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MORAL BOOSTER

Sunny Deol returns in a morality-play thriller that’s not exactly bad, but not much good either. Plus, a skit that’s too slight to amount to anything.

MAR 14, 2010 – WITHIN THE FIRST FEW MINUTES OF NEERAJ PATHAK’S Right Yaaa Wrong, we witness a car speeding through rain-slicked streets. A quick close-up of a license plate being changed, and the camera dollies into a home where an invalid rests on a wheelchair. Shots are fired, a hand hangs limply, and we cut to the legend “Six months before…” As openings of tightly wound thrillers go, this one crackles and pops – it yanks us by the collar to the point where we will not rest until we know what happened and why. Sadly, though, nothing in the endless minutes that ensue live up to the tautness of this beginning. It’s hard to say what exactly goes wrong with Right Yaaa Wrong (well, other than that Tarzan-yell of a misspelling in the middle), but I think the downslide begins the instant Sunny Deol pops up with prosthetic buckteeth. (He’s apparently a master of disguise, this cop named Ajay. Translation: no one save the jeering audience will recognise him from his multifarious avatars.)

Ajay is the kind of cop who will leap over an oncoming van and shoot, through the opaque roof, a bullet into a passenger’s thigh. (The victim is a villain, naturally, and he’s named Boris, which makes you imagine a defector from behind the Iron Curtain with an ice-blonde moll named Natasha – he’s played, instead, by Aryan Vaid.) Ajay is not only superhumanly brave, he’s also supremely good-hearted. He lets go a kid who got mixed up with these bad eggs because a destitute mother required hospital attention. And thus the film’s central conflict is set up, the battle between right and wrong. Should the law be followed to the letter, or should extenuating circumstances and emotion be taken into account? Ajay’s colleague Vinay (Irrfan, who delivers the best performance, though with Sunny Deol and the numerologically rechristened Eesha Koppikhar around, that’s a bit like being amazed by Gulliver’s size in Lilliput) is more hard-bitten. He argues that the kid should be jailed, and in reply to his anger, Ajay flips on the car radio, which responds with Koi haseena jab rooth jaati hai to from Sholay.

The clash between the opposing forces of the title – and between Ajay and Vinay – is played out through a twisty tale involving insurance money, a cuckolded husband, a wily wife, and the hunk she’s having an affair with. But this isn’t Double Indemnity – that plot, instead, is turned on its head into something that, at least on paper, must have looked promising. But the story’s emotional implications aren’t explored, the moral vacillations are shortchanged, and, most damagingly, the thrills aren’t quite thrilling. The big reveal is squandered right after interval point, which leaves the rest of the film mute spectator to the dreary sport of one-upmanship between Ajay and Vinay. These latter portions are graced by Konkona Sen Sharma, who shows up, rather mystifyingly, well into the second half as one of those all-in-one heroines – a potential love interest for Ajay, a mother to his child, and a lawyer who steps into the courtroom to fight for what she feels is right. For some reason, Monty’s songs are entirely devoid of beats, and that feels entirely in sync with a film that struggles to get any kind of rhythm going.

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THE FOLLICULARLY CHALLENGED AMONGST US might be inclined to view Rahul Aggarwal, director and leading man of Na Ghar Ke Na Ghaat Ke, with more empathy than he deserves. Here, finally, is a protagonist – not some supine sidekick – whose dome is depleting rapidly, and who will resort to neither hairpiece nor hat. He’s balding, and there’s nothing he can do about it, and he’ll court neither sympathy nor smirks. He just goes about his business like any other man on the street – the chap with the ripening paunch, say, or his cohort with the hirsute man-breasts. We’ve gotten to such a point in our films – our Hindi films, at any rate – where we worship the waxed and the wonderful that there doesn’t seem any possible space for an unheroic hero like Amol Palekar, him of the hawk nose and the hesitant gait, who carried film after successful film on his underdeveloped deltoids. It is, therefore, genuine cause for celebration when the reflector lights bounce off Aggarwal’s shiny forehead, as he makes his appearance as Devki Nandan Tripathi.

Unfortunately, shared genetic connections can only take one so far in the enjoyment of a movie. After the initial burst of recognition, we need a story to care about built on characters worth following around – and this genial television-level skit (imagine the feel of Piya Ka Ghar routed through the sensibilities of Hrishikesh Mukherjee by way of Priyadarshan) is too slight to amount to anything. Devki hails from a nondescript village where the walls advertise impotence cures through a single pill and whose elders stash their money inside their underwear, thus necessitating the unloosening of pyjama drawstrings whenever cash is required. He travels to Mumbai for a job, where his fish-out-of-water status (as contrasted with a slick-operator flat-mate, played by an appropriately loud Ravi Kishan) is milked for mild chuckles. But when his new wife (Narayani Shastri) falls into trouble with the police, Devki cannot afford to be a simpleton any longer – he has to employ the wiles of the wicked city dweller. In the face of a narrative that grows increasingly preposterous under the guise of peddling small-town charm, Om Puri and Paresh Rawal do what they can to justify their hopefully heavy salaries.

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PHONE BHOOT

Spooky 5 a.m. calls perk up a wallflower-loser in an eerie urban-nightmare that’s terrific for the most part.

FEB 28, 2010 – THE EPONYMOUS UNDERACHIEVER in Karthik Calling Karthik (superbly portrayed by Farhan Akhtar) lives in a washed-up apartment whose walls are as bare as his life. The only people in his sad little existence are the landlord who bullies him, the boss who berates him, and the girl of his dreams (Deepika Padukone’s Shonali) who doesn’t know his name despite four years of inhabiting the same office. The film’s prime metaphor is the Rubik’s Cube that Karthik keeps shuffling between his twitchy fingers – despite endless tries, the coloured squares are all awry. He is alone, even on his birthday, and what better instrument to aid his pathetic attempts at connection than the telephone? If no one else will talk to him, if no else will be friends with him, he will speak to himself, he will befriend himself. That appears to be the subconsciously surreal conceit behind the occurrence of Karthik beginning to receive calls from a voice that sounds like his, and belonging to someone with a name like his. It’s Karthik calling Karthik.

The Karthik at the other end of the line is Tyler Durden to our meek corporate-drone protagonist — part motivational speaker, part messiah– and he delivers the Karthik at this end from the soul-crushing banality of his existence. Under his empathetic urging, Karthik transforms into something of a rock-star rebel. He subdues his landlord, squashes his boss, and he sweeps Shonali off the feet that cap her never-ending legs. Most importantly, he solves that pesky Rubik’s Cube – the pieces of his life are finally in place. The first-time director Vijay Lalwani gets a real rhythm going in these early scenes, aided by the deadpan charms of his peerless leading man (is there an actor who can put over a quip with a better sense of self-deprecation?) and Padukone’s pitch-perfect embodiment of the ice-goddess object of Karthik’s geeky affections. Lalwani is not a showy filmmaker. Like the siblings Farhan and Zoya Akhtar, he achieves his emotional effects by observing from a discreet distance – the first time we sense Karthik and Shonali are in love is not through express demonstrations but rather through the camera that rises up behind them and lingers on the golden sunset in front. The mood sets up the meaning.

And yet, you know things aren’t quite right, thanks to the low-key dread conjured up right from the opening credits, over Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy’s appropriately alienated score – layers upon layers of eerily disorienting machine-music. And sure enough, the placid surfaces of the story begin to ripple with quasi-existential urban nightmares, reminiscent of No Smoking. (There’s an offhand moment, early on, where Shonali lights up in her office while ignoring a sign that clearly states there’s no smoking allowed, and I wonder if that’s some sort of nod to Anurag Kashyap’s now-notorious trawl through Kafka-land.) The voice at the other end takes possessive control over Karthik – who becomes increasingly addicted to this form of self-help, delivered, seemingly, through his own self; after all, it beats listening to his brutally practical shrink (whom Shefali Shah imbues with a characteristic blend of softness and steel) – and the film crawls into a fascinating zone that’s both disarming and disturbing. Karthik’s situation leaves you at once charmed and creeped-out.

The final stretch, though, is underwhelming. The subdued scenario called for a more abstract resolution, and the big reveal is too literal. While it isn’t difficult to understand the commercial logic behind the overly explanatory deconstruction of the mysterious goings-on – who, really, wants another befuddling bomb like No Smoking on their hands? – it’s hard to shake off the sense of dismay that this is all there is to it. Lalwani is too classy a filmmaker to stoop to simplistic Freudian fixes (despite hints at a childhood trauma) and schlocky gotcha! effects – even when Karthik awakens from a sweaty nightmare, he merely opens his eyes; there’s no sitting up with a jolt to the accompaniment of soundtrack hysteria – so we’re denied the thrills that would normally accompany such a premise. It’s easier, therefore, to view Karthik Calling Karthik as a love story between two damaged souls – she’s been in too many bad relationships; he’s been in none – in an age where we’re all slave to too much technology. How are our lives impacted by the remote control studded with endless rows of buttons when all we need is the power-on and mute and channel up/down? That’s the question that may hover in a thought bubble over your head while walking out of this absorbing anti-thriller.

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DOUBLE TROUBLE

A dramedy about groom-hunting that promises only to deceive. Plus, a shocker about ghost-hunting that promises only to deceive.

FEB 21, 2010 – TABU, MORE OFTEN THAN NOT, is an actress nobody knows what to do with. She isn’t – and she never was, praise the heavens – a stick-figure siren capable of seducing the multiplexes. (It’s only the rare MF Husain who will even begin to think about venturing into her Amazonian voluptuousness.) As for the other side of the actress, courtesy the reputation of an industrial-strength role-inhabiter, she appears to have peaked a little too early, in the pre-plex era. The films, today, that amble along the path less trodden – Ishqiya, say, or even Kurbaan – opt for younger actresses whose lesser skills are counterbalanced by greater star power. (Tabu may be a pyromaniacal performer, but she’s never quite set the box-office on fire.) So, at first, Kedarh Shinde’s Toh Baat Pakki seems little more than a pocket-money project for the actress, a means of prodding the public memory while making a tidy bit of cash till the next truly worthy offer trundles along.

But as this dramedy begins to roll, we’re in for a mild surprise. We’re thrust into the kind of India that isn’t quite shining on screen these days – it’s Palanpur, a bustling anyplace where people still bond over community names like Saxena, where dowry is still a millstone on the bride’s family, where one-upmanship with gossipy neighbours is still a rousing sport, where bashful youngsters still count on much-venerated elders to fix them up with matrimonial alliances (and where a perfectly ordinary looking engineer-to-be like Sharman Joshi, who plays Rahul, is considered a prize catch), where the Hindu hero’s best friend is the local Muslim paan-wala, and where the ideals of Mahatma Gandhi still mean something.

Better yet, there is – at least on paper – the sketch for a magnificent character in Rajeshwari, the über-controlling elder sister that Tabu portrays. She showers affection on Rahul, hoping to marry him off to her sibling Nisha (Yuvika Choudhary), and when the richer, handsomer Yuvraj (Vatsal Sheth) steps through the threshold. Rajeshwari, quietly, packs Rahul away and begins to dream about Yuvraj and Nisha spending the rest of their lives together. As such, she comes across as a callous vamp who values success and status over more humane qualities – but a little earlier, we’re shown that Rajeshwari is the pillar of the family. Her mother, a vestige of a more chauvinistic age, comments that Rajeshwari takes such good care of them that she’s more son than daughter – and Rajeshwari replies that she is a daughter, and that daughters take far better care of parents than sons.

The way Rajeshwari sees it, she’s more than the man of the family – she’s the woman of the family. And that means that the tough decisions, the ones no one likes to take, are hers. (She’s like the iron-fisted matriarch Dina Pathak played in Khubsoorat.) When her husband – the henpecked Surendar (Ayub Khan), who prefers Rahul to Yuvraj – demands what she will do if she located, tomorrow, a Saxena-surnamed bachelor worthier than Yuvraj, Rajeshwari replies that she’ll marry off Nisha to the newcomer. Not an eyelid is batted. It’s her responsibility to ensure happily-ever-after for her sister, and she will do whatever it takes – the feelings of Rahul are of minor consequence. He’s a good man, yes, but her sister deserves the best. The character of Rajeshwari embodies not only the traditional middle-class desperation of finding a good match but also the wily determination to achieve this end at any cost.

What a pity, then, that this character – like the others – is mired in an appalling hodgepodge of drollery and drama. The director can’t decide if he wants to coast along with weak laughs or dive into fascinatingly flawed humans. The result is dull beyond belief, with amateur-hour plot contrivances involving missing diamond rings and botched kidnap attempts and an akhada-based wrestler-uncle (the aptly surnamed Sharat Saxena). This isn’t even cinema – just TV-style drama with shot after shot of talking heads. The attempt may have been to emulate the light-hearted family entertainers popularised by the likes of Hrishikesh Mukherjee – who, incidentally, would never have staged a generic soniye-heeriye bhangra-rock celebration during a Kayasth engagement ceremony – but there was more to those films than just the grim grind of plot machinery. When Surendar hands his son money to buy kulfi, Rajeshwari snatches it away citing the boy’s health as reason, and we move to the next clinically calculated scene. Mukherjee, however, would have paused for a moment of empathy, giving us the father’s attempts to cheer the crushed child behind the mother’s back. That’s the difference between a pretender and a pro.

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MORE DISAPPOINTMENT ARRIVES VIA Sangeeth Sivan’s Click, with Shreyas Talpade and Sada inhabiting the barely believable parts of a photographer-with-a-past and his excessively loyal girlfriend. Taking a cue from the preternatural premise, the film, too, could have broken free from its earthbound confines. The plot – from the Thai horror hit Shutter, which also formed the basis for the Tamil remake Sivi – is a Shyamalanesque stunner, with an accumulative twist you’ll never see coming. And while there are plenty of shock-cut scenes (with jangly sound design) intended to keep the heart hammering, Click is also about the heart in an entirely different respect – about its capacity to cling endlessly to love. Unfortunately, what could have been a prime entry in the hitherto underserved elegiac-horror-as-gothic-romance subgenre is reduced to a mere jump-out-of-your-seats exercise. That said, though, such an exercise demands its own cluster of skills and has its own clutch of fans, whose screams are sure to overpower the complaints of the critic.

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MY NAME IS CORN?

Shah Rukh Khan shines in a dully earnest drama that bites off too much and chews on too little.

FEB 14, 2010 – THE RHYTHMS OF MY NAME IS KHAN aren’t at all what you’d expect from a Karan Johar extravaganza – or, for that matter, a standard-issue Indian melodrama. Take, for instance, the moment where Rizwan Khan (Shah Rukh Khan, in an endearing performance that organically showcases his natural hyper-energy) is almost flattened by a San Franciscan tram. We’re at a point in the film where we’re primed for the introduction of the heroine (the hairdresser Mandira, played by Kajol), and we expect her to charge across the street and push Rizwan out of harm’s way (especially as, by now, we’ve gotten used to the heroines in Shah Rukh-starrers being more heroic than the hero; the actor continues his charming on-screen emasculation by sporting, in a later scene, a woman’s oversized overalls) – but that’s not how things happen, and neither do we catch that long-awaited glimpse of Mandira. It’s a muted introduction. We hear her voice – that distinctive nasal screech – and we see the back of her head, and then she vanishes into the wings, waiting to resurface in dazzling, full-frontal glory.

Take this other scene where, after a few shy encounters with Mandira, Rizwan proposes marriage. At that precise instant, as if ordained by the gods of Classic Melodrama, she receives a call. It’s from someone named (gasp!) Sameer, and Mandira signs off by declaring (gasp!), “I love you.” Even if we recognise fully well that this is but the reddest of herrings, we expect a degree of emotional conflict before Rizwan (and we) discover who Sameer really is – but, again, this revelation comes through quietly, and through a completely unexpected agency. In a similar fashion, the true-love moment, the point where we know Rizwan is well and truly besotted by Mandira, is also free of fireworks. He’s an autistic (the specific condition is Asperger’s Syndrome) and he cannot bear to be touched, and yet he allows her to cut his hair, which is as close as he can probably come to clambering onto a rooftop and announcing to the world that he’s in love.

In a childhood flashback, Rizwan sees his younger brother Zakir (Jimmy Shergill) in tears and muses, “Zakir bahut khushnaseeb tha… Ro sakta tha.” Rizwan is incapable of expressing that kind – or possibly any kind – of emotion, and it’s as if Johar and his writers adopted a similar strategy, deciding not to wallow in that kind of emotion, the kind we expect from our melodramas. There are certainly passages intended to bulldoze us to tears, but My Name is Khan is unusually (and unnecessarily) restrained – even the palette is drained of the bright colours of, say, the Chandni Chowk stretches from Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, and there’s no adrenaline-busting Rock ‘n’ Roll Soniye shot with every available Klieg light from every single Mumbai studio. (Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy, meanwhile, contribute a shockingly generic score.) You are left with the feeling that, stung by criticisms of his larger-than-larger-than-life filmmaking style, the director retreated all the way to the other end, at least to the extent possible while still retaining the must-haves of the Great Indian Melodrama.

The niggling question, inevitably, is why anyone would bother with the apparently oxymoronic conceit of a muted melodrama – but the more pressing issue is how a film could pack in so much and yet accomplish so little. There is the story thread of a mother (an effective Zarina Wahab, who makes a difference simply by virtue of not having played this part in a hundred other movies) so obsessed with her elder son that the younger child ends up neglected. Sanjay Leela Bhansali milked a similar situation for a very affecting dinner-table showdown in Black, and you’d think that such a turn of events would make Johar salivate with shiny eyes – but he isn’t interested in pursuing that path. There is the other storyline, reminiscent of Swathi Muthyam and its remake Eeshwar, about a not-quite-there man adapting to domesticity with a woman and her son (in a seriously cute moment, Rizwan prepares for his wedding night by poring over “Intercourse for Dummies,” which, he declares, has excellent pictures) – but Johar doesn’t want to go down that route either.

Either of these developments – along with a detour about a mother’s quest for justice – would have made for an entire (and altogether more fascinating) movie, but Johar relegates them to the background, as half-hearted subplots, in order to clear the stage for a bleeding-heard screed about the plight of the modern-day Muslim, after the events of 9/11 branded even innocent practitioners of the religion with the scar of suspicion. My Name is Khan is a sprawling lesson on Islam as narrated by a Gump-like holy fool, an innocent, a man-child fashioned along the lines of the child in the Capra-esque Ab Dilli Door Nahin who set out to meet the Indian Prime Minister in order to right wrongs. The crux of the film’s message is embedded in this single statement that Rizwan seeks to deliver to the American president: “My name is Khan, and I am not a terrorist.”

And with his ambition of weaving a tapestry that encompasses every imaginable stripe of humankind – an East Asian who suspects Rizwan of being a terrorist, a Latin American detective who heads a murder investigation, an African American family that offers Rizwan refuge, the white all-Americans who live next door to Rizwan and Mandira – Johar becomes slack with the threads involving the locals we could have come to care about. (Mandira, in particular, is mercilessly lopped off from the latter portions. She declares, at one point, that she cannot be a wife as she has to be, first, a mother to her child, but her role as mother is written as an apparent afterthought. She’s, first and foremost, Khan’s wife.) The intriguing complications in these lives are insultingly smoothed over – even a victim of stabbing wakes up barely a few seconds later, because we cannot stoop to bother with the petty problems of people when there’s such a Higher Noble Purpose to be served – and as a result, most characters end up being abstract manifestations of ideology, not so much personalities as pawns to hammer home a one-note agenda.

And that is the film’s undoing, at least for a certain type of viewer. Early on, Rizwan’s mother instills in him that the schism that splits people isn’t about being Hindu or Muslim but about being good or bad – and I’d venture that a similar rift exists between people outside of the movie screen. There’s one kind of moviegoer who values well-intentioned purpose over personality-driven conflict – the kind that assesses the impact of a narrative based on the heft of its neon-lit message – and then there’s the moviegoer who’d rather watch stories about people and not issues, and who doesn’t mind message-movies as long as the message is buried someplace deep below the lives of the characters. The former is the type of viewer who possibly wakes up with a broad smile and hugs everyone in the vicinity and is complacent in the belief that the ills of the world can be cured by a celluloid-strip band-aid, preferably one with tiny heart-shaped designs.

I am not that viewer, and I’m sure there are other crusty curmudgeons who feel borderline-insulted when lectured at by fat-cat filmmakers with more money than they know what to do with, so that they can ease their conscience about having made all that money in the first place. (It’s like those disaffected rock stars who make their millions and then whine, through their lyrics, about how lousy life is, how everything is just doom and gloom.) My Name is Khan is filled with this spirit of atonement. It’s a film with a single-minded purpose, and with sequence after Muslims-are-people-too sequence, I began to long for Johar to step off the podium and revert to what he’s good at, la-la land stories about The Bowled-over and the Beautiful. His idea about life elsewhere is alarmingly simplistic. One of the most embarrassing passages here involves a Southern black family right out of Gone with the Wind – they sho’ ah po’ but ah’ll be damned if dem don’t take time off their cotton-pickin’ lives to praise the Lawd. (And when disaster strikes, wouldn’t you know it, Khan is the only man in all of America who hunkers down to help.)

Other broad-strokes depictions include an incipient terrorist organisation that discusses its plans in the great wide open, a schoolteacher who instructs tiny tots that Islam is the most violent religion, and a candle-light vigil for the 9/11 departed where Rizwan sports the traditional taqiyah simply so that the camera can pull back and isolate this sole white-capped skull in the midst of hundreds of blonde heads. The compensatory aspects are equally generalised – a kindly white-American employer who doesn’t care that Mandira’s last name is Khan, the visual of Rizwan fearlessly kneeling down for namaaz in the presence of potentially hostile whites, and a clarification about the Abrahamic religion of Islam that invokes the story of Abraham himself. (A rabble rouser insists that it was God that demanded the sacrifice of Ibrahim/Abraham’s son; Rizwan counters that it was shaitaan, Satan, and that God would never demand the sacrifice of innocents for any cause.)

In the midst of all this blandly naïve ennoblement, the entertainment-seekers among us are left utterly stranded. The moments I took away were a mere handful, like Zakir comforting his wife while asking her to discard the hijab, “Allah samajh jayenge magar yeh log nahin,” that God will understand but the Americans won’t. This is an exquisitely sculpted line, like the one Rizwan delivers about his son’s soccer shoes or the rebuke a cub reporter hurls at a television producer who refuses to air Khan’s story. And there’s a smattering of scenes that hark back to our ancient narrative traditions – after Rizwan moves away from Mandira, he stops by a salon and peers in, recalling Mandira at work, and hundreds of miles away, Mandira looks outside her salon, as if sensing an emotion that has been carried to her doorstep by the wind. This is the sort of unabashedly sentimental storytelling that comes so naturally to Johar – even the death of Rizwan’s mother is due to congestive cardiomyopathy. “Dil zaroorat se zyada bada ho gaya tha,” Rizwan informs us, that her heart had swelled so much to accommodate her love for him that it eventually burst.

I worry that these traditions will vanish if filmmakers like Johar (who, along with Aditya Chopra and Sooraj Barjatya, is among the few still interested in the romantic melodrama) begin to feel ashamed about their roots – about the instincts that come so easily to them – and end up emulating the relatively naturalistic style preferred by today’s hip multiplex audiences. The envelope needs edgy pushing, surely, but we also need filmmakers harking back to times when Indian movies were still “Indian.” Subhash Ghai is a prime example of a director who lost his way when he abandoned his innate flair for vulgar showmanship and sought out “classy” ways of storytelling. My Name is Khan is extremely well crafted at a basic level, and it’ll probably do mind-boggling business, so I hope this is a one-off that will satisfy Johar that he can grow up if he wants to (as if the relationships in Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna weren’t the very definition of grown-up in a mainstream context). And I hope he returns to chronicling the lives and loves of people, leaving issue-oriented narratives to directors more suited to dour message-movies seeking to rehabilitate a world stricken with ills. Come on, Mr. Johar, be yourself. Raise a hand and repeat: “My name is Karan, and I am not a therapist.”

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BOARD EXAM

A carrom whiz is constantly tested by life in a beautifully textured docudrama that keeps us at an arm’s length.

FEB 7, 2010 – SURYA (SIDDHARTH), THE MINOR-LEAGUE LEADING MAN of Striker – I hesitate to call him “hero,” for he stands resolutely, refreshingly life-sized – is someone with major dreams. He lives in the Mumbai suburb of Malvani (the film is based on true-life events, we’re told), where his best buddy Zaid (Ankur Vikal) smirks about not having stepped beyond Ghatkopar – but Surya envisions a lucrative future in Dubai. Despite his brother’s (Anoop Soni) admonitions that life isn’t wish-fulfillment fantasy, like the kiddie tales in Chandoba, Surya forks over a sizable sum to a dubious travel agent and, unsurprisingly, loses it all. What will make good this loss are his considerable skills in carrom, a game he has a natural flair for but hasn’t visited in six years. How does Surya feel about this, and what is his relation to the game? If he’s rusty after all those years away, we’re not aware of it. If he’s disgruntled about being forced to return to the board, if he thrills at the speedy recovery of an innate talent, if he resents the game that’s forced him to partner with slippery underworld customers, we have no insight.

For that matter, we’re not clued in, either, to the precise nature of his relationships with the people on his periphery (except, of course, Zaid, whom he battles, and bonds with over bottles of booze, in an endlessly comforting cycle; this Hindu and this Muslim are truly bhai-bhai). When Surya’s sister (Vidya Malvade, scrubbed clean of warpaint like everyone else, and embodying an affecting character despite a mere handful of scenes) announces quietly that she plans to get engaged to a man who will whisk her away to another city, he asks simply, “Bangalore jayegi?” He then places his hand on her head, as if in affectionate benediction, and shrugs, “Sahi hai.” There are no tears, and neither does the background score burst into a wail. Elsewhere, when Noorie (Nicolette Bird), the inter-religious object of Surya’s shyly delivered affections, moves away without word or warning, we see him enquiring about her whereabouts, but if this cruelly curtailed romance has scarred him, if his heart has been darkened by shadows of these memories, we really don’t know.

In a traditionally built Hindi (or even Indian) film, these feelings – these hints at a troubled and fully-experienced inner life – would be exposed through song, but Chandan Arora, the director, uses his music for slightly different purposes. When Ajab teri karni maula rings out, we witness a Hindu household in prayer, and we wonder if this seamless integration of different religious sensibilities is what it meant to be in Mumbai at one time, even in the Muslim-dominated Malvani. (The film begins at the cusp of the riots in December 1992, and thereon, travels back to 1977 and 1988.) Striker, therefore, is a traditional story narrated in a decidedly untraditional fashion, and Surya comes off as some sort of Benjamin Button, something of a cipher kept deliberately at a distance as tumultuous events unfurl around him. He strikes the obvious external registers – the rage upon being duped by the travel agent; the howl of anguish at the loss of a loved one – but the smaller shadings that contribute to the interior image of a man are largely absent. Whether done deliberately or otherwise, we view Surya through a thick wall of glass.

This isn’t, as the promos might have led us to believe, the exclusive underdog sports story of a slumdog becoming a (figurative) millionaire, and neither is this a flinty examination of the shameful events of December 1992, with a single Mumbai ghetto standing in for a microcosm of the nation. The director goes for a loosely patterned weave of both these threads, with Surya’s life serving as the frame. As a result, there isn’t the primal emotional satisfaction that we’d get from the kind of fiery drama that either of these plotlines could have birthed – we don’t get to cheer the victory of the small man, and we aren’t asked to cower in terror at the depths to which we can descend in the name of religion. Arora’s muted docudrama approach, instead, allows us to soak in the richly detailed atmosphere – Striker is superbly shot and edited and scored – of a lived-in world whose oddly shaped fragments are meant to fit together inside our heads (as opposed to the filmmaker prefabricating, for us, our emotional responses). Arora does his job as a director, and he expects us to do ours as an audience.

This is, at once, a plus and a minus. Because our expectations of how events will play out are constantly subverted, the film keeps us on edge all the time. Where is all this headed, we keep wondering (and during the slacker moments, even if there is a point to all this). The story strands may be cliché, but there’s nothing clichéd about the ways in which they fuse together. When a drugged-up Zaid is egged on by Jaleel Bhai (Aditya Pancholi, as the local don whose bland handsomeness is redeemed by a sinister scar slicing through a cheek) to distract Surya during a key game, we are left with neither a showdown between friends nor a nail-biting progression of the game itself, with Surya’s opponent seizing an advantage. Even when, towards the end, the epithet of “striker” transfers from a piece on the carrom board to the protagonist himself – he becomes the one who strikes back – and when he transforms into a unwitting savior, we are denied the visceral rush we’d typically associate with such a heroic development. Striker is the low-key story of a low-key man, and it seems entirely fitting that it is narrated in this low-key manner, with scenes making their point discreetly and tiptoeing past, without pausing to preen with punch-moments.

And yet, there are times you wish for something forceful to cut through this clutch of carefully accumulated detail. At one juncture, it appears that Farooque (Anupam Kher), the level-headed cop, is going to be the moral voice of reason in this unavoidably opportunistic universe, someone whose authoritative presence informs both the carrom and the communal aspects of this story. But he’s just a diffuse presence on the sidelines. (In one particularly awkward bit, he’s thrust in front of the media and asked to justify the actions of his subordinates. He keeps threatening to develop into a significant figure, but this scene, like the others he’s in, goes nowhere.) What does it say of a film when everyone, including the protagonist, is rendered hard to read? We are always aware of the broad-strokes version of all that happened, but the lives of these people don’t possess the texture of their intricately etched-out surroundings. We’re drawn adroitly into the feel of the film, but we don’t feel for its characters.

To take the instance of Raging Bull – another multipronged sports-themed docudrama with flashbacks and underworld links and a staunch brother-figure – the boxer-protagonist’s battles with his opponents were simply the other side of the coin of his battles with himself. We loathed the outer shell of the man and yet pitied him and identified with his attempts to locate some semblance of inner peace. Surya, too, is enormously conflicted, but because we’re never allowed to enter his head, his passivity becomes quite troubling after a point, especially when he practically rapes Madhu (Padmapriya), a sympathetic fisherwoman who manages a bar. It’s a complicated turn of events but it doesn’t complicate our relationship with Surya because he’s played by Siddharth, an actor with a charming presence and melting puppy-eyes (that he likes to scrunch up ever so often) which assure us that he can’t be that bad. Had Surya been portrayed by Ankur Vikal – who, shorn of leading-man looks as well as the need to shoulder the film, delivers its most raw-edged and explosive performance – we might have thought differently. We might have, as the moment demands, recoiled in disgust. Is it right that the countenance of an angel be allowed to mask the deeds of the devil?

Star Ratings

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BROADCAST NOOSE

The ever-tightening web of news-channel foul play forms the focus of an engrossing melodrama. Plus, a wickedly entertaining desi-Western that pulls its punches.

JAN 31, 2010 – RAM GOPAL VARMA’S RANN OPENS with the sun glowering on a sweltering metropolis. Inside the homes, however, the heat emanates from television, from news channels aboil with sensation mongering (underscored by shivering strings and pounding percussion more suited to the climactic battle in Macbeth). Within a short span, we are thrown amidst a battalion on the rims of the TV-news business – the patriarchal anchor Vijay Malik (Amitabh Bachchan), his smarmy competitor Amrish (Mohnish Bahl), Vijay’s son Jai (Sudeep), Vijay’s son-in-law Naveen (Rajat Kapoor), callow reporter Purab (Riteish Deshmukh), the buffoonish journalist Anand (Rajpal Yadav), go-getting news executive Nalini (Suchitra Krishnamoorthy), and the barbarous politician Mohan Pandey (Paresh Rawal), the vermilion patch on whose forehead resembles a victorious smear of blood after vanquishing a series of opponents. And the first words out of these mouths are invariably overarching opinions on media – about its nature and function, about how news isn’t a communal service anymore but a cutthroat business predicated on TRPs.

As such, some fifteen minutes into the film, my worst fears seemed to crystallise. The moralistic subject matter and the message-ripe promos appeared to indicate fodder more appropriate to the Madhur Bhandarkar stables, which specialise in breeding genetically dumbed-down strains of socially relevant issues that are eventually led to multiplex abattoirs for slaughter. (And indeed, Bhandarkar’s inexplicably feted Page 3 touched on several topics dear to Rann.) Why, I wondered, would a far superior filmmaker like Varma be interested in this past-sell-date material, especially since he’s the last person you’d expect to take up cudgels for any cause? Soon, however, there are hints that this isn’t a story about media so much as one that skirts around it. In a confessional address towards the end, a beleaguered Vijay Malik drones about the misuse of the medium, and I thought the medium he was alluding to was The Media – but turns out he was only referring to India 24×7, his own channel. The milieu does result in pat Bhandarkar-like abstractions, but underneath the unmasking of a public institution, this is a very personal tale.

To say that Rann is about media would be to label The Godfather as being about gangsters – whereas the latter is simply about people (first), who happen to be gangsters (second). And in order to showcase these people in a mythic light, Varma, as he did in Sarkar, leans towards the Godfather template. He restages the dinner-table scene from Sarkar. (Bachchan is still the patriarch at the head of the table, surrounded by an extended family mired in tensions.) A birthday party for Vijay Malik is shaped like the wedding that opened the earlier film, with friends and foes alike showing up to extend wishes, and amidst these celebrations, Jai introduces his girlfriend (Yasmine, played by Neetu Chandra) to his parents. At the very outset, Purab comes off like the boy-scout Michael, the unlikely savior of an empire, just as Naveen appears to take his cues from the traitorous Carlo (another son-in-law who never fully belonged to either the family or the Family). Like the Godfather who refused to countenance lucrative drug dealing, Vijay too is a dinosaur who lives by certain principles, unwilling to truckle down before equally lucrative TRPs.

These parallels could be inadvertent, but there’s nothing indeliberate about Varma’s portrayal of media men as corporate gangsters, and that’s when I saw what could have interested him – the opportunity for another mythical meditation on men at work. (It’s no accident that a song towards the end invokes the chakravyuh, and chants of yada yada hi dharmasya permeate the background.) Regardless of the quality of his recent output, Varma is an entirely necessary presence in our cinematic landscape if only because of his preoccupation with the workplace, a domain traditionally considered masculine, and a far shout from others who’d rather deal with home and heart, those traditionally feminine spaces. Rann is a muscular throwback to the archetypal masala movie (and how fitting that Bachchan, once again, returns as Vijay!) – an update of the David-Goliath template (think Arjun), with Purab invested with the irony of investigating the very men given the job of investigating the wrongs around them.

And yet, this ancient myth is thawed from its amber trappings and hauled to the modern day. The good guys are a distant presence in the first half, and even later, they must share space with their opponents, who dominate the screen. (Bachchan, therefore, is necessarily subdued amidst a spate of attention-grabbing performances, carrying the cross of being a national monument, “poore desh ka maseeha.” He’s attired in stuffy suits that underline his outdatedness in relation to Amrish, who lords over his empire in jeans and sneakers.) Even the final victory of good over evil is Pyrrhic, obtained over great personal loss, and the villains aren’t quite brought to book in a fashion that would satisfy the strictures of the time-honoured black-and-white masala melodrama – their fate is a question mark hovering over our future. This is a morality tale with a conclusion that verges on the amoral.

Varma’s accomplishment in Rann is to transform an entirely predictable outline into an engrossing experience. There are several small moments to savour – Purab being handed a statuette of Ganesha by his girlfriend (Gul Panag) so he won’t be alone in his first day at work, a sheepish Jai lying to his mother that his Muslim girlfriend’s nickname (Yash) is short for Yashodha (instead of Yasmine), or Purab delighting in a word of praise from Vijay Malik, whom he hero-worships. There’s also this director’s unique approach to cinematography, which demolishes traditional concepts of an actor’s all-encompassing “body language” in favour of isolating close-ups of body parts in order to highlight emotion – the eyes of a concerned mother framed atop a television set, or the nervous hands of a son playing with a cigarette lighter. Varma is possibly the only filmmaker who’s as respectful of his environment as of his actors – even walls and furniture help to colour the conflicts of the characters. I don’t know that we want (or need) our films to poke our jaded selves into shocked action, but if it has to be done, this is the way to do it – with fervour and flamboyance. Madhur Bhandarkar would do well to look and learn.

THERE’S NO IMAGE, ONLY SOUND, at the beginning of Abhishek Chaubey’s Ishqiya, as Rekha Bhardwaj, in her inimitably tossed-off style, hums Ab mujhe koi intezaar kahan. A few phrases later, the black screen begins to brighten, and our eyes descend on Krishna (Vidya Balan) – a Reclining Venus (even if fully clad), a vision that’s woman from top to toe, from the slightest curve of breast to the generous swell of hips to the endless taper of legs. Much later in the film, when Khalujaan (Naseeruddin Shah) exclaims that Krishna is a frustrating amalgam of pari and tawaif, it’s this Madonna-whore picture that pops into mind, at once chaste and carnal, and lit by the afterglow of lovemaking. It wouldn’t come as a revelation if Chaubey intended the mobile suspended from a car’s rear-view mirror – the figure is of Eve, the fig-leaf Temptress – as an homage to Krishna, hinting at the ways she will tempt both Khalujaan and Babban (Arshad Warsi).

These initial frames are about physical love, though Ishqiya is about love in all its shapes and forms, with its power to reduce grown-ups to slobbering infants (evinced in the lyrics of the marvellous Dil to bachcha hai ji, composed by Vishal Bhardwaj). There’s the scampish, fraternal (or, as some would have us believe, homoerotic) Jai-Veeru brand of love between Khalujaan and Babban. (Shah and Warsi play wonderfully off each other, suggesting a sustained history of jolly disreputability.) There’s the unilateral attraction smouldering between Khalujaan and Krishna. There’s the primal, need-fulfilling love that leads to Krishna cutting Babban’s thumb and instantly sucking on it. (To no one’s surprise, they subsequently tumble into bed.) There’s the nostalgic love that Khalujaan harbours for a mysterious woman from the past, whose sepia-tinted photograph rests in his wallet.

Finally, there’s the bordering-on-crazy love symbolised by a Taj Mahal locket, the ceaseless yearning for a lover beyond the grave – the sort of love that’s sought in the folds of a blanket of an unmade bed in the lover’s absence, the type of love that necessitates the pasting of press clippings (reporting the lover’s death) on the makeshift shrine of one’s wall, the kind of love so explosive that it (literally) scorches the skin. Ishqiya is yet another desi Western from (producer) Bhardwaj’s stable – it’s set in the sand-brushed bylanes of Gorakhpur – and Krishna is a loose updating of the Claudia Cardinale character from Once Upon a Time in the West, the widow who wills herself to bed with strangers in order to get at what’s important. There’s a degree of crafty craziness needed to embody Krishna, and I’m not sure Vidya Balan has it. Hers is a refined, soothing presence that comes with delicate line readings, and though she looks the part and acts the part, we don’t hear the part when she opens her mouth. (She renders Badi dheere jali raina, a howl from the heart if there ever was one, with expressions more appropriate to a tranquil bhajan.) The film hinges on a good performer trapped in an ill-suited role.

The other aspect that drags down Ishqiya is its over-reliance on colour. In order to differentiate Khalujaan from Babban, Chaubey usefully employs Hindi film music from an older era. Khalujaan sways to Tumhein dekhti hoon to lagta hai from Tumhare Liye – he knows that the composer is Jaidev, and he nods appreciatively at “Lata bai’s” singing. And in stark contrast to this streetside connoisseur is the earthy Babban, who shakes his hips to Dhanno ki aankhon mein in a whorehouse. (Trust a Vishal Bhardwaj production to tip a hat to Gulzar!) But the effect is that of overkill when Chaubey introduces Khalujaan and Babban dancing drunk to Ajeeb dastaan hai yeh, when Babban and Krishna get naughty with Dekha to tujhe yaar dil mein baji guitar, and when a kinky seduction scene is underscored by Aa jaane jaan from Inteqaam. Chaubey is so much in love – yes, he too cannot escape his film’s overriding emotion – with his detours into the uncharted and the forbidden (lip-locks, cusswords, an overdetermined strain of the eccentric) that there are times the loosely shaped Ishqiya comes close to being all colour and flavour and little else.

Yes, these are colours and flavours we do not see or smell in the spit-shined urban multiplex movie, but how far in the other direction will we travel before beginning to demand that a film have more to it than just these colours and flavours? On a basic level, Ishqiya is extremely entertaining, and yet, it’s hard to shake off the suspicion that it could have been so much more given its initial promise about a refreshingly adult approach to love, an emotion that has been infantilised by most of our filmmakers. Taken as what it is, however, this is an impressive first feature. Chaubey skillfully outlines a serious plot – a crazy quilt patched together from kidnappings, caste wars, arms trading and unresolved love triangles – with featherlight brushstrokes, and he orchestrates stretches featuring wonderful characters (the little boy who joins the army, the old woman with a torch) and writing, with lines so steeped in local hues that they come off as coarse poetry. (“Aaj kal nange hain ke burqe mein?” is how Babban enquires if someone is free or in prison.) I was especially taken by the offhand development where Khalujaan drops his cell phone in a melee and is unable to contact Babban and Krishna, which results in the latter discovering, in each other, hints of possible compatibility. Love can spring from the strangest of circumstances, Chaubey says, and we nod in helpless recognition.

Star Ratings

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ACTION REPLAY

It’s too long, too bland – and yet, this muscular throwback to a yesteryear cinema culture isn’t without its occasional pleasures.

JAN 24, 2010 – STUCK FOR A BEGINNING FOR this review, and after a fair amount of pencil chewing before a blank computer screen – a metaphorical endeavour, of course, now that graphite-riddled writing implements have gone the way of the giganotosaurus – I sought inspiration from my appraisal of Apne, the previous offering from director Anil Sharma. There, I’d observed, “When I say Apne is a good movie, I mean that it’s a good movie of the kind that’s often derisively labelled a single-screen movie. It is, in other words, an utter anachronism in this multiplex age, meant only for those with either the patience or the stomach – preferably a bit of both – to sit through a near-mythical, Old Bollywood narrative…” That’s the opening for Veer, right there – except that I wouldn’t go so far as to classify this Salman Khan starring (and Salman Khan written) faux-historical as “good!” (Okayish would serve as a more accurate assessment.)

So we have, for the 2976th time, a hero who falls for the villain’s daughter, and a villain (Jackie Shroff) who’s not just the embodiment of evil but a sworn enemy of the hero’s father. Yes, it’s the old Romeo-Juliet palimpsest, but thankfully shorn of the shrew-taming plot device that’s often recycled when the lovers hail from opposite sides of the tracks. The gimmick – the USP; the eye-grabbing label on this particular vial of snake oil – is that the story unfurls under the Union Jack. The time is the 1920s, when London is festooned with posters of Janet Gaynor in Street Angel, and back home, decidedly unangelic tribal clans like the Pindaris are at war with the Rajputs, much to the delight of the British, whose philosophy was to stroke their pencil moustaches as they divided and ruled.

To this effect, Lord Macaulay encouraged Indians to study in England, so they would transform into little brown sahibs, imbibing the genteel essences of Western civilisation and turning their backs on the heat and dust of their homeland. The Pindari chieftain Prithvi Singh (Mithun Chakraborty), too, dispatches his son Veer (Salman Khan) to what our older films referred to as vilayat. Veer is already something of a modernist, at least to the extent that a defiantly old-school performer like Salman Khan can project a modern persona on screen. Early on, he saves a goat from being sacrificed at the altar, thus espousing an intriguing mishmash of the progressive and the regressive. Veer appears nominally opposed to superstitious practices, but at the same time, he proposes that the blades of the Pindaris will find better purpose in decapitating goras rather than goats. (“Talwar sirf firangiyon ki gardanon ke liye hai,” Veer roars. Thrice!) This mix of Western cool thinking and Eastern hot blood is further enhanced by Veer’s stint in England – he learns to be civilised in the presence of the British, while back home, he’s as cheerful a barbarian as the next Pindari.

And yet, he observes enough over there to realise that, like the British, Indians need to think of themselves as a nation, and it’s time they shucked off petty rivalries (say, the Pindaris versus the Rajputs) and united against a common enemy. So far, so good – for these action-oriented portions play like a greatest-hits compilation of masala-movie images down the decades. If Mithun offers homage to his own Kasam Paida Karne Wale Ki as he holds aloft his infant son in the pouring rain, symbolically inuring the child to all kinds of calamity, Salman makes a nod to Amitabh Bachchan in Mard lassoing a chopper and preventing it from lifting off (here, Veer halts a hansom cab in London by sticking out a hand and grabbing a spoke), and there’s even an invocation of the Mahabharata (which is quoted explicitly) when the climactic battle pits kith against kin in a quest that isn’t so much about uprooting evil as upholding dharma.

The look of Veer is easy on the eye – all earth colours and lambent lighting – and the director (or at least his stunt coordinator) appears to have learnt from Ashutosh Gowariker’s missteps in Jodhaa-Akbar. The battle scenes are shot either in bird’s-eye sweeps or in quick-cut close-ups that hint at the savagery – there’s no ambitious attempt to capture the you-are-there-ness, which is, frankly, a relief. (If you can’t do it well, the way it should be done, it’s better not to do it at all.) There’s even the frequent dose of unintentional comedy, as when the colourfully clad Veer, after being ticked off by a martinet instructor about the need to adopt sober Western attire, offers a version on the GB Shaw quip about clothes not making the man (because it’s man who makes clothes). It’s priceless, really, this spirited defense of haberdashery from the star who single-handedly reduced the Hindi film hero to a shirtless pin-up.

Where Veer stumbles, apart from not knowing when to stop, is in its sluggish detours into romance. The Rajput crown-princess Yashodhara (played by newcomer Zarine Khan, of the marble skin and with expressions to match) is a prize Veer wins in a swayamwar, after surviving a bloody joust, and like a thousand Hindi film heroes before him, he adorns the parting of his bride’s hair with flecks of his own blood. That’s the kind of thrumming passion we want this couple to project, the sexual frisson of the touch-me-not Aishwarya Rai in Jodhaa-Akbar coupled to the laidback-Lothario advances from Veer. But their moments together are extraordinarily bland and boring, and inexplicably centered on a godforsaken brooch bequeathed by her mother. The one scene that leaps out of screen is when an enraged Yashodhara clamps her mouth on Veer’s wrist, leaving behind a circle of bite marks, which prompts Veer to remark that she’s presented him a watch, and that, henceforth, good times beckon.

Translated, of course, this is unadulterated tripe, but the line works beautifully in Hindi. That’s the other attraction for lovers of a certain kind of cinema from a certain age: a certain type of carefully calibrated dialogue. (The opening credits feature the rarest of sights, the name of the director in Hindi – as nirdeshak.) When was the last time you heard (the Britishers’) insidiously deceitful nature referred to as fitrati soch, or the irreversibility of the given word likened to an arrow that’s left the bow? (“Kaman se nikla teer aur zubaan se nikli baat kabhi vapas nahin aate.”) Gulzar embellishes this air of spoken grandiloquence with the sung – grafting, for instance, the auditory onto the ocular in Surili anhkiyon wale. He justifies this trademarked mixed metaphor by claiming, on behalf of the hero, that he’s heard that his lover’s eyes brim over with sleep, which, in turn, brims over with dreams. Forget Sajid-Wajid’s limp tunemaking, it’s the music in the words you carry home.

Star Ratings

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FOR HER EYES ONLY

Shahid Kapoor’s female fans have the actor’s physical charms to tide them through this wan showbiz-struggler drama. What about the rest of us?

JAN 17, 2010 – FOR THE SECOND TIME IN AS MANY WEEKS, the critic is faced with a conundrum. How does one rate a film that’s not interesting enough to earn outright approval, yet not incompetent enough to warrant outpourings of spite? How, in other words, does one go about the task of reviewing a piece of mass-manufactured plastic, crafted without a shred of individuality or originality, and yet shiny enough to proffer a minimal amount of distraction? At least Pyaar Impossible, last week, was saved (to some extent) by the genre it sprang from – the romantic comedy. The falling in and out of love is rarely without its rewards, and even if there were no heartfelt epiphanies to take home, the moonstruck among us could make do with the sight of Priyanka Chopra pretending to be a public relations executive when her real occupation was to parade around in micro-pants as the hottest mom on the planet.

Genelia, unfortunately, is incapable of providing those distractions. Hers is a more wholesome appeal, that of the pigtailed girl a couple of doors away who’s had a surprise makeover. But going by the sighs of adoration from the ladies in the audience (including a couple of explicit observations about what they’d like to do with that well-toned physique of his; you go girls!), Shahid Kapoor (playing actor-aspirant Sameer) is the real attraction of Ken Ghosh’s Chance Pe Dance. The last time I overheard such lusty catcalls was when Hrithik Roshan’s torso was clothed in nothing but a patina of sweat as he wielded a broadsword in Jodhaa Akbar. Fans of Shahid, therefore, should (and will) waste no time in heading to the nearest movie screen. He dances like a dream, and he gets twice as many close-ups as poor Genelia, who plays Tina, a smitten choreographer who gradually renounces her identity so she can devote her life to being Sameer’s arm-candy. (And with the biceps in question, who’d blame her?)

Those of us who’d rather watch Shahid perform, however, are stuck with a story that’s curiously free of conflict – or rather, the seeds of conflict are, at no point, allowed to sprout into significance. In his struggle to become a star, Sameer is betrayed by a friend, doubted by his father and dropped by a director (Mohnish Bahl, who inexplicably ends up cheering the hero later). And when Sameer settles temporarily into being a dance instructor at a school, he’s jeered at by the football coach who won’t even shake hands with a man who can… dance, and to make matters worse, Sameer doesn’t especially like children. But each one of these bumps on the road is smoothed over almost instantly – a metaphor that’s inadvertently reinforced by Tina’s character arc as she transforms, under the power of love, from a supremely overcautious driver to someone who nearly causes a pileup in her haste to deliver Sameer to his destination.

As for Sameer, he abandons his starlit dreams to care for a helpless father, a development that could have led to situations where he began to resent this burdensome parent – but two minutes later, the frenzy on television (when Sameer dances his way into the finals of a talent show) convinces the father to direct his son back to showbiz. The kids in Sameer’s dance class aren’t especially skilled, and this could have led to a dash of Chak De India-meets-Aaja Nachle-style underdog intrigue – but one song later, these children win the interschool competition and that plotline is left behind. Sameer borderline-insults Tina when they first meet, and this could have blossomed into some worthwhile romantic friction – but almost immediately, they resolve their tensions. Perhaps the intent was to sidestep every possible cliché – a noble thought, no doubt, but not one that does the movie (or the moviegoer) much good.

Star Ratings

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YOU’VE GOT E-MALE

A bland but inoffensive fairy tale where the computer nerd gets the girl. Plus, a dreary romantic melodrama.

JAN 10, 2010 – I WAS SURPRISED THAT DINO MOREA, that descendant of ebonies and elms, was able to summon up such a relaxed performance in Jugal Hansraj’s Pyaar Impossible – but looking back, there’s no surprise. The Italianate actor was the worst possible fit for roles (and films) with a desi sensibility, and here, in a film so American in mood and tone that you’d expect the concession stands to serve apple pie instead of samosas, he’s just perfect. (Call it the Neha Dhupia syndrome, after the actress who has blossomed after straying from traditional Bollywood cinema.) Morea slips right in with characters who breakfast on cereal, who entertain children with lightsabres, and who refer to their young ones as “pumpkin” and “munchkin.” Even Alisha (Priyanka Chopra, overdoing the perkiness) comes off like an over-caffeinated American schoolgirl, her every gesticulation bouncing off the walls.

This isn’t an indictment of non-Indianness. In fact, these Americanisms are the very things that make Pyaar Impossible possible to endure. Scenes that would have descended into heavy-handed thunder-and-lightning melodrama under the stewardship of a director more Indian in sensibility – the hero’s confrontation with the villain in a swank restaurant; the heroine’s realisation that the world is indeed shallow, fixated on form as opposed to content – are allowed to scamper across screen with minimal fuss. The price of this lightness is a marked lack of tension – if you’ve listened to Salim-Sulaiman’s score, that’s the feel of the film as well, pleasant but bland (or rather, bland yet pleasant). There’s nothing at stake except the moment where boy and girl get together by the end – but then again, the rom-com is possibly the one genre where predictability isn’t so much a sin as a specialty.

If Pyaar Impossible doesn’t attempt to rock the boat, it’s at least familiar with the rhythms of rowing. Hansraj (working from a script from Uday Chopra, who plays Abhay) is content to tweak the archetypal frog-prince fairy tale that has lasted through retellings as recent as Notting Hill. (The “I’m just a girl” speech and the reunion in front of cameras are replicated here.) The twist is that the frog doesn’t transform into a prince. Abhay – who’s even referred to as “froggie” – is a bespectacled nerd when we first see him and he exits the film as a bespectacled nerd, still smiling a little too widely, still a tad too gauche for anyone to take seriously. It’s easy to see why Alisha falls for the debonair Varun – he may be slime, but at least he has a presence. Abhay is so invisible, so emasculated, that Alisha doesn’t think twice before moisturising her naked legs in his vicinity. He’s the ideal man-friend for a certain kind of career woman – he’s straight, and he’s safe. (It’s a nice touch that Alisha begins to fall for Abhay only after looking at life through his eyes.)

And he’s weak. He cries to his father (Anupam Kher) for help. He gets romantic tips from a six-year-old (Advika Yadav, a charming newcomer). Even when he sets out with a purpose, to track down the villain who stole the software he created, he allows himself to be easily sidetracked by his love for Alisha. With Abhay, Uday Chopra has the right idea – a fairy tale for our age, where a computer nerd with zero social skills wins the girl! – and he looks the part, but he does the film no favours by playing the part. Abhay needed the shambling, self-deprecatory goofiness of Hugh Grant, and Uday is too tentative, too dull. In the film’s most apposite moment, he gazes at Alisha through a telescope – and Priyanka looks so fantastic, she’s really a distant star, light years away from the likes of Abhay. That such a mating is possible is the fiction we need these films to feed us – why else would we watch rom-coms? – and yet you can’t help wishing that the fantasy weren’t so many light years removed from reality.

A TYPICALLY LISTLESS FARDEEN KHAN (as Donsai) is the nominal hero of Dulha Mil Gaya, but it’s Shah Rukh Khan (guest-starring as Pawan) who’s handed the film’s show-stopping moment. While lounging by the rails on a Caribbean cruise, Pawan’s fashion-plate girlfriend (Sushmita Sen, called Shimmer, and desperately channeling Archana Puran Singh) flails about a delicate wrist, and as a result, her keychain flies overboard. Shimmer is distraught, for the trinket is a reminder of her beloved poodle, Bozo, who, thanks to heartless cruise coordinators, was unable to accompany his mistress on vacation. Unwilling to stand by simply as his woman weeps, Pawan dives into the deep and retrieves the object, thus shattering to smithereens that old bit of pessimism about needles and haystacks. And the slack-jawed audience wonders: How, short of being dispatched to earth from an imploding Krypton, can someone perform a feat so patently impossible?

Why, because his heart brims over with love, of course! In Mudassar Aziz’s tired melodrama, love conquers everything, even fathomless waters. The plot has to do with West Indian billionaire Donsai marrying Samarpreet (Ishita Sharma), a lassi-sipping lass from the Punjabi heartland, because clause 7(a) of his father’s will hitched those billions to his non-singleton status. It’s a union of shameless convenience, and Donsai thinks a generous monthly cheque is all that’s needed to keep Samarpreet away as he reverts to life as a debauched bachelor – but he clearly hasn’t seen Naseeb Apna Apna (or the Tamil original, Gopurangal Saaivadhillai), where spurned women, instead of suing the pants off their sorry spouses, take it upon themselves to ennoble their men, showing them the error of their ways. (Why, because their hearts brim over with love, of course!) The only thing sadder is that these dubious “Indian values” are still being peddled under the guise of wholesome entertainment.

Star Ratings

Copyright ©2010 The New Sunday Express. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

GOING STUDY!

Rajkumar Hirani’s assault on our apathetic education system is funny, timely, heartfelt – but also terribly pushy and preachy.

DEC 27, 2009 – EXITING LAGE RAHO MUNNABHAI, I WAS STRUCK by how Rajkumar Hirani had transformed the earlier film’s formula into a sequel that felt utterly non-formulaic. I wrote, “The easiest thing [they] could have done is to dust off the characters from the first outing and merely give them a bunch of new jokes to mouth, a set of new comic routines to execute. They could have dumped on us Munnabhai LLB or Munnabhai BEd or Munnabhai MSc.” That’s precisely what Hirani has done with 3 Idiots (adapted from Chetan Bhagat’s bestseller) – he recycles the Munnabhai MBBS formula into an utterly formulaic entertainment. The specialty under scrutiny may have switched from medicine to education, but little else has been tampered with: the catchword phrase (along the lines of “jadoo ki jhappi” and “Gandhigiri”) is now “all is well,” Boman Irani still plays the dictatorial overseer of the Evil Establishment whose doctor-daughter falls for the nominal hero, the wisecracking Circuit is bifurcated into the characters portrayed by Farhan (Madhavan) and Raju (Sharman Joshi), and most of all, the motivating maxim is still that the universe can be bettered by nothing more than the good thought, the kind word, the noble deed.

Ignore his primitive staging, and Hirani is our Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the Gallic charmer who, through the winsome whimsies of Amélie, set about ameliorating the world’s ills with a hop in the step and a gleam in the eye. Whimsy is Hirani’s currency as well, with which he makes us buy into setups that we’d otherwise mock as trivial melodrama. (The sight gag of an eccentric oldster being barbered to the strains of the opera is pure Jeunet.) Hirani devices old-fashioned David-Goliath fables of humble men toppling giant institutions, but because he coats his conceits with a just-this-side-of-surreal sheen, his films don’t lumber on screen. The grimness is alleviated by the goofiness. Hirani is a wise storyteller who understands that a relentlessly tearjerking narrative can be endlessly happy too – with, say, the visual of a paralysed father sandwiched between hero and heroine on a scooter, or the image of an impoverished household being reduced to a black-and-white stereotype of a shack from a 1950s weepie, with a consumptive Leela Chitnis armed with a roomful of medicine bottles. This isn’t the trick employed by earlier filmmakers, who would shoehorn a comedy track into their narratives, at periodic intervals, to provide relief. Hirani’s methods are organic – his sequences bustle, simultaneously, with the apparently contradictory impulses to make you smile and reduce you to a sobbing heap.

He demonstrates this in a joyous stretch where Chatur Ramalingam (played by Omi Vaidya, an excellent newcomer) addresses an audience during a function at Delhi’s Imperial College of Engineering. The very name of the institution suggests an autocracy at odds with the democratic give-and-take necessary for an ideal education, but Chatur is content to scrape and bow. All he wants is a degree in hand that will make him a marketable commodity, and if rote learning is what his instructors want – they frown upon original thought – then he’ll learn by rote. Chatur is a Tamilian from Uganda, so he’s twice removed from the North Indians around him – a stranger to the nation as well as the national language. We’ve all seen misfits like him, who compensate for their alienation from people by trouncing those very people in class. This one time, however, Chatur wants to fit in, and he decides the way to go about this is by memorising and delivering a speech in chaste Hindi.

But the puckish Rancho (Aamir Khan) sees an opportunity and tweaks a few words in the address so that it’s now borderline pornographic. Poor Chatur launches into his impassioned speech, and he cannot see why every single person in the hall (on both sides of the screen) is rolling in the aisles. The scene is sidesplitting, and yet, it underscores the message – without underlining it, the way the rest of the film does – that learning by rote may fetch you marks but not mastery. At this point, Chatur is clearly the clown of the circus we call our educational system – and yet, in the scene that follows, Hirani allows this character to recover his dignity. Plastered out of his skull, he accosts Rancho and partner-in-crime Farhan and asks them why they did what they did, why he deserves to be punished so. And that instant, your sympathies shift to this outsider, who has been humiliated simply for following the system the way millions still do. The camera trains its focus on Chatur for the most part, but had it rested on Rancho, we might have seen a head hung with remorse.

But outside of this stretch, the typically generous Hirani doesn’t seem particularly sympathetic towards Chatur, who’s rendered (like everyone else) in broad swaths of black and white. He’s introduced as an obnoxious NRI with a shining $3.5mn nest, replete with heated swimming pool and Lamborghini-stocked garage. To a great many students, this is the destination of their dreams – and education is merely the expensive ticket. They endure school and college so they can enjoy life. They willingly enroll themselves in these “factories” – as Hirani castigates our academic institutions – so they can be perceived a worthwhile “product” in the job market. To pick on Chatur, therefore, is to mock anyone who isn’t especially interested in the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. (And that number would run into the millions.) The more accessible aspect of 3 Idiots is its emphasis that we need to follow our dreams, even if that means pursuing photography when your father sees you as an engineer, and even if that father has opted to swelter in his sleep because he could afford only one air-conditioning unit, the one he installed in your room so you could pore over your engineering books without breaking into a sweat.

In that respect, 3 Idiots is an embryonic Rock On – a slightly impractical (and implausible) fantasy about following your heart, except at a much earlier point in life, during college. Then again, we do not watch our movies because they are towering edifices of logical reasoning. And even formula can be fun with the right cast and in the hands of the right craftsmen. The problem, however, is that Hirani never aims for just “fun” – his mission is to entertain a mass audience while also empowering them. With a bludgeon in hand, he charges at us, daring us not to cry, or laugh, or (preferably) both – and to this end, he stages his material as broadly as possible, without the disarming delicacy, the relaxedness, of the Munnabhai movies. At two different moments, two different men actually have their eyes roll back in their heads as they droop into a faint. Boman Irani overacts as he’s never done before, and Kareena Kapoor (as Pia) keeps him company in the scene where she plays drunk. (After this and Main Aurr Mrs. Khanna, this actress will hopefully be kept away from alcohol – at least on screen.) Madhavan and Sharman Joshi pitch their histrionics several notches higher than their scenes warrant, and even Aamir, at first, goes overboard with twinkling eyes and smacking lips and busy hands perpetually wrapped around a Rubik’s Cube. (He’s much easier to watch as he eventually relaxes into the skin of his character.)

There’s a surfeit of remarkably observant writing on display here, but an equal number of scenes are so shapeless and graceless that, at places, 3 Idiots seems little more than the run up to an amateur skit with cartoon characters like Pia’s label-obsessed fiancé. (And she consents to marry him a second time?) Even the relatively normal characters are required to service burlesque bits like urinating at someone’s doorstep. (I couldn’t decide if my problem was the urination itself or the silliness of these overage actors pretending to be impish collegians. Aamir and Madhavan and Sharman do not share the on-screen camaraderie of the boys of Dil Chahta Hai or Rang De Basanti – we buy their “close friendship” not because we sense it but because we’re told endlessly about it. I wonder: Would I have bought the same routines with, say, Imran Khan and Arjun Mathur and Prateik Babbar?) And when they get caught, we’re expected to empathise with them – talk about loaded dice! – and not with the householder whose doorstep has been urinated on, or the professor whose question paper has been stolen. In the case of the latter, it’s hard to swallow that Rancho would abet cheating in the first place – even if only for a friend – given his high-minded homilies about education in general.

And it isn’t as if these attitudes are silently tucked away into the screen’s recesses – Rancho constantly mouths off about what should be fixed in our educational system, what’s the best way to learn, how teachers should act, how students need to be set free… This is a condition that’s named, I believe, TZP-itis. Take a very worthwhile subject, talk ceaselessly about it, add tons of tears, and laugh all the way to the bank (and the awards shows). Raju refuses to compromise on his principles? Cue tears. Farhan and Raju realise how right, all along, Rancho has been? Cue tears. Pia sees that Rancho isn’t really a goofball, that he’s got a heart of gold, that he’ll do anything for his friends? Cue tears. Her father sees that Rancho isn’t really a goofball, that he’s got a heart of gold, that he’ll do anything for a fellow-man? Cue tears. Farhan confesses to his father that he’s miserable being an engineer? Cue tears. The Munnabhai films were hardly subtle, and they teetered as much between merriment and message and melodrama, but the emotions there felt earned. Here, befitting the college, the emotions feel engineered.

Part of my disappointment, I admit, has to do with my expectations from both Hirani as well as Aamir – that birthing scene? Really? – and yet, it’s these very decisions that may make 3 Idiots the toast of this holiday season. It speaks to parents, it speaks to children, it speaks to students (both new and old), it even speaks to teachers (a key event loops back to September 5). More than a few scenes carry a thrillingly mad charge, especially the ones that dare to be irreverent. Hirani may be an old-school director in the most honourable sense of the phrase – it rains during a funeral, recalling a few thousand earlier instances of pathetic fallacy; the interval “twist” is one of the best in recent times – but he isn’t above knocking our hallowed tradition of mother-made food as “khujli wali roti,” or understanding that it’s all very okay to sympathise with a friend’s sister who isn’t getting married, but the sympathy cannot extend so far as to marry her yourself. Hirani’s ear for humour is golden. It’s worth a trip to the theatre just to hear some of the funniest one-liners committed to the screen. But for all the entertainment he serves up, I seriously hope that, next time, he doesn’t take on the story of unfeeling banking officials made to see the error of their ways and cancelling all farming loans. It would be a terrible tragedy if Hirani ended up the Madhur Bhandarkar of the feel-good genre, saving the world one profession at a time.

Star Ratings

Copyright ©2009 The New Sunday Express. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.