Filmi Geek

Jab We Met (2007)

Something I have learned about myself during my several years of watching Hindi movies is that I actually like pure love stories.  I'm content to watch a movie whose only plot point is how - not even whether - the principals will get together.  As long as the movie is well made, the characters enjoyable to spend time with, and the pairing adequately motivated, a romance alone can be enough to hold my interest.  Imtiaz Ali's Jab We Met ("when we met") is such a movie.  It doesn't have any cricket matches, or any goonda seeking redemption. It is largely unburdened by broader themes, like communalism, independence, or justice, that often distinguish masala films.  And yet, it's an engaging and sweet romance between two likeable people - and for that alone, a solidly entertaining movie. 

Aditya Kashyap (Shahid Kapoor) is a depressed, disaffected executive, the heir to his late father's huge but ailing industrialist empire.  In a suicidal funk, Aditya one day walks out of a business meeting and just keeps going.  He boards a train out of Bombay, with the seeming intention - to the extent he even has one - to leap to his death once the train hits speed in the countryside.  A kinetic young passenger, Geet (Kareena Kapoor), accosts him with a wall of chatter, and unwittingly saves his life.  Aditya escorts Geet to her family's home in Punjab, where her enormous, lively family takes him for her paramour.  But Geet confesses to Aditya that she intends to elope with a fellow she met in Shimla.  Aditya again hits the road with Geet, this time taking her to the Himachal Pradesh hill station Manali, to her Anshuman (Tarun Arora).  Along the way, Geet's vivacity touches Aditya - he falls in love, but willingly leaves her to a happy life with Anshuman.  Revived and inspired by Geet's moxie, he returns to his business and dives in with renewed vigor, setting the company back on track.  Soon, though, Aditya learns that things between Geet and Anjuman haven't gone as planned.  He sets off on another journey to find out what happened to Geet, and to help her set her life on a better course, as she helped him. 

Jab We Met draws on well-worn, even tired, romance elements.  There is nothing new in the story of a garrulous young woman wearing down the reserve of a long-suffering man.  The boisterous Punjabi family, full of strapping men equally eager to protect their womenfolk as to break into a bhangra, is another time-worn filmi trope.   Jab We Met does not exactly offer a fresh take on these themes, but it does present them with enough craft to make their very familiarity engaging, like cinematic comfort food.  

And Jab We Met is not entirely without originality.  Geet's uncompromising independence is a fairly uncommon feature in a Hindi romantic heroine.  I have seen its like before largely in movies that are close adaptations of western romances, like Pyar to hona hi tha, or Chori chori.  In those movies, the heroines have no family to speak of - their independence is wrought from necessity.  Geet, though, does have very a strong bond with her family.  She is on her own because she wants to be, because she feels a compelling drive to write her own destiny.  As she explains to Aditya in a thoughtful moment, Geet will be happy in life so long as she makes her own choices - even if she makes mistakes, they will be her mistakes.  This self-claimed autonomy gives Geet an unexpected depth in an otherwise by-the-numbers story, and is the greatest distinguishing strength of Jab We Met.  

A character like Geet presents Imtiaz Ali with a tough challenge. How do you make Geet's effusive (and often annoying) prattling get under Aditya's skin without also driving the audience to distraction?  It's guaranteed by the script that Aditya is eventually charmed by it, but the same cannot be said for the rest of us. Ali puts his actors to work walking this fine line, and while the balance ultimately comes out in the right place for me, I can't say with conviction that it would for everyone.  Kareena Kapoor seem a divisive star - I know many who positively hate her as an actor.  But she handles Geet well, toning it down when necessary to let some thoughtfulness or vulnerability show through.  Shahid Kapoor, too, proves his acting chops in key moments.  When Aditya leaves Geet in Manali with Anshuman, Shahid delivers a smile that is warm and sincere, and yet tinged with sadness.  It is a fairly subtle expression, and Shahid nails it.

As a final word, Jab We Met turns out to be a great movie to see as I get ready for my first trip to India in just a couple of weeks - its many road sequences deliver loads of lovely travel scenery that just make my heart race in anticipation.  From the Punjab to Himachal Pradesh and back again, there are soaring mountainscapes, idyllic fields, and supreme local color.  A highlight is Kareena's song "Yeh ishq hai", shot in Manali and packed with fascinating Tibetan dancers in gorgeous festival costumes.  

Aamir (2008)

आमिर

A mediocre thriller marred by even more contrived than average devices that generate lukewarm suspense at best, Aamir flirts unsatisfyingly with questions about such grand themes as destiny, martyrdom, and whether terrorism can ever be justified.  

Aamir Ali (Rajeev Khandelwal) returns to Mumbai after a time practicing medicine abroad.  He finds his family kidnapped by a mysterious man (Ghajraj Rao) who contacts him by phone.  The man sends him on missions across the city, and it quickly becomes clear to the terrified Aamir that the man is a Muslim extremist, and a terrorist - and that if Aamir doesn't do the man's bidding, his family will pay the price.

Despite being short - it clocks in at less than 95 minutes - Aamir is not a terribly taut movie.  The series of tasks that the mysterious man sets for Aamir feels like a video game quest - find this restaurant; wait for a phone call; pick up some dried fruit; visit this address; get a code; deliver the code to another address; pick up a suitcase; deliver the suitcase to yet another address.  These are silly, convoluted machinations full of unnecessary diversionary tactics.   They are contrived to add tension and suspense, but result chiefly in lengthy sequences in which Aamir wanders around Mumbai looking morose.

If Aamir has a redeeming feature, it is effective cinematography, and a camera that explores the grittiest alleys of Mumbai - ragged markets, fleabitten hotels, and fascinatingly filthy industrial quarters.  Aamir himself, the prodigal son, is obviously out of place here, with his expensive suit and French cuffs.  This is the mysterious man's point; the man mocks him for being repulsed by the way "his own people" (meaning Muslims) live in squalor in the city's darkest corners.  The man's reason for selecting Aamir seems to be to convince him that his duty lies with the "holy war" against the established order.  But the conspiracy to ensnare Aamir makes little sense - is a tremendous amount of overhead and risk to incur, just to convert this one guy to the cause.  The ultimate task set for Aamir could have been achieved much more simply by any member of the mysterious man's cohort.   It's true that watching movies often requires some suspension of disbelief, some willingness to accept a contrived plot in service of the story's aim.  But suspension of disbelief requires some quid pro quo.  Aamir fails to deliver on its half of that bargain.

 

3 Idiots (2009)

Raju Hirani movies are thoroughly modern and yet still express a uniquely Bollywood sensibility.  He does not shy away from melodrama or big unambiguous messages.  Yet he still puts entertainment first, with an attention to detail and characterization that yields truly loveable and fun-to-watch movies.  As Lage raho Munnabhai before it, 3 Idiots leaves you grinning like a dope even as you're thinking about ways to make the world a better place.  And there is no doubt that his approach resonates hugely - Lage raho Munnabhai was a massive hit, and the success of 3 Idiots eclipsed it.

When they were classmates in engineering college, Chatur (Omi Vaidya) and Rancho (Aamir Khan) were rivals.  Or, at least, Chatur was - competitive, materialistic, and rote, he chafed at Rancho's playful attitude and seat-of-the-pants, intuitive approach to engineering.  Now, 10 years later, Chatur gathers Rancho's best friends from their college days - Farhan (Madhavan) and Raju (Sharman Joshi) - and sets off on a quest across India to find Rancho.  Chatur wants only to gloat, to flaunt his success over Rancho, whom none of the men have heard from since school days.  Farhan and Raju, though, just want to find their cherished friend, whose influence was immeasurable.  As they travel, they flash back to memories of the school days together.  Rancho's compassion and thirst for hands-on learning put him at odds with the college's stern, tyrannical dean, Viru Sahastrabuddhe (Boman Irani), whom the students called "Virus".  It also won him the heart of Virus's daughter, a medical student named Pia (Kareena Kapoor).  But Rancho disappeared after graduation, and as his friends drive from Shimla to Ladakh to find him, remembering how he changed their lives, they learn a puzzling secret about his past.

I've been told by people who studied engineering in India that 3 Idiots perfectly captures the stresses of the pressure-cooker, rote-learning environment of colleges like the one it portrays.  It's easy to see why the movie strikes a note so close to the audience's heart; the boys' situations are readily relatable.  Farhan studies engineering to only to fulfill his parents' expectations - his own dream is wildlife photography, an ambition that his father values not at all.  Raju's desire to succeed at engineering is more sincere, but he places on himself the great burden of rescuing his family from crushing poverty.  And who doesn't remember an irritating helium-handed brown-noser like Chatur from our own days in school? 

On top of these relatable themes, the movie is full of laughs that run the gamut from fart jokes to clever linguistic humor (as there also was in the Munnabhai movies). The most prominent example is Chatur's memorized speech in shuddh Hindi - Rancho tampers with the speech, and the unsuspecting Chatur pompously delivers an outlandishly bawdy oration before the whole school.  (The point is to illustrate the pitfalls of rote learning, but it also exposes a much-needed, humanizing flaw in the otherwise godlike Rancho's character - that humiliating others is acceptable to him so long as it furthers his principles.)  But there are subtler plays on language as well, such as a cross-linguistic play on suffer/safar (the latter meaning "journey"). 

The language play is just one aspect of the terrific level of detail in this tightly crafted film.  Other nice touches include Virus's introductory speech to the students, which "Millimeter," the young boy who runs errands for pocket change, recites verbatim.  Another is that Raju's poor urban family is shown in black & white, a wink to the echos of 1950s-filminess of their situation.  There are too many more to mention. 

It feels nitpicky to point out flaws in such a well-crafted movie.  Still, there are a few.  One that gets under my skin just a little is that the story is overwhelmingly male.  There are female students in the college but they are just visual backdrop - none has so much as a line of dialogue.  Pia is a smart, level-headed medical student, but her only story arc is deciding which man she should marry.  Nevertheless, no movie can be about everyone, and so it's a forgivably small irritation for me. 

The movie's overarching message, too, is delivered with a cudgel, even by filmi and standards.  One student committing suicide would have been enough to convey the toxicity and destructiveness of the college environment - but the movie doesn't stop there.  Instead, there is one suicide, a plot reference to another earlier suicide, and a suicide attempt by a major character.

Yet the preachiness - along with a few extremely filmi, over-the-top plot twists - is forgivable, even charming, in such a good movie overall, especially with the loveable performances of all the actors.  The naturalness of these (except for Irani, exercises his typical wonderful broad comic physicality) tends to offset the extreme aspects of the story, tempering the shrillness of the melodramatic turns.  The result is a movie firmly grounded in Bollywood's melodramatic roots, yet offering natural, breathing characters who are relatable and modern.  And the twist at the movie's end is so marvelous and satisfying that anything less than perfect about what went before is readily forgiven.

Mixed Doubles (2006)

Hindi movies do a lot of things very well, but frank investigations of mature sexual relationships aren't usually considered to be one of those things.  It's a difficult subject for any movie - in any language - to handle well, with the right mixture of humor, sensitivity, and sexiness.  Rajat Kapoor's Mixed Doubles, despite choosing the absurdly sensational device of spouse-swapping as its point of departure, manages reasonably well.

Malti (Konkona Sen Sharma) and Sunil (Ranvir Shorey) have been married for ten years, and they are content in their domesticity - but their sex life has gone to sleep.  Malti feels frisky, but Sunil isn't interested.  Sunil is troubled by his absent libido, but unsure how to spark it - until a boastful friend plants the idea of spouse-swapping in Sunil's mind.  Sunil becomes obsessed with the idea, and through advertisements placed in the back of salacious magazines, discovers a willing couple, Vinod (Rajat Kapoor) and Kalpana (Koel Purie).  But Sunil has to convince Malti to go along with the plan.  And even if he can wrangle a way to do that, there's the matter of the fateful night itself, and the consequences for Sunil and Malti's marriage.

This plot is a minefield, in which a misstep could cause an explosion of bad taste or juvenile tittering.  For the most part, though, Mixed Doubles hits the right notes.  Its portrayal of Sunil and Malti's marriage is natural and believable enough to balance out the squirmy gratuitousness of the notion of spouse-swapping.  It's wonderful - not to mention, a refreshing twist on the steretypical bed-death scenario - that Malti is a mature, faithful wife with a healthy sexual appetite.  And, of course, the performances are excellent - especially Konkona Sen Sharma, whose mixture of concern, indignation, disgust, and love is just pitch-perfect.  

Most of the movie's laughs are of the awkward variety, where the audience laughs because of character's discomfort.  I am not usually a fan of this brand of comedy - The Office is the canonical example, a show that I know is good but that I simply cannot watch.  Here, though, it works, as a source both of comedy and of pathos.  There is something ineffably sympathetic in Sunil's irrational obsession with the spouse-swapping scheme; I can identify with his restless pursuit of an outrageously bad idea.  Ranvir Shorey's confused everyman performance helps keep him sympathetic - up to a point.  Indeed, the deception with which Sunil convinces Malti to accede to the plan is the movie's only real wrong note. 

Sunil's maladroit encounter with the bizarrely fascinating Kalpana is another source of awkward humor.  Kalpana is an extremely irritating character, childish and impulsive, a caricature of a Bohemian free spirit - but also, at least to me, wildly physically appealing, and that juxtaposition is oddly engaging.  Her husband Vinod is bland and formal by comparison.

The ending of Mixed Doubles doesn't offer much in the way of resolution, but that probably makes for a better film than any attempt to wrap the extreme emotions of Sunil and Malti's mutual misfires into a too-tidy package.  Each of them has deceived and deeply wounded the other, and the damage of that is just too heavy to try to fix in one movie.  The final scenes offer a gentle settling back into the quotidian domestic routine, suggesting that a peaceful resolution is possible for them, even if it hasn't yet happened by the time the credits roll. 

Welcome to Sajjanpur (2008)

Shyam Benegal's tales of village life are mostly tense, dense, gritty affairs.  Welcome to Sajjanpur, though, is none of the above.  Though not without substance or statement, the movie is light for the most part, and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny.  Neither is it a wry, dry humor like Benegal's Mandi. It is jaunty, airy, even self-consciously silly - the sort of film where characters have theme melodies that chime as they strut onto the screen. 

Mahadev (Shreyas Talpade) longs to write novels, but to make ends meet he charges a small fee to write letters for the largely illiterate residents of his village, Sajjanpur.  It seems a simple enough job, yet it lands him in the middle of several sticky situations.  A local thug Ramsingh (Yashpal Sharma) uses Mahadev's services to manipulate local politics to favor his wife's bid for village head.  Her opponent in the election, the hijra Munnibai (Ravi Jhankal) hires Mahadev to write a catchy campaign song - and also to write to the state government for protection when Ramsingh threatens her.   A superstitious mother (Ila Arun) has him write to her brother as she schemes to break a curse against her ill-starred daughter Bindiya (Divya Dutta) by marrying her to a dog - against the modern, sensible Bindiya's wishes.  And Mahadev's childhood sweetheart Kamla (Amrita Rao), now grown and married, engages him to write to her husband, who is working in Bombay.  Mahadev, attracted to Kamla, tailors the letters in hopes of driving a wedge between them and winning Kamla's heart.

The best thing about Welcome to Sajjanpur is Shreyas Talpade, whose performance is comic, physical, and likeable.  Many movies tell stories in which terrible things happen to loveable people.  Mahadev, by contrast, is a loveable person who does a reprehensible thing - and it speaks to both Benegal's and Talpade's own deft touch that Mahadev remains so darn cute even when you want to smack him upside the head for his wrong-headed attempts to sour Kamla's marriage.

Backing up Talpade is the colorful parade of side characters, also all perfectly cast and rendered.  Welcome to Sajjanpur is far from the first movie to provide a series of village vignettes or a pastiche of village archetypes, but I never tire of seeing such stories when they are as well-executed as this.  Ila Arun fills the screen in her appearances with a performance that is loud, and physical - she seems to never stop talking and her scenes are incredibly funny.  After just a few lines, Divya Dutta as the scowling, scolding Bindiya had me wanting to see a whole movie about her.  Other characters add more hues, as well as more comic situations for Talpade to work for all they are worth - like the peculiar snake-charmer (Daya Shankar Pandey) who keeps offering virility potions in payment to a very uncomfortable Mahadev.  The weak link in this bustle of villagers is, unfortunately, Amrita Rao, whose demure, rural mannerisms never quite stop feeling affected.  

Despite all the levity, Welcome to Sajjanpur is grounded - or, arguably, burdened - by a number of polticial statements.  Indeed, you can play "Shyam Benegal bingo" while watching it, checking off the social issues it systematically touches - anti-Muslim prejudice; corruption in the election process; the effect of big-business development on rural life; various traditions surrounding the rights and treatment of women, especially with regard to marriage; and polilical enfranchisement of marginalized communities, embodied in this case by the hijra leader Munnibai.  I never quite know what to make of hijras in the movies, largely because of my near-complete ignorance of them and their standing in different quarters of Indian society.  Sometimes they are portrayed as vile, sometimes as pitiable; Benegal here walks a fine line between these two, eventually landing firmly on the side of respecting them both as human beings and as a political force. 

The film's ending puts a puzzling twist on the notion that life is stranger than fiction, and muddies the social message a little by pulling a switcheroo, where one side character's happy ending turns tragic, and another character's tragic death is undone.  Perhaps Benegal is saying that it's not the destination that matters so much as the journey; that regardless of whether these specific individuals live or die, the social issues raised by their stories remain real and meaningful. 

 

Yashpal SharmaYash

Chori chori (2003)

चोरी चोरी

Like another Ajay Devgan vehicle, Pyar to hona hi tha, Chori chori ("stealthily, secretly") serves up a pretend romance that blossoms into a real one.  Also like Pyar to honi hi tha, Chori chori is based upon a mid-rate Hollywood rom-com that I never saw (in this case, Housesitter). For me, though, Chori chori is a sllightly better and more memorable movie, thanks to the wonderful Rani Mukherjee's portrayal of a surprisingly interesting character.

Khushi (Rani Mukherjee) lives on her own in Delhi.  She nominally works in a hotel kitchen, but finds excuses to skip work more often than she shows up.  Meanwhile Ranbir (Ajay Devgan) dreams of building a sprawling mountain home in Shimla for his childhood love Pooja (Sonali Bendre), but Pooja rejects him.  Khushi meets a brooding, depressed Ranbir when he attends a party at her hotel, and she learns of his planned and half-built dream-house.  When her boss finally tires of her indolence and she loses her Delhi apartment, Khushi heads to Shimla and cons her way into everything from food to furniture by pretending to be Ranbir's betrothed, charming his family.  Ranbir discovers the deception and is enraged at first - but Khushi convinces him that playing up the charade will win him Pooja for good.  So, they carry on, arranging opportunities to make Pooja jealous. But it isn't long before the pretense turns to real romance.

One unusual aspect of Chori chori is that its heroine Khushi lives alone in a big city.  (Almost needless to say, just like the orphan NRI heroine of Pyar to hona hi tha, Khushi owes her independence to the Hollywood origin of the storyline.)   Unfettered by a large, protective family the way most Hindi film heroines are, Khushi has the freedom to take off for Shimla when the mood strikes her.  But it also frees her to fabricate stories about her past and her situation with a fluidity that is oddly touching; she's very effective at conning people because there are few bothersome truths to interfere with the smoothly flowing lies.  

The result is a poignancy to Khushi's character - and Rani Mukherjee's performance - that is what ultimately makes Chori chori a better movie than Pyar to hona hi tha.  She is adorably charming - and downright funny - as she talks her way into and out of trouble, as in a standout scene where she unknowingly introduces herself as Mrs. Ranbir Malhotra to Ranbir's father (Kulbushan Kharbanda).  Yet there is a longing wistfulness in her tale-spinning, as if she believes the charade is as close as she can get to real happiness.  This yearning often rises to the surface when she is alone, confiding to her stuffed toy monkey.  Khushi's preternatural perkiness is tempered by these moments of melancholy. 

Compared to Khushi's unexpected depth, Ajay Devgan is serviceable, but flat - Ranbir's arc isn't very interesting, and he mostly broods his way through the film.  This is not really a complaint, though, as his blandness provides a suitable canvas for Rani's show.  Sonali Bendre is equally bland as the third vertex of the love triangle, but she is little more than a plot device that motivates the Khushi and Ranbir's romantic charade.  There are some nice songs, notably "Mehndi na mujhko lagake," and "Tu mere samne" - at the end of the latter, Khushi keeps dancing with abandon for a few moments after the song ends, which is both an adorable bit of comedy, and a hinting at the bleed between make-believe and reality that is beginning the in relationship between Khushi and Ranbir.

 

 

Chak de India (2007)

चक दे इंडिया

It's not a deep insight to observe that Yash Raj films are full of heavy-handed delivery and emotional manipulation.  And my judgments of them sometimes turn on whether I'm in the zone when I watch them - whether I happen at that moment to be in the right frame of mind.  I was squarely in the zone when I watched Dil bole hadippa for the first time, and I adored it. For Chak de India ("Let's go, India") - perhaps through no fault of the film's - I was not.  Despite some eye-rolling at its ham-fisted buffeting of patriotic and feminist messages, though, I still found plenty to enjoy, even if I was several years late to the game of writing about this surprise blockbuster film.

Kabir Khan (Shah Rukh Khan) is a star of field hockey and captain of the men's national team.  After his missed shot costs his team the World Cup, Kabir, a Muslim, is rumored to have thrown the match in collusion with the opposing Pakistani team.  He is thrown into disgrace and run out of town on a rail.  Seven years later, he volunteers to coach a ragtag women's team that no one in the nation's sports administration takes seriously.  Kabir faces the formidable challenge of uniting a disparate bunch of young women from all over the country and leading them to victory on the international stage. 

Chak de India at times feels like an extended clown-car gag - how many cliches can we pack into one film?  Disgraced coach seeks redemption on the field?  Check.  Doling out slices of humble pie to arrogant, indolent players?  Check.  Male athletes who refuse to respect women's athletic competition?  Check.  Also in the mix is a near-constant stream of ham-handed nods to Indian diversity.  There is a burly hot-headed Punjabi girl (Tanya Abrol), a feisty little village girl (Chitrashi Rawat), an elephant-riding dark-skinned southerner who doesn't speak a word of Hindi (Nisha Nair), and a girl with east Asian features (Masochon Zimik) whose only significant line is a complaint about "being treated like a foreigner in your own country".  And then there are the speeches - oh the patriotic speeches - that pour out of Shah Rukh Khan's quivering lips at every turn.  Throw in the foregone conclusion of all sports films, and it's hard for me to resist the temptation to adapt Geoff Pullum's delightful zing of Dan Brown - to call this film formulaic is an insult to the beauty and diversity of formulae.

Yet with all of those strikes against it, Chak de India manages to be a remarkably entertaining and engaging movie.  Shah Rukh Khan broods and bristles as Kabir, and its the right role for his delivery, which always errs on the side of pontification even when that style less appropriate than it is here. The hockey action is well-shot and exciting, if highly improbable.  And the team is adorable and easy to root for.  Despite slotting neatly into their diversity campaign pigeon-holes, the players come across with strong and memorable individual personalities - they are more than a pile of tokens.  This is largely because some of them, at least, are given story arcs of their own.  Particularly notable among these are those of the three senior players.  Bindiya (Shilpa Shukla) stubbornly refuses to play if she's not given her favorite position, and gets such a poor read on what makes Kabir tick that she offers him sexual favors if he'll name her team captain.  The married Vidya (Vidya Malvade) has to defy the wishes of her husband and father-in-law, who expect her to retire from competition and be a proper wife.  And Preeti (Sagarika Ghatge) is engaged to a rising cricket star (Vivan Bhatena) who thinks he's God's gift, and tells Preeti that cricket is "important," while field hockey is "just a game." 

All of these stories are engaging and handled quite well, and give the film an undeniable girl-power flavor that helps elevate Chak de India above the mass of sports-film and patriotic-film cliches that might otherwise drown it.   Unfortunately the movie undermines this quality just a little at its end, by relegating the resolution of the girls' stories to abrupt bites underneath the rolling closing credits, reminding the viewer that Chak de India is first and foremost A Movie About A Man; the girls' arcs are just incidental to his redemption.

Also mildly frustrating is that after all the film's emphasis on teamwork (as obvious allegory for national unity, of course), the ultimate match is decided on penalty shots. But that is a nitpick; viewed merely as a feel-good tale about a likeable bunch of unlikely heroes - from the smallest player right on up to Kabir - coming together for the glory of their homeland, defeating both prejudice and enormous unfavorable odds, Chak de India more than delivers. 

 

 

Khosla ka ghosla (2006)

खोसला का घोसला

What do you do when someone steals your dream - not to mention your life savings - out from under your nose?  Dibakar Banerjee's Khosla ka ghosla ("Khosla's nest") pits a family against one such thieving scoundrel, and over that backdrop delivers an affectionate take on the complex of relationships between a father and his grown son.  

Khosla (Anupam Kher) has worked hard for decades, saving up for his dream - a plot where he plans to build a grand house for his entire family.  When the family visits their new property, though, they find that a wealthy developer named Khurana (Boman Irani) has claimed it for himself.  Khurana, ever gracious, is willing to sell Khosla the property - for just half of what Khosla has already paid for it!  Khosla tries the available legal channels to assert his ownership - but the police, lawyers, and even charities just want to shave their share off the deal, rather than saving Khosla from the extortionate demand. Khosla's older son Bunty (Ranvir Shorey) turns to strong-arm tactics, without making much headway.  Finally Khosla's younger son, Cherry (Parvin Dabas), comes up with a plan.  Cherry's relationship with his father is strained to say the least - but Cherry is determined to help his father one last time before he takes off on his planned emigration to the US.  So with the help of a small-time con man (Vinay Pathak), Cherry's friend and frustrated paramour Meghna (Tara Sharma), and Meghna's theater troupe led by her mentor Bapu (Navin Nischol), Cherry plans a con of a lifetime, hoping to beat Khurana at his own game.

While watching Khosla ka ghosla I couldn't help but compare it to Rocket Singh: Salesman of the Year, another recent film that looks at what happens when nice people find themselves treading the waters of Indian corruption.  I criticized that film for its "two wrongs make a right" message.  But as the same thoughts cropped up during Khosla ka ghosla, I realized that as an outsider, I just don't have the right perspective to judge this sort of movie theme.  If you live with the daily effects of corruption on a small and large scale, in both public and private spheres, it might be very satisfying indeed to root for a hero who beats that corruption by becoming just as corrupt and beating the swindlers at their own game.  It leaves an uncomfortable taste in my mouth - but I am not the target audience. And unlike the loveably naive gang in Rocket Singh, who never seemed quite to understand that their actions were wrong, many of the characters in Khosla ka ghosla have serious qualms about their blatantly unethical scheme.  That makes the story a little easier to swallow, even if that thread is dropped by film's end.

At any rate, Khosla ka ghosla is only half about corruption - it is also about family, and it nails that theme with perfect pitch.  Khosla's relationship with Cherry is the real sleeper star of this movie.  Cherry is proper, uptight, and straight-laced, yet he rebels more stridently than his hapless older brother.  And his attempts at asserting autonomy - his desire to change his name, his secret arrangements to emigrate - leave Khosla bewildered and hurt.  Meanwhile Cherry's sudden obsession with recovering the stolen property for Khosla seems almost a misguided gesture; by the time the scheme underway, Khosla himself is all but resigned to the loss, and is disappointed at Cherry's imminent departure.  Father and son seem doomed to miss the mark in their efforts to reach out to one another, even when their hearts are in the right place.

The relationship between parents and their grown children is not an uncommon theme in Hindi films, of course; with the prevalence of joint households, Indian adults have far more quotidian interaction with their parents than I or most of my US contemporaries.   Still, Khosla ka ghosla is an unusual look at this theme, because its tension hangs on what's inside hearts and heads, rather than on more common hooks like parental disapproval of lifestyle choices or romantic partners.  Anupam Kher is an actor of unlimited depth, and his performance as Khosla is tender and moving.  The young actors hold their own as well; Parvin Dabas is especially endearing in his rendering of the tense, slightly discombobulated Cherry. 

 

Rocket Singh: Salesman of the Year (2009)

I am often much harder on films that have tremendous potential and take a few missteps, than I am on films that aim lower and squarely hit the mark.  There is something particularly maddening about a good film that you just feel could have been truly extraordinary if something about it had been handled just a little differently.  I'm sorry to say that for me, Rocket Singh:  Salesman of the Year is one such film.  

Harpreet Singh Bedi (Ranbir Kapoor), known to his friends as HP, has graduated - but just barely.  He's not a terribly ambitious fellow but he does have a plan to make himself a good living:  he's going to be a salesman, and he lands a position with AYS, a computer firm.  Soon, though, HP sees the dark side of AYS, when he encounters a customer who expects a hefty kickback in exchange for signing a deal.  HP questions this approach to business, angering his boss Nitin (Naveen Kaushik) and the company director Puri (Manish Chaudhary), who cut off his access to sales leads and turn his coworkers against him.  Desperate to prove himself, HP hatches a scheme to work behind his AYS bosses' backs to provide better value and superior service to the customers that AYS fleeces and neglects.  With the help of an unlikely alliance of AYS employees, HP launches the Rocket Sales Corporation - named for the paper airplanes that his disgruntled colleagues continuously toss at his desk - and takes AYS on in the field, all the while hoping he won't get caught back at the office.   

The elephant in the room during Rocket Singh is that his plan is flagrantly illegal and unethical.  Instead of leaving AYS and starting his own company, HP and his team work out of AYS offices, piggy-backing on AYS infrastructure like office space, telephone services, and supplies.  HP may be outraged at the high rates that AYS charges its customers, but the only reason he can afford to dramatically undercut them is that he steals from them right and left.  Without that pesky overhead, the real-world costs of doing business, HP gets to undersell AYS while using the company's own infrastructure to grab market share at AYS's expense.  HP's righteous indignation at AYS's corruption is substantially eroded by his own unethical approach, and his unilateral pledge to pay back the costs of all these stolen services just isn't enough to shore up his moral high horse. 

This flaw in HP's character might be chalked up to the naivete of youth; but, unfortunately, it damages an otherwise charming film and squanders Ranbir Kapoor's very believable performance.  Ranbir Kapoor here harnesses a more restrained and believable version of the manic energy that bounced him around the screen in Saawariya, the only other film of his I've seen at this writing.  The result is a character I very much wanted to root for; the story's interference with that sympathy was frustrating, bobbing up in my mind at inconvenient moments. 

Even so, Rocket Singh is a very well-made film with some unusual strengths. The casting of lesser-known or unexpected actors (such as perennial masala villain Prem Chopra as HP's cuddly grandpa) helps to lend the film an immersive realism that is unusual in the land of Yash Raj; the characters (for the most part) are more individuals, and less totems or archetypes.  AYS's office manager Koena (Gauhar Khan) - one of HP's partners in crime - is particularly delicious; a smart, ambitious woman without any romantic notes in her story arc, she is the sort of character who is a rare treat in the cinema of any country. Even the immature, horny technician Giri (D. Santosh) is rendered as something more loveable than a pure walking stereotype of the porn-ogling computer nerd.

The AYS sales office is a sort of slightly cuter version of Glengarry Glen Ross, embodying every cringe-inducing stereotype of the sales environment in all its extremes of competitiveness and cruelty.  Sexism is present and prevalent, whether in Nitin's persistent refusal to grant Koena a much-deserved promotion, or in the resigned glances shot between Koena and the office's one female sales agent when Puri drops crude comments.  Other prejudices are exposed as well, as when HP remarks to Koena that the others should not have underestimated "me the Sardar and you the item girl."  In letting such issues be prevalent without letting them take over the story, Rocket Singh avoids becoming a heavy-handed message piece. 

In short, Rocket Singh is flawed over all, but its shining moments are bright and frequent enough that it amply rewards watching, despite the missteps.   I only wish it had been scripted with just a little bit more care - it could have been not just a cute afternoon's timepass, but instead something truly memorable.

The Blue Umbrella (2005)

Like his film Makdee, Vishal Bhardwaj's The Blue Umbrella is a story about a child, though it is not as explicitly a children's story as that wonderful fable.  Nor is it as decidedly a grown-up story as his Shakespeare adaptations Omkara or Maqbool.  However one characterizes this film, though, one thing is certain - I need to see more Vishal Bhardwaj films.  

In a picturesque town in the mountain state of Himachal Pradesh lives a little girl named Biniya (Shreya Sharma).  Biniya does what most little girls do - runs around and plays with the other children, and bargains for candy and treats with the keeper of the local snack stand, Nandu (Pankaj Kapur).  One day, on the mountainside outside the village, Biniya finds a beautiful umbrella, and is entranced by its sky-blue watercolors, delicate papery canopy, its bamboo ribs and sensuous ruffles.  When the Japanese tourist to whom it belongs finds her, Biniya trades her precious good luck charm - a bear claw - for the umbrella, and brings the marvelous artifact back to the village. 

There, Biniya becomes the center of all attention, as children and adults alike are fascinated by the umbrella.  Nandu covets it, and offers her all the toffees and biscuits she can eat in exchange for it - but Biniya isn't selling.  Then one day Biniya's heart breaks - she turns her back on the umbrella for a few short moments, and it vanishes.  When Nandu obtains a nearly identical umbrella - his is red - from a foreign seller, Biniya vibrates with rageful suspicion, and determines to prove that Nandu is a thief. 

There are so many marvelous touches in this short little film that it's difficult to single out a few without feeling guilty for giving others short shrift.  It is visually stunning, with a rich palate and carefully-constructed shots that deliver beauty and symbolism in equal parts.  In one scene, Biniya brandishes the umbrella like a kung-fu master to protect her older brother - himself a powerful champion wrestler - from a coiling cobra.  In another of the many lovely scenes, Nandu tries, without success, to bribe Biniya with a bunch of balloons.  The brightly colored balloons float slowly away like Nandu's dreams as he stands, small and beige and still, before the grey backdrop of a rocky waterfall. 

Indeed, Bhardwaj uses the picturesque village and its breathtaking natural surroundings to great effect, creating a dreamlike or fable-like quality even while presenting day to day village life in charming and engaging vignettes throughout the story. And while most of the characters are not fleshed out - the 90-minute running time does not afford very much deep character development - Nandu and Biniya are, as much through expressive silences as through any dialogue.  In this way, the film bears some similarity to Bhardwaj's delicious Makdee, presenting village life with some vividness, along with the maturation of a child's spirit in opposition to a stubborn and cruel adult.  Unlike the witch in Makdee, though, Nandu has some nuance of his own.  Sour as the pickles he relishes, this bitter little man is nevertheless moved to poetry by the beauty of the umbrella, which he rhapsodizes in loving terms.

The film has some themes in common with The Gods Must Be Crazy and other stories of that ilk, in which a mysterious and desirable object of foreign origin invades a peaceful, tightly knit community and breeds unrest and mistrust among its residents.  The umbrella surely carries the allegorical force of the variety of outside influences that exert themselves on Indian village life, both foreign influences and those from other sectors of Indian society.  And in Biniya's village, where the villagers routinely entertain tourists (and sometimes even con them), there is enough resilience that in the end, the umbrella's upsetting influence can be calmed, and the umbrella integrated into the village's peaceful fabric, as Nandu changes the name of his snack stand from his surname "Khatri stall" to "Chatri stall" (umbrella stall).