I met Rituparno Ghosh earlier this very month when he invited me on the sets of his new film, Satyanweshi, in Calcutta. Ghosh and I shared some common friends and had tweeted cordially to each other before, but I hadn’t met him till I got onto his set and he — a be-turbanned sultan comfortably in control of a period drama — turned to me and smiled. It was a big, genial beam, the kind that instantly draws you in, and I gratefully smiled back. I spent a little time with him over the next couple of days, trying my best not to get in his way, and now all of that — even the long conversations we had, and our interview about the new film and Bengali literature — seem horribly fleeting.

Over the last twenty years, Ghosh has been an incredibly important Indian filmmaker, a sensitive craftsman who did not allow his perfectionism to stand in the way of his dizzyingly prolific output. There are many films  — and we all have our favourites — but what characterises Ghosh’s filmography, in my opinion, is a certain tenderness to the whole. It was as if he genuinely loved the characters he peopled his films with, and dealt with them fraternally, maternally, and like close friends. Just because a minor character was a plot contrivance doesn’t mean they could be brushed aside. They mattered to RituDa, and especially in several silent bits of his films, this fondness clearly shows.

And when not silent, the words crackled. There might have been the occasional false beats in his dramas — some of which I’ve called overwrought in the past — but the man was a true master of dialogue. The running gag is that all his characters sound the same and talk the same way — which is to say, like him — but Ghosh always made the lines work magically. People spoke and we related to them, even when they spoke languidly and poetically, like we never would, or could. We related because he made us feel their love, their anguish, their melancholy.

And now he’s gone. He was 49, and he had so, so many stories to tell. There were ideas lined up for several films after the new one — which, by the way, stars Kahaani-director Sujoy Ghosh in the lead — but alas, we won’t be fortunate enough to see any of them. It’s a devastating bit of news to wake up to, not least because he remained relentless and stood, tall and bold, in a country that looks increasingly shorn of true storytellers. His shadow will linger on — and dramatically so.

Based on my very minimal interactions, RituDa was a warm, sweet person — even though these aren’t the most visible traits when a man is on the sets scolding his actors because he knows exactly what he wants. He was precise and unyielding, often grumpy in the quest for the right take, and his vision remained undimmed. He was also highly articulate and erudite, to the extent that our impromptu conversations made fascinated actors eavesdrop, just so they could hear him wax eloquent. The passion was tremendous, and striking.

I only hope Satyanweshi, which I believe he finished shooting just before his unfortunate passing, sees the light of day as he would have liked it. Given just how specific he was with the instructions on set — and how in sync his crew was with him — one hopes the film will emerge exactly according to plan. Just so he can smile at his swansong from above. Like I said, that shadow will linger.

Much love, RituDa. May the lighting up there be just the way you like it.

~

First published Rediff, May 30, 2013

When we can’t stand something a certain way, we’re instinctively prone to wishing it were the other way around, the opposite. This, naturally, is a huge fallacy, since the opposite is hardly ever what we truly mean. When we watch a Hindi film, for example, where the songs get in the way of the narrative and make the film longer than it should be, what we long for is a film where there are no songs, or one where the songs are truly a part of the storytelling. But that isn’t the opposite, no.

The exact opposite of a film where a great narrative is disrupted by songs is, then, a film where perfectly good song-and-dance sequences find themselves hampered by a tedious narrative. And that admittedly odd description should be on the poster for Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani.

For this is a very good-looking film. It is a film with almost exclusively pretty people, each primped up and glossed and shot at their most flattering, and every time Pritam’s songs burst through the speakers, Ayan Mukerji’s film gallops into gear like the run-rate when the bowler has a towel tucked into his pants. There’s a zingy energy to the uptempo proceedings, the lead actors are at their most electrifying, and the sheer, heady enthusiasm is deliriously grand. Even the greatest heroine in all the land merrily shakes her caboose. It’s huge fun.

When the songs aren’t playing, however, this is a daftly childish film, one where most actors act half their age and the narrative stumbles forward inanely and gracelessly. What should have been a breeze turns into a pained plod, and while things still look all glossy, the songless part of the movie — the story, we dare say? — remains dismally predictable and awfully contrived, eventually becoming quite a bore. (Throw back the towel, say I; here is indeed need for a fix.)

Three chums from school (along with the class geek) hit the hills for a trek, and have the kind of riotously slapstick time that they do in the movies. So farce so good, and while Kalki Koechlin, Aditya Roy Kapoor and Ranbir Kapoor gamely put on their underage faces and walk the walk, things are made more than bearable by Deepika Padukone earnestly playing the shy wallflower, on the outside looking in. The film feels like her story, and the actress is refreshingly assured and blessedly restrained in the part. Enough to make us root for her.

And then, conveniently around the point of intermission, she whips off her glasses defiantly (as all movie geeks must do, to proclaim their newfound, myopia-beating wings) and becomes one of the gang. Which is all cheery enough except the story now becomes that of the boy. And truth be told, he isn’t worth talking about.

The hero, Bunny, likes to travel. His dreams are exploratory, dreams of soaring and falling and discovering, and he’s heading effortlessly towards his fantasy. He’s cracked the code but left everyone behind in the process — a fact nobody ever lets him forget, his dearest friends hitting him with guilt-trips and sighs instead of congratulatory high-fives the moment they learn of his awesome scholarship. And so this film becomes about Bunny being made to feel worse and worse for getting what he wants.

There is no conflict, you see. Bunny has the passport-scorching job, the life, the girls. He has parents that support him unquestionably, and friends who think the world of him. How then is a filmmaker supposed to make things weepy when the second-half of the film is set at a massively opulent Indian wedding, a backdrop made for kerchiefs and melodrama? Problems, therefore, are engineered: but despite the swelling background music, it’s all most trivial.

The girl, after discovering her cool side, is now always found by herself, feet frequently dipped into moonlit water. She has evidently been waiting helplessly, and no matter how much of a boor the boy turns into — one scene in particular has him being inexcusably horrid to one of her friends — she’s willing to wait, incredulous and hopeful. Tsk.

There are a couple of nice touches, but it needed more than a few stray smiles to save the catastrophically doomed second half, mired in boring convenience and poor plotting. The cast tries valiantly but, stuck in their one-note characters, they can’t do much.

This is the kind of film where a girl at her desk has her hair tousled by a wind-machine, and where Manali shacks look Amster-damn good, but despite glitzy unreality being the order of the day, seasoned character actors thankfully don’t seem to have been given the memo: Farooque Sheikh, Kunal Roy Kapoor and Dolly Ahluwalia are top-notch. Heck, Ahluwalia — who is inexplicably absent later in the film — could have livened up the second half all by herself. She’s magnificent merely saying the word “wild”, with utter derision, as she talks of a girl in hotpants.

Kalki’s at her shrillest and smiliest, while Aditya broods from behind a beard. They’re both good but unremarkable, as is Ranbir, except when showcasing his admittedly spectacular dancing abilities. By now he can play a rake in his sleep, and delivers some lines — like one where he calls the girl “vulgar” — with immaculate timing, but he’s strictly average here.

Deepika, on the other hand, plays it beautifully. She acts within herself and eschews exaggeration, and the results are impressive. Her Naina is intelligent and eager, impulsive yet tentative, and, while mostly timid, also a girl who can whack a ladder with gusto. This may be her most self-aware performance so far, and here’s to more of the same.

Now if only they’d have left out the story. Coulda been a helluva great Superhit Muqabla, this. For youth is wasted on the unsung.

Rating: 2 stars

~

First published Rediff, May 31, 2013

You’ll believe a man can sigh.

That’s what the godlike alien in Man Of Steel frequently does as he looks around, before he glowers and scowls and, perhaps most importantly, poses. There is very little of the winning, geeky smile we associate with Clark Kent — indeed, the eager yet shy journalist we know and love appears for one scene in the new film — and for a character named Superman who’s just turned 75, this feller doesn’t even have the spit-curl. Nope, this is the story of The Fresh Prince Of Krypton.

Zack Snyder, a man the early trailers for his own film dubbed a ‘visionary,’ starts things off on a Krypton that looks like David Lynch’s Dune and features some Giger gadgets leftover from Ridley Scott’s Alien movies. His vision might just lie in jewellery design: the headgear worn by creepy Kryptonian councilmen is most ornate, just like the exquisitely carved trinkets we’d seen adorning almost-slaughtered heads in his 300.

His approach to the Superman origin story is hamhanded and operatic, aided well by strong actors all around. Russell Crowe, mercifully not warbling his lines this time, makes for a particularly formidable presence as the Dad Of Steel, and his committed performance makes Snyder’s unsubtle theatricality appear compelling if never evocative: bland Guignol must do when the Grand isn’t at hand.

A young boy tossed Moses-like across the galaxy in a spaceship basket, Kal-El lands in Kansas, but we never see that. Instead we see him fully grown and alarmingly muscular, a gentle hulk going around helping folks and smashing the occasional truck. His earth parents, Jonathan and Martha Kent, are played by Kevin Costner and Diane Lane, and both are excellent in the way they guide him toward the truth of his origins, and to focussing his power. “Imagine my voice as an island,” Lane says, in one of the film’s most beautiful moments.

And this is where it must be stressed that Man Of Steel does have beautiful moments. Some are, as mentioned, conjured up by very fine actors, while others are visually pretty — even if somewhat Terrence Malick inspired. And, in terms of storytelling, while a lot of it might not truly make sense at all, it all happens commendably fast: the movie dishes out huge narrative chunks as if in a rush, hurtling past the Superman timeline in order to get to an endlessly long and considerably boring 45-minute fight — but wait, I’m getting ahead of myself.

Well before all the climactic cacophony we meet Lois Lane, self-praising Pulitzer-winner and one of comicdom’s most fearless women. Amy Adams is enjoyably credible as the pesky, relentless journalist, but after a bit of fun, the film — bereft of all the Lois/Clark romance — asks only that she look at Superman dreamily, and this she does. (The other big ask from her is a full-throated Wilhelm Scream, which too she delivers magnificently.) The musclebound wetsuit-wearing object of her affections, Henry Cavill, is but a dimple under a baseball cap — he has the look right and is adequately earnest, but the film affords him not the luxury to charm us. Instead, he gets to throw a million punches.

When Krypton was destroyed, prisoners exiled to a phantom zone escaped destruction along with young Kal-El. These disgruntled folk are led by Michael Shannon’s General Zod, who overacts rather delightfully. His fury is most entertaining, his eyes like apoplectic ping-pong balls, but purists will be heartbroken at the realisation that he never asks the hero to kneel before him. He reaches the Earth to hunt out Kal-El, who is, in turn, being guided rather conveniently by his dead father. Unlike Marlon Brando who was merely an interactive telegram (by way of floating hologram head) in the first, masterful Superman film, Russel Crowe’s Jor-El seems to have turned into a Siri-like helper who guides not just Clark, but Lois. And all for some MacGuffin that sounds like a cough syrup.

As you can probably tell, there is little room for simplicity and stark, shadowy moodiness now as the film juggernauts forward, crammed with much malarkey. General Zod tackles fighter planes like a livid quarterback, and Clark smashes into him, hard. They keep ramming at each other and creating giant sonic booms under them, again, and again, and again. This mindnumbing, increasingly frustrating sequence of city-tearing explosions — which feel just like waiting for friends to stop playing Mortal Kombat or at least hand you a controller — lasts for at least 45 minutes. This? This is why Snyder wolfed down huge bites of narrative? This is what we had to get to? It’s unforgivably bad (unforgivably Bay, even) and things aren’t helped by the fact that unlike in the Marvel movies where New York is New York, the fictionalised DC capital of Metropolis is stripped of all its character. So we have a skyline with lots of mirror-covered buildings, but no soul. Kinda like Gurgaon.

Oh, and while I want to rant on and on about the film’s last scene, I promise not to spoil it for you here. So when you get to the final moment, just remember there’s no possible way it can make sense after the rest of the film you just saw. No way.

There are, as said, small joys to be found in Snyder’s film: the early bits with Crowe, or with a young Clark who is literally too sensitive to function. There is Lois, drinking scotch and finding a way around her contract, and there’s Toby Zeigler, always a joy. The art direction is impressively detailed, as is the visionary bling, and the 3D never seems too dark. Plus, there’s a pretty good sight gag about toner cartridges.

But Man Of Steel (which invariably sounds, to me, like a rejected title for a gay-themed Remington Steele episode) never quite musters up the charm or the levity any story of Superman requires — and deserves. It looks good and is populated by fine actors (and we get a peek at trucks belonging to a bald man this movie could have used but doesn’t have), but the clunky Superman-as-Jesus imagery running through it all symptomises the problem with this narrative: too much steel, not enough man.

Rating: 2.5 stars

~

First published Rediff, June 14, 2013

The finest, most fascinating mysteries are the ones where we find the red herrings stashed away in plain sight all along. In Raj Kumar Gupta’s Ghanchakkar, the true clue to the proceedings is barely hidden. It’s in the song playing in every trailer, the song over the opening credits of the film: it’s fiendishly smart to say Lazy Lad and make us assume the filmmakers are talking about the protagonist when in reality they mean the screenwriter. For this is a confoundingly half-written film.

What is exasperating is how good it is right up to the third act, right up to the point when the people plotting this clever and twisty story decided not to type out any more ideas and let the film remain an almighty mess.

Like all of Gupta’s films, it starts brilliantly. Emraan Hashmi’s Sanju lives with his wife Neetu (Vidya Balan) who dresses like a backup dancer in an 80s music video and doesn’t have a knack for seasoning food. One evening, over a plateful of something too salted, a mysterious man calls with a very lucrative offer. Sanju, who insists they have enough saved up for a few years of idling, isn’t keen but Neetu nudges him towards that classic ‘one last job.’

This leads to a hilarious bank robbery, one that makes dazzling use of celebrity masks that I would hate to ruin by telling you about, but it’s like a Hrishikesh Mukherjee version of Point Break. Each mask wears a different expression — a Grin, a Gasp and a Frown — and the way these famous faces fumble their way through the chaos is priceless. The film rollickingly (and with very impressive narrative economy) zips through its constantly compelling story, and in less than a half hour we know all our principal protagonists, have seen a great robbery, and are aware that one of them has lost his memory and thus forgotten, three months later — when the cash is meant to be divvied up — where the loot lies.

So far so far-out, and Gupta and his fine ensemble cast fill in the details with wonderful whimsy. The reliably excellent Rajesh Sharma plays an unctuous baddie called Pandit, a great contrast to his profane and trigger-happy partner, Idris (Namit Das), while Hashmi looks appropriately befuddled and Balan, from amid a deluge of polka dots, sparkles in that way only she can. I think I smiled at the screen throughout the madcap first half, the lunacy of which echoed early Coen Brothers movies. (I was particularly reminded of Raising Arizona.)

Balan, in particular, deserves to be singled out for applause simply because of her willingness as a leading lady to take on a role this farcical — that of a loud character not just overweight but mocked for her weight, through dialogue and ludicrous costume. There is a scene, I kid you not, where she wears giant earrings shaped like prisoners, as if The Beagle Boys were using her ears for clotheslines.

But despite all the merry tomfoolery, a film like Ghanchakkar depends more on the meat of the story than on its execution. And somewhere through the second half, it stops being funny and becomes inane precisely at the time when it should have showed off its intelligence. We look for a big reveal and there is none. And a house of cards can’t be built on jokers alone.

So despite the delicious nuances — the sabzee-buying commuter; the roadside apothecary with technicolor bottles; a chipmunk-like crook talking naughty on the phone before, without irony, straddling the film’s hero — Ghanchakkar builds up and builds up and builds up magnificently before collapsing in a bloody silly heap. I was loving this film till it turned the tables and hoodwinked me.

Maybe, like the television-addicted Sanju, we’re all better off watching these films on Zee Cinema. At least we can change channels or fall asleep midway.

Rating: 2 stars

~

First published Rediff, June 28, 2013

So much lay in that smirk. Even if the smirk was frequently invisible behind a tough mouth. A mouth that was, in turn, protected from absolute inscrutability by a slight curling of the lip, toward a scowl or a smile. Cards were rarely played closer to the chest, and it was as if Pran didn’t need — nay, didn’t deign — to let the hero or, indeed, the audience, into his head. Even while he stood in silence as the villain before the hero’s inevitable triumph, Pran’s smug menace was palpable, schemes and machinations whirring behind his eyebrows, the right one often raised a shade higher, in disdain.

The reason he made such a fearsome adversary for many a Bollywood good guy was, quite simply, the fact that Pran invariably seemed smarter, more calculating, more intelligent than the hero. Frequently he also looked tougher, or, at the very least, scrappier and more resourceful, the sort of guy you’d want on your side when things got sticky. Consider the evidence witnessed before the climactic showdown: on one hand is the hero who has yodellingly wooed his girl, had a few laughs and gotten several songs to pirouette through, and in the other corner is Pran, who’s been through harder knocks and is, more often than not, the one grappling to prove himself against all odds.

In Hindi cinema, the hero and the underdog are two entirely different things.

Pran was neither. A hero he couldn’t be, having established himself a villain of such notoriety that people refused to name their children Pran; the only other Pran around in pop-culture, the man who gave us Chacha Chowdhury, started calling himself ‘Cartoonist Pran’, perhaps to assuage audiences worrying that Sabu was born out of a devious imagination. And while the actor could well have been an underdog — the characters Pran played were usually more wronged than wrong, more desperate than diabolical — he carried himself with such pride that it was impossible to consider him a loser.

At best, we thought the hero — when walking away triumphant — had gotten lucky.

My first memory of Pran involves a hideous wig and a relentlessly twirled keychain. The actor hammed it up quite spectacularly as Jasjeet in Chandra Barot’s Don, but he held his own to Amitabh Bachchan and — here was the crux — Bachchan couldn’t shut him up with kick or quip. At that waist-high age of VHS-aided discovery, it was a mind-altering moment to realise that even Amitabh Bachchan, as superheroic as could be, had an on-screen equal. Someone who stood his ground and someone Bachchan couldn’t easily defy.

More films were rented and watched, and since chronology was overruled by rental-store availability, Pran perplexingly popped up in contrasting situations: he was Bachchan’s best friend one day, Bachchan’s dad the next. But he was always, always important.

There have been many fantastic villains in our cinema — from the glorious Gabbar to the sinister KN Singh to the loquacious Ajit to the best of them all, Amrish Puri — but Pran was always more than that. He was a forgotten son, a disgraced heir, a spurned brother, a thwarted lover… Pran was, in sum, almost the hero. And it was in being thus their equal that he had the measure of many a leading man.

Salaam, Pransaab. May you find, up there, a horse-drawn carriage to ferry you around. The two hundred and third carriage, to be exact.

~

First published Rediff, July 18, 2013

“Do you think Elvis is dead?”

Posed with dreamy yet dolorous vagueness, the question comes out of nowhere on the heels of a rather impassioned conversation about books. But then Sonam Kapoor is about nothing if not the non sequitur.

Sonam turned 28 a week ago, and she says it was “hysterical.” “It was me and five girlfriends in Paris and we were at a Rihanna concert,” she starts off, giddily uncorked. “And we felt like kids again because it was such a pre-teen crowd! And we were drinking cheap beer, cheap champagne… like being young and broke again. And with that music — these really commercial, hip songs — it was like being in a nightclub with 80,000 people.” And thus they got trashed and woke up and had lots of fancy French things doused in chocolate “cause the best hangover cure is lots and lots of sugar, of course” and hauled themselves off to a vintage haute couture exhibition.

If this all sounds too girly — and it does — then cut her some slack. Kapoor’s worked relentlessly on back to back movies for a while now, and this year she’s been taking quick little time-outs to travel with close friends and family. “This year, I’ve managed New York, Paris and London already, and have Turkey, Hong Kong and Kerala lined up.” And does travelling bring anonymity? “Oh yeah, of course. I mean obviously there are Indians everywhere, but I think when I’m abroad I can be just another pretty girl walking down the street.”

Kapoor, I should mention, is a good buddy, and ours is a peculiar friendship: not least because she constantly shuns what I’m wearing, almost as if avenging the way my reviews claw at her films. Yet we get along merrily, despite me sticking to retro rockband tee-shirts and her making movies like Thank You. It is, after all, only fun to jibe with someone who revels in the sparring, and Sonam can laugh at herself really loudly. She’s an odd bird, this one, flighty and clever and ambitious while known, at the moment, mostly for her plumage.

Time-off hasn’t been insane, she insists. “I’m not a talkative drunk, I’m just a happy dance-y person. And I don’t really do stupid things. I mean I wish I could give you an unmentionable story, but you know my idea of a really, really good time is to just read a fucking book.”

Now this I can vouch for (not so much the un-stupid things bit, ahem). Kapoor reads more than most people I know, myself included. When she was but a tot who couldn’t pronounce “Chanel,” her mother would read to her and not finish the stories, leaving them on her bedside table. “And because I’m this freak with an overactive imagination, I’d try and finish them in my head. But I also ended up teaching myself to read just so I’d get to know what happened next.”

So she flew through “The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew and Panchatantra” before middle school. Sonam continues to read everything in range, chastising me for not having read Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl despite her having recommended it a year ago; lamenting how a dead iPad battery on a flight led her to the new Dan Brown, which she calls “so bad it’s traumatising,”; and committing possible heresy by suggesting that when it comes to Game Of Thrones, the HBO show might actually be better than George RR Martin’s formidable novels.

“I’m going to act till the day I die,” Sonam says. “Not that I’ll be grasping for lead roles or anything, but I’d like to keep honing my craft, and to earn the lines on my face.” Say what? She explains, speaking of how important aging gracefully is to her, and every line on her face should be something she earns. So what, then, of now? “Haha, yeah, right now I’m completely line-free. But I’ll get there.”

This Diwali, she’ll have spent six years as a Hindi film actress. “In that time I’ve done 8 films, which is not too many. And I think I’ve grown up. I’ve learned from every film, no matter the result or the outcome. Who says only the good stuff has to be a milestone?”

Some of her filmography admittedly reads better on paper. Top-tier directors have made catastrophic duds starring Sonam, but, undeterred, she’s constantly conjuring up off-kilter projects. Significantly quirky milestones lie around the corner: Raanjhanaa is a film she’s given a lot to and is visibly proud of; she has a small but vital role in Rakeysh Mehra’s Bhaag Milkha Bhaag; she’s stepping into Rekha’s shoes for a whacked-out take on Khubsoorat; and she’s just shot a romcom with Ayushmann Khurana.

And then there’s that ‘style icon’ cloak she wraps nonchalantly around herself. Line-free she may still be, but I wager she’s earning her stripes all right.

Part of the reason Sonam is currently even more ebullient than usual, I feel, is that she’s finally enjoying being single. She’s dated three men since I’ve known her (men she accuses me of being judgemental about and insists I include that in this piece) but she’s unstrung now and loving it. “It’s amazing. It makes me feel more free and more focussed, and I prefer being by myself. Honestly, every time I’ve become single in the last five years, I’ve never had the time to process it. And you know I’m weird when I’m in a relationship: my priorities change and the relationship becomes most important. So, last year, I realised I needed to focus on me, prioritise myself, fix me first. Before wanting to be part of a pair.”

Part of this self-repair has to do with an innate compulsion toward flawed men she can nourish. “It’s true. I have this thing, I like to save people, to take care of them. So the pattern is that I date these guys before they make it big,” she explains, with much mock-seriousness, “and then they become successful and whoops, there goes my project!”

Her superstar father is, understandably, less flattering about said ‘projects’. “My dad says I get strays home,” she admits, through peals of laughter.

(Two out of the three exes hardly ever read books, by the way. My “judgemental” side feels enormously vindicated.)

These days, thankfully, she’s looking for “more sorted” blokes, and, unlike the ones gone by, now she’d like those who have nothing to do with the movies. “The film industry is too small, it’s a mad place where everyone knows everyone. It’s sort of like a glass snow-dome, its own world. It’s too self-contained. And I think right now there are different worlds I need to discover.”

“I wanna date a lot of people,” Sonam sighs, before correcting herself. “Actually, I wanna go on a lot of dates.” Do queue up in an orderly fashion, yes, lads?

~

First published GQ magazine, August 2013

I love the word Taut.

One of the finest words to describe films about crime, it’s a delicious word, evoking images of a tightrope yanked to within inches of breaking point, a tensed muscle coiled for action, a narrative stretched like cling-film. Unfortunately, it is a word we Indian critics get to use less, since far too many of our films (our thrillers, especially) meander on — choosing to hem and haw and sing instead of getting to the point — and their gravy is scarcely as enjoyable as the meat of the plot.

BA Pass, directed (and shot) by first-timer Ajay Bahl, severs expectations with the cold relentlessness of a fastidious serial killer. Weighing in at ninety minutes, the film is a riveting chunk of solid noir that stays compelling, grounded and hard to look away from. It is a morbidly fascinating tale — of sex and secrets and sinister chess-moves — and turns up a mostly impressive one. And yes, it’s wonderfully taut.

Based on a story called The Railway Aunty by New York-based writer Mohan Sikka, BA Pass introduces us to its protagonist Mukesh at his parents’ funeral. Freshly out of school, the boy is yanked away to a reluctant relative’s house in Delhi. In college he doesn’t have the grades to study any one subject, so deals with that bare-minimum melange — that khichdi — of a degree, a BA Pass course. It’s a humdrum and humiliating life Mukesh finds himself in, until Sarika Aunty calls him over to pick up a crate of apples.

We’ve seen it before, certainly. The predatory housewife feasting on the bones of a young, willing man who doesn’t know better. But Bahl’s treatment is solid, his setting believable, his narrative unflinching and his actors uniformly impressive. This makes for a sexy, scary time at the movies and there aren’t many things better than that.

Shadab Kamal plays the pliant young Mukesh credibly enough. This is not a role that requires charisma, and Kamal brings a wide-eyed slack-jawed naïveté to the part that, even if sometimes exaggerated, gets the job done. As said, the film has solid actors throughout, from the infallible Rajesh Sharma as a gruff, angry husband to Dibyendu Chatterjee playing a Karpov-worshipping chess addict. Special praise must head toward the lady playing Mukesh’s bua (his father’s sister) Geeta Sharma, who is rather excellent.

The meatiest role, however, is that of the Aunty herself, and Shilpa Shukla — who we all remember as the girl who unzipped her jacket for Shah Rukh Khan in Chak De India — gets her teeth into it well, and stays formidably inscrutable through the film. She creates not just a character with an unashamedly carnivorous sexual appetite (moments after telling the boy not to call her Aunty, she stands up and matter-of-factly undoes the drawstring on her pyjamas) but also an oddly cold character. She affects a hard face through the film with even her smiles seeming bitter and distant, except when she’s being struck: now that pain seems to bring out a macabre, masochistic joy within her.

Bahl has shot the film himself, and he has laudably eschewed the spectacular for the service of the story. It’s well shot but markedly chooses not to show off, and some frames — like one where Mukesh is travelling on a Delhi Metro over a bridge at night — are quite lovely. But yes, applause for the lack of indulgence.

The dialogues aren’t quotable because they choose instead to be believable. One line spoken by the bua, though, stands out for me. “Haath mooh dho le, banda ban ja,” she tells the nephew (“Go and wash up, be a man”) and it is that intriguing phrasing (it sounds more like ‘become a man’ than ‘be a man’ in Hindi) that makes us smile. And his quest to ‘become a man’ that wipes our smile forcibly away.

The film works as a slow-burn, inescapable but constant and searing, and one that escalates to a high-flame only in the final act which tries, perhaps inevitably, to do a few too many things. In its quest to end with a bang, BA Pass becomes a suddenly stylized rush where plot and thought collide — and collision isn’t crescendo, it is what drowns out crescendo.

One of my favourite moments in the film comes when Rajesh Sharma, as the fearsome husband, is rendered powerless (and, indeed, speechless) by the sight and the proximity of bonafide violence, of genuine peril. As an audience, we are as well. BA Pass, for the most part as taut as piano wire, feels like a chokehold. And that’s a very good thing.

Rating: 3.5 stars

~

First published Rediff, August 2, 2013

Kings, they are a-changin.

Six years ago, Deepika Padukone made a celebrated debut opposite Shah Rukh Khan in a rollicking entertainer that marvellously spoofed his stardom. At the time, her acting inabilities were cannily masked by the director giving her little to do except look staggering, and by Khan himself, carrying the film on the muscles of his tremendous charisma. Chennai Express is, in a way, full circle for that very lady as she — enlivened by box-office success and increasingly self-aware as an actress — holds up her end of the film far better, and more consistently than her leading man. She makes an effort; he makes faces. And he’s never seemed more at sea.

Rohit Shetty’s Chennai Express is a curious beast, a film it seemed would lampoon the South Indian blockbuster — those films we claim are cheesier and sillier than our own (and then remake with much fanfare) —  but happens to be, in fact, the diametric opposite. This is, in many ways, a full-throated tribute, a Sun TV Strikes Back statement of a film, where a typically cliched example of Southern style masala chugs along normally (and unironically) but is disrupted by a Bollywood actor who has no business there. Khan’s Rahul plays the freak while the locals around him look at him dazed, befuddled by his buffoonery.

All the other actors in this enterprise, despite their one-note roles, conform to the universe of this film, to its reality, but Khan’s having nothing of it. He performs in an inexplicably bizarre pitch, as if the filmmakers (and himself, the producer) decided that he should play it like a rejected 40s cartoon, like Daffy Duck gone awry. Khan yelps and squeaks and shrieks and bares fangs and pouts and, well, exhausts himself overcompensating at every step, despite nobody else in the film following this template so inanely animated it’d make Jim Carrey think twice. A looney out of tune, then.

It’s a shame because Chennai Express is built on a simple enough bit of fluff, something that would truly have sparkled brightly in the hands of, say, an Imtiaz Ali, but something that would itself have been inherently more entertaining had Khan not been intent on looking an imbecile. In sum: Rahul, entrusted with his grandfather’s ashes to be immersed down south, decides instead to hotfoot it to Goa and party with friends who have “arranged” NRI girls. He gets on to a train to throw his sweet, unsuspecting grandmother off his scent, and it is here he runs into Padukone’s Meena, a pretty girl with an accent thicker than Mehmood. She’s being kidnapped, he tries to speak up, and they’re both frogmarched down to her village where her gangster father is told that our hero is her daughter’s suitor. There, see? Simple, fun and the ensuing hijinks pretty much write themselves. Even with a few too many airborne jeeps, this could have been a daftly enjoyable lark. (But alas, we underestimate the power of a common Khan.)

Padukone, as said, pulls off her bit with panache. So confident is she that even her outlandish accent seems normal after a bit, and she commits to the role most enthusiastically. I’d comment on her comic timing if this film had any well-written gags, but by herself (and especially in comparison to her hero here) Padukone is a delight. She’s visibly having a blast and her glee is infectious. She delivers a Bachchan line with élan, and is particularly awesome in a scene where — in a nod to the southern horror cliché — she’s casually possessed by a ghost. This may not be the most demanding of roles, but the actress revels in the madness around her and shines through like a bonafide star.

The first half of the film, with Khan monkeying about unfettered, is relentlessly awful. (Somebody confiscate his Steve McQueen t-shirt.) It is also ear-splittingly loud, with everyone seemingly yelling and the background score choosing not to background itself very much after all. The writing is bad enough to make a Priyadarshan film look subtle. In the second half, things get less asinine — this is directly in proportion to Khan shutting up for a stretch — but then the film takes turns rolling through many a overused filmi cliché without ever managing to spoof them. Shah Rukh goes from being Daffy Duck to Ram Jaane, suddenly all melodramatic and quivery-voiced and so damned earnest that his character forgets that he doesn’t know a word of Tamil, climactically rattling off complicated lines in the language.

There is one genuinely clever moment. It is the one bit of self-referencing that works, when Shah Rukh — with the Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jaayenge music playing — stretches out his arm and yanks Deepika onto a moving train, before doing the same, complete with music, for each of the gigantic kidnappers chasing her. Super. For the rest of the film, Rohit Shetty made me feel more like a lovelorn Kajol than anybody should, and it had nothing to do with Simran: but damn, I missed Ajay Devgn.

Rating: One star

~

First published Rediff, August 9, 2013

Not very long ago, I rhapsodised about the words “Once Upon A Time,” and how a recent movie shone light upon them in rather sublime fashion. This week, a film releases with a name that starts with those very words and then makes a mockery of them. Once Upon A Time In Mumbai Dobara is effectively, of course, Twice Upon A Time. Now, having walked out of this new Milan Luthria film, I wish they had gone with the Twice Upon title — if only because of how convenient it would be to call it T.W.A.T: The Movie.

The first Once Upon A Time In Mumbai was — while not a good film by any stretch of the imagination — a tolerable throwback to the dialogue-laden movies of yore. Things have gotten far worse this time around, with characters talking exclusively in the sort of aphoristic couplets found on auto-rickshaw stickers. Akshay Kumar makes some of those lines work, but the rest are beyond redemption. What is most upsetting is how the vital lines flounder the most: unrelated inanities pop up throughout, but it is when the script actually demands a line with some heft that there is none to be found. It is as if the writers copy-paste lines from railway station shayari books whenever they can, but at times of actual dramatic punch, nothing fits.

Except, that is, Akshay Kumar. Kumar — despite his preparation for this film consisting merely of picking out the right pair of sunglasses — relishes playing villain. He says as much, too, in a rare good line about how the Hindi film hero only enjoys the final reel where things end happily while the baddie lives it up throughout the film.And so his Shoaib Bhai smokes and slithers and, for some reason, taps chairs repeatedly on the floor till he gets the attention of the room. A dreaded gangster, Shoaib is most impressed by those rare ones who stay impudent to his face — even after learning that those folks have no idea who he is, and seeing them cower like everyone else when apprised of his omnipotence.

One such character is the film’s heroine, Jasmine, a thickheaded young actress with wide-eyes and a tendency to misconstrue most everything said to her. Sonakshi Sinha, who plays this exasperating actress, is quite wasted in this role — playing dumb to comedic effect isn’t up everyone’s alley — and a scene near the finale has her screeching like a possessed banshee. Why gangsters in our films fall for the most psychotic of women is, however, the story for another day.

For now, a much more relevant question would be just what purpose Imran Khan serves in a movie like TWAT. Sure, Kumar’s a bad guy and there needs to be a hero in a film this formulaic, and I get that this film is ostensibly a love triangle, but so entertaining is Kumar’s swagger and so feebly does Khan deliver his lines that even if Khan’s character were completely excised, it wouldn’t hurt the movie an ounce. In fact, since it’d considerably trim the seemingly unending 160-minute running time, it’d be a massive plus.

Shoaib is an all-powerful don who plagues Bombay with ease, getting rid of all who stand in his way. Imran Khan’s Aslam, a youngster Shoaib scooped off the streets a dozen years ago, is one of his most trusted men. Somewhere down the line, however, both men committed to life without love fall for the same girl. Ta-da. The film is constantly predictable — just like the first film in the series — but leans too heavily on a very hackneyed romantic angle. It isn’t often one gets to say this about a Bollywood actioner, but a few more gunshots could have been nice. Kumar more than makes up for the lack of Devgn, but despite having a similar first name, Imran really can’t match up to Emraan.

It is nice, however, to see Tiku Talsania and Sonali Bendre back on the big screen, albeit in small roles. (Though neither gets as inexplicably thankless an appearance as the lady from Luthria’s Dirty Picture.) Also enjoyable are a Kapil Dev lookalike who clouts a cricket ball quite like the Haryana Hurricane used to (even though when this one hits it in the air it stays there for a few minutes before reaching the fielder), and, on a related note, the sight of the once-ubiquitous Rapidex English Speaking Course books.

The rest is nonsense. No, worse: expensive nonsense.

In the film’s finest scene, when there is an all-points bulletin for Shoaib’s arrest, the gangster, fed up by the police, strides defiantly into a police station and is… well, utterly ignored as he stands there and walks out again. Typical. We never quite knew what to do with our stars.

Rating: 2 stars

~

First published Rediff, August 15, 2013

The thing about building a house of cards — indeed, a country of cards — is that its very existence is rooted in caprice. With Tasher Desh, radical filmmaker Q takes on Rabindranath Tagore’s play and interprets a familiar text with much vim and great style, and yet the fact that the end results are uneven — and uneven they certainly are — seems as much an inevitability as a matter of choice. Discordance was always, well, on the cards. And nitpicking about consistency feels as relevant here as wondering, during construction, why an eight of spades is propping up a jack of diamonds, or why some of us save picture cards for the peak, for the house’s spire.

This is a bizarre film, one that unapologetically meanders through most of its first hour, giving us a hint of its characters while soaking us in a psychedelic cauldron of ennui. It’s the same one Q’s protagonists sip from. On one hand is a bespectacled Writer who wants to mount a production of Tasher Desh, but is overwhelmed by the relentlessness of the world around him. He escapes into the pages, where we meet the play’s hero, a restless Prince weary of his luxurious cage. And as the story flip-flops between these two, the teller and the doer, the film’s visuals take over our heads as if Q were playing with the Luduvico Technique without warning. The surreal, madcap imagery is captivating, and many an image remains lodged in my head. Even a few that I found tiresome at the time.

A primary reason for the tenacity of these strong, strange images — an Oracle with David Bowie cheekbones, a toddler prince with a sword larger than himself, clockwork squirrels going around in circles — is how violently they’re juxtaposed, not just against each other in immediate contrast, but along with the music. The soundtrack takes the songs from Tagore’s original musical and keeps the lyrics the same, and while the music is edgy and eclectic and defiantly modern, it is the classic lyrical heft that propels the film’s narrative. The filmmakers have done an artful job of subtitling these words, often sacrificing literality for inferred meaning, which helps greatly in grasping the film. This happens with dialogue too, when characters repeat the same lines and words over and over but the subtitles ascribe different meanings, or emphasise different parts of the translated line. The word “Nirbashan,” for example, is translated as both “Banish” and “Punish.”

The first time we meet the Prince, he’s keeping up a metronomically precise ping-pong rally, his rhythm as unswerving as a stenographer’s typewriter. His urge to leave home is fierce. His friend, the son of a merchant, is naturally pragmatic, advocating the plush creature comforts around them instead of flying off pointlessly into the great unknown. At an impasse, the boys tap into the aforementioned Aladdin Sane oracle for wisdom and she helps them discover their truest desires. “I want to want,” the Prince scrawls on a mirror with lipstick, and his mother finally lets him out. He and his wash up onto an island and here’s when things go (gloriously) insane.

Clearly influenced by Lewis Carroll, Tagore conjured up a fascistic nation of people dressing up as playing cards, giving his musical its name. Q revels in this opportunity for structured mayhem, and his uniformed card soldiers (who come this close to actual goose-stepping) are a work of art, with their faces painted white and a tiny logo, of the suit they belong to, on their lips. The effect is striking — more Terry Gilliam than Tim Burton, thankfully — and with this highly theatrical approach, the film takes on a comic-book appearance. The colours pop, the subtitles are more stylised, and the cards yell out Bengali chopped into staccato syllables. “Progress?” is translated as “égobo?” but screamed “É!”, “Go!” and “Bo!” and the effect is decidedly more Samurai than Sealdah. The Prince and his friend, cornered by gun-toting cards for having the temerity to laugh, come up with a delicious origin story and begin to sow seeds of revolution by appealing to the card-women.

Good move, that. Suggestions of liberty from the outsiders intrigue the women in the ranks, and soon there is a full-blown sexual revolution. And here it is that the film becomes a highly erotic one, throbbing with abstract yet earthy sensuality. The play’s heroine and chief dissenter Horotoni rips up playing cards and walks around them, reducing them to mere scraps, like a currency too foreign to matter. Meanwhile, over on the other side of reality, the Writer too is grappling with matters of sexual urgency.

“If it’s a riot you want…,” promises a queen ominously, her Bangla obfuscated and rendered exotic by a strange accent. There is a mighty mish-mash of tongues and nationalities amid the cards, hidden by white paint. It is a clever trick, in a film where the cast is mostly impressive. Rii Sen is a striking heroine, Tillotamma Shome is evocative as the Prince’s mother, and all the cards get it very right indeed. Anubrata Basu (the hero of Q’s last film, Gandu) is well-suited to the part of the friend, even pulling off a Che Guevara look quite deftly in one scene, and Soumyak Kanti De Biswas is highly compelling as the Prince, especially when he looks fourth-wall-searingly through the camera.

Tagore’s 1932 play is a remarkably progressive one, and Q’s adaptation starts off slow and visceral and then — after they land on the island halfway through the film — changes gears to become a racy, lucid, sexy adventure. This gamble doesn’t entirely pay off — the first half has several boring stretches; the film exasperatingly ends just when it hits its most enjoyable stride — but the film is staggeringly original, and far too much of it stays back in the head. To haunt and to enchant.

The music plays a huge part, and the critical decision to use Tagore’s original songs — with Q singing on many of the tracks — is one that makes this effort magical, even when it misfires. But who’s to say any of the misfires were unintentional? Tasher Desh is more experience than film, more blank verse than story, and more poetry than anything else. Q for Qobiguru, then?

Rating: 3.5 stars

~

First published Rediff, August 23, 2013

Zanjeer was never a particularly great film. Sure, it had Amitabh Bachchan at his most primal, all flammable eyes and sincerely-furious baritone. And it had Pran, who brought dignity and warmth to the proceedings. It had dialogue that seared the ear, forged hot by master blacksmiths Salim-Javed. And, like all Prakash Mehra films, the music was sensational. These are what makes it a film we can watch over and over and over, with considerable awe.

The new Zanjeer, directed by Apoorva Lakhia, has none of these things. Least of all the hero. Ram Charan Teja makes his Hindi film debut with this Bachchan remake, and my heart goes out to his fans who will have to sit through this tediously trashy film. To paraphrase an unforgettable Indian movie character who shares a name with this new hero: Teja tum ho, marks idhar hai — alas, it isn’t anywhere close to a passing grade, son. You shouldn’t have bloody tried.

The writing is bafflingly bad. “Investigations start karo,” says the hero, a second before cops start whacking everyone in sight. At some point a character launches into a bizarre tirade against the Discovery Channel, which is apparently the channel of choice for the car-thieves demographic. A bawdy joke clearly written in English about one’s, um, “member” is translated sloppily into “mere mehmaan”, and is soon followed up by an offensively bad fellatio joke.

And yet all this excruciating slop is preferable to when they use the original lines. Because they go right ahead and do their take on that most iconic of scenes, the one where Amitabh Bachchan kicks the chair out from under Pran and — words scorching, eyes blazing — ordering him to stay standing, informs him what a police station is not. Making Teja play out this scene with Sanjay Dutt as Sher Khan is a brazenly stupid move, as if the makers of this enterprise lost all interest and decided to flaunt their utter incompetence with fanfare. Dutt ambles toward a chair, and Teja — who stares at it before kicking it — does so with a perfunctory scowl, the kind reserved for hanging up the phone after a wrong number. The chair itself is an office chair with wheels, so instead of flying violently across the station, this too perambulates blithely out of the screen. It’s all casually catastrophic.

The words “Sanjay Dutt as Sher Khan” might have struck fear into some of your hearts, and I’m here to reassure you that the result is exactly as woebegone as it sounds. Dutt sleepwalks through Pran’s iconic role, looking demented during the Yaari Hai Imaan dance and lazy the rest of the time, even during fight scenes. At one point he beats away assailants like they were errant pinatas, and at another — during his big, crucial fight scene with Teja — he and his rival look too physically drained to square off against each other, like Street Fighter ran out of batteries. A lame fight is apparently what passes for male bonding in the Lakhia universe, and a few scenes later both of them are playing car-racing games on a Playstation. Dutt, if only to provide us with a tragic metaphor, continues to grapple violently with his controller, mashing the buttons even though his car has already crashed and burned.

Whenever Dutt appears on screen, the background score switches to that of an operatic crescendo, like a rejected cut of something that’d play behind an Old Spice commercial. Background score man Amar “BringYourEarplugs” Mohile has a blast in this film, having made three or four music cues — others include an Inception-y blare, and a Mission Impossible riff — and clicking through them with high-volume recklessness, without care or nuance. It’s the stuff of particularly loud nightmares, this.

But even the ear-pillaging Mohile shuts up for the superloud heroine. The only positive from Priyanka Chopra’s performance in this film is that she hasn’t dragged in Pitbull. She plays a hyper-talkative bimbette — in her words, a “simple NRI ladki” — who talks nineteen to the dozen but, forget about matching up to Jaya Bachchan from the original, she serves only to show us how tough it must have been for Kareena Kapoor to pull off Poo. Chopra’s character, Mala, is a moron who mistakes Stockholm Syndrome for pyaar. I didn’t think it was possible to bring smugness into a giggle, but Chopra — made of plastic, so fantastic — looks to be giggling at the fact that she can giggle.

And then there’s Ram Charan Teja, a cop so tough he wears only two inscrutable expressions. He struts around trying to look hardcore, but clearly there is a reason why it takes someone like Salman Khan to make a stupid actioner work. This new boy has zero screen presence, possibly worsened by the Hindi dubbing, and taking on one of Bachchan’s Vijays is particularly suicidal. When the film mercifully ends, its makers have the gall to play a remixed song which uses a sample from the old Zanjeer — Bachchan’s voice saying that “yeh police station hai” line — which seems particularly cruel to young, unimpressive Teja. That one line puts into perspective just how simian this new hero appears in this unwarranted, atrocious remake — and we shouldn’t monkey around with Amitabh.

Rating: Zero stars

~

First published Rediff, September 6, 2013

Shuddh Desi Romance begins like Annie Hall. Which is to say it begins unlike any other Hindi movie romance, ever. A character talks to the camera, equates relationships and commitment to Vikram and Betaal, and wins us over: not with the usual movie-star attributes of charm or boyishness or roguish wit or a big all-conquering smile, but with his sheer sincerity. With the fact that he bloody believes in what he’s saying. And he looks frazzled as hell.

He also happens to speak just like the film’s screenwriter does. A bit of Jaideep Sahni drips invariably out into his memorable creations — his flawed, amusing, whimsical, ever-indignant and eventually noble protagonists — every single time, but there’s more of him, I daresay, in Raghuram Sitaram, the character caught in the middle of Shuddh Desi Romance. You might have noticed that I’m not calling the character a hero, and that’s because he isn’t one. He is, instead, a lead character caught between two heroines, a boy who suffers (and soars) because of how he’s turned on by girls with backbone.

And who can blame him? In Gayatri and Tara, Sahni — and director Maneesh Sharma, who, after the masterful Band Baaja Baaraat and this film, should stick to movies with a marriage motif — create two new-age heroines who are empowered, self-assured, and play by their own rulebooks. The independence they flaunt is out of motives of their own choosing, and their decision-making isn’t coloured by the many men around them. At a time when it seems the Indian man needs to be coached on what women are, it is imperative that a film like this, with girls like this, is seen by as many people as possible. Go on, you lot, make this film a hit.

The film must also be commended for the way it highlights the surefootedness of its female leads without robbing the man of his will. He is a creature of whimsy and escape, a professional liar and a streetsmart rogue, and yet he’s drawn to these women. He feels their tug irrationally and even masochistically and he responds because he must. He comes on too strong but gladly bends down to a submissive role in a relationship, and is comfortable enough in his own skin to take orders without worrying about how he comes across. He is, in other words, cool enough to know they are cooler.

A progressive script with atypical characters needs a committed cast, and the youngsters in Shuddh Desi Romance are the kind worth applause. Parineeti Chopra is impressively natural — not least when she flippantly calls her lover “bhaiyya”, insouciant and scandalous all in one breath — and gives a performance full of candour. Newcomer Vaani Kapoor takes a difficult role and, aided by a luminous smile her character uses for inscrutability and to club away all self-doubt, makes herself the one worth cheering for loudest. And Sushant Singh Rajput, a young man with significant presence and solid acting chops, is an actor confident enough to surrender to the absurdity of his character, a leading man who doesn’t mind opening his mouth in an Asrani grin.

Watching these youngsters, and looking for all the world like an Air India Maharaja come alive, is Rishi Kapoor. He observes these warm-blooded kids and their triangular machinations with befuddled interest, with affection and without empathy. He represents, in my mind, the old guard. He is the face of how things used to be: filmi, somewhat caricatured, well-meaning but ultimately, in a modern construct, out of place.

Older eyebrows would indeed be raised at this film and its numerous kisses — the first of which takes place with the couple in a crowded space, locking lips almost cognisant of the camera, treating it like a persistent voyeur — yet these are treated with breezy matter-of-factness. The reason there are so many kisses (I read a pre-release puff piece daftly promoting this as “a film with 27 kisses”) is because none of them are earth-shattering, none of them matter as much as they did back when a kiss was a headline.

I’m aware I haven’t spoken about the film’s story at all, and that’s because this isn’t a review. I hope you’ve watched it already, and if you haven’t  — and have still read this far — I sincerely hope I’ve managed to convince you that its worth a shot.

For all its pleasures, Shuddh Desi Romance isn’t a perfect film. A film this real — it does, at times, approach the easy believability of early Sai Paranjpye cinema — should not allow its characters to lipsync songs, and the last ten or so minutes ought not to exist at all.

No, Shuddh Desi Romance isn’t a masterpiece. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a film worth falling for.

~

First published Rediff, September 11, 2013

One of my favourite parts in The Lunchbox is when a character buys himself a painting. No, sorry, scratch that; it is when a character narrates how and why he bought a painting.

It is a street-side purchase of a street-side scene: an artist at a scenic vantage point draws the same backdrop over and over again, but with varied details each time, his mental snapshot making each picture a wholly different capsule of captured time. It is here that Mr Fernandez spots a likeness of himself, as a part of the throng — not that unlikely an occurrence, given that he has walked that stretch nearly every day for decades and decades. Usually a reticent man, he allows himself this rare moment of vanity and buys the painting. And then he tells — or, indeed, confesses — all of this to a stranger.

There is so much to love here — Mr Fernandez’s discovery; the uncharacteristic puffing up of his chest; the need to boast about what is not an accomplishment but feels certainly like a triumph — that this short, beautiful tale of an accidental portrait could well turn into a film all its own. And yet in Ritesh Batra’s film, this is but a throwaway scrap of a very special conversation. The film assuredly glides past this gem instead of dwelling on it, and, in the process, enriches its own narrative.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is how good The Lunchbox is, and how honest its storytelling rings. Ritesh Batra’s film — about a city and serendipity — might be about unremarkable folk, but it is a masterfully made and diligently restrained effort, one that impresses a viewer without impressing upon a viewer. It is a simple story with unanimous appeal, told with unshowy efficacy, and yet The Lunchbox is the most fascinating film to come out of Bombay in a very, very long time. In many ways — not least because it is an astonishing directorial debut — The Lunchbox is this generation’s Masoom.

The Bombay dabbawala is a miracle, a human cog with clockwork precision who operates, it seems, well outside Bombay’s haphazard universe, and yet fuels the mercenaries shovelling coal into the city’s ever-open maw. The Lunchbox begins with a dabbawala getting it wrong, odds of which happen to be one in six million. But then this is a film about happenstance, a wondrous what-if movie that lifts us from overrated realism to a far better place, and it’s only fair that  — in ways unique to itself — the city conspires, throughout the film, to set these events into motion, to champion this unlikely romance, to give us hope. For Bombay has always motored along on magic.

Thus, one fine afternoon, the city mistakes a widower for a husband and delivers him lunch. Lunch a wife laboured over, with much fondness and desperation, keen to surprise and amaze and seduce. The meal licked clean, the steel tiffin-box returns home atypically empty. And when the widower discovers that the neighbourhood eatery hasn’t suddenly upped its game, and the wife discovers her husband hasn’t even missed her cooking, the two strike up a correspondence.

The parallels with The Shop Around The Corner (and its cinematic granddaughter You’ve Got Mail) are obvious but unwarranted: the letters exchanged in The Lunchbox are less conversational, more confessional. He writes to her in English, writing initially for his own catharsis than any sense of communication, and she writes back in Hindi, giving away intimacies as if she thinks he might not understand the language that well. They are letters written with the kind of comfortable candour one finds in the neighbouring seat of an airplane, for example, candour that exists because the speakers aren’t likely to meet again and can thus speak their minds. In this film’s case, they never meet.

Not that it gets in the way of their spirited romance. For that’s what this is, a film where Ila discovers cracks in her marriage and can mention them only to the stranger eating (and, indeed, critiquing) her cooking, and where the quiet Mr Fernandez — with a first name that delightfully belies his reclusive nature — rediscovers VHS-era laughter. There is much to smile at throughout this film as the two get to know each other and, in the process, tap into suppressed sides of themselves. All while Bombay, impossible Bombay, takes each of their individual soundtracks (hers from a neighbour’s cassette-player, his from kids on a train) and melds them together.

Irrfan Khan plays Mr Fernandez with a superb placidity, a clock-obeying government employee who treasures silence. Khan clearly relishes the amount of internalisation the role allows him, and savours the quiet, thoughtful, melancholy beats of the film, unhurried but with his timing immaculate. He delivers his few lines with fantastic ease — a deadpan gag about a blind man stands out — but soaks up the silences even better: a scene where he reads a novel with one hand while eating his dinner with the other speaks, like this performance, volumes while keeping mum. A scene he stares up at an unmoving ceiling fan, with disbelief and a (momentarily justifiable) tinge of fear, is overwhelmingly good. Khan is a magnificent actor who keeps getting better, and this is him at his finest.

Enchanting him is Nimrat Kaur whom we haven’t met before, but now, I daresay, shall be besotted with as a nation. Ila’s brow is frequently furrowed and her eyes wide, and Kaur pulls off the role of a wife with a world on her shoulders very impressively. It is a disarmingly natural performance that is impossible to forget and difficult to analyse, and in this limited space one may merely express admiration. There is a beautiful bemusement to most of her actions, as if she, initially can’t believe the world she has made for herself, and later can’t believe the world the letters are tugging her toward. She cooks like someone who genuinely loves it, with an effortless sensuality and a discernible joy in the more meticulous preparations. She’s excellent, and her character is strengthened by the terrific addition of an off-screen neighbour who lives above Ila’s flat and loves to help — and to gloat. The always-great Bharati Achrekar is a treat as this invisible Aunty, and provides invaluable narrative thrust to a film that ambles along nice and slow.

Similarly critical is Fernandez’s subordinate Aslam, a long-winded rookie the senior is supposed to show the ropes. Nawazuddin Siddiqui plays it relentlessly, bearing down on the taciturn Fernandez with irresistibly good-natured oafishness. He’s a mess, full of lies and insecurity and files smelling of the vegetables he chops on them during the train-ride back home, but in a film where the leads are quiet and cocoon their cards too close to their chests, Aslam is the one yanking the narrative with furious urgency, making things happen or, at the very least, talking about things happening.

Batra, who has also written The Lunchbox, has allowed his smashing actors tremendous room to improvise, all the while himself sketching in nuanced details about the city, its food-ferriers, and the many disparities Bombay is crammed with. It is a film of multiple pleasures — small ones and overwhelming ones and exquisitely crafted ones — layered one on top of the other, with something for everyone, and so, so much for the cinematic glutton. Like the dabbawalas he loves, this director delivers.

Rating: 5 stars

~

First published Rediff, September 20, 2013

Formula One has the habit of making other sports look absurdly insignificant.

What, you run real quick? What, you flog a bit of leather? What, you hit another bloke in the face?

Well, I battle gravity and push physics to the limit by hurling myself at the apex of a curve, calculating and strategising about the car behind me, braking crucially late while knowing full well that I could careen into a rival inches ahead of me, and shatter a chassis or two or a neck or two.

Comparisons will forever appear laughable, but not quite as much as when Formula One was bloodsport, days when — as Niki Lauda says in Rush — two out of 25 drivers died every year. Those insane statistics nutshell the relentlessly, giddily gladiatorial sport F1 had become in its quest to straddle speed and danger, and even by that unacceptable norm, 1976 was a particularly dramatic year.

So dramatic, to be precise, that one would be forgiven for thinking Ron Howard’s film, set around that year’s Formula One World Championship season, is fictional. But sport is where fact often leapfrogs the imagination, when true human conflict supersedes acceptable writing. Where we only suspend our disbelief because we’re told all that’s happening on screen, no matter how preposterous, has its roots in reality.

You couldn’t find more diametrically opposed racing drivers than the technically proficient Austrian great Niki Lauda, and swinging, Union Jacking superstar James Hunt. Lauda was one of the first drivers who understood the importance of aerodynamics, and revered for his excellent understanding of a car’s limits. Hunt was the definitive F1 playboy, a man with the badge “Sex: Breakfast Of Champions” sewn onto his overalls, a lad who’d gargle champagne before winning races. In 1976, these rivals put daggers between teeth, stared death in the face and lived to finish the tale.

Ron Howard’s film is written by the infallible Peter Morgan, the playwright and screenwriter who fashions known historical facts into riveting narratives so laden with plot they’d make George RR Martin jealous. The two had worked before on the astonishing Frost/Nixon, but armed with this much deliriously cinematic meat, they go one better. This is a Scorsese-worthy story, and Howard rises to the moment and does it justice. Rush is not just the best film of Ron Howard’s career — a rip-roaring smash about a great human story, and two damn fascinating men — but among the finest sports films in modern cinema.

The casting is spot-on, with Chris ‘Thor’ Hemsworth playing the frequently unzipped Hunt and Daniel Bruhl of Inglourious Basterds as the nearly-Vulcan Lauda. Both actors are in exceptionally fine form. Hemsworth gets the swagger right, Bruhl masters that accent, and together they bring to life an intensely passionate rivalry. (To be fair, it is a bit exaggerated. The two fought on the track but never loathed each other like the film showed; by all accounts, their’s was a relationship of competitive respect. But then again, Hunt did always say Lauda looked like a rat.)

The racing action is brilliant, with inventive cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle fitting cameras into peculiar crevasses in the vintage chassis. The viewer is forced closer to the action — and much, much closer to that Sherman Tank of an engine — than television can allow, and the results are dizzying. You do not have to be a fan to love this film, though a fan would derive much pleasure by seeing the doppelgangers cast in important smaller roles, like that of Enzo Ferrari or Clay Regazzoni. (The finest supporting actor here is Christian McKay as the memorable Alexander Hesketh, a whimsical team-owner who introduced the F1 pitlane to oysters and caviar, and a man worth a movie all his own.) The acting is top-notch all around, and the women — Alexandra Maria Lara, Natalie Dormer and Olivia Wilde — up the film’s stakes considerably.

For there is so much more to this film than racing. There is a whole lot of sex: on the most important day of his career Hunt is shown waking from a Japanese hotel bed with two pairs of feet flanking his own. And then there’s even more insight: Hunt prepares for a Formula One race by lying down with his eyes closed, visualising the Monte Carlo grand prix circuit in pre-simulator times; Lauda learns that no woman can rev up an Italian man’s motor quite like a Ferrari driver can. There are even exquisite details for fans of motorsport history, including quotes that have since become legendary, and women even more so. Also, Hunt’s beloved budgerigars make an appearance.

Don’t look up 1976, don’t look up file footage, just go watch this rousing film. And then get a hold of the BBC documentary, F1’s Greatest Rivals: Hunt vs Lauda so you can watch the real men and marvel at how perfectly Morgan and Howard took the story and ran with it. Many years ago, John Frankenheimer’s 1966 stunner Grand Prix cemented my then-fledgling love for motorsport, and now Howard has, at long last, created another film evocative enough to ignite pitlane-passion in hearts that haven’t yet thumped for Formula One.

Rush is a film about a racing season — and two seasoned racers — so damned thrilling that it would compel the most stubborn Formula One hater, those people who insist mastering technology isn’t a sporting enough achievement and forget every other part of the invariably human equation. For the Formula One fan, this is a film worthy of a magnum of Mumm’s finest champagne — if only for the chance to hear those massive V12 engines explode across the big screen. VrrrRRRRRRooom.

Rating: 4.5 stars

~

First published Rediff, September 20, 2013

If your idea of a fantastic time at the movies involves Hrithik Roshan wrestling with a man’s tongue, then, my friend, you’re in for a blessed treat at the movies this week. Ditto if you’re a retailer of friendship-bands.

The rest of us, on the other hand, best stay away from this beastly big-budget juggernaut, a film ostensibly made for kids but one so abysmal that you should be most concerned if your children (or your nephews or your neighbour’s kids) want to see this. If they grow up actually liking movies like this, well, there goes the next bloody generation, conditioned for mediocrity from the get-go.

What if, for example, a child asks why Rakesh Roshan’s new film is called Krrish 3 when there is no Krrish 2 in existence? No reasonable answer exists, save the possibility that the new Krrish, for some oddball reason, is named after the number of thumbs its protagonist possesses. What the dashing young Krrish doesn’t possess is a power not to bore. In fact he — and his pot-bellied father, also played by Hrithik — are blessed with the ability to take a massively budgeted opportunity and suck it dry of all promise, leaving us with a Diwali release that can’t possibly be recommended for any reason whatsoever.

Look, I didn’t mind the first Krrish. It wasn’t a good film or anything, but Hrithik sold the character effectively enough to leave the door ajar for other Bollywood superheroes. One of the few that showed up, showered in hype, was Shah Rukh Khan’s catastrophic Ra One, one of the biggest disappointments in movie history. Now, since it isn’t right to expect big-screen miracles from the man who made Koyla and Karan Arjun, the only reason Krrish 3 might escape being labelled as bad as Ra One is merely because expectations were lower: all we wanted was a fun film for the kids.

Krrish 3 — which ends up borrowing a whole lot from Ra One, for the record — is not that film. There is no reason Indian children should be allowed to watch it unless tickets are sold really cheap, because the new Thor film releases next week and it’ll offer them a true superhero spectacle, with much more relative bang for their buck. There is much brouhaha about the visual effects in the new Krrish film, and while occasionally competent, they remain so dismally derivative of iconic superhero films that one can’t take them seriously. And the fact that the Pirates Of The Caribbean theme kicks in every time Krrish is in mid air doesn’t help. (Danny Elfman’s Spider-Man theme, conversely, plays whenever the hero’s truly tense. Every alternate scene, pretty much.)

So there are two Hrithiks, and its harder to say which is more excruciating. In one corner is old Rohit The Demented, a developmentally-disabled old man an alien refused to cure a couple of movies ago. If you close your eyes (which is not bad advice at any point during this film) he sounds like an Anil Kapoor mimic trying to do a very drunk voice. He’s a scientist, however, which means he is fiendishly smart and at least knows what he’s doing. His son, Krrish, has become bewilderingly stupid since we last met him, probably because the filmmakers want to make sure we don’t confuse his role with that of papa. There is thus much BigMoose-ian lumbering about in alarmingly tight vests, except when he’s Krrish and his jaw is perpetually quivering with rage. That or the mask is way too snug.

And there’s the baddie. “Fusion is the future,” says Vivek Oberoi’s Kaal, sounding for all the world like Bally Sagoo did back when he mattered. Immobile from the neck down, Kaal is a sinister mastermind who creates man-animal hybrids that lead to a bunch of poorly-constructed mutants with long tongues et al. Kangna Ranaut, for example, plays a shapeshifting creature born out of human and chameleon DNA. Many unanswered questions are born out of Kaal’s setup, the most crucial being why Ranaut doesn’t have a bad prosthetic orange forehead/nose like her fellow “maanwar” brethren, and who on earth has been applying the eyeliner for Kaal for all these years?

Still, a strapped-down Oberoi is mostly bearable even if he’s basically Magneto and Professor X rolled into one. Priyanka Chopra, who plays Krrish’s wife Priya, is anything but that, a shrill giggler with the most inane role possible. Ranaut makes the most of a far better part, and emerges the only plus in this C-minus production. She’s intriguing, she’s cold, she’s sexy and she holds our interest — at least till she randomly starts assaulting people with drop-kicks and even a Boston Crab. (Are you watching, Mr McMahon?)

The film is 152 minutes long, a fact corroborated by my wristwatch, but we might as well call Ripley’s. It stretches on forever, never amusing, never exciting, never anything but a wasted effort. The songs are almost intentionally horrid, each of them. Daftness abounds in every direction: the bad guys covered in green goop as if they just won Nickelodeon awards; scientists talk to themselves all the time and Surpanakha from the Ramayana is their first go-to example for mutation; a pregnant Priyanka is laid out on what has to be a funky ping-pong table; and there are hulking black statues celebrating Krrish — as if Mayawati’s taken a shine to the lad.

And twenty minutes of the film are spent in hawking Krrish-shaped wristbands that ‘make you a part of Krrish’s team.’ Krrish even delivers the “don’t try this at home” message in the flesh. It’s all very well until the climax, where a kid rebels against his mom who says they’ll give their lives for Krrish. No, exclaims he, we’ll take the villain’s life instead. Ookay then, that’s the message we’re going with. (And we thought Man Of Steel had an ethics issue.) Then Krrish shows up as the statue of liberty. It’s all positively krrishastrous.

Just stay away, will you? It’s the responsible thing to do. An empty wrist will serve you best.

Rating: 1 star

~

First published Rediff, November 1, 2013

Begone, pretenders.

Why must Bollywood try to claw vainly at the works of The Bard? Or, to be fair, why must directors overreach as they aim for instant literary endorsement? In the last year and a half, three directors (who have previously made one good film each) have tried to tell the classic tale of Romeo And Juliet and fatally floundered, creating painful works worthy of great embarrassment. Habib Faisal made the terrific Do Dooni Chaar and then gave us the disgusting Ishaqzaade; Manish Tiwary made the interesting Dil Dosti Etc and then gave us the unwatchable Issaq; and finally Sanjay Leela Bhansali, who once made the impressive Khamoshi, has turned up a movie with a title almost as grotesque as its contents.

May the brilliant Bhardwaj sic his bloodhounds upon you, foul fakers.

Goliyon Ki Rasleela Ramleela — the acronym of which unfailingly reminds me of Greater Kailash Residential associations — is a monstrously excessive film with a riot of colours, a girl who looks very pretty indeed and a daft hero, but despite that being the warning on the tin whenever you attempt (foolhardily) to buy into a Bhansali product, this can’t be what you bargained for. GKRR is an overplotted, bloody mess.

Ranveer Singh, he of that dandruff song, plays Ram, and he does so head and shoulders more effeminately than you’ve seen any Hindi film hero. He throws in the dhak-dhak dance step, for example, and later appears oiled up and wearing a dhoti tied lower than Shilpa Shetty would a sari. He also speaks like a character written for Satish Kaushik in a David Dhawan movie, all poor puns and weird vocal tics and very lame dialogue. Singh pushes himself but the part is too imbecilic, and he only does well when falling down and looking up at the camera — simply because it reminds us of his lovely Lootera.

Deepika Padukone plays his gal, Leela, a cleavage-thrusting princess who looks absolutely luminous but can’t quite handle the sheer, relentless raunch the part demands. She sells some of the dialogue impressively, but stumbles over the tu-tadaak overfamiliarity thrust onto her by the script, and performs the way SLB likes his ladies to: when she’s happy, she’s too happy; horny, too horny; sad, too pouty. She looks like a million bucks, however, and so resplendent is Padukone with screen presence that it feels like watching Angelina Jolie in a bad film — ie, it’s all pointless, but there is something worth staring at. Her hero might carry a water pistol, but this Leela packs the guns.

Speaking of which, GKRR marks Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s discovery of arms and ammunition, one that leads to his attempting dialogue more suited to Anurag Kashyap: the result is very poor indeed, awful rhymes alternated with soap-operatic exposition. Performers like Supriya Pathak and Gulshan Devaiah are reduced to cardboard caricatures and hamming, and the ever-effective Richa Chaddha isn’t given elbow room.

Somewhere in Gujarat, there are a pair of warring families, and while even a typical Sarpunch-and-Judy show can be a blast despite the cliches surrounding it, this one plays out like a bad street-play with an unjustly fantastic budget. The frames look luscious, the palette is eyewateringly vivid, and cinematographer Ravi Varman clearly has more of a blast than any audience member ever can. Meanwhile the director, who has also written the film, keeps adding twists to thicken the plot and ends up with a loopy bloodbath that — in the end — serves no purpose whatsoever. Save perhaps to warn us that SLB can be quite a sadist when he wants to.

Even the songs fall disappointingly short of memorable, and each of them sound like such a rehash of Bhansali’s own hits that it’s a wonder he — instead of turning composer here — didn’t simply license rights to his own glorious soundtracks of yore.

At one point in this silly, wasteful, loud film with many a shifting accent, Ranveer Singh’s Ram, a leading man addicted to selfies, takes a picture of himself and Deepika’s Leela, proclaiming that it be announced immediately across Twitter (!) that Ram-Leela are now one.

Go ahead, then, make his day: tweet this film’s score.

Rating: 1 star

~

First published Rediff, November 15, 2013

British actors have always taught us how to speak.

We in India have never quite been able to cast off our post-Colonial hangover, and it is that — coupled with a rigid love for perfectly enunciated Queen’s English, clipped as if cut like a cigar — that has always led us to look to British leading men for guidance. Traditionally, they were the actors with immaculate accents who represented class and the upper crust and almost always spoke like Psmith, while on the other side of the pond, the Americans grunted and swallowed consonants but could pack a meaner, more believable punch.

That perceptive pigeonholing went completely out the window the minute you saw your first Peter O’Toole movie.

O’Toole was indeed a beautiful man, sculpted on a day the maker felt particularly ambitious (and unfairly generous), a man with eyes blue enough to make a desert feel bracing, spread across a face that redefined how gorgeous the word ‘gaunt’ could be. And he spoke in the most elegant fashion, his silken tongue gliding across syllables as if it polished the language itself while he said his lines. It is dashed hard for a young man to look at old O’Toole films, with the inevitable mix of awe and envy and a grin, and not try to pick up on some of his mannerisms, all of which seemed perfect. He just felt right.

And yet, despite this finely-creased appearance, he was the manliest of them all, a true man’s man. Warrior, king, pioneer, thespian, womaniser, drunkard, scoundrel — he made it all look grander than ever, and he did so with fluent effortlessness. It was as if Steve McQueen learnt to talk right, or Clint Eastwood discovered a Windsor knot, or Michael Caine had met Henry Higgins. No man on screen was ever quite as magnificent as Peter O’Toole.

Off-screen would take a helluva fight as well. O’Toole was as legendary a raconteur as he was a drinker, and approached his life with the spirit of a slightly sloshed bullfighter, fleet-of-foot and highly skilled but essentually all whiskey and laughs and a great deal of olé. He was untameable, outspoken, garrulous and justifiably vainglorious, and we didn’t quite appreciate him as we ought have. He knew this and he laughed it off.

And naturally he did so more quotably than anyone else. I remember him starring in Brad Pitt’s atrocious Troy, and laughing it off as an unwatchable film that reminded him of a bread advert. Or when in 2003, up for a Lifetime Achievement Oscar after 7 nominations (and 7 losses), he was reluctant, and wrote a famous to the Academy saying he was “still in the game” and wanted more time to “win the lovely bugger outright.” He took the prize, and though he got an eighth nomination a few years later, that outright win never came — even though every single one of those performances was terrific.

Ah, he was the drunken uncle sitting in the armchair by the fireplace, an armchair nobody else dared ever inhabit, telling us tall stories. But unbelievable as they all seemed, chances are they — like Peter himself — were for real. In an invitation to his New Year party, O’Toole once wrote “Fornication, madness, murder, drunkenness, shouting, shrieking, leaping, polite conversation and the breaking of bones — such jollities constitute acceptable behaviour, but no acting allowed.” It could well have been his life’s motto — and while he broke the rule a fair few times, we’ll pretend to look the other way.

Long, long ago, in a stand-up comedy routine, Woody Allen lamented how he was attempting to pick up a girl in Europe when O’Toole “asked her out first, aces me out, you know?” and got a big laugh. Not, as it first seems, because of the loony contrast between that marvellous man and the dorky writer, but because of that between him and every single one of us. Peter O’Toole — who dares compare?

Revel In Peace, sir.

~

First published Rediff, December 16, 2013

Twenty minutes into Dhoom 3, reeling from the assault of cinema so amateurish it’s hard to believe it was put together by grown men, I began to ask myself precisely what this film was trying to be.

There was an annoying kid borrowed from the melodrama of Subhash Ghai movies, complete with a moist-eyed Jackie Shroff. There were the cheesiest of dialogues, Kader Khan in Dickensian mode. There were stunts seemingly executed in slow-motion and shown to us even slower, resulting in yawnworthy chase scenes. There was Aamir Khan running down the side of a building for no apparent reason. Everything — repeat, everything — looked too goofy to be either thrilling or realistic or compelling or even plain fun.

And then it hit me. Dhoom 3 is a children’s film made for children who’ve never seen a film.

How else can you explain this famine of originality? How else can you possibly justify the lack of a single interesting scene right up to the intermission? And how, after that, can you account for Aamir Khan’s blatant exploitation of yet another Christopher Nolan masterpiece that the actor (by his own admission) doesn’t understand?

Look here, I liked the first and second Dhoom films. The first was brisk enough to breeze by, the second was sheer masala but presented well, an utterly preposterous but very good looking film. The reason I’ve been looking forward to this film, however, was the fact that I was one of the half-dozen people on the planet who actually liked the director’s first film, Tashan. All I wanted from Vijay Krishna Acharya’s third installment, then, was a film that made like a firecracker and went boom — even if it didn’t make sense.

But this is a Christmas debacle.

We start with Chicago in the year 1990, though it may as well be a hundred years ago. An old magician (Shroff), his labrador-brown eyes eternally wet with tears, runs a circus housed in a massive structure the size of the New York Public Library. The bank moves in to cut off his loan and Shroff, instead of perhaps leasing out the place and moving to a humbler venue, decides to kill himself. For how dare the evil bankers remain unmoved by his clown-nose wearing son?

Said son grows up to become Aamir Khan, a frequently shirtless man who sleeps in corduroy trousers. Oh, and robs banks, since banks = evil.

American police seem ill-equipped to handle things (The Rock must have had the month off) and thus, naturally, help is imported from back in India. Where Uday Chopra’s Ali spends several minutes talking up his boss to goons — in “Don’t you know he’s Dirty Harry?” vein — before the aforementioned boss shows up flying through the air in an auto-rickshaw with stickers of Salman Khan film  optimistically on either side.

Abhishek Bachchan’s Jai Dikshit seems a nice enough fellow, if somewhat surly, but he happens to be a remarkably incompetent police officer. (I mean, if not from Dad, at least take some pointers from Iftekhar Uncle’s movies, Abhishek?) Here’s a fellow who, when he traps a fleeing motorcycle on a bridge, helpfully tilts it up to offer the fugitive a convenient ramp. The rest of the time he scowls.

Ah, and then there’s the girl. Apparently all the “hot Asian ladkiyan” in Chicago have been auditioned for Khan’s Great Indian Circus act but none has enough “liquid electricity,” whatever in innuendo’s name that means. Enter Katrina Kaif, all stuntwoman-flexible and whippety hairdo, looking like a million bucks and speaking, disconcertingly enough, like a twelve-year-old.

The rest of the film is, essentially, a dumbed-down version of Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige, arguably the greatest movie ever made about magicians. Aamir Khan, who claimed Ghajini was a great story but that he didn’t understand Nolan’s groundbreaking Memento, will probably say some such about this bit of shameless pilfering as well. Oh, and he uses a Joker sign too, to boot. (I can already picture ambitious young screenwriters lining up outside Khan’s bungalow with easy-to-understand song-filled scripts titled Sapne Mein Sapna.)

The other thing in this film is The Face. If you’ve seen the trailer or the songs or the posters, you know what I’m talking about. It’s the perplexingly weird expression Aamir sticks onto his face throughout, and the smugness with which he wears the A-Face makes me wonder if we’re all — inadvertently and inescapably — seeing his vinegar strokes over and over again. If we’re eskimo brothers now, Aamir Bhai, must say you messed up. Big time.

Not that Khan’s acted badly. Oh no. Outside of The Face, he’s pretty solid and has the charisma to power this film through, especially when he’s being all summery: i.e. all cutesy smirks and grins and chortles, a happy part of his repertoire the actor seemed to have left behind awhile ago. He also deserves credit for being a massive superstar who has agreed to look, occasionally, like an Oompah-Loompah; he’s been shot most unflatteringly. It is purely because of Khan that the (three) dramatic twists in this movie have any heft at all, but even he can’t help the vacant nothingness that engulfs the script before and after those stray moments.

But, you might persist, having already bought into the exorbitantly priced weekend tickets, aren’t the stunts good? Or IMAX-worthy? Well, the locations aren’t bad. It’s mostly shot in Chicago, and some of the vistas used as backgrounds for the bridges look pretty awesome. The stunts themselves, however, are both pointless and badly edited. Khan’s bike (which is a Transformer™, for some reason) is flung around excitably enough but hurling action figures isn’t the same as choreographing an action set-piece. So much time is spent in slow-motion, and so long do we linger on each shot, that the chases appear sluggish. There is no sense of urgency. At one point stationary police cars randomly start to do cartwheels, perhaps only to indulge Acharya’s inner Rohit Shetty. Like I said, if your child doesn’t know what movies are, he might be amused. For a bit.

The trick, of course, is on us. Shroff might have called his act The Box In The Box, but producer Aditya Chopra goes one better, knowing we’ll show up to watch a Dhoom film if only to laugh at it. This time around, Aamir’s The Boy In The Box Office.

Rating: 1.5 stars

~

First published Rediff, December 20, 2013

My big Irrfan Khan moment came when I reached the cafe a half-hour late and saw Nimrat Kaur sitting by herself, waiting.

I did spy her from a distance, but unlike Khan’s character Saajan Fernandez in The Lunchbox, I strode right up to the actress who, unlike her own character in that film, sat with an iPad, “doing some serious Facebooking.” For those eager to draw more reel parallels between this piece and the most critically-acclaimed Indian film in decades, I must confess that she hadn’t been downing endless glasses of water. Ah well.

Kaur, in case you’ve been living under a rock for the last few weeks, is the leading lady of Ritesh Batra’s debut film, The Lunchbox, a film every critic in the country hailed unanimously as the right pick to send for the Oscars — and thus, naturally, the one film the government of India decided not to send. But Oscar-Schmoscar, for The Lunchbox has given us much: an exceptional performance from leading man Khan as well as stellar debuts from Batra and his actress, who delivers the kind of performance one should rightfully be thrilled by.

There are precious few actresses to get excited about in Hindi cinema. Most of them are mannequins who learn excruciatingly slowly on the job, after which critics and audiences, numbed by repetition, begin to mistake confidence (and, sometimes, stark make-up) for talent. The last time we got this thrilled about a new heroine was when Chitrangda Singh dazzled us in Sudhir Mishra’s Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi in 2003, and the intervening decade has made us acutely aware of her limited talents. Kaur — who spends most of the film acting by herself, with only a neighbour’s voice for company — appears a lot more promising. An actress worth rooting for, then.

She’s as taken aback as we are about the way the film has connected to people. “Once Ritesh and I were coming back from an interview, and he was saying it’s unnerving sometimes how much adulation [there is], he was like, ‘we were just doing our jobs,’” says Kaur, trying to put mega-hype into perspective. “Actually that’s all it is. Its not a flawless film, its not the best film that’s ever been made. It is a film. It has been made to the best of all of our abilities, with the right intention, and it has taken us as close to the requirements as possible at that time and place. That’s it.” She stops herself for a second and wonders if that’s enough. “But really, yaar, that’s it.”

“The great sense I get is that people are very proud of this film. Not just the people who worked in it, and I hope I don’t sound conceited when I say this, but there is a lot of warmth and pride among people watching the film, who are so happy that the film has been made. And all credit to Ritesh for writing such a film and pulling it off in such a way just to make the film that he wanted to make. And it’s his first, man.”

Kaur is — just to set the record straight, o interested menfolk — nothing like the Ila she plays in The Lunchbox. She’s a smart girl with a sharp tongue and very bright eyes, and a part of her that Batra might have missed out on putting in the film is her gigantic laugh. She throws out breathless rat-a-tat peals, inevitably infectious and childlike, laughs that are almost always triggered off by what she finds preposterous. And show-business provides that in spades.

“In this country, we go a lot by how people look,” she says, speaking about perception and advertising, for instance. “And that is meant to decide your personality. Like I used to sometimes sit and talk to agency people, and ask “how do you decide that this girl is Dove or this girl is ICICI?” It’s interesting, because I’ve auditioned for all of these and there’s a category that I’ve never, ever been able to crack. And I know it’s not me, so what is the issue? So then they’ll come up with stuff like, ‘please don’t quote us on this but, you know, see, a girl with a round face and round eyes looks ‘friendly.’” Her peals are waiter-distractingly loud. “A girl with North Indian features — which means a long face and a long nose and small eyes, or whatever — she looks a little bit distant, haha. She’s like ‘Housewife,’ but not ‘Girlfriend.’ What is all this? I don’t understand it, but it’s damn entertaining.”

That stereotyping manifest itself in Kaur’s head when she met Ritesh Batra the first time, with him eager to offer her the role without an audition. “When I met Ritesh, I was like, ‘is he sure? Because I’m not simple, I’m distant!’” Her volume soars just for the laughs, enough to make neighbouring coffee-drinkers gape, and settles down as quickly. “I better not say all of this, better keep my mouth shut. Can we just sign this somewhere so he can’t go back on his word?” There was no fear of the latter because Batra, who had seen Kaur in a small role in a still-unreleased film called Peddlers and as a lead in a theatre production called Baghdad Wedding, was more than impressed. “It was a very demanding, tricky role,” Ritesh explains, about the stage-part, “and she gave it so much. I knew she could do a lot with the film.”

For a very acclaimed theatre performer — co-actor Anshuman Jha calls Nimrat “an actress who can do anything” and one of the best he’s seen in his 13-year career on stage — Kaur’s beginnings came with Madhuri Dixit and Sridevi, with Dil and Beta. “It’s strange when you recognise, while growing up, that you’re not really into the hero; you’re more into the women,” she smiles. “You want to be them. I thought Madhuri and Sridevi were goddesses, because they could do anything!” Kaur wasn’t a shy kid, she enjoyed performing, and while she was significantly academically inclined, on some level she knew she’d chuck it all up for the greasepaint soon as she could.

An Army kid who lived all over the place, she did her Bachelors in Commerce from Delhi’s Shri Ram College Of Commerce — but only because it was the shortest course available to her. “It was a 3 year course. There was the Society of Planning and Architecture for 5 years, the Delhi College of Engineering for 4 years, and Shri Ram for 3. Those are the entrances you give, na. So that choice was made on the basis to get here fast,” she says of her Bombay move 9 years ago. It was a move that took her towards modelling and a couple of music videos, but also one that ignited a fierce passion for the stage.

“I love the medium so much,” she gushes. “It’s never been a stepping stone. It started out as a means of learning something or understanding stuff better, but then it became a way of life. Before I knew it, it was my sense of belonging and it has had such a deep impact on my life. How I carry myself. Why I’m able to understand some things better, in life or for work.”

I ask if she has a preference between acting for the screen or the stage, whether one is harder or one is more rewarding. “What if you write a column for a travel magazine, or you write one for a newspaper?  You’re writing, but you just have to understand the dynamics of the space. Or it’s like swimming. Are you swimming in the ocean, or a pool or a Jacuzzi? It’s that. Your challenges are very different. You have to reach out to many people, your devices are different, the tools are different, but the heart of the matter remains the same. Because you will catch on to a lie, whether on stage or on camera, you will catch a lie.

“On stage you are a lot more responsible. A lot more depends on you, because once the bell goes on then until the end, it’s just you. No one really controls your performances. There is nothing to hide behind. You’re there in all physicality. You know, a lot of people say you have to be spontaneous; I don’t think its that. I think you have to really be responsible and alive. There is no time to die. You have to be there. It is a discipline, a superb discipline,” she says, already geared up for her next play but taking time to figure out her next cinematic project. “You may be playing the same part, but on the 86^th day there will be a dead audience, no reaction, that’ll change who you are, change the part you are playing. So the mortality of that exchange is within those two hours, within those 400 people. That’s that. That is what they will take back, that is what they will remember at the end of the day. But on film, your luxury of being immortal is far greater. There is much more sophistication in crafting. “

It’s this sophistication she appreciates in the films she likes, like Lootera which she watched thrice — “I loved it, there was something very languid and easy about that film.” — and could have gone for again had it not left theatres. I ask her about Shuddh Desi Romance which released a couple of days ago, and about how refreshing it is to see mainstream Hindi cinema with female characters who take charge. “Yeah, because life is like that, no?,” she asks, with a big smile. “”No, really, you go to any classic household, the man seemingly earns for the family, but the decisions are mostly taken by the women, you know? They really are the co-drivers, they navigate all the decisions. I don’t think that women are that sad and nonexistent in terms of decision-making. From the smallest things to the biggest things. Women quietly have their way with everything.“

She’s going to a taping of a reality show called Comedy Circus tomorrow to promote her film, and while she’s amused by all the promotional hoopla — “I even went to Lakme Fashion Week, imagine!” — she’s more than gratified that it’s making her family take notice. “My mum saw it in Delhi and Irrfan was there as well, so it was a big deal, and I think she’s taken me seriously for the first time. Because so far she’s told me often enough that “hobby ho gayi teri, get a real job, study more, do something else.” My Naani keeps telling me that I should become a newsreader. But now they understand. Otherwise they’ve had no answers for what I do. ‘Ladki yahan plays karti hai.’ ‘Play kya hota hai?’ People don’t even know what acting is!”

The biggest trump-card in her hand, she gloats, is Irrfan Khan, claiming she offhandedly drops an “Irrfan ke saith” into her conversation to impress the family. “He’s such a big star. Internationally, my God! In France I saw the reactions and I thought, man, this guy is big, we don’t realise it.  My Mamaji saw it in Toronto, and he got a picture clicked with Irrfan, and now his friends are showing it off.”

Soon, the family will invariably be boasting about their girl, not her leading man. Over at the next table, Karisma Kapoor and Malaika Arora keep constantly turning in Nimrat’s direction, curious and eager, as if sniffing out the shift in spotlight — even if it’s a very different kind of spotlight. They can’t quite place her (even though they can’t stop staring) when we’re talking, before the release of The Lunchbox, but by the time you’re reading this, she’ll have become more relevant than they’ve ever been. With one film.

“I want to keep my life interesting,” Kaur says about future decisions. “I want to surprise myself, more than anything else. And it’s a lot of failings that have got me here, you know, I haven’t always made the right choices; I’ve tried a lot of stuff. I know that now things change, because everything becomes public. Your decisions become public, and your failings become public. That’s the basic difference after you become visible, with a film out there. I don’t want to take on that pressure. ‘Don’t try to be something you’re not,’ they say. I say, ‘I don’t know what I am.’ I’ve never known who I am. And thank God for that.”

~

First published Man’s World, October 2013

It’s always harder to make a Worst-Of list than one chronicling the best of Hindi cinema, largely because we’re all so spoilt for choice. 

Thumb-rules, therefore, come into play. My basic rule is to pick films that come with certain expectations (as opposed to something that stars Sunny Leone or Shahid Kapoor), to look at films made by directors (or featuring actors) who should know what they’re doing, and to leave small B-grade films out of the mix unless they are, of course, truly ghastly.

Here then, in alphabetical order, are the films that make up the bottom of 2013’s barrel:

Besharam

Ranbir Kapoor, who can’t seem to get enough of mooning us in mediocre movies, strikes again with this film. Not just does Dabanng director Abhinav Kashyap squander Kapoor’s considerable talents, but he unforgivably ropes in Ranbir’s parents and makes them plod through this execrable film. This is bilge.

Chashme Baddoor

The disease called remake-fever has scarcely been more shameless than in David Dhawan’s massacre of Sai Paranjpye’s immortal Chashm-E-Buddoor. That Dhawan takes a modest masterpiece and turns it into trash isn’t surprising, but the true crime lies in the way something so remarkable is turned into something so unbearably generic. Ugh.

Himmatwala

Boasting that this would be the highest grossing film of Ajay Devgn’s career, director Sajid Khan clearly didn’t expect audiences to throw up all over his planned walk to the bank. The first Himmatwala was schlock, and this remake is schlock as if manufactured by a particularly sadistic director who doesn’t know what a scene is. For once, the mandate from audiences and critics was unanimous.

Issaq

Manish Tiwary’s offensively bad take on Romeo And Juliet mightn’t normally have made this list, if not for a leading man who provides arguably one of the worst performances of all time. Prateik Babbar is dismal here, so so goddamned awful that anybody you can think of — Uday Chopra, Suniel Shetty, your kid brother who’s never acted — would be a fair bit better.

Ishqk In Paris

A feature-length commercial for producer Preity Zinta to flaunt her dimples, this monstrous vanity project is truly hard to sit through. A man called Prem Raj directs a flimsy film so besotted with its Parisian setting it doesn’t bother to have a storyline, and Zinta is insufferable in the lead.

Krrish 3

Many a bad blockbuster minted money this year, but Krrish 3 stood significantly below even the Chennai Expresses and Dhoom3s of the world with this spectacularly stupid film, a film that — going by the box office receipts — has instantly lowered the collective IQ of our nation’s children by at least 20 points. And then it sold them wristbands, making them (and indeed, all of us) pay to watch the commercial.

Rajdhani Express

It isn’t cricket to poke at a target this soft, but tennis champ Leander Paes talked up his own acting debut far too much, going on to state that he wanted to win Oscars as an actor. Displaying all the thespian bravado of a Wimbledon ticket-stub, Paes is laughably bad in this inexplicable project.

Satya 2

Putting a Ram Gopal Varma film in a Worst Of The Year list isn’t sport either these days, but special allowances have to be made for the godfather-of-the-gimmick putting his own credibility on the line by making a sequel to his single-greatest triumph. The question was never one of the new Satya proving worthy of the classic, but the amateurishness on display makes it abundantly clear that this Ram Gopal Varma is nothing but a poor, watered-down Part II of what he once was. The name is the same, but that’s about it.

Satyagraha

Directed by Prakash Jha and featuring an all-star cast — Amitabh Bachchan, Kareena Kapoor, Ajay Devgn — alongside Jha regulars Manoj Bajpayee and Arjun Rampal, this is a mammoth waste of time. A remarkably patchy and inconsistent film, Satyagraha tries hard to draw Kejriwal/Hazare parallels but does so with all the subtlety of a BJP speech. What a drag.

Zanjeer

Shame on you, Apoorva Lakhia. Shame on you, Priyanka Chopra. Shame on you, Sanjay Dutt. And shame on you, Ram Charan, for trying not just to step into the shoes of Amitabh Bachchan’s most incendiary role but for even attempting to mouth that immortal line about police stations and baap ka ghars. This harebrained, tacky, senseless, woefully acted remake is nothing short of a cinematic crime.

~

First published Rediff, December 31, 2013