dressed in black, and that the lamppost-like prop between them was actually concealing the fact that these are two separate events, from two separate lives. The director Devika Bhagat, carries this conceit throughout – at one point, she uses the wall dividing two stalls in a men’s bathroom – and the point is that we are witnessing one story about… two separate people. One By Two isn’t, as you’d expect, a rom-com – it’s a pre-rom-com, which doesn’t begin with the meet-cute but ends with one.

So in one track of the story, we follow Amit, a “boring guy” (a disaffected Deol plays him all too well) who hangs out with two friends who look too young to have been his buddies from school. His girlfriend has dumped him and he wants to get her back – that’s his life’s mission. And the second track is about Samara’s attempt to win a televised dance competition. In her spare time, she tends to an alcoholic mother (Lilette Dubey ) and communicates with a distant father (Anish Trivedi). How do you make a multiplex-friendly movie about two colourless people flailing about in an existential funk? Bhagat’s solution is to throw in a lot of colour and a springy Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy soundtrack, but otherwise, she lets her movie wallow in a bit of existential funk itself. In a scene towards the end, Samara jumps into a swimming pool and screams – but we hear no sound. One By Two is a little like that, like a song played almost on mute. After a while, the film begins to feel like an academic experiment: Can the lives of two not-terribly-interesting people be shaped into an interesting story?

That’s a slightly dangerous question, especially when the lively characters surrounding Amit and Samara come off as better candidates for a movie. There’s Amit’s uncle (Darshan Jariwala), a cop who likes to recite questionable poetry at gatherings. He tells he’s shot down gangsters and asks the whiny Amit what he’s accomplished. The answer: nothing. Then we have Bunty (Netrapal He-Ra Singh), a wrong-side-of-the-tracks contestant on the talent show Samara wants to win – his brief and unlikely friendship seems to shake something up in Samara, who lives in a privileged cocoon. Better yet, we meet Shishika (Yashika Dhillon), who’s delightful as the girl Amit’s mother (Rati Agnihotri) wants him to marry. She’s so wrong for him, it’s hilarious.

Bhagat does a lot of little things well. She has a talent for the offhand moment, like the one – again with a split screen – where Amit strums a guitar and sings a popular advertising jingle while Samara, on the other side, practices dance moves. (Deol sings well on screen; it feels like he’s really singing the soft numbers, though it’s a different story with the hard-rock song that comes later – completely at odds with his low-key energy levels.) I liked the fact that there’s no comeuppance awaiting Amit after his cool act of sabotage, one that all but ruins Samara’s life. When Amit and Samara meet, finally, and he repeats a line from a conversation they’ve had earlier, there’s no bell-clanging, forehead-slapping reaction, just a bit of confusion that the line seems familiar. The bits of randomness – like Amit’s encounter with Bunty on a train, or his walking past Samara, or his glancing idly through the window at Samara as she dances in a neighbouring building – are also nicely done.

Bhagat clearly doesn’t like to oversell a moment, but there’s a hair’s breadth between being subtle and being uninvolving – she goes too far in the other direction. A running gag involves Amit’s flatulence, but at times you wish Bhagat had let it rip. There needed to be more energy in the showdown between Samara and her mother. They say hurtful things to each other, but the hurt barely registers. And scenes that might have worked in a shriller narrative end up looking ridiculous here. I didn’t buy a minute of the subplot with Samara’s father, who lands up at her house in order to take her out for dinner. If he did not want to include her mother in the evening’s plans, and if there there’s all this awkwardness between them, why not simply ask Samara to meet him at the restaurant? Why have the scene where he’s forced to tell his former flame (it’s a nice contrivance that she was his mistress, not his wife) that he’s only interested in his daughter’s company? The out-of-nowhere proposal by Samara’s former friend-with-benefits (Yudhishtar Urs) – he wants her to move with him to Amsterdam – she throws a fit! – is equally ridiculous.

Eventually, we see that the film is about today’s young people who turn molehills into mountains, seeing life-crippling problems where there are none, and that the languor in the film is perhaps intentional, a reflection of the ennui experienced by Samara and especially Amit – but all this sounds much more interesting as ideas being tossed around in a script meeting than as a movie on the screen. One By Two is one of those films with a lot of little touches – while Amit is babied by his mother, Samara often ends up mothering hers; the reality of having to wade through shit in life being reflected in the many bathroom scenes – that don’t quite add up to a bigger picture.

Copyright ©2014 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

When we meet Meeta (Parineeti Chopra), she seems to be auditioning for the part of an autistic savant. She’s clearly some sort of genius, but she looks a little unhinged. She blinks furiously. She tucks in her lower lip and sticks her tongue out. When she’s not popping a cocktail of pills, she’s scarfing down toothpaste and sugar. These traits are on display throughout Vinil Mathew’s Hasee Toh Phasee, but a little before interval point, we realise that – savant or not – Meeta is essentially a child. “Bade hokar life ko complicate karte hain,” she tells Nikhil (Sidharth Malhotra), when she finds him wringing his hands over a situation – and we see that these aren’t hollow words but her life’s philosophy. She doesn’t overthink things. She just goes ahead and does whatever she wants, without worrying about consequences. When she wants money, she steals it. When she wants a guy – Nikhil, who’s engaged to her sister Karishma (Adah Sharma) – she coolly asks him to marry her and leave Karishma. She’s slapped constantly, like a naughty child, and her annoyingly squeaky shoes are the kind you’d see on children. She even has a peeing-in-the-pants moment.

Nikhil, on the other hand, is a grown-up – at least he’s trying to be one, doing things that he thinks are the right things to do. Very early in the film, we get a couple of sequences that establish what adventurous out-of-the-box thinkers Meeta and Nikhil are as children, but while Meeta has held on to this spirit, Nikhil has lost it along the way. He meets Meeta in his teens, and she asks him to jump into an auto-rickshaw and come with her to Goa – he’s tempted for an instant but his rational self asserts itself and he declines. And now, he’s become a dull man, the kind of person who wants to conclude a business deal not because he has a passion for it but because he can tick another item off his to-do list and go on and get married. (Had he followed his heart, like Meeta, he’d have become a police officer.) He has the fears of a grown-up. At some level he knows he doesn’t love Karishma, but he’s afraid to break up with her because he says – in a touching moment – that she may not come after him and he’ll end up alone. Breaking up is easy, he says, but sustaining a relationship when the going gets tough? That, in his eyes, is the mark of a grown-up.

Seen one way, then, we have here the classic rom-com set-up of opposites attracting. But the thing is, they’re not really opposites, and Hasee Toh Phasee isn’t exactly a rom-com. Part of Mathew’s agenda is to tell a coming-of-age story with two people who’re different in many ways and yet similar in some. Nikhil and Meeta are both the odd ones out in their traditional families (her exasperated uncle says, of her “unfeminine” ways, that she’ll bring home a bride, not a groom), and they both want to escape – it’s just that Meeta has gone ahead and escaped, while Nikhil has convinced himself that the life he’s leading is the right life for him. Meeta needs to grow up. She has to learn how to think about others, how to handle emotions without suppressing them. And Nikhil needs to find his inner child, that boy who effortlessly slipped out of a locked room many, many years ago, to get to a screening of Agneepath.

Mathew has a light touch and he pulls off the “com” part of his film quite delightfully. The conversations between the leads are loaded, yet casual, like the exchange that results in Meeta finally remembering that, yes, she has met this man earlier. The marginal supporting characters are played by good actors (especially the Anu Malik devotee) and they’re given nice bits. I liked the touch with Nikhil’s “lucky trousers,” and many of the extended comic sequences – the crazy walk through a crowded Mumbai marketplace, the search for a missing necklace, and a very funny attempt by Nikhil to help a faraway Meeta catch a glimpse of her estranged father (Manoj Joshi plays this character beautifully, a successful businessman who doesn’t seem to have forgotten that he began life in a chawl).

But the heavier scenes don’t work at all. Part of the problem is that the film, as it goes along, becomes broader and more “Bollywoody,” with wedding songs and a disgraceful computer-hacking scene and a cell-phone-era update of that old trope involving a conveniently overheard conversation. The Shake it like Shammi song sequence doesn’t really belong in the film, but it’s buried behind the opening credits. (Besides, it’s a lot of fun.) The other music videos are awful speed-breakers, and worse, they clash in tone with the film we thought we were watching. This is the problem with these films. They begin by wanting to stay far away from cliché – the characterisation of Meeta, for instance (when was the last time you saw a science genius as a heroine?) – but along the way, they get cold feet, and begin to wonder whether the first-weekend target audience, lured by that oh-so-fun title and those oh-so-young-and-yummy stars, are going to sit through something so quirky and different. The makers of Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu (another coming-of-age tale masquerading as a rom-com) stuck gutsily to their off-kilter course, but Mathew, gradually, loses the plot.

The big Bollywoody scenes are too restrained. There’s an excess of “good taste” going around. (You can almost hear Mathew saying, “If we have to have these bloody scenes, let’s at least tone them down.” But these scenes just don’t work when toned down.) We see two large households (with kids), but there’s no incidental noise or movement. The air is dead. Everything is so artfully designed that even at a puja, where smoke fills the room, people cough politely into their handkerchieves. (And the near-geometric way in which they’re positioned suggests that the seating arrangements were done by an art director.) Nikhil tells the emotionally blocked-up Meeta that when normal people get depressed, they cry and scream. That must be the film’s biggest joke. We never see that kind of intensity anywhere, not even in the scene where Nikhil embraces Meeta for the first time – though this may also be a reflection of Malhotra’s inability to do much more than project a charming geniality on screen. (Would you buy him as an IPS officer?) Where’s the prickliness we were promised early on, when Meeta tries to cross over a wall and gets tangled in barbed wire? And what is this bland love triangle we seem to have landed in, where the third angle (Karishma) is so one-dimensional that we don’t feel a thing for the fate that awaits her?

The time spent on the tiresome machinations keeping Nikhil and Meeta apart till the last possible minute ends up shortchanging their romance, and – more damagingly – her character. Her pill-popping and her science-guru subplot come off looking more like a dash of colour, something to make her appear more “interesting,” than something real and rooted. And yet, Parineeti Chopra does some remarkable things with the part. At first, I feared we’d be seeing one of those mannered performances that actors resort to when asked portray an illness or a condition, but those scenes, thankfully, are kept to a minimum. The rest of the time, Chopra manages the difficult feat of making us care (at least to an extent) for a character who doesn’t project any emotion. The innate Parineeti-ness – that no-bullshit quality, that disarming directness, that ability to transform “dialogue” into matter-of-fact conversation – is reimagined with slightly newer shades, and this performance is another sign that we may be seeing the evolution of a major actor-star, one who can be others even while she’s being herself.

KEY:

* Hasee Toh Phasee = If she smiles, she’s mine
* Agneepath = Path of fire.
* Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu = There’s you and there’s me.
* chawl = A large building divided into many separate tenements.
* puja = Religious ceremony.
* Anu Malik = You really don’t want to go there.

Copyright ©2014 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

This Valentine’s Day, Bollywood gives us a bromance. No, really. Forget Amitabh Bachchan horsing around on a bike with Dharmendra, or sloshing around in the showers with Shashi Kapoor, or locking eyes with Vinod Khanna – that’s kid stuff, Bollywood Homoeroticism 101. Ali Abbas Zafar’s Gunday goes a level higher, with the visual of its leading men – Bikram and Bala (even their names are matching-matching; how cute is that?) – in bed, wearing white trousers with a big red heart emblazoned on their bottoms. They’re shirtless – but then that’s how they usually are. Even when they wear shirts, these are unbuttoned to reveal as much as possible of their muscled torsos, and later, when these best friends turn foes and charge at each other in an action sequence, the first item on their agenda is to rip each other’s shirts off. Apparently, a fight isn’t a fight unless it involves shiny pecs and abs showcased in slow-motion. During the end-credits roll, you may find yourself looking for Assistant Torso Oiler.

Gunday begins with raw documentary footage depicting the birth of Bangladesh, in 1971, and we’re quickly deposited in a refugee camp at Dhaka. A solemn voiceover (from Irrfan, who plays a cop with his typical casualness) holds our hands through the goings-on, which are about the young and very hungry Bikram and Bala (the terrific child actors Darshan Gujar and Jayesh Kardak) negotiating the tough terrains of gun couriering, coal smuggling and sexual abuse. It’s a sombre start – but soon we see that this background is simply wallpaper, an attempt to add epic heft to a story that’s essentially a love triangle. (It’s a different story that Priyanka Chopra’s Nandita is as dispensable as Etta Place was in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, whose closing freeze-frame is replayed here).

No Hindi masala movie set in the 1970s can escape the shadow of Bachchan, but Zafar goes a step further and strings together so many references to the star that part of Gunday becomes a spot-the-film exercise. An early scene where the young Bikram (or is it Bala? I forget) refuses to pick up coins tossed at him as payment for work echoes the phenka-hua-paisa moment from Deewar (the System-made-me-so wail from that film is also present) – and thereon, we get the smuggling from Muqaddar Ka Sikandar, the friend-turned-foe from Namak Haram and Hera Pheri, the coal mines from Kaala Paththar, the framed-murder from Immaan Dharam, the coin-toss from Sholay (this time to decide who gets the girl), the mole-operatives from Don, the heroine-asking-the-hero-to-give-up-his-life-of-crime from Khoon Pasina, and what might be a serious take on the mirror scene from Amar Akbar Anthony.

In addition, we get, from that era of cinema, the visual of running boys turning into running men, and an instance of heartbreak is underlined by bombs going off in the distance. There are rug-pulling big reveals, and the rhetoric from those times is also revisited, with a number of metaphorical reworkings of the concept of coal. And everything is two-hundred per cent – the thunderous background score, the colours, and especially the performances of Ranveer Singh (Bikram) and Arjun Kapoor (Bala). They pout and rage and swagger as if performing to an audience on the moon.

The experience is immersive, but solely at a surface level – we’re not pulled in. Zafar is so busy making a movie that looks like a 1970s movie that he forgets to make a movie that feels like a 1970s movie. We’re told that Calcutta is known for two things – the Howrah Bridge, and Bikram and Bala (shouldn’t that be three things?) – but we never sense that monumentality in these two. We’re told that they’ve opened schools and hospitals, and poor Victor Banerjee (who’s probably remodeling his kitchen and needed the cheque) turns up as a cop and labels our heroes as “aam logon ke liye maseeha” – but we don’t get a sense of the people around them who are helped, the people who celebrate these two outlaws. For that matter, we don’t sense the deep friendship between Bikram and Bala. We seem them bouncing around like bratty schoolkids, but the emotional moorings between them aren’t fleshed out – and neither are their feelings for Nandita (or hers for them, though Chopra does well with her scenes). So much time is spent showing us how cool Bikram and Bala are that when we’re asked to buy into their tormented past – with a line like “humne sirf apna haq maanga” – we wonder when they ever did something as basic as ask for something and wait for an answer, without racing ahead to grab it.

And yet, I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen, which pops with a vital vulgarity. Gunday is dazzlingly mounted, and every frame is sculpted to perfection. Even the action sequences, including one in a theatre playing Mr. India, are artfully staged. This may not be much to go by, but in an era where films come mainly in the wan pastels of the upper-class rom-coms, the saturated reds and bright yellows of melodrama can really shake you up, with what you’re seeing making up (to an extent) for what you’re not feeling.

KEY:

* Gunday = Hoodlums
* the phenka-hua-paisa moment = where the hero refuses to pick up coins tossed casually at him
* aam logon ke liye maseeha = messiahs of the masses
* humne sirf apna haq maanga = all we did was ask for our rights

Copyright ©2014 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Spoilers ahead…

In a very funny moment in Imtiaz Ali’s Highway, Veera (Alia Bhatt) attempts an apology. She feels bad about snapping at Mahabir (Randeep Hooda), the man who’s abducted her and is now giving her a two-cent tour of the real India. She says she’s not usually like this, and that she’s tameezdaar, polite – and he barks at her. “Hum kya tameez dikhaane aaye hain?” But once we stop laughing, we realise that a fairly unusual thing has occurred. She hasn’t burst into petulant tears, the way rich brats do in the movies. Much later, we see why. We see that she comes from an impossibly upper-class (and yes, tameezdaar) family where her mother refers to her as “aap” and gently changes the subject whenever she begins to talk about something that’s not… proper. We see that it’s actually a relief, for her, to be around someone who’s normal, human, who raises his voice when angry. Veera’s claustrophobia at home is literalised as a medical condition; closed spaces make her sick. (Her NRI fiancé, on the other hand, is happy to remain in his car-cocoon even when he sees her in danger, as she steps out and falls in Mahabir’s path.) And this is why, after a point, Veera doesn’t try to escape. When they reach a settlement, she covers her face and lowers herself in her seat. When stopped by cops at a checkpoint, she hides. And later, when Mahabir literally hands her over to the police, she flees, as if she were the criminal.

In a way, she’s like Heer in Ali’s Rockstar, a rich girl who finds herself when she begins to hang around a guy from a lower social class. (There too, we saw someone stifled by all that tameez around her, preferring, instead, to watch soft-porn movies in a dingy – and potentially dangerous – cinema hall.) Highway is like a female-centric version of that earlier film, a be-careful-what-you-wish-for drama. Like the protagonist of that film who wanted pain, Veera wants freedom and open spaces. She wants a house in the mountains, where she’ll cook and where her husband will graze sheep. And when Mahabir kidnaps her, she gets her wish. We see them progress from hemmed-in roads in the city to the open mountains, and we see Veera progress from the back of the truck (where she’s tossed in, first; it’s a most interesting truck, with its inscriptions and its indicative painting of a lion pouncing on a deer) to the front and, finally, to the top of a bus. She’s free. She’s been “cured” of her claustrophobia by this lower-class man, just as Heer, for a while, was “cured” of her mystery ailment by the presence of her lower-class man.

But unlike Rockstar, Highway isn’t a love story. At parts, it certainly looks like one. On top of that bus, when Mahabir throws his blanket around Veera and she leans against him, they do look like lovers. And they looked like lovers while inside the bus as well, when her knee grazed against his, and she fell back in her seat, relieved that he hadn’t abandoned her. And before that too, we could have made the case that this is love. When she finds him after he has run away from her, she tells him that he cannot be making decisions for “them” all by himself. And he smiles, for the first time. It looks like relief, that she’s found her way back to him. The “them” sounds like her admission that they are a couple. It looks, also, like destiny – however much he tries to break free, they’re meant to be together. Or some such thing.

But this isn’t just man-woman love, instigated by the Stockholm syndrome. Veera tells Mahabir, in no uncertain terms, that she doesn’t want to marry him or bear his children. She just wants to experience freedom, with him by her side. (In case we don’t get this, Ali has her say as much – needlessly.) As for Mahabir, he isn’t interested in Veera at all. She’s just a hostage, whom he threatens to fling into a kotha. But then, one night, while he’s having dinner, she begins to tell a horrible story, and he stops eating and looks at her. The next morning, she embraces him – very tentatively – and he puts his arm around her, very tentatively. He too has a horrible story from his past, one that involves people like her, rich people, but after hearing her story, the anger he’s been holding on to abates a little. He sees that at least this rich person is like him. The love between Veera and Mahabir is also the love between two scarred people (Hooda literally carries a scar, which slices through an eyebrow) who finally luck into someone like them.

More interestingly, the love here is also that of a mother for her son, of a father for his daughter. Veera baby-talks to Mahabir, the way a mother would respond to her son’s cuteness. She strokes his head when he sleeps, and she sings him a lullaby, making up itty-bitty staccato words to fit the tune she overheard him humming. (In contrast, the words sung by his mother, in the flashback featuring the lovely Sooha saha, are more free-flowing.) In some ways, Veera becomes the mother Mahabir has left behind, and he becomes the father she never had. When she runs away and returns after finding that she has nowhere to go in the desert, he instructs the members of his gang not to help her. “Apni marzi se bhaagi, apni marzi se bheetar jaayegi.” And the next morning, she asks for permission when she wants to step out. This disciplinarian aspect of a father is also brought out when he asks her to dress properly. But elsewhere, when she gaily climbs a tree, he watches with worry from below. And he buys her new clothes, which she parades before him. (She’s like a child in a fancy-dress competition, with every state presenting the opportunity for a different look.)

And in a stunning sequence towards the end, Veera and Mahabir take turns being the parent. They find a cottage in the mountains. She orders him to stay outside while she tidies up the place and makes lunch. He steps out, then returns and opens the door cautiously – and this scene of a woman keeping house, the sheer domesticity of it all, is too much to bear. He crumbles. Hooda is extraordinary here. (And how nice to finally see him in a big film, where his performance will be seen by many.) Mahabir steps in, steps out, steps in, steps out, torn between wanting to enter this world and knowing that it’s not really real, that it comes with an expiry date. He breaks down. She holds him. Shh… sab theek ho jayega. He cries out, Amma. She’s a mother consoling a distraught child. And then, when he carries her to bed, the act doesn’t carry a sexual charge – not even when she lies on top of him. She’s like a little girl sleeping on her daddy’s tummy.

Highway offers rich readings even if you don’t look at it as a love story. It could be a buddy movie – Veera and Mahabir are mismatched, at first; then she learns from him, he learns from her. It could be Veera’s story alone, a Bildungsroman about a young girl who, through an agent of change (Mahabir), is transformed. Or it could be seen, like Gravity, as the story of a woman whose past trauma is exorcised by a traumatic experience in the present. Bhatt is spectacular in the scene where she reveals what this trauma is – it’s as if all those suppressed screams which she talks about have congealed into this creature that’s burrowing its way out through her throat. Ali doesn’t lead up to this moment. We’re thrust into it. There’s no explanation, no why – Veera’s decision to speak up, here, is like her decision to hide at the checkpoint. When asked, then, why she didn’t make a run for it, she whispers to herself, “What’s wrong with me? What’s going on?” This confession is part of what’s going on. For the first time, she’s free to speak about the past, without being shushed, without the topic being changed by her mother.

Or you could see Highway as Mahabir’s story, with Veera as the agent of change, helping him understand that his assumptions are wrong and leading him towards peace, perhaps even salvation. The anger against the rich he’s held on to is ebbing away slowly. His protective layers are being stripped. At one point, he clasps his hands and literally pleads with her to leave him and go away, something that she should be doing, given that she is the hostage. Mahabir is the classic Ali hero. When the confused character played by Abhay Deol in Socha Na Tha is asked why he’s doing what he’s doing, he says, “Kyonki main kuch aur nahin kar sakta. Mere paas aur koi raasta nahin hai.” (The protagonist of Rockstar was similarly unable to leave Heer when her mother ordered him out. “Main nahin jaa paaoonga,” he said, simply.) Mahabir, too, has decided that this is his life, that he has no other options. If he hates the rich, he seems to hate himself more – when told by a gangster (who, in a touch that’s typically Ali, has a transgender partner) that he’ll die a dog’s death, Mahabir replies that he is a dog in any case, and that’s how he’ll die anyway. The one clichéd note in his character may be that he’s the principled bad guy, who looks away when he sees Veera’s bra strap, and protects her when a creepy gang member tries to feel her up (the supporting cast is just fantastic) – but then he couldn’t be any other way in Ali’s romanticised universe, where we’re asked to empathise with stalkers and misfits and people bereft of “common sense.” (That we willingly do so is a testament to the writer-director’s skills.) But other times, Mahabir stays true to character. When Veera, playing with Mahabir’s gun, remarks that the person being fired upon dies instantly, he replies that the person pulling the trigger also dies. In other words, Mahabir is already a dead man – he died the minute he killed his first victim. Could an anti-hero get any more romantic? Yes, he can, when his traumatic past is revealed to us, but not to Veera. Ali denies us the counter-scene where Veera is shocked by Mahabir’s revelation – she keeps asking him why he is the way he is, and he doesn’t reply. That’s how it should be. That’s how he would be.

Besides, logic – or its sibling, “realism” – has never been of interest to Ali. This is not the film for you if you’re the kind who wonders how a girl who knows so little about the non-air-conditioned India – entering a dilapidated building, she exclaims, “Kaise kaise jagah hain is country mein!” – finds her way back from the unforgiving desert. We’re not meant to worry about the cops on their trail, either. Ali doesn’t want to interrupt his romantic story with that procedural angle, which is causally (and rather brilliantly, I felt) tossed off in one concerted post-interval stretch, mirroring the similar documentary-like footage at the beginning of the film. Ali doesn’t want much plot in the way either. Highway is a film for those who loved the Ladakh portions of Dil Se, and wondered how much better things would have been if the rest of the narrative had been similarly untethered from what-next contrivances. (At midpoint, Veera says she doesn’t want to go back to where Mahabir brought her from and she doesn’t want to reach wherever he’s taking her to – she just wants to be on the road. Ali accedes to her wish for the most part. The feeling that we’re on a journey with no use for beginnings or ends is exhilarating.

But even to fans, Ali’s occasional tendency to overexplain can be exasperating. The closing portions, particularly, are utterly redundant. The film ends with the gunshot that echoes the gunshot that marked its beginning, when Veera first ran into Mahabir. (Both times, the sound is amplified by the silence.) She’s got the freedom she wanted, and thanks to her, he’s gotten a glimpse of what it would be like to meet his mother again, to visit that simpler world again. And that’s enough. Instead, we’re forced to listen to Veera musing that she was free outside and, now, back at home, she feels like she’s in jail – yap, yap, yap. We feel what Mahabir must have felt like, at first, when she just wouldn’t shut up. Even the closure she has, with respect to her past trauma, seems unnecessary, as she’s already kicked it out of her system. I am also not a fan of Ali’s tendency to close his films with kitschy greeting-card visuals. If it was the Rumi-quote image in Rockstar, we have, here, the young Veera and the young Mahabir in an Elysium covered by a rolling carpet of green, from which sprouts a solitary dandelion.

A lesser issue with the second half is that it has too many songs underlining the mental state of the protagonists. Some are indispensable – like Sooha saha (which features the gently disorienting editing we’ve come to associate with Ali, with Mahabir’s chronology slightly fudged, boy to infant to boy again). And the positioning of Patakha guddi is sensational. One scene, we see Veera’s mother fearing the worst, and the next, we cut to how much fun Veera is having, gulping down ganne ka ras and making pehelwan poses as the song soars in the background. Even the stretch with Wanna Mash Up? is fun. (The entire theatre burst out laughing when Mahabir’s gang member joined Veera in her uninhibited dance.) But did we really need Kahaan hoon playing over the confusion already etched on Veera’s face? We may not have minded this intrusion in another film, but the storytelling in Highway is exquisitely minimalist, with about five minutes of background music in total. (AR Rahman’s short, eerie bursts of sound are perfectly in sync with the slight surreality of the film.) The script and the performances provide the narrative tension through the long stretches of silence – and it’s an insult to the performers to have these editorialising lyrics playing in the background. As for Heera and Maahi ve, they seem to have been squeezed into the final reels just because Ali didn’t want to leave them out. But given what he’s achieved, you feel ungrateful for complaining. By the end, I felt I’d been on a bit of a journey myself, as if, after weeks of stale movies, the air in the cinema hall had suddenly become cleaner. It’s hard to explain but you’ll know what I mean if you remember the scene where Veera sees the river up in the mountains and is awestruck. Leaving Highway, I knew exactly what she felt.

KEY:

* the real India = see here
* Hum kya tameez dikhaane aaye hain? = Do you think we’re here to be effing polite to each other?
* aap = the respectful form of “you”
* NRI fiancé = see here
* Rockstar = see here
* a love story = see here
* kotha = see here
* Apni marzi se bhaagi, apni marzi se bheetar jaayegi = She went out on her own. Let her go back in on her own. (Don’t help her.)
* fancy-dress competition = see here
* sab theek ho jayega = everything’s gonna be okay
* Amma = Mommy!
* Kyonki main kuch aur nahin kar sakta. Mere paas aur koi raasta nahin hai = Because I cannot do anything else. I have no other option.
* Main nahin jaa paaoonga = I won’t be able to leave.
* a dog = see this
* Kaise kaise jagah hain is country mein! = It’s amazing, the kind of places in this country.
* Ladakh portions of Dil Se = see here
* ganne ka ras = see here
* pehelwan poses = see here

Copyright ©2014 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Spoilers ahead…

I enjoyed Saket Choudhary’s Pyaar Ke Side Effects, and I wrote: “We’ve seen this sort of thing a thousand times in Hollywood before, and if something like this had come along with, say, Matthew McConaughey or Kate Hudson or Luke Wilson or Reese Witherspoon, we’d have just rolled our eyes and said: ‘Not again!’ But with the same basic idea transposed to a desi setting – with brown-skinned people and smatterings of Hinglish (though no one’s actually ‘Indian’ in a sense; these folks may live in New Delhi or Bombay, but with their attitudes and their lifestyles, they may well be from New York or Boston) – it all seems fresh and interesting again.” But that was 2006, when these ultra-urban films were still something of a novelty. Now, with every other multiplex movie channelling Hollywood sensibilities, there’s little reason to sit through the many-years-later sequel, Shaadi Ke Side Effects.

The earlier film was a chronicle of the male terrors surrounding commitment and marriage. This one’s a chronicle of the male terrors of becoming a “family man,” namely growing into the role of a father. Siddharth and Trisha are now played by Farhan Akhtar and Vidya Balan, and you couldn’t find two actors more suited to these parts. In him, we sense the Peter Pan aspects of the character (does Akhtar ever age?), and it doesn’t hurt that he’s a terrific comedian. And in her, we have an actress whose body type isn’t what we usually see on screen – Balan will go down in history for liberating, to whatever small extent, this image of the heroine and still managing to carve out a niche as a star – and this adds to his discomfiture, that he’s now married to this… mother. They’re believable as a modern-day couple. When Trisha realises she’s pregnant, they don’t scream for joy. They sit down and think about the consequences – about what this could mean to his dreams of cutting a record, to her upcoming promotion.

It’s telling that his career is detailed with fetishistic obsession, and hers is just alluded to with a vague line about making a “deal.” Shaadi Ke Side Effects, like its predecessor, is narrated from a male point of view – except that the asides to the audience are now voiceovers – and after a while, the film becomes unbalanced. This wasn’t a problem with Pyaar Ke Side Effects because that was primarily a love story. It was the man’s problem that he couldn’t see what the woman did, that they were meant for each other. But that gambit doesn’t work here because all we see, for the longest time, are his problems with his parents’ breakup, his insecurity about the new neighbour (Purab Kohli), his loss of space at home, his having to work harder because she’s given up her job (though given their house and the way they live, money doesn’t seem to be a problem), his inability to understand what his infant daughter’s crying really means… We’re force-fed this notion of Trisha as a comically obsessed mother, a punching bag for Siddharth and the screenwriter – and then, towards the end, we’re told she has issues of her own. (Balan is superb when she says, “I was such a fool.”) It’s too little, too late.

And worse, the already overlong narrative, at this point, takes the ugliest imaginable turn and veers off into cheap, audience-baiting melodrama. Why all this seriousness in a film that’s essentially a reworking of comic bits that we saw in Hollywood rom-coms like Nine Months, nearly two decades ago? The lines, here, unsurprisingly give off the thought-in-English-and-translated-to-Hindi vibe. Sample: “Apne fatherhood ko feel karne laga…” And like those films, Choudhary goes for the most obvious jokes. Shaadi Ke Side Effects isn’t unwatchable. I enjoyed Ram Kapoor’s portrayal of a Buddha of domestic wisdom. He gets a good running gag about teaching his young son foreign languages. (When the kid has to use the bathroom, he announces solemnly, “Papa, nombre deux.”) And I loved the bit with the decapitated duck. But after a few of these jokes, the film feels toothless, pointless, pretending to tackle real issues while really searching for the next easy punch line.

KEY:

* Shaadi Ke Side Effects = the side effects of marriage
* cheap, audience-baiting melodrama = see here
* “Apne fatherhood ko feel karne laga…” = I’ve begun to experience what it’s like to be a father
* nombre deux = see here

Copyright ©2014 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Spoilers ahead…

The Pakistani hero (Ali Zafar) of E Nivas’s Total Siyapaa is named Aman, and he’s in love with an Indian named Asha (Yami Gautam). (Get it? She’s “Aman ki asha,” which is what this film was called at some point.) And they plan to confer on their daughter the admirably pacific name of Shanti. We don’t get to the point where the child’s sartorial choices are announced – say, a saffron-tinted salwar and a green kameez emblazoned with a star and the crescent moon – but we get the idea: we are all the same people, and we should be together, not apart. Early on, as Asha is taking Aman home to meet her family, she asks him if he’s bought gifts for everyone. He says yes and jokes, rather lamely, that one of the gifts is “ek chhota sa bomb,” and this is overheard by a cop. Aman is arrested, stripped, interrogated, and eventually released. There’s worse in store. Asha’s family is horrified that she is marrying a Pakistani. By now, we are primed for a film that’s as much about the difficulty of us coexisting with our neighbours as it is about brown-skinned people coexisting with the white man.

But the Indo-Pak angle, it turns out, was just a switch to get the film started. Aman could have been Adam, and the story would have been no different. Total Siyapaa is peopled with promising characters: a hysterical mother (Kirron Kher, reprising her Dostana character), a five-year-old who likes to strap pillows to her stomach and pretend she’s pregnant, a visually impaired grandfather who determines the gender of the person in front of him by copping a feel. But despite a few big laughs, the film never becomes the farce it so desperately wants to be. Nivas doesn’t drum up enough madcap momentum, and even at less than two hours, the happenings feel stretched. At the end, we’re left with – how do we put this? – ek chhota sa bomb.

KEY:

* Total Siyapaa = complete chaos
* Aman ki asha = hope for peace
* Shanti = peace
* ek chhota sa bomb = a small bomb
* white man = see here
* copping a feel = see here

Copyright ©2014 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Spoilers ahead…

I walked into Soumik Sen’s Gulaab Gang expecting a fiery feminist drama. I walked out having watched a Tamil/Telugu mass-hero masala movie – only, with women. I’m serious.

As with the heroes in those films, we are teased with flashes of the heroine’s (Madhuri Dixit-Nene, playing Rajjo) presence before finally getting to the scene that reveals her face. We get the moment where she issues a challenge to the villain and walks away in slow motion. (It’s a villainess, really, a scheming politician named Sumitra, and played by Juhi Chawla. We get a glimpse of her feet first, which is only right given that that’s where she wants the men around her.) We get the action sequence where Rajjo defies a handful of laws of gravity and sends bad guys spinning through air. We get colourful punch dialogues, and punchy scenes like the one where a rapist taking a dip in the local lake – it’s a village named Madhavpur – is slowly surrounded by a dozen of the heroine’s henchmen (henchwomen, rather; the “gang” in the title is rather apt, for these women do what men do in gangs in the more macho movies). The heroine, inevitably, is compared to a goddess. When asked if Rajjo is right in wielding weapons, a cop says, “Durga maiya ke haath mein bhi hain.” And the villainess? She’s so unspeakably evil that she rubs her palms with hand-sanitising lotion after touching a villager’s child during a photo op. Even the characters and situations are the ones we’d find in the Tamil/Telugu masala movies. The politician’s son who specialises in rape. The spineless secretary. The heartless collector who demands exorbitant bribes to deliver the most basic services. The heroine’s trusted (and much loved) lieutenants who will meet a tragic end. A risible climax involving a machine gun attack that’s conveniently filmed by a videographer. An all-male remake featuring Vijay and Prakash Raj may not be far away.

The film begins with the young Rajjo, who’s beaten up by her wicked witch of a stepmother for expressing a desire to study. (Her father cowers impotently in a corner.) So the girl practices writing alphabets on walls, and when the stepmother takes her to a tantrik and he places a lump of burning coal on her palm, she hurls it back at him. And then, we move to the adult Rajjo, who heads what looks like an ashram filled with women wearing pink, as they go about pounding spices and weaving baskets. The most interesting questions remain unanswered. How did the girl grow into this saviour who unleashes the most brutal forms of justice, like the protagonist of Vinay Shukla’s Godmother? When did she first wear pink? Why pink? While it’s a terrific touch that Rajjo is not given a lover to romance, why not address this aspect of her life? Has she sworn off men? And how did she meet these women, who back her up and execute her commands? The Robin Hood legends are powerful and popular because we see how he met each of his Merry Men. Imagine if there was no fight on the log bridge and we met Little John as a taken-for-granted part of the Sherwood Forest ensemble – that’s what happens in Gulaab Gang. If you’re going to make a rousing lowbrow entertainer about a woman outlaw who brings the rich and the powerful to their knees, why skimp on these juicy subplots?

In the few films we’ve had that were filled with women – Utsav, Mandi – the characters were defined in swift strokes, a quirk here, a backstory there. Yet, we sensed their camaraderie, their oneness. But here, with the possible exception of Kajri (Tannishtha Chatterjee), we know nothing about the inner lives of these women – just that they muscle their way through problems, with sickles and sticks, and then break into daintily choreographed songs and dances, with Saroj Khan’s signature steps. The “masculine” and the “feminine” – in one pink package. The musical interludes are most problematic. It’s as if we’re watching a dance-drama troupe, perfectly in sync. I wasn’t able to put my finger on why this appears odd here when the heroes of the Tamil/Telugu masala movies break into dances too, when they aren’t fighting – but it just doesn’t fit, and neither does the heroine. The women around Rajjo look rough, tough, messed-up – they’re believable as action figures. Dixit-Nene, whose star presence is acknowledged by a nod to Ek do teen…,  looks like she’s play-acting. There’s no earthiness, no fire – she’s cut from a more delicate cloth than what the film demands. And she doesn’t sell her big speeches, one of which is delivered in front of apathetic students. We’re meant to see how her words inspire them, but there’s no payoff. We cut almost immediately to an attempt on Rajjo’s life. Of course, the would-be assassins end up dead, thanks to a single sweep of Rajjo’s sickle. It’s as if she were harvesting corn.

Chawla, surprisingly, comes off better. At first, it seems too much of a stretch. (Looking at her, we can imagine what audiences must have felt on encountering the genial Henry Fonda as the icy killer in Once Upon a Time in the West.) But she gradually grows into the part, however one-dimensional Sumitra is, with a few too many repetitive scenes that have her humiliating men. There’s an interesting backstory that suggests that she may have had her husband killed, and the film’s biggest joke is this man, with his macho moustache, reduced to a garlanded portrait on the wall. As with Rajjo, we wonder what made Sumitra what she is, how she became this monster who hears about a rape and, instead of punishing the perpetrator, tries to hush up the matter with a bundle of notes – but this lack of information doesn’t cripple the character. She has a great scene where an election officer calls her by name, and her face clenches with rage. A little later, she’s back to sporting a sickly-sweet smile. It’s chilling. I didn’t think once of those Kurkure ads.

Gulaab Gang isn’t interested in exploring the validity of the means Rajjo and her gang employ to obtain justice. We get a couple of questions about whether “this is right” – they’re answered half-heartedly. And that’s fine. If all you want is to make a women-fuelled vigilante movie, who can deny you the right?

The film isn’t interested in feminist politics either. When Kajri is rescued from her suicide attempt by members of Rajjo’s gang – Kajri was kicked out of her house because the dowry she brought wasn’t big enough – she sighs, “Jee ke kaa karen hum.” The response: “Arre, apne liye jee.” This is just tokenism, for Kajri seems to do nothing but follow Rajjo’s orders. Where is the life she’s supposed to have made for herself? But again, this is fine – a masala movie can afford not to make logical sense.

But it must make emotional sense – and that’s where Gulaab Gang really fails. When Rajjo is handed a cheque for Rs. 10 lakhs, to begin work on a school for the girls in her village, she breaks down. But we feel nothing because, between the fights and the musical sequences, the school is hardly in the picture. We see the Devnagri alphabet “ra” in the place of a bindi on Rajjo’s forehead, and we hear her speak about education (and early on, we also hear her use a couple of English words, like “idea” and “okay”) – but these stray details don’t accumulate into the kind of power source that can really illuminate an issue, even within the confines of such a movie, even if it’s just a random plot point. Perhaps the most insulting thing about the film is the parade of real-life women survivors over the closing credits, with a line or two about what they went through and where they are today. (No Sampat Pal, though.) They’re the true heroines, and they deserved to be more than just the rah-rah coda for a second-rate masala movie.

KEY:

* Gulaab Gang = Pink Ladies, but not these Pink Ladies
* defies a handful of laws of gravity = see here
* Durga maiya ke haath mein bhi hain = the goddess Durga wields weapons too
* alphabets on walls = see here
* tantrik = black magic man; see here
* fight on the log bridge = see here
* Saroj Khan’s signature steps = see here
* Ek do teen = see here
* Henry Fonda = see here
* Kurkure ads = see here
* Jee ke kaa karen hum = What am I going to achieve by living?
* Arre, apne liye jee = Live for yourself
* 10 lakhs = see here
* Devnagri alphabet = see here
* Sampat Pal = see here

Copyright ©2014 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.