DAS BHOOT

A kid gets chummy with a ghost in a winning fantasy that unfortunately falls apart towards the end. Plus, the most horrendous star-son launch ever.

MAY 11, 2008 - WHEN I HEARD THAT VIVEK SHARMA’S BHOOTHNATH was about a ghost doing its darnedest to scare away the family that’s moved into its home, I was afraid we were in for a retread of Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice – but, thankfully, the only Burtonian bit about this film is its No Smoking-ish credits sequence, where a candle is snuffed out and the names of the cast and crew are conjured up from the wisps of smoke that have apparently invaded the entire house. Strangely, though, that’s the only hint of the macabre, and what follows is a most sweet-natured fantasy for children. Except for the last half-hour or so – where the director appears to have realised there are grown-ups in the audience too, and in a desperate, last-minute attempt at throwing sops at them, he lets the free-floating whimsy curdle into tiresome melodrama – Bhoothnath is the kind of film you rarely ever see made here, where something like Koi… Mil Gaya or Krissh is what passes for children’s entertainment.

I mention these films not just because Hrithik Roshan’s caped crusader inspired thousands of Indian boys to stretch their arms and leap off their couches – and, reportedly, off an apartment rooftop in Patna – but also because of the basketball game where the hero’s newfound alien friend supplied the superpowers so he could beat a bunch of bullying opponents. Here too, there’s the incidence of a sport – Banku (Aman Siddiqui) versus a schoolmate in a hurdle race. Here too, Banku has a newfound alien friend – well, alienated from mankind, anyway; he’s the titular ghost, played by Amitabh Bachchan – with supernatural powers. Here too, Banku’s bullying opponent has been winning all the races so far, and crowing about the fact. But instead of Bhoothnath fixing the clincher race in Banku’s favour, he advises the boy, “Sports mein cheating nahin,” and that Banku can win if he simply tries harder – and sure enough, Banku walks away with the prize. I’m not at all a fan of messages in movies, but this particular instance works beautifully because it’s exactly the kind of thing you’d tell a child; it’s exactly how you’d shape a child.

That’s not to say Bhoothnath is a quasi parenting manual gussied up with mainstream-movie clothes – because some of the mainstream elements are a little unnerving in a film targetted at children. In one of the many underwhelming songs by Vishal-Shekhar, two kids who are at loggerheads at school are reimagined as rival gangland leaders – it’s like a hip-hop video version of Bugsy Malone – while little girls in loads of bling pose alongside as their… molls? Worse, hos? Elsewhere, in the Mere buddy number, Bhoothnath and Banku are accompanied in their exertions by shapely extras in little, black dresses and fishnet stockings. Then again, I guess this is nothing when compared to what’s usually seen in our “wholesome” family fare – and let’s face it, almost every film released in our country is deemed fit for family consumption. (Do you know many people who vet what their kids are watching?)

Bhoothnath gets going when Banku moves into a haunted mansion with his parents – played by Juhi Chawla (whose helium-voiced mugging makes it appear that she saw the film as an extension of her Kurkure ads, especially with so many packets of the munchies popping up so frequently) and Shah Rukh Khan (guest starring as her husband, and charmingly laidback; free an actor from the pressures of carrying a movie, and it’s a nice surprise what you end up with sometimes) – and the early scenes set a tone that’s at once childish and childlike. I did find myself getting restless every now and then – when is the story going to get going, I kept wondering – but the director finds interesting and inventive ways to appeal to the part of you that still responds to innocence and fun and wide-eyed wonder.

The special effects sequences, especially, are a joy. The visual trickery in Bhoothnath is easily the most seamless, most accomplished I’ve seen in an Indian film of this kind – but what makes these scenes really work is the context. You don’t have to be a child to laugh at the moment where Banku tricks Bhoothnath into cleaning the house. The ghost lines up the pieces of furniture – as yet unpacked – in two neat rows, and on his signal, they chug forward to the accompaniment of choo-choo train effects in the soundtrack. And some of these effects come with unexpected grace notes, as when Bhoothnath clears the floor of dry leaves with a mighty expulsion of breath, and when Banku points to the last, remaining leaf, he inhales it and chomps it down. (I was so delighted with this touch, I’m going to be quite upset if someone reveals it’s been taken from such-and-such foreign film.)

Even the songs, when they appear to have been better left on the editing-room floor, surprise you with lovely flourishes. When Banku’s mother slaps him, Bhoothnath launches into Chalo jaane do, and part of his cheering-up routine includes a click of the fingers that results in a passel of clowns materialising with balloons on a beachside. And in addition, there’s a human special effect in the form of Satish Shah, in high-cartoon mode, as a headmaster with an indeterminate accent – “control” comes out as “can troll” – prone to digging into his students’ lunch boxes. But after filling about three-quarters of his film with such warm-hearted whimsy, Sharma begins to fill us in on the ghost’s back story, and Bhoothnath begins to fall spectacularly apart. This is the kind of film that established its irreverence by mocking the mother as not just a bad cook, but also a lazy one who constantly fed her family sandwiches (and, perhaps, the occasional bowl of Maggi) – and suddenly, the director whisks us off into the kind of movie where mothers were gaajar ka halwa specialists, where it’s all about tradition and cultural values and all that sort of thing.

The ending is particularly grotesque, featuring a religious ceremony – a shraddh – for the emancipation of souls, something that Banku is forced to perform for Bhoothnath because the latter’s son (named Vijay, no less) has unresolved issues and won’t take up this responsibility. Why is this suitable material for a children’s film? And why wasn’t all this wrapped up in a tidier fashion, when Bhoothnath advises Banku about the virtues of forgiveness? Couldn’t they have skirted the last-minute melodramatic mess by simply throwing this advice back at the advice-giver, when Banku realises Bhoothnath hasn’t forgiven Vijay for whatever reasons? That miscalculation apart, the leads make Bhoothnath worthwhile. Bachchan goes the gamut from crotchety spirit to caring grandfather-figure, his raggedy-man guise and mottled-Kabuki makeup gradually giving way to the actual human being we know and love. And Siddiqui brought out for me some of the most endearing aspects of childhood. When Bhoothnath says he’ll eventually become a star and asks Banku to watch out for him in the skies every night, Banku can’t help but ponder about a technicality: but what if there’s a cloud? After all these years of children acting like adults in our films, how refreshing it is to find them being kids again.

IMAGINE YOGEETA BALI WITH A FIVE O’CLOCK SHADOW and a mild case of laryngitis, and you’d have a fair idea of what Mimoh Chakraborty is all about. The resemblance is uncanny – though you wish he’d inherited his genes from his talented father instead. Mithun Chakraborty scaled huge heights as an A-list star – albeit in a host of B-list movies – before settling into the comfortable groove of a C-list stud. And based on Raj NC Sippy’s Jimmy, Mimoh (who plays, uh, Jimmy) wants to get to that comfortable groove right away, without suffering the ignominies of nationwide stardom and hysterical fandom – hence this awful, outdated mess about being slapped with a murder rap and trying to wiggle out of it, as girls on the soundtrack go “zu zu zu zu.” The comedy is terrible (Shakti Kapoor enters the frame cupping a buttock), the romance is worse (after enduring a fainting spell, Jimmy coos into his equally vapid girlfriend’s ears that he’s looking forward to the day she’ll go through fainting spells; get it?), and let’s not even get into the choreography (Mimoh executing signature MJ moves to a Billie Jean lift) and the screenplay and the performances. After Jimmy is exonerated, his mother exults, “Bhagwan ne meri prarthna sun li.” If only He’d listened to ours.

Copyright ©2008 The New Sunday Express. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

IT’S A (MOSTLY) WONDERFUL LIFE

MAY 11, 2008 - OVER THE YEARS, AND ESPECIALLY DURING OSCAR SEASON, we’ve gotten used to rags-to-riches, footpath-to-fame biopics of American musicians, but La Vie En Rose is absolutely, entirely, completely different: it’s the rags-to-riches, footpath-to-fame biopic of a French musician, the legendary Edith Piaf. (That qualifier notwithstanding, the first time I heard Piaf was in Saving Private Ryan, when a song of hers wafted over the smog and the silence during a respite before the climactic battle, when the scholarly Corporal Upham – so marvellously played by Jeremy Davies – translated its lyrics to the rest of his unit.) Piaf’s story has to be seen to be believed – or rather, if you didn’t see it, if you didn’t know that all of this really happened, you wouldn’t believe a second of it. We’ve all heard – or have been consoled by – that cliché about God opening a window when he closes a door, but when it comes to people like Piaf, His policy seems to have been more along the lines of opening for them a great door (to fame, to fortune), allowing them entry into the kind of hallowed, rarefied space that you or I can only dream about, and then shutting all the windows, one by one. First success, then suffocation – that appears to be His plan, the price for experiencing more joys than most mortals being the commensurate experience of more sorrows.

And in the case of Piaf, what sorrows they were. She was snatched away from an alcoholic mother by an acrobat father who dumped her in his mother’s brothel, and later dragged the child away kicking and screaming after she’d formed a bond with a maternal prostitute (but not before she underwent a period of temporary blindness). She was taken to a circus where she was cursed at, and once that ordeal got over, she was taken to the streets to (literally) sing for her supper and fork over her earnings to a pimp. Her benefactor Louis Leplée (Gérard Depardieu) was murdered. When she finally found the love of her life, he turned out to be a married man, who died soon after in a plane crash. She battled booze addiction, an unhealthy morphine dependency, liver cancer and the death of a child, along with onstage collapses and at least a couple of car accidents. How do you say phew in French? It’s hardly the ideal pickup at the end of a long day, but the reason I finally caught up with La Vie En Rose – other than the fact that I pretty much watch everything – is that Marion Cotillard (who plays Piaf) scored an upset win at the Oscars this year over Julie Christie (who was widely touted as the front-runner for Best Actress, for Away From Her.)

I haven’t seen Away From Her, so I can’t say if Cotillard deserved her Academy Award over Christie – Wikipedia tells me she’s the first person to ever win one for a performance entirely in French – but there’s little doubt she deserved some sort of recognition for meticulously crafting a full-blooded, sympathetic character out of outlines that could just as easily have been shaped into a stereotypical showbiz monster. This is one of those performances tailor-made for derision as “chewing up the scenery,” but that would be completely inaccurate in a sense. The scenery is merely the appetiser, after which Cotillard works her way through the props and the supporting cast and layers and layers of old-age makeup, and washes it all down with the large glasses of wine she’s constantly guzzling on screen. And the amazing thing is that it actually works. It works because it’s an outsized performance in an outsized movie. The writer-director Olivier Dahan knows he’s got a rather predictable dramatic arc, so he slices up his story and rearranges the pieces in a non-linear fashion, so what you get isn’t a sustained psychological portrait of Piaf so much as snapshots that reveal – despite the occasional frustration about what’s really going on – how the melodrama of her life informed the melodrama of her music.

If you’re looking, for instance, for the reason Leplée is murdered, La Vie En Rose isn’t about to give you one – because all you need to know is that Piaf used to love this man, this father-figure she called Papa Leplée, and now he’s been cruelly snuffed out, and worse, the cops and the press are hounding her, so cue yet another eddy in the whirlpool that was her existence. What kept her from being sucked under was, of course, the music – and yet, we don’t hear her sing the first time she performed in the theatre, the first time her talent was showcased for the kind of audience whose adulation would eventually elevate her to a national icon. (Her earlier shows were in two-bit nightclubs, where – much like the fate that befell Liza Minnelli’s showgirl in Cabaret – the incandescence of her gifts couldn’t peek through the dingy gloom of her surroundings.) Piaf shuffles on stage, in the blinding spotlight, her hands locked behind, like a nervous schoolgirl’s, and when she finally breaks into full-throated song, it’s as if she’s a mime. Her lips move, her throat warbles – but all we hear are the gentle notes from a piano glazed with swirls from an accordion, rising and falling and underlining the swells of emotion in an enraptured audience. It’s the first time Piaf is feeling the words she’s singing – so far, she’s been merely a technical virtuoso, a brassy belter of tunes – and Dahan shows us that what she’s singing, now, has been eclipsed by how she’s singing it. It’s a beautiful moment that tells us how talent met technique that night in Paris, how Piaf finally found her one joy that would tide her through life’s sorrows.

Copyright ©2008 The New Sunday Express. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

MR. KNOW-IT-ALL TELLS IT ALL

MAY 10, 2008 - ALFONSO CUARÓN’S Y TU MAMÁ TAMBIÉN IS SEVERAL MOVIES
for the price of one – a Spanish sex comedy about teenagers looking to get laid while their girlfriends are away; a coming-of-age drama set against the social mores of a developing country; the story of a woman attempting to cope with the cards she’s been dealt; an ode to the joys of unbridled carnality in the face of the cold inevitability of death – but its easiest, most facile categorisation is as a road movie. This is, after all, the story of Tenoch (Diego Luna) and Julio (Gael García Bernal) driving off – apparently through the dusty highways of Mexico; actually into the great unknown – with the older, wiser, sexier Luisa (Maribel Verdú).

But unbeknownst to them, there’s a fourth person tagging along – an omniscient narrator, a dispassionate chronicler (of their pasts, their shared present, and their futures) whose observations seem, at first, tangential, until you stand back and see that these loose bits have come together in a sacred mosaic of nothing less than Life itself. At the beginning, in the middle of Tenoch’s frantic coupling with his girlfriend Ana, he seeks a little-boy’s whiny assurance that she won’t sleep with “a Mexican hippie,” nor with “a pretty little French guy,” or indeed anyone else while on vacation – and the narrator chips in, “Ana’s mother, a divorced French woman, a teacher at the Foreigners’ Institute, didn’t object to Tenoch sleeping with her daughter.”

But it was different for Julio. “It wasn’t noticeable, but Cecilia’s father, an allergy specialist, feared that her relationship with Julio went too far beyond.” And while we see why this so – because Tenoch and Julio are from opposite sides of the tracks, because Tenoch is the desirable son of a Harvard economist (who’s now an official in the government) and Julio’s mother has always been a secretary in a corporation – we only truly know about the gulf that divides them when the narrator lets us in on the fact that Tenoch “used to lift the toilet cover with his foot at Julio’s.” Clearly, sometimes, friendship means never having to bring up the subject of personal hygiene.

After seeing their girlfriends off, and on the way back from the airport, Tenoch and Julio yelp with the joy of pups who’ve snapped their leashes. They complain about the traffic holdup, and console themselves that it’s probably due to a demonstration, and that there’d at least be “nice chicks” among the protestors. But the narrator knows there’s no such luck, for though three demonstrations did take place that day, the jam was due to a pedestrian having been hit by a truck. “Marcelino Escutia, an immigrant carpenter from Michoacán.” He never used the pedestrian bridge because it forced him to walk two extra kilometres to get to the building yard. “His unidentified body was recovered and brought to the mortuary. It was claimed four days later.”

Unaware of Escutia’s fate – and in all fairness, unaware of Escutia’s very existence – Tenoch reaches home. Then, with Julio listening, along with another friend who’s rolling joints for a party that evening, he goes into raptures about what exactly he’d like to do to Miriam, where he’d like to bite her, how he’d like to take her. Later, when a similarly explicit confession erupts in the car, when Tenoch and Julio and Luisa are on the road, the narrator, again, has his mind on other things, another accident. “Had they passed by there 10 years earlier,” he reveals, “they would have run across a couple of cages in the middle of the road. Then across a cloud of white feathers. Shortly after, more crushed cages, with dying chickens. Later on, an overturned truck, surrounded with smoke. They’d have seen two inert bodies on the ground, the smaller one covered with a jacket.” The narrator stops as suddenly as he started, and it’s back to the present, back to the people in the car, one of whom is itching for another cigarette.

Copyright ©2008 The New Indian Express. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

SUCKS COMEDY

A truckload of stars and a truckload of set pieces – but where are the laughs?

MAY 4, 2008 - SOME THIRTY YEARS AGO, WHEN AMITABH BACHCHAN spat out that he had a gaadi and a bangla and a this and a that, and Shashi Kapoor replied that none of this mattered because he had his mother by his side, did the actors realise what they were unleashing on the world? Did they know then that Kapoor’s iconic, laconic riposte – just four words: “Mere paas maa hai” – would travel the trajectory from goosefleshy dialogue-writing at its best to God-awful parody at its worst? Is there anyone who wants to hear this line again in the movies – whether as worshipful homage or wicked spoof – or at least, is there any filmmaker capable of putting the kind of spin that would make it seem fresh again? Deepak Shivdasani, the director of Mr. White Mr. Black, clearly thinks he’s the man for the job, and so he fashions an entire scene – indeed, an entire character (the don named Laadla, and played by Ashish Vidyarthi) – around Salim-Javed’s salute to motherhood. As this exchange from Deewar plays on his television, Laadla weeps uncontrollably, remembering his mother who made gaajar ka halwa and who almost died with pride when he announced his ascent to ganglord (“Aaj tera beta don ban gaya hai maa”) and who actually died a minute later when a stray bullet from her son’s gun brought down a chandelier on her skull.

That incident has never left Laadla’s mind, and so he’s amassed a collection of such motherly cinematic moments – Lata Mangeshkar’s saccharine Tu kitni achchi hai from Raja aur Rank is another – to be viewed whenever he feels like a really good cry. (A sidekick who speaks in a falsetto stands beside him, dutifully unspooling a roll of toilet paper so his boss can dry his eyes.) And this is one of the better gags in Mr. White Mr. Black, the latest shot in the arm to the contention that we’re witnessing one of the sorriest movie-going years in recent memory. A nonsensical comedy with Suniel Shetty in the lead – he plays a bumpkin named Gopi – was never a promising proposition to begin with, and any hopes of pleasantly being proved wrong are dashed when we see how Gopi meets the girl of his dreams: a dog pulls his dhoti off and the garment is borne away by the wind, only to land on the comely Tanya (Anishka Khosla). And this is one of the better romantic tracks in Mr. White Mr. Black, because when we first meet Kishan (Arshad Warsi) and Anu (Rashmi Nigam), she’s flinging a wad of cash at him because she thinks he’s a cad named Hari (a lookalike of her lover Kishan), whereas he’s only pretending to be that cad named Hari so Anu won’t know that he’s a conman (in other words, a cad named Kishan).

These are the moments that make you terrified of setting foot in Mumbai, because there’s clearly something in the water. Can you think of another reason anyone would bankroll such a project, which kicks off with Sandhya Mridul sucking on a lollipop as she – along with two others – steals a bag of diamonds (belonging to Laadla) that, by the end of the film, lands up on an arm of chandelier, thus necessitating the formation of a tottering human pyramid? And this, just after the supposed comedic bit where Upasana Singh requests Manoj Joshi to hook up her blouse, without realising that he’s not her husband. And this, just after a drunk Tanya asks Gopi to kiss her because he’s got – you’d better be sitting down for this – “such a desi smell.” And this, just after Kishan walks into Inspector Brown’s house – yes, Inspector Brown, played by a hapless Sharat Saxena – and announces that he’s the recipient of the Plumber of the Year award. As such, Mr. White Mr. Black is likely to delight only film scholars pursuing the trail of homoeroticism in our cinema, for if you saw (or imagined) traces of a love of a – cough, cough – different kind in the likes of Sholay and Dharam-Veer, just wait till you hear the song sung by the heroes here, likening them to beats of the same heart: Ek dil do dhadkan, ek Gopi ek Kishan. And here we were, thinking all along that their hearts were beating for Anu and Tanya.

Copyright ©2008 The New Sunday Express. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

FIVE MINUTES OF FUN AND NOTHING ELSE?

MAY 4, 2008 - THERE’S THIS QUESTION THAT SENDS ACTORS on deep voyages of introspection, as they chew their lower lips and ponder about how and why their characters came to be. It goes, “What’s your motivation?” And of late, I’ve been creating scenarios in my mind about what it would be like if the same query were put forth to the songs in our cinema – say, Chhaliya, from Tashan. So here I am, intrepid pop-culture reporter, recorder in hand, approaching this number, fawning about how good it looks up there on screen (to which the response is a shimmy shake and an indifferent toss of blonde curls), and asking about its motivation, its reason for existence – and all I get is a blank stare. It could have been a question about quantum mechanics I’d posed. Chhaliya pouts and examines an invisible chip at the corner of a lacquered fingernail. After a minute, the silence is broken by a booming laugh, as director Vijay Krishna Acharya joins us. “You’re looking for the reason I have Chhaliya in my film? To show off my heroine’s brand-new size-zero shape in a two-piece swimsuit, that’s why.”

And that’s how surreal the placement of songs in our cinema has become – even of songs that aren’t supposed to be surreal. The only considerations seem to be: Is there a hot heroine? Are there good-looking backup dancers? Are they all in the kind of locations that could fill up a hundred travel brochures? And, does the number have a groove that can be extrapolated to an evening at a nightclub? When the heroes and heroines in the earlier days used to be in Andheri one second, and off in the Alps the next, they’d at least be celebrating their love. Or something like that. Our rational minds may have balked at the sudden change in scenery, but the emotional temperature didn’t change, and that was alleviating to an extent. Who knows? Maybe their minds saw undying love as a five-minute break in climes hardly suited to sleeveless blouses and chiffon saris, the way we daydream about beachfront escapes involving rainbow drinks with tiny umbrellas while we’re chained to our desks between nine and six. But what to make of Kareena Kapoor, who’s apparently out to avenge her father’s death, and is now – just before immersing his ashes in the Ganges – giving the audience the come-on in Chhaliya? Who knows? Maybe her mind sees revenge as a series of pelvic contortions on a boat filled with a dozen other hotties.

Now, if you’re going to ask me what prompted the preceding paragraphs – in other words: “What’s my motivation?” – I’d have to point towards an afternoon of flipping television channels and landing on Ravindra Peepat’s Waaris. Actually, I didn’t know it was Waaris, as this happened to be one of those rare channels that didn’t feel the need for commercial breaks, after which the re-entry to the next installment of the film would be announced with the kind of fanfare more appropriate for an imperial coronation. I stopped because I saw Smita Patil and Raj Kiran, two of my favourite actors of the eighties (the former because of a number of films, the latter mainly due to Hip Hip Hurray). They got married, and then he got killed, and I stuck on because the film turned interesting. It was something about the problems faced by Smita Patil’s character (named Paro) in holding on to the land that belonged to her husband, now that he’s left her without a waaris, an heir. (Call it melodrama, call it old-fashioned and hysterical, but if the films today had half as interesting a story hook as this one, our cinema halls would be much happier places to visit.)

At some point, Amrish Puri – twirling his handlebar moustache and playing the villain, what else? – taunts Paro that all her efforts are in vain, as he’s her father-in-law’s (Kulbhushan Kharbanda) brother and he has three sons, so the land will end up theirs. And Paro decides to get her father-in-law married off again, so he can produce a legal heir to the property. The minute Paro walks into Kharbanda’s home and asks him to make a promise that he’ll do anything she asks, and he replies with an unflinching nod, I thought she was going to do something really icky – like asking him to marry her. (So she’d be marrying her dead husband’s father, the way Hema Malini married her dead husband’s brother, Rishi Kapoor, in Ek Chadar Maili Si). But no – the girl Paro has in mind is her younger sister, Seebo (Amrita Singh). After the inevitable protests, Kharbanda agrees – and the reason I’m telling you all this is because the very next scene has the lovely duet, Mere pyaar ki umar ho itni sanam. (That’s when I knew the film was Waaris.)

Placed anywhere else, this would have been just another nice number that Seebo sings with Bindar (Raj Babbar), just another declaration of love, but placed here – after Paro’s decision to marry off Seebo to someone else, someone older, for some reason Seebo isn’t even directly affected by – the song acquires a special poignancy. Here they are, the young lovers, uniting their names on a wall with sticks of charcoal, and you watch with the sinking dread that they’re soon to be separated. See what a difference this one song makes? See how consequential it is? And see how few filmmakers today – with the exception of an Ashutosh Gowarikar (case in point: In lamhon ki daaman mein from Jodhaa Akbar, which is a grand physical culmination to the hitherto platonic love story) or a Farhan Akhtar (case in point: Agar main kahoon from Lakshya, which lays out, in a few minutes, through lyrics and music and choreography, more about the characters played by Hrithik Roshan and Preity Zinta than reams of clumsy expository dialogue could; he’s a goofball slacker through the entire song, while she looks like she’s going to enlist any instant in a hipster equivalent of the Narmada Bachao Andolan) – are interested in anything of this sort? To most of them, music is just mindless filler. That’s why I’m writing this piece. That’s my motivation.

Copyright ©2008 The New Sunday Express. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

LIFE, AS HE KNOWS IT

MAY 3, 2008 - THE WAY MAJID MAJIDI’S BARAN OPENS, it’s likely to strike terror in the hearts of the average audience, for the first thing we see is this text: “In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. By the time the Soviets withdrew 10 years later, the country had become a ghost of its former self. The devastation, combined with an ensuing civil war, the brutal reign of the Taliban regime, and a three-year drought, prompted millions of Afghans to flee their country. The United Nations estimates that Iran now hosts 1.5 million Afghan refugees. Most of the young generation was born in Iran, and has never been home.” The simple fact is that, however much we prime ourselves for overtly political stories – and that solemn, silent intonement does point to an overtly political story, the cinematic equivalent of spinach – they always remain something of a chore to get through. We know these films are good for us. We know they open our eyes to realities far beyond our shores. And yet…

But the welcome surprise of Baran is that it isn’t about matters of the state so much as murmurs of the heart. It’s about people; the politics merely adds an extra dimension to these people. In another film, when construction worker Najaf (Gholam Ali Bakhshi) falls from the second floor of his work site and breaks his leg, and when he’s forced to send his young son Rahmat (Zahra Bahrami) to fill in for him, you’d say it’s because he’s poor and he’s got all those mouths at home to feed. But here, you say it’s also because he’s an Afghan refugee in Iran who’s getting paid far less than his Iranian counterparts, so if he doesn’t send Rahmat to take his place, he’ll lose even the miniscule amounts of money he’s making, besides not knowing if there’s going to be any employment available once his leg heals (dependent as that is on hard-to-get authorisation cards).

But Najaf doesn’t break that leg till about five minutes into the film, and until then, we’re free to savour how much easier Iranians like Lateef (Hossein Abedini) have it. He waits outside an eatery where the cooks inside are kneading dough and making small balls and flattening them into roti-shapes and laying them out on a conveyor griddle, where the heat causes them to erupt into sickly boils that then turn brown, then black, and now look merely delicious. Lateef counts the pieces of bread, folds them into a shoulder bag, grabs one for the road and sets out for the construction side, where his job is to feed the other workers. He also has to brew for them frequent glasses of tea, but all told, life couldn’t be better given the circumstances, considering the alternative is to sunder walls and shoulder heavy bags of cement.

The lightness of Lateef’s being – of his job, of his life – is unobtrusively laid out as he dawdles back to the site, stopping to laugh at a couple playing catch with a hat, smiling at his reflection in the doorway of an expensive-looking building. He passes a couple of men engrossed in a game of chess. He sights a coin on a road strewn with dead leaves. He looks around, places a foot on it, squats as if to tie his shoelaces, and pockets the coin. He enters a grocery store and shops for the other workers – pasta and Harvardin cigarettes – and while totalling the purchases, he impulsively grabs a lollipop and sticks it in his mouth. And when – his hands heavy, his tongue sweetened – he arrives at his destination, he finds a crowd milling around the injured Najaf. Lateef doesn’t know it yet, but that accident will change his life. He will no longer be the man-boy who smiled into a glass door and delighted in the casual, roadside games of an anonymous couple. But now, as he’s still leading his life as he knows it, he can afford to look at Najaf and smirk to a neighbour, “He jumped without his parachute?”

Copyright ©2008 The New Indian Express. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK

Robert Downey, Jr. makes a great superhero in a well-made – if somewhat routine – comic-book saga.

MAY 2, 2008 - SOMEWHERE IN THE KUNAR PROVINCE IN AFGHANISTAN, Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) is being escorted someplace in a military vehicle. The soldiers around are understandably in awe – not just because he’s a billionaire arms manufacturer who’s recently unveiled to the world his brightest, shiniest, new toy (a spectacular missile system), but also because he’s a legendary ladies’ man. One of the army escorts wonders aloud if it’s true that Stark went “12 for 12 with last year’s Maxim cover models.” Sloshing his drink around in its glass, Stark deadpans that the facts are correct, but perhaps the figures aren’t: one of those covers involved twins. Now, this much you can imagine any other leading man – George Clooney, for instance – do. It’s no stretch for the one-time Batman to play a playboy who’s mastered the art of the dapper comeback. But much later, when Stark’s unfortunately named woman-Friday – Pepper Potts (a charming Gwyneth Paltrow) – reminds him about a ceremony he has to attend at MIT sometime in the future, and when he admonishes her not to “harangue” him just yet, you can’t imagine Clooney milking the same effects out of this word. He’d have wrapped his silken bass around it, and in the process, he’d have reduced it to an understated, invisible purr. It wouldn’t have leapt out and jabbed you cheekily in the side, reminding you how unusual its presence is in an American movie of late, let alone a superhero movie.

Once that body suit comes on and once that mask envelops the face, pretty much any gym-ripped slab of meat could play Iron Man – but Downey convinces us that only he could have played Stark. Or at least, only he could have made Stark – a man described as “constitutionally incapable of being responsible” – such an unusually blithe addition to our groaning canon of angsty superheroes. For one thing, his line readings are utterly unpredictable. You never know which part of a sentence he’s going to seize and underline, and hearing him speak, you realise what a real actor – a vital, charismatic actor – can do with the most overplayed of parts (in this case, the superhero before he became a superhero). When we see Christian Bale in Batman Begins, we are left in no doubt that this a good actor before us, but Bale, on screen, is almost always a dour presence, just as Batman himself is not exactly a barrel of laughs. But Downey is that rare combination of a performer who’s also an entertainer – there’s always that bad-boy glint in his eyes that makes it appear he doesn’t take the business of acting very seriously, which is perhaps the reason he’s so fun to watch – and this quality goes a long way towards redeeming the rather lightweight Iron Man, which, without its leading man, would surely have been yet another routine saga of a man in a silly suit out to save the world.

The casting’s the thing in these first installments of superhero movies, because otherwise, they’re brewed up every single time with the same ingredients. Iron Man may not be powered by a red sun or by radioactivity – early on, it’s by a car battery connected to an electromagnet in his chest to keep shrapnel from an explosion from entering his heart – but very little else is different. You still have to show the man he used to be before you show the man he will become. You still have to bring in a potential love interest who may or may not stumble upon the secret identity of her man. You still have to have that wow visual-effects sequence where our hero learns to control his powers. And you still have to orchestrate the superhero’s grand face-off with the supervillain (Jeff Bridges, who’s shaved his head and grown a beard, perhaps because there’s not much else he can contribute to his cardboard-cutout embodiment of evil). All of this is handled fairly well, though the fact that Stark is an arms manufacturer lends itself to peculiar real-life parallels. He’s an American whose weapons are sustaining the wars in Afghanistan – and presumably the Middle East and everywhere else – and the way director Jon Favreau sees it, Stark’s rebirth as an upholder of peace comes through the destruction of his own weapons, which are smelted down and forged into Iron Man’s blast-proof suit. If only. What a better place the world would be if it were run by Hollywood.

Copyright ©2008 The New Indian Express. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

FACT OF THE META

A masala movie that winks at masala movies. Sounds like fun, no? It’s actually anything but. Plus, what could have been this year’s Life in a Metro.

APR 27, 2008 - I’M WILLING TO BET A FAIR-SIZED SUM THAT this is how director Vijay Krishna Acharya’s pitch to producer Aditya Chopra went: “See, we’re used to films where a crucial plot enabler is the MacGuffin, the red herring – a bag of crisp notes, say, or wine bottles filled with Uranium – but what if the plot itself were the MacGuffin? People walk in expecting a story to unfold, but what if we take the very elements that make this story interesting and hurl them out of the window, or else chop them up into little hyper-stylised pieces so that they don’t seem to be a part of any single story so much as our cinema’s great kitsch continuum? What a terrific masala movie that would make.”

“After all, a masala movie is, by definition, pitched over the top, so let’s pitch this way over over-the-top, and instead of shaping our ‘story’ through a masala narrative, let the masala – the songs, the fights, the dialogue, the humour, the style – be the narrative. You don’t follow? Well, for instance, there’s the potential for a thrilling heist sequence when Jimmy (Saif Ali Khan) sets out to steal a heavy suitcase full of cash – one that belongs to a gangster (named Bhaiyaji, played by Anil Kapoor) – but let’s just dump all the suspense and simply show Jimmy walking out with the suitcase, to the accompaniment of wacky seventies’ music. What’s the point of this sequence, then, you ask? There’s no point. That’s the point.”

That’s an awesome conceit in theory – to do for the masala movie what Tarantino has done for the martial arts movie, which is to fall on all fours before its trashy magnificence – and so we have Tashan, a very brainy meta movie pretending to be a no-brainer masala movie, slapped together with shades of noir cinema (femme fatale, check; clueless, love-struck patsy, check) and the road movie (Kerala, check; Rajasthan, check) and the hoary revenge saga (child out to avenge parent’s gory death, check). The coming together of these elements should have been the most fun, most irreverent, most retro evening out at the movies since Main Hoon Na, but something gets lost between intent and execution – though I’m sure a lot of merriment was had during the script discussions.

“Let’s introduce Akshay Kumar (who plays a character named, hyuk hyuk, Bachchan Pandey) dressed as Ravana with sunglasses,” someone must have said, and the mental image must have cracked up everyone in the room. And as the other gags were tossed around – let’s have Bhaiyaji deliver a Deewar monologue in Hinglish; let’s spoof Don, by having the only cop who knows about the mole on the other side drop dead unceremoniously; let’s have a couple of sidekicks play hopscotch with a revolver instead of a stone; let’s have, in the Falak tak song sequence, a movie hall advertising a film named Falak Tak; let’s have an L.A.-based firang filmmaker (who’s shooting in India) get a call from Harvey (Weinstein); heck, let’s add “the” before the names of the stars during the opening credits (The Kareena Kapoor, by the way, is so totally hot, man, especially in that bikini) – the conference table must have caved in from all the slapping.

What we’re left with, though, is a cautionary tale about what’s likely to result when someone tries to think their way through an unabashed masala movie. It’s not the easiest of things to put together a masala entertainment in these (supposedly) enlightened multiplex climes, but the single-screen-era practitioners of this unholy genre-mishmash surely operated with their gut, not their grey cells. That’s perhaps why Tashan is so tedious – all the energy appears to have been expended on planning the movie, with very little left for the actual execution. The entertainment elements are all in place, but they just don’t come together in an entertaining way. Tashan is a like a gleaming sports car with no driver, and hence, no discernible direction. One moment it’s a crazy cartoon movie, where Bhaiyaji gets dressed in a room with a wall-sized Mona Lisa, flanked by a couple of suits of armour, and the next, Bhaiyaji clobbers someone to death with a cricket bat. (This unlikely instrument of death, still smeared with a dark crimson pulp of blood and flesh, is subsequently presented for our inspection.)

It’s one thing to see Jerry swing a sledgehammer on hapless Tom’s head – giving rise to a familiar boink sound effect and the inevitable hillock of red that rises instantly – but if the same levels of violence were shown in live action, is it still supposed to be fun? Or have we entered a different kind of movie now – a real, honest-to-goodness masala movie, instead of one that’s merely winking at those conventions? (This is the same problem I had with Om Shanti Om, which never really decided whether it wanted to have fun with a certain kind of cinema or follow in its footsteps.) By the time a young-love flashback – rather nicely spun, with sweet, homespun flourishes like electricity theft and an all-girls school and a mouthful of red chillies – comes to an end, and we discover who the boy and the girl in that story have grown up to be, we’re not sure whether to giggle or take the whole thing seriously.

There are distractions aplenty – in the form of hilariously nutty (though overlong) stunt sequences best described as Rajinikanth-meets-Parkour. The songs, too, are eye-poppingly staged, but they seem to exist simply because you can’t have a Hindi movie without songs. For all the brainstorming that’s gone into the characters, their entries and exits and their detailing, no one seems to have thought about how to bring about a song sequence – or, at least, create the kind of surreal atmosphere (like we saw in those other meta movies, Jaan-e-Mann and Jhoom Barabar Jhoom) that makes these considerations redundant. Only Dil dance maare lives up to the outrageousness of Vishal-Shekhar’s conception, and if you’ve seen the promos with the leads in blonde wigs, it’s a hoot to see how this situation comes to be.

Otherwise, the only thing you take away from Tashan is how Akshay Kumar totally deserves the first part of his screen name. It’s not just that he’s referred to, at one point, as Mr. Ganga Kinarewala, or that he’s mistaken for the Big B by that firang filmmaker. He plays so instinctively, so effortlessly to the gallery – part action stud, part bumpkin buffoon – that he gets away with things he shouldn’t be getting away with, the way his namesake did in so many masala films of the seventies and the eighties. And if Tashan becomes a hit – like Welcome or Bhool Bhulaiya or, oh, pretty much everything Akshay’s been in recently – you can add another reason for the comparison. The ability to transform dreck into box-office dynamite was yet another Bachchan specialty.

AFTER SURVIVING TASHAN, THE PROSPECT OF a second film by a first-time director was utterly enervating – but if Rajaatesh Nayar’s Sirf isn’t all that it could have been, it’s at least got interesting characters who find themselves in interesting situations. This one had the potential to be this year’s Life in a Metro – an unflinchingly urban take on a series of interlocked relationships, peopled by a talented cast (Sonali Kulkarni, Kay Kay, Ranvir Shorey and Ankur Khanna, among them) – but everything’s brought down a couple of notches thanks to Nayar’s general tendency for overemphasis. (This is, after all, a film whose tagline goes, “Life Looks Greener on the Other Side,” with the third word shaded in green.)

You could go on cataloguing the film’s faults: the songs don’t linger; the scenes don’t know when to stop; the dialogues keep looping back to explain what’s already been explained; the staging is elementary; the actors are left pretty much to their own devices (and their performances, therefore, range from the wildly hammy to the barely adequate); terrible clichés coexist uncomfortably with moments of surprising insight (the conversation Kay Kay has with his driver, for instance). And yet, the universality of the bittersweet predicaments – of having love but no money, of having money but no love, of having money and love but no time – resonates just enough to make you wonder what Nayar is capable of with more money and better collaborators.

Copyright ©2008 The New Sunday Express. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

SEX AND VIOLENCE, FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY

APR 27, 2008 - AS TWO RECENT RELEASES OFFER AMPLE PROOF, there are some things in Tamil cinema that will never change – the fact, for instance, that the hero isn’t a hero until he flexes his muscles. Santhosh Subramaniam and Yaaradi Nee Mohini are both what are known as “family” films, and that genre (if it can be called that) has come a long way from what families used to watch in the black-and-white era – the melodramas of P Bhimsingh, say. I can’t recall a single one of those films where Sivaji Ganesan – who moped and monologued his way through a goodish number of them – raised a hand. He’d raise his voice, yes, that lion’s roar that defined declamatory acting for an entire generation – but if he raised a hand, it was, at best, to direct a slap at a scheming co-star’s cheek (or, perhaps, a series of why-God-why blows at his own forehead), and never to have a go at a henchman’s solar plexus. But then Sivaji Ganesan, and others like him, were merely the protagonists of those films, while today, the likes of Jayam Ravi (in Santhosh Subramaniam) and Dhanush (in Yaaradi Nee Mohini) are heroes. And where there is a hero, there is, by definition, a villain, and where there is a villain, there is an angry confrontation, and where is angry confrontation, there is a fight sequence.

These fight sequences have become so mandatory, it doesn’t seem to matter if they’ve been integrated organically – or at least in a convincing manner – into the screenplay. There’s an air of “we’ve got to have some action in the film; let’s get it done with and move on” about them. In Santhosh Subramaniam, Jayam Ravi gets his date with the stunt coordinator when his girlfriend Hasini (Genelia) is harassed at her college by a bunch of rowdy students. Had our hero simply charged at them and reduced them to a heap of bruised bodies, this bit wouldn’t have grated so, but what makes things worse is the subsequent revelation that these supposed bad elements are Hasini’s friends, who didn’t mean anything by their teasing. (This is clearly some kind of college that exists only in the fantasies of horny adolescent males, where it’s entirely appropriate to comment lewdly on the delectable proportions of women-friends’ physical assets.) And in Yaaradi Nee Mohini, Dhanush gets to beat up a number of goons who turn up expressly so that Dhanush can beat them up. These men play no part in the film before this fight sequence, or after.

Ask the director why he couldn’t have dropped hints of a running conflict through the film – so that when this fight erupts we at least know that it’s been a long time coming – and he’ll probably shrug: “Well, if you can suspend your disbelief enough to accept that a single punch from the hero can result in the villain’s triple-somersaulting through the air, why should the flash point of this fight be any more convincing?” Fair enough, I guess – and by extension, I suppose you could justify the soft-core elements in these family films too, like the item number performed in Yaaradi Nee Mohini by Rahasya, who, towards the song’s end, spends some thirty seconds, all by herself, convulsing in little choreographed spasms. It’s as if the rest of the dancer-extras have packed up and left for the day, but Rahasya – alone, and in the barest of essentials – is in some sort of booty-shaking trance, so completely committed to her cause and to the moment that minor impediments like the director yelling “Cut!” are of little consequence.

The point of these observations isn’t to bemoan the state of our family films today. (Both Yaaradi Nee Mohini and Santhosh Subramaniam are fairly easy to sit through, the latter especially so.) But what’s interesting is that these fights and these sexy item numbers used to be staples of the masala movies, and they’ve gradually insinuated themselves into the family fare as well. And this is where I’d like to wonder why. Is it because Tamil audiences are incapable of accepting a film with a big-name hero and without these “commercial compromises?” Is it because humour and romance and charm and sentiment aren’t enough to carry these family films, without the additional requirement of reducing every single protagonist to a hero? Or is it because no major male star will commit to a lead role like that in Jab We Met, where Shahid Kapoor was every bit as young and in love as the characters played by Dhanush and Jayam Ravi, but was not required to participate in a gravity-defying, laws-of-physics-challenging action sequence, and (despite his excellent dancing skills) not asked to match steps with a navel-baring Rakhi Sawant?

Copyright ©2008 The New Sunday Express. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

IT’S NOT A KILLING IF IT’S MURDER

APR 26, 2008 - THE WAY ANTHONY MINGHELLA SAW IT, Tom Ripley merely killed Dickie Greenleaf. When the director adapted Patricia Highsmith’s nasty little novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley, he shaped the elimination of Dickie’s character as an accident. A crime of passion, the courts would have called it. Dickie’s gotten tired of Tom and his constant mooching. “I think we’ve seen enough of each other for a while,” is one of the kinder things Dickie says on the boat that will turn out to be his final resting place, and Tom’s adamant refusal to take a hint results in crueller name-calling: that Tom can be a leech, that Tom can be quite boring. The plangent score over Tom’s equally plaintive face leaves us in no doubt about the direction our sympathies are to be routed.

Poor Tom. Poor homosexual Tom with an unrequited crush on Dickie. Poor helpless Tom who is now being slapped around by a bullying Dickie. And then, an incensed Tom, a provoked Tom who grabs an oar and slams it into Dickie’s head. Blood begins to cascade down Dickie’s face. Tom is horrified, but Dickie launches himself on his inadvertent attacker, pinning him to the floor of the boat and screaming, “I’m going to kill you.” His face, already twisted with rage, is rendered positively demonic by the unceasing drops of blood that are now leaking onto Tom, who’s yelling “Stop, stop, stop, stop” – and when Tom finally pushes Dickie off and pummels him to death with that oar, we shake our heads at the sad turn of events that caused Tom Ripley to kill Dickie Greenleaf.

But the way René Clément saw it in Plein Soleil (the French adaptation of the same novel), Tom Ripley didn’t just kill Dickie Greenleaf (here called Philippe) – he murdered him. By the time the event is to occur, Tom (Alain Delon) and Philippe (Maurice Ronet) have already been discussing its possibility in a what-if conversation on that boat. Philippe knows Tom isn’t who he says he is, so he goads the impostor, “So you kill me. What then?” Tom reveals his plan, that he’ll first dispose of the body, then forge Philippe’s signature and write himself a new life with untold riches. Philippe challenges Tom to a game of poker. If Tom wins, he stands to gain $2500. Philippe deliberately loses, and yet Tom doesn’t want the $2500. Hell, he doesn’t want the $5000 that Philippe ups the offer to. He wants it all.

And so he sticks a knife into Philippe’s chest. You’d think the suddenness of the action would be complemented by a sharp burst of music – all we’ve heard so far is the lapping murmur of the ocean – but there’s just Philippe’s gnarled death-croak of an “Aaah.” He keels over. And now the soundtrack explodes with dramatic chords and odd rumblings of percussion – as if informing us that the crime isn’t as significant as its consequence – and the sea too explodes, with the fury of an impotent witness. (In contrast, in Minghella’s take on this scene, the violence is contained within the boat; the waters stay serene throughout.) As Tom prepares to get rid of Philippe’s body, he also tries to take control of the craft, but seeing that it’s apparently gotten itself a mind of its own, he downs a mouthful of liquor. (He may not be able to steady the boat, but at least himself he can steady.)

He wobbles over to the far end and fetches an anchor, which he straps onto Philippe – but as he tosses his victim overboard, he’s knocked into the water. The camera plunges into the choppy sea, recording Tom’s flailing attempts to clamber back aboard, and when he does, it’s back on the deck, now looking askance at Philippe’s body being dragged alongside the boat, still attached through a length of cable. Tom loosens the cable, flings it behind, and the body finally sinks. If Hitchcock, in Torn Curtain, showed us how difficult it was to kill a man, we see in this earlier film some sort of corollary: how difficult it is to dispose of his body once you’ve killed that man. After his exertions, Tom takes his shirt off, towels himself dry, and rewards himself with a voracious bite out of a fruit he finds in the cabin. He’s clearly taken the first step towards satisfying his hungers.

Copyright ©2008 The New Indian Express. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.