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.

Spoilers ahead…

Farah Khan wouldn’t be making movies if people before her hadn’t made movies. She loves the films she grew up on, and she gives the term “tip of the hat” a whole new meaning. In Happy New Year, she tips her hat to Tezaab (the dancer-heroine, played by Deepika Padukone, is named Mohini), Rocky (a dance competition makes use of Aa dekhein zara), Shalimar (this film too is about a jewel heist, masterminded by Shah Rukh Khan’s Charlie), Deewar (the hero is told, “Tera baap chor tha”), and what appears to be the entire Shah Rukh Khan oeuvre, from Devdas to Chak De India to Main Hoon Na (which remains Farah’s funniest and best-made film). Plus, we see Sajid Khan get his comeuppance for his cinematic crimes. We have a villain (Jackie Shroff) named Charan Grover (rhymes with Karan Johar). We have a killer spoof on Saroj Khan’s dance steps for the Chane ke khet mein number. In a scene where Deepika Padukone appears as the object of everyone’s desire (though one could argue that that’s pretty much every scene), we hear strains of Aankhon mein teri, which was the song that played when she became the object of Shah Rukh Khan’s desire in Farah Khan’s Om Shanti Om.

This relentless cannibalisation (and self-cannibalisation) is a pity because Farah’s real talent lies in the mad bits she cooks up – like the spitting-teacher routine in Main Hoon Na. In an early song here, Mohini is so hot that things literally catch fire. Charlie’s team members are given little quirks that, sometimes, have amusing payoffs. I loved the idea of Boman Irani’s safecracker having a Mary Poppins-style bag, from which he pulls out the most amazing things, including a whole pineapple cake. And the scene where Nandu (Abhishek Bachchan) uses rather unconventional methods to prop himself up is a scream. I wouldn’t mind watching a Farah Khan movie that was just a random collection of these skit-like stretches – like a longish Saturday Night Live episode with really big stars.

But, alas, Farah wants to tell a story – and a sustained narrative is most certainly not her strong point. The sentimental portions (Anupam Kher makes an “emotional appearance”) and the inordinate length (nearly three hours) make this comedy/heist movie less comedic and nail-biting than it should have been, but Farah probably thinks that, with an often-shirtless Shah Rukh as the draw, nothing else is needed. He pulls the film together, despite a bizarre, tasteless running gag where his character keeps demeaning Mohini as a bazaroo aurat (bizarre because this actor makes a point of his feminism by having the heroine’s name before his in the credits). And he certainly plays to his (and Bollywood’s) NRI fan base. The film, which is set mostly in Dubai, begins with cheering multi-ethnic crowds waving the Indian flag and it ends with a stage performance where the confetti is coloured saffron, white and green. In between, we get a visual of the Taj Mahal, a “Narendra Modi” cameo, and the nagging sense that Farah Khan is doing for Bollywood what Leni Riefenstahl did for Nazi Germany. Happy New Year is possibly the most lavishly mounted propaganda movie yet about India’s increasing soft power.

KEY:

* Aa dekhein zara = see here
* Chane ke khet mein = see here
* Aankhon mein teri = see here
* spitting-teacher routine = see here
* bazaroo aurat = fallen woman

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…

Why can’t we make a good sex comedy? Perhaps the problem lies with the Censor Board that demands cuts instead of rating films according to content. And surely, part of the problem lies with the audience too – the screening of The Shaukeens I attended was filled with children, and with them in the theatre, you certainly don’t want a sex comedy that goes all the way. (Maybe that explains films like Grand Masti, whose leery one liners fly over the heads of these tots.) But why is it that dramas routinely get away with more adult content – both visual and, well, oral – than these comedies? At least with the earlier Shaukeen, it’s easy to point out why it was so limp. The director Basu Chatterji treated the material like something to be watched with the family, without squirming – and to be fair to him, the era was less permissive. Also, maybe there was only so far you could go with actors of the stature of Ashok Kumar, Utpal Dutt and AK Hangal. I mean, do you really want to see Imam Sahib dreaming about a D cup? But how does one excuse the sheer ineptness of this new film?

It’s a good idea, in theory. We usually flinch when we hear of old films being remade, but Shaukeen needed a makeover. This story of three old men looking to score was begging to be filled with the smut the material really demanded. The director, Abhishek Sharma, tips a hat to the older film by reusing the voiceover-filled beginning, and he makes one of the old men (Annu Kapoor; the other two are played by Anupam Kher and Piyush Mishra) sing the Kishore Kumar number Jab bhi koi kangna bole. (And Rati Agnihori, the object of lust from that film, now plays a sexless wife. A hopelessly out-of-place Lisa Haydon takes over as heroine.) Otherwise, this is a new setting – it’s a new world, filled with sex toys and pole dancers. But the only worthwhile gag has the Mishra character re-enacting the evolution of man. (You have to see this.) The film, otherwise, is a disaster. (And Tigmanshu Dhulia wrote this?)

It’s only when Akshay Kumar shows up – he plays himself – that we perk up. The actor is always better in films where he doesn’t have to carry the load, and he’s very funny here, spoofing the sameness of his roles and yearning to win a National Award by collaborating with an acclaimed Bengali filmmaker. Just watch the scene where he poses for a series of endorsements without missing a step. Or the scene where he attempts to emote a “ganda feeling.” Or the scene where he practices the navarasas, with the help of a chart. Too bad his part is just a longish cameo – this should have been the movie. Forget the sex – at least we would have had comedy.

KEY:

* Jab bhi koi kangna bole = see here
* navarasas = 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…

It’s the wedding night. The groom is the man who will go on to become the famous painter, Raja Ravi Varma (Randeep Hooda). His bride, smiling shyly, makes a move to blow out the oil lamp. He stops her. “Let it be,” he says. “I want to look at you.” She doesn’t comply, but we get the teeniest glimpse into a side of the painter, a side not many people may know about. He has his kinks (later, he will make love to his muse on a floor splattered with paints of every hue), but he’s also interested – as any painter should be – in anatomy. It must not have been easy, in those conservative times (we are talking about the nineteenth century), to study a woman’s body in detail, and when his wife doesn’t cooperate, he enlists the help of a curvy maidservant, who is only too happy to pose in fine clothes and jewels, and, sometimes, far less. Going by the stately photographs of the greying Ravi Varma we’ve seen in books, would you picture him as a man this obsessed with female flesh? No wonder his descendants are livid. Who wants to see their stately ancestor as this… sari chaser?

But then, how did Ravi Varma paint the men in his paintings? How did he study the shape, the proportion, the musculature? Did he look at himself in a mirror? Did he look at the men around him, in Kerala, who usually wandered about shirtless? Was it easier to get male models then? Ketan Mehta’s Rang Rasiya (adapted from a book by Ranjit Desai) doesn’t tell us, and it’s easy to see why. It’s so much more fun showing female nudity on screen. Even in the scene where the artist lies spent, after making love to a prostitute named Sugandha (Nandana Sen), we see him with his legs crossed. (She, however, has bared a breast.) I am not trying to make too much out of this. A filmmaker shows what he wants to show. But by focusing only on the (nude) female form, the film becomes slightly suspect. We begin to wonder if this nudity was really necessary, or if this is one of those cases where the filmmaker decided to thrown in a nipple so that people who wouldn’t usually see this kind of movie would end up watching it.

I suppose we wouldn’t be asking this question if the film had paid more attention to the process of painting, which, surely, takes more than just an easel and a willing muse like Sugandha. There’s a promising early scene where we see Ravi Varma attempting to portray her as the goddess Saraswati. When he asks Sugandha to pose like a devi, she laughs and says she doesn’t know what a devi looks like. So he lays flowers at her feet, thrusts a veena in her hands, and kneels and prays to her. He sees her as a devi, and now she feels it too. And voila, the painting is done. But he’s just prepared her – what about the rest of the process? When we watch a film like La Belle Noiseuse, we witness the gestation of art, not just its delivery. We see the painter, we see his tools, we see his muse, her impatience, we sense his struggles, his frustrations, his thoughts. All we see here is Sugandha smiling beatifically, completely convinced about the worthiness of Ravi Varma’s art. We look at La Belle Noiseuse and we think, “What a terrible, destructive thing it must be to want so badly to create art.” We look at Rang Rasiya and think, “All these women just waiting to drop their clothes? Where do I sign up?”

Then again, Mehta – who’s a wan shadow of the filmmaker he was in the 1980s – isn’t too concerned about the art itself. He’s more interested in the Big Questions – about censorship; about how our conservative society, despite prodding from Khajuraho and the Kamasutra, has always failed to understand a certain kind of art. And to this effect, he opens his film with a sequence that intercuts a present-day art auction (of Varma’s paintings) with an angry mob outside. Then he cuts to Raja Ravi Varma’s obscenity trial in British India, where he has been charged with “humanising” (or simply put, naked-ising) gods and goddesses. And then, we have a second flashback structure – and this is where the film gets all Wikipedia on us. Childhood in Kilimanoor, Kerala. Marriage. Title of “Raja”, courtesy an early benefactor. Move to Bombay. Fame. Buys a printing press and floods the country with reproductions of his paintings, making art – and gods – accessible, for the first time, to the man on the street. We keep turning the pages. Scenes just drift by. There’s no atmosphere – just plot. Instead of zooming in on one aspect of Ravi Varma, Mehta tries to show us everything – and we come away with very little insight into the man. Well, other than the fact that he liked his women. I would have liked to know more about his attitude towards these women, especially Sugandha. He tells her that she doesn’t exist outside his imagination. Is that all she was? Was he just using her? Did he have real feelings for her, or was she just someone who helped his painting and someone he could occasionally, um, dip his brush into?

Rang Rasiya suffers from the two major problems that plague our biopics (and, in general, our films set in the past). One, there’s very little actual sense of slipping into a period – everyone seems to be wearing freshly laundered clothes and playing dress-up in freshly furnished sets. The contemporary actors look stiff, formal – they don’t look like they belong in the nineteenth century. And two, the tendency to portray a period through lazy invocations of what else was happening at the time – like a Congress party meeting where we see Tilak. All this is so perfunctory, we can only laugh. And in between, we get the melodramatic story of Ravi Varma and Sugandha, which, despite all the screen time, is utterly generic. They are painted in the broadest strokes (we never see her with her clientele; she seems to spend all her time with him) – but at least, they fare better than the supporting characters, like Ravi Varma’s brother, who’s just required to stand in a corner of the frame, a hunkier Ramu kaka. Late in the film, we get a scene that tells us he had artistic ambitions too, and we go “Huh?”

For a film about art, it’s shocking how little artistry there is in Rang Rasiya. I liked the stretch where a ganja-stoked Ravi Varma experiences a hallucination, imagining himself and Sugandha enacting scenes from the epics – to others, the man and woman in his pictures may be Vishwamitra and Menaka, but to him, they are Ravi Varma and Sugandha. How you wish this had been the crux of the film. We come away feeling nothing – except maybe that we’ve seen a routine Bollywood melodrama in artier garb. Bad music. (It’s unbelievably loud.) Bad lines (Sugandha simpers: “Mujhpe daag lagaane ka haq tumko kisne diya?”). Bad scenes – like the one where Sugandha runs through a street and her sari catches fire, and then… nothing. Bad characterisation. (We know the moneylender played by Paresh Rawal is trouble because we hear “ominous music” in the background when he makes a deal with Ravi Varma.) And bad writing in general. A court case, naturally, means that all the movie’s thesis points can be stuffed into the mouths of the accusers and the accused. And the minute we hear the Urvashi-Pururavas legend, we know what’s in store for our leads. The difference: that story soared to the heavens, while this one stays resolutely earthbound.

KEY:

* Mujhpe daag lagaane ka haq tumko kisne diya = Who gave you the right to… oh, never mind.

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 you’re one of the four others on the planet who liked Jhoom Barabar Jhoom, you should check out Shaad Ali’s follow-up Kill/Dil – not because of the film itself (it’s pretty much a disaster), but because of the film’s style, which basically does for the gangster movie what JBJ did to the romantic comedy. Allow me to reproduce a few lines from my JBJ review: The bold, brassy pitch that Ali maintained throughout Bunty Aur Babli is cranked up a couple of notches here, and it’s layered onto so many instances of self-referencing (and, yes, self-indulgence) that you’re no longer sure if you’re watching a film or winking at it or watching a film winking at itself… It isn’t just that Ali is unashamed of the whole song-and-dance routine; it’s that he positively revels in the glorious absurdities of the musical genre… What we’re seeing in these films is the Bollywood format taken to its most logical end: surrealism. All of this applies to Kill/Dil too, and as a purely academic exercise, the film is fascinating.

Why, then, did JBJ soar (at least for the five of us), while Kill/Dil stays steadfastly earthbound? I think it’s the genre. I think it’s easier to make a meta- musical out of a romance, where we really don’t expect all that much to happen, than from a masala-template gangster movie (Ranveer Singh and Ali Zafar play two hit men named Dev and Tutu), where we expect strong emotional beats if we are to invest in whatever’s happening. And Ali’s po-mo technique of disregarding the narrative in favour of the various “bits” he cooks up – the characters are, to the last one, abstractions – backfires badly. Take Disha (Parineeti Chopra; as her screen name suggests, she sets Dev in the right, you know, direction). It’s the kind of preposterous role Sonakshi Sinha would be called upon to play. Disha is a millionairess who rehabilitates criminals, but that’s tossed off in a line of dialogue and a scene with a “common man.” (Translation: the kind of weather-lined chap you wouldn’t expect to find in this kind of Yash Raj production.) Elsewhere, she’s seen in clubs, she drives a bike, she drinks, she swims, she flirts lazily with Dev… Nothing says that Disha should roam around in a khadi sari, given the kind of work she does. But absurdity is a toughie. Do it right, and it becomes a narrative technique. Otherwise, it’s just… absurd.

Or take Bhaiyaji (Govinda). The casting sounds fun, and the man still dances like a dream. But the character is the human equivalent of the (intentionally generic) props in Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy adaptation (which was pretty faithful to the comic strip), where the daily paper is called… Daily Paper and the label on a bottle of ketchup says… Ketchup. Bhaiyaji could have been called Bad Man and it would have made no difference. Like everything (and everyone) in the film, he’s a stylised abstraction. (Govinda tries, and he’s fun to watch, but he has nothing to play.) But I did like the scene where he meets his end, at the hands of a character we’ve met just a minute earlier, and whom we know nothing about, other than the fact that he is another… Bad Man. It’s fitting that one abstraction is wiped out by another.

It’s a pity Ali doesn’t go all the way with this conceit. (I’m hoping it’s a conceit, and not just rotten writing.) Because we cannot have an “Indian movie” without emotion, the film, around the midway point, addresses the bifurcation in its title – the intermission is really the forward slash in the middle. Hereon, “kill” gives way to “dil”, and Dev begins to follow his heart – this killer wants to go straight, and from taking lives he begins to work in the business of… life insurance. And had this path been pursued with some conviction, the film might have still clicked, if in a half-cocked way. It would have been a film with a split personality, a cartoony action-musical in the first half and a relatively “real” romantic musical in the second. But that wouldn’t be cool – and cool is something Kill/Dil wants to be above all else. Conventional romantic scenes – one atop the Qutab Minar; another one at a roadside dhaba – wilt in this arch atmosphere. Gunday, which this film keeps reminding us of, took the masala route and pulled no punches, and so we were enveloped by all that noise and colour. Imagine the same kind of story accommodating a scene where a character digs out a gun he’s buried in the earth as Gulzar keeps reciting verses in the background. The difference, of course, is that Ali likes to push his films past the fourth wall (when Dev asks Tutu to relax, he sings chill, chill, to the tune of the title song), but this time, the approach defeats the material, which isn’t strong enough or fresh enough to withstand this treatment.

The leads don’t work at all. They seem to be amusing themselves. They seem to be having a good time on screen. But they don’t radiate this enjoyment to us. Ranveer Singh tries too hard. As he showed us with his marvellous “performance” in Goliyon Ki Raasleela: Ram-Leela, he’s one of the few young actors today who can slip into a heightened zone of role-playing, but all he ends up doing here is mugging. (He’s made to enact tired routines like the one where he faces a stern interview panel and tries to manage with his pidgin English.) And Zafar cannot hide his basic affability – he swaggers so hard, it’s painful to watch. It’s like watching Sachin attempt to play Gabbar Singh.

Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy’s music – the songs, but also the background score, which is part RD Burman, part Spaghetti Western – is the film’s only unqualified success. But the choreography doesn’t keep up. There’s none of the verve we saw in Jhoom Barabar Jhoom. Only Daiya maiya shows some invention, with a morose Dev, after failing to land a job, being cheered up by a happy Dev (a surreal second avatar) and Tutu – and the tables are turned in the repeat of the song, after Dev gets a job; now, sad Dev turns into happy Dev and turns on the other two. As for Sweeta, it’s the song that winks at us the most. It starts with Dev announcing the names of Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy and Gulzar, like on the radio. It’s fun, but it’s hard not to recall that the same technique was used all the way back in 1978, in the Tamil film Ilamai Oonjalaadugiradhu.

At every point, you keep wanting Kill/Dil to be so much more – but this isn’t a lazy failure. If anything, Ali tries to do too much. Some of the dialogue is so tangy you can taste it. (“Poore sau gram ke garam goli daale hain body mein.”) And even the de rigueur Bollywood referencing is meticulous, miles removed from Farah Khan’s hefty nudges in the rib; few, if any, must have spent so much mental energy over a Nirupa Roy gag. She’s the founder of the company Dev works for, the one that sells life insurance (her picture hangs on a wall), and her Bollywood avatar stands for maternal love, aka mamta, and the slogan of the company is rahe na rahe hum, which is, of course, a song from a film named… Mamta. The film’s tragedy is that Ali works up such a sweat and ends up nowhere.

KEY:

* Ilamai Oonjalaadugiradhu = see the beginning of this marvellous song
* Poore sau gram ke garam goli daale hain body meins = I’ve pumped a hundred grams of hot lead in him.
* rahe na rahe hum = 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…

Happy Ending, which is directed by Raj Nidimoru and Krishna D.K., begins with a scene in a cinema hall where a surprise guest star declares her love for Yudi (Saif Ali Khan). A startled Yudi’s response is to spill Coke on his shirt and stuff his face with popcorn, so he doesn’t have to say anything back – but when she insists, he cannot lie. She’s outraged. She accuses him of having no depth, but he’s content to coast in shallow waters. “Jitna dikh raha hai utna hi hai,” he shrugs. And I thought to myself: “Isn’t Saif too old to be playing these roles, and hasn’t he played them a hundred times before?” What was charming in Salaam Namaste has curdled into self-parody – he seems stuck in the same place, the actor’s equivalent of Rishi Kapoor jogging on a giant LP. The Salaam Namaste déjà vu is exacerbated by the presence of Preity Zinta, who’s rather winning as Divya, one of Yudi’s exes, now married and a mother of three. We are reminded of her pregnancy in Salaam Namaste and it looks right that she’s with children now, while he’s still brandishing his bachelor status like a sword against Time.

As it turns out, the film is in on this… joke, if you want to call it that. In fact, Yudi’s friend Montoo (Ranvir Shorey, salvaging a thankless role with a few zingy one-liners) says as much. “Main yahaan baap banne wala hoon aur tum abhi tak break-up patch-up khel rahe ho.” Yudi himself knows he’s not getting any younger. When his alter ego Yogi (also Saif, this time as a slob with a beard and a paunch and some kind of junk food always at hand) reminds him that he is indeed old, Yudi mutters that he is at least young at heart. What we appear to be watching, then, is some kind of meta-comedy about the Saif Ali Khan persona, and the suspicion is confirmed when a film star named Armaan (an underutilised Govinda, who’s fun to watch nevertheless) makes an appearance. The meta-ness is doubled because Armaan is a former single-screen star who now wants to court the multiplex audience (much like Govinda did in last week’s Kill/Dil), while Saif is playing safe again, courting the multiplex audience after a couple of disastrous attempts (Bullett Raja, Humshakals) to cross over to the single screens. And like Saif, Yudi (who’s a writer) is at the crossroads of his career. His last success was a few years ago, and now his fame is on the ebb.

You think this is great terrain to be explored by these directors who aren’t exactly known for playing it safe, but, bafflingly, they choose to make a rom-com. The Armaan angle is sidelined – he wants Yudi to write a movie for him, and he hands him a bunch of DVDs. (I suppose this counts as an indictment of Bollywood… or something.) Instead, we settle on Aanchal Reddy (Ileana D’Cruz; interesting surname that, in a Bollywood movie), who will become Yudi’s latest object of interest. To the directors’ credit, they at least try to fool around with the rules of a rom-com, which is presented not as the main story but as the story within the story that frames the movie. Yudi’s transformation to screenwriter means that the various episodes between Yudi and Aanchal become “scenes” in the screenplay, archly advertised as “Boy Meets Girl,” “Dhinchak Song,” “Airportwala Scene,” and so on.

There’s also an attempt to debunk the opposites-attract cliché that is the very oxygen of rom-coms. Vishakha (Kalki Koechlin, playing yet another of Yudi’s girlfriends) tells him, “Apne aap se bahut pyar karte ho.” (This film has the habit of putting its thesis points into the mouths of its characters.) She’s right, of course, and it only follows that someone this solipsistic would fall for someone exactly like him, which is what Aanchal turns out to be. She’s a writer too. She’s content to coast in shallow waters as well, mocking “true love” and all its accoutrements (though she certainly doesn’t mind making a living by exploiting those who believe in these things; she’s a romance novelist). And she gives Yudi the lines he gave the girls he brushed off, lines like “We can still be friends.”

The rom-com that results, however, is hardly as edgy as all of this suggests. (It might have been, had it ended at the point where Aanchal walks away, after giving Yudi that line about being friends.) Happy Ending is too long, and too content to settle for easy gags, which aren’t even all that funny. (One of them involves the classic hitchhiking scenario, on a Pacific Coast highway. Aanchal takes her shirt off and no one stops. Yudi takes his shirt off and a hillbilly-like man stops. I suppose this counts as “subversion”… or something.) And the film makes it too easy for Yudi to get away from his other relationships. The women around him are either shrews (like Montoo’s wife) or stalkerish nutcases (like Vishakha), and both of them are used to peddle a “joke” about pregnancy being the most horrifying thing that a man can face. Strangely, for a film that revels in its hipness, it’s the traditional rom-com scenes that work best – like the long drive with Hindi songs playing on the radio, or the proposal at the end. Surely directors this smart should know that you can’t mock a genre and embrace it at the same time.

KEY:

* Main yahaan baap banne wala hoon aur tum abhi tak break-up patch-up khel rahe ho = Here I am, becoming a dad, and you’re still breaking up and patching up…
* Jitna dikh raha hai utna hi hai = What you see is what you get.
* Apne aap se bahut pyar karte ho. = You love yourself a whole lot.
* classic hitchhiking scenario = 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.

REVIEWS IN THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA

• A review by Sudhir Srinivasan, in The Hindu, is here. An excerpt:

While it may seem like a fairly plain statement to make, you catch yourself going back to it during the infrequent times that you disagree with his points. Whether you agree with the reviews or not, there’s little doubt that they are a whole lot of fun to read. He is the reviewer equivalent of that school teacher you loved, the one who taught you without ever making the art of instruction seem onerous.

Spoilers ahead…

I may be a little off here in terms of the exact number, but in Rensil D’Silva’s Ungli, we have the 6784-th filmic instance of a hapless senior citizen camped out at a pension office while corrupt clerks refuse to look at his file unless he slips them some money. Is the situation snatched from reality? Sure. Is it terrible? Does it deserve to be showcased? Undoubtedly. But is it also, by now, a cliché on screen? Absolutely. How, then, to depict issues such as this – along with the corruption of the police, and political hooliganism – without making it seem like we’ve seen it all a thousand times before? The director Shankar’s solution is to make quasi-superhero movies and blind you with bling. But D’Silva likes to operate at a lower register, and he just cannot figure out a tone that works. Despite the breathtakingly moody cinematography by Hemant Chaturvedi, the film is hardly… there.

The story focuses on a gang of four (Kangana Ranaut, Randeep Hooda, Angad Bedi, Neil Bhoopalam) who don ski masks and take to vigilante justice. They target the corrupt and mete out imaginative punishments – imagine Se7en, but without the sadism and with a couple of training montages. (Hey, vigilantes need to keep up their fitness levels too.) Emraan Hashmi is in there somewhere – and yes, he snags a kissing scene. Sanjay Dutt is in there somewhere – he’s named Kale just so that someone can play on that name in a line that goes, “Agar aap ‘kale’ hain to woh bhi dilwale hain.” The Mehmood reference feels real odd in this movie, which strives to be cool, stylish and doesn’t want to get its hands dirty with anything as messy as emotion. (The other dialogues are equally bad, including one where the phrase “house of cards” is translated into “taash ke patton ka ghar.” Just reading that now makes me wince.) The relationships are barely worked out. (Wait till you see Neha Dhupia falling for Hooda one second after she’s looked at him as if he were something the dog did on her carpet.) The backstory that drives these vigilantes is bland. The convenient way in which the villains are looped back into the story after a long absence is downright laughable. And the treatment is way too facile for anyone to work up any angst – on and off screen.

I wished the vigilantes had been a younger lot. It may have been easier to empathise with them and their idiot idealism. And I wish D’Silva had been a better filmmaker. I kept thinking about how much juice Bejoy Nambiar infused into Shaitan, which was also the story of a gang of youngsters. Maybe a lot of that film was empty flash, but there was at least something to get the pulse racing – Ungli, on the other hand, feels as dead as its surroundings. We are supposed to believe that this vigilante movement has the nation gripped, but there hardly seem to be any people on screen and all the action seems to be taking place in a cavernous studio backlot. About the only thing that worked for me is the presence of Reema Lagoo, as Emraan Hashmi’s mother. The actress has an unfussy way of making us care about her characters, and her scene with Sanjay Dutt is one of the few times we get a sense of rooted emotion. The rest of it is just empty posturing.

KEY:

* Mehmood reference = see here
* Shaitan = 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.

This is a Book Club event and entry is by invite only, so do let me know in advance if you need an invite. Look forward to seeing at least some of you there.

Spoilers ahead…

Rajkumar Hirani has often spoken about his admiration for Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s films, and it comes as no surprise. Hirani’s films, from the two Munnabhai entries to 3 Idiots, are essentially reworkings of Mukherjee’s films like Anand, Bawarchi and Khoobsoorat, where a free-spirited outsider breezed through stuffy surroundings and made people rediscover what they’d lost. In the charming Ferrari Ki Sawaari, which Hirani co-wrote, there was an echo of the scene in Guddi where a student is late to school and ends up leading the choir in prayer. In the quirkily named pk, the narrator (Jaggu, played by Anushka Sharma) writes a book on the titular character – and that’s what the Amitabh Bachchan character did in Anand. (His book was named Anand; Jaggu’s book is named pk.) But consider the title itself. It goes back to the joke in Chupke Chupke that transformed the initials of a character (P.K.) into the Hindi word for “intoxicated”.

The outsider in pk is played by Aamir Khan, and he’s named pk because people hear him speak and think he is intoxicated. But the truth is that he hails from another galaxy (he’s an alien, the outsider to beat all outsiders), and as the Dharmendra character in Chupke Chupke expressed befuddlement about the intricacies of English, pk is puzzled by the workings of Hindi. (In a hilarious scene, he ponders over the various meanings of “achcha”.) pk is more puzzled by the workings of religion. Like many earthlings, he wants to find God, but his is a more immediate purpose – he thinks God can help him return to his planet. (He’s stranded on earth, like the alien in E.T.; Jaggu is his Elliot.) He prints “Missing” posters with the images of various gods on them, and he wants them found – for only they can help him. And how does he know this? Because he’s been told repeatedly: “Only God can help you.”

This bit is pure genius, and it is revealed in a flashback, the film’s best stretch. It’s truly joyous, and a textbook example of combining a message (how mystifying our religious practices are) with entertainment. The magic touch that Hirani displayed in the Munnabhai movies (and which deserted him in 3 Idiots) is back. The laughs are plenty (“dancing car”, “rotation” of chappals in temples), and Aamir plays the character beautifully. I wasn’t too taken by the controversial nude poster for the film – he came off too muscled, too chiselled. But this look suits the character, making him look a little otherworldly in the midst of the portly men in Rajasthan, which is where pk lands. His wide-open green eyes and raised eyebrows (he looks perpetually astonished) and even those protruding ears look just right, and he’s amazing in a song sequence (Tharki chokro) where he robotically replicates the dance steps of a newfound friend (Sanjay Dutt, as a bandmaster named Bhairon Singh).

This song sequence is itself quite amazing, filled with the whimsy that is such a part of Hirani’s cinema. pk’s means of communicating with earthlings is by holding their hands, and when Bhairon Singh refuses (he’s a guy, and guys don’t hold other guys’ hands), pk looks around for women, whose hands he thinks he’s allowed to hold. Of course, this causes all kinds of mayhem, and hence the lyric – Tharki chokro. They think he’s a horny bastard, and this time, they’re the ones unable to understand him. But gradually, as pk realises the futility of searching for God, the laughs subside and we get the song Bhagwan hai kahan re tu – his plight in the face of God’s silence is truly moving. If Bergman had made a Bollywood music video, this is how it might have turned out. Hirani is one of the handful of filmmakers left who still likes his song sequences to say something, mean something. Even the use of older songs is perfect. After a bomb blast perpetrated by religious extremists, we hear the Phir Subah Hogi number Aasman pe hai khuda aur zameen pe hum / aaj kal woh is taraf dekhta hai kum. No further commentary, no more dialogue is necessary.

But apart from the flashback, there aren’t many scenes that stand out. (And some scenes look downright forced, like the one where pk teaches Jaggu to shrug off sadness by launching into a “cute” dance.) There’s the moment where Jaggu is stranded without cab fare, and pk offers her money – he knows what it’s like to not be able to go home. It isn’t a big scene, and the emotions aren’t exaggerated – the offhand quality of the staging is enough to make us empathise with pk. A latter sequence with Sarfaraz (Sushant Singh Rajput) is also very nicely pulled off. His early scenes with Jaggu are alarmingly bland and I wondered why they even needed to be there, but this arc is resolved most satisfyingly. The biggest relief is that the heavy-handed lecturing from 3 Idiots has been replaced by a gentler form of hectoring – we’re still staring at a wagging finger, but at least, for the most part, we aren’t being beaten over the head with a bludgeon.

The smaller problem with pk is that it’s reminiscent of OMG – Oh My God!. But that’s forgivable – after all, we do keep watching variations on, say, love stories all the time. As long as we are entertained, we shouldn’t really care. The bigger problem is that the film practically reeks of formula. Hirani has become some sort of Madhur Bhandarkar, telling, essentially, the same story and simply focusing on a different facet of society. If the enemy-establishment was the medical profession in Munnabhai MBBS and educational institutions in 3 Idiots, it’s now the religious right. If the catchphrases earlier were “jadoo ki jhappi” and “all is well,” it’s now “wrong number.” And as with 3 Idiots, the Aamir character is practically deified. It isn’t enough that we, the audience, know that pk has fallen for Jaggu – she has to find out too, and shed fat tears about his sacrifice. (In many ways, her character is a conflation of the Madhavan and Sharman Joshi characters from 3 Idiots. The film keeps cutting to her reaction shots each time pk says or does something.) These similarities are exacerbated by the casting. Hirani likes to keep using the same actors (in big and small roles), but sometimes they seem to be playing the same parts – Saurabh Shukla, who plays a godman here, played a similarly manipulative guru in Lage Raho Munnabhai. The result is endless déjà vu. Someone should remind Hirani that Hrishikesh Mukherjee liked to repeat a winning formula too, but in between Anand and Bawarchi and Khoobsoorat, there was also a Buddha Mil Gaya, an Abhimaan, a Namak Haram, a Mili, an Alaap, a Gol Maal…

KEY:

* Anand = see here
* Bawarchi = see here
* Khoobsoorat = see the whole film in about 15 minutes here
* Guddi = this is the song where she’s late to school and ends up singing
* Chupke Chupke = try keeping a straight face through this bit here
* chappals = slippers

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

The protests against ‘pk’ bring up the question: When the people themselves don’t mind, why are self-appointed people’s representatives getting all hot and bothered?

Centuries ago, a Hindu named Vatsyayana wrote a treatise that, if filmed, would never clear the Censor Board today. The erotic imagination of another Hindu named Jayadeva, whose Gita Govinda depicts an intensely physical aspect of Lord Krishna, is something you want to introduce to Alok Sanjar, the BJP MP from Bhopal who recently remarked that frequent sex can drastically reduce a person’s lifespan. And yet, here we are again, having to defend Hinduism from those who seem to think that the slightest hint of humour or heresy can bring crashing down a religion that has stood strong for millennia. I refer, of course, to the controversy around the Hindu director Rajkumar Hirani’s pk. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad wants it banned, and its members, along with those charming chaps from the Bajrang Dal, have taken to tearing up the film’s posters and halting screenings. The reason? According to VHP spokesman Vinod Bansal, pk “keeps making fun of Hinduism.”

For a moment, let’s forget pk. Let’s talk about a stretch in 3 Idiots, Hirani’s earlier blockbuster with Aamir Khan. Anxious about an exam, students of an engineering college resort to prayers. The narrator tells us sarcastically, “Today was Results day… time to make a deal with God.” And indeed, “deals” are made. One student performs an arati, to the accompaniment of a tinkling bell, in front of a wall filled with pictures of Hindu deities, and mutters, “God, take care of my Electronics paper. I’ll break a coconut.” Another student bows before a cobra, promising a litre of milk a day if ‘Nag Devta’ will help him clear his Physics paper. A third is seen stuffing a handful of grass into a cow’s mouth – he wants ‘Gau Mata’ to help him pass his exams. Another student halts in front of an idol and pledges Rs. 100 per month. The narrator stifles a laugh and remarks, “Rs. 100 won’t even bribe a traffic cop, let alone the Almighty.”

This is exactly the kind of “mocking of religion” that pk is being criticised for, but there’s more: the narrator in 3 Idiots, the one whose mocking commentary underscored those visuals, is named Farhan Qureshi. And where is that film’s “hero” through all this? Blithely asleep. Even the sounds of the mantras muttered during that arati, even that tinkling bell can’t wake him up – which is just another way of saying that he is beyond all this. So one has to wonder why no one made a noise, then, about a Muslim narrator’s amusement at what are legitimate Hindu rituals, practised in many parts of the country, and why no one brought up the fact that the Muslim actor at the film’s centre, the film’s messiah, was shown not needing the crutch of rituals. Not a word was heard, either, about the seeming lack of Christian, Sikh and Muslim students praying hard to their gods, participating in rituals that might have seemed similarly strange, perhaps even amusing, to Hindu eyes. Why, one might have asked, are only Hindus shown to be following practices that the rational/secular mind would find ridiculous?

But no one brought it up – probably because 3 Idiots was not overtly about religion. As the stretch depicting the blind adherence to rituals was such a small part of the film, which was about the ills in our education system, maybe no group thought it worthwhile to protest. But pk is much more obvious about its intent. It is a brazen attack – though “attack” is too strong a word for such a sweet-natured film – on religion, and therefore it announces itself as an instant target. In all likelihood, the film also became the focus of all this attention because it’s a big movie, with a big star, which means big attention when you speak up against it. It’s like what happened with Kamal Haasan’s Vishwaroopam. The Muslim outfits that protested against it seemed oblivious to the fact that the film’s hero was a namaaz-performing Muslim who saves the world by foiling a terrorist plan hatched by other Muslims. You’d think those Muslim outfits would have celebrated the film’s choice to make the hero a Muslim – most other films with a similar theme would have opted for a Hindu hero performing these heroics. But no. The radicals almost always miss the point.

The other charge against pk is that it promotes “Love Jihad,” with a romantic track that revolves around a Pakistani man named Sarfaraz and a Hindu woman with the goddess-like name of Jagat Janani, the “creator of the world”. But the romance plays out neither in India nor Pakistan, but in the relatively neutral Belgium, just like My Name is Khan set the romance between a Muslim man and a Hindu woman in the US. The women in both these films are educated, liberal – there’s no evidence that they will convert to Islam after marriage, and neither did the strong-willed Hindu heroine of Jodha Akbar renounce her religion. Even in earlier decades, you can find films like Muqaddar ka Sikandar, where the hero is raised by a Muslim woman and is in love with a Hindu. And if you consider interreligious love stories with the gender polarities reversed, you have Gadar (Muslim woman-Sikh man), Veer-Zaara (Muslim woman-Hindu man), Raanjhanaa (Muslim woman-Hindu man), Ek Tha Tiger (Muslim woman-Hindu man). Did you hear many protests against these films?

WARNING: Hindu-Muslim making-out in the clip below…

All the movies mentioned above are hits – 3 Idiots, in fact, was the first film to gross over Rs 200 crore at the box office. You don’t make that kind of money without love from all sections of the audience, especially from Hindus, who make up most of our nation. And if they don’t mind this light-hearted mocking, then who are these others, from opportunistic political parties, to take up cudgels on their behalf? Don’t they realise that movies are like elections? People wait patiently in line, go to the counter, and cast their vote by buying a ticket. So when a film like pk becomes this kind of a blockbuster – it’s practically guaranteed to cross the Rs. 300 crore mark, the first Indian film to do so – then it means that it has been approved by an overwhelming majority. The people have spoken. On the one hand, you hear that the Maharashtra government has asked the police to “look into” the content of the film. On the other, the boxofficeindia site predicts that pk may the first film to collect Rs. 100 crore in the Mumbai circuit alone. You have to ask the question: Who’s really being offended here?

Once a film has come through the Censor Board, no one has the right to demand that it be pulled from theatres because it has offended them. Everyone is sensitive to something, and if you begin to factor it all in, you’ll never make a movie. You know this, I know this, and the outfits doing the protesting know this. Why, then, do they continue to get all hot and bothered? Is it because of the increasing “saffronization” of India, as some claim? Because the cultural climate is certainly different. In the 1970s, a film like Hare Rama Hare Krishna could get away with yoking the names of the gods in its title to scenes (and a smash-hit song, Dum maaro dum) that featured uninhibited pot smoking and pre-marital commingling. But a bigger reason is that our 24×7 TV channels and Internet portals need news, and when this news is related to a blockbuster film, then it becomes bigger news. And sensational, viewership/readership-attracting news as well – when protesting organisations, in their quest for cheap and easy and guaranteed publicity, proffer up such incendiary images of rioting and poster-burning. The sad news is that you know this, I know this, and the outfits doing the protesting know this.

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

Thoughts on Rajkumar Hirani, formula films, and the astonishingly successful ‘pk’.

Most of us turn filmmakers when something we’re watching doesn’t satisfy us. If X occurs and we’re not happy with it, if our mind screams out “this cannot be happening,” then we automatically come up with alternatives. It’s our way of making peace, finding closure, and it happens all the time in the movies. It happened to a reader of my blog, who watched pk and commented that the love track between the alien named pk (Aamir Khan) and a human named Jaggu (Anushka Sharma) could have been subtler, that we learn about pk’s love for Jaggu only at the end. I agree. As for me, my filmmaking instincts kicked in during the stretch in which pk comes to Delhi in search of a crooked godman. Earlier, we’re shown that pk lands in Rajasthan and a local promptly steals the device that helps him communicate with his spaceship. He’s stranded, and when a newfound friend tells him that all stolen goods are fenced in Delhi, pk decides to go there and look for the device. And he finds it in the hands of the godman, whose assembly he stumbles into by chance. I wasn’t too happy with this contrivance, which comes at the end of a riotously funny segment involving a street-theatre actor posing as Lord Shiva. This kind of “coincidence”, where you just happen upon the very thing you’re looking for, is always a little iffy, and I wished something else had brought pk to Delhi. Let’s say pk, in the living room of that friend’s house in Rajasthan, discovers this wondrous box-like contraption that broadcasts moving images. He discovers that there’s another wondrous contraption, with buttons – he can hold it in his hand and flip from image to image. And one of these images makes him pause. It’s the godman, and beside him is the stolen device. And that’s what makes pk decide he needs to go to Delhi. And there, he meets Jaggu…

It’s fun to do this, sometimes, but most people I’ve trotted out this scenario to haven’t been amused. You know pk is a phenomenon not just because it’s minting staggering amounts of money, but because viewers are so much in love with it that they cannot stand criticism. The film, according to them, is perfect. With other films, they’ll say to me “let’s agree to disagree” – they are okay with the fact that our views are at variance. But pk has become one of those films where it’s practically a case of “you are either with us or against us.” They want consensus, and it vexes them to find someone with a contrarian opinion. I faced some of this when Interstellar came out and I expressed my annoyance with what I considered the director Christopher Nolan’s bad habits. I bring this up because, like Nolan, I think Rajkumar Hirani is an important but problematic filmmaker, and if they weren’t important, I wouldn’t be analysing their work in such microscopic detail. With hacks, I’d just say it’s a bad movie, point out what went wrong (or right), and move on – this handwringing wouldn’t happen. It happens with Hirani because I expect more, I demand more.

How do we know Hirani is special? Because of the flashback in the first half of pk that tells us about the alien’s experiences on earth. Hirani is one of the few mainstream filmmakers who can pull of the mix of tones and emotions we find in this stretch – it’s funny, it’s whimsical, it’s sentimental, it has parts that make us think, and, most importantly, it’s original. It’s easy to make money with Dhoom 3, working off a prefab template, riding the coattails of a hugely popular brand, counting on the guaranteed patronage of a pre-existing audience. But Hirani’s films are different. You could say that Lage Raho Munnabhai was as much a sequel and a “franchise film” as Dhoom 3, but the film wandered off into a unique zone with its engagement with Gandhian values. I am not a fan of 3 Idiots, but at least at a conceptual level, the film is unique, as is pk.

And yet, when it comes to the execution, Hirani – and this is my problem with him – is turning out to be as much a “formula” filmmaker as the maker of a franchise film. If the enemy-establishment was the medical profession in Munnabhai MBBS and educational institutions in 3 Idiots, it’s now the religious right. If the catchphrases earlier were “jadoo ki jhappi” and “all is well,” it’s now “wrong number.” I don’t have an issue with formula, per se. All franchise films (the Bond adventures, Fast and Furious) thrive on it – we go to these films because we liked what we saw in the previous instalment and want more of the same. In this category, you could also lump films that belong to a genre, and therefore have the must-haves of that genre, which is another way of talking about formula. Most rom-coms, for instance, must have the scene where Boy and Girl get separated (mostly due to some misunderstanding) before their grand reunion at the end. So why, as a reader asked, can you not treat Hirani the way you treat a Subhash Ghai, who was a formulaic filmmaker as well?

The question sounds logical enough, but consider this: Ghai’s formula is a generic masala formula, whose ingredients are the strong mother character, the mythical hero-villain showdown, and so on. So here’s the difference between Ghai and Hirani. Ghai, at his peak, picked and chose from these formula elements and did not repeat them all that often. For instance, Hero is very different from Karz which is very different from Kalicharan. There’s a formulaic sensibility in these films, but the films themselves aren’t reiterations of the same formula. Hirani’s films, however, are more unique in their conception – that is, they’re not assembled from “generic” bits and scraps – and this uniqueness is what makes us instantly sniff out the formula.

He likes, for instance, the Disapproving Father Finally Relents trope – we see it between Munnabhai and his father in Munnabhai MBBS, between the Jimmy Shergill character and his father in Lage Raho Munnabhai, between the Madhavan character and his father in 3 Idiots, and between Jaggu and her father in pk. And apart from the first film, the fathers in all the others were played by Parikshat Sahni. And Saurabh Shukla, who played a manipulative guru in Lage Raho Munnabhai, plays the manipulative godman in pk. A reader pointed out the similarity of the “bittersweet Disney-type farewell” in 3 Idiots and pk, followed by the “happy return scene”. You could add the Death Accompanied By Quirky, Unexpected Music trope – when the Sharman Joshi character attempted suicide in 3 Idiots, we heard opera, and when an equally beloved character in pk dies, we hear an old Mukesh hit. You could add the hero’s sidekick character as well – played by Arshad Warsi in the Munnabhai movies, by Sharman Joshi and Madhavan in 3 Idiots, and by Anushka Sharma in pk – whose reaction shots are constantly invoked in order to amp up the emotional quotient, to make us marvel at the hero just a little more. The Tamil auteur Mysskin’s oeuvre consists, essentially, of variations on his pet themes and tropes, but in his case, these are not just simple, narrative-level dramatic devices to evoke a response in you. They are part of an overall vision. But with Hirani, these are just scenes that move the story forward, and when similar scenes with the same actors, in service of similar stories, become a fixture across four consecutive films, it becomes – as I said – a problem.

And only to me, it appears. When I mention these issues to people, I get some variation of the “but this film has made so much money” response. But was there any doubt about its success? For a good part, it’s genuinely charming and entertaining – Hirani may be like Madhur Bhandarkar in terms of identifying new settings for essentially similar plots revolving around “socially important” issues, but his light-hearted scenarios are far easier to take than Bhandarkar’s humourless hectoring. (Even if you say that only half of pk is truly worthwhile, that half is more satisfying than the entirety of most other films.) Besides, most people aren’t into analysis of art or artists – they just want to have a good time at the movies. And more importantly, pk features an actor who can do no wrong at the box office, who has assiduously built up a reputation as someone whose films are always worth forking out money for in theatres. If there’s a man who sees just one Hindi film a year in the theatre, that film will be an Aamir Khan starrer. Even the gloomy, moody Talaash (which I think is among Aamir’s best two films of the last decade, the other being Rang De Basanti) made over 90 crores at the domestic box office. And heck, when a film is making so much money, isn’t that it’s own kind of success? Why should Hirani change? Why should he fix something that ain’t broke?

Because if he doesn’t, then it’s going to be hard to consider him a major filmmaker, who is almost always someone with range. Hirani is undoubtedly an important filmmaker – he knows the pulse of the people like no one else. He is also a real filmmaker, in the sense that, when all cylinders are firing, he can create magic on screen, like the way he invests a quotidian phrase (“God only knows”) with existential weight in the scheme of the narrative in the early parts of pk. But what else is he capable of? That question hasn’t been answered by his quartet of films. I hear that Hirani’s next is a biopic of Sanjay Dutt. I am really looking forward to this. It would have been devastating if his next was about another impish, twinkly-eyed outsider who sets about changing things – though at some level, it would certainly be understandable. After all, when your films become the first to breach the 200-crore and 300-crore benchmarks (pk is zooming in on that target), why take a risk with something different? Filmmaking isn’t just an art, and not everyone wants to be a “major filmmaker”. It’s also commerce and it’ll be interesting to see if this Sanjay Dutt project gets going, or if Hirani decides to do more of the same, with the logic that once you enter the race you have to keep running.

On another note, critics, these days, are part of a different kind of race.  A long time ago, films would release on Fridays and the reviews wouldn’t appear until the next Friday. Then the interval shrank – the reviews began to appear on Sunday. Then, after the Internet arrived, reviews started showing up the same evening. Now, apparently it’s all about how quickly you can get your review up on the web. It’s all about who’s the first to review the film. How does this help? Once the gold medal for first-on-the-web has been handed out, what about the quality of the review itself? How can one properly process a film and mull over the parts that you’re unsure about, have problems with, when you have an eye on a deadline? I’m being sucked into this race slowly, as the paper has begun to publish its reviews on the web the same day, and it’s caused a bit of stress. As my resolution for the new year, I’m going to try not to think about the deadline. The review is ready when it is ready. As long as the content has some meat, I guess… all is well. Happy 2015.

Lights, Camera, Conversation… is a weekly dose of cud-chewing over what Satyajit Ray called Our Films Their Films. An edited version of this piece can be found here. Copyright ©2014 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Spoilers ahead…

I wonder who coined the phrase “dishoom-dishoom.” It has to be an Indian, and it has to have come from watching Indian cinema. No other filmic tradition has featured, so consistently, the action sequences that produce this sound. It’s a great bit of onomatopoeia – close your eyes and say the phrase loud, with that faintly echoey effect, and you can imagine the hero’s fist sinking into the villain’s solar plexus. There’s quite a bit of that in Tevar, and like in most movies today, the old-fashioned dishoom-dishoom is spruced up with wire-fu choreography. Earlier, the villain would receive a punch and fall down instantly, or maybe he’d stagger a bit before falling down. Now, he flies 50 feet away, as if he were sucked into a giant, invisible alien magnet that found him attractive and then changed its mind at the last minute.

I usually find these action sequences tedious. It’s the same thing, over and over – there’s no real choreography, and there’s very little fresh imagination. Moreover, they tend to go on and on. I saw Taken 3 recently. The film is terrible, as generic as they come, but the hand-combat stretches are swift and short. But in our films – in the climactic stretch – the hero has to fight off the villain’s goons first, and then he has to take on the villain, and for a while, the godlike strength he displayed while dispatching those goons vanishes and he’s at the receiving end of punch after slo-mo punch from the villain, and then he’s knifed and he falls on the ground as dust clouds rise around, and the heroine screams in distress and runs towards him, and the villain stops her and drags her away, and then, as the background goes silent, the camera zooms in on the hero and we see an eye flicker open, a finger waver unsteadily…

Amit Ravindernath Sharma, the director of Tevar, understands the need to do something about this. He knows he can’t do much with that climactic stretch, but elsewhere he gives us variety. And apart from the dishoom-dishoom, he focuses on chases. Car chases. Bike chases. Chases during rains. Chases during Holi. Chases on foot. The latter turn out to be the most interesting. They are staged in the intricate network of narrow alleys in Agra and Mathura, and you can imagine the cameraman having dropped twenty kilos during the shoot.

Scene for scene, Tevar is beautifully filmed – and part of this beauty comes from its locations, which contribute “local” props like the istriwallah’s iron and the halwai’s ladle to the fight sequences. We keep ruing the fact that rural India has vanished from our screens, but small-town India has taken its place, and this is equally fascinating. Masala movies are typically set in near-mythical villages lorded over by demons, but the small town adds a little more texture – these ancient good-versus-evil scenarios now play out in a world of Facebook and phone cameras and the Chicago Bulls jacket on the leading man (Pintoo, played by Arjun Kapoor, who really needs to learn how to hold back; there are times he seems to be acting in his own little silent movie). But the India around him hasn’t changed too much. It’s noisy and colourful, and the frames burst with life. Sharma is a genuine filmmaker. His scenes are artfully lit, staged, populated with extras – he makes a masala movie as if he’s making something loftier, worthier, and Tevar is the better for it.

At heart, the film is a compendium of masala-movie clichés. (It’s a remake of the Telugu blockbuster Okkadu, which was remade in Tamil as Ghilli.) It’s the kind of film where you have a song (a nicely choreographed number that goes “Main to Superman, Salman ka fan”) to show that the hero can dance and then you follow it up with an action sequence to show that the hero can fight. The people surrounding Pintoo are clichés too. There’s the quietly exasperated father (Raj Babbar), the paratha-dispensing mother (Deepti Naval), the perky sister, the loyal, cheerful, and not-exactly-career-minded pals – even the villain is a cliché, a bad guy with big connections. Gajendar Singh (Manoj Bajpai) is the brother of the home minster, and he makes a habit of donning florid scarves and killing enemies on the roads, in broad daylight. But the way Bajpai plays the character is far from cliché – he shows us what a good actor can do with a stock part. Around midway, after one of those chases, Pintoo finds that he has the upper hand and decides to have some fun. He orders Gajender and his goons to take their pants off. There’s no rage on Bajpai’s face – just bemused amazement, as if he cannot believe that this kid has reduced him to this.

This plot point comes about because Pintoo wants to save Radhika (Sonakshi Sinha)  from the love-struck Gajendar, and Bajpai is good in these falling-in-love portions too. When Gajendar sees Radhika, the soundtrack erupts with Kora kaagaz tha yeh man mera, and if we are to take the song literally, then this is the first time he’s fallen in love – hence the shyness. In Gangs of Wasseypur, Bajpai played a tough guy who goes butter-soft in the presence of women – he’s playing a similar character here, but with an undertone of menace. He has a terrific scene where he barges into Radhika’s college and tells her that he wants to marry her. He doesn’t raise his voice, but underneath the proposition you can sense the threat. Marry me… or else.

One of the more interesting aspects of this story is that we have a love angle, however one-sided, between the villain and the heroine, but for the longest time, there’s nothing between hero and heroine. Pintoo is one of those men we don’t see that much anymore, the hero drawn from the Hanuman-bhakt archetype, respectful and protective of women but not really into following them around with songs destined to add to the repertoire of the Eve-teasers in the audience. He’d rather play kabaddi with his guy friends. The film’s great visual joke is that the Taj Mahal looms over his neighbourhood, practically begging him to fall in love, or maybe mocking his lack of interest in it. And when he does fall for Radhika (and when she falls for him), we see it as the result of a natural progression of events, not as something “cute.” You see why she falls for him, and how – and the director stages this realisation in a song video that also features… dishoom-dishoom. Only, now, she’s the one who’s hit in the solar plexus – that sudden realisation, that thunderbolt. The cost of this artsiness is that Tevar isn’t as electric as it should have been, though that’s also a function of the film being at least a half-hour too long. Win some, lose some, I guess.

KEY:

• tevar= scowl / attitude

Copyright ©2015 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Spoilers ahead…

Dolly Ki Doli opens with a long, concentrated narrative stretch that zooms in on Sonu (Rajkummar Rao) and Dolly (Sonam Kapoor). The first time we see them, they’re in a car by a railway crossing. He leans in to kiss her. She simpers and shakes her head. Shaadi ke baad. He sulks that they’ve been dating for a couple of months now. But if he wants the ke baad, he has to commit to the shaadi first. He meets her parents. She meets his. They get engaged, exchanging rings and smiling for photographs. They get married. On the wedding night, Dolly walks into her in-laws’ room and gives them glasses of milk. Main vaisi bahu nahin hoon jo keval apni pati ko doodh doongi… Main sabko doodh doongi. Then she enters her bedroom – there are roses everywhere, in pictures on the walls, on the canopy of flowers over the bed, and, later, on the table on which the empty glass of milk rests, the glass that has been drained by Sonu and which has caused him to pass out. Sonu wakes up the next morning and calls out to Dolly. This is the point all this exposition has primed us for – the discovery that Dolly is a thief, that she has decamped with all the valuables in the house. Only, we already know, thanks to the trailer (see below), which opens with the scene in which Sonu wakes up and calls out to Dolly. The trailer also features the doodh doongi line, the rose-filled decor of the bedroom, and the reveal that Dolly is a – as the film puts it – looteri dulhan.

As Dolly Ki Doli began to drag, I thought the problem was this trailer, this two-minute equivalent of the guy in the seat in front of you shouting “Rosebud is a sled” or “Bruce Willis is a ghost.” (There was a time you could try and avoid trailers, but they’re so ubiquitous now, I’ve stopped resisting, if only because I don’t want to be the guy in the movie hall scrunching his eyes shut, plugging his ears, and going lalalalalalala…) Why set up, so leisurely, this reveal about Dolly if the surprise is already out in the trailer?

But there’s a bigger problem. The film, directed by Abhishek Dogra, tries desperately to convince us that it’s a comedy (again, see that trailer), but the jokes are essentially one-note, the same setup warmed up and served over and over (get married/hand out glass of milk/cut to shots of empty cupboards). The really interesting stuff is in the darker shades. The fact that Sonu continues to love Dolly despite a back that still smarts from her stabbing. The fact that a guy (Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub) in Dolly’s gang doesn’t want to pose as her brother anymore. The fact that the only genuine emotions that Dolly expresses are towards little girls she sees begging – this has to do (inevitably) with her past, which we learn about (inevitably) through a song. With most movies, you wish they were shorter. Here, you wish more time had been spent on fleshing out these characters. Surely there’s a way to do this without compromising on comedy.

The local colour and some of the performances help a bit, though none of the actors are given enough to do and we are left with lots of questions about them. (How did the Ayub character get over his feelings so quickly, so easily? How did Sonu discover Dolly’s whereabouts? Also, doesn’t he have an iota of self-respect?) Pulkit Samrat is completely miscast as a tough-guy cop. He’s too model-pretty – every time his face came on in a close-up, I expected him to lift a razor and demonstrate how smooth a shave it gives him. Zeena Bhatia, who was so good in Miss Lovely, is wasted in a bit part – or perhaps the way to look at it is that she’s been shown, firmly, her place in the commercial scheme of things. Sonam Kapoor isn’t required to stretch – she’s fine in her comfort zone. But Rao is the real surprise. We all knew he could act, but did you know he could dance? He keeps up, amazingly, with Malaika Arora in an item song (see below), which is a little like chancing upon Salman Khan reading a book.

I liked the closing portions, though. There’s a refreshing, even thrilling, emancipatory element that seems wasted in a film this frivolous. And the last scene offers the biggest laughs. We meet people headed to Chennai and they are attired in what they seem to think are appropriate clothes, in order to “blend in.” The men have perfectly painted-on white markings in the centre of the forehead, and they wear perfectly pressed angavastrams. (If I saw someone like that in my vicinity, I’d think they were either from outer space or from a Bollywood backlot.) And the women wear white saris with gold borders – maybe their first stop is the Malayalee Club in Chetpet?

KEY:

• shaadi = wedding
• ke baad = afterwards
• Main vaisi bahu nahin hoon jo keval apni pati ko doodh doongi… Main sabko doodh doongi. = I’m not the kind of daughter-in-law who’ll just give her husband a glass of milk. I’ll give everyone a glass of milk. (Or if you want what she really means: I’m not just going to screw over my husband. I’m going to screw everyone over.)
• looteri dulhan = the bride who steals
• Miss Lovely = see a clip with Zeena Bhatia and Nawazuddin Siddiqui here
• angavastram = the scarf-like, over-the-shoulder stretch of crisp cotton that Bollywood thinks everyone in Tamil Nadu wakes up with and goes to sleep with
• Malayalee Club in Chetpet = see here

Copyright ©2015 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Spoilers ahead…

Watching Akshay Kumar as covert ops specialist Ajay Singh Rajput in the new thriller Baby, I began to wonder if there was another star who would have been equally at home in this exceptionally physical role. Salman has the muscles, yes, but with him, the film would have turned more escapist and pop-py. Shah Rukh looks tired, and Aamir has the intensity but has to work twice as hard to register the physicality. Ajay Devgn? Probably – but he’s too dour on screen. You see him on the posters and you don’t exactly rub your hands and go, Now this should be a crackling entertainer. The younger lot – Ranveer, Ranbir, Shahid – are too, well, young. You wouldn’t believe them in the scenes with the wife (Madhurima Tuli) and the two young children, or in the scene where Rajput grimly guns down a team member who’s been tortured and practically left for dead by the enemy, almost as if granting him release. The stray strands of grey on Akshay’s face help us buy into the illusion that the character he plays is capable of doing these things, that he is in a place in his life where he would be doing these things.

The physicality helps too. Akshay surely works out as much as the others, but looking at him you don’t think, “Spends five hours daily in the gym.” You think, “Health.” He looks naturally fit, like one of those old-time wrestlers who, with nothing more than dumbbells and a proper diet, looked in peak shape. Akshay looks like a natural candidate for the missions depicted in this movie. There’s no backstory needed. We don’t need to be convinced about Ajay Singh Rajput. The film hits the ground running, and it’s because of the authenticity Akshay wears like a second skin that we don’t have to struggle to keep up.

The actor spreads himself so thin across so many genres and has so many releases that it’s easy to be fatigued by his omnipresence, but Baby is worth seeking out. It’s a fairly generic film – the good guys are gooder than good, the bad guys are the worst. Ajay is such a boy scout, he keeps saying “please” and “thank you.” There’s not a shade of grey in sight. There’s not a moment where we sense, say, Ajay conflicted between his desire to serve his nation and his desire to be with the family he doesn’t see for months on end. And when a junior officer is singled out as someone celebrating his wedding anniversary – in one of those bonding scenes so inevitable in these movies, where the bonding is as much between the characters as between the characters and the audience – you know he’s going to get blown up a couple of minutes later. But the lack of complexity isn’t a failure here, just as it isn’t a failure in the Bond movies. That’s probably a good comparison. There aren’t any girls, of course – Ajay is too straight for that. But there are guns and there’s a lot of globetrotting (Istanbul, Nepal, Saudi Arabia). What camouflages the comic-book nature of the enterprise is the flag-waving. If you have synesthesia, you’d see the militaristic background score in stripes of saffron, white and green. As one-dimensional as these characters are, some corner of the brain registers that there are heroes and heroines in real life doing these very things, and we feel grateful. Films like Baby help us put a face on the people who choose to remain invisible.

The enemies, of course, are people who are all too visible these days – they are Islamic terrorists. (The top villains are played by Kay Kay Menon, wearing contact lenses the colour of pure evil, and the avuncular Rasheed Naz, who looks like Dumbledore after the latter had apparated to Pakistan.) And in true masala-movie tradition, there’s a “Good Muslim” to balance things out, a young boy who almost became a terrorist and who’s now opted to become an informer. When a terrorist named Jamal is killed early on, a higher-up in the defence ministry congratulates the covert ops team leader Feroze Ali Khan (another good Muslim, played by a terrific Danny Denzongpa) and says, “Jamal ek gaddaar tha.” But Khan knows better. He replies, “Jamal ek Hindustani tha.” The real danger, Baby says, are those like Jamal, Indian Muslims who are being brainwashed by foreign terrorist organisations into disbelieving the national pledge – they’re being told, “India isn’t my country, all Indians aren’t my brothers and sisters…” But Baby isn’t about the whats and whys of terrorism. All of this is just a coat of paint to make things seem fresh and relevant.

The director Neeraj Pandey realises that he isn’t making a film about ideas. He’s making an action movie, a thriller. Baby feels long at over two-and-a-half hours, but there’s nothing that feels redundant. Pandey’s focus isn’t just on goosing us with periodic thrills. He wants to take us through the painstaking processes, step by step, so we feel the scope of these missions, the planning and coordination it takes to pull them off. It’s not just about going somewhere and pumping a few bullets into a guy – we are always aware that if things go wrong, Ajay and his cohorts (Rana Daggubati, a droll Anupam Kher) will be left hung out to dry.

It helps that, despite that running time, there’s no fat – no item song in the villain’s den. The only extraneous scenes are the ones with Ajay’s family, and even there, the outside always intrudes. In the film’s best stretch, Ajay promises his kids a series of outings, and even as he’s going down the list (a movie, the zoo), the phone rings, and when he doesn’t pick up, a second phone rings, and then a third – those outings will have to wait. Even at the end, there’s no loving hug, no sense of happily ever after – just the satisfaction of a mission well done. Baby is as good an example as we’re likely to see of a film that seeks to entertain but with a semblance of “reality” – it’s a world removed from the similarly themed Holiday, which couldn’t be taken seriously for a second. And yet, the “punch” moments are all there. Ajay gets a series of great comebacks – a crack about the “religion column” on forms, a scene with a slap, an interrogation that ends with the line “aadat hai.” And Taapsee Pannu almost walks away with the movie – not because of her performance or some such thing, but because her scene in a hotel room comes with such a devilish twist. Sometimes it isn’t just the comedy that leaves you smiling.

KEY:

• Rasheed Naz = see here
• Jamal ek gaddaar tha = Jamal was a traitor.
• Jamal ek Hindustani tha = Jamal was an Indian.
• aadat hai = it’s become a habit.
• national pledge = see here

Copyright ©2015 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 of our politicians are going to be very, very happy with Vibhu Puri’s Hawaizaada. (About that title – is it just me, or did you too feel, when you first encountered it, that you’d heard a swearword?) The film posits that an Indian named Shivkar Bapuji Talpade invented the airplane eight years before the Wright brothers did. No, scratch that. It was some other Indian, round about the time the events of the Ramayana took place, who really invented a flying machine. And the devas invented the telephone – at least, they were making the equivalents of STD calls long before some poor sod named Alexander Graham Bell came along. But back to Talpade (Ayushmann Khurrana). We may not have heard of him, but we know his story. It’s the story of every other biopic that comes our way, the story of a brave, slightly eccentric man who, against all odds, achieves something extraordinary. We saw this story most recently in Harishchandrachi Factory, which, like Hawaizaada, is about another Maharashtrian pioneer from the pre-Independence era.

The challenge Puri faces, then, is the challenge faced by all filmmakers who attempt biopics – the beats are so familiar. Someone has a mad dream. They’re mocked. The first trial is a failure. Dejection. Then hope arrives anew. This time, it all works. Time to rewrite those history books. How to make all this seem new again? Puri has a mad dream of his own. He knows there’s little he can do about the story, so he goes after style – Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s style.

Bombay is transformed into some sort of surreal Never-Never Land, with Baroque bric-a-brac bursting out of each frame. If Gabriel García Márquez were an interior designer and took to designing upmarket brothels, this is what we might get. (I mean this as a serious compliment.) The scientist Shastri (Mithun Chakraborty, all greyed up) lives inside an abandoned ship that’s often seen from the outside – its fakery is unmistakeable. The last time I saw such an obviously make-believe ship was in Hitchcock’s Marnie. The clothes on the characters aren’t “realistic,” but the equivalent of plumage on tropical birds – they’re speaking a language of their own. Even the aircraft that Talpade designs is less an engineering marvel than a delicately filigreed sculpture. It doesn’t belong in the skies. It belongs in the Louvre.

This is no accident. Puri assisted Bhansali on a few films, and in frame after lovingly composed frame, you can sense the disciple striving to make his master proud. I wish he hadn’t been so slavish about this. Sometimes, you feel he’s forgotten to make his own movie. But he’s a terrific craftsman, and his eye for detail is astounding (as is the technical team’s work.) The tone is Bhansali too – at least, that’s the attempt. In the film’s best scene, Talpade heads back to the theatre where he met the showgirl named Sitara (Pallavi Sharda). They fell in love earlier and he wanted to get married, but she knew, even before a single Hindi film had been made, that “girls like her” don’t get married. She left him, and now she’s back. Talpade runs into Sitara’s manager (Lushin Dubey), who makes him squirm – and the scene has a surprising end, a revelation about the little girl we saw hanging around Sitara earlier, and a grace note from the manager. My heart turned cold when I saw that little girl. This unsettling mix of happiness (in Talpade’s case) and sadness (in the little girl’s case) is pure Bhansali.

Unfortunately, that’s the only scene that works. It’s puzzling why so many others don’t. The pre-interval scene where the prototype plane takes off, the scene where old and loyal friends offer help when Talpade is down, the revelation of the reason Talpade’s brother resents his young son’s (Naman Jain, who’s fantastic) involvement with Talpade’s project – these are powerful plot points, and they just die on screen. We don’t tear up. We don’t feel the gooseflesh.

Puri has toiled hard to make his film look outré, but that isn’t enough – you wish he’d expended an equal amount of energy to infuse a similar eccentricity into the plot and the characters as well. The Shastri-Talpade scenes are dull. The Sitara-Talpade scenes are dull. The science is disposable. So is the romance. We see each scene coming a mile away. When Shastri says his life is in the book containing design diagrams, is there any doubt about the fate of the book, and about Shastri’s fate?

Puri’s focus is on the metaphor of freedom – Talpade’s freedom from gravity is a stand-in for India’s freedom from the British (played by a bunch of really bad actors) and the Indian woman’s freedom from patriarchy, and so forth. It’s all very heavy-handed. We’re never allowed to forget that this is a film about flight. We see pigeons, kites, the winged horse Pegasus. Ayushmann Khurrana, on the other hand, remains earthbound. He’s too busy. He’s always doing something, the way he did in Vicky Donor and Nautanki Saala!. Essentially, he plays himself and not Talpade, though I did like the casual mix of Hindi and Marathi he spoke – the languages entwine effortlessly. I enjoyed this “musicality” more than I did the songs, which are engagingly offbeat but sound too light in these surroundings. They’re drowned out by the thunder and lightning of the images.

Walking out of Hawaizaada, I felt the way I did after Amit Ravindernath Sharma’s Tevar. As directors, they are amazing. About Tevar, I wrote: “noisy and colourful… the frames burst with life… is a genuine filmmaker… His scenes are artfully lit, staged, populated with extras…” All of this applies to Hawaizaada and Puri. But a good director without a good script can only do so much. He is expending all his talent on nothing. It’s a glass-half-full thing. We sense the talent, but we also sense the nothingness.

KEY:

• devas = gods
• Harishchandrachi Factory = see here
• make-believe ship was in Hitchcock’s Marnie = see the sixth in the series of stills here

Copyright ©2015 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Spoilers ahead…

As Khamoshiyan opens, we see a mansion – its name: Lakeside Manor – and over it, we hear a man’s voice. “Kal raat phir wohi khwaab dekha.” And I thought this was going to be a retread of Rebecca. First, there is that looming mansion, redolent of Manderley. Then there’s the line itself, practically a photocopy of the novel’s famous opening: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again…”

And given this film’s connection to the Bhatts (it’s from their production house), it’s easy to see why they’d be attracted to the story. The quasi-supernatural tone. The dead soul beckoning from beyond, exerting a vice grip on the present. The what’s-really-happening mystery of it all. Add a voluptuous heroine and a hero willing to slip into her bed and mimic a hungry ruminant on an Alpine meadow, and you have the script for Raaz 12.

But as it turns out, the script veers towards BR Chopra’s Dhund, where a young man walked up to a house and got entangled with a wife and her dead husband. In Khamoshiyan, the young man (Kabir, played by Ali Fazal) is a writer on a downward spiral. He wrote one book. He started work on three others and could never bring himself to complete them. I guessed it had to do with the first one’s reception. We see a copy with the title Sarfarosh… it’s in English. So unless it was a record of the making of the Aamir Khan hit, it’s hard to see why an English-reading audience would buy a book with a Hindi title. By the end of the film, his second book is out. This one’s in English too, and it’s called Khamoshiyan. Maybe he just likes naming his books after movies.

This is the kind of idle speculation you begin to indulge in when the film – directed by Karan Darra – doesn’t offer much. Unless you begin to treat it as a drinking game, with a shot for every illogical move Kabir makes. He walks into Lakeside Manor and discovers that all rooms are empty, and yet he chooses to stay. (Shot.) The fireplace suddenly bursts into flames, and yet he chooses to stay. (Shot.) The keys he keeps on the table slide to the edge and fall down (of their own accord), and yet he chooses to stay. (Shot.) The antique radio suddenly comes alive with the song Aayega aane wala, and yet he chooses to stay. (Shot.) A character in a portrait vanishes from the frame, and an instant later, the character reappears, and yet he chooses to stay. (Shot.) The resort’s manager Meera (Sapna Pabbi) begins to speak in a growly man’s voice, and yet he chooses to stay. (Shot.) He’s driving and an apparition appears in the middle of the road, causing him to crash into a tree, and yet he chooses to stay. (Shot.)

We’ve heard of second chances, but Kabir gets a third, a fourth, and when he doesn’t pack his bags by the fifth odd happening, you sink in your seat and actively begin to will him to die. A man this moronic should not be allowed to consume the earth’s dwindling resources.

After all those shots, you’ll probably be too drunk to care, but Meera’s husband (Jaidev, played by Gurmeet Chaudhary) likes to walk into a forest, take his shirt off and douse himself with the blood of chickens. Meera follows him and sees this and, instead of taking off right away, returns to Lakeside Manor in order to pack her bags. (Shot.) Given her general state of undress (this is a film from the Bhatts, after all), you can’t see why she bothered. But at least now, the film becomes slightly more fun. You have another stupid person to wish a gory death for.

KEY:

• Dhunds = see here
• Aayega aane wala = see here

Copyright ©2015 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

About “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans,” John Lennon probably meant it in a bigger, more existential sense. But I found life happening to me, in the face of my other plans, when I walked into the zero-degree weather outside Berlin’s Tegel airport. While in Chennai, I decided I’d take the bus to the hotel – or a train. After all, every euro comes with a multiplication factor of 80 – a euro saved is a euro earned. But at Tegel, with that weather and with my bags, I just said “Muck it” and decided to take a cab. (I didn’t say “muck it” exactly, but it was close enough, and this version can be printed in this family-friendly paper.)

A cab pulled up. The cabbie got out. He had fair skin and a silver beard. He took one look at me and began to talk in Hindi. I swear, they’re everywhere. We talked all the way to the hotel. My Hindi is pretty good, except for two things. One, the accent. Sometimes I slip up between the light and heavy sounds, tha and thha, ba and bha – a lot of south Indians tend to do that. Second, the gender thing drives me crazy. I don’t see any reason for tables and books and trees to be declared masculine or feminine, and whenever I use ki instead of ka (or vice versa), I end up doing my bit for the equality of the sexes, the malapropian equivalent of bra burning. (I fervently hope that bras are feminine in Hindi.)

Normally, I don’t think about this, but the cabbie was going all Gulzar on me, casually using words like lutf and mohtarma – and I began to feel a tad self-conscious. But he didn’t mind. According to him, I was making myself understood. The conversation was flowing well. That was enough. That instant, I wished this man had graded all my science and maths exams.

We spoke about the Indian-Pakistani community in Berlin. (He, not surprisingly, was from Pakistan.) He said the numbers had dwindled. You could be a worker here, nothing more. He wasn’t talking about the IT generation, of course, and a lot of people didn’t want to continue being just a worker. He said he’d come to Berlin in 1976, hoping to become rich. He’s still in Berlin. He never saw those riches. Hearing him sum up his life in such a matter-of manner made me feel something. He kept pointing out the sights. This is East Berlin. This is West Berlin. This is the Wall. I think he took the scenic route, and I kept looking at the fare with the eighty-times table in mind, but I didn’t mind that much. He was a born yarn-spinner and he was fun to listen to. He spoke, for instance, of this Turkish ghetto whose inhabitants are so violent that the police, when summoned, never came alone. It was always a hundred cars. I tried imagining a hundred cars swooping into a ghetto. Even Michael Bay might dismiss that as overkill.

We then spoke about the movies. I asked him if he saw films in theatres, and how much the tickets cost. He said the last film he saw in a theatre was in 1978 – it was Guide. But the young Indian kids, he said, go and watch Hindi films. He keeps in touch through DVDs.

He said he liked realistic films like A Wednesday and Encounter, Bombay and Roja. He seemed to like the director who made the latter films, “Mani Rattan” as he called him. He cited the climactic courtroom scene in Guru and said that this “Mani Rattan” chap was so good that he even made Amitabh Bachchan’s son act. He told me he didn’t like pk. He felt the theme was good, but Aamir’s performance wasn’t great. By “great,” he meant it wasn’t like the performance in… Ghajini. The mind boggled slightly and I considered putting up an argument, but the hotel didn’t seem too far away and I told myself: “Ah, muck it.”

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

Spoilers ahead…

If you wandered into a multiplex and wanted to locate the screen on which Roy is playing, just head towards the discreet coughing. That would be the audience, after two-and-a-half hours of incessant second-hand smoking. Kabir (Arjun Rampal), Roy (Ranbir Kapoor) and assorted supporting characters are rarely seen without a cigarette (or a cigar), and when the camera isn’t focusing on their faces, we get shots of ash trays brimming with stubs. And the sound effects. Much pain has been taken to reproduce, with frightening accuracy, the sound of paper burning – that light hiss-and-crackle, as if twigs were being snapped in the next room – as cigarettes are consumed. Do not watch this movie if you are trying to quit.

Why do these people smoke so much? Maybe because they’re creative. When you want to show someone as intelligent in the movies, you make them wear a pair of glasses. Cigarettes, similarly, are accessories that suggest creativity. Because, heaven forbid, you wouldn’t actually want to show the person creating something. Where’s the cool quotient in that? Kabir is a screenwriter (Roy is the protagonist of the movie he’s writing), and there are stray shots of him at his typewriter. Yes, I said typewriter. The manual kind, with a ribbon and everything. With this heavy-duty clacking and the cigarettes and the glasses of whiskey and the fedora, Kabir, I guess, is meant to be the Hemingwayesque type. The Old Man and the Ciggie. As a writer myself, I was very curious about the accoutrements on Kabir’s desk. The clock, I get. After all, deadlines are an undeniable fact of the writing life. But an hourglass as well? And a mirror on the facing wall? Perhaps this is the director Vikramjit Singh subtly alerting us to what lies ahead: those grains of sand are going to dribble out very, very slowly as Kabir/Roy embarks on a series of reflections.

I don’t keep track of less and more, right and wrong… We always want to lead other people’s lives… The noise of life is trapped in its silences… I am a tourist… The man who holds the gun, he’s the one people listen to… The questions are the same; it’s the answers that keep changing.

These musings unfold against the most scrupulous staging. The settings are lush, and even the mess is exceedingly pretty. There’s a scene that takes place inside a car as it begins to drizzle outside – it looks as if Jackson Pollock is at work on the windshield. Imagine an Architectural Digest spread that featured a Cambridge doctoral student whacking off with a copy of Camus in his hand – that’s Roy in a nutshell. The production designer’s brief must have been to bring to life the pages of an upmarket lifestyle magazine, except that what’s being sold aren’t perfumes and liquor but existentialism and male angst. Sometimes a female gets into the act. Jacqueline Frenandez – who plays Ayesha in the track with Kabir, and Tia in the one with Roy – asks: Are you who people say you are, or do you try to be the kind of person people assume you to be? Sometimes, a simple “hello” will suffice. Ayesha does yoga. Roy rides a bike. Tia feeds a horse. Kabir stares at the sea. Roy fires bullets into the ocean. Kabir says he’s going to miss Ayesha, and she replies that she always wanted to be a ballet dancer. Later, Kabir reveals that he always wanted to play the piano. I was reminded of the scene from Dev.D where Paro walks into Dev’s hotel room. He says that he wants to loves her. Main tumse pyar karna chahta hoon. She says she doesn’t get what ‘wanting to love’ someone means. Log pyar karte hain. Yeh karna chahna kya hota hai? But then, practical people don’t get romantics, especially brooding, solipsistic romantics. And for some reason, whether in literature or in the movies, these navel-gazers turn out to be babe-magnets. Devdas had Paro and Chandramukhi. Kabir, we learn, is something of a “ladies’ man” – he has had 21 breakups. A male fantasy? It may be no coincidence that none of these books or movies was written by a woman.

Every frame in Roy is freighted with so much significance that it’s a miracle the screen doesn’t sag to the floor. Kabir polishes the outside of a goldfish bowl, aka he’s knows what it’s like to be a celebrity. Or something. While Kabir suffers from a writing block, Roy is on a boat that’s going nowhere, aka they are both adrift. Or something. Kabir’s father gifts him an expensive watch and Kabir refuses it, aka he doesn’t really live by the clock. Or maybe he prefers the hourglass on his writing desk. Kabir mentions that he feels like he’s trapped in a room with no exits, aka finally someone had the decency to put into words what the audience has been experiencing all along. There’s no lightness, and we have to invent our own jokes periodically, like the fact that Ranbir Kapoor’s soporific presence is advertised in the opening credits as “a dynamic role.” I also had a quiet laugh about the name of Kabir’s film, Guns III. As if someone like him would consent to his work sounding like something dreamed up by a third-rate hack. Even if Kabir were to write a hack-like story with lots of guns, he’d title it That Feeling When A Bullet Expands Slowly In Your Brain. Or something.

The film didn’t have to be this way. It has a superb premise, about a creator and his mirror-image creation. It has some good actors – Anupam Kher as Kabir’s father, Shernaz Patel as Kabir’s assistant and mother-figure, Rajit Kapur as a detective. But the characters don’t connect with each other or with the audience. The director is just after mood and posturing, and he is great at manufacturing this – but he seems to want to be known as a philosopher rather than a good storyteller. It’s not wrong for a film to prefer the abstractness of ideas to the concreteness of events, but it is a problem when we’re not allowed to work out these ideas for ourselves, when they’re constantly being murmured into our ears. We’re used to our movies telling us what to feel. Roy tells us what to think. After a while it becomes unbearable.

Things go really downhill towards the end, with a desperate lunge at the shoelace-tying symmetry of a rom-com. And there’s a curious letter with Hindi sentences written out in English, which pretty much sums up the problem with these filmmakers. Figure out the language, the sensibility, of your audience – and then make your movie. In other words, Roy is what happens when an art-house English film masquerades as a mainstream Hindi movie.

KEY:

• that scene from Dev.D = see here

Copyright ©2015 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.