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Saturday, September 25, 2010
The Film Emotional Atyachar
Every character in debutant director Akshay Shere's funny, bitter and violent ode to the road movie wants money. Sometimes they also crave for sex. For example, there's this incidental character (the film has drug dealers, racketeers and criminals crawling out of every frame) who's force-doped by Ravi Kishen, who is very at home playing the revved-up psycho. The zonked-out sociopath asks Kishen, "Koi launadiya milegi, kya?"
You hope for his sake he never runs into Kalki Koechlin. There is one very smart and manipulative woman in this wicked and wacky road movie. Koechlin seems to enjoy herself playing the woman on the run. She ain't no nun. And boy, does she have fun! She is the casino-owner Abhimanyu Singh's mistress. But happily gets kidnapped by the extortionists Ranvir-Vinay duo (yes, they are back together again!). Then when she runs into Mohit Ahlawat and his backseat wealth, she snuggles up to him as though she was Marilyn Monroe on speed.
Speed is paramount to the mounting tension in "Emotional Atyachar". Everyone is in a hurry to get to the end of the road. Short-cuts are most welcome. The characters range from the strange to the deranged. This is quintessential Quentin Tarantino territory soaked in the oozing blood of Vishal Bharadwaj's storytelling.
Add a dash of cruel humour -- for sintance a fat man dying on the backseat whose friend, played by Jimmy Viryani, cuts open an artery while trying to remove the bullet. And you have a work that gets its target audience charged up and ready to go. A hurried impatient narrative edited with brutal austerity, "Emotional Atyachar" is not every one's cup of tea. Really, one doesn't see people rushing for this strange tale of blood, gore and vendetta situated in the greyest moral zone of the modern wounded civilization.
While the screenwriting (Bhavini Bheda) and dialogues (Kartik Krishnan, Bheda) are quite often funny in a weird and quip-friendly kind of way, the performances are uniformly engaging. Ravi Kishen and Abhimanyu Singh are the pick of the lot. But the unknown theatre actor Anand Tiwari, who makes the mistake of offering the wounded Ahlawat a lift on the deserted Goa-Mumbai highway, and who plays the only morally conscious character, is outstanding.
The plot is self-consciously complicated. The wheelerdealers who swish in and out of the plot charting a bloody course are not quite the people you want to meet at a party let alone on a deserted highway. They don't seem to know the knack of quitting while they are ahead.
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Saturday, September 18, 2010
We Are Family
Director: Siddharth P Malhotra
Actors: Kajol, Kareena Kapoor, Arjun Rampal, Aanchal Munjal, Nominath Ginsburg, Diya Sonecha
It’s this thing about soppy chick flicks, or afternoon soppy soap operas, if you will. The male character is destined to severe step-mom treatment. If he’s present at all, he usually has no say in his own destiny. He quietly follows nature’s will. Humour is generally scarce. This fits in well with the female worldview, perhaps (okay, that’s a joke!). It doesn’t help include varied audiences.
Arjun Rampal plays that muted, pointless gent in this movie adapted from Chris Columbus’s Stepmom (1998). To be fair, Rampal gets better playtime in the Indian adaptation. And he also looks suitably dishy for his target audience, as We Are Familyagainst a bald, old, divorced, charmless Ed Harris, who’s in with a girl (Julia Roberts) hotter than his vintage, in the Hollywood version.
Rampal’s the “strong, silent types”, who tells his girlfriend (Kareena), “Never say, I love you. It (the love) goes away.” The scene appears early on in the film. It’s a sweet promise of subtlety, hardly met by the movie thereafter. Unfortunately.
The leading man also has an alternate family: a divorced wife (Kajol), two daughters, and a son, who seems pretty low on the brat-quotient, ‘feminised’ perhaps in the company of women. Their mother is terminally ill. The kids are introduced to the dad’s young, sassy girlfriend they’re unlikely to accept, given the obvious circumstances. They call her D, short for daayan (witch), rather rustic nickname from children born and raised in Australia!
The setting is the sanitised First World. Spaghetti's ready for supper. Aesthetics of modern, good housekeeping is established. As it is, for most urban Hindi films by now. The women (Kajol, Kareena) the film centres on, arguably make for the brightest big screen Bollywood talents. The shots are tightly clean.
It’s just the idea that binds all these together, which is entirely outsourced from the West. So is an Elvis hit, with lyrical Hindi additions that go: “Main toh bhool gayi kya wordings thi (I forgot what the words were), something something, Jailhouse Rock!” Jesus knows this Indian poverty (of imagination) is not new. This film is merely its rare, official acknowledgement. The producers have suitably paid for the copyrights. They’re not sneakily thieving this time! There may be hundreds of original local writers waiting for a medium to express something of their own, through the nation’s top leading ladies, no less. But then, creative laziness is not a moviegoer’s concern. The film is. English movie-rental, or Indian readymade remake: who cares?
A warm, doting single mother, losing before her eyes, her life and her sweet children to fatal cancer, you can tell, is something that’ll weep any woman off her feet. The premise is stuff dry tissues are made for. Yet, the pathos here is produced not from moments, but from performances alone: a stunning Kajol’s in particular. She appears superior to Susan Sarandon, I suspect, because the corny background score here, unlike the quietness of the original, rarely allows for sheer drama to take over. She also cannot quite place her family in the fakeness around, which can’t be concealed in candyfloss anymore. This ain't Archie Andrews.
This is an Indian family drama over a dying single mom. Most such families would have a support stream of parents, uncles, aunties, many other relatives, pooling in at this tragedy. The mom’s hip, self-sufficient, in control, alone; despite an ex, and his hot girlfriend. The children look lost. This cultivated suaveness is but suddenly forgone as everybody begins to simultaneously weep from the screen. The heroine morphs into the image of the desi mother, in a saree, hoping the best for her daughter’s grand wedding after her death. Bollywood dhol beats hit the crescendo. Filmmakers hope you’ll hear the lady behind you go, sob sob sob… Hmmm.
Columbus discovered America in the 15th century. But he mistook it for India. Over 500 years later, in a film originally directed by Columbus, the confusion between the two cultures (and countries) still persist. Huh. It’s only fair!
Some films are good to look at. Some feel good at heart. Very few mainstream films manage to look as good on the surface and also capture the heart. "We Are Family" is equally appealing from the outside and at the heart.
It doesn't take us long into the narration to realize that the debutant director has his own ideas on how urban man-woman relationships work. Siddharth Malhotra brings the traditional compassion and large-heartedness of Sooraj Barjatya's films into the same line of vision as the urban fables about the man-woman relationship of Gulzar's "Ijaazat" and Govind Nihalani's "Drishti". The brew is invigorating and often very very moving in the way movies stopped moving us a long time ago.
The basic premise and even chunks of sequences and dialogues are taken from Chris Columbus' "Stepmom". Are Kajol and Kareena Kapoor as powerful in portraying the wife and the other woman as Susan Sarandon and Julia Roberts in the original?
What if one says the two divas in the desi "Stepmom" are far more empathetic in their understanding of the complexities of a marriage that has not quite terminated and the alternative relationship which doesn't know where to go without disrespecting the earlier relationship? Kajol and Kareena share a compelling partnership in portraying a household that's run by two women.
The intricacies of the triangle are worked out with heartwarming delicacy, so much so that you wonder why the director needed to keep any of elements from the Hollywood film. "We Are Family" takes the "Stepmom" saga to another level. It's an urban fable told with subtlety and a softness of touch which completely avoids excesses of emotions until the last ostensibly gut-wrenching finale when the narration gets excessively melodramatic.
The rest of the film is remarkably devoid of extravagant emotions even though the situation described and defined by the plot is susceptible to acute bouts of overt emotion. Having three actors who know how to play down the pitch without taking away the edge in the narration surely helps the situation.
Kajol needs absolutely no recommendation. Her transformation from physically healthy but restless in soul, to a dying but spiritually healed entity happens right in front of our eyes. The little-little things she does with her eyes and lips just rips a hole in our soul. Yup, she is one of our all-time greats - without trying. The moments when she watches Shreya (Kareena) take charge of her children and husband find Kajol expressing a mixture of envy and resignation the way only she can.
But it is Kareena Kapoor who is an utter revelation. Never before has she demonstrated such a complete understanding of her character's inner life. To the role of Kajol's husband's girlfriend Kareena brings a rare and reined-in passion. Everything that she has done so far on screen is undone as Kareena redefines the role of the Other Woman in Hindi cinema.
Admirably the 6(!!) screenplay writers have worked overtime on Kareena's part. She could easily have been the bitch who steals Kajol's husband away. As written in the script, Kareena comes across as flesh blood tears - and yes, as a woman of great beauty.
Arjun Rampal has been constantly evolving as an actor. Here he balances out the powerhouse performers on both his sides with a deeply felt emotional binding presence. And by the way, he dances better than Kajol and Kareena in the disappointing 'Jailhouse Rock' number.
Sensibly, Siddharth Malhotra has avoided the temptation of too many confrontational moments between Kajol and Kareena. We wouldn't have wanted this tender-sweet look at a shattered family's attempts to hold the fabric of their togetherness in place to end up looking like one of those T. Rama Rao mera-pati-sirf-mera-hai kitsch-kitsch-hota-hai stale-tales from the 1980s.
Aashayein
Director: Nagesh Kukunoor
Actors: John Abraham, Prateeksha Lonkar, Shreyas Talpade, Anaitha Nair
"'Aashayein' is the story of a gambler, who wins a lot of money and is ready to live his life, pursue his dreams and do all the good stuff until he finds out the same day that he has only 90 days to live," Kukunoor told IANS.
"It is then the journey that he undertakes begins and the characters that he meets and how he learns to live life all over again," added the director, who is also making a comeback to acting with a cameo in the movie.
Produced by Percept Pictures Company and distributed by Big Pictures, the movie is an emotional uplifting drama. It also stars Sonal Sehgal, Prateeksha Lonkar, Girish Karnad, Farida Jalal, Ashwin Chitale and Anaitha Nair.
At a party to celebrate his big win at gambling, Rahul (John) proposes his girlfriend Nafisa (Sonal). Within minutes of announcing his engagement to her, he collapses on the floor.
After a medical diagnosis, Rahul discovers that he has only a few months left to live. How he makes the most of this time and how it changes him is what "Aashayein" is all about.
The movie is the tale of an individual's journey from darkness to light and "the way people perceive their phase with the imminent end of life," says Nagesh. The medium-budget movie has been shot entirely in Puducherry.
Noteworthy is that both Kukunoor and John didn’t charge a penny for "Aashayein".
"In order to show accountability for the project, we make all sorts of concessions and that is what we did in this case," said Kukunoor.
The movie has also been waiting in the cans for close to two years for differences between the producer and the distributor.
"It took them about a year to resolve their differences. Around January this year, when everything was clean and settled, we decided that August 27 will be the date of release," Kukunoor said.
"This was a technical glitch which was extremely frustrating but it was not something one could control, so we sort of waited on the sidelines for it to resolve," added Kukunoor.
But that was not it for him.
"The film has taken a while. I had written the script long ago and it took almost four years to find Percept as producers to come on board and then finally I got John."
"The amount of effort I’ve put in to get 'Aashayein' released, it seems like I’ve made a fresh feature film altogether. It has been an extremely long run process but at the end of it, it is all behind us and now fingers are crossed," he added.
This is a film about coping with dying. But that's not what makes it such a special experience. It's the writer-director's profound understanding of human nature that furnishes the simple story with a lucidity and coherence even when the protagonist's mind is so numbed by physical pain he can barely think straight.
"Aashayein" is structured as a journey from a bright delusory light into a place where the radiance comes from a consciousness of why mortality is not to be feared.
In John Abraham's eyes are mapped the entire history of the human heart, its follies and foibles as it struggles to make coherent the indecipherable logistics that define our journey across that bridge which everyone crosses from this world to the next.
As that very fine actress Prateeksha Lonkar (a Kukunoor favourite) says, "The only difference between the healthy and the ill is that the former don't know when they are dying and the latter do."
Between that state of blissful oblivion where we all think life is forever (and a day) and that one moment when our delusions come crashing down, there resides some very fine cinema. Hrishikesh Mukherjee's "Anand" where Rajesh Khanna smiled his way through that wobbly bridge taking us to the next world, is an interesting reference point in "Aashayein".
I also thought of the actress Supriya Choudhary shouting into the dispassionate mists in the mountains, "I want to live". The echoes reverberate all the way to Kukunoor's heartwarming, funny and elegiac exposition on the truth that lies on the other side of that illusory mountain we call life. Kukunoor pays a homage to life per se, and life as we know in the movies about death.
Even in the most poignant places in the art Kukunoor ferrets out some humour. When John's lovely girlfriend (Sonal Sehgal) hunts him down in his exilic place of the dying, John quips, "So you are not going to behave like one of those heroines in films who dumps the dying hero?"
The fantasy element creeps into the hospice (yes, that's the spotless space that the story inhabits unostentatiously) with the least amount of fuss. There's a little boy (the bright and expressive Ashwin Chitale) who weaves mystical tales borrowed from the comic books for the desperate and the dying. Here Kukunoor brings in an element of rakish adventure borrowed from the edgy hijinks of Indiana Jones.
Who says money can't buy love? John uses bundles of cash to bring a smile to these doomed lives. When he doubles up with pain in womb-like postures of helplessness we feel his pain.
John in Harrison Ford's hat and whip cuts a starry figure. He has never been more fetchingly photographed. John's smile reaches his eyes, makes its way to his heart and then to ours. This film opens new doors in John's histrionic abilities. It's a performance that heals and nurtures.
John's finest moments are reserved for a hot-tempered sharp-tongued 17-year-old girl on a wheelchair, played with intuitive warmth by Anaitha Nayar. He guides the relationship between these two unlikely comrades of unwellness with brilliant restrain and candour. She wants him to make love. He does with his eyes using his unshed tears as lyrical lubricant.
Here is a performance that defines the character through immense measures of unspoken anguish. Rajesh Khanna in "Anand"? Nope. John pitches his performance at a more wry and cynical world where true feelings are often smothered in worldly sprints across a wounded civilization.
This is unarguably Kukunoor's most sensitive and moving work since "Iqbal". We often find little sobs pounding at the base of our stomachs. Not all the characters or situations are fully formed and fructified. But even the partly-realized truths in "Aashayein" convey more common sense and uncommon affection for life than the "entertainers" of today's cinema where laughter is generated through cracks in places very far removed from the heart.
"Hum log bhi zaadatar aam logon ke jaise hi dikhte hain (We mostly look like common people too)," explains a poor, old prostitute (Farida Jalal), almost looking into the camera. You heart's supposed to melt at that profound appeal from her community. Apparently.
This reasonably healthy woman, diagnosed with AIDS, is a social pariah even among the terminally ill. Fellows around switch chairs at her presence. A perfectly educated, "M.Com, MBA" (Girish Karnad) believes her touch could spread the deadly disease. Others with literally few days left to go themselves feel the same.
AashayeinThe hero of this film's checks himself into a super posh hospice, a home for intensive palliative care. The film takes us through an extended, guided tour of this house of death. Where waiting lists multiply, but the charity home restricts its patients to 50 only. Each day could offer a newly vacant spot but.
A warden here suggests, "The difference between us and the terminally ill is the latter can see death coming. We can't. Death is certain, either way." Live for the moment, I guess.
The camera pans then on to the pained eyes of a woman suffering for long on life-support. She pleads the nurse. The nurse pulls the plug. You're supposed to gasp. Well.
Scenes after another, whether long lessons on karma or carpe diem, make for a bunch of similarly banal misses between outcome and intent.
Given the picture's purpose itself leaves very little room for doubt. An audience's pre-knowledge that the characters before the screen will eventually degenerate into vegetables make for instant sympathy. Destiny is not even on the hero's side. Everyone smiles still. Your eyes must wet. Movie manipulation is complete. Alas.
While the filmmakers figured their supposedly perfect setting out, a story didn't follow. Or it did. A part of it is fair endorsement for the Make A Wish Foundation. The hero sets out fulfill one last wish on each inmate's bucket list. A rock show follows several vodka shots. You could do with some of the latter to figure if the rest of the movie is more macabre or moronic.
A millionaire hunk befriends a giggly 17-year-old who wants to bed him before she dies. That cinematic threat looms large right through the film. Both suffer from diseases with names "more complicated than lymphosucoma of the intestine."
John's the bachelor hunk. The film preaches 'no smoking'. He makes love to the cigarette while his lungs die. A miracle child next-door offers him outlet into his childhood dreams. He secretly auditions for Indiana Jones And Raiders Of The Lost Ark in his sleep! The minor girl waits around for the slurpy kiss still. No, please!
Most of us have little choice but to stoically make light of death. This death-wish turns instantly into a barrel of laughs; all of it unintended, of course. Eventually you may like to sing, 'Gimme hope John? Naah!'
Antardwand
Director: Sushil Rajpal
Actors: Raj Singh Chaudhary, Vinay Pathak, Swati Sen, Akhilendra Mishra,Himanshi,Jaya Bhattacharya,Neelima
First, compateeson (competition); then, byaah (wedding). These two simple steps have traditionally defined middle class Bihar’s aspirational ladder. It’s also been for long the feudal obsession of a poor, politically active state.
The competition stands for the IAS, an exam that carries with it a 35-plus years’ warranty of unfettered power and illegitimate wealth. Successful candidates at this annual UPSC test are transported right across to the local marriage mart. Where fresh civil servants fetch highest prices among prospective grooms. The conveyer belt is set. Value for money is guaranteed. So is status for the allied families, in the eyes of samaaj (society). The couple itself getting wedded is not the point.
AntardwandThe hero here (Raj Singh Chaudhary, fine casting), is a graduate student in Delhi, and one such strong candidate. He’s likely to clear the Mains (second hurdle of the IAS exams), as he does later. His father, a social investor (Vinay Pathak), is strongly positioned to extract the best (dowry) deal for his son.
Such cash cows make local news. The father should be careful. The boy, on his way back from the family home, gets abducted in broad daylight. The goons belong to a neighbouring village. They lock him up in a cowshed. He must agree to wedlock. They beat his body to pulp, save the face, of course. The girl’s not known to the boy. He’s already secretly engaged to a girlfriend back in the city. It’s a visible nightmare.
Such shotgun affairs are popularly called jabariya weddings in the region. They’re mostly prevalent among the state’s poor, who can’t afford pressures of dowry and massive ceremonies to marry off their daughter, a social burden. Like the boy’s own father, a feared figure, the abductor -- the bride’s dad (Akhilendra Mishra, crackling show) -- belongs but to the landed rich. They have ‘connections to the top’, a key survival kit for any lawless state.
It’s more a battle of the moocch (the moustache) then. Women, the more caring ones, usually remain sandwiched between male egos at such homes. So is the meek bride, in this case.
Lack of cellphones around suggests the film's set in the past, albeit recent. The leading man, you’ll admit, makes for a poor, amnesic advertisement for things you can do under the influence of alcohol.
But the disturbing premise of the film, and its cultural authenticity, makes up for all its suggested flaws. Abducted grooms, and shotgun weddings, have forever been an open secret of the east’s badlands. That would be a news-feature.
Set in rural Bihar where nothing works except the law of the lawless, "Antardwand" takes the firm and gripping route to expose a hinterland-headline - the kidnapping of marriageable boys by desperate fathers of wannabe brides.
This was a prevalent malpractice in Bihar until some years ago. Not so much any more.
Debutant director Sushil Rajpal's film works more for its deeper resonances than just the surface sincerity. It is not so much the sensational value of the theme ('dulha uth gaya') that makes "Antardwand" watchable as the treatment of the layers of socio-political irregularities and caste aberrations that generate a society of anarchy where kidnapping an aspiring groom is serious business.
The narrative is punctuated with bouts of savage humour. When the Delhi University civil service candidate Raghuveer (Raj Singh Choudhary) with a pregnant girlfriend (Himanshi), is kidnapped just yards away from his parents' home in rural Bihar, his confoundedness, and rage at the bizarre confinement is expressed in bouts and spasms of indignance.
The director knows the milieu well. He doesn't waste time exploring rural Bihar just because he has chosen to film his story on location.
The narrative never loses its momentum. Rather than opt for a dry docu-drama tone, director Sushil Rajpal has chosen to format the film as a thriller. The pace from the moment of Raghuveer's kidnapping to his escape is largely relentless.
The second-half of the plot gets more introspective as it becomes the story of the humiliated bride (newcomer Swati Sen, well cast) who finds herself with a man who has been forced to marry her. The rage of confinement and the anguish of rejection ooze out of the tense frames.
Sequences in the couple's bedroom with a gigantic tell-tale double-bed at its centre, capture the ironical nullity of a marriage based on bullying tactics. There is an element of naïve desperation in the couple's shared space.
The writing is hard-hitting but relentless, supple and slender. There is ample room for innuendoes in the dialogues and situations.
"Antardwand" avoids the easy road to realism. The ambience does not depend on how the actors pitch the accent in the spoken word or their body language. Though these are authentic, it's the deeper malaise of a society buried neck-deep in prejudices and superstition that the director focuses on.
The camera work by Malay Ray is exploratory but non-judgemental. Scenes of characters moving in and out of dark old-fashioned interiors are shot without wallowing in symbolism.
The performances are thoughtful. Akhilendra Mishra and Vinay Pathak pitch into the ambience of rousing realism as the father of the bride and the kidnapped groom, respectively. Raj Singh as the precious groom last seen in Anurag Kashyap's "Gulaal" again reveals an admirable ability to blend into the bleeding fabric of mofussil mayhem.
The film is suffused with sincerely sketched characters. Jaya Bhattacharya as the bride's far-from-persecuted bhabhi (sister-in-law) and for that matter the unknown actor Dadhi Raj Paney who plays Akhilendra Mishra's faithful servant, bring a kind of fringe fertility into the storytelling.
The finale is self indulgent in its idealism. A society so breached by gender and caste biases cannot be lit up by a sudden beam of optimistic light.
Lafangey Parindey
Director: Pradeep Sarkar
Actors:Neil Nitin Mukesh, Deepika Padukone, Kay Kay Menon, Piyush Mishra, Manish Chaodhary, Namit Das, Amey Pandya, Vijay Adhav, Vinay Sharma, Palomi, Rahul Pendkalkar
Taporis exist more in our cinemas than the city they try to replicate. Bolay toh (in a manner of speaking), you’ll realise, within months of tourism in Mumbai, that no one quite commonly talks in the ‘Bambaiya’ vocabulary, developed by writers for films alone. Where a doctor’s assistant is a “dispensary” (Munnabhai MBBS), a short man a dedh footiya (Vaastav), or in this case, a ballet-dancer of the neighbourhood’s a “dance bar”. The suggested roadside slang still makes for loved humour, always worth looking forward to.
Dull filmmakers here know this, attempt it, but are in no position pull it off. The said dancer goes blind in a road accident. Her mawali (loafer) friends make light of her situation: Ek hi jhatke mein Hema Malini se thenga Malini! It’s the best line so far. No one’s likely to laugh.
With few references pointed to the real, cramped ghettos of Mumbai allow for huge dance floors and gymnasiums (at Andheri’s Yashraj studio, perhaps). This is where One-shot Nandu (Neil, reasonably sincere), a prized fighter, teaches the blind dancer (Deepika, roughly spunky) to master her sense of smell and sound to overcome the lack of sight.
Both rehearse together as dancing partners on roller skates. The premise seems evidently clear. This is, I guess, a film on dance (Flash Dance, Shall We Dance etc). There’s but too little of dance here, and most of it rank ordinary to make the genre’s grade. The music itself, for a given musical, appears borrowed from recent films labeled for the supposed youth (Rock On, Wake Up Sid).
A cop, beyond his call of duty, personally investigates the accident that cost the heroine her eyes. There was more to the mishap than the suggested car crash. A don had sent his minion, the hero’s brother, to kill off his rivals. The don himself, baldpate, golden teeth, is the hero’s surrogate dad. Running local trains overlook Mumbai’s underbelly. You’re definitely in for a gangster film (Ghulam, Parinda, or On The Waterfront that inspired both).
The blindfolded hero knocks his opponents out with a single punch. Men fight like cocks. Betting crowds surround the ring. This has to be a street fighter boxing movie then.
You will never know. I give up. It’s not even worth trying to figure. The overloaded confusion never ends. Going back to the dance movie, the leading pair, having a ball with the ballet, makes it to the final round of a popular talent show on television. A friend cautions the hero: “The audience's vote decides all. There are three kinds of audiences. Housewives, aunties: give them the ‘saas-bahu’ (soap opera) look. Young dudes: show them off your dolay sholay (muscles). Young girls: they’re already on your side; just don't overact.” The words are spoken with rare conviction.
The director on this one sussed out the first set of audience with his last film (Laaga Chunari Mein Daag). He’s forcing himself now to check on the other two. Such scatter-brained, mish-mash of a movie is only possible when the makers' eyeballs are trained at some sucker or the other the cinema's intended for, and not the soul of even a semblance of a script. I’m sorry, but my eyes are turning bleary now. Be careful. So would yours.
"So this is a love story!" says the wry cop at the end of the film while closing the case that exonerates our hero 'One-Shot Nandu' of accidently blinding Pinky Palkar in a car accident.
Indeed "Lafangey Parindey" (LP) is a love story. And how grotesquely indecorous has been the marketing of this tender and shimmering look at an improbable love in the slums between a free-wheeling boxer and wannabe roller-skating spitfire gone blind.
Deepika Padukone gives to the tale the kind of fluent grace and eloquent spin that the audience associates with the female legends of celluloid, namely Meena Kumari and Nutan. Deepika brings the poignant lyricism of the former and the spirited delicacy of the latter into what's unarguably one of the best-written female characters in recent times.
When Pinky goes blind all of a sudden, she doesn't flutter her eyelashes and trip over furniture like any self-respecting blind diva in our cinema would. She quickly picks up the pieces of her shattered life, and yes, also the rollerskates and leaves home to a sniggering brother's taunt and a concerned mother's encouragement to renew her dreams.
The above is one of the many finely-written and worded sequences in this film suffused with a delicate charm and infinite wisdom.
Neil Nitin Mukesh has a tough thankless role. Not only is he that archetype known as the 'Supportive Lover' in the script he must also move back in every other sequence to let Deepika walk away with the best expressions and dialogues. Neil never over-steps his boundaries. As the shy fighter who needs the blinded sports-girl's clairvoyant spirit to take him on the road to love more than she needs him to cross that traffic-laden road which she can't see, Neil gets the lower notes in the scale of the love symphony right.
While the two protagonists' journey into love via a dance contest ('Rab Ne Banadi Jodi' revisited) takes centrestage in Pradeep Sarkar's deftly-cut material, the peripheral characters also get enough space to have their say aggressively without getting hysterical.
A film set in the ghetto is bound to remind the audience of Danny Boyle's "Slumdog Millionaire" and Vishal Bhardwaj's "Kaminey". Sarkar dodges both and goes for the most unexpected reference points, namely Douglas Sirk's "The Magnificent Obssession" and its desi spinoff Gulzar's "Kinara". As in "Kinara", the hero is on a redemptive route taking the blinded girl through the corridors to her dream. It's a journey undertaken with great warmth, tenderness and loving care.
The dialogues convey a streetside sauciness without getting abusive. Street wisdom need not be eeks-rated.
But hang on. LP is not soft at the edges. Pradeep Sarkar brings to the storyboard a gritty edge-of-the-street desperation that miraculously accommodates a very supple love story.
In a moment that can only be defined as tragic-comic, one of the hero's friends walks away with one of the most expressive lines in this film. After Pinky goes blind the friend says, "Ek minute mein Hema Malini se Thenga Malini ban gayi."
The reference to Hema Malini is not lost in a film that takes Gulzar's "Kinara" to another shore.
The scenes are written by Gopi Puthran with utmost concern for a pitch that conveys high passion without toppling over. Deepika looking into the sky with a lovelorn look in her unseeing eyes asking Neil to describe the moon is a moment that is priceless and poignant.
Cinematographer C. Natarajan Subramanian shoots with loving care. LP is an inspirational tale told with as little fuss and as much feeling as cinematically possible. Not to be missed.
New Delhi, Aug 16 (IANS) After the 2007 box-office dud "Laaga Chunri Mein Daag", director Pradeep Sarkar looks forward to securing a hit with "Lafangey Parindey", an unusual love story about a blind ambitious girl and a street fighter that releases Friday.
Produced under the banner of Yash Raj Films, "Lafangey Parindey" is about Nandu (Neil) who fights blindfolded and visually challenged Pinky Palkar (Deepika), who can dance on skates.
While Nandu is fierce and hungry to win, Pinky’s ambition is to rise above all the 'losers' living in her locality and carve a niche for herself. They, along with a group of friends, set out on a journey to achieve the impossible.
Deepika calls it one of the most challenging films of her career.
"For me, this role out of all the films that I have done was the most challenging. It's not been easy. It required a lot of focus and concentration. I had to observe a lot of blind people before I could play this role," Deepika told IANS.
"The biggest challenge was to pretend that I was not seeing. There were no supporting tools like black goggles or a stick with me to make it obvious that I am blind," she added.
The actress along with other cast and crew spent time with visually challenged people to understand their behavioural nuances and figure out counter actions.
The film will have some daring stunts and both the actors have performed them themselves.
Neil admits he was covered in bruises for a major part of the shoot but insists that before he attempted the death-defying action sequences, he was properly trained by action director Sham Kaushal.
"There's nothing fake about the fists of fury that fly in Pradeep Sarkar's film. It requires the rawest of physical violence and it can't be faked. So if you see me now I'm covered with welters, wounds and bruises, all gifted to me every day while shooting this, the most dangerous film of my career," Neil had told IANS.
In fact, the actor narrowly escaped a major accident while shooting for the film when his bike went over a manhole and the actor lost his balance. Fortunately, he quickly managed to jump back on and wasn’t seriously hurt.
Even Deepika didn't shy away from taking risks. A scene required her to ride a bike and fall into a muddy dip. The director and Neil were wary of Deepika doing such a stunt on her own, but the actress refused to use a body double and successfully performed the stunt on her own.
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Dabangg
Director: Abhinav KashyapActors: Salman Khan, Sonakshi Sinha, Arbaaz Khan,Sonu Sood,Mahie Gill,Vinod Khanna,Dimple Kapadia,Om Puri,Anupam Kher,Tinu Anand,Mahesh Manjrekar,Amitosh Nagpal
If you kill me off, Chulbul 'Robinhood' Pandey warns a bunch of goons: “You serve 21 years in jail; thokai alag se (get thrashed separately).”
He says of himself, “Iss policewale ne agar thoka (If I bump you off instead), then promotion (for me); bahaduri ka medal alag se (bravery award comes separate).”
Mr Pandey is a policeman, of course. In the midst of a shootout and while chasing criminals, he never yet lets go of his sense of humour. A Bollywood ‘item song’ recurrently blasts out of a cellphone ring tone, from one of the goon's pockets. Pandey stops. He starts to gyrate to the song instead.
Dabangg This undisputed cop hero makes no bones about making black wealth from his uniformed job, openly pockets cash, stashes them in his mother's locker, answers politics with his own deceit, is still the hero, without any signs of redemption (unlike, say, Bachchan’s Shahenshah). He also lives for the moment he could literally tear his shirt off to finally reveal at the end, homoerotic biceps and a shaven, bare torso. The public will accept with open arms this hero, who's both naked and nakedly corrupt. The producers are convinced. Mainstream movies in that sense, aimed at what they call the masses, subtly confirm a truth or two about a disturbingly changing India. This is stuff for sociology!
Mr Pandey’s a super-hero in the tradition spawned by children’s cinema since the ‘70s (films of Bachchan, Dharmendra, thereafter Mithun, Devgan, Sunny Deol etc). Where the leading man serves for his audience poetic and vigilante justice in three hours flat. This one is merely two hours long. And for a change is relatively richly set, in the under-scaled, dark interiors of Uttar Pradesh.
Salman Khan, perhaps for the first time in his career, sports both a moustache to suggest his provincial maleness, and local accent to suit a lead role. He even stretches his stiff facial muscles occasionally to lend to his fans the rare grin; throws in the odd public service message on polio drops and religion in politics. He is but no underdog up against any system.
It’s difficult to figure what the hero is fighting for really, but his own self. This makes the villain (Sonu Sood) terribly weak; eventual salvation, deeply unsatisfying; plot, fairly pointless. But if you were in with the flow, I suppose, you wouldn’t care.
Salman’s puzzling swagger alone is probably what you walked in for. And this swinging pastiche is a whole lot less of a Bollywood bore than the super-star’s recent event pictures: Yuvraj, Wanted, London Dreams, Veer. The balance between soulless spoof and self-serious senselessness is also easier consumed here than similar attempts of the recent past (Tashan, Jhoom Barabar Jhoom). Each time, for instance, the camera swish-pans to a soap operatic scene, the filmmakers make sure to switch into a corny background score from the American Westerns! The genre remains untouched.
The music, largely inspired from Vishal Bhardwaj’s Omkara – title track, or the nautch number Munni Badnaam Hui (the new Bidi Jalaile) – it appears, comes with hoots and whistles as an inserted underlay. Something you suspect about scenes as well. The audience is suitably informed. The action is comically balletic, and when there’s no humour to complete the masala, standalone jokes play out before the screen. This is that epilogue-film-prologue, super-B movie, with reasonably A-budgets.It'd be a shame to watch this anywhere outside of an old, decrepit single screen theatre, in the spirit of the loud tribal tradition that Hindi movies have always been: severely light on both the brains and the wallet. Mad stuff! Really.
New Delhi, Sept. 10: Dabangg means fearless. Set in Laalgurj, Uttar Pradesh, this is a story of Chulbul Pandey (Salman Khan), a totally fearless but corrupt police officer with unorthodox working methods. But even the most fearless at times face a tough fight with their innermost demons. Chulbul has had a bitter childhood. His father passed away when he was very young after which his mother Naini (Dimple Kapadia) married Prajapati Pandey (Vinod Khanna). Together, they had a son Makhanchan (Arbaaz Khan).
Prajapati favours Makhanchan which does not go down well with Chulbul. He decides to take control of his destiny and detaches himself from his stepfather and half brother. His sole attachment is his mother. However after his mother's demise and an unsuccessful attempt to mend wounds, Chulbul snaps all ties with his stepfather and half brother. Rajo (Sonakshi Sinha) with her unique perspective of life enters his world and turns life upside down. Chulbul starts to see life more positively and also gets sensitised to the value of a family. But his detractors especially the dubious Cheddi Singh (Sonu Sood) have their own vested interests and emerge as spokes in the wheels, putting one brother against the other. Makhanchan ends up carrying out act oblivious to the consequences. When he realizes he has been used, he turns to Chulbul. Will Chulbul take his extended hand?
This then is "Dabangg". A world swarming with unit-dimensional characters who seem to know exactly which way the fists fly. We certainly don't. The comic book hero Chulbul Pandey, played with lip smacking pleasure by Salman Khan, shows up in every dingy warehouse in this mofussil town to settle scores, man to man.
"Dabangg" is the kind of old fashioned family drama combined with a vendetta saga that we thought had gone out of fashion in the 1980s. Chulbul Pandey could have been played by Amitabh Bachchan 30 years ago. Yes, that killing comic dimension that Salman brings into his characters has its roots in the Big B's action-comedy films. And Dimple Kapadia, wheezing, coughing, groaning and ranting her way through the mother's role (what got into Dimple) hams her way through this action drama where being opulently outrageous comes naturally to everyone. But all said and damned, there is something to be said about Salman's Chulbul Pandey's ability to be cartoonist, caricature and larger than life and yet warm and very real in his tongue-in-cheek bravura. Some of the less over-punctuated moments in this film of ceaseless bone-crunching sound-effects occur each time Chulbul woos his bulbul Rajjo (debutant Sonakshi Sinha). Each time she passes by Salman becomes putty in her hands. The debut ante has eyes that plead for peace. But who's listening? The raucous riotous soundtrack is slave only to the rhythm of blood gore and screams of innumerable goons crashing through wooden supports that have seen better days.
The action sequences are the backbone of this bone-breaking actioned. The stunts are done in an enticing mix of masti and mayhem. The crusted dusty-brown unwashed ambience is created with care. But the plot is almost completely free of delicate moments. "Dabangg" is Ram Gopal Varma's "Shool" on steroids. In "Shool" Manoj Bajpai was the honest cop on a cleansing spree in a Bihari backwater town. In "Dabangg" Salman takes on the mofussil mafia with much more humour than Bajpai could muster. It is the need of the hour. We have to laugh away the corruption and violence all around us. Salman does a splendid job of it. It's hard to tell where debut ant director Abhinav Kashyap's abilities end and the action director Vijayan Master begin. That seamless quality goes well with this unpunctuality tribute to the spirit of free-for-all one-oneupmanship.
An ear-catching music score by Sajid-Wajid does diminish the level of violence in the presentation. Sonakshi Sinha uses her eyes beautifully. And the song "Tere mast mast do nayan" describes her eloquent expressions well. But this is a Salman Khan vehicle all the way. He gets to be funny, wicked and belligerent. sometimes all at once. Sonu Sood as the main antagonist brings an in-your-face menace to his villainy.
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