Even the Married Woman stereotype is red hot.

The pallu that, in one strategic slip, changes gears from bashful to boastful. That oomph that comes from experience. That smile which knows which men to fend off and which to encourage. That wrist, miraculously flexible by years of egg-whisking. That silently leonine air that comes of controlling a pride, a brood, a household. That grace under unending pressure. That self-assuredness. That way she can always tell when the milk’s gone off. And, without question, that sheer and complete unattainability. Do we not always want who we can’t have?

Why, then, the asinine assertion that actresses in India remain desirable only till they tie the knot? As a culture that has always fetishised the married woman — from Bhabhi to Boudi, the aforementioned stereotypes abound — how does it make sense for us to suddenly get prudish about ogling actresses who just so happen to be wives?

As theories go, unavailability is as daft as can be. Nobody sitting in a movie theatre imagines they have a shot with Priyanka Chopra simply because she whines about being single in interviews. And what dreamy delusion stops short of fantasy because of a mrs-shaped technicality, a mere squiggle before a name?

The people who do care about the unavailability of actresses happen, in fact, to be the same ones building up the ludicrous fallacy about how the public doesn’t want to see married women on screen. It is the heavy-bankrolling producers who insist strongest about casting single starlets simply because marriage does indeed make an actress less attainable to them, nudgenudgewinkwink. The public couldn’t care less.

~

Malaika Arora Khan. I’m no pollster, but that lady may well be the most blatantly lusted after woman in our cinema today. Does the fact that she’s married to a burly actor lessen her appeal when she grinds on screen? Does it lessen her appeal in any way at all when she grinds on screen with his brother? Nope, and that’s as it should be. Just like Marilyn Monroe’s marriages — or indeed, her many men — never dented our universal craving for her. Hollywood, in fact, makes it hard to keep score, but drool we do regardless of who’s-with-who.

And yet, Bollywood’s punditry wholly and unanimously subscribes to the theory that actresses lose their appeal after they get married: a statement that might have something to do with the fact that we constantly like casting younger girls opposite older men. Not that any sort of Bollywood formula is at all surefire: the actress with the most impact on Hindi film audiences this year is one significantly older than the Khan triumvirate, a married woman returning to the big screen after about a decade and a half.

The stubborn fatcats with the chequebooks, however, staunchly refuse to buy into fact, consider gamechangers anomaly, and continue to look askance at leading ladies with hyphenated last names. And we can editorially tut-tut all we like, but that won’t change things.

~

What could change things is a woman who isn’t content being a heroine.

Kareena Kapoor Khan — a 32-year-old who has just married into singularly unfortunate initials — wears the pants in her relationships. At least the ones with her filmmakers. As the country’s highest-paid leading lady, she commands both banknotes and box-office openings, and has the singularly incredible star power to remain unfazed by failure. Her films may tank in theatres, may be savaged by critics, but Kareena isn’t out to prove herself, or her stardom: she walks away from the debris with her memorable chin held up, her head high, her hips sashaying invincibly past the doomed rubble of a ruinous Friday. And when the films do click, she smiles like she knew they had to.

Kapoor is, thus, significantly less comparable to other actresses and more to someone like, well, Salman Khan. Regardless of the project, so firmly has the stardom been established that the cape will be worn (and paid for) even if the film doesn’t soar. Not just is Kareena most unlikely to slow down following her very recent nuptials, but she — the first Hindi film heroine to be blasé and candidly on the record about her relationships — may indeed storm more intensely in the months to come, and blaze a trail for actresses, and not just for married ones, but for older ones.

Because it takes one with the fierce incandescence of a star like Kapoor — starina, even, to rhyme with the csarina she doubtless is, a star driven amazingly enough by her own staggering sense of entitlement — to redefine the age-old presets that continue to handcuff our films. To effectively force the powers that be to sit up and take notice. To keep the fire burning. And a slower flame might well prove to be the most scorching.

Congratulations, Kareena Kapoor Khan. May even your bhabhidom dazzle us all.

~

First published (but in a very sloppily edited version) in Femina magazine, November 2012

You can tell a lot about a megastar by the way he throws his punch.

A Hindi film hero might routinely fell over seven with one blow, but each has their own approach. Aamir Khan, all bloodshot eyes and biceps rippling with the fury of thousands of killed wives to avenge, brings both physical intensity and a sense of inescapable irony to the picture. Shah Rukh Khan, his every sinew straining with gargantuan effort, bellows like a wounded animal as he metamorphoses from charming lover to crazied aggressor.

Salman Khan doesn’t bother breaking a sweat or even trying for realism as he buffets his opponents, effort be damned, smirk and quip steadily in place. The ubiquitous one-liner just underlines how one-sided the battle always is. Because Salman Khan is larger than life. And he believes it.

As do we, clearly. Earlier this year in Dabanng, Salman’s shirt tears itself off his enraged body, as if anger – and the need to show off his bare chest – are reason enough for him to suddenly turn into the Incredible Hulk. Coming at the film’s climax, the moment is dated and ludicrous beyond belief. Eternal romantic Shah Rukh would have been laughed out of theatres for trying to do the same. Aamir would have had to write a longish blog-post explaining how the scene was all a metaphor, or, somehow, Meta. Salman earned whistles, his film becoming one of the most successful in the history of Indian cinema.

In Mumbai’s Mehboob Studio, two days before that epic release, Khan sniffles his way past a ravenous pack of news-channel cameras. In no mood for niceties, he struts, chest out, upto a studio chair, parks himself on it, and turns to them. In a brutal show of strength and savvy, he preempts the questions they want to ask him, throwing out monosyllabic answers to each. “Aur kucch?” The reporters, used to standard-issue questionnaires, are flummoxed and bereft of fresh queries, and Khan is pleased as punch. He relaxes, blows his nose into a big kerchief, and swaggers out. All in less than five minutes.

He sneezes just as I walk up, clearly not in the mood but nevertheless resigned to a conversation. At this minute, eyes visibly watery, nose nearly crimson, Salman looks anything but invincible. He warily grunts through the first few questions until I ask, young man to forever-swaggering man, where on earth he meets women. “You can’t be serious,” he laughs, tired eyes instantly twinkling. Oh, but I am; he’s dated Somy Ali, Aishwarya Rai and Katrina Kaif. Is there a clandestine bar where the world’s most attractive women consistently turn up? “Ha, I wish. There isn’t a bar, dude. Otherwise we’d all go every night. I’ve… worked with them, I’ve known them. I have been fortunate with the kind of women I’ve… met. They’ve all been very nice. I’m sure you’re talking about the way they look and everything, but I mean the kind of people they are, their personalities. I’ve known them for the longest time. And as far as people, they’ve all been really beautiful.” He takes in a moment to smile. “And really loving, and really caring. Yeah, I’ve been lucky.”

Luck aside, Khan at 45 is the only single man among the industry’s megastars. “You’re single till the time you aren’t married, dude,” he interrupts instantly. I agree, wholeheartedly, but my question is how a man that powerful can gauge genuine romantic interest. Isn’t every girl awestruck? “It depends, you know,” he says, thoughtful. “The ones who’re awestruck… Nahin, yaar. Doesn’t work. Just doesn’t work,” he shakes his head.

And yet his cinema is all about invoking that very kind of awe. Is being larger than life a conscious effort? “No, it just happens. You work with good technicians. And more than that, audiences want to see things larger than life, so they make it happen.” This is clearly a position Salman enjoys, and feels he has earned. “When I started working in movies, I could never have played that character. Maine Pyaar Kiya and all, the only role I could have played was a romantic hero,” he says with a slight sneer. “From that, to come to this stage has been a long journey.” He speaks of his action-figure persona as an evolution, saying that while both romance and emotion are vital, the fights might just be the hardest part to pull off.

Even as an actor, he rates it the hardest, most challenging part. “Action is challenging for anybody. To jump, or take a punch, do all kinds of stuff, cable-work… That is more scary, because with every shot you feel something could go wrong. And you still do it. And so far, touchwood, everything has been all good. So action is the most difficult thing to do.” And in terms of performances, I ask, in terms of actual acting? Khan grins and winks. “That? It’s all good.”

Increasingly lauded for his utter lack of pretension, Khan is considered a star who often phones in his performances, barely even attempting to act. “If a film requires hard work, you work hard, yaar,” he shrugs. “If a film doesn’t require any hard work, why should you do it? If a director says ‘okay’ to a shot, okay! If he says ‘one more,’ one more!” Unlike his peers, he refuses to use terms like ‘method acting,’ to spend a shooting schedule in the skin of a character, or, sometimes, to even stop playing himself. He’s Salman Khan, and once in a while — if a director is valiant enough, or a script stirring enough, he’ll stand and deliver — but the rest of the time, it is, as he said, “all good.”

Or, at the very least, good enough for him.

~

Legend — and relatively credible word — has it that Salman Khan was utterly shattered when Shah Rukh Khan finagled Will Smith from Sallu’s guest-list, only to throw a party for the Hollywood A-lister at his own bungalow. Salman cut a melancholy picture at his own Smith-less party, while Smith reportedly looked somewhat bored at SRK’s party, where Salman wasn’t invited.

Undeterred, Salman turned up in a motorbike, yanked Will unceremoniously, casually and instantly from the party, and before anyone could react, took him to his own. If fellow guests are to be trusted, Smith got wonderfully jiggy at the new venue.

It isn’t a very hard story to believe, Khan’s off-screen persona being that of an old-school superstar, the picture of defiance, the ultimate rebel without a cause. Depending on who you believe, he thrashes actors in bars and sends over expensive watches in morning-after apology. He is also quite the philanthropist, and judging from how he got all of Bollywood’s A-list heroines to shake their collective caboose for his Being Human charity earlier this year, he’s doing quite the bang-up job. There are whispers about his constantly roving eye, and an almost mob-like entourage which gets him ‘anything’ he points to. And then there are those who vow he’s the most honourable man in the industry.

The myth, then, is as self-contradictory as the man. The role Khan seems to fill, in fact, is that of the man-child, who thrives on indulgence, indulgence we now have to spare, being so frequently cynical the rest of the time.

“How well do you think the media knows me, or any of my closest people?,” Salman snorts, instantly sneezing hard. Battling a cold valiantly, he takes turns blowing into a formerly-white kerchief and wrapping it tightly around his knuckles, as if preparing for a street-fight. Occasionally, when thinking hard, he absently bites into it, tugging it with its teeth as if insight can be sucked out of cotton. When emphatic, he punches the air in front of his face, a phlegmatic pugilist jabbing at invisible, omnipresent opponents. “Nothing ever bothers me. Nothing.”

He says every part of the public persona is inaccurate, but he can’t be bothered to go about telling people what to think. He laughs scornfully when the aggressive, ‘bad-boy’ image is brought up. “Please. If that was there… Listen, do you hear the questions they ask me? All the time? They ask me the kind of things my own father would never ask. I don’t care, and I don’t react. The day I start reacting to it…” He trails off in a dramatically threatening voice, before winking.

“Naam, Don, Majboor, Sholay, Deewar, Zanjeer,” he rattles, with the unthinking ease of a man used to listing his favourites among his father’s screenplays. Son of Salim Khan, one-half of Bollywood’s most celebrated screenwriting pairs, Salman confesses a desire to direct. “I always wanted to direct. I really thought that I would, somewhere, make a… good… director,” he mumbles softly, before saying that he does make creative suggestions to directors he works with, but backs off because it is, eventually, their call.

“You don’t have cinema till the time you don’t have a story. You have a story to tell and you shoot the film with the worst technique, and that film will do well. And you have the best technique in the world, but the lousiest script, you can do anything you want to do but that film will not work.” So then do all the hits have strong stories? “There is something, dude,” he shrugs. “Something they like. The character, the script, something clicks, and they want to go see it. Why would they want to go see something they don’t like?”

He prides himself on his unerring script sense — “The ones that I thought will do well, so far, pretty much all of them have,” he says, saying that his thinking is that if he wants to see the film he’s making, everybody would want to see it — but that doesn’t reflect as well on his hit-loss record, with far more forgettable films showing up than actual hits. “Well yes, but the script is not usually made the way it was. They start improvising, they start changing, they get scared, yeh bhi daal do, woh bhi daal do…”

So what went wrong, then, with Veer, a film he wrote and produced earlier this year, a catastrophic failure? “First of all,” he insists, “Nothing went wrong with it at all, at the box office. But in my head, I felt a lot of things went wrong. I wanted to shoot for 18 more days.” I ask him why he didn’t, considering it was a pet project he was completely in control of, and Salman disarms me with the sort of answer no megastar could possibly dare to give.

“Dad didn’t let me,” he sighs, almost pouting. And then falls silent.

Moving on, I ask him about another bizarre Salman contradiction. “Painting?,” he grins. “Painting is a big jhol. I wanted to buy three paintings for my house. The artist charged me a lot of money, and they didn’t turn out the way I wanted them to turn out. So I thought, ‘let’s try.’ So I started painting, started getting good at it. I was fortunate to find my own style in the first five and a half, six months. Artists take the longest time to find their way to say what they want to say…”

Salman’s paintings are sold at exhibitions with the money going into a charitable trust, and that’s clearly what fuels his fire. “So I’m getting better and better at it, and the money’s going to a good cause.” He isn’t under many delusions about why his paintings sell. “When somebody’s buying an artist’s work, two things are important: one is the amount of experience that he has, and two is a business plan: how long is he going to be there? After that, we’re going to make so much money because we’ve gotten his art, and after he’s dead, he obviously can’t paint anymore. So,” he pauses, briefly sounding alarmingly morbid, “they make money.”

“Here, how many paintings am I going to make anyway? I’m an actor. I paint when I find the time,” he says, explaining that it’s usually at night.

And how does he rate his own art, honestly? “If my name is not signed, it’s below average. Once my name comes down there, it’s outstanding work.” A smug grin accompanies the jab this time, the grin of a star who knows his worth. However unreal.

~

First published Rediff, December 29-30, 2010

Salman Khan has become the new Dharmendra.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not blaspheming for effect. When I say ‘the new Dharmendra,’ I don’t mean the fine actor from Satyakam or Chupke Chupke, or even the ridiculously charming hero from Sholay. I mean the guy Dharam turned into later, when he became incorrigibly obsessed with canine blood.

And that isn’t necessarily a bad thing at all, given how fondly we look at even latter-day Dharam Paaji. It’s good to know what to expect. The assembly line star-vehicles in Bollywood today are now nearly impossible to tell apart, and you could splice together a supercut from, say, Singham, Rowdy Rathore and Salman’s latest, and the storytelling narrative would merge seamlessly. It’s evident these movies aren’t about anything but the person starring in them, and all that matters are punches and punchlines, both sadly unmemorable.

Thing is, other actors play ridiculous, dated, larger-than-life characters. Salman, on the other hand, plays himself — or at least a bizarre (or less bizarre?) screen version of himself. This is where the Dharmendra parallel kicks in. Khan’s own persona, massaged by record-shattering blockbusters and his uniquely unapologetic lifestyle, is now larger than any character can be. And that, in itself, makes this film halfway entertaining.

For a fan of the star in question, all that matters is whether the star seems to be having fun. In which case Dabanng 2 is just the ticket, since Salman looks to be having the time of his life. The film itself is better than the original — or, to word it differently, is less unwatchable. And yet it has absolutely nothing new to offer, and nothing to remember, quote or take away from the theatre. The language in the dialogues is quite excellent, though: by which I mean the Hindi used in the UP-based film, and not the actual lines.

Things begin with a Kanpur kidnapping, and since Khan’s Aviator-collaring Chulbul Pandey lives there now, short work is briskly made of the kidnappers. The drill is remarkably unoriginal: a bigger bad guy shows up, Khan toys and teases him till the evil one snaps and hurts actors whose names we know, and thus we have a vendetta. Somewhere in the middle, naturally, Salman’s sister-in-law shows up to boogie, and (thankfully) on an unrelated note, his shirt eventually comes off. End film.

But Salman, thank heavens — unlike any of the characters written for these — is a goof. And that means his Chulbul Pandey giggles, sobs, prank calls his father, has an automatic pelvis-jiggling belt buckle, and plays volleyball with crooks. There are times, of course, where he looks far too old for the part. He’s an embarrassment when dancing, and his torso is so oddly proportioned that his solid colour shirts look like they’re inflated; there is a fair bit of hot air, to be sure. But all things considered, he wears the expressions unashamedly enough to make them work.

His heroine is, like in the first film, Sonakshi Sinha, who spends most of this film pouting. It is an unwise choice for a face that has become astonishingly round; the dupatta framing it fits her like the rim of an egg-cup. She still cannot act, not that it seemed ever a requirement. This film marks the directorial debut of Arbaaz Khan, who will doubtless pat himself on the back for making more crores than the more mediocre original, and why not: his motives appear clear, and as an actor, he’s actually surprisingly likeable as Pandey’s simpleton brother. His wife Malaika appears briefly and looks significantly more captivating than Kareena Kapoor, though the latter has a frustratingly catchy song. Inane, but catchy. Something about glue and bottoms, I believe.

Super actor Deepak Dobriyal, shows up here in an uninteresting role he may have done for the leather jacket he gets to wear, but really, by now after Omkara, he should know better than to mess with the whole carrying-bride-from-altar situation. Never ends well for the guy. Prakash Raj is the main villain, and he’s always good — it’s just that, unfortunately for us, he always gets to play the exact same baddie in Hindi cinema. And he’s never even allowed to lord it over the hero in case we start thinking less of our star. Tsk.

Which means the infallible Chulbul Pandey — after a movie riddled with painfully unsubtle product placement and odd public-service style dialogues made to convince villagers that women can get jobs — climactically gets to beat up an ageing politician. And that’s no battle compared to Khan keeping a straight face through very obviously (and atrociously) computer-generated shirtlessness, the first moments of which just happen to be the film’s funniest.

Oh, and there is one decent line — one referring to Chulbul as Kung Fu Panday — but, quite like the time we spend watching this film, it’s a throwaway.

Rating: 2.5 stars

~

First published Rediff, December 21, 2012

It’s been yet another mixed bag of a year for Hindi cinema, with some fine performances mired in poor films, and some fine films marred by weak actors at their centres. As actresses go, however, it’s been a pretty good year, boasting of some very fine performances from some very talented women. Two come from the same film, and one even pops up twice.

Here, then, is the class of 2012. Give the ladies a hand.

10. Rani Mukherji, Talaash

One of the few things Reema Kagti got truly right in Talaash was the casting, and while the characters may all have been one-note, the actors portraying them fleshed them out into real people. Rani Mukherji, as a grieving mother who has lost her child, was achingly vulnerable and believably devastated. The film didn’t offer her enough, but what little Rani found, she shone in.

9. Kalki Koechlin, Shanghai

Koechlin got the short end of the stick in Dibakar Banerjee’s Shanghai, a political thriller offering more meat to its male actors and leaving her with a rather annoying character. And yet despite being coiled exasperatingly tight throughout the film, she’s rewarded with a glorious outburst near the end of the film, a helplessly violent expression of impotent rage. Armed with a dinner plate and fury, she’s astoundingly good.

8. Ileana D’Cruz, Barfi

Winsome, naive and with enough natural charm to make bicycling boys lose their heads, D’Cruz won us over as surely as she did her film’s leading man. Mushy, moment-laden romance is an obvious screen confection, and it takes something special for a new girl to make her part memorable. This pretty one brought genuine, credible sweetness to the table, and made us believe in, and root for, Barfi’s love.

7. Kareena Kapoor, Heroine

Undoubtedly the weakest film on this list, Madhur Bhandarkar’s Heroine does nonetheless feature a pretty striking performance from its, well, heroine. Kareena Kapoor is handed a part that has everything, and she takes on this extreme, showreel-y character head on, showing us her powers to cry, to soar, to emote and to scheme. She does brilliantly enough to almost salvage the film, but some things are beyond the power of actors.

6. Parineeti Chopra, Ishaqzaade

It’s been impressive to watch young Chopra steadily grow as a performer, and even though Habib Faisal’s film is ridiculously, regressively cruel to its heroine, Chopra makes sure her Zoya works, constantly. Starting off as a plucky girl brimming with underage enthusiasm and bonafide bloodlust, she manages also to swoon with the helplessness that defines her age. A true firecracker, this.

5. Kareena Kapoor, Talaash

My absolute favourite thing about Talaash is Kareena Kapoor, the actress mouthing lines belonging to cinema (mostly bad cinema) from several decades ago, and yet doing so with a lovely lilt in her voice, enveloping herself with an air of not taking things too seriously — which contrasts her perfectly with the film’s somber hero, Aamir Khan. As I mentioned in my review, she plays her part lightly, mockingly, like Anne Hathaway’s Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises. And it is this buoyant sense of play that keeps the film afloat.

4. Dolly Ahluwalia, Vicky Donor

Shoojit Sircar’s oft-hilarious filmabout a young sperm donor wouldn’t have been half the joy it is without Ahluwalia as his mother. Playing a delightfully original character, a Punjabi beauty-parlour owner with a sharp tongue and a fondness for the daily tipple, Ahluwalia is amazing in the film, be it when sparring with her mother-in-law, chiding her son or holding on to him because he is all she has in the world. It’s a warm, tender portrayal of an impossible character that seems all too real.

3. Vidya Balan, Kahaani

One has to applaud Balan for taking risks. Sujoy Ghosh’s Kahaani sees Balan waddle heavily around the city of Calcutta, her belly pregnant to near-exploding levels, as she sweatily negotiates Bengal’s unrelenting sultriness. It is a character unlike any in our cinema, and Balan plays her Vidya Bagchi with nuanced perfection, shifting uncomfortably through a film that cares little for her character’s convenience. Most of the battle is won when a mystery makes us empathise with its protagonist, and thanks to Vidya Balan, we always care.

2. Richa Chaddha, Gangs Of Wasseypur

In a film packed with crazy characters stuffed to the gills with quirks and an ensemble throbbing with authentic, theatrical intensity, it takes some significant magic to stand out. Chaddha does so almost effortlessly in Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs Of Wasseypur, right from its uneven Part One where she violently lambasts the menfolk around her till she gets into a position of control, and the madder Part Two, where she, as matriarch, controls the show. It is a stunner of a performance, one that sets up Chaddha — who was so thrilling in Oye Lucky Lucky Oye a few years ago — as an actress with a tremendous amount to offer.

1. Sridevi, English Vinglish

What. A. Return.

I’ve never been the hugest Sridevi fan, growing up decidedly on the Madhuri side of the fence, but this wondrous performance deserves massive, massive applause. Gauri Shinde’s terrific English Vinglish casts the once larger-than-life Sri as a mousy housewife struggling to establish her own identity, and the actress is superb as she deals with bratty children, a smug husband and, of course, the English language, without a grasp of which she is made to feel most inadequate.

It’s a great character, one revelling in audience sympathy, and Sri plays it deftly and tenderly. Her Shashi is flawless, sure, but Sri makes her an irresistible underdog who must be cheered on. There is magic in the way she is spurred on by the minor victories — like learning to negotiate a NYC subway turnstile — and magic also in how believable she keeps things. This is a simple film where things are credible, never melodramatic, and Sridevi — in a range of well-picked cotton sarees — always judges the tone right. It’s the sort of performance younger actresses, including the ones on this list, should learn from. Hats off, Ma’am.

~

First published Rediff, December 21, 2012

2012 has been a very, very solid year for actors. We’ve had some sensational ensembles, and many films underscored by standout performances. And yet, ironically enough, this is a list with only eight men, testimony to just how stunning one particular actor has been this year. And even he’s been bettered.

Thank you, gentlemen. For creating and inhabiting characters we won’t forget.

10. Adil Hussain, English Vinglish

It’s easy to play a character like a jerk, but Hussain makes sure his character — that of Sridevi’s husband — never knows how badly he’s behaving. To him it’s okay teasing a wife with a recurring joke, or hugging a colleague. He’s being innocently callous, insensitive as well as indignant. It’s what makes his character a real person, one who needs to be cut down to size and yet one who picks out a good saree.

9. Ayushmann Khurana, Vicky Donor

Khurana plays a lout in this film: completely full of himself, rough around the edges, insouciant to the point of being obnoxious, and generally good for nothing. Well, unless you look closer and realise he’s also the first Indian leading man to give out pedicures. Khurana creates a Vicky who is jagged on the outside, swaggering around like his world needs him to, while unmistakably tender and well-meaning. His easy charm goes a long way, and he gets further applause for singing his own songs.

8. Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Talaash

The script structure of Talaash goes awry with Siddiqui. He plays Tehmur, a limping two-bit hustler. He’s a throwaway character, a mere sidekick, but so compelling is this amazing performer that he takes over the film, his track emerging the most genuine and most impassioned — even though it’s meant merely as a distraction. Siddiqui perfectly creates a creature of the gutters, one raised on ridicule and lovelessness, and one who thus longs only for love. His eyes do the talking, sure, but that one chase sequence where he bolts through Bombay crowds, still limping, may well be the film’s highest point.

7. Rajesh Sharma, Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana

One of my favourite actors in current cinema, Sharma lights up whatever screen he appears in. But rarely does he get to play this unhinged a character. This one is a wonderfully whimsical wastrel who pretends to be insane just so he can get out of doing the chores. Sharma plays madcap with glorious elan, making even flatter lines work with consistently killer dialogue delivery and immaculate timing. Super, super fun.

6. Abhay Deol, Shanghai

Showy theatrical grandstanding is often mistaken for good acting, and it takes a lot for a leading man in this country to give up the vanity and go deeply internal. Deol plays a stuffed shirt in Shanghai, a conflicted bureaucrat who seems utterly apathetic to the murky world around him. Handed a simple assignment merely so he can shove it under the rug, he discovers there is a certain basic honesty, a schoolboy morality perhaps, ingrained within him. He can’t take it lying down. It’s a deliberate, constantly solid performance.

5. Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Gangs Of Wasseypur

Rarely does an actor get a film that steps back and lets him do his thing. And considering he’s the hypertalented Nawazuddin Siddiqui, his thing is very special indeed. With all the rawness of Pacino in Scarface, he starts out intense and keeps it constantly on the boil. We first meet his Bachchan-obsessed Faisal as a doped out wastrel, and can’t help but be awestruck by his fearsome growth into a truly driven mob overlord. Who cries when scolded by a pretty girl. Spectacular.

4. Irrfan Khan, Paan Singh Tomar

With legs of greased-up lightning and a perpetually intriguing personality, Irrfan’s Paan Singh Tomar runs havoc as a character because you have no clue where he’ll sprint next. It’s a searingly honest performance, one that has an actor do so much more than act. Khan’s commitment to the biopic comes through in every frame, and even when the film isn’t working, he’s galloping away, making us gape. Making it impossible to look away.

3. Ranbir Kapoor, Barfi

The finest mainstream leading man we’ve had for decades — or perhaps even ever — Kapoor’s constant and impressive reinvention continues with a film where his effervescence conquers all, from skepticism to disability to violence to, most importantly, silence. Sunnily enthralling and irrepressible, he plays it with a smile. Mostly. Because when Barfi isn’t smiling, he’s busy breaking our collective heart. It’s an anguished, soulful, authentic performance, and balancing it with goofy humour makes it an artistic triumph.

2. Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Kahaani

He was striking in Talaash, Wasseypur might well mark the yardstick by which he’s forever measured, but I firmly believe Kahaani was the ace of Nawaz’s pack this year. There isn’t a single false or indulged note, it’s all prime. Playing a brutal, boorish Intelligence Agent, he brings an interminable ferocity to the role. The unceasing harshness, the cigarette smoke, the constantly threatening aura. The result: an authentically unpredictable character who scares you. In a year where the big three are nowhere to be found on lists like this, it is then Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s Khan who deserves to take a bow.

1. Emraan Hashmi, Shanghai

Gobsmacked. Watching Hashmi in Shanghai is an abrupt revelation, like being slapped in the face only to finally see clearer. His character sounds straightforward, a videographer (with more than a passing interest in porn) who chances on a conspiracy and wants to help out, but Emraan plays him nuanced and authentic and, eventually, tormented. It’s a bravura performance, and here’s what I’d said about it in my review:

He occasionally shoots porn — this is off-camera, we see him ask his subjects to clear up and hear the hurried sounds of straps and zippers — and later, when the film’s heroine is about to sit on his bed, he instinctively barks that she sit somewhere else, because the bed’s dirty. It’s a throwaway grunt but Hashmi nails it — just like he nails highly energetic pelvic thrusts in a streetdance, one where he keeps biting his tongue, faux-scandalised by the words of the song. It’s one of the best performances from one of our leading men in quite some time, and in one chilling pre-climactic moment, when sitting on the floor and confounded by the situation, his plaintive wail is fittingly reminiscent of the late great Ravi Baswani’s angst in Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro’s darkest minute. Bravo.

Incredibly well done, then, Mr Hashmi. Yours is the year’s finest, bravest and most consistent performance. Congratulations are indeed in order.

Now.. Feed us more?

~

First published Rediff, December 25, 2012

There are two ways to make a Worst Of The Year list. One is to look at the embarrassing B-grade films, the predictably weak and awful movies that can fight for places in these lists even before they are released. The other is to look at prominent films that carry certain expectations, and how filmmakers who ought to have known better have disappointed.

I’ve traditionally taken the latter route, but this year my Worst Of list is a blend of the big and the banal, the inevitably tacky as well as the fatally flawed. Thing is, a couple of them are so bad they deserve to go cult, and hence can’t be ignored just because nobody’s surprised at their hideousness.

Without further adieu, then, the year’s most horrid Hindi movies:

10. Heroine

Kareena tried hard, but this Madhur Bhandarkar trainwreck was one of the most unbearable films of the year, with all his cliched, feed-the-audience-what-it-knows tropes seeming more tired than ever. The token lesbianism alone, with two drunken girls hooking up and then feeling sickened and ashamed, is reason enough to shun this one.

9. Aiyya

The most bewildering film of the year, Aiyya sees a caricatured larger-than-life protagonist overshadowed by even more larger than life protagonists. The result is a screechingly annoying film, an inexplicably shrill and stupid film. Rani Mukherji valiantly tries to exert her lovability but it only serves in dredging up repressed memories of her dressed as a young Sikh batsman. Shudder.

8. Jism 2

Only in India, ladies and gentlemen, only in India. Only in India can a pornstar make money by keeping her clothes on. Only in India does a film touted to be the year’s sexiest turn out to be such a damp squib. And only in India can said porn-woman outperform the two ‘actors’ alongside her in the film.

7. Players

On paper, the idea of Abbas-Mastan, our most hardened genre filmmakers, officially taking a remake of The Italian Job doesn’t sound like that bad an idea. Until, that is, they decide to make the classic Italian Job and the Mark Wahlberg remake, and puree them together in an atrocious smoothie, giving us a pair of conjoined heist films, each awful. And whoever okayed that cast? Bizarre.

6. Tezz

You could be forgotten for thinking there are two Priyadarshans. One, the thoughtful and often meditative South Indian filmmaker who churns out emotive art-house fare. Two, the head honcho of the harebrained, the man with movies that hinge critically on both slapstick and actual slaps, falling dhotis and an invariably Benny Hill style run-along climax. Neither man, as the achingly boring Tezz proves, can direct a thriller.

5. Ghost

Granted, it seems like a bit of a cop-out to pick a sub-B-grade film for a list like this, since expectations for a release like this were non-existent. And yet I must single out Ghost — a film the Indian censor board apparently considered “the most violent in the history of Hindi cinema” — for its intolerable tedium, for being a horror thriller than never scares and barely thrills, and for making a valiant stab at the so-awful-its-unmissable genre. At one point there is creepy crucifiction, even. All in the name of tawdry gimmick. This is one all masochists should watch, ideally as a drinking game.

4. Son Of Sardaar

It’s becoming harder and harder to justify watching an Ajay Devgn movie. They are all increasingly inane, increasingly star-worshipping, and increasingly dumb — a formula that somehow seems to work for Devgn, despite himself being a reasonably solid actor capable of far more than what he does. I refuse to watch Bol Bachchan, but Son Of Sardaar seems to me the most monstrous and unforgivably braindead of Devgn’s films thus far. “But he did Omkara” now feels a lame and rather dated defence.

3. Teri Meri Kahani

Red And White Bravery Awards need to be handed out to producers who continue to finance films featuring many shades of Priyanka Chopra. She’s pretty decent when in a normal, singular role, but more than one PC never ever works. And yet we continue to be struck by films featuring her in multiple avatars, laying it on as thick as the director allows. Kunal Kohli’s film is a terribly hacky bore, but it is Chopra who must be looked on — quite literally — as the repeat offender.

2. Dangerous Ishq

Karisma Kapoor. In 3D. Past-life regression never felt like this much of a “what were we thinking?” hangover — as in, what were we thinking when we watched movies like this, back in the worst of the 80s? Or what were we thinking when we made women like this film’s leading lady, making her comeback after ages, a star? Tackiest film of the year, no question.

1. Ishaqzaade

The year’s biggest culprit, the abominably regressive Ishaqzaade was decried by a horrified friend on Twitter as “a rapey romance.” Habib Faisal’s (finely crafted and mostly well performed) film typifies the most irresponsible kind of our cinema.

The film creates a genuinely spunky heroine, then has the ‘hero’ coerce her into marriage and consensual sex before doing an about-face, and then humiliating her by telling the world he ‘took’ her virginity. The girl justifiably sets out to kill the man who wronged her, only to then be bound and gagged by his mother, and told that she’d be better off marrying him instead. Which the hero grudgingly accepts, scowling like he’s being made to eat green vegetables. He then takes her to a brothel, and ties her up again while golden-hearted prostitutes wonder why she’s so angry.

What happens to this captive girl? Ah, she falls in love with the boy, because under all his ruggedness, he is a nice guy after all. (In sum: Yes, Romeo did trick me into sleeping with him, but at least he looks good in stubble, that jawaan chhokra. Aww.)

Faisal defended the film lamely saying that’s how things happen in various parts of the country, but the way his film continued to exult in its hero’s neanderthal mindset, celebrating him like he was blameless and naive, and essentially charming, showed clearly what side the director was on. Tying a woman up till she submits isn’t what we should even momentarily call love, and sending that message out to easily misled masses looking to cinema for role models is an absolute shame. At a time when we are finally, belatedly, definitely looking at ourselves and questioning the sexism in our society, it is films like this that need to be beaten down.

Disgraceful.

~

First published Rediff, January 1, 2013

It isn’t often that I get to make a top ten list of good films. Most years, there are four or five good Hindi films. Sometimes I add a few more on, with a caveat. 2012, on the other hand, has offered up several shards of cinematic joy, and it is a year that may well prove to be a milestone in modern Hindi cinema. Or so one hopes.

All ten films listed here may not necessarily be perfect (though the ones at the top come dashed close) but each of them gets certain things very right indeed. And are well worth smiling at.

10. Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu

It’s easy to call Shakun Batra’s directorial debut derivative, and indeed the film does owe quite a debt to Hollywood romantic comedies and the work of Cameron Crowe, but it does show off enough charm to earn its own applause. Imran Khan is better than ever, Kareena Kapoor is effortlessly vivacious, while Ratna Pathak Shah and Ram Kapoor appear to be having quite a blast. It’s snappy, fun and — thanks largely to the sudden way it wraps things up, almost as if the screenwriter were afraid to write the final act — mercifully brief.

9. Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana

There is quite the surfeit of flavour in Sameer Sharma’s directorial debut, a film that spends a bit too much time on its characters and their earthiness before getting to the actual plot. And yet, despite the lazy indulgence, there is much to warm up to and appreciate here, with a smashing ensemble enjoying feasting on the quirks the screenplay provides. In this film about a forgotten recipe for a famed chicken dish, there’s a wicked twist in terms of the ingredient, and one hopes people experiment with it off-screen as well.

8. Paan Singh Tomar

It’s taken a while to finally reach us, but by golly, Tigmanshu Dhulia’s film about the truly unique life and times of the steeplechase runner provided one of the year’s most enthralling stories. Most of us knew precious little about the titular Tomar when the film began, and the incredulity of the story proved impossible to resist. Irrfan Khan, showing up with one of the year’s finest and fiercest performances, makes sure we’re glued throughout.

7. Gangs Of Wasseypur 2

People who liked the first Wasseypur didn’t care as much for the second, and vice versa. What we could all agree upon, though, was that if these two epics were melded into one and edited as brutally as the characters within slaughtered each other, we’d truly have a masterpiece on our hands. That said, , the very fact that a filmmaker like Anurag Kashyap could realise his massively ambitious dream, is a great sign. I liked Part 2 more than Part 1 simply because, knowing what to expect, I could enjoy Kashyap’s dark lunacy without worrying about how it all added up. A heady film with many a magnificent performance.

6. Barfi

Yes, I’ve seen the Youtube clips. Yes, there’s far too much in this film that comes from other films, and I agree it can’t just be explained away as a tribute. That said, Anurag Basu’s Barfi is a film with genuine heart, and even if Basu borrows sentences from other stories to tell his own tale, it nevertheless remains a tale worth telling. Ranbir Kapoor is extraordinary in the title role, Priyanka Chopra tries hard, and in the winsome Ileana D’Cruz we find a debutant who appears more than a pretty face. And the film, while a bit long and, in my view, fundamentally flawed (Barfi’s relationship with the autistic Jhilmil is one of sympathy and should not be mistaken for one of love) does still transport one to a different world. The magic can’t be denied.

5. OMG Oh My God

Based on the Australian film The Man Who Sued God, OMG is a dashed clever project to adapt to an Indian setting, what with our multiple gods and godmen just ripe for a big, no-holds-barred sendup. It’s not the best produced of films, but the points it makes — about false idols, promises to gods, donations, etc — are as effective as they are unsubtle. Paresh Rawal grounds the film with a fine everyman performance, but it is producer Akshay Kumar (in a winning turn as Krishna) and Mithun Chakraborty (clearly lampooning a certain limp-wristed religious icon) who steal the show.

4. Vicky Donor

There’s a little something for everyone in Vicky Donor, a romantic comedy that bucks convention and embraces it at the same time. Shoojit Sircar takes a rather brilliant idea, that of the hero as a prolific sperm-machine, and uses it with warm familiarity, making a perhaps-taboo subject instantly and eagerly accepted by a massive chunk of the nation. The film plays through standard Bollywood ideas — like the cross-cultural wedding cliches, for example — with inspired ease, and a routinely good cast (including the two debutants in the lead roles) makes it a film worthy of repeat viewing.

3. Kahaani

A grown-up thriller with many a pleasure secreted between the lines, Sujoy Ghosh’s Kahaani is the kind of film Hindi cinema hasn’t seen for a very, very long time. Lovingly showcasing Calcutta both at its most sublime as well as its most slimy, this often-illogical but beautifully crafted thriller features one of the best female protagonists in recent cinema and characters that remain very hard to forget. Vidya Balan, Parambrata Chatterjee, Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Sashwata Chatterjee all do splendidly well, and Ghosh has promised a sequel. For a change, it’s a sequel we’d actually like to see.

2. English Vinglish

Girl power hit a new high with Gauri Shinde’s directorial debut. The trailers promised us hardly anything save for a Mind Your Language takeoff, but boy, were we surprised. A simple film about a laddoo-making entrepreneur forced to double up as a housewife, this happens also to be a sharp commentary on the way we talk down to those unskilled in English. All Shashi (played fantastically by Sridevi) does through the film is take an English-language course, but Shinde makes sure every little triumph counts like a major one, and the film — sensitively and smartly — emerges immaculately balanced. A perfect film, and possibly the definitive what-to-watch-with-Ma movie for our generation.

1. Shanghai

Bharat Mati Ki… Bharat Mata Ki… 

It’s hard not to say Jai to Dibakar Banerjee’s bleak and gruesome take on India’s developmental delusion. Banerjee takes Vassilis Vassilikos’ classic Z, about a very specific real-life Greek assassination, and turns it into an unrooted allegory for our times: the city is not quite Bombay, the politician is not quite Mayawati, and the IAS officer is not quite sure where he stands. At a time when our films are content merely flexing cinematic muscle and showing off what they know, Shanghai is a film that probes, that questions, that unsettles, as important cinema must.

Banerjee is a master filmmaker, one of the most fascinating megaphone-wielders in the country, and each of his four features thus far — Khosla Ka Ghosla, Oye Lucky Lucky Oye, Love Sex Aur Dhokha and now Shanghai — have reached out and connected on a different level. Shanghai is a film with a dismal, nearly fatalistic worldview, and yet a film that highlights just how vital every last glimmer of hope is, and how much of a difference it makes.

Emraan Hashmi delivers a standout performance, Bengali film icon Prasenjit is perfectly cast, Pitobash Tripathy and Farooque Shaikh are sneakily excellent, Abhay Deol stays impressively in semi-smarmy character and Kalki Koechlin makes the most of one glorious, tempestuous scene. Mikey McCleary makes for a darkly dazzling score, and the murky but brilliant cinematography by Nikos Andritsakis is quite something. The script by Urmi Juvekar and Banerjee himself is a strong one, one that builds up the tension, and Banerjee takes all his flashes of individual brilliance and crams them tightly, claustrophobically together: as if packing TNT into a scary scarlet stick.

Boom.

~

First published Rediff, January 4, 2013

Without warning, there is an accident. Then, a flashback: to ten minutes earlier. A flashback which explains, nearly in realtime, how the accident comes to be. Why, then, did we not directly start from the flashback? Because Vishal said so.

Vishal Bhardwaj’s latest film delights in its own impish, impromptu absurdity. There is much daftness in this oddly titled Matru Ki Bijlee Ka Mandola, a cock-and-pink-buffalo story that stays surreal even at its most satirical. It’s theatrical, insightful, wickedly clever and, often, too funny to even laugh at, if you know what I mean. It is also, as may be apparent, an utterly random movie, sometimes jarringly uneven and frequently meandering. And yet it works, because it is, at every single step, unexpected and surprising.

Even the most seemingly slapdash of scenes appears magical when the work of a master is evident. This film swings with two sultans, each spurring the other on toward a sillier spectacle, a sight of grand lunacy. Bhardwaj more than handles his end — heaping on wordplay and quirk and texture — but the Quixote in the other corner is even wilder: Pankaj Kapur, who carries the film with smiles and slurs. Together, this jesting juggalbandi provides a rare treat: a legendary actor rolling up his sleeves and a director giving him miles of room in which to conjure. Forget Matru and Bijlee, in Mandola lies the magic.

Technically, though, the whole film lies in Mandola. It’s set in a fictive Haryana village of the same name, a name it shares with its only wealthy resident, a land-hungry tyrant played by Kapur. And while he squeezes farmers dry by day, a few stiff drinks invariably bring out his inner socialist: it’s a regular Dr Jekyll and Comrade Hyde. A drunken Mandola even leads the oppressed masses to revolt against himself, but isn’t at all amused once he regains his wits.

It is a peculiar universe populated by many a weirdo, and akes a while to settle in. One on hand is Mandola’s canny driver, Matru, (Imran Khan) who indulgently leads his master toward drink, clearly fond of the sloshed socialist within. On the other is Bijli, (Anushka Sharma) the tyrant’s daughter, an over-kohl’d drama queen eager enough to marry into money. There are farmers hunting for Mao to guide them, and sycophantic policemen who collude gladly with a scheming politician (Shabana Azmi). And being set in the laconic state of Haryana, the humour is dryer and flatter than usually seen in a farce: the laughs may not come easy, but it’s hard not to keep grinning.

But it’s not all snorts and chortles. Behind the beguiling buffoonery and unrestrained slapstick lie deeper points, about how barren fields can be more profitable than lush ones, about how politicos justify self-interest by hailing it as another form of altruism, about the way even rain can be co-opted as a farmer’s greatest foe. Why, in one unforgettable moment, glasses are raised and, instead of the often-mispronounced ‘chairs’ for ‘cheers,’ the politician raises her drink with a cry for actual seats of power. ‘Kursiyaan!’

There is much this film says, about Special Economic Zones and the development myth, and with that subject it — with a diametrically different approach — treads on some ground covered by last year’s finest film. When the most important filmmakers of our time concentrate on the same issues, we should be paying attention, too.

We must also heed the language, for there is no Indian filmmaker who uses words as deliberately, pointedly and skilfully as Bhardwaj. An accidental revolutionary, when jeered at, snaps back “ghar mein Mao-Lenin naa hai ke?” instead of bringing up mothers and sisters. Mandola’s profanity sounds coarse but is technically innocent, his most colourful bit of cussing — “uski toh Ma ka papad sadega” — merely sounding dirty. And in one exceptional scene, when Mandola evocatively outlines his vision of farms turning into shopping malls, he kicks things off with brutal lyricism, by saying this dream has been clawing at the back of his eyelids.

There is much detail to cherish, crammed lovingly between the lines. The flighty Bijli, unsure of herself — alternating one minute and direct the next, if I may — is told she has cobwebs inside her. Her father, meanwhile, is a feudal oppressor with his greatest weakness inside him, his moat literally inside his castle. Fateful rain comes from the sky soon after people from an African tribe dance exuberantly around a fire, perhaps inadvertently willing it. And a father shoves his errant daughter ahead of him, as if making her walk the plank.

Bhardwaj’s influence is clear, and, as always, saluted. The brass band in the film is called the Kusturi-ca Brass Band, and while the Serbian master Emir Kusturica is known for his chimerical surrealism, Matru appears simpler and less fluid, perhaps due to its need to adhere to a familiar dramatic narrative. In that Bhardwaj’s film appears closer to one of the loonier Coen Brothers films, or even, ah yes, a PG Wodehouse plot by way of Jim Jarmusch. It would be depressingly bleak if it wasn’t as spontaneously fun.

Imran isn’t ideal but looks the part and manages to get by, and Anushka — while stumbling on some of the stranger lines — is great in a couple of scenes near the climax. Arya Babbar, in a Reggie Mantle like clean-shaven idiot role, is pretty decent and Azmi’s reliably good, especially when armed with a scary soliloquy.

But make no mistake, this is a one-actor show, giving the greatest thespian in our country another delightfully odd space. Pankaj Kapur is the best we’ve had, and — as he hallucinates, as he rouses the people, as he steels himself — this is all a reminder of that. Even the way he gigglingly insists on giving a man who calls himself Mao the bottle with his Left hand.

Laced with both acid and arsenic, Matru Ki Bijlee Ka Mandola isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. It takes a while to get into its groove, but changes gears with spectacular finesse after that. And no matter the slight niggles: this is a film that goes far out on a limb, and gives us both bedlam and nuances, enough to warrant repeated viewings. And more than enough to love. Oh boy oh boy indeed.

Rating: 4 stars

~

First published Rediff, January 11, 2013

Once in a while there comes a movie that automatically deserves the tag of Epic. Tom Hooper’s monumental, grandstanding adaptation of Les Misérables does that and even more: it earns the second word of the phrase so popular by Twitter: it is definitively (and, in every sense, literally) what is called Epic Fail.

Look, I love musicals. Love ‘em to bits. I have an obvious (if shameful) bias toward clever lyric, and when it skilfully drives narrative and replaces dialogue, the result is joyful. Hollywood might not exactly be serving us opera, but the pizza-pie version it offers up has its own distinct pleasures — even the excessive cheese merely adds to it all.

There is much to commend about Tom Hooper’s effort: the actors strain their sinews and furrow brows furiously as they sing their own bits; the director keeps amplifying up the emotion as he zooms relentlessly into their faces; and there is an undeniable sincerity to the film, an earnest desire to powerfully adapt Victor Hugo’s weighty  novel.

And yet an ambitious film can also be a bad film, and this is more of the latter than the former. Or does that sound mild? It shouldn’t. This is a monstrosity of a film, a pompous and bloated farce that uneasily straddles the line between spoof and drama, serving only to make us aware of the gargantuan acting efforts. It is also sadistically long, a hundred and sixty minutes of mostly unbearable cinema.

One of the primary reasons is that they don’t stop singing. A screen musical (as opposed to one on stage, which casts genuinely incredible singers, not A-list actors who can also sing) can be crammed with songs, sure, but they must be matched with lyrical highs. Characters should sing to express the dramatic, the romantic or the humorous. Here, every line is sung, and thus the music never lets up. Characters doggedly wail and moan every bit of banality, and while it is an approach that may sound good on paper, it translates horridly on screen: when Russell Crowe looks at Hugh Jackman and sings his prisoner number, warbling “24601”, all seriousness invariably vanishes and he might as well be singing 867530 nie-e-ine.

The cast, as said, does a lot. Jackman, playing protagonist Jean Valjean, turns in a mammoth performance and sings with startling intensity: often, as he strains to hit a high note, it looks like his head may explode. He hits said note and we must duly applaud, though our care is for the actor and not the character. The words never stop sounding hokey — except when Anne Hathaway gets to them. Her Fantine is heartbreakingly good, and for short stretches, she lifts the film. Propelling her lips forward like a duck in a Disney cartoon, the actress makes her anguish credible. Plucked yet plucky, she’s the only one who really does.

Crowe, who is overwhelmingly sincere as Vajean-chasing policeman Javert, sings flatly and, it must be said, rather weakly. Even his finale, which is one of the highlights of the musical, emerges half-baked. Stuffy and unsure of himself, Crowe might as well be singing Leggy Blonde.

Visually, there are times when Hooper allows cinematographer Danny Cohen to show off the grandiose scale and the painstakingly recreated world of early-19^th century France, but that’s only when he isn’t zooming right onto his actor’s faces. On a large screen, faces aren’t meant to be seen this big, and it feels rather like an assault. There are a couple of ingeniously shot sequences — the street of the prostitutes, and a moment when snow appears almost to be floating upward, like in a snowglobe — but mostly there’s just faces, contorted with their commitment to shriek adequately well.

As the dramatic stakes rise, there is enough meat in the plot for it to start to matter, for the film to feel like more than a farce. Revolution is in the air, and a little kid who looks like an infant Jon Bon Jovi sings rousingly of equality as the French flag emphatically gains importance. That, however, is Hugo’s glory and not Hooper’s. You can’t not care about the end of Les Misérables. You care despite the director’s single-minded hacky treatment of the source material.

It’s an incredibly tall order, making a musical from something as tragic. Ironically, one of the few times this film achieves buoyancy is when two castmembers from just such a project — Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen — finesse their parts as they sing George Costanza’s favourite Les Miz song, Master Of The House. They’ve done it before, you see. With the masterful Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street. But Hooper ain’t Tim Burton.

Off with his head, I say.

Rating: 1.5 stars

~

First published Rediff, January 18, 2013

God bless grown men who make swooshy laser sounds with their mouths. Wonderment is the cornerstone of the Hollywood we know and love (and are frequently exasperated by). The magical escape cinema allows, the willingness with which we surrender to surreality and to nonsense, the way we — gladly, gratefully even — believe in what we choose to, regardless of plausibility or reason. Sometimes what we are made to buy into is pure lunacy. And sometimes it’s even madder: the real thing.

Ben Affleck’s Argo, set during the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-1981, is a loosely, dramatically retold true story, one blurring the line between fact and farce which such mastery that the actual recorded facts seem nearly inconsequential. Near the finish of this film, one character quotes Karl Marx, another asks if he meant Groucho, and, after the laugh, I left the theatre wondering that — when all is indeed done and dusted — which of those two namesakes mattered more, struck at genuinely weightier truths. But I digress; Argo is a masterpiece.

The Iranian revolutionaries, the Komiteh, storm the US Embassy in Teheran. The Americans are genuinely outnumbered, their marines helpless, as the revolutionist take over the building, taking nearly 50 Americans hostage. Six, however, escape. And it is up to the CIA and its exfiltration experts to figure a way to smuggle them out before they are caught and beheaded. The doomed ideas tossed around the table sound awful, amateurish, worthy of slapstick: one of them involves smuggling in bicycles. It is here that exfil specialist Tony Mendez (Affleck), the shaggy-haired hero of this feature, suggests what is referred to as “the best bad idea” American Intelligence has: faking a movie.

‘Argo,’ short presumably for argonaut, is a hackneyed blockbuster script that involves, among disrobed princess and attacked citadels, chases through an exotically Eastern bazaar. It fits the bill concocted by Mendez and Oscar-winning prosthetics expert John Chambers (John Goodman), and is cunningly co-opted by producer Lester Siegel (Alan Arkin), a poster is made, advertisements placed in Variety. Despite the broken down sign, Hollywood is still the best manufacturer of falsehood in the world, and Mendez and his fake film crew go about lying to the press to help them spread the fib farther. The idea is that Mendez enter Iran, help the diplomats in hiding to pretend they are indeed a crew scouting for locations, and leave Iran before the Komiteh can piece things together — and piecing things they are, very sinisterly indeed.

It is an urgently told film, one that recreates in macabre detail the situation as seen in file-footage and news photos: one where bodies are hung in the town square and where gentle folk leave their wine and scurry into crawlspaces. Rodrigo Pieto’s cinematography is mostly claustrophobic and occasionally expansive, and goes brilliantly with Affleck’s frantic but unhurried style which takes its own time to built up to a climax of relentless breathlessness. And the timebomb ticks on with excruciating, exquisite inevitability.

It is an incredible account, and Affleck runs magnificently with it, allowing Chris Terrio’s mostly restrained screenplay the breathing space it deserves for some killer dialogue — Arkin has the film’s most quotable lines, about how the Iranian revolutionaries would like CIA blood with their breakfast cereal, about the Ayatollah and the Writers Guild of America, about how he must be an unplanned part of a film — and crafting, in the process, a film that goes from a Sorkinesque walk-and-talk to a ruthlessly rat-a-tat trot and, finally, a full blooded gallop. The dramatic escalation at the film’s finale is unbelievably, spectacularly rousing, but made so only by the smaller details that precede it.

For Argo is a film of superb, fastidious nuance. The nods to diplomats out on assignment compelled to make wives into fellow staffers. The sneer with which an immigration official crosses out the word Kingdom from Iran while granting a visa. The way even a revolutionary pauses at images of Rocky Balboa and Ted Kramer in a magazine. The importance of being allowed a mid-air drink.

Affleck alternates between soft and harsh beats, starting with a historically grounded assault and then expertly flipping back and forth: deadly news reportage is spliced alongside a line-reading of the B-movie, bad dialogues of crushing gravitational fields contrasted with hostages forced into the ground. And then there’s the hilarious, rallying war cry for the renegade team: one involving the film’s title and one that, reassuringly enough, makes its way from reality to the script and not the other way around.

Peopled by a striking ensemble — Bryan Cranston, Victor Garber, Philip Baker Hall, Clea DuVall, Chris Messina are all there and in fine form, especially Cranston — Argo tells a staggeringly peculiar story, and tells it with violent tension and extreme cleverness. Affleck’s direction is emphatic, self-assured, manipulative in the most effective of ways, and crucially tinted with irony. It is as the film’s music winks, midway through: it isn’t enough merely to Swing for the fences, unless you back yourself to be the Sultans.

Rating: 5 stars

~

First published Rediff, October 19, 2012

The title means nothing, you know. Sahib Biwi Aur Gangster was fine, cheeky and homage-y but this added Returns, a grammatically incorrect English word at the end of a Hindi title? (Instead of, say, Sahib Biwi Aur Doosra Gangster? Ek Aur Gangster?) It is this anything-goes approach that carries itself on to the opening credits — with oddly tacky graphics of tossed coins and guns, as if to rub the film’s lack of finesse in our faces — and to the characters, who are introduced with no subtlety whatsoever: the word Gangster shows up with a funny gong sound, the Biwi appears to wailing B-movie siren sounds in the background.

Thus does director Tigmanshu Dhulia make it clear that he’s plunging us into a world of pure and unashamed schlock, and this film is meant to be terrifically tawdry. From the background score that often features infant screams a la bad horror films, to scenes resting heavily on obvious metaphor, to the protagonists speaking exclusively in clever and applause-seeking dialogue, this is a film that aims to thrill and do so in the delicious language of the lurid. Saheb Biwi Aur Gangster Returns is a theatrically indulgent entertainer, one that makes no bones about its pulpiness and stays well and truly juicy.

In the land of the Uttar Pradesh kings, where all moustaches are twirled up with flair, a once-wealthy royal sits in a wheelchair and plots his second marriage, deciding that arm-twisting is as good a seduction tactic as any. Saheb (Jimmy Shergill) wants what he wants, which is to humiliate everyone around him, bring them to their knees.

Meanwhile, his sloshed yet serpentine wife (Mahie Gill) lashes out: for help, for money, for company and for her queenly honour, whatever that last one means. There is an abducted young princess (Soha Ali Khan) and her vengeful lover (Irrfan Khan, this film’s Gangster) and much, much skullduggery afoot: this is a film where women sing old movie songs in their haveli at night, but even that romantic song about embraces comes from Woh Kaun Thi, a film of cruel conspiracy. And of double-crossing women.

Rife with their own internal motivations, none of the mains can be trusted. We are never sure just how much each protagonist knows, and what their next move is — or what, indeed, they want. Their fascinating amorality keeps the narrative tense and genuinely unpredictable, and a very solid ensemble coupled with tremendously entertaining dialogue — not to mention Dhulia’s irresistibly quirky gallows humour — makes this a very rollicking film.

Take, for instance, the lush queen. Mahie Gill’s Madhavi is all sarees and seduction, sure, but she’s made to play the drunk and desperate character cartoonishly over the top. She may or may not be bad, but, like Jessica Rabbit, she’s just drawn that way. Jessica Rabbitch, then. She’s hurt and wounded as well as hot and hungry, and Dhulia uses her cunningly, to evoke disgust and pity and love. And yet to keep us guessing.

The film’s dialogue is exceptionally good. Not just the taaliyan-at-a-baithak lines about how everyone looks the same in a wheelchair and why men swear more (because they sob less), but also the telltale lines that winkingly give away bits of the game. A policeman measures out the future in terms of the next year, the next election, the next Shah Rukh Khan film. While a politician (in what will inevitably be the film’s most quoted moment) triumphantly calls himself a sensitive tomato.

The air is heavy with metaphor, as mentioned, but it’s handled most entertainingly. A man with killer aim starts to wield a camera, a sharpshooter learning to shoot. A veteran actor known for on-screen lasciviousness is the only one woefully out of place during a trashy dance sequence. A princess stands on her lover’s toes; a wife needs hands to steady her. One character ambitiously reads the constitution while another, attempting to forge and caress an unlikely romance, reads Shrabani Basu’s Victoria And Abdul, about the clerk who loved the queen.

The performances are unanimously strong. Irrfan, with several quivers full of the dialogues he likes, is a riot at first, and then a delight to watch gradually unravel. Mahie is intentionally exaggerated but performs with significant flair, and makes sure her barbs sting. Soha has the stateliness for the part but plays naive in almost childlike fashion, which is great. Raj Babbar and Pravesh Rana are very well cast. And we must also single out Rajeev Gupta as the film’s funniest character, the theatrically inept politician, the tomato.

But the film belongs, as it were, to Shergill. He dominates proceedings with delicate nuance and wonderful presence; it is as if he finds more dynamism from being strapped in a wheelchair. It is his lines that ring the loudest, and his eyes that do the film’s talking. This is a rendition that deserves a salaam.

Despite finding a lot to individually love, I wasn’t very sold on the first Sahib Biwi Aur Gangster, largely because of the way it stretched out, its uneven tone, and the fatal misstep in attempting to pay tribute to Sahib Biwi Aur Ghulam by mirroring the classic. The new film is much sharper, more assured, and, unencumbered by a classic to stand beside, a far better film.

Like the crooners aware of which guests to keep away from the tipple and the aides who wait till the master’s lips touch drink before letting their own, it is clear Tigmanshu Dhulia knows what he’s doing. This has, in fact, never been clearer. Which itself is worth drinking to.

Besides, how could one resist a film where even drawers opening and closing sound like guns being cocked?

Rating: 4 stars

~

First published Rediff, March 8, 2013

It all began with a glass of water.

We all have our own gateways into the wondrous world of Steven Spielberg. From the glowing doorway in Close Encounters Of The Third Kind to the first sighting of the shark in Jaws to the rolling boulder in Raiders Of The Lost Ark… we have, each of us, experienced that moment of sheer cinematic exhilaration, a moment where we realise just how headily joyous bigscreen cinema can be.

For me, it was the water. A glass that stood on a dashboard of an SUV with two children (and a lawyer) locked inside, the exploring palaeontologists far out in the rain. Few visuals in cinema are as ominous as the way the water in the glass ripples outward and, at 12, I remember gaping at that moment in 1993’s Jurassic Park — scared and thrilled and with my heart going boom — and being overwhelmed.

For that is what Spielberg does: he makes us fall head over heels in love with the movies. And no matter what image he bowled us over with, we remain grateful fans. Each of us, no matter what we think of War Horse or the last Indy movie, has been jolted, galvanised, touched by his work. Several times over.

~

And so it was a particularly unbelievable Monday evening in Mumbai when we gathered to meet the man who made ET. Self-importance and egos were thrown aside as a dazzling assemblage of Hindi movie directors arrived at the venue, more than a half hour ahead of the scheduled time. And with a crowd like that, it was special well before Spielberg walked in.

It was fascinating to see all of Hindi cinema represented in one hotel ballroom, a stupendous set of directors waiting for the man who had wowed us all, a room teeming with talent. The assemblage was magnificent — from Shyam Benegal to Anurag Kashyap to Abbas-Mastan to Gauri Shinde to Rajkumar Hirani — and each was as thrilled. Personally, as one of only two critics in attendance — the wonderful Anupama Chopra being the other — it was a huge privilege to rub shoulders with this set of helmers, to exchange Indiana Jones notes with Nagesh Kukunoor and discuss the Munich telephone sequence with Sriram Raghavan. Unlike any other industry event rife with politics and far too much press, here we all were, talking about a man who mattered. And we all sounded as old as I was when I’d seen that water ripple.

The tables were eclectic tag-teams bursting with talent. I sat, for example, on one between Rohan and Ramesh Sippy, Sriram Raghavan, Onir, Nagesh Kukunoor and Kunal Kohli. Wow. For a minute I wondered how thrilling it would be to give each table a video camera and instructions to film a short in a half- hour, and then I realised it’d lead to more bloodshed than anything else. Ah well.

~

The event, organised by Reliance Entertainment, promised us Amitabh Bachchan in conversation with Mr Spielberg, and this it provided most wonderfully. The directors couldn’t be gladder that the only actor present was the one on stage, and Mr Bachchan, a handful of years older than Mr Spielberg, conducted a thoughtful conversation peppered with witty asides and insight. He asked fine questions — about how the director has come to rely on his actors more, and whether he’d like to take on a Bond film — but, above all, let the director speak up. Giving us all a glimpse of just how inspiring and how humble one of our idols truly is.

With the schoolboy passion his movies evoke, Spielberg spoke about it all, with exemplary generosity and candor: about cross-cutting shots of his train set to make his first film as a kid; about how all great comedic performers have incredible dramatic performers within, as he’d found with Tom Hanks; about how he repeatedly tried to get a job directing a Bond film and about the fundamental difference between his movies about aliens and those made by his friend George Lucas: “George wants to go out into outer space and find them, I want the aliens to land in my backyard,” he said talking of how nobody but Lucas could have made Star Wars. “I don’t want to lift a finger,” he laughed, and I couldn’t have been the only one thinking of that famous Extra Terrestrial finger.

Mr Bachchan kept taking questions from the rapt audience, questions Mr Spielberg handled deftly and articulately. Asked by Javed Akhtar if his shift towards “cinema with more gravitas, like Lincoln” would mean he won’t make any of the more joyous films we celebrate him for, Mr Spielberg smiled and said, “Well, I did just make a movie called Tintin.” He then proceeded to compare himself to Woody Allen in Stardust Memories, quoting the scene of the filmmaker who meets an alien in a field who says they loved his films in outer space; well, at least his “earlier, funnier films.”

~

It was an immaculately organised event, intimate and wonderful. Steven Spielberg walked into a room and made the Hindi film industry feel far more united and tight-knit than it usually seems. He inspired us, smiled at us, shook our hands. Yes indeed.

And after all the directors were done asking questions, often prefaced by how he changed their lives, I couldn’t help asking him about that famous video clip of him in 1977, having just made the super-successful Jaws, watching the Oscar nominations announcement on TV. In the terrific clip, a 26-year-old Spielberg predicts that Jaws will get a sweeping 11 nominations, and then reacts with disappointment as it gets ‘only’ four. And he doesn’t get a nomination for Best Director, but in the video says “I got beaten out by Fellini.” I asked if this was said with regret, fury or admiration, in the sense that at least he was beaten by the master.

“I don’t remember that day very well except to ask myself why on earth I let those cameras into my office,” laughed Mr Spielberg, bringing the house down. “The amount of ego and hubris that I could have, as a 26-year-old director, to assume that I would get nominated and the film would get these multiple nomination, I think my karma intervened. I was probably on the wrong side of the Academy that year because I never should have said it. I believe if I had perhaps watched [the nominations] privately, it might have been a little brighter.”

“You know, I had met Fellini when I was very young, because he had seen Duel and liked it, loved it, and I had spent my day with Federico Fellini, The Maestro! And we kept communicating with each other, and I believe the last letter he read before he passed away was one I wrote to him, and so when Fellini got the nomination that year [for Amarcord], I remember actually feeling happy for him.”

~

I went and shook his hand and thanked him for Jurassic Park and that glass of water, and he smiled and reminded me that the film is re-releasing in 3D next month, for its twentieth anniversary. And as I walked out and pinballed among a crowd of excited filmmakers with a “my year is made” vibe coursing through the room, I realised that very few things can make us feel as young as the films of Steven Spielberg.

We talked about his movies, about ours, about movies in general, and specific instances of his movies, all while being giddily aware of just how remarkable the evening had been. And then I walked out and, um, phoned home.

~

First published Rediff, March 12, 2013

10. The Avengers

9. Safety Not Guaranteed

8. Looper

7. Beasts Of The Southern Wild

6. Argo

5. “The Late Show” Parts 1-3

Louie : Season 3, Episodes 10, 11, 12

(It doesn’t have to be an actual film to be better than most films.)

4. Ruby Sparks

3. Django Unchained

2. Moonrise Kingdom

1. The Master

~

Some slant their glasses as they pour out their beer. Some pour it straight but fastidiously slow. Some others like their brew topped with foam. And then there are those — like a German dentist working as a highly efficient bounty hunter in the American South — fill their mugs to the top and then slice off the foam by the neck: in one swift motion, Dr King Schultz beheads his beer.

Routinely fascinating, every little thing Schultz does is magic: theatrically flamboyant and effectively surprising. Played marvellously by Christoph Waltz, Schultz uses loquacious language to flummox and to wheedle, to sneak and to stun. His gestures are deliberate and confounding in equal measure: he takes a fair while to wear his glasses and peer at the written word; he takes significantly less time to cave to temptation and shoot a man down. With a gun hidden, as it were, up his sleeve.

And as Quentin Tarantino’s extraordinary new movie begins in the year 1858, the good doctor buys a slave called Django. As fortune (and filmmakers that believe all too gladly in legend) would have it, Django has a wife with a German name, her horrible story echoing the German folk tale of Brunhilde and Siegfried. Schultz says it isn’t every day that a German gets to help a real-life Siegfried, and feeling as he does some awkward guilt and misplaced responsibility towards Django, partners up with him to help him bring back his wife, his “Broomhilda” from her living hell, the worst slave plantation there is. The fireworks are obvious.

Yet Tarantino’s concoction is so much more than spaghetti, with an awful lot of red sauce and a far more enduring aftertaste. His explosive, inflammatory anti-bigotry crusade takes no prisoners as it shockingly and plainly tears away genteel notions of the antebellum south and presents it to us in all its grotesquerie. (Gone With The Wind, for one, can never feel the same again.) We are made to laugh at the ridiculousness of hooded racists on horses and savagely shown how slaves are treated while white men sit in their parlours musing on superiority. And looming above all is the grand villain of the piece, the monstrously silken Calvin Candie. With bowls of jellybeans for him in each room, the amusement-park name for his plantation — Candyland — not softening the sting of the whip on the backs of his slaves.

This is a brutally violent movie, yes. Men are ripped apart by rabid dogs, women are baked naked in sundrenched coffins, and the wealthy make spectacle — like in the 1975 movie Mandingo — by pitting slaves against each other in bouts of bloodsport. That said, the words are sharper, crueller, stormier still. A black maid is told to treat Django like a free man, but not, indeed not, like she would treat a white man. Broomhilda is “wheeled out” for Dr Schultz because she can speak German, and when she speaks a line of the language, the hostess’ eyes widen with disbelief. (“Astonishing”, Schultz remarks, his sarcasm uncharacteristically unhidden.) “Talented as they are in the kitchen,” Candie says icily, “from time to time, adult supervision is required.”

It is a wildly entertaining but bitterly sobering film, a film reflecting on past shame while stabbing at the remnants of racism that remain within. Tarantino’s last film, the revisionist-history masterpiece Inglorious Basterds (where Hitler is burned down by Jews in a movie theatre) was a far sexier and more stylised film; Django Unchained is cruder and less finessed, feeling more like a chokeslam than an elegant uppercut. There is style, certainly — and cinematographer Robert Richardson is quite the master, especially when photographing blood splattering onto unplucked cotton — but this is, above all else, an angry film. (An older character from the Tarantino Universe given to Bible quoting might have called the new film, quite simply, “righteous.”)

The performances are all larger than life, and universally thrilling. Jamie Foxx smoulders as Django, saving his swagger for when he finally deems himself deserving, all the while playing a more subdued character while everyone around him is wallowing in flash. Schultz hands him a beer and Django sips at it incredulously, trying to keep it together but unable to help curling his lips up into a half-smile: it is quite likely his first drink, and he nods with approval. His character — named after the hero from 1966’s Django, with that hero Franco Nero in a flawless cameo here — has to act as a black slaver, the sort of man he loathes more than anything, and this he does with a natural alacrity that borders on the frightening. At one point, establishing his authority, he calls a white cowboy ‘Moonlight’ and barks the words “that means you” to put him in his place, moments after big boss Calvin Candie has used the same words to one of his strongmen.

Leonardo DiCaprio, in turn, is magnificently mercurial as Candie, a blustery slave-owner, an articulate and slimily, devastatingly decorous Francophile who holds court with a chilling discourse on the misled ‘science’ of phrenology while sawing into a skull. As with Django but for purposes much shallower and self-gratifying, much of Candie’s behaviour — from his exaggerated bellows professing love for his sister to his meticulously chosen words — is an act, an attempt to create character and stay in it. He even snarls the word “splendid.” And when he holds a hammer in a bloodied hand, he makes the shivers come.

The only man who has the measure of Candie is his head slave, Stephen. Laying it on nightmarishly thick, Samuel L Jackson conjures up a truly fearsome character, the film’s most hideous takeaway. It is a sickeningly good performance, one that blurs the lines as effectively as Tarantino likes. Stephen controls the slaves with an iron grip while enjoying an unparalleled friendship with Candie, sipping brandy with him in his library, at least in private. In public, he stands by the master with dogged loyalty but never gives an inch more than he must: he might not know what the word ’panache’ means but grasps it swiftly and uses it perfectly soon enough.

As with all of Tarantino’s films, so much of Django Unchained is about words, words perfectly used and perfectly picked, words that actors like Waltz and Jackson take to a different level and words that, once used, can’t be replaced. Words that result in a couple of immaculate lines about d’Artagnan and Dumas, the single best bit of dialogue on screen in years.

And Django suffers only from the filmmaker not letting in enough of his own words.

Tarantino has spoken of his film scripts as novels in their own right, as scripts he works on till they are so good they should be able to stand alone and tempt him into not making them into movies. And they truly are: reading Tarantino is a very special pleasure, and I urge fans to look up the lushly-detailed screenplays he leaks regularly onto the Internet. And by that measure — because Tarantino is a genre onto himself — I find Django Unchained a far better script than it is a film.

And this isn’t merely a question of slavish loyalty (though the Basterds adaptation barely left out two scripted scenes while Django omits massive and vital chunks) but one of storytelling. Kerry Washington’s character Broomhilda suffers massively from losing her entire, wonderful backstory, for example. There are some positively frightening but stunning Candie moments in there that I hate to see unfilmed and while the argument can obviously be made about length, this is the man who made two Kill Bill movies. The format bows to the master and it must not be the other way around.

Most vitally though, Django stumbles in its final act because — unlike in the script — Django’s heroics are already showcased in the film well before the finale, and also because there is a gratuitous pre-climactic action flurry that — in terms of gallons of blood used — outsplatters the eventual climax and renders it less effective. Lighting the same powder-keg twice never works quite as well. (Oh, and then there’s a far-too-casual cameo from the director himself, using a peculiarly comical Australian accent. Tsk.)

But that, in terms of the big bloody picture, is nitpicking. Despite that final fanboy caveat, Django Unchained provides more entertainment than most genre films can dream of, and more of a wallop than the most ambitious of dramas. It is a vulgar, gorgeous, wild piece of untameable poetry (which mostly doesn’t rhyme, except when Schultz gleefully says “Candieee” like “whee!”) and there is, quite simply, no other film in the world like it. Drink up.

Rating: 4.5 stars

~

First published Rediff, March 22, 2013

There is a scene in Sai Paranjpe’s Chashme Buddoor where Farooque Shaikh and Deepti Naval are on their first date. Despite coffee and tutti-frutti ice-cream, and her cooing enthusiasm for him studying Economics, there isn’t much to really talk about. And the shy Shaikh sheepishly confesses to having stalked her, to lurking outside her music school based on timings she’d let slip when they last met. Biting her lip, Naval grins that the reason she’d spoken of her schedule in such detail was precisely that he may notice. They laugh in awkward relief, instantly and acutely aware of having both acted on the same impulse.

It is a simple scene and yet — as can be said for a majority of Paranjpe’s cinema — within it lies a masterclass. Shaikh’s Siddharth Parashar is endearingly guileless, baring his first-ever gambit because it comes unnaturally to him, and because he’d rather not lie to the first girl he’s ever struck up conversation with, but also because he is, funnily enough, proud of his effort. It all shows in Shaikh’s grin as he looks away from her. Meanwhile, there is a joyous giddiness to Naval’s Neha, a girl only too glad to express her gladness. She’s flattered, thrilled, and positively glowing as she eases his confession with hers, following which he expansively orders more coffee and ice-cream, markedly more confident as he overrides her protestations. It is an exquisite piece of acting naturalism, one of the finest of them all. And the writing is flawless.

Chashme Buddoor, digitally remastered and brought to screens in a spanking new version, might have needed the cinematic scrubbing but remains a film glorying another time. 1981. A time when 500 rupees went a really long way and cigarette companies merely wanted you to relax. A time when posting pictures on one’s wall was a very literal activity (and a striking Shabana Azmi was a pin-up girl). A time when a character’s parents lived or vacationed in Nairobi. And a time when it seemed appropriate to shoot green and lovely Delhi with an uncynical, tender eye.

As time-capsules go, it’s one of the best and brightest. Chashme Buddoor is a masterpiece, and even 32 years after it first came out, I can safely declare what this is the best Hindi film you’ll see in theatres this year.

The characters are magnificent. Ravi Baswani makes his screen debut as the cavalier Jomo, a dedicated Lothario who believes in equal-opportunity flirting: no woman is spared from an attempt, albeit a harmless one. His side of the room he shares with two other Delhi University bachelors has the Azmi pin-up alongside many others, plus tall black boots he shines meticulously, and even when he’s swallowed a few punches and is bolting out of a farcically dangerous situation, Jomo stops to gather up his cigarettes and his sunglasses.

Rakesh Bedi’s chubby Omi, on the other hand, believes in muscle-magazines and injudiciously short shorts. He’s failed college a few times, sure, but he loves his ghazals and a spot of shaayari, and — truth be told, while he may not admit it to Jomo — prefers watching a play than chasing pointlessly after a girl.

But he talks a very big game, which leads us to the film’s finest moment: when a dejected Omi returns home, puffing thoughtfully on a cigarette and then — suddenly — throws it down and twirls dramatically on it, jumping up with an instant spring in his step as he gallops home to regale friends with a grand tale of a conquest that never was. In the snap of his fingers lies sheer, unadulterated movie magic.

Siddharth is the straighter one, the studious one mostly willing to foot the bill for his freeloading friends. There’s Gandhi on his wall and his shelves, and even the chair he sits in happens to be marked Aristotle. And, as mentioned, his artlessness is remarkable: he patiently picks out a whole new outfit and then, when his girl is impressed and comments on it, he smugly says he’s just been shopping. And he’s just waiting to be told to quit smoking.

Naval, on the other hand, imbues her Neha with such effervescent heart that it’s impossible not to fall for her. She memorably hawks detergent door-to-door to pay for music classes she diligently refuses to ever miss (well, almost ever) and the amount of unaffected joy the actress brings to the film livens it up miraculously. And she looks dazzling, by the way — even when imagined as Chhoti Bahu, in black and white.

And that, by no means, is all. There’s neighbourhood paanwala Lallan Mia, played by the amazing Saeed Jaffrey, a genial soul who couldn’t resist peeking at the girl in the pink salwaar-kameez as she strolled by early on, giving the film its plot. He harangues the trio for never paying for their cigarettes but his threats are but barbs; he threatens to confiscate an LP from the lads but scornfully hands it back. And how he exults about the addition of a bright table-lamp in his shop.

Because Chashme Buddoor is, above all, a film about small joys. About letting a pack of cards decide who gets first crack at a girl. About admitting that a bracelet is indeed too expensive. About friends with interchangeable wardrobes, all borrowing from each other. About flying kites in the park. About finding inspiration in Amitabh Bachchan movies. And about a brilliantly placed nail to hang a censorious towel on, whenever needed.

Chashme Buddoor is a marvel. Watching it two nights ago made my jaws hurt with laughter, predictably, but also my cheeks ache from constantly smiling. It is a wildly ebullient wonder of a film, very special and soaked in far more warmth than we are currently used to. It’s a treat, and like tutti-frutti ice-cream that is far harder to find than it should, we should lap it up while we can, gratefully and ravenously. Go to theatres now.

Rating: 5 stars

~

First published Rediff, April 5, 2013

It’s easy to forget just how much that suit weighs.

And that’s because it looks so, so good. Aerodynamically magical and ergonomically perfect, the suit is a technological marvel in red-and-yellow — it’s as if Jony Ive worked for Ferrari. Everyone’s favourite sequence in the last Iron Man film, in fact, featured the suit extending itself (Pictured above) — going from a briefcase to sheathing all of Tony Stark’s body in a matter of very sleek seconds. In the latest film the suit goes even further, peeling on and off bodies in motion, mid-air and even clamping itself on piecemeal. It’s a jawdropper all right.

And yet it is only in Shane Black’s Iron Man 3 that we actually get a sense of the suit’s perceptible weight; of how goddamned heavy it must be as it protectively rearranges itself around Gwyneth Paltrow’s body during an explosion — and how helpless she looks, pirouetting as the suit yanks itself off her and goes to find its master. Her neck twirls like a twig as the suffocatingly secure red and yellow leaves her, safe but decidedly with her brains puréed. Tony now has more suits than a man could need (even Barney Stinson will agree) but this is a film where we see him also as a fallen knight, dragging his armour through the snow. The message is clear: his armour is also his prison.

All messages, in fact, are clear as a plexiglass visor. In a world after the last Marvel megamovie, “subtlety,” as a character in this movie says, “has kinda had its day.” It’s true. Tony Stark might be playing with suits, but there’s a cartoonishly fearsome fundamentalist loon on the horizon called The Mandarin, and he’s sending parable-filled messages and revelling in making America crumble like a fortune cookie.

Meanwhile, Stark himself is suffering from anxiety attacks. Following the climax of last year’s blockbuster which saw him almost dying before he suggested everyone try shawarma, Tony’s apparently shaken up. “Nothing’s the same since New York,” he broods 911istically about what might have been. Best friend Colonel James Rhodes is less impressed, complaining about how Stark is frequently “off with the superfriends.” Yup, it’s a movie where sincerity is met with a wisecrack, a movie where snappy lines cut each other up like swordsmen on steroids, a movie that builds its energy from its banter. (The arc-reactor inside Shane Black must be a VHS tape of The Odd Couple.)

Rhodes has reason to be upset. His old-school grey War Machine suit has been painted red, white and blue, and he’s been rebranded Iron Patriot. This sets the stage for some delicious Riggs-and-Murtaugh style repartee between him and Stark, no surprise coming from Black who wrote the Lethal Weapon movies. Iron Man 3, then, is a film about Tony talking to people: To Rhodes, to an impressionable young kid, and to his girlfriend Pepper. And when someone like Black’s writing words for Robert Downey Jr to say, we’re in business. Kiss Kiss, Clang Clang.

Yet what glorious clanging it is. Iron Man 3 boasts of the headiest of action setpieces, long and spectacular bits of movie wizardry dreamed up by grown men who like pushing their action figures to the limit. A lot of superhero movies look alike now, with increasingly incoherent action populating most of them, but this is a pleasure: these set-pieces feel like big, expansive, boastfully huge splash-pages — the kind of pages created by a master storyteller and a truly gifted artist, the kind of pages where there’s a clear idea behind the explosion, where the scene and its contents truly merit the riotous RAKABADOOOOM sound where the letterer goes to town. The kind of pages that you stare at for a while, refusing to flip ahead, grinning at it all.

(The kind of pages, also that don’t really need 3D conversion; I recommend you watch this film without the big glasses.)

Cheekiness seems to be Black’s mantra, thankfully. Things get a bit sloppy near the end, and it is often that the film recklessly veers towards Deep and Meaningful, but there’s always enough of a wink to ensure things stay entertaining. Even when the climax gets far too long drawn out, you know who to root for because of the crackling narrative and, of course, the actors.

Gwyneth Paltrow’s Pepper Potts is an increasingly important part of the Iron Man franchise, and this installment lets her bring some serious spunk to the table. Plus she really knows how to nail a line, delivering it flat, cold, with brutal brilliance. The beautiful Rebecca Hall is mostly wasted as one of Stark’s onetime flings, but, after watching Scarlett Johannson in the last film, those of us Iron Man fans who love Vicky Christina Barcelona must start petitioning Marvel to get us Penelope next time.

Don Cheadle’s Rhodey is reliably strong, and Jon Favreau’s Happy Hogan as likeable as can be. On the other end of that spectrum stands overzealous scientist Guy Pearce, hamming it up unimpressively. It is Sir Ben Kingsley’s Mandarin who turns out to be a truly clever construct, a character written for another time and cannily made relevant today, and Kingsley plays him with great flair. A young man called James Badge Dale is quite terrific as an evil henchman, and Ty Simpkins, playing the kid who befriends Tony, is spot on.

And then there’s Robert Downey Jr, immaculately inhabiting both suit and smirk. The actor has taken the character and really, really run with it, and his version of Iron Man — younger than the comics, less of a drunkard, as much (or more) of an egomaniac — is now more definitive than the character in the books. He does the impossible: playing it cool and yet coming off grandiose. Bravo. Tony Stark seems as much a part of RDJ’s personality as he does a mask, and perhaps the actor inside the armour will find it hard to imagine leaving the character, this wonderful career-altering character, behind. For now, though, he’s our Iron Man. No two ways about it.

And he’s in the best hands. “I got you,” Pepper says as she saves Tony, in an echo of that most unforgettable scene from Richard Donner’s Superman, the most iconic man-woman moment in all of superhero cinema. Stark looks up at her, refuses to blink, and says “I got you first.”

Classic.

From one True Believer to another, thank you, Shane Black. Iron Man has never soared higher.

Rating: 4 stars

~

First published Rediff, 26 April 2013

Why do we love the movies?

Why do we stiffen with anticipation when that censor certificate flashes on the big screen, its signatures the size of couches, even when I may already be warning us that the film may be interminably long? Why does popcorn taste better when the lights go down? Why do we root for some movies and debate passionately against others? Why do we care about stray opinions expressed by people who don’t matter about our favourite actors who, clearly, do? Why do we let movies sunnily melt our cynicism or grimly erode our optimism with just a couple of scenes? And why, oh God why, does it feel so damned good when a movie makes us cry?

Bombay Talkies, a four-film collection of movies about Hindi cinema, is a portmanteau project that might not aim to provide a definitive answer to those questions, but is a film that certainly likes to wonder aloud, alongside us. There are four films, each roughly 25 minutes in length, made by four very different kinds of filmmakers, each a champion in their own right: Karan Johar, Dibakar Banerjee, Zoya Akhtar and Anurag Kashyap have made these films, and each, in a way, has unmistakably left a comfort zone behind in this commendable effort to high-five the movies.

~

Johar’s film, which will invariably be the most talked about of the lot, is more statement than film. It is a bold, sensitively handled drama about an inert marriage and, perching on its fringes, a young man bursting with pluck and defiance. It is not about a homosexual, but one of the characters happens to be gay. It is a film about old Hindi film music, with Johar expertly reappropriating classic songs, classic lyrics, and making them heartbreaking in a whole new way. It is about overfamiliarity, friendship and about how a man can drag another to a place of sheer wonderment.

Saqib Saleem, who was last so impressive in Mere Dad Ki Maruti, is excellent here, playing it far too cocky in a bid to overcompensate for his fragility. It rings true while being anything but cliched. Rani Mukherji plays his increasingly indulgent boss, a woman who wears her blouses slinky and her eyes sad, and the actress is perfect in the part. Randeep Hooda, as her husband, is problematic: he’s suitably subdued but a bit too awkward throughout the proceedings — even a character steeped in self-denial should know something about himself.

Johar’s first scene is searingly explosive, a great cinematic jolt, following which it first hiccups with some on-the-nose overfriendly banter, and then steadies and settles into a more predictable narrative. And it could have been flat if not for the beautifully used music. Johar’s is a film that loves language — one “Come in?”/“Come out?” moment is particularly gorgeous — and the way he melancholically paints his frames to accompany the words “ki sabse door ho gaye,” is exquisite.

It is also a film made by a maker less sure of the format. The camera is tight and intrusive, as it should be, but perhaps too eagerly, too often. There are a few too many shots of a more ‘cinematic’ composition — of people looking on in loneliness from sea-facing balconies, for example — which sometimes jar with a narrative this stark. Because, stripped of its makeup — as savagely as its actress peels off her own, in one alarming scene — this is the most vital film of the lot.

~

A truly great director does not need trained actors, a fact which led the master Satyajit Ray to use lots of non-professionals in his films. It is a method frequently used by Dibakar Banerjee to terrific effect, populating his films with the unfamiliar and the awesome. It is this that might have led Ray to write the short story called “Patol Babu, Film Star” that Banerjee’s film is based on; and it is ultimately deliciously ironic that, with this very short, we discover just how good things can get when a brilliant director does indeed collaborate with a highly accomplished actor.

Nawazuddin Siddiqui, that wondrous chameleon, seems to get better with each cinematic bound, and he’s at his absolute best in this wily adaptation. Mopping up the floors as he talks to his wife, Siddiqui nimbly takes the mop and cleans under his own feet before he steps onto the freshly wiped floor. This is a film that revels in the most acute, the most magnificent detailing. Even in the chawl they live in, Siddiqui’s daughter sleeps beside a Hannah Montana pencilbox. It is a film of many and varied joys, one of the finest and quirkiest going by the name Anjali.

Siddiqui plays a failed entrepreneur who strays onto a film-set and is snapped up as an extra, and much magic follows, most of which I should allow you to experience first hand, without knowing what you’re in for. Siddiqui is spectacular, Sadashiv Amrapurkar (as his overbearing, omniscient father) is perfectly cast and quite special, and Shubhangi Bhujbal is spot-on as Siddiqui’s wife; a particular moment — when she assures him that nobody can turn him down by asking if she herself could say no to him — is one to cherish.

It’s a remarkable film, unmistakably carrying the auteur’s stamp in every frame. (No mean feat considering just how much it borrows from Ray; from his films and his fiction: Anjali constantly made me think of Big Bill, for example.)

The shots are desolate, beautiful, gorgeous and the writing is crafted excellently. It is about the magic-dust the movies sprinkle on everyone within range, but more than that it is about a director himself overreaching: taking a story from the master and cleverly doodling enough around the margins to make it his own, and also taking a song from Rabindranath Tagore and himself composing music to compliment a devastatingly good final shot. These are salutes that must in turn be saluted.

~

I want to be a football, says a kid wearing a Lionel Messi jersey in the adorable opening montage of Zoya Akhtar’s film where children of various ages, shapes and heights tell the camera their dreams. (A  boy, wearing a fullblown superhero costume, is one I identified with the strongest.) This film isn’t about us, though, it’s about a kid who looks at the girls in tights longingly (not like that, no) while being forced into football practice; about a kid who wants to be Katrina Kaif.

It’s a simplistic fairytale of a film with clear-etched character archetypes — Strict Dad, Submissive Mom, Sweet Sister — and that suits both narrative and format. The youngster who dreams of glitzy outfits and high-heels is played by Naman Jain and he is simply fantastic, carrying the whole film off remarkably well.

Kaif has a cameo, wings and all, but her being chosen for this film is itself interesting, considering that till before Sheila Ki Jawaani — the song that makes this boy lean forward, agog — she wasn’t even considered a dancer. Dare to dream, but dream covertly, she tells the boy who drinks it in. It’s a sweet, escapist film — with understated ambition — featuring some great dialogues, that climaxes with simplicity and sunniness.

~

Anurag Kashyap’s film does what most of us have done, at least at some point: it mythologises Bachchan to the hilt. The narrative is weak (the plot is very reminiscent of Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal) but the masala spirit more than willing, and Kashyap churns out something both nuanced and nutty. In that sense, there may be no better conceivable tribute to Hindi cinema.

An Allahabadi youngster bolts from the Kumbh Mela to see his bedridden father who (after some top-notch Dilip Kumar mimicry) sends him off to see Amitabh Bachchan carrying a gooseberry, a solitary murabba in a jar. His mission: to get Bachchan to take a bite and bring back the half-eaten, megastar-indentured murabba so that the father can get better, bite by Big-B-endorsed bite.

The dutiful son (appropriately named Vijay, naturally) wears a scarlet, Coolie-coloured shirt and makes his way to Bachchan’s, thinking that the most famed of Juhu dwellers would take in all who hail from his hometown. The film is propelled by Vineet Kumar Singh’s stellar performance in the role, and while Kashyap crafts a nice-looking film with some delicious dialogue, this is a film that emerges half-baked. The struggle works but the end is a sham, and the cameo in the middle almost ruins everything. Or maybe the director was aiming for half-eaten?

~

Right after Kashyap’s film ends, scram for the door. Because after all this, after four directors doing their best to celebrate Hindi cinema, the film’s producers massacre things by throwing in a horribly tacky song that starts with ghastly YouTube-style lipsyncing and ends with Bollywood at its most disposably shiny. Even if Anil Kapoor’s having fun dancing his Lakhan steps, nothing justifies this atrocity. Run, I tell you, hold on to your murabba jar of movie memories and flee.

~

So then four films. Four statements. Four attempts. In the final reckoning, Bombay Talkies is mostly good, with one spectacular film and three that are, at worst, earnest: a collection that deserves to be watched for what it tries to celebrate more than what it ends up being. But like we say about so much of Bollywood, go for the magical bits.

Rating: 3.5 stars

 ~

First published Rediff, 3 May 2013

A famous Hindi film actor (who shall naturally go nameless here) once told me, while gushing about Baz Luhrmann’s work and cinematic flair, that he “is like Sanjay Leela Bhansali, gone right.” I laughed it off at the time, but there are few more astutely drawn parallels than between these gentlemen who insist on creating opera but staging it a la cabaret. Alas, it is with this new adaptation of The Great Gatsby — in which Luhrmann indeed borrows an actor Bhansali has used before — that the Australian director is tragically at his least heartfelt as he looks to smother F Scott Fitzgerald’s literary masterwork with tinsel butterflies. In 3D, no less.

Which isn’t to say it doesn’t look good. It is a massive piece of confectionary with Disney castles and gleaming yellow automobiles and flapper dresses and pink suits and champagne magnums filled with confetti, and Luhrmann shows off his world with brashly hallucinatory glee. A visual where the most beautiful shirts in the world are flung towards us like exotic birds is particularly gorgeous, for example. And this Gatsby is set in the 1920s but — despite the occasional and unintentionally hilarious swell of Gershwin (watch for the moment we first see the ‘hero’) — booms along with a cleverly used but highly modern, JayZ-filled soundtrack; even the Charleston challenges the subwoofer. That might well have been the Jazz Age but this is unmistakably the Baz Age.

And yet it all comes across as a pale Moulin Rouge imitation, as if that eye-poppingly original director was being reined in, perhaps by the very source material many have called unfilmable. The result is trite, a mess of restless marionettes — characters made wooden and visibly dying to burst into song but never allowed to — peopled by very fine actors forced to ham it up. Tobey Maguire’s Nick Carraway, for instance, talks of his cousin Daisy with the same saccharine awe he used as a 17-year-old in love with redheaded Mary Jane Watson. Which wouldn’t have been as problematic were he not this film’s narrator.

Ah, but far stranger things are afoot than merely contrived attempts at sincerity. In this film Carraway plays not just Gatsby’s friend but, inexplicably some sort of loony stand-in for Fitzgerald himself: Luhrmann’s whole film is a flashback from a sanatorium told in Maguire’s voice but heavy-handedly using Fitzgerald’s prose as if the character had come up with it. What this B-movie framing device adds to the narrative itself is unclear, save for giving the director opportunities to write words like ‘grotesque’ in cursive text and take us all for beautiful little fools.

Then again, at least Maguire’s eyes are adequately soaked in pity. Carey Mulligan drowns her Daisy in such a state of melodramatic disrepair that the character never leaves an impact. Elizabeth Debicki’s Jordan Baker fares better and looks the part perfectly, shimmying even as she stands up straight. Leonardo DiCaprio’s Gatsby is — like most screen versions of the character — far too charismatic to be that hospitable bootlegger on the fringes and looking in, but DiCaprio manages to bring some vulnerability and authenticity to his Gatsby, even if sometimes channelling his own Aviator role a bit much. But Leo’s better moments (like one where he waits impatiently for Daisy, his white suit soaked but his enthusiasm undamped) serve only to throw the script’s inadequacies into sharp relief.

“Let’s get the wolf-pack back together,” says Tom Buchanan as the film opens, jarring us immediately by using that word now linked so tightly to the Hangover movies. Buchanan is played by the excellent Joel Edgerton, who the film takes pains to ensure we loathe, right from the get go. These pitiful broadstrokes are seen everywhere: in Isla Fisher’s caricatured version of Myrtle; in the satanically manicured beard on Amitabh Bachchan’s Meyer Wolfsheim… Bachchan’s bit is quite good though, to be fair, and a couple more scenes with him might have helped. (At the very least they could have prevented Luhrmann from going on and on, spelling things out about bootlegging and drugstores.)

The genuinely exasperating thing is, however, that this film indeed tries doggedly hard to capture the spirit of the book. Not just the vulgar excesses of Gatsby’s frequently flaunted wealth but also its sadness, its yearning. And while the visual circusry propels the first half of the movie to at least the level of an impressively exploding firework, the flourishes mostly dry up in the second half as Luhrmann tries to tell the story of a man and a woman with ill-judged restraint. The romance, told the way it is, comes across more infantile than fabulous.

There is style here, then, but not enough of it. Merely keeping things spectacular all the way might have sufficed. As it stands, I recommend smuggling a flask of gin into theatres in order to swallow the second hour easier. Fitzgerald (and Jay Gatsby) would have approved. What he might not have approved of, though, is the way Luhrmann appropriates and trivialises those exquisite, immortal last lines from the novel. Just so his film can look at itself in the mirror and preen some more.

Rating: 2 stars

~

First published Rediff, May 17, 2013

I couldn’t resist taking an umbrella along.

I mean, how often do you get to have a drink with a Nargis, anyway? It’s a name we don’t run into much, despite our legendary screen goddess. The girl sitting across from me, one film old, didn’t particularly dig the name as a kid — “I grew up with a lot of Spanish people around, and they would call me Nalgas, which means ass-cheeks” — but loved it later. “Nobody else had my name. And when I was modelling I would never use my last name. Ever.” She pronounces that name Fac’ry (like ‘factory’, without a T) and then, for my benefit, says it the way Shah Rukh Khan would approve of — Fakhhri — with much epiglottal grace. It’s clear she frequently switches accents depending on her audience, and even clearer that she has to: this girl is all about travelling. And about talking.

“If you want to win me over,” she says, talking about how she doesn’t have a type, “all you gotta say is I wanna see the Great Wall of China, or climb the mountains of Machu-Picchu. He could be four feet tall with a limp, a little midget with a bike and I’ll be like ‘weally?’” The mock-swoon is dramatic but heartfelt. “It’s that big, the travel thing. I know someone who doesn’t have a passport, and I could punch that person in the face.”

Propelled by a globetrotting mother (currently in the Bahamas) who handed her a backpack at 15 and said the world is safe enough, Nargis has whimsically traipsed across continents without a plan. She’s gone randomly from Australia to Greece to Singapore, and doesn’t see it stopping. “If I ever give birth to babies I will strap them on my back like an African, and I’ll trek through the jungles of wherever, and I hope whoever my partner in crime is will feel the same way, and they’ll be strapping on the other one.” She then proceeds to do an impromptu fertility dance ‘blessing’ me with ten children. Ahem. But at least she promises to babysit. “I’ll be in New Zealand or Australia and have an organic little farm or some bullshit like that. You come visit anytime. I’ll take care of your kids.”

Hindi cinema, by that measure, is just another adventure. “Imagine someone from China came up to you and said ‘Oh my god, we love the way you look, we want you to be the male lead in our big Chinese movie. You have two months to learn Chinese. And to act.’ You never acted, you don’t know Chinese. Can you imagine doing that? With no family, no friends around. I’m insane for saying ‘Yes,’ but that I’ve established since I was very little, that I’m a bit loopy.” Worst-case scenario? She’d do badly, backpack around India and maybe “learn some Ayurveda.”

Growing up in Queens, New York, she remembers her Pakistani father watching Hindi movies but she was never really into films. “Here you’re growing up on the dance moves, you’re doing Chikni Chameli at three! We went to some Kids Day thing and I was watching these young kids dance to item numbers and they’re actually lipsyncing and I’m shocked at how intense it is.” Part of saying yes to Imtiaz Ali and his 2011 film Rockstar was not knowing better.

“It was only when we started doing promotions that I realised how famous Ranbir was. People were crying and ripping his clothes off and throwing stuff at him,” she laughs, “And I’m like, ‘Is U2 here?!’” It’s hard to imagine anything preparing one for the facemelting front-page glare of the Bollywood spotlight, and Nargis bemoans the fact that one single film has left her unable to take buses and trains in India. “As wonderful as it is, it’s sad. I didn’t ask for this. I’m grateful that it came to me, but I’m still weighing it: how awesome is it, really?”

“I couldn’t say no to the idea of India, I’m not a scaredy-cat,” she says of the challenge and warming up to showbiz. “And after you start, you think ‘can I get better at this? What else can I do? What else can I play? What can come my way?’ Also, there’s nothing else that’s calling me at the moment. So maybe, someday, something else will intrigue me far more than this and I’ll be like ‘Okay, I gotta go, bye.’”

“You give your best and you know some people will like it, some won’t. If you like it, I’m happy and if you didn’t, I’m sorry for ya,” she laughs. “But I’ll try harder next time.” She’s already shot that next film, Shoojit Sircar’s Madras Cafe, and admits it was easier. “The biggest reason is that now I know what’s up. Now I have a notch on my belt.”

 What she also has is three different salads, her fork oscillating expertly between them like a virtuoso xylophonist. In one of them she finds a tiny bug. “This salad’s so good that if you weren’t here, I could just have eaten this guy up like a pepper,” she laments as the plate’s sent back. A masochistic repeat-offender, she’s been awfully sick on much street food but gone back for seconds. “It’s like when you’re in a terrible relationship, you’re depressed and suicidal and all your friends hate the guy, but after you break up and some time passes, you forget the trauma and remember only the happy stuff. So it took me a few more times to finally learn my lesson.”

Yeah, the girl can eat. She’s done alligator, frogs, snails and chocolate-covered ants. And she’s game for more. “I wonder what dog and cat taste like. I said that on a shoot and this woman squealed but then lamb or chicken, anything we eat is adorable, right? My friend had a pot-bellied pig as a pet,” she says, her eyes glazing over. “I love pork. It’s the best. I’m salivating right now, by the way.” I ask if she could date a vegetarian, and she says she’d turn vegetarian if he were good enough. “I was vegetarian for six months, and it was the healthiest time of my life.” Ah, but was she travelling? “No,” she confesses. “Six months later I went to Germany and they have all that wonderful meat, the bratwursts and weinerschnitzels, and the vegetarianism stopped when I landed. Okay, that might not work.”

“I demand a lot from my partner because I do so much, and I expect it back.” The problem lies in making time. “In this business I don’t know how you can be in a relationship. You don’t even have the time to get to know someone. So I don’t know what I’ll do, and that could actually be a reason to leave the business.” She scoffs at the idea of dating someone in the movies. “No! I want someone normal. Someone who has a normal fucking job, who goes to sleep at 9 o’clock at night and likes to go trekking and likes to cook.”

She didn’t always crash at nine, this girl who’d jet to Barcelona to party all night but is now almost ridiculously low-key in Bombay. “It’s because of what happened in the beginning,” she explains. “I remember I went out to Olive one night and didn’t even have one drink, and they wrote in the paper that I was partying like a wild animal. And people were staring at me, like I was a monkey. It’s awkward! You’re standing there and thinking ‘why the fuck are people looking at me?’”

Thus, Nargis stays in and reads (mostly about “human behaviour and spirituality”) and watches documentaries and YouTube clips and TED Talks. Oh, and Hindi movies. She hasn’t watched her namesake in any romances yet (which means my Shri 420-themed brolly bit fizzled, alas) but has cried many a tissue box over her in Mother India. Kahaani’s the first film she ever watched twice, and English Vinglish made her weep buckets. “I wake up in the morning with a bed full of booger-tissues. And I’m such a sap, I cry when I see a cute kid or puppy. So yeah, those movies, they got me.“

Provided you don’t go someplace with exorbitant arugula, she’s a cheap date and, buzzed on a single glass of rosé, goes on about her fear of roaches, nude beaches in Europe and how she doesn’t want to ever be really fat. “But I will,” the salad-destroyer moans. “I’ll be fat when I’m old!” I tell her it’s fine, because fat folks are jolly. “Oh yeah, they are,” she grins, instantly reassured, peace brokered with inevitability. “And they want to feed everybody else. Awesome.”

I can’t help thinking she sounds like a pitch for a hit reality show. She agrees, thrilled. “Just get a Go-Pro and stick it on my head! And get me to travel and talk to people.” She insists she should be the interviewer, and, to prove she can ask personal questions, starts quizzing me about, um, fetish preferences. I order another martini. This is one tough rookie.

~

First published GQ, April 2013

Ah, Preity. When we first met Priety Zinta, we were bowled over by those sparkling eyes, those dimples and that genuinely fresh candour. When, in Dil Se, Shah Rukh Khan choked on his burger as she casually asked about virginity, we could relate. We rooted against the girl his character loved because of the character we invariably fell for, dooming the movie’s fate without realising it. And it felt worth it. What a girl, that fiesty, ebullient, Perk-eating Zinta.

That was fifteen years ago. In this Friday’s release — the moronically spelt Ishqk In Paris — Zinta assails us with those dimples in the hopes that things haven’t changed. Tragically, she seems almost determined not to act. She straddles the line between French and Hindi clumsily, speaking in a bit of a supervillain accent. Her eyes sparkle with the eagerness of a jumpy squirrel, even when they shouldn’t. (Really, should anybody’s?) There is a bit too much enthusiasm, too much bounce to her character, who shrugs all the time and nods rapidly and constantly, like a big Preity bobble-head. Without a cricketer in embracing range, Zinta doesn’t seem to know what to do with herself.

This, as you should have guessed from the title or the posters or the heading of this review, is a bad film. Evidence can be found in the fact that the men in the film, having worked previously on truly dismal projects, decided to come to this one with names changed. Director Prem Raj was formerly called Prem Soni, and made a trainwreck called Main Aur Mrs Khanna; leading man Rrehan Malliek used to go by Gaurav Chanana and last starred in Himesh Reshammiya’s Kajra Re, a film that furtively ran in two Mumbai theatres for three days. This Paris project, then, is like their witness protection program, their chance to carve new identities. Not the best pick, alas.

Somewhere in the middle of all this mediocrity is iconic French actress Isabelle Adjani, playing a Parisian playwright called Maria. The film opens with her reading from a script she’s written, and just when we think that perhaps something interesting may unfold from this unquestionably talented leading lady, she switches from English to Hindi with a ghastly bit of dubbing — I have a feeling Adjani’s irritating Hindi voice belongs to the woman who dubbed for Nargis Fakhri in Rockstar. I might indeed be wrong, but no wronger than the filmmakers.

The story of Ishqk and Akash — for that infuriatingly spelt Ishqk is the name of a character — forms Maria’s latest play, and from what we hear of the play, it seems she had watched Jab We Met a few times and then felt Geet needed to be an imbecile. Maria, while beautiful, is clearly a hack, for the love story she describes is so unbearably generic that the script could have been assembled by putting together the outtakes from any number of romantic movies. Young fellow meets Manic Punjabi Dream Woman (ahem) in Paris, they Before Sunrise it for a night, and then Salman Khan pops up for a song. Textbook, truly.

Ah, but even this hunk-less hunky-dory state can’t last forever. In a laughably bad heel turn, the hero goes from sap to scumbag in the space of one scene, going from cooing to cursing and berating the heroine’s family. Which, it turns out, she and her mom don’t mind as much. Clearly these characters deserve one another.

“This is a rubbish love story,” Zinta says in the film’s most honest, self-aware moment. “I need a drink.”

Ditto, miss. And you best be buying.

Rating: 1 star (but she looks to be fading)

~

First published Rediff, May 24, 2013