Spoilers ahead…

Kangana Ranaut looks different in Queen. The actress has always come across like a bundle of raw nerve endings, her hair seemingly frizzed by those naked electrical impulses, perpetually in angst, but here, as Rani, she looks relaxed, radiant. In the film’s celebratory opening scenes, we hear Rani’s thoughts about her impending marriage – to Vijay (Rajkummar Rao), whose name is linked with hers in a tacky heart that’s sure to be the centrepiece of the wedding decor – and she’s nervous. She’s the daughter of a Delhi sweetshop owner who drives a Maruti. The car probably says it all. Simple. Sturdy. Steady. It’s these small things that Rani wants – even her degree is simple, sturdy, steady; home science – and she’s devastated when Vijay calls her the next day and tells her he cannot marry her. He says that his life has changed, with more travel, and he feels she’ll be happier with “tumhare type ke ladke.” It’s breathtaking, the supreme condescension with which he elevates himself, but Rao doesn’t overdo it. Despite an overwhelming desire to slap him senseless, we see in Vijay not a creep but a middle-class boy who’s genuinely got his head twisted after a couple of trips abroad. He thinks he’s doing himself (and Rani) a favour by not settling.

We discover from flashbacks – used almost contrapuntally, to contrast Rani’s present without Vijay and her past with him – that Vijay was in love with Rani, and that he wooed her with a scooter festooned with red heart-shaped balloons. At first, she swears to a friend that “mummy-daddy ki kasam” there’s no chakkar going on with this fellow who’s practically stalking her, but she slowly falls for him. And now, when the mehndi’s barely dried on her hands, he’s breaking up with her. Ranaut plays the scene exquisitely. Her eyes pool with tears, but she doesn’t collapse. She makes us feel she’s grappling with the blow. She makes us feel her desperation, her panic, her confusion. She walks out. Then she walks back in and lets loose the hysteria that’s been building up inside. Instead of playing every emotion at once, she parcels each one out at an opportune moment.

It’s scenes like these that keep us watching. The scene where Rani lands up in Paris on her “honeymoon” (she’s determined to visit the city even if the wedding’s been called off) and a thief grabs at her purse and she clings to it with almost comical desperation – it’s like watching agony manufactured from slapstick. The scene where she sees her newfound Parisian friend, Vijayalakshmi (the seriously sexy Lisa Haydon, who’s just perfect as an Indian-French-Spanish cocktail), kiss someone on the mouth, and then smiles to herself with the thrill of having broken a million taboos. The scene where, after landing up in a hostel in Amsterdam with three male roommates, she slips on her bra while still under a blanket, making unbroken eye contact with a wall. The scene where Rani speaks Hindi and her Japanese roommate speaks Japanese and they seem to be having a perfectly normal conversation. And the scene where, like the boy at the end of Udaan, she breaks into a freedom run.

Like Udaan, Queen is a coming-of-age story, a breaking-of-shackles story, though one with far less grit. If Udaan was disturbingly realistic, with an ogre of a father to vanquish, Queen is a sun-dappled fairy tale, with a line of fairy godmothers cherishing and protecting Rani through her little journeys of self-discovery. This is a strange movie. It’s too long, too predictable, and too full of bits that needn’t have existed – that lizard bit? that sex shop bit? that casino bit? – but everything is pulled off with such panache (and with such good performances, especially from Ranaut) that you don’t feel like complaining. At least not too loudly.

Why did Vijay come back for Rani? Was it just because of that one picture she mistakenly sent him, of her in a “Western dress”? Why is the gag about Vijayalakshmi’s hotness – Rani’s father and young brother are captivated by her cleavage when they see her while chatting to Rani – so overused? How many more variations of the flimsy English Vinglish scenarios are we going to see? But just as I’d start fretting about one of these questions, the director Vikas Bahl would stage something miraculous and snap me out of it. Queen isn’t just about those big scenes, it’s also about tossed-off moments that linger, like a fragrance. The moment where Rani’s younger brother brings a stool for their grandmother as she begins to narrate a story about how her first choice of husband wasn’t to be either; and there’s always someone else. The moment where this grandmother speaks to Rani on the phone while clutching the Matrimonials section of the newspaper. (There’s always someone else.) The moment where Rani stuffs her face with a laddoo – from one of the dabbas packed for her wedding – after going without food for almost a day. The moment where Vijayalakshmi wonders why men make such a big deal about small penises. The moment with a killer line about Emraan Hashmi.

As find-yourself tales go, Queen doesn’t offer many surprises, except, perhaps, for a Muslim stripper who speaks chaste Urdu, one of the many signposts on Rani’s road to emancipation. And I was pleasantly surprised that she doesn’t fall in love with the sympathetic foreigner with whom she’s sharing a room. Otherwise, the film is essentially a series of before-and-after scenarios woven around Rani’s realisation that being with a man isn’t everything. She learns to be comfortable with herself. In Paris, her hotel room is booked under Vijay’s name, but in Amsterdam, she doesn’t need that name anymore. In a restaurant in Paris, she’s still so unsure, so lacking in confidence that when the maître d’hôtel shows her the intimidating menu, which is entirely in French, she just points at a dish. But later, in a restaurant in Amsterdam, she’s looser, surer about herself, more confident. She not only asks the Italian owner of the restaurant what this dish is and that one is, she also asks for additional condiments to spice up her meal. Later, befitting a fairy tale, he gives her a job, to make an Indian snack for an outdoor event, at the end of which she kisses him on the mouth – the kiss is framed so that we see the fading mehndi on her hand, one of the patterns of which bears Vijay’s name.

I thought the film would nudge Rani further in this direction. After all, we have heard her say that she’s been punished despite being a good girl all her life, doing the right things – but now that she has the opportunity to cut loose and do “bad things,” she doesn’t. She doesn’t sleep with the Italian. And she doesn’t need to. Kissing a foreigner is, to someone like Rani, practically like sleeping with him – she’s already broken a million taboos. At one point, we see Rani in an Alice in Wonderland T-shirt. It’s as if she’s fallen through a rabbit hole. Everything’s strange, surreal. There are no rules. She’s allowed to burp. She’s allowed to dance the way she wants, with no one to chide her about her abandon, the way Vijay did. Slowly, she sees that she, not Vijay, may be the one who came close to settling. The end comes along predictably. Vijay returns. He says he missed her and he loves her, and yet he chides her when she says she had champagne. We realise he’s being made into a complete heel so that it’s going to be easy for Rani to do to him what he once did to her, but we don’t grudge Rani (or Ranaut) this turn of events. The point of the film, after all, is that she doesn’t need him, or anyone else, to live happily ever after.

KEY:

* Queen = not this, unfortunately
* a bundle of raw nerve endings = see here
* slap him senseless = see here
* mummy-daddy ki kasam = swear on my parents
* chakkar = affair
* mehndi = see here.. oops, sorry, see here
* bra = see here
* Udaan = see here
* sex shop = see here
* flimsy English Vinglish scenarios = see here
* small penises = see here
* happily ever after = 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…

They’re yuppies. Mohit (Ayushmann Khurrana) works in the airline industry. (In other words, he has a high-flying job.) Mayera (Sonam Kapoor) works in the financial services industry. (In other words, she’s into money.) They earn a lot. They spend a lot. In a terrific early scene in Bewakoofiyaan, Mohit shows Mayera his Gold card (with a three-lakh credit limit). Then she steps into a shop and buys shoes, expensive shoes, which she pays for with her Platinum card (four-lakh credit limit). There are many ways this scene could have gone. He could have become upset. She could have tried to distract him so he doesn’t see her card. None of that happens. She pays. He watches. He seems secure in his love for her – and let’s not discount the fact that she looks great on his arm – and if she earns more than he does, that’s fine. He may even be proud of her.

Then Mohit loses his job. He’s young. He probably did not anticipate this day, at least not yet, so there are no savings. His credit card is declined. There’s no money in the bank. He finds himself having to borrow money from Mayera. And this changes everything. Earlier, he dismissed her father (Mr. Sehgal, played by Rishi Kapoor) when the latter sneered that Mayera made more money than he did. “Kaise mard ho tum?” was the snide interjection left hanging in the air. Mohit dismisses this view as old-fashioned – but that was then, when he had a job. And now, after fruitless job searches (he’s picky), he’s possibly begun to feel the same way – especially when he sees Mayera continue to live a lavish lifestyle. He’s an MBA class topper and now he has no rent money and she’s buying Louboutins.

The film, naturally, sympathises with Mohit. But not, to its credit, by judging Mayera. The easy thing to do would be to wag a finger at her and say she should be more responsible (with her money), more considerate (to her boyfriend) – but Bewakoofiyaan takes the tougher road. Mohit may have begun to feel emasculated, but Mayera’s not the one holding the bloody knife. She works hard so that she can buy expensive things – brand-name clothes, tickets to a rock concert. And from others too she expects things, like birthday gifts. (Kapoor, to state the obvious, is ideally cast.) In another terrific scene, when he visits her on her birthday, she closes her eyes in anticipation of a gift. He hesitates. He has no money. Outside her home, he saw a rose bush and was about to pluck a flower when a dog barked and scared him away. So now he has nothing, and, improvising a little, he plants a kiss on her mouth. She opens her eyes and says “Bas?” This is a tricky scene to pull off. We’re used to all-sacrificing heroines, who’ve opted to wallow in misery with their husbands and lovers, but here’s Mayera, expecting something from a boyfriend she clearly knows is broke. She says it’s her birthday. He should have at least gotten her a flower. Surely that isn’t too much. And we agree.

Mayera is an unusual character for a rom-com – a princess-type that we don’t resent the slightest bit, not even when she says (in the slightly pouty tone of having made “adjustments” to her lifestyle) that she hasn’t bought a pair of shoes in two months. And we feel bad for her when Mohit says, sarcastically, that that’s such a sacrifice. Why, indeed, should she stop leading a good life because he feels entitled to a job that’s similar to the one he was fired from? This is new territory for a Hindi movie. This isn’t the Abhimaan-type scenario where the male thrashes about in self-pity and the female retreats to a corner, wounded. Mayera does feel bad for Mohit. But she’s not going to change her life (or her expectations) because of his problems. An earlier generation would have called her selfish. She’d have been played by Bindu. She’d have been the vamp. Today, she’s the heroine.

Bewakoofiyaan is many films in one. In its he-sinks-she-rises trajectory, it’s reminiscent of Abhimaan. It’s also the anti-Dil. There, the lovers said that love was the only thing that mattered, not money. Here, we get the scene where Mohit asks Mayera what she’d do if he’s reduced to waiting tables. She hesitates a little longer than she should, and tells him, with a too-hearty laugh, “Tum waiter nahin banoge.” But when they embrace we see the worry on both faces. He doesn’t want to become a waiter. She’s not happy having to consider the prospect of being with a man who might become a waiter. They both know that love has its place, but money is important too. She may not be as far along this thought as her father, a safari-clad government servant who couldn’t afford to send her to America, and who now wants her to marry into big money. She says no to the millionaires in her father’s file of prospective grooms. But it’s easy to say “I don’t care about money” when your boyfriend earns some sixty-thousand. When he earns nothing, you do begin to care about money.

These are unusual and messy strains in a rom-com, and after a while, you begin to wonder if this should have been a drama instead. Either the issues are too heavy for this type of film, or the handling of these issues is too light. The director is Nupur Asthana, whose previous (and first) film was the fun rom-com Mujhse Fraaandship Karoge. That was a simple story, and it was borne along by an exuberant cast and an easy style. Bewakoofiyaan is much more complicated and adult, and by reducing it to a rom-com, Asthana pulls her punches. She wants these issues in her film (the writer is Habib Faisal), but she doesn’t want her young target audience to go home depressed, so she does her damnedest to make us think that this is not a movie about what it is about. She wants us to think that it’s really a film about a guy who has to win over the girl’s father.

Early on, there’s an overreliance on Golmaal-style high-energy shenanigans intended to hoodwink Mayera’s father into accepting Mohit. In these portions, which include a needless detour into Mr. Sehgal’s transfer to the animal husbandry department, the man is exaggerated, like a cartoon figure. I did not see why Mayera had to put up with her father’s ridiculous tests to determine Mohit’s worthiness. This Meet the Parents shtick has no place in a film that’s about money and relationships in the modern day. Worse, we’re pushed into a subplot about Mr. Sehgal finding a job. It’s a nice thought to bring a parent into the picture – so many films, these days, have no use for authority figures – and Mr. Sehgal is worked into the breakup-montage song as well (with its whooping-loop enunciation of the film’s title), as if that event did not affect just Mohit and Mayera. But this track sidelines the main story about Mohit and Mayera.

It’s frustrating how big issues are raised and immediately brushed under feel-good carpeting. There’s a nice moment where Mohit snaps at Mayera in a nightclub, when she offers to buy him a rum-and-Coke, and when the bartender advises him to take the drink, Mohit snaps at him too. But he cools down almost instantly, and apologises to Mayera as well as the bartender. We see what a nice guy he is, and how terrible it must be for him to be in this position. But this mood is crushed by the song sequence that follows, where Mohit and Mayera sing and dance as if nothing happened at the nightclub. And the scene where he repays her “loan,” making a petty list of sums borrowed, should have been bigger. With no one to really blame but the economy, he’s lashing out at her, and we should have seen the welts rise. (Though I did like Khurrana’s look – unsure, surprised – when Mayera breaks up with him. He didn’t expect things to go that far.) When he was fired, he told a TV reporter, “Darr lag raha hai.” The only scene where we sense his desperation is when he literally begs for a job, but that moment comes and goes, and we’re back to whatever the rest of the film is peddling, sunshine and good cheer and the promise that a happy ending is just around the corner.

The film does the small things better than it deals with the big things. I liked the scene where a slimming belt is given as a gift, which shows how uncaring about personal space we are in general. I also liked the film’s tendency to make us wait for something to happen and then quietly subverting our expectations. Mohit keeps talking about his promotion, and when a supervisor goes around handing out envelopes, we think he won’t get it – after all, what quicker way to drama than showing how badly someone wants something and then denying them that very thing? But he gets it. After Mohit and Mayera have a fight, she turns to find the cook (a sweet presence, even if it isn’t much of a part) holding out a container with halwa – we expect Mayera to take the container and smash it on the floor, but she just begins to dig in. And when, after the breakup, Mohit finds himself waiting to be called in for an interview at a lingerie store, we think he’ll get the job – because it’s a job Mayera wanted him to take and he kept saying he’s not a lingerie guy but an airlines guy. What better way to make him eat crow? But he doesn’t get the job.

And the job he gets? Let’s just say it loops back to an earlier conversation with his girlfriend. This is a vital story. It goes where love stories don’t usually go. And then it chickens out. The ending feels rushed, as if a happy ending was written on the set at the producer’s insistence. And we feel cheated because we needn’t have celebrated her involvement in her career if she was going to treat it so thoughtlessly, and we needn’t have invested in his issues of money and masculinity if it was all going to be so easily resolved. So is love more important or money? A brave film would have said both. This one’s content to leave us in la-la land.

KEY:

* Bewakoofiyaan = silliness
* “Kaise mard ho tum?” = What kind of man are you?
* MBA class topper = see here
* all-sacrificing heroines = see here
* “Bas” = Is that it?
* the Abhimaan-type scenario = see here
* Bindu = see here
* Dil = see here, 3:45 onwarsds
* “Tum waiter nahin banoge” = You’ll not end up a waiter
* Mujhse Fraaandship Karoge = see here
* Golmaal-style high-energy shenanigans = see here
* whooping-loop enunciation of the film’s title = see here
* rum-and-Coke = see here
* “Darr lag raha hai” = I’m afraid
* slimming belt = see here
* halwa = see here
* la-la land = 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…

And this month’s Juhi Chawla Award for Playing Against Type goes to… Satish Kaushik, the cuddly Calendar from  Mr. India who plays Reddygaru in Lakshmi. We first see him as he alights from a car in the outskirts of Hyderabad. He’s clad in a white shirt, a white dhoti, and from his shoulder hangs a neatly pressed angavastram, which, of course, no human of the male persuasion south of the Vindhyas will be seen without, even while taking a shower. Reddygaru runs a cathouse, and he likes young girls. From a row of prospects brought in by Chinna (Nagesh Kukunoor, attired like a death-metal guitarist, with one fingernail painted a bright red), Reddygaru picks the 14-year-old Lakshmi (Monali Thakur), takes her home, makes her feel comfortable, and, when she least expects it, he rapes her. The scene is terrifying – it goes where rape scenes rarely go. We’re used to the male gaze, with the gradual stripping of the victim – the sari coming off, the blouse torn, the bra strap seen. But here, we see what Lakshmi sees when Reddygaru takes his clothes off. Kaushik is huge. He towers over the tiny Lakshmi like a monster from myth. He throws her on the bed, and literally engulfs her. He’s her “first,” and he obliterates her earlier existence.

The most affecting parts of Nagesh Kukunoor’s new film, based on a true story, are these vignettes of horror. Sometimes, these horrors are overt – as when Chinna wields a club, one end of which is pocked with nails. (It’s like a toothbrush designed by the Marquis de Sade.) Or when Lakshmi tries to escape from the whorehouse she’s sent to, only to be captured and brought back to the sight of everyone else wearing livid welts, being punished for her dreams of freedom.

But other times, these are silent horrors – as when Amma (Vibha Chibber) sees Lakshmi being taking away by Reddygaru and begins to boil water and sets out a bottle of Dettol. She knows she has to clean Lakshmi up when that door opens, and we wonder how long she has been doing this, and what brought her to this. Not a trace of emotion crosses her face when she tends to the broken Lakshmi, lying before her, legs splayed. She could be wiping dust from bookshelves.

How much of this is exploitative and how much is necessary to tell us what really goes on with little girls who are sold for tens of thousands and resign themselves to selling their bodies? Take the average Hollywood sex scene. It’s beautifully lit. There’s not a drop of sweat on the bodies. The saxophone masks the grunts, the sounds of flesh slapping against flesh. This is the idea of a sex scene, the carnal answer to elevator music. We know what’s supposed to be going on, but we don’t really get into it. Now take a Lars von Trier sex scene. It’s so graphic that we are forced to respond, both to what’s happening on screen as well as our own reactions, both physical and psychological. The latter is what Kukunoor is going for, with the jars of vaginal cream, the old men, the young men, the man who wears a wig, the repeated washing of Lakshmi’s barely mature sex organs, the pieces of padding slipped into her blouse, the bottle of booze that makes it all go away till the next customer violates her and leaves her cold sober. By immersing us into Lakshmi’s new life, Kukunoor gives us a guided tour of this particular hell. “Narak mein jaaoge,” Lakshmi spits at Jyoti (a moving Shefali Shah), the madam. Her reply: “We’re already there.”

After a point, Lakshmi gets used to it, and in her roommate Swarna (Flora Saini) we see what Lakshmi might be like in ten years. Swarna is so convinced she belongs here that when Lakshmi tries to run away – again – and is brought back, she asks her why she wants to escape. She seems genuinely surprised that someone would want to leave this life.

As long as we stay in the whorehouse, Lakshmi is a powerful social document. Is it cinematic? Sure. But it’s also eye-opening in the way non-fiction pieces are, detailing the hows and whats and whys of people we know little about, these victims of human trafficking. When Lakshmi makes a fuss about going into a room with a client, Jyoti whispers to her that the more she resists the more turned on he’s going to be, so why give him that pleasure? It’s like a parent playing mind games with a child who’s scared of stepping into the pool. Jyoti isn’t just the mother figure here, she’s actually a mother. In a matter-of-fact scene, set elsewhere, she sits with her daughter, a future engineer, and says, “Teri padhaai khatam, mera kaam khatam.” There are no tears. There’s only the ice cream in her hand.

After a solidly unsentimental first half – marred only by needless flashes to Lakshmi’s earlier life, in green-tinted frames – the film morphs into a stodgy courtroom drama. It’s as if Kukunoor lost interest after a while. It becomes very predictable. Lakshmi is rescued, and with the aid of a right-minded lawyer (Ram Kapoor) she decides to expose the villains who brought her to this racket. We’ve seen these theatrics before – the efforts to embarrass the plaintiff, intimidate her, bribe her, the last-minute witness, the shocking revelations. It may have been what actually happened, but it’s trite cinema. Monali Thakur gives a brave performance, but gradually she becomes less of an individual and more of one of those kinds of template-heroines whose stories we’re asked to bring handkerchieves for at the movies. The real-life Lakshmi deserved better.

KEY:

* angavastram = an expanse of cloth draped over the shoulder
* “Narak mein jaaoge” = you will go to hell
* “Teri padhaai khatam, mera kaam khatam” = I’ll stop working when you finish your studies

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…

Watching Rajat Kapoor’s marvellous Ankhon Dekhi, you may find yourself wishing that we had one of those “Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture” awards. The casting is perfect, the performances exquisite. It’s a cliché to say that an actor has “lived” his role – but that sense of not-acting-but-being is all-pervasive here. As the film opens, we seem to be in a family drama, woven around the members of a joint family scrunched up in a small house in Old Delhi – Bauji (Sanjay Mishra), his wife Pushpa (Seema Pahwa), Bauji’s younger brother Rishi (Rajat Kapoor), Rishi’s wife Lata (Taranjeet Kaur), and assorted children and relatives. There is much love in this motley bunch – not the filmy love that’s advertised in capital letters and declared through song, but the kind that’s present in families. It’s a lived-in kind of love, so taken for granted sometimes that an outsider looking in may see only bickering and hate. When Bauji quits his job, Lata grumbles to Rishi that they’re left bearing the household expenses, and when Pushpa makes a fuss after accidentally handling a hot utensil she gives Lata an earful. But when Rishi belts his son for failing in maths, Lata complains to Pushpa about how unreasonable he is. These are complex bonds. These people may have their problems with one another, but they also come together when it matters. It’s how families are in life, and it’s how families were in Hindi cinema – say, in the Hrishikesh Mukherjee films like Khubsoorat and Bawarchi, where one didn’t have to go abroad to experience epiphanies. The household was world enough.

But we see, slowly, that there’s more to Ankhon Dekhi than these expertly observed domestic vignettes. When Bauji’s daughter Rita (Maya Sarao) is found to be in love with Ajju (Namit Das) – “ladka theek nahin hai,” says Rishi, clearly convinced that he is right in reprimanding his niece, that it is his business – Rishi and a few others (there’s even a cop) go to Ajju’s house and rough him up. Bauji is there too, but once he sees the rather pathetic-looking Ajju, he’s no longer convinced about the “ladka theek nahin hai” assessment. He comes home and tells Pushpa that Ajju is a nice boy – he’s made an “ankhon dekhi” judgement of Ajju. That sets him off. He decides he’s never going to believe or endorse anything that he hasn’t seen for himself. We’re deposited squarely in the realm of whimsy. In a brilliantly staged stretch set in the courtyard – every young director (and even some of the older ones) should study this scene, where members of the family heat water and take turns to bathe, to see how to choreograph ordinary movement – Bauji declares that even newspapers are untrustworthy. Who, after all, has seen these things happen? Why blindly accept someone else’s truth? “Apna sach dhoondh,” he says. He’s so caught up in this fervour that he forgets to wear pants.

The comic setups that follow are superb. Bauji accepts prasad from the local priest but says it’s just kalakhand, and later, when the annoyed priest asks him if he will accept the presence of God only if He makes an appearance, Bauji says that that would be ideal. Imagine what it would be like, he says, “Yahan baithke chai pee rahe hain, Shiv ji ke saath.” In another side-splitting encounter, Bauji locks horns with a maths teacher who insists that parallel lines meet at infinity.

Just what is happening here? One theory could be that Bauji is experiencing male menopause, something that’s laughingly suggested by a relative. (Would these folks use a phrase like “male menopause,” though?) Bauji, in other words, is neck-deep in a midlife crisis, and because he cannot buy a Ferrari and bang his secretary, he has found something different to lift his life out of the rut. He has a new “project.”

But there’s something else. Bauji has become some kind of Shakespearean fool, dispensing simple truths amidst all the drollery. And this gyaan makes the people around him treat him like a guru. How ironic. Here’s Bauji insisting that one should believe only what can be validated, and these others are blinding flocking to him. The film, at this point, could be called The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah. Bauji seems to be looking for something, seeking – what it is, he doesn’t know, and neither do we. In one scene, we see him on the roads, holding up a sign that advises people to open their eyes and trust only what they can see – and yet, this doesn’t build into anything. It just is. And life goes on. The film is right in refusing to make a jadoo-ki-jhappi-like movement out of Bauji’s ankhon-dekhi tenet, for whatever’s happening isn’t external but internal.

And this, inevitably, results in some frustration, especially as the latter portions become looser, more impressionistic. There are things Bauji gets into – illegal gambling, a vow of silence (that’s contrasted, hilariously, with scenes of a boy who just won’t stop talking), the decision to do away with borders on Rita’s wedding invitations – that we accept as strands of this film’s surreal DNA while simultaneously wondering if all this eccentricity is heading somewhere. And I wasn’t sure how literally to take the end, even if it has been hinted at earlier. Luckily, the more mundane domestic issues are always around. By now, Rishi has moved to another house and the resulting cold war between the brothers provides the emotional grounding through the surrounding flights of fancy. Kapoor doesn’t cheapen these bonds by staging big moments that invite us to weep. Even when the brothers embrace tearfully, we cut quickly to a relative who suggests that someone should take a picture of them. The sentiment is defused. And life goes on.

KEY:

* Ankhon Dekhi = something that’s been seen/witnessed
* “ladka theek nahin hai” = this boy isn’t okay
* “Apna sach dhoondh” = seek your own truth
* prasad = holy offering
* kalakhand = a milk sweet
* “Yahan baithke chai pee rahe hain, Shiv ji ke saath.” = We’re sitting here, having a hot cuppa with Shiva.
* gyaan = wisdom/knowledge
* jadoo-ki-jhappi = a magic hug, as espoused by the Munnabhai movies

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…

It’s election time, and some genius probably thought Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro was ripe for an update. And so we have two bumbling reporters (Pulkit Samrat, Bilal Amrohi) mired in deal-making politics, scams, a bridge collapse, unprincipled media practices, and a corpse that just won’t lie still. (Reporter One: “Yeh Avinash hai.” Reporter Two: “Nahin, yeh ab laash hai.”) But that film, alas, lacked the moment where the hero laid eyes on the heroine and burst into song. Umesh Bist, the director of O Teri, is determined to make amends. Vijay Raaz devotees will enjoy seeing the actor cut loose – he’s always watchable. And fans of Angelina Jolie might be surprised at Sarah-Jane Dias’s resemblance to their tomb-raiding idol. The comparison doesn’t stop there. The driving force behind Dias’s selection of scripts, too, seems to hark back to Jolie: Gone in 60 Seconds. First, the disastrous Abhishek Bachchan thriller Game. Then, Kyaa Super Kool Hai Hum. And now, this raucous mess, which has the gall to quote the Father of the Nation: Be the change you wish to see… Too bad the scriptwriter didn’t get that note.

KEY:

* O Teri = What the…
* “Yeh Avinash hai” = This is Avinash
* “Nahin, yeh ab laash hai” = No, this is a corpse

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…

It must be strange being a producer’s kid. You see daddy whipping out his purse and making stars of others, and you think “Why can’t that be me?” And so you set out in search of stardom. And then you discover that all of daddy’s money can only get you to the point where you’re projected on a movie screen – whether the rest of the theatre is filled with people, you have no control over. Two such actors, this week, are taking their umpteenth shot at a hit, Jackky Bhagnani with Youngistaan and Harman Baweja with the ridiculously named Dishkiyaoon. These aren’t terrible films – at least Youngistaan has its moments. But the thing that holds films together, the whole point of a star, that’s what’s missing. Baweja continues to look and act like a faded photocopy of Hrithik Roshan, and Bhagnani, when he smiles, seems to be following the advice of fashion photographers who shot aging heroines: don’t stretch your lips too wide or else the lines around the mouth will show. His smile never reaches his eyes. It’s the blandest approximation of happiness you can find outside a political photo-op.

Youngistaan, directed by Syed Ahmad Afzal, is a political rom-com in the mould of The American President. It has at its centre an endearing what-if. The premise – also reminiscent of Shankar’s Mudhalvan/Nayak – is that of the 28-year old Abhimanyu (Bhagnani) drawn into the chakravyuh of politics when he becomes the nation’s Prime Minister. What if we got a really young leader, who goes gymming in track pants, and what if he had a live-in girlfriend (Anvita, played Neha Sharma)? Can someone from today’s generation, with all those notions of “personal space,” cope with the media’s obsession with public figures? The early portions have a sweet, unhurried feel. As Abhimanyu is sworn in, Anvita weeps in bed, tucking into a tub of Baskin-Robbins ice cream. Slowly, she gets used to the reality that he is the country’s leader first, her boyfriend only later – still, she calls him at work and says she loves him and wants him to say it back, never mind that Abhimanyu is in a meeting with his advisor Akbar (Farooq Shaikh), whose mouth is twitching, suppressing a smile.

Bhagnani and especially Sharma make us care about this couple, who find it increasingly difficult to be the kind of couple they used to be. Among the first things done when Abhimanyu assumes office is the deletion of all his Facebook photos. We feel for them when their privacy is violated. And Farooq Sheikh, in what looks to be his last performance, radiates the kind of avuncular affection that bathes the film with a special warmth.

The problem is that Youngistaan has no teeth. The American President wasn’t exactly the last word in realism, but it got its bite from Aaron Sorkin’s sharp writing, which expertly balanced the political and the personal. (The magnetic central performance by Michael Douglas didn’t hurt either.) Youngistaan, on the other hand, barely generates a sense of conflict. Anvita, after some initial adjustment issues, slips too easily into her new role as the PM’s arm candy, and the mudslinging about their relationship – which could have yielded juicy drama, given that he promised her once that he’d never enter politics – is deflected with a few scenes with moist eyes and there-there dialogue. This couple is too good to be true.

As is the political scenario. There are no scenes of Abhimanyu reading up about the complicated issues that need his signature. He is shown to be a natural, adept at appeasing politicians and wily in his own way. He doesn’t even get a rousing speech to deliver, even when he addresses delegates at the UN headquarters. These situations needed texture, quirk. Still, with elections around the corner, things could be a lot worse than this story about a Prime Minister who inaugurates a hockey tournament not with a boring speech but by scoring a goal. When the reality is so depressing, even okayish fantasy can be a balm.

Sanamjit Singh Talwar, the director of Dishkiyaoon, has an eye for the twist. He has a good one at interval point, where we see where Viki (Harman Baweja) and Lakwa (Sunny Deol) are holed up. There’s another not-bad twist at the end. The trouble is with everything else. This is one of those Goodfellas-type stories where a kid announces that he wants to be a gangster. But there’s no edge, no danger. What should have been a great tragedy feels fatally lightweight, swinging between an unsatisfying love angle (with Ayesha Khanna’s Meera) and a sometimes confusing rise-to-the-top crime saga. And it’s hard to take all this seriously when there’s such an abundance of unintentional laughs. When Viki meets Meera – she’s a musician, one of those wizardly guitar players who can summon up chords without moving a finger – she asks him what he does. He says, diffidently, “I’m a gangster.” I don’t think I’ve heard a gangster announce himself as one quite this way, as if he were a lawyer or a chartered accountant. Deol is even funnier, with his unibrow and a tendency to spout fortune-cookie wisdom, like some Confucius of crime. Prashant Narayanan has some nice scenes as Viki’s mentor, though it’s never a good sign when a supporting character evinces more personality than everyone else.

KEY:

* Youngistaan = Young India
* Dishkiyaaoon = gunshot
* chakravyuh = a spiral battle formation from the inside of which it is impossible to break free
* one of those wizardly guitar players = see here (8:40 onwards)

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…

Any film that takes a dig at Katrina Kaif’s Hindi can’t be all bad – even if does feature Nargis Fakhri, the latest claimant to Kaif’s throne. Tamil cinema has a thing for casting heroines who don’t look like they’ve ever stepped south of the Vindhyas. Hindi cinema, meanwhile, has a thing for casting heroines who don’t look like they’ve been to India at all. Some of them don’t look like they’ve been to an acting class either. In Rockstar, Fakhri proved she couldn’t do epic romance. In her item number in Phata Poster Nikhla Hero, she proved she couldn’t dance. And now, in Main Tera Hero, she proves she cannot do comedy. She’ll probably end up Aamir Khan’s squeeze in Dhoom 4.

Then again, Main Tera Hero, a remake of the Telugu film Kandireega, doesn’t require much from her. It doesn’t require much from anybody, really, even the audience. This is, in other words, a David Dhawan comedy – and it begins well enough. Seenu (Varun Dhawan) falls for Sunaina (Ileana D’Cruz), not realising that a beefy rogue cop (Arunoday Singh) has his eyes on her too. Meanwhile, Ayesha (Fakhri), has her eyes on Seenu. Till a point. And then, she has her eyes on the beefy rogue cop. And a mute gangster’s sidekick (Saurabh Shula) has his eyes on all of them. It sounds like rollicking fun. But there’s an over-reliance on wordplay and not enough situational humour – the fizz leaks out somewhere in the middle, right around the interval, where Seenu is handed a bowl of popcorn.

Main Tera Hero is only half what it could have been – still, that isn’t a bad half. The film has a solid comic cast – Saurabh Shukla, Rajpal Yadav, Manoj Pahwa, and Anupam Kher, who plays a gangster whose words tend to echo. (The reason made me giggle for a good two minutes.) And Varun Dhawan, inheriting the kind of role Govinda did and Salman Khan did (before he discovered barbells) in the old David Dhawan comedies, gives an admirably energetic performance. He bobs on a diving board. He shimmies down a pillar. He almost falls on goons out to get him and steadies himself just in time. He bounces about like a rubber ball. My favourite scene was the one where he hands over his shirt to Sunaina, walks down the stairs topless, and then faces her stupefied parents. Can he do other things? Can he act with his shirt on? Can he do drama? Those questions can wait. For now, it’s enough that he’s an instinctive comedian. He makes us feel we’re more entertained than we actually are. In these films, that’s what being a hero is all about.

KEY:

* Main Tera Hero = I’m your man
* her item number in Phata Poster Nikhla Hero = 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…

Two vastly different films vie for space in Girish Malik’s Jal. The first one is a sort of tragic satire. A Russian conservationist comes to the Rann of Kutch to study flamingos. She delights at the pink-hued birds taking flight, and one day, while taking a swim in a brackish lake, she discovers that the bottom is littered with dead chicks. She realises that she needs to provide the birds a source of good water, and so she – along with her team – contacts the government and gets drilling machines, and when they cannot find any water, they enlist the services of a local diviner named Bakka (Purab H Kohli). Soon enough, water is found.

A huge sadness weighs down on this portion of the film. The villagers in the area are perpetually water-deprived. They depend on Bakka, who presses an ear to the ground and says this is where the water is. And yet, with their pickaxes and spades, there’s only so much they can do, so far they can dig. And here’s this foreign woman, who, to save birds, is able to click her fingers and summon up the kind of machinery that can drill down to water in a matter of hours.

There are many ways this track could have played out. As a Swades-like feel-good fable about how it takes an outsider, sometimes, to make a change. As a portrait of government apathy. As a study of the inertia that envelops so many of our villages, whose downcast residents seek deliverance but from what and how they themselves do not know. Any of these could have resulted in a strong, unique art-house effort.

But the director is after another film as well – a more traditional, more mainstream melodrama involving stolen jewels, a double cross, murder, rape, some “comedy” where the villagers lust after the Russian conservationist, some more comedy about Bakka marrying Kesar (Kirti Kulhari) and retreating for a 10-day-long lovemaking session, warring villages, a love triangle (Tannishtha Chatterjee’s Kajri is in love with Bakka too), and an action scene where the hero fights the villain in a slushy pit. Suddenly, those flamingos are a distant memory.

Perhaps Malik felt that the largely unvarying landscape would provide the consistency, smooth things over and fuse the two films into an organic whole. To say that he’s in love with the desert is an understatement. He gazes at his surroundings like a teenage boy opening a Playboy centrefold for the first time. Practically every scene stops for a sharp intake of breath, and strives for a David Lean effect. Early on, when Bakka prays to the heavens for water, the camera rises and pins him down amidst acres of cracked earth, which look like designer tiles. Later, when Bakka is tied to a camel and dragged through the desert, the scene is presented in slow motion, all the better for the sand to rise like clouds of talc.

If only some of this obsession had transferred to other aspects of the film. The performances range from the perfunctory to the pitiable. Kohli is an affable presence when he’s drinking coffee in TV commercials, but he just doesn’t have it in him to portray the complex Bakka, some sort of “paani ka devta” who may also be something of a womaniser. Even the usually reliable Yashpal Sharma looks out of sorts. But there’s only so much you can do with this kind of writing. When Kajri speaks for the women of the village and offers their jewellery to pay for the drilling machine, no one protests that she cannot be making decisions for them, and no one slips a locket or a ring into a blouse because they can’t stand to part with it. They stand up meekly and proffer their necklaces and bangles. Saints would possess more personality. I walked out of this missed opportunity wanting to scratch a vague itch. Maybe a viewing of Road, Movie will do the trick.

KEY:

* Jal = water
* Swades = see here
* a Playboy centrefold = see here
* a David Lean effect = see here
* when he’s drinking coffee in TV commercials = see here
* paani ka devta = God of water

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…

How times change. In 1984, when Amitabh Bachchan was still playing the angry young man, his cure for the malignant tumour of political corruption, in Inquilaab, was to become Chief Minister and whip out a machine gun and pump bullets into the members of his party. Now that he’s older – and, on screen, milder – his methods are less severe, more practical. In Bhoothnath Returns, he’s still appalled by the self-serving nature of politicians. He still decides to make things right by standing for elections, by changing the System from the inside. But this time, he leaves it to the people, to us. If we want change, we have to vote in the right people. I was reminded of that other political drama from 1984, Aaj Ka MLA Ram Avtar, where Rajesh Khanna becomes Chief Minister. At the end, he addresses a gathering and says that when we want to marry off a daughter or a sister, we carefully consider the boy’s pros and cons and come to a decision only when we are really sure he will take care of his wife. Why, then, are we so uncaring about those we elect to take care of the country? Why do we vote on the basis of religion, on the basis of who we know, or on the basis of who promises us more goodies? If we are dishonest when it comes to voting, then why should we be surprised when the people we elect to power turn out to be dishonest? Midway through these elections, it’s a sobering thought.

But Bhoothnath Returns, directed by Nitesh Tiwari, isn’t a sober movie. One of the problems with it is that it doesn’t know what kind of movie it is. At first, it looks like a kiddie romp, with Bhoothnath (Bachchan) leaving the world of ghosts – some kind of castle in the clouds – for another stint on earth, where he befriends a boy named Akhrot (Parth Bhalerao). With his tweed coat and thickly framed glasses, Bhoothnath looks like a retired English professor, but as in the earlier film, Bhoothnath, he’s charged up by the presence of the boy, who is delightful (and Bhalerao plays him without a trace of self-consciousness). Akhrot likes to show foreign tourists around Dharavi, where he lives, and he exaggerates the horror-show aspects of life in a slum – “tadka lagake” is how he cheekily calls it. But he needs more money, and Bhoothnath suggests the perfect scheme. Bhoothnath will drive out ghosts from under-construction buildings and Akhrot will pocket the fees from grateful builders.

And while doing this, the film slowly transforms into a gentle Rajkumar Hirani dramedy: Munnabhai Bane Mukhya Mantri. (Before this, though, there’s a brief hint at a Manoj Kumar social drama, when, over a Mehengayi maar gayi-like song, we’re shown the reality of the unshining India.) Bhoothnath and Akhrot encounter lazy and corrupt babus, and they decide that something needs to be done about it. Soon, they find themselves in the office of a lawyer (Sanjay Mishra), asking if it’s necessary to be alive in order to stand for elections. The satire in these portions is top notch, and the realisation that we need a bhooth, with its supernatural powers, to fix things is both sad and scary. At the same time, the film isn’t all feel-good fantasy. There is the sense of a debate when Bhau (Boman Irani; is there another actor who balances cruelty and comedy so expertly?), Bhoothnath’s competitor in the elections, offers to step down because he can never hope to match Bhoothnath’s powers, and, unlike Bhoothnath, he is bound by society and laws. This, really, is the problem, isn’t it? We want good things to happen. But, being in a democracy, we also want these things to happen the right way, the liberal way, the lawful way. How surprising is it, then, that nothing ever seems to happen?

And then, the film becomes yet another movie – a tearjerker, unfortunately. Bachchan is given a few too many speeches, and worse, Akhrot is put in danger. Suddenly, the director begins to wield a bludgeon. Instead of amping up the optimism – we see kids, future citizens, joining Bhoothnath’s party as workers, but nothing comes of this – he decides to make things “realistic.” (The lawyer gets to voice these misgivings.) Yes, we know bad things happen to good people who decide to enter politics, but if you want to tell that story, you shouldn’t wait for the last half-hour of an already overlong movie to get to it. Still, as a social document, Bhoothnath Returns isn’t without value. Inquilaab and Aaj Ka MLA Ram Avtar were released within months of each other, and they came to be considered zeitgeist films, filled with bitterness and cynicism and rage. Three decades later, we’ve had, almost back to back, Youngistaan and Bhoothnath Returns, which are filled with simple-minded hope and the belief that good things will happen to good people. Have we really changed that much? Or is it just that the multiplex popcorn goes down better when things don’t get too disturbing?

KEY:

* bhooth = ghost
* Inquilaab = see here (on second thoughts, don’t)
* Aaj Ka MLA Ram Avtar = see here (on second thoughts, don’t)
* tadka lagake = spicing it up
* Munnabhai Bane Mukhya Mantri = Munnabhai becomes Chief Minister
* Mehengayi maar gayi = see here
* babus = government officials
* Youngistaan = 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…

With Ek Duuje Ke Liye or Vicky Donor, we sense the effort to make something that’s more than just a cross-culture romance, the effort to make a movie. Why not have some fun with the fact that the only Hindi the hero knows comes from the cinema, and thus have a song – in an elevator that’s stuck – made entirely of concatenated Hindi-film names? Or, why not have the hero and heroine take a gentle dig at the stereotyping that surrounds them by calling each other “Fish” and “Butter Chicken”? Abhishek Varman’s 2 States, on the other hand, is content to be a sitcom, and not even a good one at that. Remember how wonderful Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi is when it plays inside your head? And know the feeling when, spurred by this nostalgia, you try to watch an episode on YouTube, and you cringe at the laugh track and the overemphatic performances? Sitting through 2 States is something like that. Worse, in fact. The Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi episodes lasted 20-odd minutes. This goes on for two-and-a-half hours.

That’s two-and-a-half hours of Tamilians eating from banana leaves and learning Carnatic music and rearranging their facial expressions as if trapped in an elevator where someone just let it rip. Two-and-a-half hours of Punjabis being crude and overbearing and suspicious of non-Punjabis, especially those dark-skinned Tamilians who just can’t wait to snare fair Punjabi boys for their daughters. Two-and-a-half hours of the most clichéd song situations – the shaadi song, the we-broke-up-and-I’m-moping song, the falling-in-love song.

The ones falling in love are IIM-A classmates Krish (Arjun Kapoor) and Ananya (Alia Bhatt). He’s Punjabi, but he’s all buttoned-up – in other words, he’s like a Tamilian. And he behaves like a typical tech-savvy Tamilian when he impresses her father by helping him with a PowerPoint presentation. She’s a Tam-Brahm, but she eats chicken and plants a kiss on his lips – in other words, she’s like a Punjabi. And she behaves like a typically brash Punjabi when she impresses his mother by getting aggressive with a groom who threatens to break up with his cousin sister. This is the only interesting thing about the movie. What if this angle had been pursued? What if, instead of just one-off episodes, the characters had been shaped like this consistently, where they aren’t just opposites who are attracted to each other, but also opposites of who we think they’d be?

We never find out, because the contrivances, otherwise, are the most obvious ones. His parents (Ronit Roy, Amrita Singh) don’t want her. Her parents (Shiv Kumar Subramaniam, Revathy) don’t want him. It’s like watching a never-ending game of tennis where the opponents hate each other and are slugging it out on either side of the Vindhyas: 2 states, one love. The rest of the film plays like the latter parts of Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge squared, with Krish and Ananya both doing things to make an impression on people who don’t want them. The only difference is that they’re casual about sex, something that would have seemed more subversive had we not seen these scenarios play out between a far less “sophisticated” couple in Shuddh Desi Romance.

This material, based on Chetan Bhagat’s novel 2 States: The Story of My Marriage, might have worked if treated with slapstick energy. Instead, Varman tries to class it up. He wants to transcend the writing, the way Abhishek Kapoor did with Kai Po Che (which was based on Bhagat’s The 3 Mistakes of My Life). And so we’re made to endure a lot of slow staging, with meaningful pauses. It’s hard not to laugh at this silly story being treated as if a matter of grave national importance is being raised for the very first time. Adding to the pomposity is a framing device, with a downcast Krish baring his heart to a psychotherapist. These scenes are the cinematic equivalent of lead. But the lighter scenes are no better. The moment where Krish barges into the room where Ananya is being interviewed and proposes to her should have been crazy-magical. We should be smiling. The  more susceptible among us should be wiping away a tear. But what ensues is as bland as bread – okay, a day-old Danish, given that it comes to us from Dharma Productions.

Well, not quite. The scene is somewhat redeemed by Bhatt’s I-can’t-believe-this-is-happening smile. After Highway and 2 States, she’s beginning to look like the real deal. She has a coltish vitality, and she almost compensates for her co-star’s lack of inner life. (With his hangdog expressions and lugubrious line readings, Kapoor comes across as someone who was hit by a tranquiliser dart just as the director yelled “action.”) The other almost interesting performance comes from Ronit Roy, whose character is essentially a genteel variation of the monster he played in Udaan. But he’s let down by the writing. He’s absent through most of the movie, and when he suddenly wakes up and decides to help his son, it’s like witnessing the birth of a brand-new technique to resolve problems in the plot: the dad ex machina. Could this mean that Chetan Bhagat may have been boning up on Greek drama while writing his bestsellers? I feel like I’ve just been hit by a tranquiliser dart.

KEY:

* song made entirely of concatenated Hindi-film names = see here
* Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi = see here
* learning Carnatic music = see here
* let it rip = see here
* shaadi = wedding
* a PowerPoint presentation = see here
* Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge = see here
* Shuddh Desi Romance = see here
* Kai Po Che = see here
* the monster he played in Udaan = 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…

Towards the end of Dekh Tamasha Dekh, we see the police chief (Vinay Jain) of a seaside village on the phone, talking to his young son. (It’s a land line. There are no cell phones around.) He paints a beautiful picture of the place. There’s the sea, of course, and there are mermaids, and nearby, there’s a mela. These fictions are clearly for the boy, but you wonder if they are for him as well, to keep him sane, if only for the duration of a telephone call. Due to the demise of a local, a Hindu named Kishan who took to living as a Muslim named Hamid, the village is at war. The Hindus claim the corpse as theirs, as do the Muslims. The only one who seems composed – sane – is Hamid’s wife (Tanvi Azmi). She lost her first husband to police fire during an earlier riot. Now, her son Anwar has run away and become a miscreant. And Hamid is gone too. She says she has no more men to give away. Unlike the cop, she’s at peace.

Dekh Tamasha Dekh is, in essence, a compilation of plot points that aren’t really new. We’ve seen, on screen, how sensationalistic the media can be, how opportunistic politicians can be, how powerless honest policemen and moderates can be. We’ve seen fundamentalists from both religions preach intolerance and ignite passions. We’ve seen Hindu-Muslim love. We’ve seen Hindu-Muslim hate. And we’ve seen, in Zakhm, the Muslim “wife” of a dead man (who was Hindu) being labelled a whore because they didn’t seal the deal in the eyes of society. (Like the boy in Zakhm, Anwar seethes at this injustice.) But the director, Feroz Abbas Khan, positions the film at the border of surrealism and absurdity – and this tone, gently satiric, makes all the difference. At any given moment, things are funny and wistful and sad and touching, a mix of moods that’s at once more ambitious and less difficult to take than simple-minded polemics about all these “issues.”

In this week that has seen the passing of Gabriel García Márquez, it’s a welcome surprise to see a hawaldar possessed by the ghost of Hamid, stripping his clothes off in a hospital as a nurse calls for help. Elsewhere, a big shot played by Satish Kaushik – who’s terrific as always, and who, after Lakshmi, seems to be on a mission to air out his hefty torso on screen every opportunity he gets – rouses the rabble by pointing out that Hamid died by electrocution, and so his son must be given a job in… the Electricity Board. Meanwhile Hamid’s daughter Shabbo gives her boyfriend Prashant a “magic ring,” one that will see him through difficulties. And a Doniger-like history professor, whose controversial book is being burned, takes off his hearing aid whenever he wants to shut out the noise and retreat into a world of silence.

At one level, we may wonder about these movies, which, due to their lofty aims and lack of stars, play only in niche multiplexes, attracting niche audiences who already subscribe to everything that’s being said. These films are the cinematic equivalents of op-ed columns and panel discussions, and we may wonder if these messages, these cries from the heart, are going to get through to the people who really need to listen. Otherwise, isn’t it just a bunch of liberals sitting around and chatting? But that is a question of how films like Dekh Tamasha Dekh need to be marketed. As to the question of how it’s been made, there aren’t many complaints. A few “pointed” shots apart – a Muslim kid being taught to wield a gun; an “ironic” cut from a crime scene to a stage where Ae mere watan ke logon is being performed – the film flows beautifully, alternating long unbroken takes (especially in the scenes between Shabbo and Prashant) with scenes that are more traditionally cut. The hysteria is kept to a minimum. When a character is shot dead by the seaside, we hear not screams but the lapping of waves – the sky darkens, the frame fades out. It isn’t an invitation to weep. It’s an indication that the time for weeping is long gone and there may be no tears left.

KEY:

* Dekh Tamasha Dekh = Look at this farce!
* mermaids = see here
* mela = gathering, fair
* Zakhm = the film that had this lovely song
* Lakshmi = see here
* Ae mere watan ke logon = 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…

With the release of each new Subhash Ghai movie, we’re aware of its distance from his older ones, and it’s no different with Kaanchi, Ghai’s first heroine-centric saga. As long as he was making macho epics, centred on outsized male protagonists, Ghai was an entertaining filmmaker. A sensible one, too. Like all good masala moviemakers, he knew that Nature invented thunder and lightning for a reason – with all that noise and heat, we cease to think and we respond with our most primal emotions. And he chose his actors carefully. Shatrughan Sinha, Sanjeev Kumar, Danny Denzongpa, Amrish Puri, Dilip Kumar, Raaj Kumar, Anil Kapoor, Jackie Shroff, even Sanjay Dutt – these actors knew masala cinema and they knew that there was only one right way to play their parts, and that was to channel their inner werewolf and howl at the moon. (The din that Laxmikant-Pyarelel served up as background scores was perfectly in sync with these exertions.) Then Trimurti, which Ghai produced, bombed. The failure of the film must have been hard to take, for it was essentially an incremental reworking of Ghai’s Ram Lakhan – instead of a mother getting revenge with the help of two sons, we had a mother getting revenge with the help of three sons. (And who knows, had Trimurti clicked, Ghai might have gone on to make Char Dham, about a wronged mother with quadruplets named Badri, Dwarka, Puri and Rameshwar.) Ghai decided, then, that the Indian audience was no longer worth wooing. He turned his sights towards the Diaspora. He made Pardes. He’s never been the same since.

Kaanchi is yet another attempt by Ghai to prove that his big-top ringmaster days are behind him, and that he is now a subtle and sophisticated filmmaker. And again, these two instincts – the old and the new, the innate and the acquired – are at war. On the one hand, we have a closing quote from Rabindranath Tagore. On the other, we have Jhoomar Babu (Rishi Kapoor), a corrupt industrialist who, after seeing unflattering news about him on TV, picks up a pistol and shoots the screen. Afterwards, he lies on a bed with red satin pillows and strums a guitar, while surrounded by big-bosomed women in animal-print wraps. On the one hand, Kaanchi is a contemporary movie about Young Idealistic India overthrowing Old Corrupt India. On the other, there’s the smarmy old-world villain played by Mithun Chakraborty, whose stuffed cheeks suggest botched dental surgery. If Kaanchi is watchable at all, it’s due to all the schizophrenia on display, this battle of the Ghais.

With Taal and Pardes and Yaadein, Ghai showed signs of having his heroines do more than just dance on top of pianos and hint at the bounties in their blouses. The women in these films were more than just archetypal accoutrements in a man’s world. There was, suddenly, an attempt to get into their minds, their hearts. In Kaanchi, Ghai goes a step further. In a sense, this is a return of sorts to the revenge dramas Ghai used to make, but this heroine (Mishti) doesn’t need to wait for her sons to grow up. She swears like a sailor and is described as a sherni. The hero (Binda, played by Kartik Tiwari), meanwhile, is reduced to a sex object – he gets the bathing scene.

Would Karz or Karma have worked had the polarities been reversed, had the women – Tina Munim, Nutan – taken up the task of bringing down evil? It’s hard to say, because we’ve rarely had masala movies – save the odd Ashanti, the ghee-fried version of Charlie’s Angels – where the heroines did what Dharmendra was doing at the time. Perhaps, as Khoon Bhari Maang demonstrated, the key to these films is to have a big star at the centre, someone with the gravitational pull to ground everything around her, and Mishti, whose voice, in the upper registers, is charged with a childish twang, is certainly no Rekha. But even Rekha might have found it difficult to make Kaanchi seem any less ludicrous. The basic skills that Ghai used to have – the ability to construct dramatic showdowns, the ear for rousing dialogue, the eye for glittering song picturisation, the scent for emotional continuity – have deserted him. Who knows if he even has it in him to make a Karz or a Karma anymore?

The setting, in Kaanchi, is an idyllic mountainside village in Uttaranchal. The storytelling, too, is as old as the hills. Kaanchi and Binda, who are from this village, are good-hearted and pure, just as Sushant (Rishabh Sinha), hailing from Mumbai, is the incarnation of evil. Sushant falls for Kaanchi. She prefers Binda. Many scenes later, she’s in Mumbai, wrenching the hands off a giant clock and hurling them at a villain, as Ghai keeps cutting to a rock concert. Kaanchi is flabby and punishingly long, and it perks up only in the Kambal ke neeche song sequence. Yes, it’s a desperate attempt to cash in on our Choli ke peeche memories, but at least for these few minutes, we remember who Ghai was and not who he’s become, the grandfather who greets you with a “Yo!”. Someone should tell him that after Singham and Wanted and Rowdy Rathore, the time is right for him to pitch a tent and stage his circuses again. If all that energy doesn’t recharge his batteries, perhaps nothing will. Put differently, instead of launching a nationwide hunt for his next heroine, who will be rechristened Madhulika or Mehrunnisa, he should simply buy a brunette wig and blue contact lenses and coax Sonika Gill out of retirement.

KEY:

* macho epics = see here
* Trimurti = see here
* Char Dham = see here
* Pardes = see here
* dance on top of pianos = see here
* hint at the bounties in their blouses = see here
* sherni = lioness
* Ashanti = see here
* Kambal ke neeche = see here
* Sonika Gill = 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 most annoying affectation in the movies today may be the framing device set in the present day. 2 States structured its story as the flashbacks of a man baring his heart to his shrink. In Purani Jeans, we have the flashbacks of the US-returned Sid (Tanuj Virwani), an engineer who dreams of becoming a writer. (Score!) The flashback itself isn’t the problem. In Lakshya, for instance, the entire first half was presented in the form of the protagonist’s memories – in an uninterrupted stretch. These new films, however, keep returning to the here and the now, every ten minutes – this cuts into the flow of events. All Sid does in the present is mope around, remembering his past. Why not just give us a few moping-around shots at the beginning, thus establishing his state of mind, and then let the flashback unfold without a break? Do we need to be constantly reminded that these are a sad man’s memories?

The structure is the least of the problems in Tanushri Chattrji Bassu’s Purani Jeans, whose title is meant as a metaphor for the friends in whose company we feel as comfortable as in an old pair of jeans – preferably going commando, I suppose, given that the film opens with the Jim Morrison quote, “A friend is someone who gives you total freedom to be yourself.” Sid returns to his hometown and recalls his growing-up days with his best pals, the quintet that called itself “Kasauli Cowboys.” He’s not in touch with them anymore, and this strikes an instant chord with those of us who grew up in the days before the Internet, when the end of school or college usually meant that you slowly begin to lose your friends, especially after the initial enthusiasm of writing letters wanes and new friends – at the University you’re in, or at work – make themselves available. It’s a subject that can make grown men weep.

Purani Jeans induces tears all right – but of terminal boredom. Sam (Aditya Seal) worships Jim Morrison, a musician who died young. It doesn’t take too long to figure out what fate holds in store for him. His angst is compounded when he and Sid fall for the same girl, Nayantara (Izabelle Leite, who looks like a cross between Ali MacGraw and the Sunsilk Girl). And you have to wonder: this is a film targeted at today’s kids, and they’re still trotting out the love triangle, with lines about destiny and having to choose between pyaar and dosti? Purani Jeans is old-fashioned in every imaginable way. A sunny day turns cloudy and it begins to rain, just as scenes of heartbreak begin to play out.

It’s been a while since a film featured such all-round bad performances. Virwani appears to have graduated from the Furrowed Brow School of Drama. Seal, meanwhile, has clearly been schooled in the Shatter Glass in Anger Institute of Theatrics. Even the older actors, usually reliable performers like Sarika and Rajit Kapur (clad in suspenders and a Clive of India wig), turn in their worst. I kept thinking that he was so puckered up – and then, she called him an asshole. It’s the only time I laughed.

When I say I’m losing patience with these films, I’m usually told that it’s because I’m a critic and I’m jaded and I see so many movies and so forth. But I don’t think it’s just that. I think anyone would react violently to situations like the one where a love-struck Sam carves Nayantara’s name on his arm, and instead of running away screaming at this display of insanity she reacts as if he showed her a zit. As a kid, I used to watch three-hour movies all the time, and many of them were bad – but I didn’t mind. Now, even these two-hours-plus-change films have begun to seem way too long. Perhaps the clock has begun to tick louder?

KEY:

* Purani Jeans = Old jeans
* Lakshya = see here
* Ali MacGraw = see here
* pyaar and dosti = love and friendship

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…

Amole Gupte makes movies about children but he doesn’t make children’s movies. Taare Zameen Par (which Gupte was involved in, but did not direct), Stanley Ka Dabba and his latest film, Hawaa Hawaai, are upbeat stories, certainly, but they’re grounded in prickly truths about the way children are and the way we treat them. You wouldn’t want your child to sit through these films, because these aren’t simple escapist fantasies. Every escapist fantasy has a problem at the centre that needs to be overcome, but in Gupte’s films, the problems outweigh the fantasies. He is, thus, a unique filmmaker, one who makes movies about children for adults. And yet, the adults in his films are almost caricatures, while the empathy he displays towards children is remarkable. In one of the most startling scenes in Hawaa Hawaai, a rich brat – a teenager – who has caused an accident by driving drunk in his BMW is let off with the gentlest of admonitions. The scene had undercurrents – the victim changes his mind about suing the kid because he may be falling for the kid’s sister. But that doesn’t change how, in Gupte’s world, children are holy innocents. Childhood is suffering enough, he seems to say. They need no more punishment.

The world of Hawaa Hawaai is like the world of Stanley Ka Dabba, filled with fresh-faced children from opposite ends of the economic spectrum, and like that earlier film, this one too springs a backstory on us at the end, when we least expect it. But that was a far superior film. It wasn’t tethered to a genre. There was something free-flowing about that story, while almost everything in Hawaa Hawaai feels rigidly engineered and riveted into place. Even the dreams feel manufactured. This is one of those underdog films where a slumdog becomes a millionaire. Here, a Dharavi kid with the impressive name of Arjun Harishchandra Waghmare (Partho Gupte) – we’re never allowed to forget how impressive the name is; it keeps getting trotted out, like a show pony – dreams of becoming a champion skater. Actually, he only dreams of skating, when he sees kids on wheels practicing under the tutelage of Aniket (Saqib Saleem). But when Aniket sees Arjun, the dreams get bigger. This isn’t just the story of a boy’s dream but of the coach’s dream as well. Will Arjun win the state championship? Will Aniket get off his set of wheels – he’s the one who came under the BMW; when we first see him, he’s confined to a wheelchair – and inspire his new pupil to success? Do I really need to tell you?

Predictability is, of course, part of the menu in any genre exercise – but the good ones find interesting ways to have these clichés and yet subvert them. For a while, it looks as if Gupte has found the trick. He keeps the stock good-Muslim character (a mechanic), and he shows Arjun reciting a shloka just as his friend utters an Islamic prayer. But he doesn’t rub your nose in Arjun’s poverty. He opens the film with the kind of family prayer that probably hasn’t been seen on screen since Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham – penury has rarely looked so beatific. Early on, Arjun – after his father’s death (the father is played by Makrand Deshpande, who remains an impressive presence throughout; the mother, on the other hand, is essentially a repository of reaction shots) – finds work at a tea stall, and the owner is curt. He’s not interested in why Arjun is there. He only needs someone who can serve his customers their glasses of tea. On his first day, Arjun breaks a glass. There’s no reproach, no slap on the cheek, no threats of making the boy pay for the glass. There’s just some mild annoyance – after all, glasses of tea must get broken all the time in this line of work – and Arjun is back at work. It’s not life as a movie. It’s life as life.

This lack of sentimentality makes the early portions very effective. When we see a flashback after Aniket and his New York-based brother discuss their dead parents, we expect some kind of dramatic reveal, something that tells us why Aniket is so content with being a coach, and so determined to coach his kids to success – but the flashback is just of these boys skating (nothing really happens) and when we return to the present, the two men burst out laughing. When Arjun’s rag-picker friend produces a dabba of butter chicken that someone discarded at a five-star hotel, the shot isn’t staged to make us feel anything – we just see five hungry kids eyeing some tasty food, with not nearly enough to go around. These scenes could have had the volume amplified, and they may have still worked – but Gupte is happy to coast along the margins of these emotions instead of diving into them.

But some clichés are there for a reason, and Gupte unwisely steers clear of these as well. There’s a reason these films have those bonding scenes between coach and pupil – here, there’s nothing. Aniket decides Arjun is worth teaching, and that’s it. Gupte refuses to let us into Aniket’s head, even as our questions mount. (Is Aniket really interested in that girl? What does coaching mean to him? With the district and state championships looming large, why does he decide to take off on a vacation to New York?) And we don’t really get into Arjun’s head either. His transition from smiling in his sleep to crying at night should have carried an emotional charge – we feel nothing.

And there’s a reason these films have smug antagonists whom we love to hate. Gupte makes all the privileged kids super-nice. (There’s an interesting idea in the fact that the chauffeurs and the store owners – namely, the people who serve those privileged kids – are nastier to Arjun and his friends than the kids themselves, but nothing comes of this.) There’s no sneering at Arjun, no mocking of the makeshift (and too-cute) skates that this sweat-streaked chai-wallah and his equally grimy friends have assembled with scraps from the junkyard – and that’s a relief. But there’s a difference between avoiding a cliché and abandoning it altogether. These well-off English-speaking kids (Arjun’s schooling was in the Hindi medium) are practically a cheering squad, and we get no sense of them as individuals or opponents. Gupte is after something more dramatic. He wants to show us that Arjun’s battles aren’t with his opponents but – as we saw in Bhaag Milkha Bhaag – with the demons haunting him, and the way this is handled turns out to be a bigger cliché. For a film that skirts melodrama so scrupulously in the first half, the high-decibel contrivances in the latter portions come as a rude shock. The days of the big races are when all the anvils drop out of the sky.

And yet, there are powerful moments of grace. Aniket is so used to coaching privileged children that he doesn’t know how to deal with Arjun and his friends. In fact, he knows nothing about them, their lives. (And how could he, in Gupte’s world? He is, after all, an adult.) In a quietly funny scene, he does what liberals usually do and voices aloud his dreams for these boys, and one of them effectively asks him to shut up. One dream at a time, the boy says. Let’s look at making Arjun a champion first. The perspectives – idealist versus realist; the adult who dreams like a child versus the child who thinks practically, like an adult – couldn’t be more different. I can’t recall, offhand, another scene like this in a recent film, where such a well-meaning individual was cut down to size so pitilessly. Better yet is the scene where Aniket asks Arjun to quit his job at the tea stall and train with him. He says he’ll give Arjun the money he was being paid. Arjun replies, quietly, that that was point. He was being paid, for work he was doing. He’s not looking for handouts. In his quieter moments, Partho Gupte has the wise-beyond-his-years look of an apprentice monk, and he makes the words sting. How you wish his performance had found a movie to match it.

KEY:

* Hawaa Hawaai = this film’s nickname for skates; also see here
* Taare Zameen Par = see here
* Stanley Ka Dabba = see here
* Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham = see here
* chai-wallah = see here
* Bhaag Milkha Bhaag = 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…

Manjunath is the story of an incorruptible oil-corporation employee who died in a nondescript village in Uttar Pradesh when he was 27, with six bullets in his chest. Even to those unfamiliar with the real-life Manjunath Shanmugam, a Tamilian from Karnataka, this is not a spoiler. Sandeep A. Varma, the director, opens his film with text that tells us as much. The question, subsequently, becomes one of drama. How does one make an interesting movie out of a story whose end everyone knows? A few months ago, we had Shahid, another film about an idealist. But that had courtroom jousts and Hindu-Muslim differences. It had love and sibling rivalry. Manjunath’s story is quieter and also inherently less cinematic. Scenes of an officer going around petrol pumps inspecting the levels of adulteration in fuel don’t exactly set the pulse racing. And that’s how Varma, with his low-key approach, seems to want it.

Manjunathis fashioned along the lines of what is turning out to be the narrative technique of the year. After 2 States and Purani Jeans, here’s another story that begins in the present and keeps flashing back to key events. The present is when Manjunath goes missing. (We know he’s dead.) And in the flashbacks, we see the kind of man he was. The external drama comes in the form of threats from the oil mafia, especially from Golu (Yashpal Sharma). In one scene, Golu pretends to threaten someone else when his threats are really directed at Manjunath (Sasho Sattiysh Sarathy). In another, he bends to touch the feet of Manjunath’s mother (a moving Seema Biswas, who speaks Tamil as if coached by Udit Narayan), and he makes sure that she sees the gun stuck into the back of his pants. And the internal drama comes from Manjunath’s personal life, like his being dumped by a girl in Bangalore, after which he gets drunk and gropes his friend Sujata (Anjorie Alagh). Sarathy plays this scene well, with the right mix of mortification and awkwardness the minute he realises what he’s done. The actor makes us see that Manjunath was an odd man out – a lower-caste individual surrounded by upper-caste classmates in college, a swarthy Tamilian in North India, a man with a strong moral compass in the midst of those who were content to let things lie.

And one of the many things we want to know is this: Did Manjunath feel like an outsider, or did he blend in, with only the people around him thinking of him as an outsider? (His boss refers to him as “these people.” A local calls him kaloo.) When did he first feel that something was happening in the petrol pumps? When Manjunath pulls out a cigarette and sticks it in his mouth, we wonder: Was he always a smoker or did he turn one recently, due to all the stress? What was he thinking when he rushed out at night, all alone, after getting a tip-off about shady dealings? Was there no one around he could take with him, or was he so outraged that he did not give a thought to his safety? Who, for that matter, are the people giving him these tip-offs, and how did he recruit them? Why does he come off, sometimes, like a vigilante, stalking wrongdoers instead of reporting them and letting the law take its course? Was he, as the doctor says, a paranoid schizophrenic (he keeps staring at flies outside windows), and did this feeling of persecution exacerbate his recklessness?

The film doesn’t give us satisfactory answers, and the director, instead, shifts his attention to another set of questions, structured as a debate between Manjunath’s ghost and Golu, one of the killers. Such an outré stylistic device is, frankly, distracting in a film that strives to be realistic. (Another one involves rock shows from a band with Manjunath as the lead singer. After he is shot dead, we cut to a song.) Manjunath, somewhat redundantly, makes an appeal to Golu’s conscience, but Golu has the more interesting questions. Did you give a thought to your parents when you were off waging your idealistic wars? Don’t you think your father, who needs money, could have used the fifty lakhs we offered you as a bribe? (And even if Manjunath hadn’t accepted this bribe, he could have still helped his parents by continuing to work and take care of their expenses.)

This, perhaps, should have been the film’s framing device. Instead of simply dramatising what we already know, maybe the director should have structured his story as an inquiry into the implications of honesty in today’s world. (After all, Manjunath does wonder aloud whether what he did was great or stupid.) Without this kind of scaffolding, the happenings feel familiar. The candlelit vigils, the fight to get justice, the police investigation after the murder (why not gradually reveal what happened to Manjunath as the cops go about gathering clues), the attempts to “humanise” an idealist through his goofy interactions with friends and family – we’ve seen it all. Manjunath is so focused on what happened that it forgets to tell us why it happened. Why not give us a few more scenes about Manjunath’s interactions with the villagers who live without electricity, and who find the kerosene they depend on being siphoned away by the oil mafia? This sort of insight – as Swades so memorably demonstrated – is more conducive to thoughts of bringing about change than simply having a single scene where Manjunath reads the parts about upholding dharma in the Bhagavad Gita. This is the kind of film about which you use words like “well-intentioned” and “earnest” and “solid.” But it never catches fire.

KEY:

* Manjunath Shanmugam = see here
* Shahid = see here
* Udit Narayan = see here
* kaloo = blackie
* outré stylistic device = see here
* Swades = see here

An edited version of this piece can be found here. Copyright ©2014 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Spoilers ahead…

Mrityunjay Devvrat’s Children of War opens in a lush forest. An old man, a Hindu, recites mantras as he sprinkles ashes from an earthen vessel. A little girl nearby asks him what he is doing. He says the ashes are of his family. “Main ise sula raha hoon.” He is putting them to sleep. The scene gently – and lyrically – encapsulates what it was like in Bangladesh (or East Pakistan) after Yahya Khan declared “Kill 3 million of them and the rest will eat out of our hands,” and the Pakistani Army went about systematically (and, one might add, sadistically) crushing the Bengali resistance. The plight of Bangladeshis, Devvrat tells us, was no different from that of Jews in Nazi Germany. Even children weren’t spared. In a shocking scene early in the film, a little boy who picked up a journalist’s story to deliver to a local newspaper (or maybe a samizdat publication; it isn’t clear) is shot dead by Malik (Pavan Malhotra). The killing is presented in a long shot, and we aren’t allowed to gaze on the body or linger on the boy’s fate. We see him as Malik sees him. He’s a housefly. A nuisance. And he’s been swatted.

And we move to the bedroom of the journalist – Aamir (Indraneil Sengupta) – who has just made love to his wife Fida (Raima Sen). Even the song that Fida played on the gramophone earlier, to set the mood – the Bengali version of RD Burman’s Yeh kya hua – seems portentous: What’s happening? Aamir and Fida are soon separated, and he ends up with an underground resistance group (whose head is played by, of all people, Farooque Shaikh; the out-of-the-box casting may have sounded like a good idea, but it just doesn’t work). A second story thread involves Rafiq (Riddhi Sen) and his sister Kausar (Rucha Inamdar) – they appear to be teenagers – who discover that they are the only survivors in their village. The others have been wiped out by the Pakistani Army. The siblings subsequently join a group of nomadic locals being shepherded to safety by a kindly old man (Victor Banerjee). Through these interleaving incidents, Devvrat attempts to paint a picture of a tragic era.

And what a picture he paints. Children of War is exquisitely shot – there isn’t a single lazy frame. Soldiers of the Pakistani Army halt a bus carrying Bangladeshis and order them to run across a bridge. At the other end, more soldiers lie in wait, with rifles. The helpless Bangladeshis fall into the river, flailing like unstrung puppets, their reflections rising to meet them, as the water splashes in slow motion. Later, during a song sequence, blood flows over sandstone steps – again in slow motion – like icing being poured on a multi-tier cake. And when Bangladeshi women are imprisoned and raped, so that they can bear “Pakistani” children, we see their silhouettes from the outside of lantern-lit tents. When carnage looks this good, it begins to feel pornographic. There is a thin line between the visually arresting and the overwhelmingly beautiful, and Devvrat crosses it repeatedly. At times, we seem to be watching a top-notch music video – a tropical spin on the war portions in Alan Parker’s Pink Floyd – The Wall, or a belated set of moody visuals to accompany George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh.

The overbearing background score doesn’t help. When Bhitika (Tilotama Shome), a militant, expresses her regret matter-of-factly about what happened to Aamir, he takes out a picture of him and Fida and shows it to her. The moment plays out in silence, and it’s tremendously effective. We know how horrible the situation is. We don’t need to be nudged by a solo violin on the soundtrack. But elsewhere, the score thunders over what are already ripely melodramatic constructions, and we are left with a headache. When someone hears a knock and opens the door, the person outside is revealed in a flash of lightning. When someone gives up all hope and is about to slit a wrist, the liberation forces come charging in. And the shot of a child wailing beside his slain mother is held for what appears to be a minute. When scenes this dramatic are further underlined by a score – yes, the solo violin makes itself heard – it’s like being handed five handkerchiefs. It’s too much.

One could say that about a lot of Children of War. The running time is too much. Two hours and forty minutes of rape and killing and torture, with nothing to alleviate the grimness or quicken the pulse, makes for a deadening movie experience. These are important stories and they need to be told. And yet, after years of films featuring oppression – whether by evil, moustache-twirling zamindars or the Third Reich or the British (in the case of, say, Lagaan) – these narratives have congealed into a genre. On paper, the Rwandan Civil War may appear different from the one in Sri Lanka, but when compressed into cinematic form, the events and the people begin to blur and look alike. Children of War, for that matter, looks a great deal like Schindler’s List. The barbed-wire prisons look like concentration camps, and the unremittingly evil Malik, who has loving conversations with his gun, resembles Ralph Fiennes’s pitiless Amon Goeth. How, then, does one make these movies look different? Hey Ram! solved this problem by sprinting into the surreal, equating the madness of war with the madness of a man. One of the more interesting scenes in Children of War features Kausar confronted by surrealistic images of various victims claiming to “be” Bangladesh. Better yet, a fiery orator in the present – we know it’s today because of the Los Angeles Lakers T shirt that a hip-looking audience member is wearing – announces that he is, first, a Bangladeshi, then a Bengali, and only then a Muslim. The identity of this speaker, given the shift in the timeline, is an affecting surprise. The problem with Children of War may be that there aren’t enough surprises. A film may be based on fact, but that shouldn’t stop the filmmaker from imbuing it with the zing of good fiction.

KEY:

* Yahya Khan = see here
* the Bengali version of RD Burman’s Yeh kya hua = see here
* Pink Floyd – The Wall = see here
* Concert for Bangladesh = see here
* Lagaan = see here
* Schindler’s List = see here
* Hey Ram! = see here

An edited version of this piece can be found here. Copyright ©2014 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Spoilers ahead…

A few scenes into Anant Mahadevan’s The Xposé, I sat up. Could this actually be a cunningly disguised sci-fi epic? Consider the evidence. It’s 1968. We’re neck-deep in the Bombay film industry. A starlet in a bikini top and a sarong sprints out of the sea in a shot that won’t be seen on the Hindi screen till 1982, when Parveen Babi, in a similar outfit, sprinted out of the sea in Yeh Nazdeekiyan. More time travel awaits us. Another starlet is dressed (or should we say undressed?) like Zeenat Aman in Satyam Shivam Sundaram, and a song from that film, Chanchal sheetal nirmal komal, is invoked in the title of the film being shot, Ujjwal Sheetal Nirmal, which now makes it look like the world’s first feature about a detergent. Fast-forward three years, to 1995, when Rajinikanth, in Baasha, uttered one of his most famous punch lines: Naan oru thadava sonna… These words are mouthed, in 1968, by a “South star” named Ravi Kumar. This actor is played by Himesh Reshammiya, and I fear for his life. What The Xposé is saying is that this line was Reshammiya’s long before it was Rajinikanth’s. Which Superstar fan is not going to grab a machete and buy the first air ticket to Mumbai?

A little later, though, the film begins to look like a postmodern experiment. Here we are, on the sets of Ravi Kumar’s film – and I kid you not, the walls are covered with van Gogh reproductions. The logical viewer may find himself wondering which Hindi film, from that era, evinced such interest in nineteenth-century European art, but the point may be that this is beyond simple rationalisation, much like the unlit cigarette that’s always found between Ravi Kumar’s fingers. He used to smoke when younger, but he gave up the habit when his father caught him. But he doesn’t want to let go of the habit entirely either. The unlit cigarette, I suppose, is some kind of statement. Perhaps it’s an up-yours to Anbumani Ramadoss. The statutory anti-smoking warning appears whenever Ravi Kumar appears, practically daring him to light up. Somewhere, Godard is smiling.

Speaking of whom, a poster of Le Mépris adorns the wall of the filmmaker Bobby Chadha (Ashwin Dhar). We think he’s going to change the face of cinema. Instead, he demands to see his heroine in a bikini. At the other end of the movie-viewing spectrum, we have Subba Prasad (Anant Mahadevan), whose walls are adorned with posters of Aayirathil Oruvan and Pudhiya Paravai. A starlet who auditions for him asks what she should do. He says, with a straight face, “Na dance, na expression, na pose – sirf expose.” (The two heroines, Sonali Raut and Zoya Afroz follow this advice to the T.) And finally, The Xposé settles into the genre it was always going for: horror. Not the traditional kind, with screaming ghouls – though one could make a fairly airtight case that Reshammiya, with his eerie knack for turning vowels into nasal consonants, comes close. No, The Xposé involves an entirely different kind of terror, the audience’s realisation that there’s still an hour-and-a-half to go. And Yo Yo Honey Singh is in the cast.

There is a good movie to be made from the premise of a starlet being murdered and the question of who the killer is. A small group of characters, introduced one by one, with each person having a motive – an Agatha Christie-style game is instantly at play. The best film of this type is Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s Khamosh, which turned a similar storyline into a solid exercise in claustrophobia. But The Xposé – despite murder, a catfight, a daring rescue from a computer-generated fire, multiple twist endings, and at least one partially revealed nipple – manages to remain terminally dull. And just what is Irrfan Khan doing here? Perhaps indulging in a little exposé of his own, about the vagaries of an actor’s life. One minute, you’re in an Oscar-winning Ang Lee epic. The next, you’re playing narrator in the film of a hero who cannot spell. Tell me Mr. Khan, are you really under that much karzzzz?

KEY:

* Yeh Nazdeekiyan = see here
* Chanchal sheetal nirmal komal = see here
* Naan oru thadava sonna… = see here
* Anbumani Ramadoss = see here
* Le Mépris = see here
* Aayirathil Oruvan = see here
* Pudhiya Paravai = see here
* “Na dance, na expression, na pose – sirf expose.” = “I just need you to take your clothes off.”
* Yo Yo Honey Singh = Sorry, I can’t bring myself to go there
* Khamosh = see here
* karzzzz = loan, debt; also this

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 suppose we should begin with this question: How is the animation, performance-capture and otherwise? Imagine that we had the kind of merchandising culture that Hollywood has perfected, wherein the release of a Star Wars movie would mean that the stores near you would carry figurines of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader. You’d buy these for your kids, and they’d enter a fantasy world, reenacting scenes from the film (or of their own making) by moving the arms and legs and heads of the toys. The movements would be stiff, disjointed, and the faces would remain expressionless, but the child’s imagination would take care of the rest. Watching Kochadaiiyaan, directed by Soundarya Rajinikanth Ashwin, is a little like that. The actors look stiff, disjointed – especially while executing choreography for the (way too many) songs – and they display no discernable emotion, but after about ten minutes, it didn’t bother me all that much. The trick, I suppose, is not to make comparisons with Hollywood’s animated features but think of the film as something made for Indian television, but blown up for the big screen.

The bigger question is whether Kochadaiiyaan, which heralds Rajinikanth’s return to the cinemas after more than three years, needed to be an animated feature. There are some advantages in opting for animation over live action. Some of the action scenes have the kind of sweep that is impossible to replicate with live actors – or live creatures, for that matter, in the instance of the dolphin that surfaces with the hero balanced on its snout. Then, there’s the dancing, which was never Rajinikanth’s strength – but here, he performs a thandavam and, later, matches steps with the classically trained Shobana. And in his introduction shot, which is possibly the most important part of any film he’s in, he spurs his horse to leap over a chasm, pausing midway to be silhouetted by the sun. Try doing that with a real actor on a real horse.

But when he laughs that laugh, when he delivers those punch lines, when his hand scythes through the air tracing out that half-eight, we don’t feel it’s him. Kochadaiiyaan keeps reminding us that this is him – the charismatic star who gave us Mannan and Thalapathy and Ejamaan (all these titles are folded into dialogues) – and his character does do the things we expect of him, like liberating slaves and dispensing gnomic utterances, but this never feels like “a Rajini movie.”

Part of the problem is surely the generic revenge-oriented plot, which plays out between two warring kingdoms. This may still have worked in live action, but in this animated form (and with hardly any expressions on the characters’ faces), the excitement is muted. Scenes that should have been shaped with the peaks and valleys of high drama end up flat as a plain. And there’s nothing else. There’s no comedy – unless you count the needless resuscitation of Nagesh, in a blink-and-miss part. There’s no romance either. Deepika Padukone plays the princess of the realm (she’s the villain’s daughter, naturally), and she falls for Rajinikanth’s Rana, but there’s not one memorable scene between them. (The film’s idea of detailing a relationship between two characters is to have them burst into song.) Instead, precious screen time is devoted to a baffling subplot involving the romance between Rana’s sister and a prince – after they get married, they’re never seen again.

For a brief while, in a flashback that features Rajinikanth in a second role, Kochadaiiyaan finally becomes “a Rajini movie.” As is typical in masala-movie storytelling, this is where we learn who Kochadaiiyaan is and how Rana fits into the picture, and even though the narrative – here, as elsewhere – is thoroughly generic, there’s at least a bit of energy in these scenes. This is where we catch a glimpse of Rajinikanth’s peerless ability to infuse electric style into his screen presence, tightrope-walking between performance and parody. Otherwise, we’re left with a missed opportunity of historic proportions. Kochadaiiyaan is truly history-making in a sense, because this is the first time that a huge star has allowed himself to be the hero in a full-length animated feature. Walking out, you may find yourself wondering: Did it have to be Rajinikanth?

KEY:

* Kochadaiiyaan = As Wiki puts it, “the king with a long, curly mane”
* thandavam = the dance of Siva… and Sivaji (see here)
* laughs that laugh = see here
* Mannan = see here
* Thalapathy = see here
* Ejamaan = see here
* gnomic utterances = see here
* Nagesh = see here
* tightrope-walking between performance and parody = see here

An edited version of this piece can be found here. Copyright ©2014 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Spoilers ahead…

It’s a wedding. It’s Jatland. That’s not really a word but it isn’t hard to guess what it means. Like Finland is occupied by Finns, Jatland is the domain of Jats, who, we’re told, don’t believe in love before marriage. But if that were true, there would be no movie, and so the bride elopes with her boyfriend, leaving her father fuming. Literally. When he gets this news, he’s seated at the  mandap, before the fire. He wants his daughter back. And so he abducts the friends of the man she ran off with. If they don’t know where the couple is, who will? Sabbir Khan’s Heropanti is a remake of the Telugu film Parugu, and it moves to the classic rhythms of a certain kind of love story popular in Tamil and Telugu cinema, one that’s as much about the individuality of the couple as the importance of the family unit.  Bommarillu and its Tamil remake Santosh Subramaniam come to mind, along with Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, the granddaddy of this type of love story, where love for one’s boyfriend or girlfriend was placed on the same footing as love for one’s parents. You may love the girl, but you’re not going to get her till you get her daddy to love you.

This is a strange regression in the context of love stories, after the freedoms of films like Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak and Dil, where the couple essentially told their disapproving families where they could get off. After all, you have one life to live. Wouldn’t you want to spend the rest of it with someone you like? But films like Heropanti mount a strong case for the parents’ expectations. At the wedding, when Chaudhury (Prakash Raj) looks fondly at his daughter, the bride who will soon run away, someone remarks, “Aap ki jaan to is chidiya mein basi hai.” She is his life. That explains why he has such a tough time trying to do the “honourable” thing when she runs away and he sets out to find her. He knows he should kill her, but that amounts, in a way, to suicide. (Remember? She is his life.) So he wishes – no, prays for the next best thing, proof that she hasn’t run away of her own accord. If she hasn’t, then it’s the guy’s fault, and that can be easily remedied with a bullet. After all, there’s a reason the supporting cast consists of Henchman No. 1, Henchman No. 2…

This is the scenario in which Tiger Shroff makes his debut, often backed by the flute theme from his father’s first hit, Hero. That was more than thirty years ago, and the leading man has changed in so many ways. For one, he is not allowed to be hairy, at least in the parts one can glimpse in a family entertainer. Shroff is suitably waxed and polished – as with all young heroes today, the gym is his temple, Salman Khan his deity – and his amply muscled torso is frequently put on display. This is another way the leading man has changed. In earlier films, the heroine used to be the one required to strip. (Even the prim n’ proper ones like Meenakshi Seshadri were given a form-fitting Shakuntala-type costume and a couple of thrust-the-bust dance moves.) Here, the heroine, Dimpy, is played by a pleasant newcomer named Kriti Sanon, and she’s a veritable nun – that is, if nuns were given to navel displays. That’s it, really. There’s really not much in today’s films for hormonal teenage boys hoping to drag and drop another image into their mental folder. Unless the boys are into Shroff. With the camera gazing so lasciviously on the hero, it’s probably no surprise that he’s begun to look like a heroine. Jackie Shroff was the kind of macho hero who looked macho even when he draped a bandhni dupatta around his neck. Tiger makes his entry in a leather jacket, and he still looks… well, delicate. He’s given some unfortunate dance steps that emphasise this… well, delicacy, but even otherwise he moves with the litheness of a ballet dancer. He turns as if executing a pirouette. He has a smooth face and pink lips and the body of a champion weightlifter. He’s somewhere between the hero in touch with his feminine side (think Shah Rukh Khan in the 1990s) and the hero who’s all cocky swagger (think Anil Kapoor in the 1980s). And his character, Babloo, is somewhere between the soft, swoony-hearted romantic who treasures a fallen earring (think Rajendra Kumar in the 1960s) and the brute who’ll do anything for his woman (think Sunny Deol in the 2000s). It’s all very confusing. We want to tell him: “Make up your mind. Pick one type and stick with it.” In return, he tells us, repeatedly,  that he’s got what no one else has. “Sabko aati nahin, meri jaati nahin.” He’s referring to heropanti, the quality of heroism. And then he shyly asks the heroine whether she thinks he is tall and handsome, whether his nose looks good, whether his lips look good.

Heropanti isn’t terrible. There is a nice set of contrivances, early on, that prevent Babloo from seeing Dimpy’s face. He doesn’t, therefore, realise that she’s the same girl he fell for, at first sight, when that earring fell from her ear, and later, when he saw her praying at a temple, her hair fluttering prettily in the Bollywood Breeze™. And when he sees that she is that girl, it’s a dramatic moment. Under a better filmmaker, these scenes would have registered more strongly, but in films like these, we take what we can get. A better filmmaker would have also realised that between the falling-in-love scenes and the separated-from-lover scenes and the happily-ever-after scenes, you need a few being-in-love scenes, so we know what this boy and girl mean to each other and why we’re supposed to root for them. And a better filmmaker would not rely so much on coincidences, like a conveniently overheard conversation, or following the trail of the abducted Dimpy by glimpsing a tiny statuette of Ganesha that’s fallen from her hands in an insanely crowded Delhi street. (Things always seem to keep falling from her – that earring, this statuette.) But the parts where Babloo sees how much Dimpy’s father loves her and cares for her are nicely done. There’s a terrific stretch outside a marriage bureau where Chaudhury runs into a couple that has eloped, and he tries to understand them. Prakash Raj has played these scenes a thousand times before, but as he seems to be the only one around who can act, we remain invested in him. As I said, in films like these, we take what we can get.

There are some tokenistic attempts at making the heroine more than just a showpiece. She says she wants to become Miss Haryana. (Translation: She Has Dreams.) She studies Home Science in college. (Translation: She’s Being Trained to Be a Homemaker in This Hideously Male-dominated Area.) Babloo talks to her about equality and bra burning and women’s suffrage. But there’s no denying that this is his film, a “show-reel film” meant to tell us how well Tiger can dance and fight and show off his muscles, and how tall and handsome he is, how good his nose is, how good his lips are.

KEY:

* Parugu = see here
* Santosh Subramaniam = see here
* Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge = see here
* Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak = see here
* Dil = see here
* the flute theme = see here
* Shakuntala-type costume = see here
* a bandhni dupatta = see here , around the 3:00 mark
* Bollywood Breeze™ = 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…

Something about metros makes filmmakers reach for metaphors about birds. Most recently we had Nadaan parindey, the song in Rockstar that had the protagonist calling out to pigeons that were displaced when a jungle made way for a city. It’s the other way around in Hansal Mehta’s CityLights. (About that title, apart from a man’s decision to make things better for a loved one, there’s no connection to the Chaplin classic.) Here, the birds fly into the city – they’re the hungry migrants who flock to urban jungles. A security guard named Vishnu (Manav Kaul) points to birds in flight and tells his colleague Deepak (Rajkummar Rao) that the creatures come from afar and stay close because of fear, and they’ll die if left alone. He could be talking about those migrants. Deepak is one of them. He left a debt-ridden existence in a small town in Rajasthan and moved to Mumbai with his wife Rakhee (Patralekha) and young daughter, and his flight is detailed in a song that goes Ek chiraiya ghonsle ko chhod ud ud jaaye. A bird has left its nest. There are quite a few shots of birds in large numbers taking flight and coming to roost. And by the film’s end, Deepak himself becomes something of a bird – we see him climbing higher and higher, far above onlookers who are specks on the ground.

What do you do when you have a lofty metaphor and little to pin it on? That’s the problem Mehta faces in CityLights, which has very little that’s new. When you go to a cop with a complaint, he’s going to be playing a game on his phone instead of listening to you – he is, you know, callous. When you go to a dance bar and ask for a job, the owner is going to ask you to take off your dupatta and stare at the curves that are revealed – he is, you know, seeing you not as a person but an object. All the clichés tumble out of the closet – village good, city bad, village guileless, city deceitful, village helpless, city predatory, and so forth. Watching CityLights unfold, with its banal contrivances and a plot that can be predicted the minute Deepak lands his job, I wondered what might have interested Mehta in this trite material, derived from the British film Metro Manila. Maybe it’s a job for hire. Or maybe a filmmaker cannot always, you know, soar. Still, how can you make something as stunning as Shahid and subsequently find yourself drawn to this, with its second-hand “ironies” about a family paying Rs. 100 per day to live in an under-construction apartment that will eventually sell for Rs. 3 crore? As reality, the fact is horrifying. But its dramatic value, its impact, after Do Bigha Zameen and Paar and so many years of cinema about wide-eyed rustics being devoured by a malevolent metropolis, is next to nothing. CityLights is content to leave us with what we already know, not just from the papers but from the movies. It’s all about the bird’s eye view.

This isn’t to say CityLights is a bad movie. It’s one of those new-generation Hindi films that’s so well staged and performed that there is, every now and then, a bit that sticks to your mind – like the way Rao squats, hunching his shoulders and drawing his body in, like a person in a cold country huddled in front of a campfire, or the way Patralekha, who looks like Divya Dutta’s younger sister, performs in that dance bar. The first time, she moves stiffly, consciously, as the other girls sway and swirl around her. The second time, she moves more easily, though she still doesn’t look at the customers who surround her, waving bundles of cash. I liked the way Rao delivers a smutty joke. Deepak is the least exuberant of men, a loser in every sense, and Rao makes us see how such a man would tell such a joke. And in a superb scene where Deepak goes to Vishnu’s home for a meal, we see how such a man would sing. He doesn’t belt out the number, locking his eyes with his listeners’. He’s the anti-performer. He looks down, as if singing to his plate. Manav Kaul is even better. He makes you wish that he were the protagonist, and as his wife, Sadia Siddique has a spectacular breakdown scene where she makes us realize what it really means to be “racked by sobs.”

But sometimes, we see these good actors thrown at the mercy of terrible scenes. Deepak doesn’t drink, doesn’t look at women that way, and yet, predictably, he finds himself in a dance bar, downing one peg after another. Then, when he gets home drunk, he wakes Rakhee up and asks her to dance for him. This stretch pretty much encapsulates the problem with CityLights. This is melodramatic material, but with this cast and with this director, the attempt is to “class it up,” to put a “realistic” sheen on things, and it doesn’t work because the film, as it goes along, becomes increasingly unrealistic. We have all these great “touches” that are meant to make Deepak and Rakhee “real” people – the fact that they’re god-fearing, the fact that he was in the army – but the film itself isn’t a “real” film. It keeps building towards some sort of manipulative thriller, and thrillers, inherently, are more cinematic than real. All the realism of the earlier scenes begins to look ludicrous in light of the blatant contrivances towards the end, which we would have forgiven (or even demanded) in a film that didn’t pretend, all along, to be a gritty drama.

In another touch, Deepak and Rakhee are shown to have almost similar lives. They get a scene each where they drop off their daughter at school, or with other kids. Both of them find a job through (conveniently) helpful people who are employed in the same line, and they face similar trials at work – Rakhee is asked to shed her upper garment and execute a turn so that her prospective employer can check out her wares, and Deepak is asked to strip and execute a turn in order to prove that he isn’t carrying anything on him. And both of them find themselves fired and having to ask their employers for money they are owed. All this is fine detailing, but it comes at the cost of the thriller elements, which are shoehorned in most hastily. Thrillers require their own kind of detailing, their own kind of buildup. When someone is killed, we need to register this death. We need to see what happened, and how – and if this happens to be a character we’ve grown to care for, we need time to absorb the emotions in the scene. Why skimp on this? As a result, the drama isn’t hard-hitting enough, and the thriller tropes aren’t satisfying enough. More importantly, we don’t buy Deepak doing what he does. We see him being humiliated, but we don’t feel the depths of his desperation, given that he barely seems to register these humiliations. It’s an interesting touch to show Deepak as someone who calmly accepts his lot in life – thrillers are usually based on people who don’t – but the film never manages to tie up his slow-witted and phlegmatic nature with his heated, impulsive actions later on. How is an important question in this kind of film. It’s never convincingly answered.

At least, not with the level of conviction that we found in earlier Bombay films that reached for metaphors about birds, films like Gharonda, whose title referred to the nest the man and the woman sought to build for themselves. Their situation wasn’t as wretched as Deepak’s. They were lower-middle-class. But that’s just hairsplitting in a city where everything’s so expensive, and we understood how the man and woman came together, how they split up, how she agreed to the kind of transaction that’s as alien to her nature as what Deepak does in this film is to his. We felt the desperation in those characters from what we saw and also what we heard, the lyrics that spoke of blind, bottomless nights and winding roads that would never lead to one’s destination in one’s lifetime. These are good lyrics, whose imagery adds to what we see on screen. The lyrics in CityLights are nowhere as evocative, and this wouldn’t be a problem in a tight thriller with a smattering of songs, but the music, here, is such a constant, so in your face, with the same songs played over and over, that it’s impossible not to see that the lyrics are merely telling us about what’s already been shown. When Rakhee tells Deepak she’s found a job and he weeps at what she has to do, we hear Jo mile usme kaat lenge hum – we’ll get by on what we get. Elsewhere, we get Kitne saare chehre hain aur tanha sab ke sab – so many faces and yet everyone’s lonely. We get Parchayeen ke peeche peeche bhaag raha hai man – a line about chasing shadows. This isn’t even sentiment. It’s just schmaltz.

KEY:

* Nadaan parindey= see here
* City Lights = see here
* Metro Manila = see here
* Shahid = see here
* Do Bigha Zameen = see here
* Paar = see here
* Gharonda = 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.