A Short Note on Rohit Shetty’s “Sooryavanshi”

[Contains spoilers.]

If one were to predict the kind of film Rohit Shetty’s “Sooryavanshi” was going to turn out to be, purely from its four-minute trailer, chances are that they would have got it right. The trailer laid out everything one could expect from this film: preaching, loud explosions, an ear-splitting background score, histrionics, a simplistic worldview, and a dull protagonist. Fifteen minutes in, “Sooryavanshi” has ticked them all. By the end of 145 minutes, I realised that the trailer functioned as a linear summary of the actual film. Should I have bothered at all? Shetty’s films, especially the entries in his ‘copverse,’ rarely deviate from a formula that guarantees commercial success. “Sooryavanshi,” mounted on a much bigger scale than the director’s previous films, plays it safe. It would have been foolish to expect otherwise. There’s little here by way of plot, a pastiche of ideas from the many jingoistic films we saw in the last few years: Terrorist sleeper cells have been activated, a plot is hatched, and a city is under threat. Would the titular top cop save the day? No prizes for guessing.

But the surprises in “Sooryavanshi” come from—incredibly—Shetty’s direction. There is a hint of an effort to go beyond just style this time around; Shetty’s direction has more depth and flashes of maturity. Sample this scene, for example: after the terrorist plot is set in motion, two terrorists, both old friends, sit under a tree in the dark of the night and share a quiet moment, knowing this is the last time they will see each other. Or a scene in which a terrorist, while bidding goodbye to his son, tells him to study hard, when his own father has ordered him to execute a terror attack. Or a rather heavy-handed but rousing sequence later in the film that makes a plea for communal harmony. These moments are few, very few, and far in between, but they reassure us that future entries in this series may take more and possibly bigger risks.

But these touches do little to relieve us from boredom. “Sooryavanshi” unfolds in predictable fashion. The protagonist, Veer Sooryavanshi, is projected as a demigod who never takes a step wrong, an old cliché reserved for major movie stars. Characters reiterate the brilliance of Veer Sooryavanshi, he who put country over everything else, even family. The only mistake Sooryavanshi makes is letting his personal and professional lives collide once, resulting in his son getting hit by a bullet. Sooryavanshi is guilt-stricken, but this angle is used to alert us to the innumerable sacrifices that police officers make while serving their country. Noble intention, terrible execution: we get a few speeches of varying lengths to hammer the point home. But this is the mode usually preferred by Shetty, who avoids subtlety like a plague: he creates conflicts through which one character will relay the point Shetty wants to make to another character. These characters never break the fourth wall, but they might as well have.

Notably, “Sooryavanshi” is rife with a bunch of problems common to Shetty’s ‘copverse’ films. Vigilante justice is projected as a necessity in some cases, a couple of issues are watered down to good-versus-evil, and toxic masculinity is championed. Sooryavanshi, like his colleagues from “Singham,” “Singham Returns” and “Simmba,” doesn’t seem to care much for the legal process. It is an especially insensitive point to make in the current political climate, given that the film is also keen on establishing Sooryavanshi as a true patriot. Also equally problematic is the film’s handling of the character of Ria, the wife of the protagonist, relegated here to a position where her job is to simply accentuate her husband’s heroics by being his antithesis. Ria is a ghost of other similar female characters seen in the two “Singham” films and in “Simmba,” only a shade more developed. It’s unfortunate that four films later this series is still struggling to properly accommodate female characters.

Its problematic politics aside, “Sooryavanshi” is that rare example of a big-budget starrer getting a well-worn formula wrong. Bowing out after pitching a bigger sequel is definitely an interesting thought if not exactly encouraging.

[Not for reproduction.]

Review: Nitesh Tiwari’s “Chhichhore” fails to breathe new life into the Hindi college comedy.

[Contains spoilers, many of them.]

It’s really hard to not know where Nitesh Tiwari’s “Chhichhore” is headed fifteen minutes in. A man prances around naked in the corridors of a boys’ hotel, and before we know it a water fight has begun. Two boys become five, then ten, then twenty. In five minutes, everyone is soaked but stoked; it’s a ritual of sorts and it’s done. The boys pledge their allegiance to one another. There we go, another year, another film about friendship in college. Which wouldn’t be an entirely bad thing in more assured hands; consider the charming airiness of Abbas Tyrewala’s “Jaane Tu… Ya Jaane Na” for a moment. But “Chhichhore” goes the other way; the approach to the dog-eared material here is deliberately—or at least seemingly so—heavy-handed, confirming quite simply that it is going to be that type of movie.

And that type of movie gets a fresh coat every five years or so, seldom an upgrade. “Chhichhore” tries to get the best bits of “Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar” (itself a loose remake of the terrific “Breaking Away”), “Student of the Year” and “3 Idiots” to work furiously together. But little does work. When their son tries to commit suicide after failing in an exam, Anirudh (Sushant Singh Rajput) and Maya (Shraddha Kapoor) reach into their past for a story that underlines why failing isn’t necessarily bad. And into the past we dash, where we meet a young Anirudh, a brilliant student (aren’t they all?) condemned to hostel H4 on his first day of college. H4 is reputed to be stocked with slackers, bad rooms, and bad food. And yet Anirudh warms up to his peers, a small group of lazy stereotypes: Sexa, a porn addict; Bewda, an alcoholic; Acid, a foulmouth; Derek, a chain-smoking shirker; and Mummy, a mouse. There is, predictably, an attempt to squeeze humour out of these bare descriptions, but it is forced, delivered consciously, like an obligation that must be met. We never meet the men, though; we never know what they are thinking unless they articulate it, and we never see them vulnerable or nervous like regular engineering undergrads. (I missed terribly the shaggy, smirking architecture students of Pradip Krishen’s “In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones,” who viewed the world through defeated, bored eyes.)

After we meet the group, we meet Maya. Anirudh is smitten, and with him, everyone else. He tries to woo her (thankfully without a song) and fails, fails miserably. This romantic angle oughtn’t have felt so disposable, because it does contains a pleasant moment or two, but it does, for the actors play it blandly. By this point, “Chhichhore” has barely set off but already feels like a patchwork of fail-safe elements threaded together by a clumsy craftsman. We are also introduced to Raggie (played by Prateik Babbar), the conceited (unofficial) leader of H3, the chicest hostel on campus, who will eventually end up challenging the boys of H4 in the General Championships, the annual sporting competition in which the hostels compete against each other. It wouldn’t come as a surprise to me if I was told Raggie idolised Shekhar from “Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar” as a kid; for the most part I couldn’t tell the two apart. Raggie spites the boys of H4 by calling them ‘losers’ (which, for some reason, is supposed to be a barb and not a precise classification) in a way not different from how Shekhar called the boys of a lesser college ‘pyjama-chaap’.

After breezing through the imperatives of the Hindi college comedy (with scenes of ragging, a joke about hostel food, and a stray comment about how friends in college end up being family), “Chhichhore” trains its attention on the General Championships. The boys of H4 are desperate to win: for Derek, who may not get another shot at glory, but chiefly to obliterate the ‘losers’ tag that has tacked itself to them. This is familiar territory, at times too familiar: the parallels with “Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar” are far too many to be an innocent coincidence. (At one point, the final minutes of a relay race are a frame-by-frame copy of the climactic minutes of the last race in the Aamir Khan-starrer.) There’s even a flicker of “Lagaan” here: the boys of H4 are embarrassingly bad, and the smug boys of H3 exceptionally good, and so, in keeping with the rest of the film, the impending clash leaves us little to look forward to. The underdog tale has been redrafted several times, most imaginatively “Lagaan,” which fashioned a spectacle out of an absurd story; “Chhichhore,” I am afraid, does not follow suit. It uses nostalgia to smoothen out its narrative creases, and while that approach works only intermittently, it throws up several questions, the most important of which is: What in this film is novel? The answer, I suppose, would be: Little. Nostalgia, after all, can only do so much. And with it gone, a blandness begins to infect the narrative. “Chhichhore” hits the few highs we expect it to (thanks to sincere turns from the supporting cast) and the lows, but it falls short in surprising us. It is further weighed down by its constant jumps in time, between the present, where Anirudh and his friends recount the story of the General Championships to Anirudh’s coma-bound son, and the past, where Anirudh and his friends strategise to win. This is crucial in explaining the occasional narrative lumpiness: the present is contrived, the past rather chirpy.

With its ambitions neatly outlined at the start of the second-half, it’s disappointing indeed to see “Chhichhore” retreating to the comfort of predictability. Save for a couple of spirited jokes, most of it is spent sermonising. Where a line ought to have sufficed to establish something, the film employs four, said by different characters in different ways. And just to ram the point home, someone repeats it later again, in the plainest possible terms. But in its final minutes, in spite of determinedly sticking to what appears to be a riskless formula, it does spring a little surprise, one that, when I went back to it later, I would never have guessed was coming. It is not everyday that we see a Hindi film that accepts failure as an important (if not integral) part of growing up, and somehow manages to make it uplifting and wise, but “Chhichhore” does so—quietly, skilfully. Although these concluding minutes are dusted in sugar, there is a bittersweetness to them, a rare sort of bittersweetness. God knows this film could have done with more of it. But at least it's a start.

[Not For Reproduction]

Review: Sriram Raghavan’s “Andhadhun” is the best Hindi film of the year.

[Might contain spoilers, many of them.]

Sriram Raghavan’s obsession with tributes would make a good drinking game someday. His films are littered with them; he reads James Hadley Chase, Raymond Chandler, and Cornell Woolrich; he watches John-Pierre Melville, Alfred Hitchcock, and Vijay Anand. Every master gets a hat-tip, a reference. Johnny Gaddaar, his spectacular thriller from 2007, seemed to have sprung out of the pages of a great Hadley Chase novel. In Andhadhun, these inspirations coalesce to form something that’s utterly new and compelling. There’s a murder at the heart of it, as is usually the case, but the film isn’t about the murder, or who committed it; rather, it’s about the paranoia it triggers, and how it eventually forces those involved in it to get in touch with their rotten side, right or wrong be damned. It’s about people eager to silence each other, but even more eager to listen to each other if it involves a get-rich-quick scheme. And it asks, above all, a rather interesting question: What are you prepared to do to save yourself?

Indeed, good thrillers often hinge on a surprise or two, while great ones decide against it. Great thrillers, I find, are never about their bag of surprises. They are always about their characters. Raghavan excels at writing both. In a staggering scene in Johnny Gaddaar, a young man picks up a gun and pumps bullets into his unsuspecting boss quite suddenly, killing him. This isn’t played merely for shock value; there’s logic dictating his actions. He’s been pushed into a corner. He’s scared and helpless. It’s his only way out. But, would he pick up the gun lying in front of him and kill his unarmed master? Would he dare? He does. And when he does, it makes us gasp. It’s likely the most revealing detail about this character, something that rather skillfully influences not just our view of him but also what we can eventually expect of the film.

In Andhadhun, a young pianist pretending to be blind is a silent, almost idiotic witness to a murder. We don’t see the actual murder; we see a body and a pool of blood next to it. Two people – one of whom is the victim’s wife, the other her lover – dispose of it as he plays a somber tune, pretending to not have seen any of it. (This is, in a way, reminiscent of Chaplin’s dark comedies, particularly Monsieur Verdoux; a tribute, maybe?) When she lamely tries to cover it up, he goes along with it. The sequence plays for about seven minutes, seven glorious minutes, and it tells us all we need to know about the two central characters. Both sides are lying to each other: he about his blindness, she about being innocent. But little things also tell us about who they are when the masks they wear slip off. He’s smart enough to play dumb. She weeps silently when the body is finally taken care of. A lot of things are hinted at, and some are left unsaid. Neither of them knows what the other’s intentions are. It’s an amusing conundrum. He knows for sure she’s lying. But what does he do with the truth? She suspects he's lying. But what does she do about it?

Like in his previous thrillers, Raghavan puts his characters in precarious situations, adds a layer of intrigue, and then invites us to watch what happens. In Andhadhun, exuberantly written and performed sequences lead us down a cold and damp rabbit hole. The pacing is relentless; we have barely finished relishing one sequence, one marvelous surprise, when the film moves on to a better one. Sample for a bit that terrific sequence featuring a sly police officer arriving at the protagonist’s house and nosing about, waiting for his mask to slip off. The timing of this sequence is especially interesting: it comes right after two dramatic reveals which we are still trying to wrap our heads around. It’s pure cinema, and Raghavan orchestrates the hell out of it. But the same question prods us again: If the mask does slip off, what would happen? We know what the characters are capable of, but they never react in the way we expect them to. It’s the excitement of finding out that fuels the experience of watching this film, of knowing that, in one way or another, it’ll find a way to surprise us. It’s a tightrope walk for any filmmaker, and Raghavan more than rises up to the challenge.

In the second half, however, the film’s momentum does dip. The film, as we know it, is taken from the hands of these wonderfully mad characters and placed into the hands of those we barely know. It’s a risky move, not to mention how puzzling it is, the consequences of which could very well prove disastrous. For one, a substantial amount of screen time would have to be dedicated to develop this new bunch of characters and arrive at an acceptable answer to why we should be watching them instead. (This also explains the strange void at the beginning of the second half. But it mercifully doesn't last long.) Imagination is still very much at the forefront of things, but less patient viewers may disagree. Speaking for myself, I can’t say I was too happy with this change, but I was intrigued nonetheless.

What distinguishes Sriram Raghavan’s films from other Hindi (or even Indian) thrillers is his idea of what constitutes a great thriller. His thrillers seldom revolve around the ‘who’ or the ‘why’. We know why his characters do what they do, and so we aren’t really sure what to expect when things don’t go according to plan. In Andhadhun, we know who committed the murder and why they did it. He also lets us know who might go next. It’s out in the open. And yet Andhadhun manages to catch us off guard frequently, without making a big deal of it. He never draws our attention to how clever he has been nor seems eager to shock. His plots evolve organically, his character arcs develop beautifully, and his twists are deftly done. It’s consistently intelligent filmmaking.

It is not customary for an Indian thriller to place a red herring near the end. I find that in most Indian thrillers the last few minutes before the end credits roll are devoted to connecting the dots, sometimes several times over. Flashbacks are usually employed to do the job of achieving complete coherence, or something close to it. It’s a lazy, lazy move. Andhadhun subverts this cunningly; yet another example of how well the makers have structured it and how satisfying the experience is as a result. I have seen it twice and I saw two different films: the first with an ending that was agreeable, and the second with one that was astonishing. It really depends on how we see it.

Andhadhun might be the finest Hindi film to be released this year. It might just be the year’s funniest as well, and definitely the year’s most irreverent. With an ingenious plot, insightful bits of detail that are woven into the proceedings most scrupulously, and a clump of excellent performances, Raghavan has cemented his reputation of being Hindi cinema’s thriller pundit. I just wish this means he gets to script every movie death henceforth.

[Not for Reproduction]

Review: Amit V Masurkar’s “Newton” is that rare satire that gets it right.

[May contain spoilers, many of them.]

The most telling line, in a movie full of telling lines and telling images, comes about twenty minutes into Amit V Masurkar’s Newton. At four in the morning, amidst pitch darkness, a team of armymen and government officials prepare for an eight-kilometer trek to a school where an election will be held. Bulletproof vests are slipped into, guns are kept at ready. (The CPRF officer, Aatma Singh, cannot emphasize enough on how ‘dangerous’ the area is; at one point, he makes the group a most unusual offer: that his men will brave the forests and go to the villages to get votes from eligible voters instead of the whole team doing it in a more democratic way.)

We see a woman walking up to them. She is a local, we find out; there to ensure that no city-educated, Hindi-speaking (the local language is Gondi), gun-cradling individual can mislead the locals into voting or, more likely, not voting. Her name is Malko. Aatma Singh is at once vigilant. He asks her for identification, which she has, but he asks her to return. Newton’s, the protagonist, way of introduction is friendlier; he smiles and welcomes her with a traditional namaste. Aatma Singh is dour. He accepts Newton’s request of allowing her to come along (though he clearly does not seem to be too happy about it) and orders his men to give her a bulletproof vest, too. Only she does not want it. ‘I am a local,’ says Malko. ‘I will be in greater danger if I wear one.’

It’s a marvelous line. It is that moment, one of the many in this film, where optimism and skepticism clash and the results are for everyone to see. Her understanding of this region has been conditioned by its political turmoil and years of violence, so she knows exactly how someone will react upon seeing her wearing one of those ‘government’ vests. She feels safer without it.

The other side of the same coin is Aatma Singh. He, too, has been conditioned to expect the worst. There’s a hint of distrust in the way he looks at her and speaks to her. But it’s not his fault. He’s passionate about his country and his boys; he wishes for a fatter budget so that the government can buy better weapons for them.

In the middle is Newton. An idealist and do-gooder through and through, Newton’s understanding of the world lies in the pages of his copy of the election manual. Both the woman and CPRF officer, inform him on more than one occasion that he doesn’t understand this region; while his intentions may be noble and his sincerity hard to rival, he’s far removed from the world they are accustomed to. His determination is childlike because he doesn’t understand, or maybe because he’s ignoring the hard truths. The film is, in a way, Newton’s introduction to his own country, a country he wants to protect and serve but one that won’t let him.

The Maoists have asked for a complete boycott of the elections. There is a looming threat of an attack. Every crack of a branch, every rustle of leaves is a cause for alarm. Newton, accompanied by two colleagues and Malko, and the CPRF officer and his team, has to conduct a fair election. The total number of eligible voters is seventy-six. Most of them are illiterate and unfamiliar with the voting process, partly because nobody really cared about their votes till now and partly because they never really cared.

But Newton wants to change that. He wants them to vote of their own accord. And not just that: he wants them to vote for the candidate they want to see as their leader. Without oppression or threats, like it should happen in a proper democracy. It’s far from simple. When he explains to them how an electronic voting machine works and rattles off the list of names of the candidates, Malko helpfully steps in to illuminate him about how things are. These people have never heard of these names before. They do not know the parties they represent. Or the promises they have made. How could they possibly know whom to vote for? When they push a man from their group forward saying he is their politician and leader, Newton is more bemused than amused. That’s not how a democracy functions. But again, have they ever been part of a democracy?

And therein lies the beauty of Newton. It asks these questions which, at a time when political discourse has been reduced to babel, qualify as brave. The approach isn't accusatory but shrewd; it's almost miraculous how the makers get away with it. Masurkar and his co-screenwriter Mayank Tewari aren’t really interested in exploring Newton’s disillusionment with the system. Newton isn’t readily made a hero of nor is Aatma Singh made a villain; they are both right in their own ways, and we get their agitation. Both have flawed ideologies. Both have been caught in the crossfire between the government and communists. And both have now found themselves in the same boat.

The film does seem to pit them against each other too often, given how Aatma Singh always seems to patronize locals, which Newton disapproves of. But this film isn’t about who wins between the two of them; they are simply cogs in a much larger machine. It’s about a bigger war being fought in the background, which we never see, and how innocent civilians are inevitably sucked into it. It’s a film that concerns itself less with the big problems and more with the consequences they have.

Newton works, as it should, due to its remarkable writing. With its roots firmly in the satirical territory, it allows us the luxury to laugh at certain things that one would only laugh at in a satire. But beneath the humor there is truth, stinging and uncomfortable, making us squirm. There is poignancy. In a particularly vivid scene, the villagers are grabbed from their homes and herded to the polling booth (the scene wisely crosscuts between that and a chicken getting caught and killed) because a foreign journalist wishes to get a piece of the election pie on tape. The façade is captured on camera and peddled as ‘democracy’ and ‘development’. The metaphor of the chicken couldn’t be more obvious, but it works.

Newton falters a little in the film’s third act when our protagonist, in a desperate bid to do the right thing, does something totally outrageous. It’s handled lightheartedly, making Newton come off as a Gandhian hero more than anything, but sometimes subtlety cannot be the answer. Something less theatrical would have worked beautifully here. Still, it is hardly a blot on an otherwise darn impressive film. The country moves on, as do our characters, in the same flimsy, flawed way it always has. But I could not resist feeling that the characters belong elsewhere. Maybe if Newton and Aatma Singh would have put their determination to use in better circumstances, we would have been better off.

(Not For Reproduction)

Review: Subhash Kapoor’s “Jolly LLB 2” is a farce that goes on for too long.

[Might contain spoilers, many of them.]

An evil police inspector is in the witness box, about to face questions from the earnest and determined prosecution. He's calm, but the glint in his eye is menacing. Clearly he is a staple character in a simplistic Hindi film that wants to win over its audience, and for that it takes the liberty of overlooking logic in a few places. I know this because only in such a film can one find the defendant sullen when he is asked to step into the witness box, as if he didn’t expect it.

The prosecution begins with his questions, but the defendant cuts him off by murmuring a threat. In a court of law, in front of judges, lawyers, people.

Yes, this must be a Hindi film. I have no reason to suspect otherwise. The defendant has no respect for the judicial system. The lawyer doesn’t step back; he comes up with his own smart-alecky reply. We have seen this before. In a carelessly-written exchange in Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury’s Pink, the bad guy mutters, “You don’t know who you are talking to,” through gritted teeth to the defendants’ lawyer while under questioning. For how long will baddies in Hindi courtroom-dramas be written so loosely, I wonder. They are not complex individuals. They are one-note villains whose only job is to be as evil as they can so that our virtuous heroes can get the better of them in the rousing climax for the sake of catharsis. Makes for a rather dull watch, I say.

Neither sharp enough for a satire, nor taut enough for a courtroom-drama, nor as insightful as the film it thinks it is, Subhash Kapoor's Jolly LLB 2 is a farce that goes on for too long. It is a sequel – was it really necessary to make one? – to a modest if flawed film that won us over by its sincerity. But that sincerity is lacking this time around. It’s far more ambitious, with more focus on the absurdities that are seen in an Indian court of law everyday, but so insipid is its approach that it eventually becomes a poorly conceived attempt at satire.

I have always believed that the opening scene says a lot about what kind of film the makers wished to make. In Jolly LLB 2, the answers to an English exam are revealed over a loudspeaker by a sly gent who knows how to go about doing business with slyer people. It’s an absurd scene but one that is also undeniably amusing. (I fervently hoped watching it that the film won’t end up being a hodgepodge of farce and melodrama, which is exactly what it ends up being.) Jolly a.k.a., Jagdishwar Mishra grinds away in the office of a reputed lawyer everyday, barely wringing more respect than a common peon, and dreams of starting his own practice. He has a wife and son whom we don’t see much of. He has an old father who wants to see him succeed. He’s somehow making ends meet.

And herein lies the film’s first problem. What kind of a man is this Jolly? What makes him tick? Ambition? Wanting to make his father proud? Provide a better life for his wife and son? We are not told. The film treats them as secondary characters, using them to mine drama for tears. They vanish for long periods of time and magically reappear in the film’s more dramatic bits. We do not get to understand them, empathise with them. Nor Jolly. We are forced to think he's pleasant and honest because he has a smile permanently stuck on his face and notices the ones who are really in need of help in the crowd. We don't get to see him do something that earns our affection for him. It's puzzling. What good can come from a film whose lead character is such a mystery and its villain so run-of-the-mill?

Jolly bungles up in a big way. The pregnant widow of a man killed in a fake encounter commits suicide when she becomes disillusioned with the world and with him, and he blames himself. It compels him to study her case, to fight her fight for her. It’s interesting to see a commercial film tackling the critical subject of fake encounters and how the people involved resort to untangle themselves from the mess they create, but Jolly LLB 2 plays it safe. It produces an oversimplified, easy-to-follow case for us. A man is gunned down in cold blood by an inspector who only wants a promotion. He is promptly written off as a terrorist, the inspector gets his promotion, and the case gets swept under the carpet. Until our hero comes in.

Kapoor is no stranger to satire. He made the sharply-written Phas Gaye Re Obama in 2010. He deftly mixes social commentary with humour. But here, he starts off on the wrong foot and doesn’t find his rhythm till the end. It’s haphazardly put together, as if the makers weren’t entirely show if they want to make a satire or courtroom-drama, so they settle for something in between. There are a few bafflingly absurd bits, like burkha-clad women playing a cricket match, that are mildly amusing at best but fail to signify anything substantial.

When Jolly LLB 2 does turn into a full-blown courtroom-drama in the second half, it becomes considerably more engaging. There are pompous one-liners delivered with great gusto, but I’m afraid none of them are particularly memorable. Annu Kapoor, playing a reputed lawyer against whom Jolly goes, sleepwalks through his role. He’s very watchable. But I wonder: What makes him a ‘reputed lawyer’? He gets his share of the one-liners, but his character lacks the shrewdness and sophistication that Boman Irani’s character had in Jolly LLB. We are told he is a reputed lawyer, but we do not see it.

Jolly LLB 2’s biggest undoing, however, is how it portrays the Indian judicial system. I do understand what purpose a satire serves, what purpose cinema serves in general, but even a satire must contain some amount of truth. In Jolly LLB 2, we see Jolly ‘kidnapping’ a man undergoing trial and who has been accused of abetting terrorism to testify in court for him, and the judge allows him to. (The man turns out to be innocent after all, but that’s stretching credibility.) We see a narco-analysis test being submitted as evidence to incriminate a man of perjury. To the best of my knowledge, a narco-analysis test is inadmissible as evidence in an Indian court. (A more informed piece on this titled “Brief encounter: Who wins in the case of ‘Jolly LLB 2’ versus authenticity” can be found on Scroll.in.)

The problem with these fallacies is that they show the makers are themselves ignorant about the judicial system they want to poke fun of. While their intentions might be noble, it comes across as lazy or worse, ill-informed.

The saving grace in this film comes in the form of Saurabh Shukla. The veteran is at his very best here, and his Judge Tripathi, who makes some rather tall decisions for a judge, I must say, is like the first breath of fresh air after days in a windowless room. He’s funny, comforting, and fun to watch, and injects the film with life when it seems to be failing. He even gets a nice little speech in the end about how the job of a judge isn’t easy, how even when the judicial system is flimsy millions of citizens still trust it will give them justice. It’s one of the high points in a film that is evidently in short supply of them.

Jolly LLB 2 is the kind of family-friendly film that seems to be carefully engineered to do well commercially. It has all the right ingredients for it. What it desperately needed was insight.

(Not For Reproduction)

Review: Shlok Sharma’s “Haraamkhor” is a commendable debut that could have been great.

[Might contain spoilers, many of them.]

There are films one wants to love because they are brave, especially in an environment not conducive to brave cinema. But the dilemma that I often find myself in is that these films are also flawed at the narrative level, thereby leaving me with mixed feelings. On the surface, these films look groundbreaking; we expect them to shake us, to start a debate, but they don’t. A very recent example is Abhishek Chaubey’s Udta Punjab, a compelling if somewhat underwhelming attempt at capturing a state’s war on drugs. While being noteworthy for tackling a weighty issue in a mainstream Hindi film, the simplistic treatment of its subject was frustrating. But I digress.

Shlok Sharma’s feature film debut Haraamkhor falls into this category. Sharma goes for risqué content here, choosing substance over style, and offers, in parts, a fantastic film. In parts. Because there’s too much unevenness in it to break new cinematic ground. Maybe it’s deliberate, the tonal shifts; it switches between dark comedy and drama, never settling into either genre, and it does take some getting used to. However, once we do, it begins to grow on us.

But even when the film occasionally falters, there is much to admire here; first, its fearlessness. Sharma's film doesn't just toe tricky waters but dives into them spectacularly. In the riveting opening hour of Haraamkhor, we watch with growing discomfort how the fifteen-year-old Sandhya becomes infatuated with her older married teacher. She's had a rough childhood; her mother abandoned her when she was a toddler, and her father, a police inspector, hardly has time for her. She discovers that he's secretly having an affair. The teacher, Shyam, a smooth-talking and often volatile sexual predator, fulfills the void in her life. He offers her an emotional bond, something that nobody has ever offered her. He molests her briefly when she spends a night at his place. Then, we see her slip. In a memorable scene, she asks him playfully if he's the father figure in her life. She lays it down gently; she wants to see how he reacts. He answers, just as playfully, with a 'no'. It's a scene that establishes the nature of the relationship they share: they subtly express a romantic interest in each other for the first time without saying it out loud.

Image source: www.hindustantimes.com

On the side, a younger boy, Kamal, has fallen for her as well. He wants to pursue her aggressively but is unable to. He's shy and inexperienced in the matters of love. His friend, Mintu, his chief consultant on romantic relationships, advises him to do a lot of ridiculous things if he wants to 'get married' to her. These portions are where Haraamkhor draws much of its humor from. The two boys make a charming pair. We want to see more of them, but the focus is firmly on how the platonic teacher-student relationship develops into a sexual one. Sharma treads carefully here. His handling of this development is particularly delicate. We see how the discovery that her father is having an affair drives her into the arms of her teacher, who gently coaxes her into taking the plunge. She does it to secretly get back at her father; he, because he wants to.

In the first half, this plucky premise is handled wonderfully, determinedly avoiding the melodrama that could have attached itself to some of the developments. While the exchanges between the characters are sharply written, a more important problem plagues the film: the characters are extremely underdeveloped. We begin to understand Sandhya slowly, but the others are overlooked. We aren’t given enough to connect with them emotionally. This particular flaw results in the film's climax being unaffecting when it should have been devastating. It feels out of place; I am trying to understand why the film had to end that way. It certainly doesn’t justify its denouement. Furthermore, it doesn’t help that the build-up to the climax is careless. Far too much goes unexplored. For example, when Shyam’s wife discovers his infidelity and leaves him, it doesn’t have a strong effect on him. We don’t see much of her after that. It could have been turned into a critical moment that could have given us a glimpse into the mind of Shyam, but this opportunity is passed to examine how Sandhya warms up to her father’s love interest. That, clearly, is a significant moment in the film, but a lot is sacrificed to make room for it.

The performances are uniformly impressive. There is a very specific character, as complex as any, that Nawazuddin Siddiqui excels at playing: an oily, smart-alecky thug who can slip out of any conundrum, because he knows exactly what people's weaknesses are, and he exploits them to his advantage. He doesn't wear his character's evilness on his sleeve; he brings pathos to this role, and makes us believe that though he – the character – is fundamentally evil, he's still capable of being human. It’s the kind of effort he puts into fleshing this character out that puts him in a class of his own.

This time, though, he finds a match in Mohammad Samad, the little marvel who plays Mintu. His performances in Haraamkhor and 2011’s Gattu confirm that he is a natural. He has an impish charm, a disarming smile, and though he’s sidelined here for the most part, he finds a way to be the scene-stealer that he is. We leave with memories of not Sandhya or Shyam or even Kamal, but Mintu. It takes an actor of prodigious talent to pull this off.

In the end, Haraamkhor is a commendable effort. What's unfortunate is that it settles for ‘commendable’ when a more appropriate adjective, considering the talent that went into making it, could have been ‘great’.

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Review: Nitesh Tiwari’s “Dangal” is a solid crowd-pleaser despite its problematic second half.

[Might contain spoilers, many of them.]

There is a moment when we see Nitesh Tiwari’s Dangal, a solid, solid crowd-pleaser, wobble for the first time. It arrives just before the intermission, a blot on an otherwise terrific first half. A man, who later turns out to be the film’s chief villain, publicly derides our hero. We are supposed to feel angry and horrified, but we don’t. We feel confused. Of what use is a villain in a film that does not need one and was doing fine without one?

But this is a Disney production. There will be heroes, and there will be villains. Dangal has them, too, which may or may not be a bad thing, but in the portions where there are no clear-cut heroes and villains, it’s simply outstanding. Based on the lives of Mahavir Singh Phogat, a retired wrestler, and his daughters Geeta and Babita, who won plaudits for the country internationally in wrestling, it loyally follows the script of every Hindi underdog sports drama ever made, but still makes for an inspiring watch. We see how two girls from an Indian state known for its dismal sex ratio battle patriarchy to come out on top in a sport that is supposedly ‘not for women’. We see how their father too fought his own battles when he began training them. We see them reluctant and mortified at first, then slowly getting thirsty for success. In a standout scene, Geeta loses her first bout to a man, the strongest of all the contenders she could have picked from, but wins the respect of the crowd that had assembled to watch it. Seeing how she almost managed to beat him, the judges decide to award her a higher cash prize than the winner, and she sullenly accepts it. Her father, like her, is a little disappointed by the result, but manages a smile when she walks up to him and silently hands him the money she has won. We see her tossing around in her bed that night. Unable to stomach her loss, she wakes up and asks her father when her next match is. This time his smile is different; he knows a champion when he sees one.

The effect is electrifying. Zaira Wasim, who portrays the young Geeta in one of the year’s very best performances, makes the moment hers. It’s stirring to watch her character, who was initially horrified at the thought of becoming a wrestler, turn into a determined young woman who cannot bear the thought of losing. I remembered a chapter in former tennis champion Andre Agassi’s superbly written autobiography, “Open,” wherein he described one of his first losses. Agassi wrote that after the match, his father watched stonily as he received a huge trophy as a consolation prize for a battle well fought. Later, when both of them were walking through the parking lot, Agassi, sensing that his father was more upset with him receiving the humiliating ‘consolation trophy’ than losing the match, turned to him said that he didn’t really need the trophy. His father swiftly snatched it out of his hands and threw it on the ground, where it shattered. Losing was not an option for him. We learn that losing is not an option in the Phogat household, too. But I digress.

What works in Dangal’s favor is the affectionate way in which it has been crafted. Tiwari tells their stories with humor and feeling, without wasting a single crowd-pleasing moment. He makes us feel the sweat they put in. And we like them, not because we are made to, but because they are ordinary people like us, nurturing dreams that overwhelm them. Their victories become our victories. Even the smaller characters find a way to add to the film’s charm. There is a butcher who supplies them with meat at the expense of his business when they start training for the national-level competitions, and when they begin winning accolades, it means a lot to him, too. We see this character only a few times and we don’t see him speaking with the girls directly, but whenever he appears, usually in the background, we can’t help but smile. We must never forget the little people who made their own sacrifices in our fight for success. Tiwari and his fellow screenwriters, Shreyas Jain, Piyush Gupta and Nikhil Meharotra, retain him till the very end, and it’s a sign of how sure they were of the kind of film they wanted this to be. Alas, this does not last for long.

Image source: www.indianexpress.com

In the second half, it all turns topsy-turvy. To understand why, one must first examine how the Hindi film industry usually approaches stories based on real-life heroes. I find that the industry is especially careful not to portray them as even a little flawed. We see them battling the odds and powering through them, as they might have done in real life, but filmmakers take special care to emphasize this again and again. We see them pitted against someone particularly evil, and beating them. We see everyone else’s contribution in a heroic event belittled while the subject on whom the film is made is placed under the spotlight, their contribution drawn attention to diligently. Last year’s disappointing Airlift was a good example of how Hindi filmmakers twist facts to such an extent that credibility is eventually put at risk. We get a hero, but at what cost?

It’s not a bad thing, though. We love heroes. But the facts, which I find more interesting, drown when a true-life story is embellished with fiction to become more entertaining. In Dangal, facts become insignificant when the filmmakers amp up the drama by shifting their focus on turning Mahavir Singh Phogat into a hero, as if he weren’t one already. We see Geeta turning into a weak athlete under the tutelage of her new coach, the film’s ‘villain’. We see him as incompetent and jealous and hungry for personal glory. We see her decline under him, thanks to his ineptitude, and then her ascent when she goes back to training under her father’s watchful eye. It’s clear what the film is getting at, but at the same time, it is so silly a move to introduce him that I could barely accept him as a principal character. It isn't enough that he's shown as a clown; because of his inability to understand Geeta's natural game, it is up to Mahavir Singh Phogat to ghost-train her for the international matches. The film goes so far as to show his envy hit its peak before Geeta's final match at the 2010 Commonwealth Games when he gets her father locked up in a room, thereby depriving him of a chance to watch his daughter win gold for the country. Although it is intended to be Geeta's coming-of-age moment, her moving out of her father's shadow, one can't help but wish it was handled with more tact.

In spite of these very real problems, Dangal seldom loses its grip. Its wrestling sequences are choreographed to perfection, and one has to try really hard not to jump out of their seat and cheer. (I came close twice or thrice.) No other sports movie in recent memory manages to so effortlessly generate the pulse-pounding excitement that Dangal does with its showdowns. There is the much talked-about sequence where Mahavir Singh Phogat and Geeta wrestle after she returns home from the National Sports Academy a different athlete. The training imparted there changes her both as an athlete and as a person. Her enraged father is wrestling for his faith in himself and his abilities as a trainer while she is wrestling for her independence that was taken from her by him as a child. She is desperate to be on her own, to have her own identity, while he still wants to be able to guide her. It's an emotionally charged sequence, and its execution is flawless. The same can be said of the other wrestling sequences in this film that manage to not make the second half look considerably poor in comparison to the first.

Dangal would not have worked if it wasn't for its remarkable cast. The amount of effort that has been put in to nail the Haryanvi lingo as well as the more physical sequences is evident. As I said before, there is no doubt that the filmmakers were sure of what kind of film they wanted to make. I just wish they were wise enough to not bow to commercial demands.

(Not For Reproduction)

Review: Gauri Shinde's “Dear Zindagi” is a major misfire.

[Might contain spoilers.]

In one of the many, many exchanges in Dear Zindagi, Gauri Shinde's glossy sophomore film after her delightful debut English Vinglish, Shah Rukh Khan, playing a renowned therapist called Dr. Jehangir “Jug” Khan (why does every character who is a somebody in a Hindi film has to be ‘renowned’?), says, “Genius is knowing when to stop.” It's ironic that the line finds a place in a film that's about forty minutes too long in addition to being meandering and indulgent.

There were signs. There were signs. A rich and somewhat successful urban woman, Kaira, has emotional problems. She is dealing with stress everyday. She snaps at a guy who accidentally bumps into her in the park. She is an exposed nerve in the company of her boyfriends. She is popping pills. She is trying to decide between two projects with work environments she knows she won’t be comfortable in. We don't think she will make it through either of them. She is like a castle of cards that would fall apart with a gust of wind. Vulnerable, clearly in need of help.

When a film is titled “Dear Zindagi” and it presents a character like this one, we somehow get the idea that it will be dosed with a healthy amount of optimism. And here the dose of optimism presents itself in the form of Jug, the ‘cool doc’. A ray of light in a dark, musty tunnel. Jug understands her, helps her open up and open her windows to a more hopeful world slowly, one session every week. 

It is a film that keeps its ambitions low. To Shinde’s credit, she manages to do two things unique to a Hindi film: Approach mental illness as a serious subject as opposed to an overexploited joke, and build a narrative around the conversations the doctor and patient have. She also tries to get rid of the stigma surrounding therapists. (In parts, the film did look like an overlong advertisement for therapists. I counted at least four instances where we are told that it's okay to sometimes see them.) But the problem here is Shinde’s forced dialogue that tries really hard to be free-flowing while also trying to sound profound, often failing in this regard. Its conscious, self-congratulatory tone creates a barrier between us and the characters. It goes on endlessly without purpose, without saying anything even when the characters are constantly speaking. When Jug gives an example of trying out many chairs before settling for the best one to analogise Kaira’s failure of finding the right guy, it comes across as stale. It’s the sort of theory that doesn’t work in a film anymore only because it’s hackneyed. But Dear Zindagi loves it.

Image credits: www.indianexpress.com

After a while, the pattern became clear: One life lesson per session. While Kaira looks forward to it, we don’t share her eagerness. These sessions are sermons where anecdotes are shared and the past is brought up. There is a nod to Good Will Hunting and even a really tiny one to Analyze This. But the more inspired and original bits are drowned by the long stretches of dialogue before and after them. We crave for more plot, something to break this pattern. As we expect, Kaira’s nervousness is because of a memory that has tainted her childhood. Her vulnerability stems from it. These vital pieces of information, our key to understanding Kaira, come far too late and all at once. By then we are long past caring. Or maybe just I was. 

What made English Vinglish so charming was its sharp writing that, for the most part, avoided preachiness. Dear Zindagi openly embraces it. There are snatches of dialogue that are sharp, reminiscent of the kind of writing we saw in English Vinglish, but they vanish after the character of Dr. Jehangir Khan is introduced. With him comes superficiality. And superficiality has no place in a film that revolves around conversations. It ebbs the actors' charms. The performances are very good, but it’s a shame I could not warm up to them due to this.

Dear Zindagi is a hit-or-miss proposition, really. Those who can relate to the character of Kaira might appreciate what Shinde is trying to do here, but those who can’t might find it hard to adapt to the film’s didactic approach. It might prove to be effective for some considering the film is about a woman opening up to a therapist and is meant to be talky, but this sort of approach lacks shrewdness. Even in its final moments, Dr. Jehangir Khan wasn’t done with his life lessons. I lost count of the number of times I sighed out of boredom and just wished that they had gotten Goa’s characterisation right at least. 

(Not For Reproduction)

Review: Karan Johar’s “Ae Dil Hai Mushkil” is a buzzkill.

[Contains spoilers, many of them.]

Not being much of a fan of melodramas, I have always steered clear of Karan Johar’s films. My only brush with his cinema was his well-executed instalment in the anthology film, Bombay Talkies. I don’t know his “style,” but I am told he makes out-and-out melodramas about affluent and good-looking people having problems with each other. I believe the term often used to describe his films is “weepathon.” But there’s one characteristic about Johar the filmmaker that nobody can disagree with: He has a loyal audience, and he knows exactly what they want.

I don’t know how I wound up in the theatre to watch his latest, Ae Dil Hai Mushkil, but I was sincerely praying that I wouldn’t have to sit through a “weepathon.” In 21^st century terms, the film is about a guy who gets into the “friend zone,” panics, and then attempts to get out of “the zone.” Over the course of 158 minutes – which feel like eternity – it captures the entire process of getting in, panicking, and trying to get out. This is accompanied by gorgeous locations, actors who look impeccable in every frame, and a bunch of cameos. A picture wrapped up in gloss about people suffering beautifully is a gift to us to mark the festival of lights. It doesn’t sound too bad until we realise what we have got ourselves into. 

Ae Dil Hai Mushkil kicks off with Johar bringing a surprising lightness of touch to one overwritten scene after another, something he isn’t known for. Although he follows the spoilt-brat-bumping-into-a-woman-who-changes-his-life formula loyally, he’s ignoring his own approach to a story here. Melodrama is mostly kept at bay, but there are still cringeworthy moments of indulgence and theatricality. He tries too hard. The actors try too hard. We don’t get enough opportunities to understand the characters they portray. We have met the characters before: He’s the introverted and confused son, a man-child, of a wealthy father, and she’s the buoyant and carefree woman who gets excited by just about everything. We don't know what drives them, how they see the world. It’s hard to feel for such thinly written characters, and it’s important to feel for them because we know a love story will be blossoming between them soon. (We are, after all, watching a mainstream Hindi “Diwali” film.) The story just needed to breathe, to develop naturally, but Johar doesn’t let it. 

Through the first half, the film coasts along like an old train on rusty rails: It’s somehow doing what it is supposed to, but there is no telling when it will collapse. One misplaced detail, one little bad scene or a weak plot point and it’s going to go down. (The moment does arrive near the end.) It’s strangely thrilling to watch how it tries to balance itself with its excesses and innumerable flaws, because we sense a confidence here. It’s happy to be what it is, happy to be flawed. It’s delivering what most Hindi “Diwali” films try to deliver: Digestible fun and frolic. Some people, like me, cannot watch something as self-aware and extravagant as this. But we understand that we are not the audience Ae Dil Hai Mushkil was made for.

The love between them does not blossom. The guy does not get the girl. He tries to be content by keeping her in his life as his best friend. He gets into a relationship with a mature and lovely Urdu poetess who lives in Vienna (hmph?), and who, for the first time, accepts him as a man. This is his first mature relationship. There is a moment when the best friend meets the new girlfriend, and the girlfriend wants to know why the best friend never fell for him. The best friend replies that she got a baby in a pram, not the mature person the girlfriend got. We inexplicably get the feeling that this exchange was supposed to be the film’s crowning moment. A man’s soul mate and his dream woman are sitting across each other and talking about him. The dream woman is curious; the soul mate, full of feeling. This moment could have been melancholic for the sake of cinema, but, thanks to its awkward execution, it is reduced to a sad little joke. 

Finally, a sudden – and terrible – “plot twist” in the third act crumbles the film. At least till that point the film was managing to keep itself from coming apart. From then on, I didn’t stop cringing till the lights came back on. There is absolutely no justification given for its inclusion except that perhaps we hadn’t cried enough. It comes across as Johar’s last-ditch attempt to make us cry. We still don’t. It just doesn’t work.

I discovered a way to analyse how different I am from the film’s target audience while watching the film in the theatre. A huge group of forty-somethings had occupied the row behind mine, and they laughed when the film wanted us to laugh, cried when it wanted us to cry. Rarely did we respond to it in the same way. I suppose it worked for them. Maybe I am just not cut out for Johar's cinema. 

(Not For Reproduction)

Review: Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury’s “Pink” is a solid film but leaves a lot to be desired.

[Might contain spoilers, many of them.]

Reviewing a film like Pink can be tricky. It touches upon an issue so alarming you want to applaud it for doing so in a mainstream Hindi film. What it wants to say is absolutely essential and relevant and we must listen. And yet, how much you end up liking it depends largely on how you like your courtroom dramas, not how noble its intentions are. I like them to be understated. I would prefer if things weren’t spelt out for me. I enjoy the opaqueness. Hindi cinema has rarely produced such courtroom dramas, but I digress. 

Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury’s Pink isn’t one, but it doesn’t aspire to be one either. In fact, it wants to make its points heard loud and clear at the cost of subtlety. It does manage to do that with some anger and some theatricality – the two are rarely part of the same scene – but it leaves a lot to be desired. 

In the opening minutes, the setup is established neatly and with a considerable amount of mystery. Three girls return to the Delhi flat they share in silence, and there is an uneasiness about the way they go about doing everyday things. In another part of the city, a guy bleeding profusely through a gash above his left eyebrow is brought to a hospital by his friends. As the film progresses, a few more details emerge. One of the girls was the reason he almost lost an eye to the injury. There are conversations about forgetting what happened and moving on, but the men are not willing to let things be. They want an apology. There is open intimidation between the two parties and then a flagrant attack.

Chowdhury seems to be in complete control of the film till this point, allowing us enough details to work out what happened for ourselves. We gauge the power on both sides. We know the girls are underdogs, just ordinary workingwomen in Delhi. The men have political connections and come from money. They have no qualms about going to the law. And from how blatantly they molest one of the girls in a moving car in one of the film’s most horrifying sequences, we know the impending victory for the girls won’t be without difficulties. 

On their side is Deepak Sehgal, a retired lawyer who was once popular and who feels obligated to represent the helpless girls in court. He is also their creepy neighbour, a cranky old man who wears a pollution mask that makes him seem more savage than the shadows on his face. (I can almost see him turning up in the nightmares of the kids from the neighbourhood.) He’s one of the two men who spend their evenings peeking into the girls’ home without reason. Sehgal, we find out, is concerned; he feels an inexplicable connection to them. He wants them to be safe. The other man’s intentions are obscure. Why does he do that? Is he one of those regressive people who think independent women are acting “against Indian culture” by living alone together or does he feel entitled? Either way, it’s extremely worrying. It’s not surprising when he turns up later in the film and attests to the girls being of “questionable character.”

When Sehgal readies his guns to defend the helpless and frightened girls in court, Pink enters a familiar territory. We were introduced to brave women who stood by what they believed in, who fought back, but here they are reduced to a stuttering mess. Now they need a protector, someone vigilant, who can help them fight the world. Sehgal becomes that person for them. He becomes their father figure. In some of the scenes where the actual father of one of the girls turns up, we barely register his presence. The character doesn’t get enough screen time to earn our sympathy. 

But that is beside the point. Their transformation is unnerving. We desperately want them to stand up to the world, represented here by the prosecution lawyer who is regressive, strident and brutal in his approach to take them down. But they are right in the face of a society so oppressive that being brave can be foolish. There are exactly two moments when they do snap and stand up for themselves in the court of law, and Chowdhury milks those moments for their emotional power. The film’s chief arguments are presented with such bluntness that we are left a little dazed. They are that provocative. But, the heightened drama makes us cringe. The message is gotten across – or shouted across – at the exact moment when using subtlety would have made it a stronger scene, a stronger film. 

Pink isn’t without a couple of nice touches, most of them sketching the character of Sehgal for more clarity. In possibly the best scene of the film, the lawyer and one of the women are taking a stroll in the park when they cross some young men who recognise her from the scandal. She is quick to cover her face with her hood, but the lawyer silently removes it. He knows there’s truth on their side. She has nothing to hide. She has to learn to live with dignity before the trial is even over. It’s a superb, superb scene that reiterates his new role of a father figure to her. In another scene, as the antagonist takes the stand and is about to testify, Sehgal objects and unexpectedly reads out the man’s enviable educational qualifications to show him that he’s aware of them. And then, with a deadpan expression, he concludes with: “Could you please take your hand out of your pocket?” It’s like he was delivering a joke just to relish the punchline. We sure do. It’s cathartic. 

As the film wears on, however, it becomes increasingly predictable and winds up so neatly that I had a hard time accepting the ending. Any reasonable person would. The bad guy loses his mystique and starts acting like a regular villain in a Hindi film. He openly defies the defence lawyer in a critical scene, becoming the face of regression, and the defence lawyer finally gets the better of him like most heroes do in Hindi films. It’s a happy ending, that’s for sure. But why does a happy ending mean that the film must eschew realism? Maybe giving it a not-so-happy ending would have made a good case against the flimsy justice system, but Pink isn’t interested. Oh, well.

Finally, though, it leaves us with something to ponder over: If the film’s biggest flaw lies in its end credits, does it mean that it is its biggest triumph or failure? Triumph because many could have missed it. And failure because, well, many could have missed it. The sequence that the makers cleverly avoided showing, the one that formed the crux of the story, plays over the end credits before Amitabh Bachchan’s voice booms from the speakers with a poem. It’s almost as if the makers feared we had had trouble figuring out what happened or getting the film’s message. I don’t understand why it didn’t just end like it began: in silence. I don't understand the eagerness to not leave things a bit hazy. I just don’t.

(Not For Reproduction)

Review: Anurag Kashyap's "Raman Raghav 2.0" is bland.

[Might contain spoilers, a lot of them.]

There is a little detail from Home Alone that I recalled quite suddenly when I was watching Anurag Kashyap’s new film, a detail that gave me much amusement. It was insignificant, really, but I am puzzled by why it came to me out of the blue, and why it seemed to be relevant. In Home Alone, Kevin watches a grim and violent gangster film that terrifies him, and the film is titled – believe it or not – “Angels With Filthy Souls.” By the end of this film I couldn’t help but chuckle at the irony. Oh, how wonderfully the title would have worked here! But I digress.

Early in Raman Raghav 2.0, we see a madman who has just surrendered to the police describing one of the murders he committed. Quite suddenly – significative of his nature, perhaps – a casual story becomes a confession, and it indicates that he is not of sound mind. We are entranced by the acting on display, but here’s the problem: As much as we would have liked to soak it up, we cannot. The music is terribly distracting. This sequence needed silence. This actor needed to be left alone to do his job. The music accentuates the character’s unstable mind, our first glimpse of it, but it doesn’t need to. Take the music out of the sequence and we have a truly spectacular one, where the actor in question effortlessly displays his potential and his ability to take a standard scene and do something extraordinary with it for the umpteenth time.

And it doesn’t end here. Very little in the film works and it is such a shame. Kashyap is back in familiar territory here, working with a small cast and largely driving the plot using atmospherics, juxtaposing the murkiness of Mumbai’s underbelly against the murkiness of the human conscience. It is an idea that looks intriguing on paper. However, when it takes shape on the big screen, it becomes a muddled mess of man chasing man, of man killing man. It’s ugly. In his previous films, this sort of ugliness had a way of keeping us hooked. Gangs of Wasseypur found mood in its violence. Raman Raghav 2.0 tries to find a footing. It is a story of two men on either side of the law united by a penchant for violence, emotional and physical, but the violence here has little meaning. Most of it is carried out without emotion, like an everyday activity. Scene after scene of an iron rod being dragged around, of it splitting a skull open, of blood spilling does little to tell us more about the character perpetrating it except he’s a psychopath who does not seem to care. And scene after scene of the junkie policeman ill-treating his woman tells us that he’s perpetrating a violence that is not physical, that does not leave a bloody trail. It’s an interesting concept that needed more ironing out. Because Raman Raghav 2.0, miraculously, is flat. And “flat” is an adjective one would never have associated with a film helmed by Kashyap until now. At least I would not have done so.

One thing I have consistently admired about Kashyap’s cinema is how he manages to make his characters seem like people who have inhabited the world he creates for a long time. They seem born into it. It lends so much credibility to the film, lends it an energy that he uses so well. But I did not get the same feeling as I watched Raman Raghav 2.0. These characters never commanded my attention nor were successful in upholding it when they had it. The lines they uttered lacked the characteristic sharpness of his writing. Gone are the days when his ear for Mumbai’s street lingo (Satya; co-written with Saurabh Shukla) made us marvel. Gone are the days when the city’s colors and sounds (Black Friday) he captured made us sit up and take notice. He still has a wonderful ear for the lingo and an eye for locales, but Raman Raghav 2.0 is not a creature of the city. That the city does not play a major part in this film is its undoing. It really puzzled me why Kashyap, who captures Mumbai in all its grime and glory quite unlike his peers, didn’t use it more.

However, there are some redeemable moments. Kashyap really shows a flair for infusing a seemingly ordinary sequence with dark humor in a chapter titled “The Sister.” What if your psychotic sibling turns up at your doorstep one day after many years and asks for a little harmless help? The creative possibilities are endless. It could make for a tense story that allows the audience a sigh of relief in the end or a more casual one but with a terrific twist. Kashyap goes for both here. It’s a superbly controlled chapter, where each line carries weight and each expression adds to the tension. We are allowed a little relief before it bounces back with a bite. We recoil but not without a small chuckle. Now, that is some sequence! Nawazuddin Siddiqui is reliably brilliant here, bringing fury and menace to his role with aplomb. Vicky Kaushal and newcomer Sobhita Dhulipala do extremely well in their respective roles, adding layers to their drearily written characters. I was particularly impressed by a scene of theirs where he waves a gun at her, threatening her without bothering to mince words, evidently proud of his masculinity and his ability to not care for a fellow human being. His aggressiveness stems from his addiction to coke. In the middle of his threat, she casually answers a call from her mother, leaving him dazed and speechless. After the call ends, she returns to the conversation almost lazily with “So, what were you saying?” It’s a line that swiftly reduces him to a nobody. It underlines his vulnerability and hollowness. The masculinity is only a façade. We discover who the stronger person is here, and we don’t need someone who flexes their muscles for that.

Some months ago, I watched a 1997 Japanese horror-thriller called Cure, about a policeman with some domestic troubles on the trail of a most unusual serial killer. It was a slow and complex film that went places, explored many ideas and ended on a high. The patient viewer was rewarded. It did not explore the fascination a serial killer has for someone out to hunt him, but it did a splendid job of exploring his demented mind. The pattern of violence in that film had meaning. It was integral to the story. Its inclusion in the film wasn’t purely for shock value. Raman Raghav 2.0 is no Cure, but it had potential if only it wasn’t so repetitive. We know how it is going to end, and it disappoints us by taking the safest route there. And the safest route is usually the most predictable. Such a letdown.

(Not For Reproduction)