Spoilers ahead…

Watching Holiday, AR Murugadoss’s remake of his Tamil hit Thuppakki, we are able to see better what made the earlier film work. One, the fact that the other big-budget, hero-worshipping Tamil films that year – Thaandavam and Maattrraan – turned out to be terrible, and Thuppakki showed up just in time for audiences who were despairing of seeing a movie from a major hero that made at least a smidgen of sense. Two, it was a Tamil film set in Mumbai – the plot about hunting down terrorists was essentially that of Sarfarosh, but with more masala – and yet, the hero and his cohorts weren’t the usual rubes flailing about in an alienating “North India.”  They spoke Hindi and English when needed, like how people who’ve made their homes elsewhere do. Holiday is set in Mumbai and this cultural connotation, this colour, is lost. It’s just business as usual.

Three, and most important, Murugadoss found a balance between the demands of the story and the desire to enshrine his hero. So on the one hand we followed the sober tale of a soldier in the Indian Army (namely, the Character) who wipes out a significant threat from a terrorist organisation’s sleeper cells, and on the other, we basked in thrills from a hero (namely, the Archetype) who swaggers through this mission in style. And after seeing Holiday, I think we can safely declare that it was Vijay who made Thuppakki work – rather, our expectations of a Vijay movie. The bar is usually set so low that Thuppakki came as a pleasant surprise. Even more surprising was the decision to make Vijay play a part far removed from the ones he usually plays. The typical Vijay masala movie is about street smarts, but here he was genuinely intelligent. If Kamal Haasan was shown cracking a Rubik’s cube, we’d yawn and say where’s the surprise in that (and we’d expect him to move to on to one with twelve sides), but with Vijay, these gimmicks seemed fresh. Plus, he was a sadistic vigilante, who took out a toolkit and snapped off fingers of terrorists. And then he shot them dead. We’d never seen Vijay like this, and what would have been a sub-par Kamal Haasan thriller ended up seeming a fairly impressive masala outing.

In other words, the star’s image had a lot to do with our perception of Thuppakki, and without that particular star, the film’s flaws stand out in sharp relief. Akshay Kumar is a good action hero, a good comedian, probably better than Vijay in both these departments, but he doesn’t have what Vijay has, a unique image – he’s a rather generic presence in his films. When he does the “mass moment” scenes, they don’t send a frisson through us, the way they would when these moments are enacted by popular stars with a strong image. He cannot carry a bad film. His films are good if the writing/directing is good, and here, these aspects are far from satisfactory. Holiday, like Thuppakki, is too long. The romantic track (with Sonakshi Sinha) is too bland, too sexist, too redundant. The emotional beats are weak – we aren’t invested enough in the characters to chew our nails over their fate. Murugadoss told me, in an interview recently, that in his remakes (like Ghajini) he fixes the problems in the original film. Didn’t he think these were problems? Or is the real problem the fact that there’s no Aamir Khan this time around?

KEY:

* Thuppakki = see here
* Thaandavam = see here
* Maattrraan = see here
* Sarfarosh = see here
* Ghajini = 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…

Nitin Kakkar’s Filmistaan gets going when an affable Indian named Sunny (the fantastic Sharib Hashmi, who looks like Satish Kaushik in his college days) is captured by militants and held hostage in Pakistan. We get a glimpse of Sunny’s plight through an early scene where a local cop drives up to the film unit he’s a part of – he’s an actor, but he becomes an assistant director to pay the bills – and commands them to stop shooting. The reasons? They’re in Rajasthan. It’s the border area. They haven’t obtained the requisite permissions. But Sunny knows that the real reason is the man’s ego. The crew has clearance from the Government of India, but they haven’t approached this satrap – and so Sunny begins to work on him, addressing him as hukum and mai-baap, and asking him to stand in front of the camera and say something. Sunny, we see, is a charmer. More importantly, he’s doing what comes naturally – he’s an actor, and he’s putting on a show. That the cop ends up granting the crew permission to continue shooting is only part of the story. The rest is about Sunny getting to appease his inner ham. Imagine, then, how he must feel, locked up in another country in a room with no audience – at least for a while.

Filmistaan is ostensibly about a capital-P Plot. It’s about India and Pakistan. It’s about the spirit of one-upmanship that causes Sunny to declare that Australia may have won the World Cup the most number of times, but India still has two while Pakistan has only one. It’s about the sameness of our food, our faces, our emotions. It’s about the sameness of our songs, whether sung by Reshma or Lata Mangeshkar. It’s about how we really want to be one, if only for the super cricket team that would emerge. It’s about hapless children who turn into militants because they want a change from the kind of life where they pray five times a day but eat only once. But these undercurrents are subsumed into some sort of meta movie about how cinema courses through our subcontinental veins. This makes Filmistaan sound profound and serious and important – but it’s none of things. It’s simply about loving cinema. Had the film been released last year, it may have given serious competition to Bombay Talkies in celebrating 100 years of Indian cinema. Where that film went about the celebration in a formal, auteurist manner, this one is shaggier, looser – it’s all heart.

It’s about how cinema gives words to the wordless events in our lives – Chakke pe chakka plays when Sunny is driving his car, and when the next number comes on, Ey phasaa from Bobby, he’s ambushed. It’s about how cinema gives us lines to make mundane events more colourful – when a colleague says she’s leaving, Sunny says, “Tu chal, main aayee.” (And even the film’s original lines have the ring of Old Bollywood-style writing, like the one that goes something like “Bandook se mulk jeet sakte hain, dil nahin.”) It’s about how cinema leaves us with echoes, with everything being bound to this film or that one – when Sunny finds a new best friend in Aftab (the superb Inaamulhaq), the relationship is classic Hindu-Muslim-bhai-bhai, and as emotional as the ones in the movies. They embrace, they weep, they re-enact the climactic action scene from Sholay (with, maybe, a touch of that other bhai-bhai movie, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid). Sunny’s being sealed in his prison, brick by brick, reminds us of Bina Rai in Anarkali, and there are also echoes from the early days of cinema, when men played women. You could even read the near-absence of women in this film as some sort of comment on the utter disposability of the heroine in a certain kind of cinema. And if you want to be really charitable, what are the wayward and somewhat disappointing latter portions if not a reflection of how our films tend to lose the plot in the second half?

Filmistaan is about making cinema, discussing cinema, viewing cinema. In an outrageously funny moment, Sunny decides to become the director of his own hostage video – you haven’t lived till you hear the militants utter “rolling” and “action” – and eventually, Aftab decides it’s time he made a movie. Aftab is to Pakistan what Sunny is to India, the average bloke who’s besotted with Bollywood. He sells pirated DVDs (of Bollywood movies, naturally), and he mourns the fact that Pakistan has so much cinematic talent but so few avenues for fame and fortune, and he knows that Farhan Akhtar was an assistant director on Himalayputra, and he yearns for the day Bollywood will end up watching pirated DVDs of Lollywood movies. In a scene that brings to mind Swades, he also arranges for screenings for the village. First, he screens Maine Pyar Kiya. Towards the end, the sound goes off. Sunny steps in and recites the lines he knows by heart. It’s a magical moment – there’s just the night, a bunch of impoverished villagers, an old television set, a hostage, and yet things couldn’t be happier. This is the scene to show people how mad we can be sometimes about our movies. And then, when Aftab screens Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, Sunny catches one of his captors smiling. This man is actually having a good time. Later, a militant declares that he doesn’t watch films. “Yeh fizool cheezein hamare liye mana hai,” he says, that these silly things are forbidden for them. And we see why he’s so joyless. Filmistaan doesn’t go as far as to suggest that this man might not have ended up like this had he been weaned on the Dev Anand or Shah Rukh Khan oeuvre, but it does say that the reason the villagers grow to love Sunny is because he brought them something that isn’t usually found in these parts, something that our cinema brings them. He brought them joy (and he’s a fizool cheez himself, in the grand scheme of things).

Filmistaan isn’t always heart-warming. It has a bit of an edge. Sunny sees a militant getting emotional over cricket commentary. (It’s an India-Pakistan match, naturally.) And we think it’s another moment that humanises this man, like the one that humanised the earlier militant, who smiled during Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. But this time, it’s not cute. The man is still dangerous. And he sets out to destroy… cinema, by breaking Sunny’s camera. It says a lot about the dreamy quality of the filmmaking when something so light on the surface allows so many readings. Sunny even jokes about the fact that he’s not all that different from the militants, because they both end up “shooting.”

Not all bits are worked out well. There’s a stretch about porn-loving border patrol cops that looks shoehorned in, and the scene where Sunny “steals” an automatic and entertains kids by doing impressions of gun-toting stars is tonally off. But this is followed by a gem of a scene between Sunny and a healer. They talk about Amritsar and little lanes that no one remembers any longer, and then they talk about cinema. We sometimes dismiss our films as stupid, but it’s impossible not to be moved when this healer reveals what Indian cinema means to him. That’s where the title comes from, I suppose. There’s Hindustan and there’s Pakistan – but it’s all really only Filmistaan.

KEY:

* hukum and mai-baap = terms of respect, especially from someone in the lower rungs of society to a powerful person
* Reshma = see here
* Bombay Talkies = see here
* Chakke pe chakka = see here
* Ey phasaa = see here
* “Tu chal, main aayee” = You go, I’ll follow…
* “Bandook se mulk jeet sakte hain, dil nahin” = You can win countries with guns, but you cannot win hearts…
* Sholay = see here
* Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid = see here
* Anarkali = see here
* Himalayputra = see here
* Swades = see here
* Maine Pyar Kiya = see here
* Kuch Kuch Hota Hai = 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…

F*ugly gets at least a part of its name right. The film is filled with “ugly” behaviour. There are ugly cops, politicians, mediapeople – even the regular folks are ugly. A schoolgirl waves a sweet goodbye to her parents, and the minute she steps out, she musses up her hair and begins to strut suggestively. An old man leers at the picture of a skimpily dressed woman in the paper. Another old man gets ready to have sex with a young woman who’s unconscious. A mother pimps out her daughter. A TV reporter flirts with a hospital orderly (she feels up his butt) in order to gain exclusive access to a patient. The director Kabir Sadanand sets his story amidst the seedier residents of the capital – and as Devi (Kiara Advani) says, “It’s getting fugly out there for women.” She should know. A shopkeeper gropes her and when she slaps him, he makes a fuss and tells people that she propositioned him. He’ll be forced to apologise later – it’s the film’s best scene. But for now, he’s got the upper hand and she’s the slut. An onlooker takes in Devi’s fashionable, midriff-revealing clothes and comments that a girl who dresses like this can only have one thing on her mind.

Devi storms out of the store, and here’s the really sad part: she’s no wallflower. When a creep with a predilection for brightly coloured boas brushes against her at a party, she squeezes his crotch till he screams in agony. But even for one so, well, ballsy, life can be difficult. On a late-night drive, she asks her friend Dev (Mohit Marwah) to define identity. He looks around and when his eyes light on the national flag, he says that’s it. He says it makes him feel proud. She replies, “I feel betrayed.” The feeling is exacerbated later, when another friend, Aditya (Arfi Lamba), blames her for the mess they’re in, after a series of events arising from the incident at the store. “The man just groped you,” he says. “It’s not like he raped you.” And this is her childhood buddy.

There’s a good movie to be made from all this, one that looks at our country through the eyes of women, especially in light of recent headlines – but F*ugly isn’t it. The problem isn’t just its unwillingness to go the distance. If you want to make a hard-hitting film about an ugly social issue, then you have to be willing to sacrifice a bit of beauty. But here, when Devi and her pals go camping, they have fairy lights, and when Dev, at the beginning of the film, sets himself on fire, his handsomeness isn’t affected one bit. We expect chunks of singed flesh. Instead, he looks he was painting with charcoal and scratched an itch. After his drastic act, he declares, “Yeh aatmahatya nahin hai, it’s my redemption.” We get that it’s not a suicide attempt, but what about the latter part? Why does he need to “redeem” himself, when he’s done nothing wrong? By the end, we’re no clearer.

The film gets going when Dev and his friends – including Gaurav (Vijender Singh), who wants to win the boxing World Championship, but contends himself with fashioning a pair of boxers from a stolen American flag – run afoul of a corrupt cop named RS Chautala (Jimmy Shergill). How corrupt is he? Let’s just say that whenever he appears, the background booms with religious chants, which, as Ram Gopal Varma has taught us, means that the man in the foreground is the embodiment of evil. He frames the quartet, and then demands money. There’s a good scene where Chautala arrives at an amount by adding up various costs and slapping on a VAT charge at the end. Shergill is good as this cop. Something’s hardened in his face. He’s still boyishly handsome, but over the years, it’s become easier to believe he can be cruel. (It wasn’t as easy in Maachis.) In another terrific scene, he shows us the kind of man Chautala is by doing practically nothing. He’s on the phone and, without missing a beat, he appraises the foreign prostitute in front of him. He undoes the spaghetti straps on her dress, and when it falls down, he takes a long look at her, as if he were in an electronics store and wondering if a camera is worth his investment. He’s a cool customer. He’s always a step ahead of the four friends, and not for a minute do we believe that they can outsmart him.

But let’s back up a bit. Why should they have to outsmart him in the first place? Wasn’t this film about Devi and the travails of Indian women? How, from there, did we leap into the Shaitaan-like contrivances of kids forced to cough up cash when blackmailed by a cop? F*ugly, as it goes along, becomes increasingly deranged. It just can’t decide what it’s about. Dev and Co. agree to commit murder, but they treat it like high adventure (there’s not a bead of nervous sweat), and a subsequent rescue operation is laughably staged. Actually, the set pieces – an IT raid, another raid by cops –  are uniformly awful. And then, we’re suddenly airlifted and dropped into Rang De Basanti territory. (In case we haven’t guessed, Gaurav, who’s always seen in colourful tees, now wears one with Bhagat Singh’s picture.) Our heroes (and heroine) want to clean up the muck – or something. But setting out to kill one crooked cop doesn’t have the resonance of planning a hit on the Defence Minister whose corruption is compromising the lives of those who put themselves on the line in order to protect us. As an intensely emotional scene began to unfold, the people behind me were discussing the taste of the popcorn. One found it sweet. The other said he’s added too much flavouring. Anything, I guess, to spice up a bland evening.

KEY:

* as Ram Gopal Varma has taught us = see here
* Maachis = see here
* Shaitaan = see here
* Rang De Basanti = see here
* popcorn = 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…

Humshakals opens with a scene where Ashok (Saif Ali Khan) is doing stand-up comedy. At least, he seems to think he’s doing stand-up comedy – he’s really just unleashing PJs that were old when our grandfathers were in school. The audience, understandably, departs in droves. Ashok’s best buddy Kumar (Riteish Deshmukh) – Ashok… Kumar; I’ll wait a couple of minutes till you’re done laughing; done? okay then – asks him how he can keep doing this when he’s so obviously bad at it. This is something we might ask of the director Sajid Khan, who has, so far, shown little talent for making a movie. He does seem to have a sense of humour. In a later scene, two men are tortured by being made to watch Khan’s Himmatwala – with their eyelids taped open, like Malcolm McDowell’s in A Clockwork Orange. But the joke’s on us really. Ashok may suck at comedy, but he has tons of money – in other words, Sajid Khan can keep making movies for no reason other than a desire to keep doing it. Simply put, we’re doomed.

Why are our comedies so bad? We don’t have to search very far for the reasons – tempo-killing songs, underwritten heroines (Tamannaah Bhatia, Bipasha Basu, Esha Gupta), leaden pace, overlong running times… And we insist on casting stars rather than comic actors. Stars may be able to pull off light-hearted scenes or rom-coms, but for energetic lowbrow comedy – which is an art, by the way – you need someone like Satish Shah, who plays the tyrannical warden of a mental institution. He worships Hitler, Idi Amin and Gaddafi, and he imbues his scenes with a crackpot vitality. In my favourite bit, he performs the dandiya with a pair of live electrical cables. The other actor who acquits himself (dis)honourably is Ram Kapoor. Watch his rage vanish after being handed a lollipop, and you’ll be surprised at how comfortably he channels his inner idiot.

Humshakals is dedicated to the memory of the screen’s great nutters – Kishore Kumar, Jim Carrey, Peter Sellers. It’s a bad idea to remind us of how physical comedy can be done when what we have before us is the sight of Saif Ali Khan embarrassing himself thoroughly. Watching him in the scenes in the mental institution, I was reminded of Carrey’s sublime romp through similar situations in the first Ace Ventura movie. That, right there, is the difference between mastery and misery.

The story is something about people in multiple roles, and it’s set in motion because the Ram Kapoor character wants to usurp Ashok’s billions – and this brings us to the other reason we don’t make good comedies. Because the writing just isn’t good enough. Khan and his writers think of terrific setups – parathas made with cocaine and vodka; a drug derived from various species of dogs; lines from film songs being recited as dialogue (jahaan koi aata jaata nahin…), an apoplectic Prince Charles venting in Hindi – and these gags should have exploded on screen, but the follow-through is so uninspired and lazy that it appears as if they didn’t know what to do with these ideas once they dreamt them up. We walk in expecting lowbrow comedy and all we get is low-rent filmmaking.

KEY:

* Humshakals = lookalikes
* Malcolm McDowell’s in A Clockwork Orange = see here
* Satish Shah = see here
* dandiya = see here
* Carrey’s sublime romp = see here
* parathas = see here
* jahaan koi aata jaata nahin = 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…

If the movies have taught us anything, it’s this: Whenever a blood-spattered gangster falls in love, he will get in touch with his inner twelve-year-old girl. Thus, in Mohit Suri’s Ek Villain, Guru (Siddharth Malhotra) transforms from a thug who douses a man in kerosene and shoves him into a fire to a chweetie-pie who plays blind man’s buff with Aisha (Shraddha Kapoor) and helps her catch butterflies. I’m not being metaphorical here. They’re near a waterfall, and find themselves surrounded by butterflies. It’s meant to be poetic, I guess. And now she can cross off the item on her wish-list that says: “To play with butterflies.” This wish-list is in her scrapbook, which also has this to-do item: “To unite two lovers.” And so they barge into a mental asylum, free an elderly man who’s watching Shahenshah, and get him married to an elderly woman – in a church. That’s when Guru knows he’s falling for Aisha. Twisting a knife into an enemy is all very well, but at the end of it you don’t get cake.

At the other end of the relationship spectrum, we have Rakesh (Ritesh Deshmukh) and Sulochana (Aamna Sharif). She nags him constantly, and he lashes out by dropping in on women who are alone and thrusting something long and red and hard into them. I refer, of course, to the screwdriver he always carries with him. His best buddy (Kamaal R Khan) is even more of a charmer. When his wife brings him a drink, he slaps her because she hasn’t brought any ice. He says they’re middle-class people, sandwiched between the upper and lower classes, and you need to de-stress somehow. This is how he does it, by reducing his wife to a punching bag. She takes it silently, but there are others whose sole function is to spout something that’s supposedly emasculating, and then pay for this “sin” by winding up at the wrong end of that screwdriver. You’d have to look hard for a film that treated its women with more contempt.

It’s probably no surprise that Ek Villain is so bad. It was bound to happen. The law of averages had to catch up with Suri, who, if nothing else, is a good craftsman, a solid storyteller. So a single dud after a series of respectable dramas isn’t the end of the world. The surprise is that Suri found this material interesting in the first place. The story, I hear, is filched from the South Korean thriller I Saw the Devil, but there’s nothing startlingly original about it – at least, nothing that you have to import from South Korea. It’s the standard you-killed-someone-close-to-me-and-now-I’m-going-to-make-your-life-hell crap – imagine Ghayal with Sunny Deol as a gangster and Amrish Puri as a serial killer. Knowing Suri, there are a few nice lines (“Shaitaan se dosti karega to ek na ek din tere darwaze par dastak dega hi!”) and some deft Indianisation (a mother’s curse comes true), but not nearly enough to make us sit up and care.

The writing is so wretched that nothing, really, makes us care – certainly not the characters (or the actors playing them). Sulochana is a fashion-plate who hardly looks like she’s suffering. Aisha is annoying to the extreme, one of those perpetually sunny types who can whip out, at will, something that, say, Martin Luther King said. She keeps cracking these weird jokes, and I think I lost my patience when, while driving, she turned to the Ganesha statue strapped to the seat next to her and made a wisecrack. (Suri fills his frames with Ganesha imagery. This is not the kind of film where you want to dig deep and find out why.) Aisha is not someone you want to hang out with for two hours. I was intrigued by a couple of things. One, Aisha drives motorbikes and Jeeps – the image of the frail-looking Shraddha Kapoor in (or on) all this macho metal is something that might interest a fetishist photographer. Two, she’s ailing from some disease, and the film just won’t tell us what it is. We keep hearing she has a “beemari” – why this coyness?

In Hasee Toh Phasee, I felt that Malhotra’s character suffered from his “inability to do much more than project a charming geniality on screen. (Would you buy him as an IPS officer?).” I felt the same here. Not for a moment did I buy him as a gangster. His worst scene has him running on the platform and speaking to Aisha as she leaves on a train. He tries to tell her the kind of joke that she usually tells him. She begins to cry. It’s out of emotion and all that, but it’s nice to imagine that she’s finally learning what it’s like to be at the receiving end of those jokes. Deshmukh fares slightly better, but his unvarying hangdog expression only compounds our impatience with a character who’s already such a bore. We never feel that creepy thing we feel in our stomachs when we’re watching a good serial-killer movie. This may also be the result of all the unintentional comedy. Shaad Randhawa plays a cop who’s out to thwart Guru’s attempts at getting to Rakesh, but eventually, even he grows tired of pretending he cares about what’s going on. “Go kill him,” he tells Guru, with an eye on the cold beer waiting for him at home after pack-up. And Remo Fernandes is hilarious as a Goan don of the seas. He has a ponytail, naturally. I don’t think you can be a crime boss in Goa if you don’t have a ponytail. He vanishes for a long stretch and pops up like a genie towards the end, killing someone and hastening the arrival of the final scenes. His eye was probably on the beer too.

KEY:

* Ek Villain= A villain
* Shahenshah = see here
* Kamaal R Khan = see here
* I Saw the Devil = see here
* Ghayal = see here
* “Shaitaan se dosti karega to ek na ek din tere darwaze par dastak dega hi!” = If you make friends with the devil, he will knock on your door one day.
* beemari = illness
* Hasee Toh Phasee = see here
* unintentional comedy = see here
* Remo Fernandes = 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…

Bobby Jasoos, a low-key charmer set in Hyderabad, makes you wonder why more filmmakers don’t step out of their Mumbai-Delhi-London cocoons and locate their tales in the various nooks of India, each of which comes with its own lingo, colours, food, sensibility, cultural and religious complexions, and even architecture that’s a cinematographer’s dream. Why couldn’t Ek Villain have been set in, say, Bhubhaneshwar? Wouldn’t the pathos of Citylights have come through had the couple migrated to Jaipur or Surat? What about Bhoothnath Returns? Why not unleash the ghost on Kolkata? Maybe the identification factor has something to do with it. Because Mumbai and London are such huge markets for Hindi films, maybe it makes sense to give those viewers stories that they instantly relate to or see around them. But what’s lost in the process is flavour. The scent of biryani practically wafts off the screen in Bobby Jasoos. The film appears to be shot in digital, but apart from the flesh tones, you can’t really tell because the city has been filmed so lovingly and with such detail. Even the inevitable Char Minar shots aren’t the usual full-frontal clichés. We see the structure as a Hyderabadi might see it, from the upper floor of a building that’s right across.

The person with that view is Bobby (Vidya Balan), a hilariously inept detective. She has ambition and pluck (she captures a suspect using a clothesline), but not much else. She misses things that are under her nose. And her ‘assignments’ are essentially glorified bouts of snooping, something your gossipy neighbour-aunty would do if she were younger and if she had the energy (and also the assortment of moles, beards and dentures that Bobby disguises herself with). Then, one day, a stranger (Kiran Kumar) drives up in a big car and promises Bobby a huge amount of money if she can find a missing person. The hiring of a private eye by a rich mystery-man is a classic noir setup, but instead of shadows and seriousness, we get a brightly lit world and lots of humour. If there’s something called ‘comic noir’, then this is it.

The other cheerful subversion is that the protagonist – the ‘private eye’ – is now a woman. This is the engine that powers Bobby Jasoos. It isn’t just a detective story, but the story of a female detective from a deeply conservative Muslim family. This is the kind of society where a man dismisses his wife – she’s massaging his head – when he wants to have an important talk with his son. The only person who takes Bobby seriously is Bobby herself. The owner of a detective agency throws her out when she begs for a job. Her sister playfully throws a carrot at her and says, “Apna gaajar leke jaa, Karamchand.” (What she’s really saying, of course, is this: “Why don’t you leave this work to the men?”) When Bobby hands over the first payment for a case to her father (Rajendra Gupta), he says that he doesn’t need the earnings of women to run his household, which happens to overflow with women (the mostly excellent cast includes Supriya Pathak and Tanvi Azmi as Bobby’s mother and aunt). Maybe it’s a mark of revolt, or maybe it’s a reminder to herself that she’s no one’s inferior – she has forsaken the lovely, feminine name of Bilquis and adopted the more androgynous ‘Bobby’.

The investigative angle of Bobby Jasoos is a bit of a letdown. The Big Reveal isn’t about the unmasking of evil (as we’d expect in noir) but something more personal and emotional – and while watching the film, I felt it such a waste that all this time, all this build-up had been expended on something so… domestic. But thinking back, it occurred to me that the film wouldn’t have worked any other way. Given who Bobby is, given her limited skills, her amateur enthusiasm, the plot couldn’t have borne the weight of anything more intricate or elaborate. Bobby Jasoos is only seemingly a noirish film – if that word weren’t in the title, we may not be so disappointed with the story’s priorities, which converge on Bobby’s personal (rather than professional) life. The final scenes, which tie up the detective angle and the domestic angle – namely, Bobby’s professional and personal lives – add up to a quiet kind of feminist statement.

Bobby is adamant on making a name for herself as a detective, but her story is that of any woman who puts career first. Her family is unable to marry off her younger sister because she refuses to settle down. (She’s 30, and people think she’s too old to have children.) And when forced to stay at home, she has to employ little ruses to get out and do her job. (One of these, involving the consumption of copious amounts of biryani, is a riot.) Her sense of achievement on securing an actual office space is palpable – earlier, her ‘office’ was essentially the printout of her name on the doors of an Internet centre, run by a chubby male friend (Prasad Barve) with a fondness for tight T-shirts – and we see why she instinctively slaps a suitor (Tasavvur, nicely played by Ali Fazal) when he brings up the topic of marriage. To the film’s credit, this relationship never becomes a ‘love angle’. (There’s a terribly miscalculated duet, though, one of those dream numbers that’s an instant mood-killer.) Even the superb scene where Tasavvur realises his feelings for Bobby begins as flat-out physical comedy and ends with his defending her right to pursue a career. Balan, in unfussy salwar kameezes, gives a typically assured performance (though one wishes her occasional detours into English didn’t sound so convent-educated; it was the same when she played ‘Silk’ Smitha), and it isn’t a stretch to see this Bollywood actress identifying with her  Hyderabadi character, a woman asking for her own space in a man’s world.

KEY:

* Bobby Jasoos = Detective Bobby
* biryani = see here
* moles, beards and dentures = see here
* “Apna gaajar leke jaa, Karamchand” = Don’t forget your carrot, Karamchand; see here
* salwar kameezes = 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…

In theory, Lekar Hum Deewana Dil, directed by Arif Ali (brother of Imtiaz), is pretty interesting – it turns the elopement trope of our cinema on its head. In the older movies, when the boy and girl eloped, it was the result of deep, unflinching love. They met, they sang songs, and when their disapproving parents wouldn’t let them sing songs anymore, they ran away and built log cabins, and he went and did some blue-collar work and she made chapattis and waited for him to return, and so forth. Some of that sensibility is retained here. We have the scene where the couple’s families are at war, and the scene where they’re stopped by cops, but what we don’t have is the scene where we see how much in love Karishma (Deeksha Seth) and Dinesh (Armaan Jain) – who prefers to go by Dino – are. They’re more like good friends who decide, on the eve of her engagement to someone else, that they may be better off with each other. They take this decision like they’d order pizza – on a whim. Remember the confused youth of Imtiaz Ali’s Socha Na Tha? That’s the template for the lovers here. (Dino even has an older brother who’s all sorted and quite his opposite, like the one in that film.) Dino says he doesn’t know if he loves Karishma, but he knows he doesn’t want her to get engaged to someone else. She wonders how she will know if someone’s The One. After they elope on his bike, he stops suddenly and kisses her and says he loves her. A little later, they wonder if they’re making a blunder.

In Socha Na Tha, Imtiaz Ali wove these maddening flip-flops into his incisive screenplay. Arif Ali comes close to doing this in the scene where Dino admits he likes music because it isn’t forced on him, and if he’d had to endure music classes – that is, if they’d become a formal part of his life – then maybe he wouldn’t like it so much. That’s pretty much how he reacts to Karishma. The minute they become a ‘couple’, the minute their relationship is formalised, they begin to have doubts and drift apart. They still care for each other as friends, and maybe a little more, but they’re not sure if they’re destined for a life together, or for lifetimes together. (Their janam-janam-ka-saath lines are delivered in mocking tones.) In the older Hindi films, indeed in the older India, love was an easier emotion. You were either in love (and if you were, you knew it), or not in love – there was none of this neurotic I-think-I-may-be-in-love, which is something of a western import. At least among a section of Indians, love, today, is a more complex emotion, and we need more films that reflect this indecisiveness. After all, how long can Imtiaz Ali be the only one making those movies?

There are flashes in Lekar Hum Deewana Dil where Arif Ali looks like he’s going to give his brother company, but the film is pretty much a mess. (And despite that bouncy title, this is a serious affair.) The primary problem is this: it’s okay if Dino and Karishma are confused about their feelings for each other, but the film has to be clear about the trajectory of these feelings. Dino and Karishma are defined by the scene where she steps out her lehenga and we see she has a slinky little dress underneath. At heart, they’re meant to be a modern couple, and the film could have been something if it had stayed true to who they are. We may not have ended up liking them a whole lot, but we’d have seen what today’s rich kids are like when it comes to love. But Arif Ali makes the disastrous decision of laughing at them. (And he wants us to laugh along.) He wants us to see how pampered and privileged these brats are, how unlike the couples in the older Hindi films, who took to eloping only as the most desperate of measures. Here, when Dino goes on his bike to pick Karishma up, in order to elope, he finds her waiting with many suitcases. (Where did she think she was going to fit them? On his head?) And he, when they end up in Naxal territory, doesn’t know what a ‘Maovadi’ is. They don’t think of taking enough money with them. (Maybe they thought they’d use their cards?) But they do remember to take along his guitar and her camera. They seem to be going on an excursion. At every point, the director seems to be nudging us about how clueless these kids are. As long as the money lasts, they’re great together. “Jaise chahe rahenge, jo chahe karenge,” they proclaim, not realising that to do whatever they want, they need some kind of regular income. Inevitably, their money runs out. She sells her jewellery. But it never occurs to him that he could find some work, earn something. The Salman Khan character in Maine Pyar Kiya was a rich kid too, but he proved how much he loved his girl by renouncing his wealth and becoming a labourer. Dino would never do that. Where, then, would he find time to play the guitar? And why on earth would we be interested in the romantic destinies of two such profoundly ridiculous people?

Things get more ridiculous when Arif Ali ventures into the territory of his brother’s Highway. On the run, Dino and Karishma find themselves hiding in an India that’s very different from the one they’re used to. (In case we don’t realise this, we’re given the scene where they enter a forest and a monkey scampers across the frame. Seriously.) He tells her that they know all about the US and Europe but nothing about their own country. She tells him that she finally sees the difference between fairy tale and reality. And at some point, Arif Ali decides that instead of entering the heads of his characters, he’d be better off aiming lower. When they’re forced to spend a night at a dingy hotel, Karishma is disgusted at having to use the toilet after Dino has vacated it. She cannot bear the stench he’s left behind. Later, when they’re in Naxal territory, she needs to go. A Maovadi hands her a leather pouch filled with water and points her to the vast forest. She’s had enough. She flings the water at Dino’s face and smashes his guitar against a tree. He pins her down and comes this close to punching her. We brace ourselves for the breakdown of civilisation. We cut, instead, to an item number. I literally did a double take. One minute, he’s about to hurt the girl he thinks he loves. The next, he’s matching steps with a group of sexy dancers as ‘tribal’ ululations echo in the background. The Maovadi leader seems to be having a good time too. Long live the revolution… of these hips.

After a point, the film turns as clueless as its characters. It’s a nice little loop. Arif Ali is laughing at his leads (both of whom wilt under the bad writing), and we are laughing at him. He cannot decide what kind of movie he wants to make, and for whom. If he’s interested in updating the elopement scenario, then why is he so coy about Dino and Karishma having sex? And is Dino a smoker or isn’t he? He is, the first few times we see him, and then he never touches a cigarette for the rest of the film.

So many opportunities for genuine emotion are bafflingly left unexploited. Dino and Karishma adopt a pup, and they seem to be a family unit – mom, dad and kid – until he leaves it behind. Dino and Karishma get married in the middle of nowhere. Dino burns with fever and Karishma is helpless. Dino and Karishma return to their homes and file for an annulment. Not one of these scenes furthers our involvement with this couple. At some point, it appears that the only thing they care about is a good bathroom. (She dreams about soaking in a bubble bath.) There’s only so much you can bring yourself to care about a couple whose love for a Western closet exceeds their love for each other.

In the older films, the act of elopement was a political statement. It was a fuck-you to the establishment. Parents were important then. Families were important. Sex was something major. Today, when parents are hardly in the picture, when sex is so casual, what kind of statement are Dino and Karishma making?  Karishma says that she ran away because she didn’t want to lead a traditional life in an arranged marriage after having such a modern upbringing, but when it comes to doing something about it, she finds that she prefers an arranged marriage if that means she won’t have to take a crap in the open. It’s a fuck-you to every love story that’s come before.

Arif Ali sets up the film so that its second half is one long wait until Dino and Karishma get back together. What do you do in the meantime? We slip half-heartedly into Dino’s brother’s life. He loves this girl and can’t bring himself to say anything. Then there’s Mahesh, Karishma’s suitor. He’s the quintessential third-wheel character. He calls her Karishma-ji. Dino, meanwhile, simply calls her K. It’s all so facile. The big, fat romantic moment at the end is meant to echo an earlier moment, but it feels ridiculous because that earlier moment was staged like afterthought. How do you echo an afterthought? Dino and Karishma, we’re constantly told, are the kind of lovers who cannot see that they belong together even if everyone else can. But of course, they belong together. They’re back in their air-conditioned worlds, with his and hers bathrooms. They’ll live happily ever after – or at least until the flush fails.

KEY:

* Lekar Hum Deewana Dil= With our joyful hearts
* the elopement trope = see here
* built log cabins = see here
* Socha Na Tha = see here
* janam-janam-ka-saath = together across time; also here
* that bouncy title = see here
* lehenga = see here
* Maovadi = Naxalite
* “Jaise chahe rahenge, jo chahe karenge” = We’ll live as we want, do what we want
* Maine Pyar Kiya = see here
* Highway = see here
* stench he’s left behind = see here
* quintessential third-wheel character = 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…

Is this retro season? If last week’s Lekar Hum Deewana Dil dragged the old elopement dramas into the modern day, Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhaniya updates a certain kind of romantic melodrama that was popular in the 1990s. When a lovelorn youth (Rakesh ‘Humpty’ Sharma, played by Varun Dhawan) is licking his wounds after being kicked out by his girlfriend’s father, we hear, on the soundtrack, Dil deewana bin sajna ke… The tune that’s heard, at the end, when the girl (Kavya, played by Alia Bhatt) propositions the guy is the title track from Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, and she steals the Shah Rukh Khan character’s lines from that film. But it’s Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge that’s invoked most repeatedly. Humpty and his friends laugh and cry while watching DDLJ for what must be the hundredth time. Both Humpty and Kavya, while surrendering to their emotions, are very mindful of their parents, their families. (She won’t go trousseau shopping in Ambala, where she’s from, because she doesn’t want to rub her happiness in the face of her divorced elder sister.) And like the Kajol character in DDLJ, she’s spunky (she has the word “pataka” tattooed on her nape), yet resigned to living life according to the dictates of her father (Ashutosh Rana, who, thankfully, doesn’t go all bug-eyed on us). With so many films having tipped a hat to Aditya Chopra’s era-defining romance, you may wonder if we really need another rehash.

But the director, Shashank Khaitan, does something unexpected. He doesn’t subvert DDLJ the way the delightful Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana did. (That film transformed an Udupi restaurant into a mutton-tikka joint – with the emphasis on “joint”.) But he stages similar scenes – the girl waking up after a drunken night thinking that she’s had sex; the railway-station climax – and tweaks them with affection. Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhaniya isn’t a cynical rip-off. It’s more the work of a young filmmaker who clearly adores an older filmmaker’s movie, but infuses it with his own new-gen vibe. And that vibe is infectious. In the 1990s, it was all the fad to set the story in a foreign location, but these days, India has become fashionable again – so the love triangle between two NRIs and one desi dude has been reworked into one with two desi dudes and one NRI. And Humpty and Kavya are dudes. Not for them the coyness that infected the DDLJ couple. They kiss. She out-drinks him. And they tumble into bed – rather, the floor of the modest bookstore his father owns. And when it comes to dealing with her recalcitrant father, she doesn’t sob in silence. She gets where he is coming from (it has to do with her sister) and she coaxes him to negotiate a deal. (There’s a Rajshri movie in here somewhere: Dulha Wohi Jo Papa Man Bhaaye.) The father, too, is no Amrish Puri, who silenced his family by thundering at them. He’s more malleable, more reasonable. If his modern daughter displays a conservative side in wanting to keep her family happy, this somewhat conservative man displays a modern side by at least hearing his daughter out.

This, really, is why this lightweight film is so winning. It downplays all potential sources of conflict, and thus transforms a heavy-duty romantic melodrama into a low-key romance. It’s like listening to an opera fashioned into a summery, guitar-backed ballad. When Kavya’s sister asks her – after she’s fallen for Humpty in Delhi; she’s back in Ambala now – if she’s left behind anything there, it appears to be the cue for a sad and “meaningful” look, and a line that tells us that she’s left her heart behind. We get that line alright: “Jo reh gaya so reh gaya. Ab America ki taiyari shuru.” (“It doesn’t matter what I’ve left behind. Now let’s look at what’s ahead.”) But there’s no melodrama in Kavya’s look or in the delivery of this line. Khaitan doesn’t manufacture a Big Scene. He’s content to let it remain a small moment. Later, when Humpty asks Kavya why she loves him, it’s again a potentially dramatic scene muted down. Even the contrivance of teaching a cad a lesson – something that could have been played at a high volume, resulting in slapsticky hijinks – is tossed off casually. Nothing is oversold – not even the interval point, which usually brings the first half to a clanging close. It’s a lovely… small moment.

The story gets going when Kavya comes to Delhi to shop for her wedding lehenga. She wants something designer, and one of the film’s funniest moments occurs at a clothing store where a salesman offers her a good price on a “100 per cent original fake” Manish Malhotra. She figures she isn’t going to have the guy of her choice, so she may as well have the lehenga she wants – and she’s willing to do anything to lay hands on the lakhs it will cost. There’s a mild unprincipled streak in her. She’s not a goody-two-shoes rule-player like the Kajol character. When Humpty asks her if she wants to go to a party, she coolly shoots back, “Behen banake le jaayega ya girlfriend banake?” (“As a sister, or as a girlfriend?”) There’s none of that hand-wringing about her being engaged to another man. But when they pull off a bit of a scam that involves someone’s wedding jewellery, she insists that they return it. She’s not that heartless. These aren’t characters with great depth, but these push-pull traits make them endearing.

The only problems with the first half are the utterly generic songs. There’s one at a disco, there’s another at someone’s wedding – these music videos have begun to blend and blur into one another. The steps, the costumes, the choreography – everything looks the same. And a couple of kinks aren’t ironed out very well. When we first see Humpty – who isn’t the brightest of bulbs – he’s making out with some girl in the men’s loo, and later, he celebrates his birthday with a Jessica Rabbit cake. (He playfully slices out a boob and stuffs it into his father’s face. It’s a nice touch that the latter isn’t one of those long-suffering movie dads, going on about his “duffer” of  a son.) How does this flirt fall into such “pure” love with Kavya? I would have liked to know. And the scene where Humpty’s father and friends pool in money to buy Kavya her lehenga doesn’t ring true. But we go along because we’re coasting on the film’s vibe, and because the performances are lovely. These friends (Sahil Vaid, Gaurav Pandey) are allowed space to fill out their templated constructs, and one of them is a riot in a farcical stretch that involves a gay angle.

And then the second-half syndrome strikes. More specifically, the third-wheel syndrome strikes. How many more films are going to try to convince us that someone who’s not the hero actually stands a chance with the heroine? It’s such a foregone conclusion that Humpty will end up with Kavya that the scenes with the new character (Angad, played by Siddharth Shukla; with his broad frame and his equally broad smile, he looks like a toothpaste-ad billboard walking amidst mere mortals) end up a complete waste of time. Even the film seems to realise this – Angad doesn’t even get a closing scene. He just vanishes. And as much as I enjoyed the low-key nature of the proceedings, I wished Khaitan had amped things up towards the end. Humpty’s Big Speech to Kavya’s father just isn’t big enough.

But the leads keep us smiling. They are wonderful together. Their lines aren’t just cute but snappy too – there’s a ping-pong fleetness to the banter. After three films, it’s clear that Dhawan is an excellent light-comedy actor. Just watch him sell the scenes where he spouts doggerel – first in a comic flavour, and then in a romantic mode (that doesn’t get too romantic). The Shammi Kapoor slot has been vacant for too long, and Dhawan has some of that ability to light up the screen without doing much. This isn’t something that can be taught. You either have it or you don’t. And Bhatt continues to remind us that her wan Student of the Year outing was a rookie mistake. When Humpty re-enters her life, in a gurudwara, she doesn’t widen her eyes in shock. She doesn’t gasp. She just registers his presence, looks this way and that to make sure no one’s caught her staring, and then her eyes slowly pool with happy tears. The only problem with her (though this is probably more my problem) is that Lolitaesque air – she looks like a teenager, and you want to look away when her characters enter a sexual zone. Hopefully, she’ll be able to resist roles against our forty-plus superstars.

KEY:

* Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhania = Humpty Sharma’s bride
* Dil deewana bin sajna ke… = see here
* Kuch Kuch Hota Hai = see here
* Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge = see here
* pataka = firecracker
* Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana = see here
* mutton-tikka = see here
* Dulha Wohi Jo Papa Man Bhaaye = a reference to this film
* Manish Malhotra = see here
* lehenga = see here
* Student of the Year = see here
* Lolitaesque air = 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…

If the movies have taught us anything, it’s this: When you want the heroine to be seen as serious, she will be seen wearing glasses. (Refer also Padukone, Deepika in Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani; Zinta, Preity in Kal Ho Naa Ho.) So it’s enough, really, that Sajid Nadiadwala’s Kick, a remake of the similarly named Telugu hit, opens with a shot of the bespectacled Shaina (Jaqueline Fernandez) stepping into a wintry Warsaw street – we don’t need the additional shot where she plays Scrabble with her family and, seizing an opportunity for a word beginning with “S,” spells out S-O-R-R-O-W. (The feisty grandmother, on the other hand, spells out S-E-X. I’m just saying.) But what an idea, sirji: character delineation through board games. Imagine the narrative possibilities. When it’s the hero’s turn to be introduced, resplendent in shining armour, we get a scene where he’s playing chess and makes a knight move. No, wait. That would mean a scene where Salman Khan plays chess. Even Salman Khan can’t pull that off.

Anyway, back to Shaina, whose despondency the film clearly cannot get enough of. Her wardrobe, in the early scenes is filled with greys and blues and blacks. That’s some S-O-R-R-O-W, clearly. For J-O-Y, she’ll have to wait until the second half, when the hero (Devi Lal, played by… you know) invites her to a nightclub and persuades her to dance, at which point she shucks off her drab overcoat to reveal a slinky red dress – according to Statute 56 of the Costume Designer’s Handbook, she’s finally discovered passion. She also shucks off her glasses. What do you think this character does for a living? Being a dancer makes sense. She executes a jaw-dropping split. Or a singer? These professions go with the generic nature of these characterisations. When you have a heroine as a singer or dancer, you don’t have to write too many scenes to establish her as a presence. You can cover this even within the space of the song-and-dance routines. But no. Shaina is a psychiatrist. Why? So that she can take Devi Lal home when he’s afflicted by retrograde amnesia. So this is how the Polish health-care system apparently works. You walk up to the doctor who’s treating the patient and announce that you’re a psychiatrist, and he’ll let you take the patient home in order to implement the highly regimented treatment procedure called… TLC. Maybe those glasses helped. Maybe looking at them, the doctor knew that Shaina was capable of pulling off a triple word score with Devi Lal.

Movies like Kick depress me – and not because of the ineptness on display, the sheer waste of resources, the utter contempt for the audience. What depresses me is that they become hits, and further the conventional wisdom that this is what masala cinema is all about. Have the hero make his entry in a scene that literally showers him with confetti. Have him break some bones, and depict this bone-breaking through X-rays. Have him wrap things up with this admonitory punch line: “Dil mein aata hoon – samajh mein nahin,” that we should embrace him with our hearts and not our brains. And we’re supposed to go home happy. It’s depressing because it makes a mockery of the masala movies that take the trouble to write out convincing quasi-mythical narratives, with characters that are at once rooted and larger than life. Heck, you don’t have to look further than Salman Khan’s Dabangg, whose moves are still popular enough to be referenced here.

The difference between Dabangg and Kick is also the difference between India and Poland. Masala movies are essentially warm movies. They need the spice of colours like red and yellow. They need the heat from numbers like Munni badnaam hui and Aare pritam pyaare. They need to be peppered with moving parent-child scenes, piquant romantic stretches, epic hero-villain showdowns. Late into Kick, we get a sequence that unfolds during a charity ball. What self-respecting masala movie goes to a charity ball? Why not situate the same scene in a mela? A lot is lost when you take a quintessentially Indian genre and set it in a foreign country that doesn’t get much sun. It turns cold. And it looks ridiculous because the filmmakers don’t want to make a cool, Hollywood-style movie – they want all the elements of the great Indian tamasha, but they want it in Warsaw. It’s like making kebabs from a kielbasa recipe.

Another way to make these movies work – that is, if you don’t want to spend the time and effort on actually writing a script – is to fill the running time with moments that make use of the things that make your star a star, so that we don’t notice how underwritten the other characters are (the little girl Jhumki; Devi Lal’s father, played by Mithun Chakraborty). Just make the movie a start-to-finish show-reel of bits – like the animated flashback that showcases the hero’s herogiri, or the stretch where Devi Lal breaks into a dance as the song Saat samundar paar (from Vishwatma) booms on the soundtrack. Salman Khan, in bright red pants, is in his element here – he even copies Divya Bharti’s bunny-rabbit-wagging-its-tail dance moves from that song. But that’s it. The story has to do with Devi Lal also playing a robber named Devil – and not a single heist is staged well.  All we get are tired action scenes – cars chasing a bus as a mother walks into the frame wheeling a baby carriage, that sort of thing. It’s depressing when, with all this money, even the technical  departments don’t bother.

A number of good actors walk in and out of the frames – Saurabh Shukla, Sanjay Mishra, Rajit Kapoor, and an embarrassed-looking Randeep Hooda, who plays the thankless role Shashi Kapoor played in some of the Bachchan outings. I did enjoy watching Nawazuddin Siddiqui, though. The minute he enters the film, the sluggish proceedings suddenly come alive. His first scene is terrific. He doesn’t have much of a role – odd, considering he’s the villain – but what screen time he gets he chews up with relish. He sings old Hindi film songs. He laughs like a wheezy hyena. He punctuates his utterances with the sound of a ping pong ball hitting the paddle. He commits murder using bubble wrap. It’s strange that this supposed “art-film actor” gets so completely into the spirit of a masala movie and does his darnedest to keep us entertained. Is it too much to ask the same of others, that they earn their fat paycheques?

KEY:

* Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani = see here
* Kal Ho Naa Ho = see here
* Telugu hit = see here
* Dabangg = see here
* Aare pritam pyaare = see here
* kielbasa = see here
* herogiri = the things that a hero does
* Saat samundar paar = see here
* Nawazuddin Siddiqui = 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…

How do you know you are in a South-style masala movie? One clue is the sound – and not just the general background score that makes it appear that a space shuttle is being launched behind your seat. It is also the sound associated with specific actions, which, in real life, would produce no sound at all – like the picking up of a cell phone, or a glance being directed at someone. A glance. If an alien species watched these movies, they’d end up thinking that the motion of our eyeballs was controlled by typhoons. It follows, then, that these films tell stories that are equally subtle: good is good, bad is bad, and grey is something you find at the end of a Maharashtrian surname. Singham Returns, the new Rohit Shetty movie – new only in chronology – is content to coast around this ambit. He’s so reluctant to tamper with a winning formula that he even replicates the framing device of the earlier film, where an honest cop (with a wife and a young child) ends up dead and suspected of corruption. The only surprise here is… is… uh…

Why do these films have to be so predictable? Consider the stretch where Evil Guy hatches a plan to scare three Good Guys. We hear about this plan first, and then we see the attack on Good Guy 1 (a child is abducted), then on Good Guy 2 (the family is shot at), and, finally, Good Guy 3 (a car is wrecked). Why not show us these three violent acts erupt out of nowhere, leave us wondering about the who and the why, and then take us to Evil Guy and his evil plan? Before a scene ends, we know what’s going to happen in the next, and the next… What is Singham Returns about? We don’t have to wait long for the answer because we’re shown, right at the beginning, a press conference where the issue of black money is raised. It’s worse because the characters are the same: corrupt politicians, crooked godmen (Amole Gupte plays one with some glee), honest and beleaguered cops, the fearless reporter with a thing for bindis the size of crop circles…

As DCP Bajirao Singham, Ajay Devgn is his usual dour self. There’s no charisma, no looseness, no sense of enjoying himself – he treats the role like a task that needs to be ticked off. He has a new heroine: Kareena Kapoor Khan. What happened to the character Kajal Agarwal played in the earlier film? I found this puzzling because the rest of the cast (Singham’s parents and so forth) is the same. Maybe there was an explanation somewhere that I didn’t catch because I was trying to protect my eardrums from permanent damage. A couple of shootouts are imaginatively staged, and there’s a nice bit of comedy involving a selfie. I liked the drama with the impoverished mother who lashes out at Singham, asking him if he has the balls to go after the really powerful. I remember thinking that this scene wouldn’t fly in a Tamil or Telugu movie, whose heroes have it written into their contracts that they are never going to be insulted. At least inside the movie. At the hands of critics and on social media, it’s another matter altogether.

KEY:

* the sound = see here
* Kajal Agarwal = 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…

In the opening stretch of Mardaani, the camera peers at traffic from the back seat of a car, fuzzy taillights in the distance – it’s all very verité. In the front are two men we quickly recognise as cops. They stop to pick up a colleague, Shivani (Rani Mukerji), who’s dressed in a sari – she looks like your average housewife. And then we see that the cops are in mufti too. Their joshing banter tells us that they’ve done this a lot – the camaraderie is casual. But once they reach their destination, it’s business. They pull out guns and get ready to do what they’re here to do. It’s all very hush-hush – even the background score. We’re primed for a “realistic” thriller – and then we discover we’re inside a regular hero-versus-villain saga. Only, this is a heroine-versus-villain saga. Mardaani does to the masala movie what the Tamil film Goli Soda did earlier this year – it serves it up with a cool twist. There, the protagonists were children, and the fun came from seeing them do what our big action heroes regularly do. Here, the protagonist is a woman, and it’s equally fun to see her slip into the kind of film (and role) that could have easily accommodated Salman Khan. Shivani is a stickler for workouts, and, at the end, she even shrugs her shirt off.

Coming a week after the dreary Singham Returns, Mardaani is essentially a demo on how to do this kind of film with class and a certain sensibility. The larger-than-life aspects are all there. After a big win, Shivani strides towards us in slow motion. She lets loose a series of crackling lines. When hauled up by her superior, she turns to her colleagues and says, “Sir ki biwi ko koi shopping le jao yaar.” Another time, she refuses the bribe of a 35th-floor flat, explaining that life would become too difficult if the lift shut down. In a most entertaining scene that Salman Khan’s writers are going to kick themselves for not thinking up, she slaps a havoc-wreaking goon while rattling off the various IPC sections she’s going to throw at him. (And she respects her uniform. When her colleagues tell her that it’s not their job to get involved with this goon because they’re “Crime Branch,” she tells them that they’re police first.)

In addition, we get all the clichés from the masala movies. At different times, the soundtrack swells with the Hanuman Chaleesa as well as an azaan – and the “good Muslim” trope gets a surprising spin, through a character we come to identify, initially, as evil. (Shivani feeds this character, Rahman, some biriyani and he gives her the information she needs, but he then says, “Bachche ke liye kiya, khaane ke liye nahin.”) When we are taken near the villains, it is through a shot of a chameleon – nothing in our cinema insinuates evil more than a tongue-flicking reptile.

And yet, Mardaani is more than just your average masala movie – at least the ones we see these days. There’s something very human, very womanly about Shivani – and not just because we see her in the kitchen or combing her 12-year-old niece’s hair. When her enemies end up hurting her husband (Jisshu Sengupta), she doesn’t gnash her teeth in rage. She regards him sorrowfully, realising that the poor chap’s plight is entirely her doing. (And with his character, the gender reversal is taken to its logical conclusion. He’s mere arm candy to Shivani and as disposable to the proceedings as Kareena Kapoor is in Singham Returns – and he doesn’t even get a duet.) Even when Shivani issues her I-will-get-you threat to the villain (“Walt,” played by Tahir Bhasin; the name is an homage to his favourite TV show, Breaking Bad), it’s a tough moment imbued with vulnerability – a tear rolls down her cheek. Shivani knows what’s at stake.

And there is something at stake, something that makes us root for Shivani in a way we never did for Singham. The latter’s enemies were corrupt politicians and godmen, and we’ve had enough of those (and they’re too distanced from us) – but Shivani is up against a child trafficking ring that kidnaps young girls and sells them as “Julia” and “Angelina.” The very fact that Shivani is a woman makes her “emotional” about this (as Walt mockingly points out), but there’s more. She’s foster mother to her niece, and one of the kidnapped girls, a flower seller, is someone she rescued a while ago. Could a male cop be as “emotional” as Shivani, given these circumstances? Sure. But he probably couldn’t feel it from the gut, the way she does – the prospect of being raped, of being sexually abused, is never a possibility in his case (and Shivani comes dangerously close). Rani Mukerji is reliably terrific, and her stature (or lack of it) adds to the performance. A bigger actress may not have seemed this vulnerable. As for whether she’s believable as this ass-kicking cop, if we are able to believe that men fly through the air and knock down opponents fifty feet away, then there’s no reason we shouldn’t buy the scenes where Shivani pursues assassins, or goes womano a mano with Walt at the end. (Besides, at 1.60 m – thank you, Wikipedia – she stands as tall as Lucy Liu, and we all know what mayhem the latter unleashed in Kill Bill.) These films – whether Singham Returns or Mardaani – are essentially escapist fantasies that feed on our powerlessness, and here, for a change, we see a woman use not just her intelligence and her wiles (as, say, Vidya Balan did in the similarly female-oriented Kahaani and Bobby Jasoos) but also her strength. That, I think, is a step.

Strangely, it’s this evenhandedness – this attempt to strike a balance between the worlds of Shivani the heroine and Shivani the woman – that makes Mardaani a little queasy to watch. In a traditional hero-oriented masala movie, the archetypes are so brazen that we don’t take much of it seriously (other than as entertainment, of course). But here, the director Pradeep Sarkar is after shades of realism. He forces us to watch how horribly the barely pubescent kidnapped girls are treated, how they are stripped naked, how they are viewed as mere “virgin” bodies – these scenes fit into a blood-curdling drama like Nagesh Kukunoor’s Lakshmi, but they come off as exploitative in such a broad, escapist entertainment that’s not really about an issue. And yet, this is when we get an idea of Walt, his heinousness. Sarkar does something very interesting. Walt and his cohorts aren’t the usual underground dwellers, people who come off to multiplex goers as the “other,” and are therefore easier to accept as killers and kidnappers. (Again, the gruesome villains of Lakshmi come to mind.) They are the kind of people you find at the multiplex – urbane, upper-crust. They are the demons within us. And Tahir Bhasin plays Walt beautifully. His face is in the shadows at first, and as he exposes himself to Shivani, he slowly comes out into the sun. And he has his vulnerabilities too. Like Shivani, he suffers loss too, he sheds a tear too.

What a difference it makes when villains are treated like human beings rather than ogres. Another character, one of Walt’s underlings, gets a spectacularly vulnerable (that word again) moment as he’s about to be shot. The supporting cast is fantastic. Sarkar doesn’t just point and shoot – like Rohit Shetty. He shapes his material. Even the traditional montage of Shivani interrogating possible witnesses is done so that each person is framed against a different setting – they’re not just talking heads; we get glimpses of their lives. I wish the latter portions had been written better (there’s also too much exposition), and that the background score was less insistent – but Sarkar brings it all in under two hours and still leaves us with the satisfaction of having watched a full-on commercial Hindi movie. He doesn’t shy away from the grime of it all. He even goes for the expletives. Between Singham and Shivani, there’s no question who’s got the bigger balls.

KEY:

* Mardaani = manly; a brave woman
* Goli Soda = see here
* slow motion = see here
* “Sir ki biwi ko koi shopping le jao yaar.” = Someone should take the boss’s wife out shopping…
* Hanuman Chaleesa = see here
* azaan = see here
* “Bachche ke liye kiya, khaane ke liye nahin.” = I did it for the kids, not for this food.
* Kill Bill = see here
* Lakshmi = see here
* bigger balls = 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…

Until I watched Raja Natwarlal, I never realised I had any affection for Deepak Tijori. I didn’t know he was in the film, and I caught myself smiling when he appeared in the very first scene, schlubby and padded around the midriff, looking very much like the kind of meek, middle-class office-goer who, in a Basu Chaterji movie, would have been the guy stooped over the manager, getting the latter’s signature on a contract clipped to a file. Or maybe it was those movies I had affection for, and that’s what made me smile. Anyway, there comes a point when you decide that, unless something goes terribly wrong, you’re going to sit back and take whatever pleasure you can from a movie – and that point came fairly early for me in Raja Natwarlal. I liked the scene set in the Irani cafe, with those checkered tablecloths. I liked the scene where the conman named Raja (Emraan Hashmi), flush with funds after pulling off a swindle, hands over a lot of that money to a homeless orphan selling cigarettes by the roadside and asks the boy to go to school. I liked the sentimental touch with the little red book. I liked the sparkle in the tawdry dialogues, with phrases like “museebaton ka mala” and lines like “Kismat chhoti si bachchi hai… Usey hide and seek khelna pasand hai.”

Raja Natwarlal isn’t a great – or maybe even a good – movie, but it serves up some of the innocuous fun we used to get from Hindi films before the industry went all global and classy on us. It’s nice to see a decently made “mass” movie that isn’t one of those deafening masala blockbusters. This is a milder flavour of masala, and the title is no accident. It harks back to Amitabh Bachchan’s Mr. Natwarlal, and the story is similar – something about an unscrupulous young man who seeks revenge. (At one point, Raja calls himself Mithilesh Kumar Srivastava, after the real-life Natwarlal who inspired the Bachchan movie.) Like this year’s Gunday, Raja Natwarlal isn’t interested in being its own movie. It’s content to cannibalise from the Bachchan oeuvre and exploit our nostalgic memories of that era. If the Bachchan character visited a kotha in Muqaddar Ka Sikandar, Raja frequents a dance bar; even the names of the women roll similarly off the tongue, Zohra and Ziya (Humaima Malik).

There are also bits derived from Hollywood. Yogi (Paresh Rawal) spins a variation on the line from Heat that went “Don’t let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.” There’s the speech from The Prestige about the three parts of a magic trick. There’s a stretch that reminded me of Robert De Niro and the baseball bat in The Untouchables. And the film itself is reminiscent of numerous heist movies which depend on a terrifying combination of luck and timing and the villain turning out to be a bit of an idiot, all of which is the equivalent of jumping out of a plane over a desert, without a parachute, and hoping you’ll end up splashing into a spring in an oasis. For a large part, the director Kunal Deshmukh convinces us that this can actually happen. Of his work in Jannat 2, I wrote, “He isn’t out to reinvent the wheel – he merely wants to keep the gears spinning and make a solid, if not especially memorable, B-movie.” That’s pretty much what he does here as well, most notably in a sequence where Raja’s cohorts pretend to be pest-control experts and facilitate a meeting within the headquarters of a BCCI-type organisation. Raja Natwarlal, like Deshmukh’s first film Jannat, revolves around cricket, and it’s set in Cape Town. Talk about not reinventing the wheel.

The film is overlong and, at times, slack, but it keeps throwing things at you – corrupt cops, a possible twist involving Yogi, a possible betrayal, a hitman with a gun tucked into a book – and at least some of these things stick. (I didn’t see the final con coming.) And the cast is more than game. Tijori and Hashmi work very well together. You believe they share a history – perhaps even some biology, owing to their Mahesh Bhatt genes. After a long time, Hashmi seems to be working on screen instead of coasting along on his supposed charm – he pulls off the emotional scenes quite well. (After a long time, he gets to suck face too.) And it always helps when you hire pros like Paresh Rawal and Kay Kay Menon. The latter plays the villain with the panache of a silent-movie star, all raised eyebrows and downturned lips – it’s as if he’s never sure how he should be reacting at a given moment, a court jester who’s faking it as the emperor. It may be too much of a “performance” for this trifle of a film, but I wasn’t complaining. Getting good actors to participate in movies that don’t quite deserve them is its own kind of con game, but I was happy to be hustled.

KEY:

* Natwarlal, aka Mithilesh Kumar Srivastava = see here, and here, and here
* Deepak Tijori = see here
* Basu Chaterji movie = see here
* museebaton ka mala = chain of difficulties
* Kismat chhoti si bachchi hai… Usey hide and seek khelna pasand hai. = Luck’s a little girl who likes to play hide and seek.
* Mr. Natwarlal = see here
* Muqaddar Ka Sikandar = see here
* Heat = see here
* The Prestige = see here
* The Untouchables = see here
* Jannat = see here
* Kay Kay Menon = see this joyous clip here
* suck face = 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…

Mary Kom opens with a note that says this is “based on” the boxer’s story, so we know we’re in not for the truth but for a version of the truth, shaped by the expediencies of drama. And then, we are plunged into drama. We are in Imphal. Mary (Priyanka) is in labour, and her husband Onler (Darshan Kumar) is escorting her to the hospital. And everything that can go wrong goes wrong. It’s raining. There’s a curfew. Men with torches are setting the streets on fire. When Onler discovers an abandoned rickshaw and tries to break the chain that tethers it, cops show up and begin to beat him, thinking he’s a troublemaker… If you are cynical, like Birdie in All About Eve, then you’ll be rolling your eyes, saying what she said: “What a story. Everything but the bloodhounds snapping at her rear end.”

There are essentially two ways to tell a story, a boxing story. One is to dive deep, into the character, into the psychology, the way Martin Scorsese did in Raging Bull. The other is to stay resolutely on the surface and just narrate a series of life events, like Rocky. Omung Kumar, the director, opts for the latter approach – action takes precedence over thought, and through this action we get hints about what the characters must be thinking. Mary’s motivations are presented to us through mirror events: she removes the trophies and medals she’s won/she replaces those trophies and medals; fans hound her for autographs/she’s on a bus where the man opposite her speaks of Mary Kom but doesn’t realise that she’s sitting right there, and her autograph becomes a way of re-establishing her effaced identity; the scuzzy manager of a street fight, on learning that she wants to participate, sneers that this isn’t a kitchen/after becoming a famous boxer, while being interviewed by a journalist, we see Mary in the kitchen and learn that she’s a great cook as well; while in difficult labour in the hospital, she thinks of her time in the ring/while in the ring, she thinks of her child in the hospital.

In other words, this is melodrama – not merely melodramatic, simply because the events are staged at a high pitch, but fashioned in the style of a melodrama and played (mostly) at an even keel, and my favourite scene came when Mary’s match is being televised, and her father (Robin Das) refuses to watch. He’s always been opposed to her passion for boxing (or boa-xing, as Chopra pronounces it). When Mary, as a young girl, finds a pair of gloves, he says, “Yeh ladkiyon ka khilona nahin hai,” and when she persists, he asks, “Tera naak muh toot gaya to tere se shaadi kaun karega?” This former wrestler (or race-ler) looks at her as a girl, a woman, and he cannot bring himself to applaud her achievements. In a different kind of movie, we may have been shown why – maybe, in a small way, he resents her international fame when his exploits in his sport were confined to a small village in a small state. But when people gather around the television set and cheer for Mary, his stubbornness gives way to excitement and perhaps even pride. She seems to be in a bit of a pickle. He yells at the TV screen, “Maar use.” As if hearing him, she lands a punch. She wins. Father weeps on this side of the TV screen. Daughter weeps on the other side. And as she looks at the TV cameras, she seems to be looking at him. A public moment becomes an intensely personal one. It’s no surprise that the film comes from the house of Sanjay Leela Bhansali, who is also credited as creative director. No other filmmaker, today, is as attuned to the nuances of melodrama.

The film sets Mary up against a line of men who become obstacles – and in true crowd-pleasing style, they all realise their “mistake” and fall at her feet, in a manner of speaking. There’s, of course, the father, who eventually asks for her forgiveness. Then there’s “Coach Sir” (Sunil Thapa; with his white whiskers, he reminded me of the gruff, wise trainers in the Shaolin movies), who refuses to take Mary’s ambition seriously, and later, when she decides to marry Onler, he warns her that she’s throwing her life away – and he too, eventually, comes around, strapping her twin infants to her back and announcing that motherhood has made her stronger. Then we have Sharmaji (Shakti Sinha), the corrupt official from the boxing federation who can make and break careers on a whim. He humiliates Mary, but by the end, he’s on his feet, cheering for her in a comeback match on the world stage.

You’d think that Mary, in her low moments, would have a female BFF to confide in – but no. So bent is the film on showcasing the hurdles in her life that even Mary’s supportive mother – who, again, in a different film, would have had more to do; it isn’t everyday that a farmer’s wife ends up supporting her daughter’s dreams of making it in a brutal, bloody sport – is shoved to the sidelines. Mary Kom isn’t just about Mary versus her opponents inside the ring; it’s also about this woman who prevailed over the many men who stood in her way.

And that’s why Onler comes across as such a surprise. He’s effectively the martyr-heroine of a 1960s melodrama, looking after home and hearth while the “hero” goes out and does his thing, making sacrifices for the greater good. He takes care of the children, he massages Mary’s back after a training session, and he tells her something I’ve heard no male character on screen tell his wife: “Apne baare mein socho.” He has assumed the role she’d play in a traditional Manipuri (or Indian) household, and he’s telling her to think about herself – not about him, not about the babies. And Mary is the film’s “masculine” presence. She’s stubborn. She flies off the handle. She’s not easily intimidated, not even by emotional blackmail. (Her father asks her to choose between him and boxing; she chooses boxing.) When Onler gives her a lift at night – it’s their first meeting – and his bike breaks down in a deserted spot, she tells him, “Don’t worry. Tu mere saath safe hai.” The line gets a laugh, but it also shows us how Mary never really thinks of herself as the “woman” in any situation. She even gets to participate in an amusing reversal of the scene where the wife is bathing and the husband knocks for some reason and ends up ogling at her nudity. Here, Onler is inside, and when he opens the door, Mary remarks that the water is probably cold. But this isn’t to say that her “feminine” side is neglected. She sings a lullaby for her children, and in that scene in the kitchen, she tells the journalist, “Mere haath ka khaake dekho.” Again, we laugh at the double meaning, but it tells us that this woman was comfortable enacting the traditionally accepted roles of both women and men.

Mary Kom doesn’t strive for greatness, and you always know what’s coming, but it’s eminently watchable. It doesn’t make the mistake that Bhaag Milkha Bhaag did – it doesn’t try to transcend the material, do a Raging Bull on a Rocky, which usually ends up looking ridiculous in the Bollywood context. It’s content being a generic Rocky clone, and though the against-all-odds arc is old, the newness comes from the fact that this is the story of a woman, that this is a big Bollywood movie about a woman, that she is a sportsperson, and the sport isn’t cricket, and the place isn’t someplace we usually see. In the first scene, a legend on screen informs us that this is Imphal (Manipur) – when was the last time you saw a film that felt the need to tell us that the events were set in “Mumbai (Maharashtra)”?

The first half moves as fast as Mary’s punches. The director knows that this is a familiar story, so he doesn’t linger on scenes. One moment, Mary marries Onler. The next, she’s pregnant. Another time transition happens “Two years later.” But when the film stops to linger, it’s less successful. The Sharmaji character, who’s here to represent the evil bureaucracy, deserved, at most, a scene or two – but he keeps popping up to make Mary’s life miserable and he quickly becomes unbearable, a one-note villain in a movie whose heroine is already battling bigger villains like motherhood and hulking German boxers. Some scenes, like the one where Mary shaves her head, don’t make much sense, and some of the product placement (especially the “Iodex” line) is truly hideous. And at the climax, the film stops being a melodrama and becomes over-the-top melodramatic, which, given the relative “realism” earlier, is shockingly out of place. But Priyanka Chopra keeps us watching. She doesn’t look like Mary, but she looks the part. She’s done something to her eyebrows. There’s a dusting of freckles on her cheeks. She seems to have lost weight and trained – she looks like she could be doing these things inside the ring. Acting-wise, she doesn’t do anything she hasn’t done earlier, and her eyes keep pooling with tears too often, but this is what the film asks of her. There’s little point trying to be Robert De Niro when all you’re required to be is Sylvester Stallone.

KEY:

* Mary Kom = see here
* the All About Eve scene = see here
* melodrama = see here
* “Yeh ladkiyon ka khilona nahin hai” = This isn’t a plaything for girls.
* “Tera naak muh toot gaya to tere se shaadi kaun karega?” = Who’ll marry a girl with a battered face?
* Shaolin movies = see here
* “Mere haath ka khaake dekho” = refers to food… also to punches
* martyr-heroine = see here
* Tu mere saath safe hai = You’re safe with me.
* 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…

I am relieved to report that Finding Fanny isn’t about the search for a pair of buttocks – not that much searching is needed in the case of Rosie (Dimple Kapadia), whose well-upholstered posterior would raise Rubens from the grave. Rosie is the local busybody in the Goan village of Pocolim, and she lives with Angie (Deepika Padukone), the widow of her son Gabo. Note that name. Márquez is certainly one of director Homi Adajania’s guiding spirits. Time stands still in Pocolim and a character lights a candle for every part of the body that aches. But it is the soul of Wes Anderson that hovers over the film – not so much in the visual design but in the tweeness of the characters and the off-the-charts “eccentricity” factor in the situations they are put through. In a coincidence that’s uncanny (and which wouldn’t be out of place in an Anderson movie), Adajania’s film shares with The Grand Budapest Hotel a scene where a cat meets its end when tossed out of a window. Even the felines in these films are eccentric: they have but one life.

Finding Fanny shares similarities with Adajania’s first film Being Cyrus. Both are about small, colourful communities (Parsis, Goans), who speak English with a smattering of a local tongue (Gujarati, Konkani). Both feature artists (a sculptor there, a painter here) and dream sequences, and both films gaze on Dimple Kapadia as a fleshy object of lust. (The protagonist of Cyrus noted her “swish of hips and bounce of breast.”) And both films are determined to prove how quirky they can be. From the first frame – indeed, from the disclaimer at the beginning – Finding Fanny labours to be different. Soon, we hear a man singing tunelessly, accompanied by yowling dogs – and the story gets going when this man, Ferdie (Naseeruddin Shah), receives a letter he wrote to a lover, Fanny, many decades ago. Clearly, she never got it. Angie convinces him that he should go in search of this woman: Fanny must be found. And so, a motley crew – Ferdie, Angie and Rosie, along with Don Pedro (Pankaj Kapur) and Savio (Arjun Kapoor) – set out on this quest, in a car. No, wait. They set out in a vintage car. No, wait. They set out in a vintage car that’s foreign-made. No, wait. They set out in a vintage car that’s foreign-made and coated with rust.

This accrual of off-kilter detail, Adajania hopes, will distract us from the paper-thin characters and the dullish, predictable situations they find themselves in. But films need more than painstakingly sourced props. For a while, Angie does sound interesting. She makes a wish every day. She’s manipulative. She’s also very emotional – her eyes fill with tears while reading Ferdie’s letter, and later, in the car, she gets weepy just staring at the scenery flashing by. Or take Savio. He scoffs at Rosie when he learns that she lied in order to keep up appearances – but he’s ended up doing the same thing. His pride did not allow him to tell people the truth about his life outside Pocolim. And like Ferdie, he too let a loved one slip away when he couldn’t bring himself to talk to her about his feelings. But these shades never add up to a bigger picture. They’re just detail, like the rust on that car.

And the humour, mostly, falls flat. (The film I saw could be called Finding Funny.) There’s a scene in which the five find-outers stare at a house which may hold a clue to Fanny’s whereabouts. The camera is positioned behind them, so it can catch Savio scratching his… fanny. It’s all very droll in conception, but Adajania doesn’t yet have Anderson’s directorial control – these gags need to be filmed with precision, otherwise the bits come off looking stilted. And lazy. One joke depends on Savio conveniently carrying a strip of sleeping tablets. Another focuses on Don Pedro’s face as a biscuit he’s dipping into tea splits in half and melts away – his uncomprehending expression suggests that he’s never ever encountered a soggy biscuit during teatime. Don Pedro’s character, in fact, is the weakest. He supplies the car, but that’s about it. You could take him out of the film and no one would miss a thing. No, wait. He is taken out of the film and no one misses a thing.

Slowly, we realize that Fanny is less a character than a metaphor, and that the trip is really an excuse to shake these people out of the inertia they’ve settled into. Maybe I should have taken the trip, given the inertia that settled over me after a while. None of the actors really convinced me that this was a journey worth taking. The senior performers are fine, if a tad too pleased with their craft, but younger actors like Arjun Kapoor and Anand Tiwari are underwhelming – there’s not a note of newness in anything they do. As for Deepika Padukone, she’s become a relaxed presence on screen – but she’s also become so luminous that she blots out everything around her. She may have gotten to the point, like Elizabeth Taylor in the 1960s, where she cannot play ordinary people anymore. The fact that we’re supposed to accept her as a lonely, sexless widow may be the film’s best joke.

KEY:

* buttocks = see here
* Rubens = see here
* Being Cyrus = see here
* sleeping tablets = see here
* soggy biscuit during teatime = see here
* Elizabeth Taylor in the 1960s = see here

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

Spoilers ahead…

I’d heard that Knight and Day was really bad, and then, long after its release, I caught it on TV and found that it was quite fun. Sidhdharth Anand’s Hindi remake, titled Bang Bang!, could be something similar. It’s way too long for this kind of movie, but at least on TV you can change channels during the boring bits. But TV won’t give you what the screen does, the billboard-sized impact of one of Hrithik Roshan’s purest performances. I don’t mean “performance” in the “acting” sense – heaven knows the actor has been trying to do a lot of that recently, huffing and puffing his way through dramas like Agneepath and Guzaarish. But that’s not his forte. He seems to suffer from the curse that afflicts the spectacularly good-looking – they spend all their energy trying to convince us that there’s more to them than just those looks. But just as we go to an Irrfan Khan movie to see the embodiment of everymen, we go to a Hrithik Roshan film wanting to be blinded by star wattage. Both types of performers are important, and in Bang Bang! Roshan does what he does best. In scene after scene he sells his brand, treating the camera like a mirror, letting bloom that self-aware smile and saying, “Hey there, handsome.” This narcissism has always been his signature quality, and it works horribly against him when he’s trying embody quadriplegics and underworld dons. But here, it goes with his character, Rajvir – he’s a dashing spy, James Bond reincarnated as a Gucci parfum model.

Unfortunately, he’s paired with Katrina Kaif. She’s supposed to be playing a ditz, but asking for sparkling comic sass from an actress who can barely emote or enunciate is asking for the moon. There’s zero chemistry between the leads, though in the interest of fairness it must be said that Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz, in the original, didn’t exactly set the screen on fire either. Kaif plays a mousy nobody named Harleen, who works as a receptionist in a bank in Shimla. At home, she takes long showers while conversing with her grandmother, who likes to sit on the pot, in front of strategically displayed Garnier Fructis® products. One day, she decides to upend her boring life by going on a blind date. Who should turn up at the restaurant but Rajvir, who’s so smitten that he begins to dance for her amidst signboards for Johnson Tiles®. She joins him, and in that golden lighting they look like Greek gods. If they did what the film’s title suggested, Mount Olympus would be littered with the handsomest tykes ever.

Then, she discovers that he’s a thief. He’s stolen the Kohinoor. They’re on the run. You think the opportunities for product placements would rapidly diminish, but do not discount the creativity of a Bollywood filmmaker who’s after the big bucks. Rajvir and Harleen stop at a Pizza Hut® and order Mountain Dew®. They steal cars – and also talk about them, Scorpio® and Volvo® and Honda®. They are shot at by gunmen who have the worst aim ever in the history of the movies. They stop by a beautiful island. She wakes up in a bikini and walks out and sees him bronzed and shirtless, chopping wood. Later, he barbecues fish for her. Even later, he teaches her how to kiss, first swallowing her upper lip, then the lower. Somewhere, Barbara Cartland’s estate is gearing up for a lawsuit.

Knight and Day, really, is the perfect film to remake in Bollywood, and the reworking comes with solid masala echoes at the start and finish. The action is also pretty good. I particularly enjoyed a stretch in the ocean, where Rajvir and Harleen come off like cavorting dolphins. But the film needed better location photography. It needed better writing. (Some lines are really bizarre, as when the Pizza Hut® -chomping villain, played by Danny Denzongpa, accuses Indian bureaucracy of doing “corruption ke bazaar mein nagna naach”; not even nanga, but the purer form, nagna!). It needed better songs. And it needed a better director, someone with attitude and style. But the audience around me wasn’t complaining. They were devotees cheering for their gods. Or maybe they were just uncomplaining consumers, gorging themselves on Hrithik Roshan®. At this point, it’s become tough to separate performer from product.

KEY:

* Knight and Day = see here
* Agneepath = see here
* Guzaarish = see here
* Gucci parfum = see here
* Kohinoor = see here
* Barbara Cartland = see here
* “corruption ke bazaar mein nagna naach” = dancing naked in the bazaar of corruption

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 possible to imagine an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet without the balcony scene – not ideal, but conceivable. Julius Caeasar, too, you could probably rewrite without Mark Antony’s appeal to friends, Romans and countrymen. But a rendering of Hamlet without the prince’s most famous soliloquy is unthinkable. Even those who haven’t read the play know those opening words, which have percolated so deep into culture that Arnold Schwarzenegger has taken a crack at it. In Last Action Hero, he played Hamlet in a dream scene structured like a generic action-movie trailer. The voiceover, in that familiar mix of velvet and gravel, intones: “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark, and Hamlet is takin’ out the trash.” Indeed. After hurling Claudius out of a stained glass window, this Hamlet lights up a cigar and ponders, “To be, or not to be…” He decides the latter option is better and blows up the castle at Elsinore. What a piece of work is this man.

Other interpreters of Hamlet, mercifully, weren’t tempted to weave explosions into their words, which they rightfully regarded as an implosion. Both Laurence Olivier (in his Oscar-winning version) and Innokenty Smoktunovsky (in the 1964 Russian adaptation) delivered the soliloquy while gazing on restless waves, perhaps taking inspiration from the “sea of troubles” later in the speech. Mel Gibson, in Franco Zeffirelli’s vividly cinematic outing, muttered these lines in a crypt, while walking past sarcophagi – a reminder of “that sleep of death” that weighs heavily on his mind. Kenneth Branagh, who presented the play intact, at nearly four hours, spoke his lines to a mirror – and what better staging for all this self-reflection? Ethan Hawke, playing Hamlet as a film student, mumbled these words while wandering through the “Action” section of a video store – a wicked joke, considering that he is, at this point, the epitome of inaction.

In Vishal Bhardwaj’s (very loose) adaptation of the play – set in 1995, in Srinagar – Haider/Hamlet (Shahid Kapoor) expresses this dilemma most explicitly after making love to Arshia/Ophelia (Shraddha Kapoor, looking quite lost). A soliloquy, thus, is transformed into a part of a conversation. And that, pretty much, sums up Haider. An extremely interior play is opened up, and an extremely solipsistic hero is remade into a politically aware youth who engages with the outside world as much as he battles the torments within. (At different points, the dilemma also becomes a public protest: “Hum hain ki nahin.”) Like Hamlet, Haider is away at college during the events that kick-start the story, but unlike Hamlet, Haider has been sent away because while at school he’d begun to hang out with militants. His mother Ghazala/Gertrude hopes that he will calm down once he’s out of Kashmir, in some place where there’s “na din pe pehre hain, na raat pe taale” – I wish the film had found space for more such poetry; though I must also confess that without subtitles, I was a tad lost with some of the Urdu dialogue – but that doesn’t happen. There too (he’s at Aligarh Muslim University), his research paper is on Revolutionary Poets of British India. That his militant spark hasn’t been extinguished is evident in the scene where he returns to Srinagar and is stopped at a check post. When asked where his home is, he says, “Islamabad.” He’s needling the authorities. Islamabad is another name for Anantnag. But even otherwise, he keeps threatening to go “across the border” for training.

Haider is back because his father Hilal/King Hamlet (an excellent Narendra Jha) has gone missing. Everything’s a metaphor here, so let’s begin with the fact that Hilal is a physician. When Haider is being sent away, Hilal protests that that isn’t the cure for this “illness” (“is marz ki dawa nahin”). Hilal is a kind man who believes in restoring his “ill” hometown to health, and he doesn’t care if the patient is a civilian or a militant. And when he ends up treating a militant, it’s for appendicitis – something’s got to be removed if health is to be restored. Haider, initially, is constantly seen with a backpack – and who’s to say that that’s not the baggage he’s lugging around? As for Ghazala, when we first meet her she’s telling children what a home is, something with “brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers…” That’s not just any home; that’s Kashmir. When Hilal is taken away by the army, his home is incinerated by rocket launchers because his militant-patient is inside, tucked away behind a secret cupboard (this scene is echoed at the end; only now, Haider is the “militant” who’s being targeted with rocket launchers) – and when Haider reaches Srinagar and asks Arshia to take him home, she tells him, “Tumhare ghar mein ghar jaisa kuch bacha nahin hai.” The home he knew – the Kashmir he knew – doesn’t exist anymore. The Dal lake sojourns are a thing of the past. This is a Kashmir where you’d rather be thrown into jail because the alternative is worse – you could “disappear.”

In Hamlet, Shakespeare hit the ground running. The ghost appears. The treachery is made known. Revenge is sought. The plot wasn’t/isn’t as important as the poetry. But in Haider, the “ghost” (Roohdar, played by Irrfan Khan) appears only at interval point (and what a grand appearance it is). So the play, as we know it, is mostly crammed into the second half, while the first half concentrates on presenting a “realistic” picture of the situation in Kashmir. (Note the title design: white and red, signifying blood on snow.) We are schooled about the happenings at Laal Chowk, about specific military operations conducted almost exclusively by South Indians (one of them oddly named “Nagrajan”), about the need to look at things from other points of view (though the film, understandably, looks at the barbarous Indian Army solely through the eyes of the Kashmiris). Khurram/Claudius (Kay Kay Menon, who’s fine, but sometimes caught “acting”) isn’t automatically in power – he has to be elected by people. Haider’s madness is ascribed to a proper medical condition: post-traumatic stress disorder. Even with the characters, Haider takes great pains to flesh out everything – even what’s taken for granted in the play. (Shakespeare knew what his audiences wanted, and it wasn’t backstory.) Khurram has had a crush on Ghazala… from his college days. Haider has had a crush on his mother… since his childhood. He has been writing love poems to Arshia… since his schooldays. Rosencrantz (or is it Guildenstern… as both are named Salman, after their favourite hero?) claims that he knows Haider… from Class XII. There’s a thin line between information and too much information – and with Haider, sometimes, we feel it’s the latter.

This level of detail – orientation, really – is important in a book. Indeed, Basharat Peer, who co-wrote the screenplay with Bhardwaj, is the author of one such book, Curfewed Night. But in a film, these specifics, unless dramatised sharply, come off like footnotes. (And we know when the dramatisation is sharp – as in the superb scene where a civilian refuses to enter his home unless he is frisked. This single moment shows us what an entire populace has been reduced to.) Mani Ratnam gets a lot of flak for “simplifying” the politics in his films, but he does so in order to concentrate on the human drama, which is always at the forefront. And if you’re making your film the “Indian way,” smoothing down thorny issues with a pat message at the end (as opposed to art-house foreign cinema, where you needn’t consider the audience at all), that’s probably the best approach.

With all this attempt at being realistic, the melodramatic/fantastical elements of Hamlet – the real meat, if you will – come off looking forced, as if they were shoehorned in simply because there needed to be parallels to the play. Roohdar should have been a chilling spectral presence; instead, he’s the abstracted spirit of Kashmir. (“Main tha, main hoon, aur main hi rahoonga.”) The “Alas, poor Yorick!” moment makes little sense because we have here not an existential Hamlet, scratching his chin over ontological puzzles, but a political Haider, who’s being inflamed by militants. Liaquat/Laertes (an excellent Aamir Basheer, who might have made a better Haider, good though Shahid Kapoor is) is defanged – he’s no longer the righteously angered nemesis, merely a symbol of the educated Kashmiri youth who were fortunate enough to escape and find well-paying jobs in MNCs outside the state. Haider’s madness is unconvincing, as are some of the play’s conceits – Khurram’s confession after being outed by Haider, for instance. The guilt appears tacked on. Also, how does Haider’s father know that his brother seduced his wife? As a ghost, he’d know, of course – but as a man?

And the outré song sequences jostle uneasily within this framework. The play-within-the-play is now a song – and it’s exquisitely choreographed (watch out for the slow zoom into Haider’s questing face as the dancers around him leap about in an apparent imitation of the roiling Jhelum) – but is this how Haider would go about “realistically” ascertaining his stepfather’s guilt? The gravediggers’ song is worse – it looks comical. But this may be the result of songs no longer fitting smoothly into Bhardwaj’s universe. There was a time – say, around Omkara – where he was less self-conscious about filming music videos to convey emotion. That Bhardwaj would have incorporated Gulon mein rang bhare – the Faiz ghazal; it’s on the soundtrack album, marvellously tuned by Bhardwaj himself – into the flashback establishing the loving bond between the young Haider and Hilal, but here we just have the characters idly humming these lines. These days, Bhardwaj’s song sequences, save for a blandly filmed, utterly conventional duet between Arshia and Haider, come in mostly in quotation marks.

In fact, quite a bit of the film comes in quotation marks, if you’ve been following Bhardwaj’s recent work. The Salmans (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern) look like characters who’ve been abducted from an Anurag Kashyap movie. Then there’s the wordplay Bhardwaj has become so fond of – he rhymes “chutzpah” with “AFSPA” (Armed Forces Special Powers Act) – along with pop-culture nods. (Arshia: Yeh kya haal bana rakha hai? Haider: Kuch lete kyon nahin?) He brings in a reference about birds of prey and later has Haider prancing around in a bird mask. At one point, I thought I saw, at a corner of a militant’s hideout, a bowl containing carrots and cauliflower. We all prefer different phases of a filmmaker – and every good filmmaker, every filmmaker who refuses to stagnate, will have his phases – and I must say that I prefer the earlier Bhardwaj, the man who made Maqbool and Omkara. Those were flavourful adaptations too, and they worked beautifully as drama – the emotional beats in the original plays were transferred intact. Haider, on the other hand, left me cold. It’s extraordinarily crafted, but it’s something you admire from a distance. In terms of technique, though, Bhardwaj is irreproachable. Even the scenes I felt weren’t needed are beautifully written, with perfect lead-ins and lead-outs. And his craftsmanship remains beautiful. Whether it’s Haider’s first glimpse, through a gauzy scrim, of his mother flirting with Khurram, or Arshia’s mind unravelling along with her knitted scarf, Bhardwaj’s pictures continue to make words unnecessary.

But Hamlet is all about the words – so why Hamlet? This was the question that continued to haunt me while watching Haider – especially given there’s no equivalent of Horatio (Arshia takes over the best-friend duties) and so few of the famous lines are translated. (Among the ones that survive are the king’s instructions about Ghazala: “leave her to heaven.”) Why zero in on a play so famous when your story could have worked just as well (perhaps even better) outside its shadow? After all, Mission: Kashmir too told the tale of a disturbed young man with two father figures, one of whom he blames for the other one’s death. That film, too, had a journalist as the hero’s love interest, and there, too, we had the scene of the mother seeking out the son in his hideout, trying to reach out to him. Even the end, with Haider (and the film) in an emotional limbo, mirroring the state of Kashmir, doesn’t need the crutch of Shakespeare.

Two characters survive unscathed. Parvez/Polonius (Lalit Parimoo) is no longer a foolish old man but a cunning schemer, wheedling information as if by giving candy to children. And Ghazala is magnificent (as is Tabu). She is the most fully formed creation – a symbol, yes, but more importantly, she’s also a woman. Something is rotten in the state of her marriage, but she doesn’t hate Hilal. She just cannot come to terms with his high-minded idealism. Her needs are simpler. She wants love. She wants that home. And she wants a life that’s not spent waiting for loved ones to return. In what’s perhaps an inadvertent intertextual touch, she reminds us of Tabu’s Lady Macbeth incarnation from Maqbool. Ghazala is as much a manipulator, though her mode of operation, this time, is emotional blackmail. The scene where Haider applies scent on her neck took me back to Lady Macbeth’s line about all the perfumes of Arabia. The film’s grimmest joke is the mehndi she keeps flaunting before her son, driving him further over the edge. At the end, she even plants a peck on his lips. What a piece of work is this woman.

KEY:

* balcony scene from Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet = see here
* Mark Antony’s speech from Joseph Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar = 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…

Some actors you don’t have any opinion about. It isn’t about whether they’re good or bad – it’s just that they don’t have much of a presence. They blend right into the scenery. Nikhil Dwivedi is one of those actors, the cinematic equivalent of a potted plant or the daytime sky. The hard-edged Richa Chadda is the opposite – she’s big, she’s loud, she’s what the scenery is built around. You can see the idea behind the casting in Tamanchey – opposites attract, et cetera. But sometimes, actors can be too different. This is a Bonnie and Clyde-type story about two small-time criminals who get off on crime and on each other, and it needed, more than anything, rock-solid chemistry. As Munna, Dwivedi tries too hard to pull off the slack-jawed small-town guy who would have been played in the fifties by Raj Kapoor and in the nineties by Govinda. It’s painful to watch. “Ladeej hote hue bhi jean pant pahenti ho,” he tells Chadda’s character, who then startles him with her very un-ladeej-like name: Babu. Everything about her startles him – her clothes, her ballsiness, her English, her cussing. Someone like Munna wouldn’t survive five seconds with someone like Babu, let alone a movie.

Tamanchey is one of those scuzzy little B-movies that didn’t need to be very good – at least, we’re never going to ask too much of it, just that it give us some attitude, some colour. The director Navneet Behal gets this, and how he labours. He squeezes Babu into tight, provocative clothing – at one point, she’s wearing fishnet stockings. Even her sneakers are a standout – they’re bright red. And the language is a treat. I laughed loud when Munna referred to the human posterior as pavan kund. Everyone talks in the kind of flamboyant patois that reeks as much of a certain kind of hinterland reality as the dialogue-writer’s sweat. When Babu’s tough-guy lover (Rana, played by Damandeep Sidhu) discovers she’s been sleeping around with Munna, he says, “Mhare itne peene ke baad bhi botal mein shahad baki hai.” The lip-smacking leeriness in the line is refreshing, given the character, given the situation, given that most dialogue, these days, seems to be thought out in English and translated to Hindi. And the soundtrack is pretty good. The electric opening from RD Burman’s Pyar ne dil pe maar di goli gets the film going. (The reworked portions aren’t that great, though.) Sonu Nigam is in gorgeous form in Dildara – it’s the usual sad-song scenario, but I was instantly hooked by the tune – and Khamakha is used well throughout the film. At one instance, it’s heard when Munna and Babu flirt surreptitiously under Rana’s roof. Suddenly, the song stops… as Munna barges in on Babu massaging a nude Rana. He’s put in his place.

The film needed more of these moments. But given the madcap situations – Munna and Babu make love in a train carriage filled with tomatoes, and at one point, a wrecking ball descends on their hideout – Tamanchey should have been way more fun. Or they should have dialled down the comedy and taken the serious route, especially with this ending in mind. What we’re left with, then, is an unsatisfying mix of blood and laughs. Even with our low expectations, that’s not enough.

KEY:

* Tamanchey = guns
* Bonnie and Clyde = see here
* “Ladeej hote hue bhi jean pant pahenti ho…” = You’re a woman and you’re wearing jeans…
* pavan kund = a play on havan kund, which is the site of a sacrificial pyre
* “Mhare itne peene ke baad bhi botal mein shahad baki hai.” = I thought I licked the pot clean, but looks like there’s still some honey left…
* Pyar ne dil pe maar di goli = see here
* Dildara = see here
* Khamakha = see here
* wrecking ball = 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.