Spoilers ahead…

As I was stepping out of a screening of MSG: The Messenger of God – as opposed to, you know, MSG: Do You Really Need It In Your Kitchen? – a man who was in the audience came up and asked how I’d liked the movie. I’d have told him the truth, but then telling a total stranger “Are you freakin’ kidding me?” didn’t seem terribly polite. So I said I liked it. He said he was from Haryana, and a disciple of Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh, the film’s hero and, to quote Wikipedia, “social reformer, preacher, spiritual leader and the head of the India-based socio-spiritual organisation Dera Sacha Sauda (DSS) since 23 September 1990.” He’d come to Chennai to gauge audience response. He’d already been to a couple of theatres. He was heading to another one after this screening. At three hours per screening, this, I thought, is some disciple. But he said there were others as well, from U.P. They’d rented a bungalow for a week. He sounded simple, sincere. He said the social reforms shown in this film were real, and that someone in his family had married a prostitute. I must admit I hadn’t heard of this guru until the Censor Board controversy erupted, but he seems to be some good things – again from Wikipedia, “cleanliness campaign, blood drives, tree planting, disaster relief, and support for transgender people, tribal communities, orphans, and rehabilitation of sex workers.” Unfortunately, this cannot form the basis of one’s appreciation of MSG as cinema, to which the only logical response can be: bwahahaha.

A major chunk of laughter comes from Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh’s appearance. It isn’t the way he looks, as such. If anything he looks… normal, a little chubby, unkempt, with fertile skin sprouting hair from every nook. And that’s refreshing these days, when every leading man appears to have spent every waking moment in the gym. Singh, on the other hand, appears to have spent every waking moment raiding Kalpana Iyer’s wardrobe. Fur collars, jackets studded with pearls, sequinned caftans and harem pants – all embellished with jewellery. It’s like peering into a kaleidoscope dusted with Anil Kapoor’s arm hair. That is why we laugh. The plot has to do with people – one of them played by an actress named, I kid you not, Olexandra Semen; she appears in spurts – trying to assassinate Singh with rifles and bombs. You may wonder why they didn’t just lead him to a full-length mirror and induce instant cardiac arrest.

Did I mention that he sings and dances? He’s been blessed, in that department, with Sunny Deol’s genes – only his arms seem capable of movement. And so, in one song, he moves a solitary finger – it looks like he’s either lecturing us or indicating to the crew that he needs to use the facilities. In another song, he keeps tapping his chest and waving goodbye. He fares slightly better in the action scenes. People hurl swords at him – he raises his hand and the weapons turn into rose petals. Then they train machine guns at him – he raises his hand and the bullets become a tiara. It’s like a Mahabharata video game developed by Michael Bay’s dope supplier.

Why did some people want this film banned, given how it – even if only inadvertently – heartens our humdrum lives? Was the objection on artistic grounds? After all, we’ve seen better acting in a Vicco Turmeric commercial. Or was it something more serious? Was it because MSG is a blatant propaganda vehicle, with Singh positioning himself as an avatar? Despite the disclaimer, at the beginning, that “no claim is made of any individual possessing any fabulous power” – but of course; it’s the dresses that are fabulous – we hear a conch shell when the title appears. Later, we are told that God sends his angels to vanquish evil – and lo, here’s one, without wings, but with a beard and rhinestone boots. And with powers. The light emanating from the centre of his forehead reduces villains to a heap. If this isn’t God, it’s at least Rajinikanth. Still, one must acknowledge the work that Singh has put into MSG. Not only has he co-directed it (with Jeetu Arora), he’s either partly or wholly responsible for the action, lyrics, music, cinematography, story, screenplay and dialogue. If nothing else, Hindi cinema finally has its T Rajendar.

KEY:

• T Rajendar = 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…

R Balki was put on earth for two reasons. One, to provide exciting projects for Ilayaraja and ensure that the maestro doesn’t languish in the south. Two, to provide exciting projects for Amitabh Bachchan and ensure that the superstar doesn’t languish in the shadow of his super-image. About the latter, first. When it comes to Bachchan, Balki is like a little boy who loves to dismantle and reassemble his favourite toy. Consciously or not, what he’s accomplished, over his films, is a sort of de-iconisation of the icon. In Cheeni Kum, we saw Bachchan play the kind of role usually played by someone half his age, and the part too – a rom-com leading man – was something new for the actor. (He’s done romances, but not rom-coms.) Then in Paa, the actor morphed into… well, I don’t know if there’s a name for it. The face, the stature, the voice we knew – everything had changed. And we saw Bachchan as he’s never been seen, as a child actor.

The de-iconisation continues in Shamitabh. What if Bachchan never became a star? What, in fact, if he never even got a chance to be in the movies? What if he was stuck doing the voiceovers he was doing at the early part of his career? Or what if he were a dubbing artist? In other words, what if we associated that iconic baritone with another actor, who’s now getting an award from… a very sporting Rekha? And what if he didn’t even have that famous last name? What if he’s called Amitabh… Sinha?

Shamitabh opens with a glitzy Bollywood party, celebrating the success of a movie named Lifebuoy. (Yes, like the soap. And there’s a hilarious reason behind that name.) We see famous people like Javed Akhtar and Ekta Kapoor being asked for sound bytes – they call Shamitabh a star, a storm. Shamitabh rocks. And then we discover that Shamitabh is this self-effacing actor, played by Dhanush. And when he begins to speak, he speaks in Bachchan’s voice. I sat up, shocked – but also smiling. What the hell? I was glad I knew nothing about the plot, and that the trailer hadn’t given anything away. This is easily one of the best surprises I’ve had at the movies.

I thought, then, that this was a south-versus-north thing, that maybe the Dhanush character – named Daanish; Shamitabh is the screen name – had faced a lot of rejection in Bollywood because he spoke Hindi with a south-Indian Hindi accent. (He was once a bus conductor. Remind you of anyone?) But that would be too low-concept for Balki. We soon slip into a flashback and discover that Daanish is mute. And he wants to become a hero. Main Amitabh Bachchan Banna Chahta Hoon.

The song Ishq fillum begins to play, and we see the reason for the lyrics, and for the rather sinister tune (delivered in a stentorian tone) for what should have been a rollicking romp of a song. The same mix of showbiz-sparkle and sinisterness is found in Ilayaraja’s trumpet riff heard throughout the film. As is obvious by now, we are being prepared for a meta-ish film about the movies, but we are also being prepared for the danger that lies ahead – in the form of bruised egos, in the form of tragedy. I wasn’t too impressed by the songs as a standalone experience, but they sound fantastic on screen. Sha sha sha mi mi mi sounds like what it’d be like to be inside Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy’s heads as Farhan Akhtar is giving them a story narration. Even the borderline-silly Thappad is perfect, a slick version of a Balakrishna-type song for a slick, Balakrishna-style movie being made in Bollywood.

The film, for the most part, moves like a dream. It’s about impersonation – think Mrs. Doubtfire, but without the padded bras – and it has the bounce of a Hollywood screwball comedy. It’s easy to swallow the crazy contrivances, which involve, among other things, a trip to Finland. Remember Woody Allen’s Hollywood Ending, where he played a director who went blind on the sets and had to pretend he wasn’t blind, so that the show would go on? Shamitabh is something like that. And just like Hollywood Ending was a making a point with its conceit – even a blind man, these days, can make a bloody Hollywood movie! – Shamitabh seems to say that, unlike the other arts, filmmaking is collaborative. The mute man needs a voice. The baritone needs a body.

There’s a bit of the Abhimaan angle here, when Amitabh begins to resent Daanish’s success. There’s a bit of the Pygmalion/My Fair Lady angle here, in the question about whether the credit for success is due to the person behind the scenes or the one in front. There’s a bit of Singin’ in the Rain here, about a star who’d have been at home in silent movies but is now forced to reckon with the reality of talkies. And there’s a bit of Balki’s Bachchan worship here, that that voice is enough. Even a mute man can become a bloody Bollywood hero if he has Bachchan’s voice! Accordingly, we have Amitabh Sinha lapsing into Kinara’s Naam gum jaayega, chehra yeh badal jaayega, meri aawaaz hi pehchaan hai... Translation: The names and faces may change, but this voice is forever.

The dialogues are snappy and fun. The situations – a sex scene with a very vocal orgasm; a song sequence about toilets; the bit about Amitabh’s fear of injections; the fact that a nobody like Daanish makes a home for himself in the vanity vans of stars – are clever. And the actors work together beautifully – Dhanush’s youth and bounce and self-belief and can-d0 enthusiasm versus Bahchchan’s boozy world-weariness. (The man’s an alcoholic.) Akshara Haasan plays a pixyish assistant director (named Akshara) with a hairstyle that resembles a curtain (or a screen? the screen?) she has to keep pushing away. The casting is on-the-ball – she looks young, unsure, way beyond her depth, all of which is the character too. You think she’s going to be the love interest but she isn’t, which is refreshing but – when you think about it – not very surprising. Daanish and Amitabh have their own can’t-live-you-can’t-live-without-you thing going. There’s probably no room for anyone else.

The momentum slips in the second half. The film begins to meander, a tad too pleased with its metaphors about whiskey and water. (After the third or so mention, I wanted to yell: Shut up!) There’s a subplot about a journalist that isn’t very convincing – and it has no real finish. I don’t think the film would have lost anything if this hadn’t been there. I didn’t care for the scene where Amitabh speaks to Robert De Niro. It’s a good idea – but it isn’t pulled off very well, and Bachchan hams here in a way he doesn’t elsewhere. I wished Amitabh’s entry into a rival camp had been detailed better – he just walks in and starts dictating terms, which the filmmaking team is only too happy to obey. (Or is there a meta reference in there as well?) And there are times Balki’s cleverness can come off as… too clever. The A-to-Z gaali scene, followed by an A-to-Z lesson about living together. Really?

But the real downer is the ending. Thinking back, this ending may be logical. After all, the signs were all there. Amitabh lives in a cemetery. His dreams are dead. He’s dead to the film industry. Akshara seems to be in perpetual mourning – she always wears black. As for Daanish, his very first attempt at acting before an audience, as a child, has him imagining the death of his mother. And that’s enough. Instead, Balki wants to recreate the climax of Punnagai Mannan (I’m guessing; given the Ilayaraja connection and the chartbuster songs, it isn’t too wild a guess), and the scene in the car goes on and on. If you want to shock us, you shouldn’t work on us so much – just make us walk into a door we never knew existed.

But then, that’s always the problem with Balki. He’s great at making these light, fluffy, funny, clever films, but he feels the need for tragic undercurrents – and he just isn’t very good with heavy drama. The little girl who dies in Cheeni Kum was fun as the film’s “cute factor”, but her death and the ensuing drama felt like another movie altogether. So too Paa – a convention-breaking film suddenly turned all melodramatic on us, with the boy wanting his parents to get married, and they begin to circle his hospital bed… It’s like reaching the centre of a chocolate cake and discovering coffee grounds. As a philosophy, there may be something existential there, but certainly not in the way these films are being made. Why not just give us the cake?

KEY:

• Hollywood Ending = see here
• climax of Punnagai Mannan = 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…

The tag line for Sriram Raghavan’s new film Badlapur is “Don’t Miss The Beginning,” and we wonder, first, what’s so missable about it. Everything’s so… ordinary. We’re on this side of a street in Pune. At the other end, there’s a bank. There are a few passers-by. There’s the noise of traffic and the sounds of people talking. It’s hard to say what we’re supposed to be looking at. There isn’t even any music. Then someone comes into focus – Misha (Yami Gautam), who’s crossing the road with her little boy, holding his hand. She’s walking towards us. She reaches her car, and… bam! It begins. The masked men who emerged from the bank with loot – again, no music! – are now beside Misha. They shove her in the back seat (her son too), and drive off. A police van gives chase. And now the music begins. But this isn’t the slick chase we usually get, weaving in and out of peak-hour traffic, showing how well the action choreographer knows his job. It’s horribly messy, and life intrudes at all points. Even as the car is revving up, a bike crashes into it. Then, a dog chases it. Another car is hit. The door opens, and the boy falls out. Misha is shot. And a little later, as if it were the most natural thing to do at this point, we cut to the kind of cheeky ad film (for brassieres) that R Balki might have shot.

What, now, to make of the “Don’t Miss The Beginning” injunction? It’s to make us invest in the plot, sure. We now have a reason to root for Misha’s husband Raghu (Varun Dhawan), as he embarks on a revenge mission. But this beginning also alerts us to the mood, the tone, the off-kilter rhythms of what’s to follow. For despite the lip-smacking African proverb that opens the movie – “The axe forgets but the tree remembers” – and makes us anticipate a sumptuous revenge saga, and despite the badla in the macho title, this isn’t an action movie. The proverb, which sounds like an old jungle saying, makes us imagine something out of a Phantom comic, fists of fury and a leading man who moves like lightning, but Badlapur is about a man who becomes a phantom, a shell of his former self – he’s literally the ghost who walks. What Imtiaz Ali did in Highway – subverting the abduction thriller/romance – Raghavan does to the vengeance-is-mine thriller. The films in this genre usually remind us of Hollywood, of Death Wish, where Charles Bronson turned into a vigilante when his wife was murdered. Badlapur reminds us of Dostoevsky, of Bresson, and of the Randeep Hooda character’s line in Highway that a bullet finishes off not just the man being fired at but also the man holding the gun.

Nothing in Raghavan’s career prepares you for Badlapur. He’s always been an interesting filmmaker, and he’s never really made a dud (no, I didn’t mind Agent Vinod), but I’d slotted him as one of those slick movie-obsessed directors who keep reshaping their memories of the films they’ve watched and loved – a solid genre filmmaker, in other words. Even in Badlapur, we catch glimpses of the things that probably shaped Raghavan. The Nicholas Roeg thriller Don’t Look Now (based on Daphne Du Maurier’s book about another father grieving for a child). Aa chal ke tujhe. Ek ajnabi haseena se. And of course, Sholay. Even the repeated attempts by Liak (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) – one of the masked men – to escape from prison could be seen as a slapstick variation on similar scenes from Bresson’s A Man Escaped.

But Badlapur goes beyond genre and simple homage. It isn’t slick. It has a verité feel. The film appears to have been edited on the jagged edges of life.. It’s a slap in the face of films like Death Wish that exhort us to cheer for the wronged hero. And it tells us that no one’s really that heroic, that good, that blameless, that spotless – and it tells us that the survivors are most likely victims of PTSD. They need help. It isn’t just Misha or the little boy who end up as collateral damage, or even Misha’s Tamilian parents, who refuse to eat. (In one of the many subtly amusing moments, Raghu’s north Indian mother asks her husband to go to the supermarket and get idli and sambar mix. Madrasis, clearly, don’t eat anything else.) Raghu himself is collateral damage – he’s “damaged goods,” in the way we use the term for people who are “psycho,” like those who return from war and discover that their life is now shrapnel.

Scene after scene subverts what we think a hero in our cinema is going to be like. We expect Raghu to be in mourning for his wife and his son. And he is. We are invited to sympathise with him when people recognise him on the train and point at him as if he were a minor celebrity, or when he makes a reference to the money he’s getting from his little boy’s LIC policy, or when, in a fit of self-flagellation, he gets beaten up by irate truck drivers. But slowly, we pull away from him. The easy empathy we have for people in these situations isn’t what we have for Raghu. Badlapur complicates our feelings for him. He has sex with a prostitute named Jhimli (Huma Qureshi), and later, with the social worker Shobha (Divya Dutta). At one level, this is only to be expected. After all, why should Raghu be like other husbands in Hindi cinema, whose sex life dies after the wife’s death? But this isn’t just that. This isn’t just about forgetting the world for at least those few minutes. Something else has hardened inside Raghu, and we are left disoriented.

I was initially unsure about the casting of Varun Dhawan. He’s an excellent comedian – put him or Ayushmann Khurana in a light film; you need no other selling point – but he’s also so young and such a livewire (at least in the few films we’ve seen him in) that when Badlapur makes a time leap of 15 years, I couldn’t see how Dhawan, in spite of a few flecks of grey in his beard, would portray a man in his mid- or late-thirties. This is also a man who’s slowed down, weighed down by every negative emotion that’s congealed inside him. Raghu, in other words, is no livewire; he’s dead. Acting older or younger than you are is one of the more difficult aspects of performance, and some actors manage to age convincingly – Anupam Kher in Saaransh, for instance. It was a surprise, later, finding out that the actor really wasn’t that old. It isn’t that Dhawan is a bad actor, as such – just watch him at Misha’s bedside, attempting to console her while breaking down inside. He’s completely convincing. It’s just that he isn’t that good a dramatic actor yet, and there are scenes in the latter portions where we feel an older actor may have brought something more to the movie.

But then, an older actor may not have been able to give us the jolt of joy Dhawan does in the brief flashback when he learns Misha is pregnant. His comedic instincts, his timing – they’re perfect. And the placement of the scene is equally perfect. We see this utterly lovable chap, and then, in a flash, we return to the present, where that ecstatic, young father-to-be has been replaced by this frightening murderer. Raghu’s scenes with Kanchan, played by Radhika Apte, have to be seen to be believed. And my stomach was in knots when Raghu inveigled himself into a dinner at Divya’s home – there was no telling what he’d end up doing. I don’t know if Raghavan is a fan of The Godfather, but there’s a line there that goes “Revenge is a dish that tastes best when cold,” and part of this movie’s mission is to show what waiting that long can do to someone like Varun Dhawan. Liak actually gets a line that riffs off this idea, when he – as the film’s voice of reason; it’s a stunning twist of irony – tells Raghu that at least his crimes were committed in the heat of the moment, unlike Raghu’s, which are the result of icy-chill calculations.

The film makes us pull away further from Raghu when we learn that Liak has terminal cancer. The karma thing, that’s apparently worked. Or maybe God has punished Liak. (Badlapur is the kind of film that keeps making you think about things like “retribution” rather than mere “revenge.”) Balance has been restored in the universe. That should be enough for Raghu. And when it isn’t, when Raghu keeps baying for blood, we realise he’s become the “villain” of the piece. He’s not doing this for justice, so that Liak won’t hurt another family again. He’s doing this for himself. Badlapur is the name of the place he’s settled in, after moving from Pune – revenge is his home, his destination. We don’t want anything to do with this man anymore.

And just as unexpected as the revulsion we feel for the hero is the sympathy we begin to have for Liak. Outside of gangster movies, where the bad guys are the protagonists and we are therefore invited to empathise with them, I cannot recall a film where we root for those who’ve done the hero great harm. The other characters, too, are detailed with great love, especially the women. There’s Shobha, whom Dutta plays with tremulous righteousness. She’s outstanding in the scene where she tries to convince Raghu that he should sign a petition that will allow Liak to be released on humanitarian grounds. You can see she believes in what she’s doing, fighting for Liak, and yet, she knows what she’s asking of Raghu. Then there’s Ashwini Kalsekar, playing a private detective hired by Raghu. The character is written well, but the actress comes off as too flamboyant, too cinematic in a film otherwise so rooted and real.

But the presence of this professional is unusual – we don’t usually see someone like her in the average revenge thriller. Even in Ek Haseena Thi, the person who helped the protagonist was a criminal, someone she met accidentally – whereas Raghu seeks out this private detective deliberately. He knows he’s no superman and he knows he needs professional help. Badlapur is full of these odd little asides. I don’t recall seeing a scene in another film where a prison inmate eats with his hands cuffed. The cut to “15 years later” – that’s a small shock. It’s done so… invisibly. The writing constantly confounds us. I expected a showdown when Kanchan finds out what her husband Harman (he was Liak’s accomplice, and he’s played by Vinay Pathak) did – but the drama happens off-screen. (Pathak is fantastic in the scene in an elevator with Raghu. He keeps us guessing: Does he recognise Raghu? Does he just find the face familiar?) And then there are the hints at something larger – something karmic or even divine. It’s in the way, for instance, Raghu meets Kanchan. Was he tailing her? Or is it providence? And there’s a cop (Kumud Mishra) at the end who finds out what Raghu is up to. I felt, for a while, that this blackmail subplot was unnecessary – but here, too, through Liak, we inch towards the film’s themes of compassion, forgiveness, and the divinity inside that can surprise us sometimes – all of which are now alien concepts to Raghu.

This is the thing with Badlapur. There’s no character too minor or too evil to be regarded as undeserving of love and compassion. Even Raghu. As for Liak, he’s surrounded by love. Pratima Kazmi is wonderful as his mother, a Nirupa Roy who’s been sandpapered over. You can see she loves her son, but that’s not the only dimension to her. She’s got her own baggage, about a dead husband, whom she cannot stop bad-mouthing – and this revelation syncs beautifully with Liak’s actions at the end. Harman too lucks out in this department – Kanchan does things above and beyond the call of duty. And yet, she flinches at his touch. Can you love and loathe a man at the same moment? Apparently yes, according to Radhika Apte – one grows tired of describing performances as “superb” and “fantastic,” but that’s what they are in Badlapur. Only Huma Qureshi seemed to me a little off. Playing a prostitute is always a problem for our heroines, and we know what’s missing in this performance when we see, later, another prostitute named Sweety. This actress (I don’t know her name) doesn’t seem to be “acting” at all.

Neither does Siddiqui. On the surface, he’s doing what he’s done in many films now – puncturing badassery with comic quirks. And he gets juicy moments – when he pleads with Jhimil for “gandi baat” over the phone, or when he mimics another prisoner’s limp. I laughed out loud when, after his release from prison, Liak walks up to the man who’s tailing him and has a casual chat. Siddiqui’s enunciations are entertainingly weird. You have to see the way he says goodnight to Patil (Zakir Hussain), compressing the word and spitting it out like a bullet. But Badlapur gives his character a hell of an arc, and he finds new things to do, newer ways to do them. At first, we think he’s scum – when Raghu visits him in jail and beats him up, Liak smiles, and we don’t doubt the reason for that smile. Surely he’s pure evil. Surely that’s why he’s smiling, at this realisation of how much pain he’s brought to someone. But then again, looking at him in the latter parts of the picture, maybe not? Maybe there’s something more to that smile? Siddiqui gives us a fully shaped performance and yet he doesn’t connect all the dots (and the writing surely helps). He keeps us on our toes. I don’t want to make grand statements like he’s the best actor we have today, but if anyone’s making “I heart Nawazuddin Siddiqui” T-shirts, will you let me know?

KEY:

• gandi baat = dirty talk

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…

News is just out that they’re planning a sequel to Blade Runner, which was released in 1982. So as belated follow-ups go, Ab Tak Chhappan 2 isn’t all that belated. Still, the decision to add another chapter to Shimit Amin’s 2004 film (this one is directed by Aejaz Gulab) is a curious one. It was neither a blockbuster, not a cult film – so why bother? Especially now, when the gangster genre that Ram Gopal Varma birthed is all but dead. Those stories about straight cops, crooked politicians and ruthless gangsters were fresh then – but no longer. Why didn’t they simply cash in on the first film’s success a few years later, when the protagonist, the encounter cop Sadhu Agashe (Nana Patekar), was still relatively young and would have been able to unleash more mayhem, with a bigger body count? They could have called it Ab Tak 112.

But this long wait has given us a slightly different Sadhu Agashe. The encounter cop in his prime is now a retired man in a village in Goa. And what a retired life it is, filled with fishing on calm waters, an endless supply of coconut water, games with the local kids, and the sounds of son Aman (Tanmay Jahagirdar) playing the piano. Sadhu asks Aman about the words he’s going to fit into a new tune. Aman says he hasn’t thought about the lyrics yet. Sadhu says the words should come first, then the tune. Clearly, he has no experience with the way songs are composed for films.

But this idyll must come to an end – otherwise there’s no movie. After some very generic exposition about the underworld, the big shots in Mumbai decide that Sadhu needs to be brought back to clean up crime. He refuses at first. He only cares about himself, his son, the people around him – he doesn’t care what happens outside. But of course he does. Aman reminds him that there’s still a cop under this man pretending to be at peace fishing and sipping coconut water. And thus we’re whisked back into the territory of the earlier film, where cops shoot first and ask questions later.

Ab Tak Chhappan 2 is perfectly serviceable, but that’s about it. We get several action sequences – in a cowshed, in a public toilet, outside a brothel – but we don’t know who’s being shot, how important they are in the overall scheme of the underworld. The only gangster who’s detailed to some extent is Rawle (Raj Zutshi), who putters about in a motorized wheelchair and has the kind of conversations with Sadhu that another gangster did in the first film. As for the good guys, they’re delineated in a few quick strokes. One cop in Sadhu’s team is overweight. Another is celebrating his wedding anniversary. In these films, it’s always some cop’s wedding anniversary.

But it is nice to see Nana Patekar again. The best scenes in the film involve his conversations with Aman – while making an omelet; while chopping vegetables – and with Shalu (Gul Panag), a crime reporter who’s trying to complete a book on encounter cops that her father started writing. I wish this had been the movie – the story of how a former encounter cop is now transformed into an ordinary “middle-class baap,” worrying about his son’s decision to make a profession out of his passion. Patekar’s performing style is so often about heavy-duty histrionics that it’s a pleasure to be reminded how good he can be even at low volumes. When his superior remarks about his physical fitness at this age, Sadhu says, “Goli umar nahin dekhti. Pata nahin kab zaroorat pade.” (Bullets don’t care how old you are. You never know when this physique will prove useful.) Later, after a tragedy, he tells the people who’ve come to commiserate: “Hamdardi nahin chaiye. Thanks for coming.” (I don’t need your sympathy.) One’s a lightweight line. The other one is drenched in sorrow. But both come off in an even tone, befitting a man who won’t let his emotions show. If nothing else, I hope this film is a reminder to filmmakers that Patekar’s still out there, and a long way from retired.

KEY:

• Ab Tak Chhappan= 56 kills so far

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…

Sharat Katariya likes to take familiar stories and set them in places you don’t expect. In his first feature, 10ml Love, he relocated A Midsummer Night’s Dream to modern-day Mumbai. In Dum Laga Ke Haisha, he transports the rom-com – a traditionally urbane genre – to Haridwar of the 1990s. The era is lovingly recreated. Mile sur mera tumhara wafts out of television sets, but Bhimsen Joshi has nothing on Kumar Sanu, who’s everywhere. The film’s heart, though, is from the 1970s. Within his rom-com template, Katariya resurrects the Piya Ka Ghar-type drama, filled with large, tradition-bound families whose members couldn’t take a step without everyone else voicing an opinion. The frames buzz with life – someone is always flitting in and out. This may be the only rom-com where the leads – Prem (an effectively subdued Ayushmann Khurrana) and Sandhya (Bhumi Pednekar) – meet in a temple, surrounded by their families. Boy Meets Girl… and the In-Laws. They’re soon married.

That’s the first of a series of surprises. Sandhya is a sweet-looking woman, a little on the heavier side – but she isn’t terribly conscious about it. She’s no Bridget Jones, determined to knock off the kilos in order to gain self-esteem. Sandhya’s self-esteem is fine, thank you very much. She knows her weight is a function of her body’s “metabolism” – her use of this word when mocked lightly about her size by Prem’s aunt (Sheeba Chaddha) is one of the film’s most delightful moments. In other words, the people around her (including her bratty younger brother) may be fat-shaming her, but she’s not fat-shaming herself, which is – to use the appropriate word here – huge. Plus, she’s no wallflower. We see her dancing with others at weddings, full-on jhatkas that find fruition in the adorably tacky ‘90s-style song over the closing credits.

It would have been easy to make Sandhya the (big) butt of jokes, like Guddi Maruti was in the films of the period. But Katariya treats her with respect. The “comedy” scenes are beautifully low-key, like the one in which she goes to a neighbourhood store to buy lingerie because Prem doesn’t seem terribly interested in discharging his husbandly duties. The result of this purchase made me laugh my head off. Prem yields to her overtures, and the next morning, he says to the head of the RSS-like organisation he’s a part of that he succumbed to his senses. Main indriyon se haar gaya. Every now and then, it’s nice to be reminded that there are filmmakers who don’t think in English and write in Hindi.

Sandhya is ambitious. She’s done her B.Ed. (Fittingly, the first fight between Prem and Sandhya occurs in a library; like a stern schoolteacher, she asks him to lower his voice.) She’s got guts too. When she gets a posting in Meerut, she doesn’t hesitate to accept the job, despite never having lived alone. Above all, she’s practical. When things don’t work out between her and Prem, she simply says that she doesn’t need him and he doesn’t need her. She weeps a little, but she bounces back. It’s a good thing that Kataria didn’t get an established actress to play this part, having her put on weight like Vidya Balan did in The Dirty Picture. We respond to Pednekar’s freshness and her lack of actressy tics. She just seems to belong to this place, to this period. She looks real.

Amazingly, it’s Prem who has the complex – and this is where the film becomes a little more than your empty-headed rom-com. Scratch the fun surface and there’s serious dysfunction. Prem has a complex about not having cleared Class X. He has a complex about not having stepped out of his domineering father’s (Sanjay Mishra) shadow. Kataria respects Prem too. We aren’t invited to hate him – not even when he insults Sandhya while with his friends. We know the man’s got serious issues, and we aren’t even sure if his problem with Sandhya is that he doesn’t like plus-size women in general or if Sandhya’s arrival in his life has caused another complex, that he’ll not just be known as the guy who couldn’t clear Class X, the guy who gets bossed around by his father, the guy who gets emotionally manipulated by his mother (Alka Amin) and aunt, but also as the guy who couldn’t get a svelte, conventionally pretty girl to marry him.

The minor miracle of Dum Laga Ke Haisha is that, unlike English Vinglish, we don’t follow the journey of the person with the perceived problem. By the end, Sandhya isn’t asked to transform the way the Sridevi character did in that film. She makes no effort to change. Prem learns to accept her the way she is – and the film is really about Prem’s journey. In an early scene, his father relegates him to the back seat of their car, and later, he says he’ll sit in front – that’s his character arc in a nutshell. At the end, he enters a competition – this film keeps reminding us of Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi – in which husbands carry wives on their backs and run a race on an obstacle course. This is, of course, a metaphor for marriage. Prem has starting trouble, then he picks up speed, negotiates ups and downs, and reaches the finish line. While watching the film, I felt this was a little sexist. The man has to do all the heavy lifting in marriage and the woman just hangs on. But because this is Prem’s journey, we accept the conceit. Besides, the awww-factor in these portions is off the charts. I couldn’t stop smiling.

The film could have used more romance. There’s a nice scene where Prem and Sandhya walk and talk, but I wished more had been done with the recording studio that Prem runs. (If you are of a certain vintage, his stacks of cassettes may remind you of your hostel room in college.) His passion for film music – and our passion for film music, which seeps into the fabric of our lives – is spoofed in a hilarious antakshari-type sequence, where Prem and Sandhya keep playing songs that reflect their moods. (She: Woh meri neend, mera chain mujhe lauta do. He: Samjhauta ghamon se kar lo.) When we are led into the plot point where Sandhya asks Prem to record songs for her, I thought this would lead up a big moment. But the payoff is disappointingly muted.

But in general, this film knows its music. A soothing Italian-sounding score fills the soundtrack – it’s as laidback as these environs – and the lovely Yeh moh moh ke dhaage is used to underline the physical nature of the central relationship in unexpected ways. The first time the song plays, Prem is driving his scooter and Sandhya is holding on to him from behind. The second time, he’s carrying her in that race.

A few small things didn’t work for me. I didn’t care for the aunt’s sudden transformation to the catalyst in the Prem-Sandhya marriage. I wasn’t too convinced about the way Sandhya allowed herself to be roped back into a life with Prem after walking away and initiating divorce proceedings. And the business about a rival recording studio doesn’t play well. But Kataria always has a trick or two to smoothen out these wrinkles. Prem’s argument with the man who threatens to open the recording studio – both men are surrounded by their families, naturally – ends with the distribution of cake. It’s someone’s birthday. And at the divorce court, Prem and Sandhya are practically sidelined – their wailing families occupy centre stage. Dum Laga Ke Haisha reminds us of a time when family was such an important part of India – and Indian cinema. It’s a rom-com about kith and make up.

KEY:

• jhatkas = 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…

Dev Anand (Arjun Mathur) is a coffee expert in Bangalore, but his heart is probably in the Himalayas – he wants to get away from it all, become a sanyasi. He keeps listening to spiritual discourses on his earphones, and his only friend appears to be Sondha (the charming Ishwari Bose-Bhattacharya), a cheerful Bengali neighbour who has no qualms admitting that she’s a “kept woman.” When she playfully makes the moves on Dev – though we’re never sure if she’s playing or serious – he declares, “I won’t dance your sansarik disco.” Sondha shrugs and backs off. After all, that’s the way (aha, aha) he likes it. But there’s no movie there. So Dev goes to Coorg on business, to source coffee from an estate. And he runs into his ex Anika (Sugandha Garg). Soon, he’s barely stayin’ alive.

Manu Warrier’s Coffee Bloom begins with gorgeous shots of landscapes – the sunlight looks like gold dust falling from the heavens. But the film is about interiors – of the mind, of the heart. Dev’s predicament is essentially that of Humphrey Bogart’s bar owner in Casablanca, who memorably summed up the ridiculousness of the situation thus: “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.” Of all the coffee estates in all of Coorg, Anika happens to be in the one Dev walks into. She owns it, actually. With her husband, Srinivas (Mohan Kapoor). How do you say ouch! in Coorgi?

For most of its running time, Coffee Bloom is like one of those Alice Munro stories where we’re aware of cataclysms in the past but very little seems to be happening in the present. I say this as a good thing, for in the absence of minute-to-minute plot contrivances, the emphasis shifts to mood and character. And the actors, all of whom are terrific. When Dev first sees Anika, he steps away the way people do when they see someone they don’t have the wherewithal to handle right then – but she sees him too, and she comes up to him and begins to talk. Mathur portrays Dev’s agony exquisitely. His mind won’t function. The right words won’t come to him. His hands and face won’t stop betraying his uneasiness, the fact that he’d rather be anyplace but here. And Srinivas is his opposite. Kapoor plays him as an exuberant bear of a man, the kind dreaded by sensitive souls like Dev, who just can’t stand to be reminded that there are people out there laughing, squeezing every drop out of life and still thirsting for more. Dev finds that even his earphones won’t keep life away, as it begins to happen to him anew.

After a gentle two-thirds or so, the plot picks up and the film becomes hurried and less satisfying. An early gunshot finds an echo later. An early mention that “bhoomi Coorgi logon ke liye maa hai” turns heavy with portent later. We get the sense of the tidiness of screenplay-writing school. But the mess inside the characters is very real. The scene where Anika asks Sondha to leave (Sondha has come to visit Dev on the estate) rings false as it plays out, but there’s no denying Anika’s possessiveness about Dev. She knows she can’t be with him, but she also knows she doesn’t want him to be with Sondha, who, with her earth-mother sexiness, is as much the opposite of Anika as Srinivas is of Dev. As for Dev, he’s stuck with the resentment that Anika has moved on (and, apparently, happily so) while he’s marooned in a limbo. Coffee Bloom is about the bad things that good people cannot help doing sometimes, things that would make even Amrish Puri blanch.

KEY:

• sanyasi = ascetic
• sansarik = wordly
• bhoomi Coorgi logon ke liye maa hai = The Coorgi people consider the earth their mother.

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

Dissuaded by his father from joining the family shoe-trading business, Atul Sabharwal turned filmmaker. Now, in a documentary titled ‘In Their Shoes’, he looks at the shoe trade in Agra – how it began, and what it is today.

After Aurangzeb, a big, fat mainstream movie for Yash Raj studios, what made you decide on a documentary?

I get drawn to the project based on what I am feeling at that moment, the inner crisis that I am facing. Aurangzeb was about three sons who leave their respective homes and their fathers in the physical sense or in a meta sense, by leaving their ideologies only to return home all battered and bruised and open to those ideologies. In Their Shoes is about sons who returned and those who didn’t and won’t. Fathers make sons and In Their Shoes goes on to inspect what makes fathers, the history that they lived through.

I guess Aurangzeb, in a way, left these emotions incomplete in me, and I thankfully found an avenue in In Their Shoes to dig deeper into them and hopefully exorcise myself.

In India, only a few “art film” makers like Adoor Gopalakrishnan have consistently alternated between features and documentaries. Given your interest in mainstream cinema, could being known as a “documentary guy” affect the kind of films you are offered?

I would like to believe that it won’t. I am not the first one to do this. Shyam Benegal, Wim Wenders, Martin Scorsese have made great fiction and documentaries. You somehow have to slip through the fingers of the people who are trying to put a label on you. That’s one of the givens for a film director, I believe. Then, somehow, find a way back. So I guess I’ll be fine whenever I want to make a mainstream film again.

When I made Aurangzeb, I was often asked: “You have done Powder; will you do more television?” I’ll keep doing whatever I get drawn to if I can raise or have at my disposal enough means to invest into the emotion that is attracting me.

The narrative begins with intimate, first-person accounts about how people came into this business and slowly grows into an “India story,” about manufacturing shoes for the export market. Did you have this in mind while you began shooting or did you discover the scope of this story as you went along?

Most of it was a discovery as I went along. But having said that, my grandfather was a great storyteller and his favourite backdrop was the Partition. He used to tell us personal stories from pre-Partition India. And as I grew up to be a storyteller of sorts, I always recollected my grandfather’s narratives and felt that there was something very The Grapes of Wrath-ish about the immigrants and refugees who came from what is now Pakistan. I also had recollection from my childhood about a classmate who was known to be the son of one of the richest men in town. And then suddenly one day they lost their fortune. Where did their wealth go? It was a mystery to us kids in school. It went with the collapse of the USSR, I learnt later, when we grew up a bit. So I had a vague memory of USSR’s collapse and its impact on the shoe market in Agra. Then by the time I was in 9th or 10th grade there was this euphoria in my father’s voice about a magical scheme called VDIS (Voluntary Disclosure of Income Scheme) that was introduced by Manmohan Singh. It seemed to be the answer to all my father’s prayers. These stories and incidents were somewhere in my subconscious and I discovered these within me as much as I discovered new things that I had no clue of at all.

What made you choose to show the actual process of information gathering (the way we hear your voice here asking questions, and the subjects responding) versus doing the whole thing “invisibly,” with an omniscient narration?

I did not want to have an alien voice in the film. That much I was clear about from the start. A commentary from a dubbing artist who is not a character in the film was something I resisted from the beginning. It was just one of those stubborn decisions that you make, a rule that you devise for yourself and then stick by.

The electronic music is an interesting choice. Given the Agra setting and all the talk about the past, one would have expected a more traditional-sounding score. What made you go for this?

The soundscape of a film does not have to be in tandem with the visual-scape. The music is more for the mood of the story, for the subtext. I hope I am not intellectualising the choices. These things sometimes happen and they turn out to be “right decisions” because they feel right in the final film. That’s the extent of my articulating it.

Early on, in Agra, we see a sound guy with boom mike. Then we see you in a dubbing room in Mumbai, with scenes from this very documentary playing on a screen in front of you. Why did you opt for this distancing framing device?

Call it some kind of confluence of the worlds of filmmaking and shoemaking: a collision of my world and my father’s world. There were very few ways of suggesting visually that “this man’s son didn’t join the shoe business and is now a professional film director”. People who have heard of me or who have read about me would know, but what about others? I am directing this documentary, fine. But how would anyone who hasn’t heard of me know that directing films is my day job? That thought led to this approach. I don’t know yet if the technique works.

A hypothetical question. How would you have treated this “journey” had you made it part of a mainstream film, with your character being the protagonist?

I don’t know. How can I ever tell? At least not for the time being.

This is obviously a very personal story. Was making this documentary a form of catharsis, especially as your father is in the film too?

It was somewhat. Nothing can be fully cathartic though.

There are times one gets the feeling you almost yearn to be a part of all this, and that some part of you is resentful of your father for stopping you from entering this business that has your – to borrow a phrase from the film – “buzurgon ka khoon” (blood of your ancestors).

I am not resentful at all, in fact. I am happy to be a part of Dadasaheb Phalke’s legacy in our country. I always dreamt of being a filmmaker, and when I was in Agra I didn’t know how to turn this dream into a profession. I never told anyone in my family about this dream, this secret love. So my lazy choice was to join my father’s business. And it was my father’s foresight, heroism or sheer coincidence that he wanted his children to seek broader horizons. For him, that meant that I become a Chartered Accountant or get an MBA degree. So he nudged me in one direction, life pulled me in other, and eventually I just gave in to the urge of my secret love for making movies. It’s just wishful thinking that one could gain this without losing out on the legacy of the shoe business of one’s ancestors. I just acted on that wishful thinking and gave it a tangible shape in the form of a film.

You stop the shoe story at one point and get into a sentimental Hindi film dialogue about the love between a father and his son. Your father wanted you out because he felt this wasn’t an easy business to be in. He wanted you to do something “safe.” And yet, here you are, a filmmaker – it’s as unsafe a profession as can be. What does your father feel about this?

I think he’s fine with it. He’s made his peace with it. Some of our relatives have often told me to make a blockbuster of Rohit Shetty proportions, as if it was as easy as just deciding on it and doing it. Their logic is that a money spinner or two will make you secure, firm your feet in the industry. I don’t know if my father is part of that brigade in our family.

An edited version of this piece can be found here. Copyright ©2015 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Spoilers ahead…

When a smart, talented filmmaker takes on genre material, there’s often the tendency to inflate it, to make it mean something – and sometimes the material just buckles under this baggage. The visceral thrills, the purity, of the genre get blunted by the efforts to make things “classy.” Something like this happened when Neil Jordan made The Brave One, with Jodie Foster. It was the story of an upper-class woman whose fiancé (Naveen Andrews) is killed in a vicious mugging; she becomes a vigilante, tracking down the killers, taking them down one by one. Dirty Harriet. It should have been cathartic entertainment. After all, there’s a social function these films perform, and that’s allowing us to see people on screen do what we’re too gutless to do in real life. It’s vicarious wish-fulfilment. For a couple of hours, we feel as though we went about getting rid of the punks in our neighbourhood.

But The Brave One was a disaster. I wrote in my review: “[The film] can’t decide whether to condone vigilantism, explore its consequences, or celebrate it. And as long as we’re talking tripartite confusion, neither can the film decide whether to aspire to the violence-is-inside-every-one-of-us thesis of Straw Dogs, the psychological and moral dimensions of the avenging angel in Taxi Driver, or simply the audience-pleasing revenge-fantasia elements of Death Wish.”

Navdeep Singh’s second outing, NH10, isn’t quite a disaster, but it’s a confused film, one that makes the mistake of having too much on its plate. On the surface, here, Singh wants to do with the Deliverance-type yuppies-trapped-in-the-redneck-backwoods thriller what he did with Chinatown in his excellent first feature, Manorama: 6 Feet Under. The yuppies are Gurgaon-based Meera (a very effective Anushka Sharma) and her husband Arjun (Neil Bhoopalam). (Something about these names must sound terribly urban to filmmakers. In Yuva too, the yuppie pair was Arjun/Meera.)

The film opens with night-time visuals of what could be any city in the developed world, filled with tall buildings, cranes putting up more of those tall buildings, and street lights painting posh cars a dreamy neon yellow. Arjun and Meera are in one of those cars. A little later, Arjun decides to take Meera to a resort in Haryana for her birthday, and soon, we see the other India, and the people of the other India. Like the grinning, special-needs child in Deliverance, we have here an adult with the childlike name of Chhote, who looks and acts like he’s not quite all there. He mumbles. He chomps on a marigold.

And – surprise! – the change in landscape seems to have changed Arjun as well. The hitherto metrosexual-seeming chap discovers a caveman side to him. He won’t ask for directions. And when he’s slapped while trying to break up a brawl, he takes it personally. He broods about it and goes about avenging himself. He becomes the hunter. But things don’t go as planned, and soon Arjun and Meera find themselves being hunted by Satbir (Darshan Kumar) and his cohorts. A little later – no surprise! – Arjun is injured, and Meera has to carry on without him. (When actors like Naveen Andrews or Neil Bhoopalam are cast opposite female co-stars who burn with a higher wattage, it stands to reason that they will, at some point, end up powerless and hand the reins of the story to their women.) So what seemed to be Deliverance is now Deliverance-meets-The Brave One.

And Navdeep Singh adds another element to the mix. In Deliverance, the villains were pure evil, literally demons unleashed from the city-dweller’s id, but Satbir and Co. are more complicated characters. They’re emblematic – or symptomatic – of the India that believes in honour killings, and they want to hunt down Arjun and Meera because they think these outsiders are journalists who’ve witnessed one such honour killing. At this point, a remarkable thing happens. Arjun ends up killing Chhote. It’s an accident, of course – but Satbir and Co. don’t see it that way. And now, Arjun has given up the idea of revenge – he’s too frightened by Satbir and Co. (their brutality is truly horrifying) – but Satbir wants to avenge Chhote’s death. Not every vigilante movie gives the villain a reason to hate and hound the protagonists.

In the midst of all this, or maybe we should say running along in a parallel track, is a “women’s picture.” Meera is in marketing, and she could be shown dealing with any product – but we see her making a presentation on a new brand of sanitary napkins, adding a few lines about how rural women find it difficult to buy this product. After the presentation, we’re reminded that it isn’t all that easy for urban women either. A male colleague smirks to another that women employees have it easy with the  boss. Then, during the drive to the resort in Haryana, when Meera steps into a toilet, she finds scribbled on the door the word randi. And on top of these women-oriented issues, we are exposed to how the caste system still thrives in these parts of India, which is really why those honour killings happen.

The point isn’t that a film shouldn’t aim to transcend its genre. The point isn’t that a film shouldn’t preach. But when there’s all this other stuff and it isn’t integrated organically into the genre framework, it begins to stick out. It begins to feel didactic, like in the scene where a cop gives Meera a mini-lecture about the caste system and Manu and Ambedkar. Suddenly, we feel we’re in one of those movies where the bitter pill of socially relevant messages is wrapped in the sugar shell of a story. Manorama: 6 Feet Under, too, stepped out of its ambit. We didn’t just see a noir mystery unfold in parched land; we also saw, through the characters played by Abhay Deol and Gul Panag, a social class that we rarely see in Hindi cinema, people resigned to their circumstances and yet constantly seeking to make things better. But all this was folded neatly into the overarching narrative. NH10 feels like several issues and themes hastily tossed into a pot and set to boil.

The problem is perhaps the realistic nature of the storytelling. This genre is rife with coincidences and things we shouldn’t think about too much, and if NH10 had been just a simple vigilante thriller we wouldn’t be asking: But when did Meera learn how to fire a gun? How come all the victims fall so easily, so conveniently, after a single shot or blow? Why doesn’t anyone “return from the dead” and scare the crap out of us? How does Meera just run into Arjun, Manmohan Desai-style, after their long separation in the wilderness? For that matter, how does Meera seem to know this alien land like the back of her hand, never having the slightest doubt about where she’s headed, where to find this person or that village? And does the first house in the village she visits have to be the one that belongs to… you know?

At some point, I was reminded of the Nana Patekar-Karisma Kapoor starrer Shakti: The Power, which was also the story of First World Indians who get trapped amidst Third World Indians. (In fact, it would make an interesting case study to compare that film with NH10.) That was a melodrama, and the sensory overload barely gave us time to think about the ludicrousness. But here, everything is stark, rooted, real – and the contrivances begin to look ridiculous. The too-neat echoes in the end – Satbir getting hurt in the thigh the way Arjun was; Satbir being battered the way he battered someone earlier – are an insult. They belong in Shakti: The Power.

But I did like a few things. I liked the image of the Deepti Naval character erasing memories of her runaway daughter by scraping away the stickers on a cupboard. I liked the scene where Meera flags down a jeep and backs off when she realises it’s filled with “dangerous-looking” men. In one sharp moment, with no words, we see what it’s like to have to make a decision about whether the prospect of rescue is worth the risk of rape. I liked the way Meera, when in a car, automatically reaches for the seatbelt. That’s the kind of person she is, and while I didn’t look too closely, I’d bet the men in that car weren’t wearing seatbelts. Such a thing would probably never occur to them. I liked the visual of Meera and Satbir’s wife locked up together in a room. Looking at them, they seem to be from different worlds. Meera’s from a world where a woman can do the things a man can – she’s in jeans; she’s wearing the pants. Satbir’s wife, demure in her salwar kameez and dupatta, is from a world where women are women, nothing more. And yet, here they both are: imprisoned. Again, a picture letting slip a few thousand words. I liked the contrivance where a distraught wife asks Meera to help her, and Meera waves her off the way we’d wave off an annoying beggar; and later, karma comes and bites Meera in her shapely behind – when she’s the distraught wife, and she’s the one who needs help. I liked the overall atmosphere, which is so skilfully created that at a few places I found myself scrunching up my eyes the way I would in a horror film. If only NH10 had been that horror film.

KEY:

• randi = whore

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

Reflections on Shashi Kapoor, recipient of the Dadasaheb Phalke award for 2014.

I’m not getting into the whole “does he deserve it?” debate, but the news about the Phalke filled me with a vague kind of happiness. There’s always been something wholesome, something nice about Shashi Kapoor. You probably remember the Friends episode that was about the crush-worthy celebrities you were allowed to sleep with – in theory; no questions asked – if the opportunity presented itself, and no, the spouse/significant other wasn’t allowed to get mad, because she or he had to understand. For a lot of women of a certain generation, that celebrity was… not Shashi Kapoor. It was Rajesh Khanna. Every female friend or relation of a certain age will admit to a crush on Shashi Kapoor – “soooo cute, yaar,” followed by a liquid sigh – but things never really got out of hand. Or below the belt. The Rajesh Khanna mania, at least the way we hear about it today, carried an A-rated vibe. There was something dangerously hormonal there. With Shashi Kapoor, you imagine a photograph, the face outlined with a lipstick heart, tucked into a Chemistry textbook.

I’ve sometimes wondered why. A slightly older woman friend I was discussing this piece with dismissed Shashi Kapoor as an “ornamental presence.” She added that his “good looks came in the way of his being taken seriously.” I asked her if she preferred the more macho kind of leading man. Her reply, her exact words: “Women always do.” But Rajesh Khanna wasn’t exactly macho either – unless you consider the eye crinkle a muscle movement.

But I’m not going to dwell on this. The ways of stardom and fandom are mysterious – as mysterious as Shashi Kapoor’s career. He was an actor who liked to internalise things, and yet he ended up working in Hindi cinema in an age where everything was externalised. He never really was leading-man material – in the way we talk of, say, Amitabh Bachchan as a leading man, the kind who appears on screen and causes everything and everyone else to disappear – and yet he was one of the most successful leading men of his time. His solo hit ratio wasn’t great, and yet he just kept making movie after movie after movie, a few worth remembering, many hard to even recall the names of. A random selection of his mid-seventies’ films: Jai Bajrang Bali, Naach Uthe Sansaar, Farishta Ya Qatil, Hira Aur Patthar. Shashi Kapoor’s career is one of the things that justifies the existence of Wikipedia.

It’s easier to understand the “classy” part of his career – the Merchant-Ivory films, the art-house movies he produced (Junoon, 36 Chowringhee Lane, Kalyug, Vijeta, Utsav). He just seemed like that kind of guy, a Western kind of guy, with their sensibilities. Wasn’t that why he married Jennifer? (Hey, maybe that explains the relatively chaste nature of the Shashi Kapoor crush; he was a happily married man. You could look, but you couldn’t touch.)

It’s easy to understand, too, the films like New Delhi Times and In Custody, which came from a relatively “naturalistic” mould. He did solid work in these films – but maybe “solid” isn’t quite the word for Shashi Kapoor. A measure of his talent is his ability to disappear and let the co-star walk away with the scene, the song, the movie. That’s surely a reason we think of Shashi Kapoor and think second fiddle – which he played to Bachchan, most famously, but also to his heroines and to his oftentimes mediocre material. The flip side? His bad movies were really bad – he was probably too much of an actor to do the things a star can do to save a bad movie. Think about it, and you’ll find it easier to recall a few dozen bad movies that Shashi’s brother Shammi or nephew Rishi Kapoor were in than the bad ones Shashi was in. But a lot of the money he made from all these bad movies went into producing good movies, or movies that sounded good at least on paper. If you didn’t end up actually watching Ajooba, you’d have thought it’s a pretty cool movie.

What’s surprising is how comfortable Shashi Kapoor seemed in the cheerfully loud and large-hearted Hindi films of the sixties and seventies, something you’d associate more with Shammi Kapoor. The latter was born with springs in his soles and a small-sized nuclear reactor in his heart; he was energy incarnate, made for bouncing around our screens. Had he been cast opposite the beauteous Leela Naidu in The Householder, he’d have blinked twice, leapt into a lorry, and burst into Subhan Allah, haseen chehra…

Ek raasta hai zindagi, from Kaala Paththar, is really a Shammi Kapoor song. But see how marvellously Shashi Kapoor coaxes out his inner ham, almost convincing us that he doesn’t look ridiculous in that beret and that floral scarf knotted at the neck, that with his getup he shouldn’t actually be in another film, a Western film where he’s named René and is staring thoughtfully at a canvas, paintbrush in hand. Is there another actor who has worked so hard to convince us that he isn’t doing something ridiculous? Kapoor’s greatest challenge probably came in Satyam Shivam Sundaram, where he was entrusted with the task of making us believe he was attracted to Zeenat Aman because of her voice.

But watch him in Kaise kahen hum, from Sharmilee, and you’ll see how he can also dial it down. The SD Burman number is almost ridiculously gorgeous, and Kishore Kumar sings it so magnificently, with such feeling, the actor on screen is practically irrelevant – Mukri could have been cast and we’d have felt a twinge. But Shashi puts the actor at the centre of this number. He does that thing where he’s really sad but putting on a brave face for his friends but even as he’s smiling he’s unable to forget how he’s been screwed in love. Happy-face, sad-face, happy-face, sad-face – not many actors can do this convincingly. And of course, those looks don’t hurt. You can imagine the women going: Oh you poor thing. With a face like that, you’re still a one-woman man.

The same film has Khilte hain gul yahan. During the prelude, Shashi plucks a rose from a woman’s hair, and when he says bikharne ko, he does a little hand toss. It may be the most blithely existential hand toss in Hindi film history. And then he smiles that crooked-teeth smile. He’s not just going through the motions, mouthing the words, looking for things to do as the interlude comes on. He’s enjoying the song. It’s coursing through him. We get the sense he believes in it, in this faintly ridiculous situation that has him singing someone else’s words in someone else’s voice to a tune someone else has composed. This is also some kind of good acting.

Even in his “bad movies,” by which I refer to your garden variety Hindi film without any great pedigree, you can find snatches of good acting – though maybe a different kind of good acting from the good acting we talk about in the context of New Delhi Times and In Custody. I’m talking about melodramas like Abhinetri and Baseraa – Shashi Kapoor played a beleaguered husband in both. Watch him in the scene in Abhinetri where he drops Hema Malini home and they have a small conversation about mothers. Her mother is now a portrait on a wall, and she tells him that she “speaks” to her mother constantly. He seems to genuinely like this trait of hers. His reaction is lovely, just the wee-est bit animated – the screenplay instruction must have read “He gushes without actually gushing.” And then she asks him about his mother. He smiles, as if anticipating a future in which every time he’s spoken about it’ll be to the accompaniment of a line that has him declaring that he has his mother with him. He’s charming (to us) and awkward (with her) and innocent (the way young men were, generally, then). Had Rajesh Khanna played this scene, we’d have seen Rajesh Khanna in the scene. Here, at least to the extent that we can do these things, we see the character, we see Shekhar Babu.

An edited version of this piece can be found here. Copyright ©2015 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Spoilers ahead…

Some thirty minutes into Dibakar Banerjee’s Detective Byomkesh Bakshi!, based on the character created by Saradindu Bandopadhyay, I realised I still hadn’t gotten a lock on whatever was going on, and my mind began to drift to Banerjee’s Love Sex aur Dhokha. In that film, he made us believe we were watching a re-enactment of Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge. He even named the lovers Rahul and Shruti, so their initials would match those of Raj and Simran. And then he threw an axe-wielding (okay, hockey stick-wielding) psychopath into the mix. Forget happily ever after – they ended up in the hereafter. It was like biting into a bar of chocolate and discovering dead lizard. I wondered if Detective Byomkesh Bakshi! began as a similar act of subversion, if Banerjee made his backers (Yash Raj Studios) believe they were in for a re-enactment of, say, Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes movies. But? Another bar of chocolate. Another dead lizard.

Not since Sanjay Leela Bhansali made Saawariya, the film that was supposed to justify Sony Pictures’ investment in the Indian market, has a major filmmaker made something so… idiosyncratic for a major studio. Bhansali teased us with the prospect of a love story with star kids – we expected a heart-warming romance and got something with the temperature of Pluto. Banerjee, similarly, teases us with pulpy highlights. 500 kilos of opium. A book with porny illustrations. Gruesome murders. Strychnine poisoning. A corpse swarming with ants. Chinese gangsters. Sedition. Blackmail. We expect a thriller – a noir thriller, given the early sight of a looming Expressionistic shadow. What we get, instead, is… well, it’s hard to say what it is. Probably the only thing we can say for sure is that it is an origins story.

It’s easy to see why, the matching initials apart, Dibakar Banerjee was drawn to Detective Bakshy (played by Sushant Singh Rajput). This director has always been sympathetic towards the upwardly mobile, the underdog – and that’s what Byomkesh is. For a while, he’s hopelessly out of his depth, but he soldiers on and gets where he wants to be, and like the classic Banerjee protagonist, he will achieve his aims through equal parts playacting and hoodwinking. In an early scene, he glimpses an actress named Angoori Devi (Swastika Mukherjee) discard her sari and plunge into the water in her swimsuit – he averts his eyes. Angoori Devi tells her assistant, “Dekhne do. Shaayad inhone pehle dekha nahin hai.” (Let him watch. He’s probably not seen anything like this.) She’s right. He’s inexperienced. After the swim, after getting dressed, she embarrasses him further by flashing a leg.

He has no social graces either – in that department too, he’s a virgin. In the scene in which he meets his to-be sidekick (Ajit, played by Anand Tiwari), the latter is worried about his missing father. Byomkesh proposes a few theories in a clinical, multiple-choice format – (D) your father has run away with another woman. Ajit, unsurprisingly, slaps Byomkesh. Rajput, sporting a unibrow, plays Byomkesh like a benign robot that’s learning the ways of humankind. I laughed seeing him on a chair, his spine erect, one leg crossed over the other. I kept waiting to see if he’d slouch. His philosophy is equally rigid: Is duniya mein ‘aise hi’ kuch nahin hota. Everything is logical, everything comes with a reason.

The setting is Calcutta, caught between the British on one side, the Japanese on the other. It’s 1943. This gives Banerjee and his team to indulge in some characteristically brilliant detailing – even if everything is reminiscent of Hollywood. Angoori Devi is styled like a Clara Bow type. The posters on the streets scream out Shadow of a Doubt and The Ox-Bow Incident, 1943 releases both. But the biggest blockbuster in India at the time was Ashok Kumar’s Kismat, our first one-crore grosser. That doesn’t seem to be playing anywhere. Or maybe that’s not cool enough to be part of the immaculate production design. After all, Banerjee does take a lot of his cues from Hollywood and other foreign cinema.

On a moment-by-moment basis, Banerjee’s cinema is sensual, fulfilling and, more than anything else, precise. He’s Indian cinema’s answer to a Swiss watchmaker – everything’s just so. And in wanting everything to be just so, he sometimes drains all the juice from his material. The anachronistic score (Sneha Khanwalkar and others) is a relief, because it shakes things up. Suddenly, there’s life. And then the score dies down. We’re back to long stretches of silence – it begins to feel like an eternity inside the theatre. There’s no doubt about Banerjee’s talent. If you’re the kind, you could dine on the images alone. Byomkesh sitting opposite Dr. Guha (Neeraj Kabi), a lantern between them casting the most gorgeous shadows. Angoori Devi marinating in a bathtub and the upside-down heart of her face as she leans back and Byomkesh places a cigarette between her heavily lipsticked lips. The extraordinary wide shot as Byomkesh and Angoori Devi enter a dining hall, where a man at the head of the table is having some soup. The shot takes in so much, it conjures up, in an instant, an entire way of life.

But shots alone cannot sustain a movie. There needs to be some energy as well. After the tenth or so deliberately composed image – you can practically hear Banerjee behind the scenes, scratching his chin thoughtfully – I began to wish the camera would sneak into one of those cinema halls screening Shadow of a Doubt instead. At least Hitchcock did not think he was above mere “entertainment.” Detective Byomkesh Bakshi! suffers from the high-mindedness that suffocated Shanghai as well. We aren’t just making a movie. We’re sculpting a masterpiece. The result? A sluggish pace. This wouldn’t be a problem if the characters were well-drawn, interesting, or if the plot was gripping. But no and no. And in the midst of all this supreme good taste, the pulpy elements (“villain laughs maniacally;” “femme fatale stares seductively”) come off looking ridiculous. Towards the end, we get, out of nowhere, a Tarantinoesque bloodbath that looks like something the studio ordered after seeing the rushes and panicking. You can hear Aditya Chopra screaming: Enough with the lizards already. Gimme some fucking chocolate.

KEY:

• Is duniya mein ‘aise hi’ kuch nahin hota. = Nothing happens ‘just like that’.

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…

Let’s face it. Sunny Leone isn’t being hired for her face. It’s a pretty face, but it isn’t what’s getting her hired. Neither is she being hired for her acting, which, to put it kindly, makes Katrina Kaif look like Smita Patil. No. Sunny Leone is being hired for her unswerving obedience to the directors of her films when they put her in the scantiest of tops and yell into their megaphones: “Now bend down and show us that W.” She’s a sport. She makes that W, by a rough count, about 26½ times in Bobby Khan’s Ek Paheli Leela. One of those times, she’s in a lacy bra, and the camera leans in on her from a height, the way you’d stand on tiptoe and stare down into a well to determine how deep the water is. The audience whistles. Another image is added to that great filing cabinet in the male mind. All is well.

But this isn’t some poor girl who came to Bollywood with stars in her eyes and ended up being exploited by lecherous men. In a way, she’s the one doing the exploiting. She’s a canny entrepreneur who knows what the market wants, and she’s exploiting that want. Early on in Leela, in a scene set at a party, she looks around at the men and tells her friend that they are “aankhon se rape karne wale perverts,” that they’re raping her with their eyes. You have to laugh because she’s simultaneously playing the victim card (within the film) and urging her fans to do the same thing those men at the party are doing (without). An unscientific web search told me that Leone’s net worth is $2.5 million. I’m surprised it isn’t more.

So hooray for her and all that, but isn’t this kinda-sorta bad news for the Hindi film heroine? Leone, essentially, is undoing what Zeenat Aman did in the 1970s. In films like Heera Panna and Manoranjan – which look tame today, but must have been shocking then – Aman wrested female sexuality from the vamps and said it was okay if the heroine had a great body and thought nothing of flaunting that great body. With the rare exception of a Satyam Shivam Sundaram, where Aman was reduced to doing what Leone’s doing in these films now, she made it okay for the heroine to wear, say, a cleavage-baring top and made the men whistle in open appreciation, even admiration, rather than salivate in a corner with barely concealed lust. She seemed to say, “Let’s not make a big deal out of this, boys.” This is what has led to Deepika and Priyanka and Katrina wearing (and getting way with) dresses that, at one time, would have made Helen and Bindu blush. We see these girls in these clothes and we react to them the way we react to Hollywood actresses in a bikini – it’s simply not that big a deal anymore.

But Leone is making it a big deal again. Or perhaps she’s proving that, despite Zeenat Aman, despite Deepika and Priyanka and Katrina, there’s always a market for full-figured women who can and are more than willing to bend down and make W’s. Mallika Sherawat proved this for a brief while in the noughties. Now, it’s Leone.

Only, Bollywood seems intent on crafting for her a different kind of narrative, one that she, unapologetic adult-film star that she is, probably never cared for in the first place. Bollywood seems hell-bent on giving her a Purab Aur Paschim makeover, wiping off her “shameful, Western” past and situating her in the continuum of the traditional Hindi-film heroine. What else is one to make of scenes like the one where Leone’s Meera utters lines like “Woh mera suhaag hai” or “Main shaadishuda hoon”? She wipes away a tear after receiving a proposal of marriage. She even gets to participate in a puja. And like the traditional Hindi-film heroine, she wears W-making tops earlier, but once married, she slips into demure – at least, as demure as her sensibilities will allow – salwar kameezes. Heck, by this point Meera could have been played by Rani Mukerji, circa Baabul. Why denude an actress of her USP?

But even with Leone brandishing her USP in the early scenes – at times, the camera angles make the 2D screen almost look like a pop-up book – Leela is an awful film, awfully staged, written, acted. (The wooden cast includes Rajneesh Duggal, Rahul Dev, Mohit Ahlawat and Jay Bhanushali, who looks like a fifth-grader who stuck on a beard to play Joseph in the annual nativity play.) This is the kind of movie in which we learn Meera is claustrophobic and fears flying, so to get her on a plane, her friend tells her it’s an… airplane-themed party. That’s enough to get Meera aboard. I suppose this is the distaff equivalent of men doing crazy things because all the blood rushed from their brain to their you-know-what.

The painfully snail-paced story is about the search for a statue, and there’s a reincarnation angle that goes back 300 years, which seems to be about the time we started watching the movie. The laugh track is filled with abominable fellatio jokes, and at some point you may begin to wonder if Leone isn’t regretting leaving behind her past. At least, there’s a certain kind of purity in porn. Pizza delivery guy rings the door bell. Co-ed opens the door. Insert joke about sausage toppings. Instead, here, we have to suffer through plot, character development, twist ending, dialogue… I laughed exactly twice during the movie. First, when the villain throws at Leone a bejewelled bra and a loincloth and snarls, “Yeh vastra pehen lo.” If this is vastra, then the Mahabharat we watched on TV would have been enacted by an all-nude cast, which probably tells us why Gandhari really wore that blindfold. The second time was when Meera is introduced as a supermodel who’s come “all the way from Milan.” Alas, nothing in this film goes all the way.

KEY:

•  “Woh mera suhaag hai”= He’s my husband.
•  “Main shaadishuda hoon”= I am married.
•  “Yeh vastra pehen lo.”= Wear these… clothes!

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…

The cleverest thing about Dharam Sankat Mein, directed by Fuwad Khan, is that title. The plot kicks off when Dharam Pal (Paresh Rawal), a sacred thread-wearing Brahmin in Ahmedabad, discovers he’s really a Muslim. So the obvious meaning of the title is that Dharam is in a sankat, crisis. But reduce his name to a common noun, and it means religion. Hence the other dimension of the title: religion is in a crisis. The film, thus, riffs on the many ways in which both Dharam and dharam are in trouble. Along with Dharam’s attempts to get a grip on his situation, we are given lessons on the communal madness that surrounds us. We are given glimpses of the us-versus-them distrust that exists between Hindus and Muslims. We are told what it’s like to be a member of a minority community, especially whenever there’s a terrorist attack. On the flip side, we are shown how intolerant some Muslims are, how they try to convert people from other faiths. To succeed with all this within the framework of a broad-strokes, Censor Board-friendly comedy isn’t easy. At times, you may feel a more appropriate title would have been Fuwad Khan Sankat Mein.

But first, it’s important to acknowledge the need – today, in an increasingly insane nation – for films like this one, or OMG: Oh My God! (whose DVD is visible in an early scene), or pk. These films use comic frameworks to push forward their sobering agenda – and this is the best approach. Ask Karan Johar, who mainstreamed homosexuality through comedy and did what more earnest-minded dramas like My Brother Nikhil couldn’t. Today, no one bats an eyelid when a gay character shows up on screen, and some of this acceptance has spilled over into real life too. If something similar happens with religion, thanks to these films, then more, please.

Dharam is, in the initial portions, this film’s Kantaben. Despite that sacred thread, he’s not really religious, and when his son falls for a girl whose father is a member of a godman’s cult, Dharam, discovers, like  Kantaben thought she did, what it’s like to get buggered by people from the same faith. Is there anyone better than Rawal at playing the lovable cynic? Even if he’s played this role before, he’s so good that he almost convinces us his lines are funny. But they aren’t. This film’s idea of a joke is to name a psychiatrist Dr. Choonawala. Fuwad Khan has no idea how to stage comedy. There’s an attempt at a slapstick chase in an orphanage. We get a man standing in his undies when his pants are pulled down. It’s painful. There’s a bit where Dharam’s wife suspects he’s gay. A director with better instincts would have made this a running gag, letting it build before letting it explode. Here, the whole thing is resolved with a couple of lines of dialogue. I wonder if The Infidel, the British film whose adaptation this is, made these gags work.

The worst scenes are the ones in which Naseeruddin Shah plays that godman. He makes an entry more suited to Rajinikanth – on a motorbike, to the cheering of thousands of fans. But game as Shah is, this is a terribly contrived part headed in the most obvious direction – and the resolution of this subplot is an embarrassment. This is what I don’t get, whether here or in pk.  Our godmen are already jokes. Every day you open the papers, and there’s some this-can’t-really-be-happening news about them. How can a movie expect to top this? How can you spoof something that already looks like a spoof?

And when it decides to get serious, Dharam Sankat Mein isn’t dramatic enough. A wonderful Annu Kapoor, who speaks as if rehearsing for a local production of Mughal-e-Azam, plays Mehmood, Dharam’s Muslim neighbour and eventual confidante. We are given the sense of a long-running feud between them, but when Dharam reveals to Mehmood that he is a Muslim, there is instant empathy. Perhaps the point is that Mehmood is so aware of what it is “to be a Muslim” that it doesn’t take much time for him to realise what it must be like for a Hindu “to be a Muslim.” Still, this doesn’t help the character, who ends up somewhat colourless, a little more than a comic sidekick, a lot less than what you’d expect from him as this film’s sole, sane Muslim.

But he does get the film’s funniest stretch, when he begins to school Dharam in the ways of his dharam. Dharam knows little about Islam, and he doesn’t know too much about Hinduism either, so he gets a Hindu tutor too. He keeps mixing up what he learns, which is just another way of saying that there’s not much difference, really, and it doesn’t – and shouldn’t – matter. That’s pretty wonderful coming from a movie whose leading man is a BJP MP.

KEY:

• Choonawala = con man

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…

Vikram Bhatt’s Mr. X is an irredeemably bad film, and proof of its irredeemable badness arrives very early. We are with Raghu (Emraan Hashmi) and Sia (Amyra Dastur) in their bedroom. They’ve just made love – at least we think they’ve made love. We don’t actually see anything. This coyness is a little puzzling in an Emraan Hashmi movie, but then, remember, this is in 3D. Imagine him approaching the camera, mouth wide open, leaning in for one of his patented kisses… Better yet, don’t imagine it. So we cut to the aftermath. She’s in his shirt. He asks her why. She replies, “Agar tum meri tasveer apne zehan mein rakh sakte ho to main tumhara shirt apne jism pe nahin rakh sakti?” Translation: If you can have my picture in your mind, can’t I have your shirt on my body? The logic is terrible – still, you feel sorry for her. She thought Raghu had her picture in his head while making love. She doesn’t know a lot about the kind of men Hashmi plays, does she?

Mr. X is ostensibly an Emraan Hashmi movie, but he turns invisible fairly early and we’re left with Sia. When I saw Dastur in the Tamil film Anegan, I thought her terrible performance was the result of not knowing the language. I was wrong. She’s equally capable of belting out a bad performance in a language she knows. For a while, you think her awkwardness is due to the cards life has dealt her. Her father was in jail. He was responsible for her mother’s death. And now, she’s got an invisible boyfriend – and given that this boyfriend is played by Hashmi, she cannot even take a shower in peace. That’s more baggage than you’d find at the American Tourister warehouse. But slowly, you realise you have to stop making excuses for her. Dastur is shrill till the end. You wish she’d turned invisible.

This is the dullest, most generic action-adventure you’re likely to see. Raghu survives a bomb blast, but is exposed to the ensuing radiation. A friend takes him to a lab, where he is dunked in a tub of ice-cold water and fed the contents of a glowing test tube. His flesh peels off. He turns invisible. But there’s a catch. You can see him in sunlight. And so the film keeps darting between light and dark, as the special-effects guys make Hashmi appear and disappear with soundtrack whooshes that make it seem that Rajinikanth’s tossing a cigarette somewhere in the vicinity. Will Raghu get his revenge on the men who reduced him to this state? That’s the question we’re supposed to chew on, but there’s a more interesting one: When Raghu vanishes, why do his clothes vanish too? But again, we have to remember that this is a 3D film. You do not want a nude Emraan Hashmi charging towards your glasses.

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…

Laila (Kalki Koechlin), the protagonist of Shonali Bose’s Margarita With a Straw, is like any other person in their late teens/early twenties, give or take a skill or two. She’s on Facebook. She’s terrific at chess. She’s into music – she writes lyrics for a band called Tribe. She’s friends with these musicians and she has a crush on the lead singer. She even sings a little, with her mother (Revathy), who she calls Aai. She laughs with her friends, She weeps when men she loves don’t love her back in that way. She swears. She fights with Aai. She makes up with Aai the way people in loving families do, invisibly, without manufacturing a production out of it. Oh, and she needs a wheelchair to get around because she’s afflicted with cerebral palsy.

With many filmmakers, this last aspect would eclipse everything else. One, because it’s the most obvious, visible thing. And two, this sort of thing really puts the fear of God in these filmmakers. They’re terrified they’ll be labelled insensitive, or that politically correct organisations will descend on them fuming with righteous indignation. And so they portray the afflicted person as a suffering saint. Or a conduit for a triumph-of-the-human-spirit message (though the overly symbolic last scene, as twee as the title, comes dangerously close). Or worse, a Wiki-page printout to be distributed to audiences, in order to “educate” them about the condition. I usually run a mile from these movies.

The utterly remarkable thing about Margarita is that Laila isn’t a differently abled person. She’s a person who is differently abled. The order of the words matters. The human being comes first, the condition only later. And like all humans, Laila craves intimacy, and not just a hug from Aai. Sanjay Leela Bhansali touched on this beyond-delicate issue in Black, when the deaf/blind protagonist wanted to know what it was like to be kissed – but Bose goes all the way. Laila talks to her wheelchair-bound classmate Dhruv (Hussain Dalal) about some “red top waali” he’s got his eyes on. She watches porn. And in a scene I’ve never seen on screen, she turns her wheelchair away from us and masturbates. I don’t know what was turning her on, but I kept thinking about Pahlaj Nihalani’s face.

In other words, take that wheelchair away and Laila is “normal.” The word comes up a few times in the movie. Dhruv has a crush on Laila, but she has feelings for that hunky singer. A disappointed Dhruv tells her, “Normal logon ke saath dosti karne se tum normal nahin ho jaaogi.” (You’re not going to become “normal” just because you hang out with “normal” people.) It’s refreshing, even touching, to hear this word used by someone in a wheelchair. No one knows better than Dhruv that, despite the efforts by the legions of the politically correct, he’d rather be “normal” than “special.” (I’m guessing Bose knows this too. The film is dedicated to her cousin Malini, who has cerebral palsy.) The film doesn’t make us pity Dhruv (or Laila, for that matter). It doesn’t call them abnormal. It just tells us that Dhruv defines normalcy the way a dictionary does, as “conforming to the standard or the common type.” The people around him who don’t need a wheelchair – to his eyes, they’re “normal.”

And he’s right about Laila. She yearns to be “normal.” In a too-strident scene that’s tonally off, Tribe gets the first prize at a rock competition, and the judge declares that it’s because the song’s lyrics were written by a “disabled” and “not normal” girl. Laila is furious. She retorts with a raised finger. The film’s conflict arises from this word, from the friction between desires that are “normal” and a physical state that isn’t quite.

And how can these desires not exist? Early on, we get the scene where Laila has to be carried up the stairs by two men, because the lift isn’t working. The camera sticks close to Laila’s face. Koechlin doesn’t do any semaphoric “acting,” and her blankness makes us want to read her mind. I thought we were being asked to respond to her helplessness, or perhaps her humiliation. But later, the New Delhi-based Laila moves to New York on an academic scholarship, and we get this scene where she is with her classmate Jared (William Moseley), and she needs to use the toilet. (Jared is another hunk; Bose appears to have cast the male roles with an eye on how easy on the eye these men are, so we know what Laila is reacting to.) Jared carries her in, and steps out. When she’s done, he comes back in, straightens her underwear, and lifts her from the seat. She clings to his shoulders for support, practically draping herself on him. And I saw that earlier scene, with the two men and the broken lift, in a new light. Given Laila’s condition, she’s constantly in positions that could be considered “romantic.” Men keep touching her. Men carry her. Men put their arms around her and lift her. They may look at the whole thing clinically, but surely all this physical proximity must be getting to her.

And then, we get the film’s biggest googly. In New York, Laila meets Khanum (a no-nonsense Sayani Gupta), who’s blind. The film takes on another disability – but again, there’s not a trace of stereotype, not a shred of self-pity. When we first see Khanum, she’s participating in a political protest that ends with tear-gassing. She makes a more radical statement with her style. She wears peacock-feather earrings, ornate rings, and in the film’s most moving moment (all the more moving for being so matter-of-fact), she applies eye shadow while getting ready for a date. She may not be able to see, but the ones who can need to know how hot she is, right?

Laila is one of those. She’s slowly drawn to Khanum, who’s gay, and discovers she’s bisexual. In her audience-friendly handling of hot-button issues, Bose is the multiplex version of Mani Ratnam. Her sense of humour is like his, delectably understated. Her narratives are like his, warm-hearted and mainstreamed, focusing more on the emotions of the characters than on the roughshod “reality” of their environment. (We don’t get much about, say, what it’s like being disabled in a country like India.) And this film features a Ratnamesque sprawl of ethnicities: a Maharashtrian mother, a Sikh father, an Assamese crush, a Pakistani-Bangladeshi Muslim girlfriend… But given that Bose’s films aren’t exactly “mainstream”, her sex scenes are bolder, and necessarily so. Not only has she made the kind of sexual-awakening film we rarely see in our cinema, she’s made one on a differently abled protagonist, one who coolly wheels into a store and asks for a vibrator. But there’s sexual confusion too. Even after Laila moves in with Khanum, she has sex with Jared – and who’s to say why? Maybe it’s just because she’s bisexual. Then again, maybe having sex with a man is another way of proving to the world (or at least to herself) that she’s “normal.”

The snide joke in Hollywood, especially around Oscar season, is that you’re guaranteed an award if you spend the movie stuck in a wheelchair – but Koechlin deserves all the recognition she’s getting. There’s a scene where she breaks eggs over a skillet, and cleans up the mess of shells and spilt yolk. There’s not one overdone motion. The woman sitting next to me murmured “bechaari,” and I wanted to tell her that Laila is anything but. The scene is practically a celebration of her independence, now that Aai is no longer around. You don’t think wheelchair. You think breakfast… yum!

Koechlin seems to be at her best when she’s playing some variant of a lost little girl. (It helps that her features look like they’re still being formed.) She played one in Dev.D. She plays one here. The scenes where she realises she’s attracted to Khanum are beautifully done. She plays an unplayable emotion, the feeling of having to redefine yourself after you thought you knew all there was to know about you. The best thing about Laila is that there’s none of that… nobility we’re asked to endure when differently abled characters show up on screen. Bose says it’s okay to laugh, at them, with them, and the upbeat (and excellent) background score reinforces this. When Laila’s creative writing professor asks her if she needs a writer to help her with an essay, she’s about to say no, and then she discovers that the writer is Jared. She says, “That would be wonderful.”

There are tears too, but they have nothing to do with – as you might have expected – Laila’s coming out to Aai. This happens during a scene that echoes an earlier one in which Aai was helping Laila bathe, and Laila announced that she had a crush on a guy. Now, the roles are reversed. Aai is unwell, and Laila is helping Aai bathe, and she tells Aai she likes Khanum. Aai is confused and angry, but she doesn’t break down. That happens elsewhere, in front of a mirror. Revathy gets her best scene, where she crumples from what seems to be sheer exhaustion. (She literally seems to deflate.) How much can one woman take? Margarita isn’t just about Laila. You can see Aai wishing, if only for that instant, that her life were “normal” too.

KEY:

• red top waali = that girl in the red top
• bechaari = poor thing

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

A fascinating documentary shows us what Salman Khan means to an India that’s not quite shining.

One of the more perplexing moments on Season Four of Koffee with Karan was when Salman Khan made an appearance – his first on the show – and declared, “I am a virgin.” He added that he was going to save himself for the one he gets married to. Host Karan Johar stood in for everyone who’s read about the star’s sexual exploits – his eyes popped. But Khan maintained a grave demeanour, as if he’d just announced he was retiring from acting. After all, what performance could top this? Sneakily, Johar let us know that Khan may not have been entirely truthful. Earlier, he’d asked Khan about his relationships. The actor replied, “I’ve never had a girlfriend.” Johar smirked. A little later, he asked Khan how he handled ex-girlfriends when he bumped into them. Khan, apparently, had forgotten he had none. He began, “Some I ignore totally…” And we laughed.

But Balram Gehani didn’t. In Being Bhaijaan, a fascinating documentary directed by Shabani Hassanwalia and Samreen Farooqui, this Salman Khan fan from Nagpur reveals that he liked the word “virgin” very much because Khan accepted that that’s what he was. As proof, he offered this fact: Khan has never done a kissing scene. According to Gehani, it is important to remain a virgin because, during sex, “the sperm that carries the male power is lost to the woman.” Gehani concludes, “I am 100% virgin and will remain one.”

The fact that a fan models his behaviour after that of a star is in itself disturbing, but there’s more. Gehani believes that India’s population is under control because Bhai’s (as Salman is popularly known) fans haven’t married. “And that’s because Bhai himself hasn’t married. If Bhai gets married, then at least 3-4 crore men will get married. A year later, they will have children. The earth will topple over and the world will end right there. He is like Vishnu’s avatar, who is balancing the whole world on his finger. If he moves his finger even a little, the world will be destroyed.”

Gehani is exaggerating, but not by much. Until Khan was sentenced, he was more or less a god. He was a god to the industry, certainly, balancing the box office on his finger, summoning up blockbusters out of thin air, thinner material. And to fans like Gehani, too, Khan was a god – for the hero of the masala movie is a direct descendent of the protagonists of our epics, an embodiment of good, a vanquisher of evil. And like most of our big stars, Khan created his screen persona with a bit of mix-and-match: respectful to elders like Rama, mischievous and flirty like Krishna, and, off-screen, unattached like Hanuman. (It’s no accident that Khan’s next release is titled Bajrangi Bhaijaan.) Many fans buy this persona totally, at least those from the kind of India mainstream Bollywood has been trying very hard to make us forget.

These are ordinary people. Gehani wants to reopen his father’s bakery on the same street. Bhaskar Hedaoo, another Salman Khan fan and all of 19 when the documentary was made, wants to earn enough money to marry off his sister. And Shan Ghosh, a Bhai lookalike who’s earned the nickname “Junior Salman,” is investing in real estate so that he can move his family from middle class to upper class. (His father worked for the Madhya Pradesh Electricity Board.) But these real-life aspirations come second to dreams of – as the documentary’s title puts it – being Bhaijaan. If you want to know just how much of a god Salman Khan is to Shan Ghosh, listen to how he answers calls: “Jai Salman.” That’s also the name of a Whatsapp group for fans.

Shah Rukh Khan, with his NRI romances and designer duds, embodied, depending on how you look at it, either aspiration or escapist fantasy. Aamir Khan made a name for himself as a thinking-man’s actor. There was no one speaking to the real India – as some might put it – that wants godlike heroes and modern-day myths. Salman Khan stepped in, and, in due time, became the Rajinikanth of North India, speaking to an audience to whom a burning bra is simply an undergarment in flames. Rajinikanth, at one time, specialised in putting his heroines in their place. Ghosh expects his wife to cook, keep house, look after his parents… “These are the things girls should do.” Ghosh emulates his hero’s inconsistency as well. After listing out the qualities of an ideal wife, he says he doesn’t believe in love. Bhai, after all, said that he wanted a girl who’s like his mother, and according to Ghosh, “The marriage market doesn’t have those kind of girls anymore.”

As with many Indian men from smaller towns (Ghosh is from Chhindwara, about 3½ hours from Nagpur), there’s more bromance than romance. Ghosh tells Gehani that he’ll come to Nagpur and they’ll watch the new Bhai film together. It’s practically a date. On his way to meet Ghosh, Gehani wonders nervously, “How do I look? Will he be smarter than me?” At one point, Ghosh is viewing, on his phone, the Fevicol se number from Dabangg 2. Asked about Kareena Kapoor, he says, “Oh, I can’t even see her. If Salman Bhai is on screen, I can only see him.” In the mirror too. Ghosh not only looks like Khan, he’s also chiselled his physique like Khan’s. He has no qualms tearing his shirt off during the first-day-first-show screening of Jai Ho. But why copy someone? Why not create your own identity? Ghosh replies, “Amitabh Bachchan got ahead by copying Al Pacino… If you look at his photos, you’ll be able to see Al Pacino… We copy and that is how we move forward.”

Gehani believes that building a Bhai-like physique is about masculinity. “If a man shows his body, he is successful. It means he’s a man. If somebody beats up two more men, he’s a man. A man needs courage, and what gives him courage is his masculinity.” I asked Gehani if Khan’s sentencing had made him re-evaluate his fandom. He said no. He also said that what happened was “ooparwale ki marzi,” God’s will. Which god, he didn’t say.

An edited version of this piece can be found here. Copyright ©2015 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

The following review is relatively spoiler-free. If you’ve seen the film and would like to read a more detailed (i.e. spoiler-filled) review, then please go directly to the review below.

Piku (Deepika Padukone) brings to screen a robust multidimensionality we don’t usually see in our leading ladies. She balances domestic chores (laundry, dusting) and a career as an architect. She admits to – you may want to sit down for this – being thirtyish. She’s religious, traditional – and yet, she’s modern, if that’s the word. She’s not in a relationship, but has a friend (Jishu Sengupta) who brings benefits. And because her mother is no more, she takes care of her supremely cantankerous father (Bhaskor, played by Amitabh Bachchan).

Bhaskor (the ‘o’ because he’s Bengali) is a Grade-A hypochondriac. Plus, he’s constipated, and he’s obsessed about it. (Bachchan is fantastic. It’s enormous fun watching this most iconic and dignified of actors mouth the most foul, scatological lines.) But Piku is as ornery as her father. And a kind of movie begins to build in your mind. You think this is the kind of movie that’ll have Piku thaw. You think that’s why the Delhi-based father and daughter take a road trip to Kolkata. You think they’ll both learn life lessons and embrace tearfully. But there’s none of that… to pick an appropriate word, crap.

Instead, they get a co-traveller, Rana (Irrfan Khan; an inspired choice opposite the radiant Deepika). Piku, directed by Shoojit Sircar, keeps making us expect one thing and then goes and does its own thing. The offbeat rhythms of the writer Juhi Chaturvedi remind me of James L Brooks, who worked very much within the Hollywood system (and in the mainstream tradition) and yet imbued his work with jagged edges. I recalled, especially, As Good As It Gets, which was also about dysfunctional characters on a road trip. How nice to see this sensibility in our commercial cinema, like sucking on a lemon wedge between tequila shots.

The constipation, finally, could be a metaphor for not letting go (by father and daughter). It’s at least a recurring motif. A kitchen sink is “blocked” with tea leaves – it needs to be unclogged. A pump stops functioning and all the water is “backed up.” But Piku is not the kind of film you want to dig up for symbolism. It’s the kind of film that makes you happy you’re on the ride.

The following is the longer version of the review and it contains spoilers…

We haven’t seen a heroine like Piku (Deepika Padukone). That’s an odd word to use in this case, heroine – it suggests not just the female lead of a film, but the Rani of Jhansi, or at least the Rani Mukerji of Mardaani. Piku, on the other hand, is simply an Everywoman, bringing to screen a robust multidimensionality we don’t usually see in our leading ladies. She loads the washing machine. She brushes her teeth (the act itself is unremarkable; the fact that the film takes the time to show it isn’t). She oils her hair. She grabs a broom and dusts the ceiling. She admits to – you may want to sit down for this – being thirtyish. She likes Ray movies. She’s an architect. She plays badminton. She listens to complaints from the domestic help. She buys bangles on an impulse. She unclogs the kitchen sink. She’s religious (she prays to Ramakrishna Paramahamsa). She observes tradition (she touches the feet of elders). And yet, she’s modern, if that’s the word. She’s not in a relationship, but has a friend (Jishu Sengupta) who brings benefits and is mildly jealous when she talks of dating others. And because her mother is no more, she takes care of her supremely cantankerous father (Bhaskor, played by Amitabh Bachchan). On second thoughts, that last bit alone removes all doubts. Piku is a heroine.

Bhaskor (the ‘o’ because he’s Bengali) is a Grade-A hypochondriac. He takes his temperature several times during the day, and his face falls when the medical report indicates there’s nothing wrong with him. Oh, and he’s constipated, and he’s obsessed about it. He keeps subjecting Piku to updates about the colour (part green, part yellow) and consistency (like mango pulp) of his bowel movements, and he even has a chair with a hole in it – some sort of artisanal port-a-potty – for use during travel. (Perched on top of a car, it’s literally a throne, this film’s topmost subject.) Bhaskor probably knows that, despite a faithful and long-suffering servant, no one but Piku can put up with him, take care of him. So he keeps telling prospective suitors that she’s not a virgin, as if that, and not he, would scare them off – him, with his bulldozing baritone and ill-fitting clothes from a century ago. Bachchan’s Bengali accent takes a bit of getting used to, but he’s otherwise fantastic. It’s enormous fun watching this most iconic and dignified of actors (think back to the other Bhaskar he played in Anand) mouth the most foul, scatological lines. Imagine Asha Parekh saying “motherfucker” on screen and you’re close.

There are many nice things about Piku , directed by Shoojit Sircar – one of the nicest is that Piku is as ornery as her father. This is no martyr suffering under a man with near-tyrannical eccentricities. To others – like the cabbies who ferry her around – she’s the tyrant. They’re terrified they’ll be called upon to serve her. And a kind of movie begins to build in your mind. You think this is the kind of movie that’ll have Piku thaw. You think that’s why the Delhi-based father and daughter take a road trip to Kolkata. (The ostensible reason is to consider selling an ancestral home, which will likely be demolished for new development. Put differently, this could point to the dilemma: Continue taking care of our visibly decaying parents or hand them over to an ultramodern retirement/nursing home?) You think the father will understand what his daughter is going through, that the daughter will see why her father is this way, that they’ll both learn life lessons and embrace tearfully. There’s none of that… to pick an appropriate word, crap.

Instead, they get a co-traveller, Irrfan Khan’s Rana. (The character is introduced in a scene about a hit and run. Art imitating life or life imitating art? Discuss. Twenty points.) I wasn’t terribly convinced by the way he’s shoehorned into the road trip, but his presence made me very glad. Rana comes from a dysfunctional home too and his life hasn’t quite worked out the way he wanted – but again, this is no healing journey for him. There’s a wonderfully strange scene with a knife. We don’t know why it’s there and where it’s going, especially with the intermission break in the middle. Then we see it may have something to do with Rana, that he’s every bit as wilful as the others. (Well, maybe not that much.) There’s another beauty of a scene in which Rana, unable to take Bhaskor’s whining anymore, stops the car and gives the old man a piece of his mind. Bhaskor is stunned. Piku, though, is… It’s hard to say what she’s feeling, for Deepika’s face seems to be registering many things at once. Piku is grateful that someone is doing what she cannot do. She’s perhaps uncomfortable being there, witnessing her father’s humiliation. Maybe there’s a bit of guilt too, that she’s chosen to remain silent and let the humiliation continue. It’s an inspired choice to cast Irrfan opposite the radiant Deepika. She’s already proved she can be a good performer, but working with him, her game goes up a few levels. As for him, this is the closest he’s come to being a romantic leading man. And it’s possibly the closest Bollywood has gotten to the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers dynamic, of which it was said: He gives her class, she gives him sex.

And yet, theirs isn’t quite a romance. Along the journey, Rana ingratiates himself with Bhaskor. He gives Bhaskor tulsi and pudina leaves to alleviate the constipation. And in an outrageously funny scene, he squats and demonstrates the difference between the “Indian way “ and the “Western way,” using a graphic illustration that to Bhaskor’s eyes must have seemed like a Renoir original. I thought this would be the point where Piku falls for Rana. Every girl looks for a bit of her daddy in her husband. Rana’s just proved he’s got the most unforgettable bit. But Piku doesn’t go there. It might go there after the film ends and we return home. We get an ending that suggests something like that. But not now. Rana knows that, despite his obvious interest in Piku, she comes with, um, a shitload of baggage. He’s a sane and rooted man, not an insane on-screen lover.

Piku keeps making us expect one thing and then goes and does its own thing. There’s a scene where Bhaskor comes home drunk and begins to do the twist to a catchy Bengali number. Piku is concerned. She thinks he should go to bed. Then she sees how much fun he’s having and smiles wearily. For a horrified instant, I thought she was going to join in and we’d have one of those “bonding” moments. But she just goes to her room – though with an added spring in her step – and closes the door. They bond enough as it is. These offbeat rhythms of the writer Juhi Chaturvedi (she also wrote Sircar’s Vicky Donor, which was also about an icky emanation, albeit from the other end) remind me of James L Brooks, who worked very much within the Hollywood system (and in the mainstream tradition) and yet imbued his work with jagged edges. I recalled, especially, As Good As It Gets, which was also about dysfunctional characters on a road trip. There’s a scene here, when Piku is on a date and talks loudly on the phone with her father about his favourite subject – it’s like the scene in As Good As It Gets where Helen Hunt is on a date and her son begins to cough up phlegm. How nice to see this sensibility in our commercial cinema, like sucking on a lemon wedge between tequila shots.

The constipation, finally, could be a metaphor for not letting go (by father and daughter). It’s at least a recurring motif. A kitchen sink is “blocked” with tea leaves – it needs to be unclogged. A pump stops functioning and all the water is “backed up” – and as Rana fixes the machine, a man keeping watch on the roof says something you might hear Bhaskor say from inside the bathroom: “Thoda thoda aa raha hai.” But Piku is not the kind of film you want to dig up for symbolism. It’s the kind of film that makes you happy you’re on the ride. Even the boring bits are a nice kind of boring, less the result of bad filmmaking than a reflection of the nothing-much-happens phases of life. Or maybe we take to the film so much that we look for reasons to explain away the things that don’t work, like the utilitarian staging, or the numerous Amul placements. We take to Piku because it is filled with the cacophonous rhythms of family – the aunt (Moushumi Chatterji) who chatters away unmindful of the occasion, or the relative filled with pent-up frustrations (another form of constipation). Most of all, the film reminds us of our parents, those sometimes frustrating people whom we feel we cannot live with until we realise we cannot live without them either. The scene in which Piku tears up after Bhaskor takes ill may remind you of the many times you dismissed someone’s complaints until the day you found them in the hospital and were hit by a sickening mix of terror and guilt. My favourite line? When Piku says, offhandedly, that we can’t judge our parents. Sometimes we go to films to forget what life’s like. Other times, we go to remember.

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…

Gabbar Is Back, directed by Krish (and based on an original story by AR Murugadoss), keeps making us think it is the real deal, a real masala movie. We see dabbawalas. We witness a lavani performance. We step into a barbershop. In other words, we see not Mumbai but Bombay, which is always a good sign in a masala movie. But there’s always something missing.

There’s something missing in the dialogues. There’s just one nicely shaped line, when the villain (Digvijay Patil, played by Suman Talwar) looks at the hero (Akshay Kumar’s Aditya) and sneers, “Suna hai evidence ka file ko mashaal banake ghoom rahe ho,” that he’s brandishing a file filled with evidence (against Patil) as if it were some kind of torch. It’s not just that the metaphor is apt. The line also foreshadows Aditya’s transformation into a crusader named Gabbar. But otherwise, there are no memorable lines, and even the ones that begin promisingly (“Puraani sharaab aur puraani yaadein…”) end with a whimper. And some make no sense. There’s one that says the System is like a diaper… kabhi dheeela, kabhi geela. Loose? Wet? Wouldn’t the line pack more power had the diaper analogy been taken to its logical conclusion and said our System was full of shit?

There’s something missing in the item song. The last time Akshay Kumar acted in a film produced by Sanjay Leela Bhansali, we got the awesomely raunchy Aa re pritam pyaare. This one’s a poor relation. It has Chitrangada Singh either (a) flaunting her sexuality and making a statement that she’s not to be relegated to “serious” roles (note also her item song in Joker), or (b) making a rock-solid case that good parts for unconventional-looking actresses are so hard to come by that you have to take up whatever comes your way. I’m leaning towards (b). And I’m thinking about Mahie Gill, who was downsized from heroine to moll in the span of a few years, from Paro in the Devdas update to Mona Darling in the Zanjeer update.

There’s something missing in the Shankar™-style flashback. This sort of flashback always involves the loss of a loved one, and in Ramana, the Tamil original, Simran played the part. She was dressed in saris. She was heavily pregnant. She looked like the kind of housewife who’d run around like a headless chicken in the morning and breathe a small sigh of relief when husband and kids left, and then unwind with a dumb movie on some random channel. In other words, even without much screen time, the archetype gets to you, and when she dies, you feel something. When Kareena Kapoor dies in the Hindi version, you feel nothing. She’s not playing a wife. She’s playing up her glamorous image, pouting incessantly and giving come-hither looks to the audience and to Akshay, in that order. She could be starring in a condom commercial. This is not the kind of flashback that births vigilantes.

There’s something missing in the characters. One of the hallmarks of the masala movie is the singular trait that defines its inhabitants – Sholay’s Basanti is a chatterbox, and so on. Here, Shruti (Shruti Haasan) likes to quote facts from Google. I think she means Wikipedia. Google’s a search engine, and it doesn’t have facts unless you type in a search term and go to a site which has those facts. A site like Wikipedia. But I am putting way more thought into this than the writer put into Shruti’s character. There’s no real payoff to this trait like there was to Basanti’s, because when Imam Saab’s son died, the extent of the tragedy was evident not just by the fact that the village went silent but that Basanti went silent. But those days of masala screenwriting are gone, and we have to settle for facile touches like this Google-quoting girl. Like the English-speaking constable (Sunil Grover). Like the meaningless “I am a brand” declaration from the villain.

The Sholay reference isn’t accidental. The title of this film, after all, references that film’s villain and the fear he invoked in the people around. We’re asked to believe that Aditya invokes that kind of fear in the corrupt, against whom he leads his vigilante crusade. But Akshay is too low-key a masala presence. The scene where he walks into the police station when cops are still looking for him; the scene where he addresses thousands of students from atop the police van that’s taking him to trial; the scene where he gives a lecture about the five fundamental forces (bending, shear, etc.) and demonstrates them while bashing up goons – these are great masala scenes in search of a great masala actor.

There’s one halfway-decent moment involving the kidnapping of a minister using masks. But the rest of Gabbar Is Back suffers from the attitude Bollywood has towards masala cinema, which is that of a rich man who has to accommodate a poor relation simply because the latter is also mentioned in the will. Masala movies bring in the big bucks, but they’re not “cool.” And to add the cool factor, these films keep winking at things that should be taken very seriously. Whatever the characters may be saying on screen, you constantly hear this line in your head: “I know this is ludicrous stuff, but hey, it’s kinda fun.” That attitude works in the films Farah Khan makes, not here. The title Gabbar Is Back merely indicates the return of the bogeyman, not the return of the glorious masala cinema of his era.

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…

When I heard Anurag Kashyap was making a movie about Bombay, I wondered – despite the heavily Hollywoodised imagery – if he would tip a hat to the “Bombay movie.” Bombay Velvet opens, instead, as a Bombay documentary, with grainy, sepia-toned footage that gives us glimpses of the city, round about 1949. There’s prohibition. There are dance bars. There’s a “Godse Will Hang” headline. And as the story begins to unfold, we get flashes from Bombay movies. We meet a singer who models herself on Geeta Dutt. She goes on to perform at the titular club, which is like Star Club in Dev Anand’s Baazi, one of those oases of Western vice after the British deserted India, with singers crooning decidedly un-Indian-sounding songs. The protagonist ‘Johnny’ Balraj (Ranbir Kapoor) is a Dev Anand-like character who wants to get rich, whatever the means. And there appears to be a nod to the mixed-descent characters we used to see on screen. The singer – Rosie (Anushka Sharma) – is part Portuguese, and something like Madhubala’s Anglo-Indian singer Edna from Howrah Bridge (technically a Calcutta movie, but same difference).

But as the posters and trailers suggested, there is more of Hollywood. Johnny (Ranbir Kapoor) is a masochistic raging bull who enjoys getting battered and bloodied in fights, and this is the first of the many Scorsese nods. The incredibly kinetic violence is pure Scorsese, possibly the work of frequent Scorsese collaborator (and this film’s co-editor) Thelma Schoonmaker. (The early portions move like a fever dream.) And like Gangs of New York, Bombay Velvet attempts to narrate a bit of a big city’s history; that film ended with visuals of modern-day New York City, this one ends with shots of Bombay today. Coppola is visible too. Johnny is quick to burst into rage like The Godfather’s Sonny Corleone. A shootout is reminiscent of the one in The Godfather: Part II. And the spirit of the director’s notorious flop, The Cotton Club, floats through this film; that, too, was about a nightclub and the gangsters around it.

Apart from these major quotations, you might catch a glimpse of Scarface. And you’ll definitely see Cabaret – not just in the staging of the musical sequences and the snare-drum-rattling transitions, but especially in the character of Kaizad Khambata (Karan Johar, who’s quite good), who comes across like a version of the malevolent, androgynous KitKat Club emcee. (Khambata is gay. At one point, he’s called a “fruitcake.”) And oddest of all, we see Johnny getting influenced by James Cagney’s “big shot” in The Roaring Twenties. Odd, because you wouldn’t think of this tapori, with his Bombay slang, stepping into a theatre screening an English movie. But that’s perhaps the point of Bombay Velvet: upward mobility. For Johnny. And for Bombay, which needs to transform from an industrial (socialist) city to a financial (capitalistic) one. (Johnny says that outside Bombay lies India, which is nothing but poverty.) Johnny may misinterpret the legal word “tender” for its other meaning (naram, soft), but he wants to deal with the legal word “tender.” He wants to be a big shot like Cagney. This, we might assume, is Kashyap’s nod to the “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster” moment from GoodFellas.

With all these memories (and you may have more), I thought Bombay Velvet would be about Kashyap diving into the movie images swimming inside his head. The movie clichés as well. The loyal friend who gets left behind. A twist on the prostitute with a heart of gold. Identical twins. (Here, Bombay Velvet goes all desi on us, quoting Ram Aur Shyam.) The orphaned hero’s sad story. All this is unremarkable, just plain water, and you want to see Kashyap adding his special brand of vodka to spike things up. You want to see the Kashyapisation of this material. This, after all, is the man who made Devdas a hallucinatory pill-popper. You want to see scenes like the one in which Dev chomps up a bus ticket, those delightfully mad moments that Kashyap seems to have an endless supply of on tap. Like the bit in Gangs of Wasseypur where Faizal Khan is reduced to tears after a romantic overture. Like the bit in Ugly where cops divert their attention from a potential kidnapping to the real names of film stars.

There’s none. For the most part, the archetypes never become characters we give a damn about. Kashyap never finds a way to make them his own. They remain generic templates. The loyal friend who gets left behind. A twist on the prostitute with a heart of gold. Identical twins. The latter could refer to Ranbir and Anushka, who are equally lost. From him, we get an overly frantic performance – he’s the rat-a-tat of Cagney’s gun. As for her, it doesn’t help that Raveena Tandon shows up (no explanation) in a couple of numbers and effortlessly embodies what being a diva is all about. Anushka, in comparison, looks like she’s auditioning for the part of Little Nell. The Dickens reference isn’t entirely accidental. An early scene where a young Johnny befriends a pickpocket reminded me of Oliver Twist and the Artful Dodger. But that’s what archetypes are. They’ve been around forever.

A number of actors come and go in supporting parts. Kay Kay Menon. A cigar-chomping Manish Choudhary. Siddhartha Basu. Remo Fernandes. They say their lines, they try to look as if they believe in them, they pick up their cheques, they’re out – you probably won’t care. Satyadeep Misra does a little more. He tries to add some dimensionality to the thankless role of best friend. (He’s the Artful Dodger, all grown up.) I liked the way he looked at Rosie after he discovers the truth about her. It’s just a shot, but we get an idea of what’s going on in his head. Vivaan Shah is there too. He’s replaying his role of shy-young-guy-in-love-with-the-heroine from 7 Khoon Maaf. As a reward, he gets to show his face during the song Mohabbat buri beemari. He’s down with a bad case of love. The film keeps doing this, it keeps using songs to underline emotions. When Rosie first meets Johnny, she’s singing Geeta Dutt’s Jaata kahan hai deewane; the line hai yeh pehli mulaquat seems to have been written for them. And when she re-enters his life with a sinister purpose, we get Behroopiya. The best songs – the ones that probably bring us closest to the movie Kashyap had inside his head – are Darbaan, which talks of the gatekeepers of the establishment who won’t let Johnny in, and the speakers-busting Dhadaam dhadaam, a devastating heartbreak number that the scarily good Neeti Mohan sings in the fashion of a Verdi heroine who wandered into a Duke Ellington recording session. Anushka’s mascara streaks notwithstanding, I kept imagining what Raveena Tandon would have done with this song.

Kaizad Khambata gets no songs. He needs no songs, for he gets the juiciest lines and scenes. Watch him react to a mill workers’ union chief who pronounces “ideology” as ideo-low-gy.  And at least from his side, he shares quite the love-hate relationship with Johnny, eyes frequently pooling with tears. The scene where he decides to nickname this young man Johnny is quite something. Kaizad checks out Johnny’s butt, then his eyes drop to Johnny’s crotch as he decides on the name. I wasn’t sure if there was something there, so I looked up urbandictionary.com. And what do you know, I found this against “Johnny”: “One who has an incredibly oversized cock.” Okay, so maybe Johnny is just a nod to the name of Robert De Niro’s character in Scorsese’s Mean Streets. But the earlier meaning does make sense, given the ripely Freudian scene where Kaizad finds himself at the receiving end of Johnny’s frenzied thrusting.

Apart from the scenes with Kaizad, there are some nice moments with Johnny and Rosie. In one, he abuses her and she slaps him and he slaps her back and she brings a chair down on him and begins to laugh. The laugh is a bracing splash of vodka. It changes the dynamics of the scene – and of her character, who’s a victim of physical abuse. It’s almost a mad moment. In another scene, they bicker again and she finds she has a limp. You wish these scenes were longer. And a joke about Santa Claus is a scream. Bombay Velvet needed more of these tangents, more of these characters and their mad moments.

Instead, Kashyap keeps cutting away to his big story about the transformation of Bombay. The technical contributions that bring the period alive are astonishing, and it’s evident a lot of research is up there –  given the preponderance of jazz in Amit Trivedi’s marvellous score there’s even a mention of Chic Chocolate, one of the many Goan musicians who ended up contributing to Hindi film music. But all this research suggests a TV miniseries. How can so many specific details result in a film so generic? Bombay Velvet looks horribly shrunk. I’d like to see all the footage that was edited out. Maybe that will make the film more of a piece. The second half, especially, goes all over the place, a grab bag of desperate invention. There’s a bomb blast. There’s gonorrhoea. There’s a Tommy gun. There’s a line of dialogue that tells us it’s a Tommy gun. I threw my hands up. I kept thinking about Mahesh Bhatt’s Kabzaa, which was also about a young man with criminal tendencies caught between two powerful men and their fight over a piece of land. Call it unfashionable melodrama, but at least that movie moved, physically and emotionally.

I was also reminded of Peter Biskind’s book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How The Sex-Drugs-And-Rock ‘N’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood. The book begins with the release of Easy Rider in 1969. Its success paved the way for New Hollywood, which resulted in the rise of auteurs like Scorsese and Coppola and Bogdanovich and a remarkable series of films. And then, it all ended about a decade later when these directors, after making their name, graduated to big budgets and flopped badly, not just financially but also critically. Scorsese bombed with New York, New York. Coppola bombed with One From the Heart. The last chapter of the book is titled “We Blew It”. As I write this, I hear Bombay Velvet isn’t doing well. At least Scorsese, after a lean period, made a major comeback. I guess now Kashyap will have to be inspired by that Scorsese story too.

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…

What an odd title: Tanu Weds Manu Returns. Considering the audience just needs to be told that this is a sequel, was Tanu and Manu Again unavailable? Tanu Weds Manu Returns sounds like Tanu weds and Manu returns. The blue-penciller in me kept wanting to insert a comma midway. Though, really, it’s Tanu who returns. As the film begins – this, too, is directed by Anand L Rai – we see the Tanu-Manu wedding which was promised in the earlier film. Soon, we are told it’s four years later. The festive Indian colours give way to chilly Western ones. Tanu (Kangana Ranaut) and Manu (R Madhavan) are in England. Their marriage is on the rocks. So they do what every troubled couple does. They go to a… mental rehabilitation centre. Yup. Clearly, marriage counsellors are so last century. He says she’s bipolar. She says he’s boring. He says she’s a flirt. She says he’s a pervert, alluding to the best scene in the first film, where he took a picture of her as she lay sleeping. It was a creepy-cute moment that made you wonder where things were going. Nowhere special, it turned out. Anyway, Tanu gets Manu committed and returns to her hometown, Kanpur.

This is an awful, outlandish contrivance and I could never get past it. I see what this scene is doing. It’s trying to remind us how impulsive Tanu is. But why not think up something more plausible to tell us the marriage is over? I would have believed it if Tanu had simply woken up in the middle of the night, packed her bags and headed to the airport. Because she is that way. That’s why we like her. That’s why we are maddened and frustrated by her. And it’s easy to see why Manu feels all these things too. What’s not so easy to buy is the whole marriage. The fact that they are separated after four years is less surprising than the fact that they lasted that long. She’s a firecracker. He’s a bath towel. It might have helped if we’d seen a few scenes from their marriage.

Once Tanu is back in Kanpur, the film picks up speed for a while. Rai is the anti-Zoya Akhtar. He thinks in Hindi. This isn’t just about the great lines dripping with ghee (I howled when a translator went from “[night]club” to “Gymkhana”), or the rooted, small-town atmosphere. It’s that his reference points are all from Hindi cinema. He likes to feature old songs. Tanu Weds Manu Returns begins with Sun sahiba sun playing over the wedding. And near the end, we get a song sequence where a heartbroken Tanu dances at Manu’s wedding – he’s back in India too, and he’s getting married to Kusum (Kangana again), who looks like Tanu. Through the song, I kept thinking what a strange, Pakeezah-like moment this was – Sahibjaan dancing at Salim’s wedding – and sure enough, a poster of Pakeezah is glimpsed a little later. The lookalike, of course, was a staple of Hindi films of a certain era – you could point to Sharmilee, say. (In a Zoya Akhtar movie, you’d have pointed to Vertigo.)

And somewhere in between, we have a nod to another love triangle, Aar Paar. Ja ja ja ja bewafa plays on the soundtrack, and it could have been written for this film. Tanu accuses Manu of bewafaii, infidelity. That’s not a word you hear very often in the post-multiplex Hindi movie. This stretch of song is lovely. It’s night. There’s Geeta Dutt’s voice. And Rai stages nice little bits. Tanu, a glass of whiskey in hand, stumbles upon a beggar. She steps into a beauty parlour and tries on a wig that makes her look like Kusum. But the song comes out of nowhere. This level of sadness, this level of longing needs to be built up to. I was reminded of last week’s Bombay Velvet, where Dhadaam dhadaam erupted out of nowhere. Songs this big need the grounding of equally big emotions. Think Tanhayee in Dil Chahta Hai. It works because it’s the culmination of a journey; it’s the epiphany the film has been building towards. This film uses its equivalent of Tanhayee as if it were just another song, as if it were Jaane kyon log pyaar karte hain. I was relieved when O saathi mere – sung exquisitely by Sonu Nigam; my favourite in a very strong soundtrack by Krsna Solo – was simply used as background music; otherwise, we’d have been wondering at what point Manu was feeling what Sonu Nigam was feeling.

It’s understandable that Rai doesn’t want to get too emotional, he wants to keep things light and entertaining – but the premise is anything but. Or maybe I should say premises. There’s a lot in here. Empowerment messages. A subplot about artificial insemination. A khap-panchayat scenario. There are many characters and they keep cluttering up the plot. Of course, this gives us the chance to see a lot of good actors – Swara Bhaskar, Deepak Dobriyal, Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub, and especially KK Raina, who plays Manu’s father and has a standout scene where he advises his son about marriage, even as his wife keeps screeching in the background. But these characters are given very little to do, and you wish more time had been devoted to Tanu and Manu. Early on, he refers to their sex life. Wouldn’t that have been something to see? Tanu blindfolds Manu and he thinks there’s been a blackout. Or something.

Even Kusum is a bit of a cipher, though Kangana plays her beautifully. (Tanu and Kusum truly seem to be portrayed by two different actresses. It isn’t just the externals. This is acting from the inside out. I hope that the fact that this is a “light” movie doesn’t prevent Kangana from being recognised richly for her work.) Manu answers our question when he says he doesn’t know why he’s fallen for Kusum, though it’s clear that he loves the idea of Tanu and because he can’t seem to live with the version he has, he’s looking for a close-enough replacement. But we know he’s going to end up with Tanu – and besides making the film extremely boring after a point, this makes Kusum collateral damage. (She’s got Jimmy Shergill’s Raja for company. He, too, is hurt in the crossfire between Tanu and Manu.)

But maybe this is what makes Rai’s films at least a little special. Whether in Raanjhanaa or in his Tanu-Manu outings, he isn’t afraid to show us unlikeable, borderline-crazy people – and this is unusual in a mainstream love story. People get hurt in his films. People die. The Abhay Deol character in Raanjhanaa was killed in the crossfire between Dhanush and Sonam. Kusum and Raja just happen to be in a lighter movie, with great sight gags like the one where we see Sardars dancing the dandiya. Remove these gags and you have the push-pull romance between two terribly self-absorbed people. Despite his stolidness (and solidness, I must say; Madhavan is doing for heroes what Bhumi Pednekar and Vidya Balan are doing for heroines), Manu is as much a flake as Tanu is. He seems to care more about his promise to Kusum that he’ll marry her (again, a Hindi-cinema thing, that whole vachan concept), even after Tanu re-enters his life and makes him re-evaluate his feelings. For the first time, I felt that he did belong in a mental rehabilitation centre.

At least Tanu is more fun. She’s a magnificent flake. When she returns to Kanpur, she sees an old friend – an old flame, maybe – who’s now a rickshaw-wallah.  She hops in and asks him, “Meri yaad aati hai? Kab?” This question is as impulsive as the hug she gives him when they reach her home – her parents look on horrified. Another lovely scene has her wondering if she should call Manu and say she’s sorry. As if it’s all a game. But Rai grounds Tanu, he tells us why she is this way – because her father (Rajendra Gupta) has spoilt her, not raising his voice ever. He’s someone else I felt the movie could have used more of, because when a couple splits up in the India of Anand L Rai, the smaller towns and cities, the parents end up as collateral damage too.

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…

Luck By Chance, Zoya Akhtar’s first and best film, is also one of the most dispiriting movies ever made. You know those books you find in the self-help section? This was the exact opposite. Consider its… lessons, if you will. Everything’s a fluke. All the hard work in the world may not get you what you want. You may have to sleep around to get ahead. Your friends may not be all that happy for you when you succeed. But that probably won’t matter, as you’re going to have to trample over their feelings if you want to get anywhere. It doesn’t matter if you’re a self-absorbed prick; great things may still happen to you. No wonder the movie bombed. It was too much like reality. Akhtar learnt her lesson and went on to make Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, which was pure fantasy. One small road trip with best buddies is all it takes to teach you to seize the day, gaze at the stars, have lots of great sex, mend relationships, and have all manner of life-altering epiphanies. It’s the kind of thing people like to hear. It didn’t hurt that the film looked like the love child of a glossy tourism brochure and Kate Middleton’s wedding cake. To put things in perspective, Hrithik Roshan was only the fourth or fifth most beautiful thing on screen.

Akhtar’s third film, Dil Dhadakne Do, takes its title from the song that played over the opening credits of Zindagi, and like that film, this, too, is a road movie –rather, a sea movie. A super-rich Punjabi patriarch – Kamal Mehra (Anil Kapoor) – and his wife Neelam (Shefali Shah) invite family and friends on a cruise to Turkey and Greece to celebrate their thirtieth wedding anniversary. As with Zindagi, the metaphors write themselves. Families are like a cruise – you’re stuck with the same people. Sometimes, the voyage is choppy. Sometimes there are clear skies. You may find yourself adrift, but, at the end of the day (not to mention the end of the movie), your family is your lifeboat, saving you from drowning, getting you safely to shore. In an early scene, Kamal sees his son Kabir (Ranveer Singh) in a spot of trouble during a business presentation, and he jumps in to save Kabir. There’s an echo of this at the end – Kamal literally jumps in to save Kabir. Some people learn screenwriting from Syd Field. Zoya Akhtar appears to have learnt the craft from a shoelace. Everything crisscrosses and loops around just so, in neat little bows.

Of course, there are worse things than fetishistically engineered (some might say twee) feel-good movies – and at least the idea behind Dil Dhadakne Do is a good one. This is essentially an update of a 1960s family melodrama. It’s all here – the line about how, after marriage, beti parayi ho gayi; the concern over log kya kahenge when they hear about a divorce; the mangni toot gayi tragedy; a father’s expectation that his daughter should gift him a grandson; the rich girl falling in love with her father’s manager ka beta… These tropes are refracted through a soap-opera prism, and staged with an emphasis on setting and character that those older films did not bother too much with. Neelam, for instance, is a stress eater – she worries about her weight and is often seen in front of mirrors. Kabir likes to fly. Kabir’s brother-in-law Manav (an ill-fitting Rahul Bose; just wait till you see him attempt a wolf whistle in a song) – he’s married to Kabir’s sister Ayesha (Priyanka Chopra) – is a mama’s boy. Mama, meanwhile, keeps announcing that she’s suffering – from vertigo, from asthma, from arthritis. And the family pet, a bullmastiff named Pluto Mehra, likes to dispense trite observations in Aamir Khan’s voice, neon-highlighting the goings-on. Maybe this is Akhtar acknowledging that Khan is the industry’s top dog.

On paper, this is a can’t-go-wrong situation. A lot of good-looking stars, many of them good actors. A director who has the most exquisite taste. And a complicit audience, aware that this is one of those times we are at the doctor’s reception room and, after a cursory glance at the magazines, are going to choose People over The Caravan. But the film never finds its footing, and it’s not just the language. I have spoken earlier about the LHHE syndrome in the Akhtar siblings’ films: “Listening Hindi, Hearing English.” Kamal hears of Kabir’s relationship with Noorie (Ridhima Sud) and asks, “Tumhaare iraade kya hain?” It’s an American father from the fifties asking, “What are your intentions, young man?” Couldn’t he just say something like “Us ladki ke saath tum kya kar rahe ho?” Elsewhere, from a broken-hearted Noorie, we get this gem: “Mera fiancé ne mujhe mandap pe chhod diya.” Oh no, sweetheart. You’d have said you got dumped.

After a while, it’s easy enough to overlook this – it is what it is. What’s unforgivable is the complete absence of life. The only heart that’s beating here is the one in the title. There’s a difference between finely detailed and just… slow. Sitting through the 170 minutes (seriously?) of Dil Dhadakne Do is like entering a five-star hotel. The outside noise disappears. It’s all very hush-hush. You feel you’re stuck in an elevator and the damn muzak won’t stop. When Karan Johar made a similar multi-starrer about a dysfunctional upper-crust family, he infused the proceedings with deliciously vulgar energy. The look may have been five-star but the feel was like that of a ghee-soaked dhaba. It was silly, it was fun. Scene after farcical scene in Dil Dhadakne Do cries out for Almodóvarian camp, but Akhtar seems to think she’s staging Chekhov. All those silences. All those meaningful looks. All those carefully calibrated line readings. You may wonder if, after filling out the soapy plot with Reema Kagti (whose Honeymoon Travels Pvt. Ltd. was another journey filled with dysfunction, though on a bus), Akhtar experienced some kind of soap-opera twist herself, amnesia or something. What else could explain the disconnect between the material and the movie?

Every problem is a cliché. Every outcome is preordained. And there are too many characters with too little to do. Son wants to step out of domineering dad’s shadow, daughter wants to end an unhappy marriage, and so forth. Had any one of these issues been stretched to movie length, it may have been affecting, but with Akhtar directing with a finger on the fast-forward button, there’s nothing and no one to care about. Yes, this is a light film and not really a drama, but it’s so airless that even the screwball bits – except the ones that involve Kabir; Ranveer Singh is a lot of fun– don’t get a chance to breathe. I liked the subplot with Ayesha, who’s a fascinating character. She’s an achiever, but her successes haven’t given her much confidence, probably because she’s been so undermined all her life. There’s a great scene where she pushes Manav away in bed and then feels sorry (or guilty; or maybe both) and reaches out to him again. These terrific shadings deserve a life-size portrait. We get a picture postcard.

The parts with Kabir and Farha (Anushka Sharma) have some zing. I loved the cut to Ayesha’s face when Kabir tells his parents about Farha. You expect a cut to their horrified faces. But here, we see Ayesha thinking, Dude, did you just say what I think you said? It’s nice to see Anil Kapoor’s eighties-style intensity bounce off Farhan Akhtar’s two-decades-later nonchalance. The latter plays a Caravan-style journalist named Sunny, who’s slightly bemused in the midst of all these People. I wanted more of him. His last scene is a joke – not the nice kind. Note to Zoya: The next time you make one of your life-is-a-journey movies, probably on a plane, with Louboutin-heeled stewardesses, write a bigger role for your brother. Even if his costar is just a Hermès bag.

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