Filmi Geek

Ishqiya (2010)

इश्क़िया

Any movie that opens with a languid, warmly-lit amble along the rolling curves of the supine body of Vidya Balan is a movie I am going to like.  A lot.  When I mentioned I was watching Ishqiya, several friends expressed surprise that I hadn't yet seen it.  ("That is basically inconceivable," said Beth.)  For what it's worth, I do have an excuse. I was a late boarder on the Vidya train; I did not realize that this mind-stompingly gorgeous woman was the love of my life until halfway through my first viewing of Kahaani just about a year ago.  I have been playing catch-up - but pacing myself - ever since. Having said that, in Ishqiya, Vidya is about as ohmigodHOT as a woman can be without violating several multilateral treaties.

Indeed, I don't know how to write about this movie without dissolving into a gelatinous heap of gush.  And not just for Vidya, either.  Ishqiya's director, Abhishek Chaubey, studied at the knee of Vishal Bhardwaj (who produced the film), and Bhardwaj's masterful influence is all over this striking, wry movie. Its tone is reminiscent of the most dry and funny vignettes of 7 Khoon Maaf.  Its narrative is less rangy than that of 7 Khoon Maaf, however, and therefore less lurchy.  Two of the dumbest criminals ever to cross a filmi screen, Khalujaan (Naseeruddin Shah) and his nephew Babban (Arshad Warsi), are in flight from their boss, Mushtaq (Salman Shahid), whom they have cheated out of some 25 lakhs.  The pair takes refuge in the home of Krishna (Vidya Balan), widow of their erstwhile business associate, the smuggler Vidyadhar Verma (Adil Hussain).  Both men fall for the quiet, intense Krishna, who hatches a plan to kidnap a local steel magnate KK Kakkad (Rajesh Sharma) for ransom.  But the kidnapping soon unravels and the men slowly realize that Krishna has manipulated all of them - Khalu, Babban, and even KK - for her own mysterious purposes. 

There is craft in every aspect of this Ishqiya. It is as beautifully shot as any Bhardwaj movie, and in the same warm, enveloping earth tones that can make a a movie as seductive for the eyes as lush caramel is on the tongue.  From the throaty reds of Krishna's sarees, to the damp brown clutter of the interior of her home, to the salted beige landscapes of the Uttar Pradesh countryside, every frame of this movie is almost tactile in its richness.  Bhardwaj's score, as his music usually does, adds texture and character, from the jaunty swagger of "Ibn-e-Batuta" to the sweet lilt of "Dil to bachha hai ji."

The characterizations are meticulously detailed  in both writing and performance. Khalujaan is philosophical and poetic, the brighter bulb of the two thieves, but not by a lot.  As he trims his beard, dyes his hair, dons handsome traditional clothes, and discusses the finer points of evergreen filmi songs with Krishna, Khalu projects the air of a man who does not necessarily want to shed the grit of his criminal life, but who wants to look as though he wants to shed it.  His love for Krishna is a touching mixture of passionate and avuncular; it's not clear exactly what relationship he wants to have with her, but it's clear that it's very loving.  Babban's style is more bombastic; his stupidity displays in rash, testosterone-driven bursts rather than Khalu's intellectual posing.  In one scene, Mushtaq and his men track down the pair when they run into Babban at a brothel in the town near Krishna's village; one has the impression that Mushtaq knows well that the most efficient way to find Babban in any city in the country is always to make a beeline for the nearest brothel. The performances of Naseeruddin Shah and Arshad Warsi as these not-so-clever medium-time crooks are pitch perfect, just the right mixture of grit and scene-chewing to be both endearing and eye-rolling.  It's hard not feel sorry for them when it becomes clear just how outclassed they are by Krishna, even when you facepalmed at their ill-considered antics just a few scenes before.

And then there is Vidya Balan, as smoldering, fierce, and sexy in this role as in any other.  (I considered doing this review in the style of my piece on The Dirty Picture - a debate between my analytic intellectual ego and my horny lesbian id - but my id did not have much to say beyond "Guh...."  A superbly executed sex scene had me wistfully craving an alternate universe in which I could be Arshad Warsi.)  But as gorgeous and fierce as Vidya is, there is a great deal of nuance to Krishna; the character is not merely a cartoon femme fatale with an eye for manipulable men.  Krishna begins the film as a loving wife, anxiously imploring Verma to give up the dangerous smuggler's life and turn himself in to the authorities.  Krishna's circumstances and what she has endured - not an inherent vicious streak or a flaw in  her nature - drive her to the bold and violent actions she takes as the film unfolds.  This is evident the first time she overtly betrays Khalu and Babban.  The men have gotten into a fight - mostly over her - while she waits in their getaway car with their kidnapping prey, the dazed and bound KK, lolling in the backseat.  Krishna hesitates nervously before taking the wheel and speeding away with their prize.  This is a woman with a plan, but not a woman so cold as to have no need to muster her courage before executing.  It is just one of a myriad finely wrought details that make Krishna - like everything else about Ishqiya - thoroughly compelling.

Kai po che (2013)

काई पो चे

It is not Kai po che's fault that I have begun to grow weary of movies about young men.   The persistent assumption in the movie industry (and not just in Bombay) is that stories about men are universal, while stories about women are niche.  As a result, audiences are inundated with the  former while the latter form rare, little-known exceptions.  (As I rehearsed this rant to a friend, she told me about Gul Panag's Turning 30, a movie I had not even heard of.  When even I am not familiar with a movie about young women, the marketing machinery has utterly failed.)  Even the likes of Zoya Akhtar seem resigned to the notion that movies about men are what people want to see.   And so as Kai po che's release approached, even as positive advance reviews came in, I found it hard to get excited.  Oh, boy, I thought, yet another story about young men.

Standing on its own, though, outside of that tiresome cultural context, Kai po che is a more than passably good film, thoroughly well-acted, if somewhat artlessly written.  The performances and characterizations of its three leads provide occasional truly sparkling moments embedded in a matrix of predictable cinematic emotional manipulation.  Part sports movie, part political movie, and part touching paean to the power of male friendship (in the way only Indian films can express it), Kai po che occasionally bows under the weight of cliché. By the time the characters are set forth and the story's foundation lain, it is apparent how the movie will unfold; it holds no surprises. But that isn't a terrible detriment.

Some of the characters are cartoonish stereotypes: the hothead with the heart of gold, the sweet-natured nerd, the smarmy politician.  The song sequence where the three boys careen through the countryside distinguishes their personalities in a most familiar movie shorthand, quoting from Rang de basanti (the granddaddy of modern movies about disaffected young men).  The impulsive Ishaan (Sushant Singh Rajput) bares his chest, flings his arms, and shouts at the universe, while the reticent Govind (Raj Kumar Yadav) needs to be coaxed and cajoled into leaping from a high wall into clear water below. 

Still, the movie's backdrop provides a compelling view of the grim upheavals, both natural and human-caused, that shattered Gujarat in the first few years of the 2000s.  Weaving historical events into a movie can be risky; it can sometimes be a cheaply manipulative attempt to lend gravitas to a story.  Here, though, it works well, adding a firm sense of place and context. The 2001 earthquake, the Godhra train burning, the ensuing riots all serve to keep the narrative from folding in on itself.  And there is a powerful visual contrast between the cramped, busy streets of Ahmedabad shown during the movie's first half, and the eerily deserted, curfew-quieted city shown in the incipient hours of the riots.

Two of Kai po che's three central characters are, in one sense, typical movie heroes, driven by strong, though different, ambitions.  Govind, studious and polite, harbors cautious, carefully planned dreams of succeeding at business.  Ishaan, the loose cannon of the bunch, wants to run a cricket academy and mine the local talent to train the next national superstar.  The third of Kai po che's tight-knit friends, Omi (Amit Sadh), is a fresh and unexpected detour from movie archetypes.  Unlike most movie heroes, Omi is not a strong personality.  A young man with no ambitions of his own, Omi follows the instructions of those he loves.  When Govind implores Omi to ask his uncle for a loan to finance the boys' fledgling business, Omi does so.  And when Omi's uncle, the powerful and slick politician Bittu (Manav Kaul), asks Omi to work for his party, Omi obliges him as well.  And yet despite this evidently weak will, Omi transforms most deeply of the three, traumatized to violence by the train massacre.  His arc is the most catastrophic; in the movie's climax, he is the one with the gun in his hand.  Omi is in that way the boldest, least by-the-numbers aspect of the entire film.  His arc is reminiscent of Aamir Khan's ice-candy man Dil Nawaz in Earth, who also suffers a tragic descent in the harsh fire of communal violence.  But Dil Nawaz was a powerful will both before and after his transformation.  Omi, contrary to movie convention, is not.  Both before and after, he bends in the prevailing winds, whether the hopeful breezes of his friends or the angry maelsrom of his uncle and his party comrades.

Kai po che takes political sides unambiguously.  Bittu's political party is closed and polarizing, framing the world in terms of "us and them" - Hindu and Muslim.   This is driven home with a cudgel when, in the aftermath of the earthquake, Bittu's party refuses humanitarian aid to the Muslim family of Ishaan's cricket protegé.   Later, it is Bittu and his cronies at the head of the riots, ignoring pleas for mercy in their thirst for Muslim blood. Bittu's and Omi's rage is not without some justification; they do, after all, lose close family senselessly in the train fire.  But this motivation happens off-screen, and in shorthand; the audience must use its own knowledge (or experience) of communal rage to fill in the blanks.  More delicate writing on this front could have made Kai po che a better movie. Bittu could  have been presented more sympathetically, instead of with the mustache-twirling smarminess that makes him seem untrustworthy from the outset.  This, in turn, would have made Omi's transformation more plausible and empathizable, and his friends' unreserved forgiveness of that transformation more understandable. 

And finally, there is the trouble with which I started this review.  The only female voice in Kai po che is Ishaan's sister Vidya (Amrita Puri).  She is present to sweetly seduce Govind, to complain about hating maths, and have a precipitously-timed pregnancy scare - in short, to be a girl.  How were women's dreams and lives shattered by the terrible earthquake, or by the spasms of communal hatred that ripped through Gujarat in those years?  Kai po che unfortunately takes no interest in those questions.  This doesn't make Kai po che a bad movie, but it does leave me an unsatisfied viewer.  While no one movie can be about everything, it would be nice if  so many movies were not about the same thing. 

 

Weaving historical events into a movie can be risky; it can sometimes be a cheaply manipulative attempt to lend gravitas to a story.  Here, though, it works.

Special 26 (2013)

स्पेशल छब्बीस

A good caper movie demands that you like the anti-heroes who are pulling off the heist.  A movie that gives you characters doing something morally reprehensible, and expects you to root for them to succeed, takes on the responsibility of convincing you to go soft on the perpetrators.  Special 26 almost meets this burden, but falls a few yards short.  The movie is slickly produced and displays a winking sense of satiric humor.  But it needs a more careful scripting hand, more attention to character and backstory, to elevate it to something especially memorable.  The cons are clever, but the film is soulless.

Special 26 makes some nods in the direction of exploring its characters' lives and motivations.  The characterization that works the best is that of P.K. Sharma (Anupam Kher), the oldest member of the group which drives investigators crazy by posing as government officials and confiscating cash and goods.  Driven by Anupam Kher's thoughtful and touching performance,  Sharma ping-pongs between anxiety and gutsiness.  He quails before each of the gang's capers, though he performs with confidence during them.  The thought of improvising worries him, and of getting caught even more so.  Sharma wants to retire, and when the film briefly visits his Punjab home for his eldest daughter's wedding, we see why:  He has a gorgeous family, a swarm of beautiful children and yet another on the way.  Sharma has reasons to pull off heist after heist, but he also has compelling reasons to hang up his spikes.  His conflict is portrayed sympathetically and with depth.

With respect to the rest of the gang, though - and to their nemesis, CBI Agent Wasim Khan (Manoj Bajpai) - the movie gives short shrift to this kind of motivation and backstory.  We are given peeks into their domestic life, but these raise more questions than they answer.  Joginder (Rajesh Sharma) lives in a crowded joint household with some elderly relatives.  And Iqbal (Kishor Kadam) is barely scraping together a middle-class existence; he and his wife share domestic chores because he can't afford a servant.  It is a mystery why either of these men live such humble lives.  The gang has pulled off 50 cons across the nation; what happened to all that money?

And then there is Ajay (Akshay Kumar), evidently the gang's leader, mastermind, and chief shot-caller. What Special 26 offers us of his motivation is his clandestine love affair with a literal girl next door, the sad-eyed  schoolteacher Priya (Kajal Aggarwal).  This storyline is a disaster; it nearly sinks the movie.  Akshay Kumar paired with a woman half his age is increasingly stomach-churning, and here there is simply no reason for it.  Even if Ajay has to have a love interest (there is nothing about the story that requires him to), she could be ten years older than Priya without any compromise to this facet of the story.  And whatever drives Ajay's criminal endeavors, it does not appear to be his love for her or any financial need on her part.  Indeed, despite the slow-motion cavorting that Ajay and Priya do in soft-focus ballads purporting to show us Ajay's tender, human side, Special 26 is woefully weak when it comes to painting his character.  When Priya asks him why he continues to carry off these cons, Ajay resorts to a time-worn chestnut of an answer:  It's all I know.  And that is all we get.

Special 26 is not a dreadful movie; it is entertaining enough while it is happening.  The cons, especially the climactic job, have a great deal of cleverness and guts to them.  The friendship between Ajay and Sharma has some sweet and genuine moments; indeed, it is far more satisfying than the relationship between Ajay and Priya.  There are some fine performances in addition to Anupam Kher's, especially from Jimmy Shiergill as Ranveer Singh, a contrite, green Delhi police officer burned by Ajay's audacity, and from Manoj Bajpai as the CBI inspector determined to foil the gang's plans.  Divya Dutta (a house favorite here at Filmi Geek) is always a pleasure, and here, as always, is a pleasure in too small a portion; she plays a colleague of Ranveer Singh who gets about one-fifth as much screen time. There is a crispness to movie's dialogue and photography, and the little bit of fat (such as Manoj Bajpai's athletic chase of and melee with a man who turns out not to be connected with the story in any way) is forgivable, because smartly executed.  

But all through, the sense that something is missing nags.  The feeling doesn't coalesce until afterward, when I think back over the film and the men I just spent two hours with.  Then I realize how little I know about them, how many shortcuts the movie has taken in presenting their lives and their friendships and their passions and their motivations.  Just as these men con their marks, posing as CBI agents or tax officials, Special 26 cons me.  It poses as a touching tale about a group of friends and their last big job, and escapes with the loot while I slowly realize just how superficial it is, how lazy the scriptwriters have been at breathing life and dimension into its characters. Ajay and Sharma's personal histories, why lying and thievery is all they know, even how these men who hail from four corners of the country came to form a notorious band of con-artists - none of these questions is answered.  And without these answers, Special 26 rings hollow, all brains and no heart. 

 

Life of Pi (2012)

The long-standing convention in the movies is that the camera is a truthful, omniscient, unbiased observer. What we see on the screen is what really happens within the movie's canonical universe. Every once in a while, though, a movie challenges this idea, offering the audience the pleasaingly dissonant experience of realizing that the camera has been lying to us. 

This is a fascinating idea space for a movie to explore, the unreliability of subjective narrative.  The TV show The X-Files did this often, showing supernatural or alien phemonena which seem "real" to the camera's eye, until one notices that no character save Mulder is witness to them.   Mystery-thrillers like To Die For and The Usual Suspects allow the camera to illustrate deceptive stories fabricated by characters as if those stories really happened within the movie's reality.

Ang Lee's Life of Pi takes the unreliable narrator idea a step further.  Its unreliable narrative is not just a plot twist for thrilling, surprise-ending effect. Instead, the notion of unreliable narrative forms the central allegorical premise of the movie.  Its narrator, Piscine Molitor Patel, known as Pi (Irrfan Khan), tells two versions of his terrible experiences following a shipwreck.  When his listener (Rafe Spall) asks which story is true, Pi invites him to choose the truth that he finds more satisfying.  "And so it is with God," Pi concludes, underscoring the message that religious narratives, too, provide a multiplicity of tellings of the same underlying tale, none more inherently correct than any other, even if they are mutually inconsistent.  Life of Pi transforms unreliable narrative from a bug into a feature; it is not a reason to distrust conflicting worldviews, but rather a reason to embrace and even cherish them.

Pi himself, as a boy, was driven by the simultaneous experience of concurrent, conflicting narratives; he considered himself a Hindu, a Muslim, and a Christian all at once.  But the story that the adult Pi tells is not just an allegory for reconciling religious dogma.  It represents our experience of self, our power to choose our own interpretetations of the truths that swirl around us and within us.  In one version of his tale, Pi is stranded on a lifeboat with an injured zebra, an orangutan, a hyena, and a tiger.  Nature takes its course, and before long only Pi and the tiger remain, staking out their respective spaces for survival.  In the other, darker version of Pi's story, the zebra becomes a wounded Japanese sailor, the orangutan his mother, and the hyena a cruel, murderous ship's cook.  The tiger, of course, is Pi himself, a wild, raw facet of Pi that both threatens him and keeps him alive as he drifts over the ocean.  (It is perhaps the movie's only misstep that it makes this mapping between animals and humans explicit, and fails to give the audience the chance to draw our own allegorical conclusions.)

In the fanciful, allegorical truth in which Pi shares his lifeboat with an untamed tiger, Pi faces and acknowledges his animal demons, understands them, and even though he neither befriends nor assimilates them, is able to let them go once his ordeal is over.  This is a very satisfying truth indeed, not just because the story is more fun and magical, but because of what it says about human strength, resilience, instict, and power.  And while Pi invites the listener to choose between the two stories, Ang Lee stacks the deck in favor of this version.  It is rendered in breathtaking and magical detail.  The visuals are not merely realistic; they are super-realistic, extra-realistic, beyond realistic.  The Pacific waters range from preternaturally glasslike calm to wild, towering, black waves. Luminscent sea creatures light Pi's lonely nights with wonder. Cheerful, chirping meerkats scoot and swarm across the brambles of a living island.  The gruesome tale of the cook and Pi's  mother, however, Lee does not illustrate at all.  Instead, the camera focuses close on the exhausted, weathered face of the young Pi (Suraj Sharma) as he recites this version of events without affect.  In the cold world of logic and reality, this version of the story is more plausible and more likely.  But in Lee's movie-world, the magical version is the one that occurs in the camera's view, the one which is granted that conventional imprimatur of truth.

Finally there is Irrfan Khan, the calm, steady heartbeat of the film even as the story and the viewer are tossed about on violent waves.  He is superb actor and delivers a worthy performance.  This is no mean feat given his character's extroardinary equanimity and the fact that most of his lines are delivered in voice over, so that Khan cannot even press his marvelous face into service of performance.  The adult Pi, narrating his tale, does not reveal a tremendous range of emotion.  And yet his presence is large; one has the sense of a man who has reached an enormous depth of insight and now takes genuine, warm pleasure in leading others to the same revelations.  He has the beatific air of one who has reconciled the infinite contradictions of this world and its many gods.  He, and Lee, invite us to join him in that peaceful place, as peaceful as Pi's boat floating in a silent sea of starlight.  It is an irresistible invitation. 

 

 

Aiyyaa (2012)

It must be unusual for a movie to make the year's best lists of many thinking critics, and at the same time the year's worst lists of equally many others. Sachin Kundalkar's Aiyyaa was nothing if not divisive, a hot mess of a film to some, subtle and even revolutionary to others. Beth's thoughtful, substantial praise describes a movie of startlingly bold feminist sensibility, a nearly unprecedented story about a woman's desires and autonomy.  With those ideas in mind, I expected to side with Beth and others who love Aiyyaa's fresh, female-oriented approach.  That isn't what happened.

I am willing to give Aiyyaa the benefit of the doubt, and credit it with aiming for the subversive narrative that Beth perceives in it.  For me, though, Aiyyaa falls far short of the mark.  As a story of female autonomy, it is passable, but not astonishing. Worse than that, as a movie, it just isn't very well crafted.  Weaknesses of script and incomprehensible choices in direction undermine its strengths and potential, yielding a movie-watching experience that is more puzzling than exciting.  If Beth is right about Aiyyaa, I should be front and center in the choir to which it preaches - but it mostly leaves me cold.

Aiyyaa takes its first wrong turn in the formulation of the ambitions of its protagonist, Meenaxi (Rani Mukherjee).  Meenaxi retreats into a fantasy world in which she dances out the famous routines of the likes of Sridevi and Madhuri.  Unlike those stars, though, Meenaxi dances not for the male gaze, but for her own pleasure; in Meenaxi's "Kaate nahin katte," Mr India is not merely invisible - he is absent.  This is remarkable, this discounting of the male gaze, and Aiyyaa deserves credit for taking its heroine this far.  But her dream is still the superficial, stereotyped dream of being a film star, of looking beautiful and being entertaining.  In that, Aiyyaa is not revolutionary - it's just lazy.  Need a big, sweeping ambition for a character who feels hemmed in by her family and circumstances?  Easy - she wants to be a film star!

The characterization does not improve when Meenaxi's desires snap into focus on Surya (Prithviraj), the art student who catches her eye.  Rather, the script underscores Meenaxi's superficiality, sending her ambitions into overdrive over a hunky guy who smells nice.  Other than this, all Meenaxi knows about Surya is that he speaks Tamil and treats her with something in between indifference and outright scorn.  None of that matters - his pecs and his fragrance are enough to drive Meenaxi to teach herself Tamil, abuse her privileges at work to examine his records, stalk him to his home, and lie to create a pretext to talk to his mother. 

All of this is the time-honored stuff of superficial filmi stalker-romance, albeit typically executed by a nominally charming hero in pursuit of some vapid heroine who has struck his fancy.  The fundamental problem for Aiyyaa is that reversing these roles - making the man the objectified meat, and the woman the aggressor - does not make such superficial stories any more satisfying or romantic.  As a viewer I don't particularly root for the pairing, because the script offers no compelling evidence that the two belong together, and anyway Surya seems to be, at best, a bit of a jerk.  (He is proven to be a Nice Guy (TM) at the end of the film, but that post hoc justification of the romance does not retroactively fix the story.)  Beth argues that Surya doesn't need a personality because the story is about Meenaxi, not him.  I don't buy this argument.  The message I get is that Meenaxi in the sort of woman who can lose her head over a guy with no personality.  That is  hardly revolutionary.  

What makes this so frustrating is that Meenaxi is a terrific character, executed as well as can be imagined by the always appealing Rani Mukherjee, who can pull off loony-cute better than any actor of her generation.  Meenaxi has a very real drive, which she articulates to her incomprehensibly nutty coworker Mynah (Anita Date) - a drive for financial independence, so that she can move out of her family's quite literally stifling home and marry at leisure, instead of at her overbearing mother's insistence.  There is superb, if unsubtle, symbolism in that household which chokes the life out of Meenaxi's dreams; between an enormous stinking pile of garbage, Meenaxi's brother's impromptu kennel for wayward dogs, and her father's smoking four cigarettes at a time, Meenaxi cannot breathe at home.  Yet she retains an exquisitely tuned sense of smell that guides and fuels her when she is away from home. These devices represent Aiyyaa at its clever best, and it's disappointing to see them squandered by the script's choice of such uninteresting prizes for Meenaxi as Bollywood fame and a ripped boyfriend.

Aiyyaa's direction certainly gives it a unique feel, almost theatrical, with an unusual and lovely background score and a parade of side characters that are wild and cartoonish and clearly intended to be funny.  Whether this ensemble falls on the right side of the line between comedy and annoyance has to vary from viewer to viewer.  For me, all the side characters are shrill and self-consciously weird, more puzzling and irritating than entertaining.  Meenaxi's family members scream at each other from the first scene, her father's bizzarre collection of old telephones rings constantly, her brother's dogs bark, her wheelchair-bound grandmother caromes back and forth across the set flashing her gold teeth, all in a swirling cacophany that at least engenders sympathy to Meenaxi's need for escape, if it doesn't also induce a migraine. And then there is the inexplicable Mynah.  Perhaps she is meant to make a point about marching to the beat of one's own drum, but in execution she is only strange, shrill, mystifying, and even - when she squeals orgasmically about John Abraham's muscles - embarrassing.

And so, despite some signs of cleverness and thoughtful intentions, I just can't say I like Aiyyaa.  As a thought-provoking commentary on women's desires it undermines itself with its own superficiality.  And as an entertainer, it veers so far into the wacky as to be more of a head-scratcher than a romp or a fun ride.  

 

Matru ki Bijlee ka Mandola (2013)

मटरू की बिजली का मंडोला

If Vishal Bhardwaj's 7 khoon maaf is a creepy fun house at a sinister carnival, his Matru ki Bijlee ka Mandola is a visit to a surrealist circus.  Trippy, touching, and uproariously funny, this movie sparkles and dances and enchants.  It is a sweet story of redemption, a biting political satire, and a magical romp all rolled into one crazy film.  It is wild, brilliant, and great fun.

The narrative at the core of Matru ki Bijlee ka Mandola is a potentially heavy one:  A crorepati industrialist, Mandola (Pankaj Kapur) schemes with the chief minister of Haryana (Shabana Azmi) to buy out, for a pittance, the farmers of the village that bears his name, so that he can develop a lucrative factory-mall complex on their land.  A mysterious figure calling himself after Mao Tse-Tung galvanizes and supports the villagers to fight back and preserve their livelihood.  Without the otherworldly, yet humanistic, levity that effervesces through Matru ki Bijlee ka Mandola, this could be the stuff of a Prakash Jha film.  But Vishal Bhardwaj paints on a different kind of canvas here.

Mandola is a man divided against himself.  When sober, he is hard and calculating, willing even to use his own daughter, Bijlee (Anushka Sharma), as a pawn to advance  his schemes, including marrying her off to the chief minister's idiot of a son (Arya Babbar).  When Mandola is drunk, though - as he is much of the time - he sympathizes with the farmers and undermines is own business interestes.  He enlists an overqualified servant, Matru (Imran Khan) to watch over him.  But Matru's own motives are murky and his loyalties do not exactly lie where Mandola thinks.

This story is embedded in a matrix of the absurd that brings it to life with joyful giddiness.  The movie careens from pink buffaloes to dung-slinging trebuchets to swarming bees to a drunken midnight joyride in a flaming airplane.  A troupe of African dancers and an itinerant wedding band are among the disparate elements that shimmer in and out of Bhardwaj's magically unreal yet palpably dusty world.  Thrown into the mix is some very clever skewering of the press, the police, and the machinery of politics that is part Peepli Live, part Welcome to Sajjanpur, and all Vishal Bhardwaj. 

While invoking many established filmi conventions - such as a "yeh shaadi nahin ho sakti" type of climax - Matru ki Bijlee ka Mandola turns others on their head.  In one sequence, the rains come to the agrarian village - but contrary to convention, the rain is not a cause for village-wide rejoicing.  It's after the harvest, and the deluge threatens to destroy the stored grain that the farmers need to sell to keep their land.  Mandola, the chief minister, and their cadre of corrupt officials dance in the downpour like film stars, while the villagers scramble to protect their livelihood.

For all its rich, rangy pleasures, Matru ki Bijlee ka Mandola is not without a few warts.  The characterizations are at times inconsistent, especially around Bijlee; her strengths are a bit unclear, and her relationship with Mandola a touch underdeveloped.  But these are minor quibbles in a movie that utterly enthralls and delights while it is happening.  (Other reviewers have complained that it sags in the middle; that could not have been further from this reviewer's experience.)  The relationship between Matru and Mandola is as touching as it is dysfunctional, and often hilarious and sweet as they drunkenly navigate the world together.  In one brilliant scene they crash into a well on a motorcycle and, deciding the well's location  is a dangerous, attempt to move it by dragging it by the rope that suspends its bucket.  United in this nonsensical and futile task, Matru and Mandola bond in the shared absurdity.

The movie is propelled through the madness by the performances of its actors.  Pankaj Kapur owns the film; Mandola is as loveably unloveable, as much the selfish softy, as his meanyhead in Bhardwaj's The Blue Umbrella.  Shabana Azmi delivers deliciously even as she chews the scenery with relish.  She has vastly too much fun as the long-suffering embodiment of manipulative evil, rolling her eyes as she strains to tolerate the buffoonery of her pawns, her son and Mandola.  I could watch Shabana Azmi all day long in roles like this one, a distillation and magnification of the character she developed for Loins of Punjab Presents.  Imran Khan does not emote much behind his fetching beard, but he is adequate to the demands that Matru's bizarre world places on him.  Even Anushka Sharma - who had better show some range soon if she is to live up to the promise of Band baaja baaraat - restrains the over-bubbliness here, and turns in a solid, reasonably grounded effort. 

Matru ki Bijlee ka Mandola has been receiving widely mixed reviews, and I went in with some trepidation, unsure what to expect.  But I came out grinning, utterly delighted with a film I can't wait to see again and confirmation of the storytelling genius of Vishal Bhardwaj.  The weaknesses will fade in memory, and all that will remain are the many pleasures, the reality of the ridiculous, the splendid satire, and the lingering laughs.  I'll stand by my gushing here because it is an honest response to a movie I enjoyed every moment of.  Matru ki Bijlee ka Mandola is simply a wonderful and unusual piece of cinematic art. 

7 khoon maaf (2011)

७ खून माफ़

I liked 7 khoon maaf ("7 murders forgiven") so much that I watched it twice in a week, and I am still not sure what to make of it.  Dark, weird, and bold, this strange Vishal Bhardwaj drama is part psychological study, part mystery, and part black comedy.  It is uneven in parts, lurching in tone from vignette to vignette.  These shifts can be confusing, leaving the viewer unsure which bits are earnest and which ironic.  But the weird, slightly disorienting effect is marvelously compelling.  Propelled by superb photography and a number of chillingly engaging performances, 7 khoon maaf is a visit to a sinister carnival's fun house.  It's discomfiting and even disturbing at times, and when it's over you can't wait to do it again, and bring your friends. 

Adapted from Ruskin Bond's story Susanna's Seven Husbands, 7 khoon maaf tells the story of Susanna Anna-Maria Johannes (Priyanka Chopra), a wealthy Christian woman whose long procession of husbands each meets an untimely and often violent demise.  Like another Ruskin Bond story adapted into movie form, Junoon, the story explores a dark psychology, the dangerous corners of a passionate mind.  But where Junoon anchors its study in the larger historical context of the Sepoy Mutiny, lending it a broader allegorical reading, 7 khoon maaf keeps its focus inward, on the mind of Susanna herself and, to a lesser extent, the mind of the young man who narrates the tale.  That young man, Arun (Vivaan Shah), catches Susanna's attention as a boy servant in her household; she finances his schooling and eventually sends him to study medicine, and a bond of love develops between them that secures Arun's loyalty to her well into adulthood, even years after losing touch with her.  As Arun narrates Susanna's tale to his own wife (Konkona Sen Sharma, in a saucy and poignant cameo), Arun makes himself vulnerable by exposing the depth of his bond to Susanna and just how much he is willing to risk to protect her.  But the real story is what drives Susanna.

The story of each of Susanna's husbands - how they meet, their courtship, and ultimately how they die - creates a separate vignette or episode within the movie, and these range from sad, to disturbing, to disturbingly funny.  In each vignette, Susanna tries on a different persona - a new style of dress, a new religion, even a new name.  Arun provides a facile, oversimplified explanation for Susanna's many romances; he says that she "looks for her father in every man she meets."  But while her experimentations do have the air of a desperate search, it is as much a search for her own identity as a search for her father.  And over time the search leaves her weary - by the fifth husband, Inspector Keemat Lal (Annu Kapoor), she is bored and resigned to the ritual of courtship, marriage, and murder - and eventually insane.  It is only through obliteration of all identities - her own death and rebirth - that Susanna can find peace, and that is why her seventh and final marriage is with a partner who has himself died and been reborn. 

Each vignette, too, reveals a bit more about the forces the lead to the husbands' deaths.  Is Susanna herself killing them?  Is her small cadre of loyal misfit servants doing the dirty work for her?  If so, are they acting on their own to protect her, or with her knowledge and at her bidding?  These questions are unanswered at first, but the truths shimmer into focus with satisfying pace as the narrative unfolds.

Part of the movie's dark thrill lies in its moral ambiguity.  Some of Susanna's husbands are horrible, vicious men, for sure, but others are more sympathetic or even hapless victims.  And even in the case of the worst abuser, the third husband - a seductively dashing Kashmiri poet (Irrfan Khan) who gets sexual satisfaction from beating the snot out of Susanna - Arun asks why he had to die; could Susanna not just have left him?  It's a fair question; Susanna and her servants operate in a constantly shifting landscape of revenge, protection, defense, and ennui that combine with the movie's shifts in tone to produce an effect that is pleasingly unsettling.  The scenes with the poet are difficult to watch - Irrfan Khan is smolderingly sexy in this role, and his character recites the most beautiful and thoughtful lines, but there is no beauty in the bruises he leaves on Susanna's body and psyche, and despite Arun's question it's easy to get behind the sneering revenge in his fate.  Likewise the first husband, Major Edwin Rodrigues (Neil Nitin Mukesh),  a plainly vicious, insecure man.   Wounded in battle, he asserts his fragile manhood in violent outbursts and creepy, if not explicitly abusive, displays of sexual dominance over Susanna; when he leeringly caresses her face with the stump of his amputated leg, it is not hard to imagine still more vile treatment to come, and not hard to sigh with relief at his death - which, being the first in the film, is also the most plausibly dismissed as an accident. 

But this sense of justice served evaporates quickly.  And in a brilliant directorial maneuver by Bhardwaj, the most cold-blooded and least justifiable of the deaths come in the most comical of the vignettes.  The fourth husband, a Russian spy named Vronsky (Aleksandr Dyachenko) is batted around like a mouse in the paws of Susanna and her servants, as they have some sport with him before he is dispatched.  This scene is maniacally chilling and also very funny.   And the poor smitten Inspector Keemat Lal, whose courtship is suffered by a bored, eye-rollingly unimpressed Susanna, encounters death by punchline in a Viagra overdose.  In both cases the viewer  is left snickering at the joke, and at the very same time thinking that Susanna has perhaps gone more than a bridge too far. 

Finally, there is Priyanka Chopra, the heartbeat that drives every aspect of 7 khoon maaf.  I am fully sold on Priyanka Chopra as an actor - I was already most of the way there after seeing Barfi - and it is her empathy, her portrayal of Susanna's confusion and desperation and fear and her ultimate resignation that knits these almost disparate vignettes together into a compelling and cohesive story.   Most of the other performances are strong as well - several of the husbands I have mentioned, and the Susanna's sideshow freak gallery of loyal servants (Shashi Malviya, Harish Khanna, and Usha Uthup) are also magnificent.   But these performances would not be enough to carry the movie were Priyanka Chopra not up to the task of embodying the shape-shifting peregrinations of Susanna across the decades that the narrative spans.  It is a remarkable performance that makes for a remarkable, bizarre, and utterly compelling movie. 

Ladies vs. Ricky Bahl (2011)

Con movies are fun. Watching a likable, charismatic hero pull off a big, bold heist is simply satisfying. The characters don't even need to have the moral high ground for a movie to be fun and loveable - Bunty aur Babli are no Robin Hoods but one can't help rooting for them every step of the way. And when the con is for a morally good cause - like the fast one pulled in Bluffmaster to teach the hero the error of his ways - it can be even easier to get behind.

Ladies vs. Ricky Bahl is a movie of this type - four women band together to out-con a con man who has taken three of them for a ride. The women are clearly on the side of justice, even if their extralegal methods are somewhat unconventional, and this, plus some sparkling and lively performances, makes them very sympathetic. Their target (Ranveer Singh), who goes by many names - they mostly refer to him as Bloody Kamina, or BK - is, in contrast, hardly sympathetic at all. He has a handsome smile but otherwise a smarmy, slimy air; knowing what he's made of makes it hard to dredge up any concern for him at all.

And that, unfortunately, undermines the central twist of the film. Ishika (Anushka Sharma), the talented, ruthless salesgirl that BK's three victims hire to put the con on him, supposedly falls in love with BK, and he with her. It's a nice idea, but it is the weakest aspect of the movie. After their cracklingly effective chemistry in Band baaja baaraat - one that earned an absolutely breathless gushing review from me - here Anushka Sharma and Ranveer Singh fall a bit flat. Part of the reason is that the movie does not spend as much time laying a foundation for their connection as Band baaja baaraat did; in that movie, the relationship between their characters was central to every aspect of the film, while here it is considerably more incidental. But worse than that, there is nothing substantive for Ishika and BK to build a relationship upon. Each has lied about who they are; each plays a role in hopes of fooling the other. On what basis do they fall in love? Only because the script says so, and this is the most unsatisfying kind of film romance. As good as they were with the strongly scripted character arcs of Band baaja baaraat, Anushka and Ranveer do not seem up to the task of filling in the holes here.

There is more mild dissatisfaction in the movie's resolution. Although BK earns his redemption, he does so by getting the better of the women. So instead of triumph, the women - who have already suffered quite a bit at BK's hands - are delivered a humiliating defeat. They do not cause BK's change of heart through their cleverness; rather, BK on his own does them the kindness of repaying what he conned from them. Despite the best efforts of these very smart, resourceful women, the man remains in control - and it is his volition, not theirs, that determines the ultimate outcome. I reluctantly admit that this didn't bother me much when I watched the movie; I went along fairly uncritically for the ride. But several people have since brought it to my attention, and it has become an irritation to my feminist sensibilities that, once perceived, cannot be unseen. It has soured this otherwise enjoyable movie in my memory.

Despite these weaknesses, though, Ladies vs. Ricky Bahl is entertaining to watch while it is happening, largely on the strength of the characterizations and performances of BK's three victims. These women are cleanly and consistently written, individual and each charming in her own way. The spearhead of the operation to beat BK at his own game is Raina (Dipannita Sharma), a resourceful and ambitious young executive who brings all her business skill and contacts to bear on her mission of revenge. It's satisfying to watch Raina channel her anger - and embarrassment - at having been conned, focusing it on a methodical, business-like approach to turning the tables on BK. And  BK's most timid victim, the young Lucknowi widow Saira (Aditi Sharma), presents the most substantial character arc, as she grows in confidence and strength over the course of the film.

But Parineeti Chopra completely steals the show here in her debut role as BK's third young victim, Dimple. Dimple may be a bundle of Punjabi stereotypes - boisterous, crass, angry - but Parineeti brings her to life with a charming fearlessness. Cursing, yelling, sobbing, gobbling down snacks, frantic with immature jealousy over BK - whatever Parineeti does as Dimple she does with complete abandon. I thrill to see young female actors willing to throw their bodies into thoroughly unglamorous roles. Like Konkona Sen Sharma in Aaja nachle, or Parineeti's older cousin Priyanka Chopra in Barfi, Parineeti Chopra shows impressive readiness to sacrifice conventional sex appeal for the sake of embodying her character and telling a story. The result is a magnificently and thoroughly appealing (if unconventionally so) performance that shines on its own as a compelling reason to watch this movie. One has to look forward to what else this promising young actor can offer.

Talaash (2012)

तलाश

Warning:  This review contains significant spoilers.

Most thrillers have a twist toward the end, a surprise revelation that spills new light on the narrative or yanks the viewer into a new perspective.  The danger for the makers of thrillers is that the full experience of the movie turns on the effectiveness of such moments. Handled well, a thriller's twist can leave a viewer gobsmacked and tingling.  Such thrillers are the ones you watch over and over, looking for clues that hint toward the revelation to come. They are the movies you discuss with your friends, arguing endlessly over what the narrative means. 

Reema Kagti's Talaash ("search") is not one of these thrillers.  Instead, it is two hours of taut, consistent filmmaking craft, undermined in the end by a facile and unsatisfying twist.  The movie features intense performances and a seductive, appealingly creepy noir mood.  But instead of psychological insight or lasting mystery, Talaash's great promise delivers only a hackneyed spook-revenge tale.

Talaash's tagline, "The answer lies within," promises a psychological resolution, and indeed the film could have been a fascinating psychological study of a man broken by loss and guilt.  Had the answer indeed lain within - had the apparition of Rosie (Kareena Kapoor) been not a real live ghost but a hallucinatory construct of Inspector Shekhawat's (Aamir Khan) troubled conscience - Talaash could have had something compelling to say about the waste that unchecked grief can lay to a life and a marriage.  The movie offers much foundation for this kind of study. Deep in denial, Shekhawat orders his wife Roshni (Rani Mukherjee) into therapy.  But he refuses to acknowledge the toll his own grief takes on him, in sleepless nights and unspoken sorrows. In one powerful sequence, Shekhawat remembers and reimagines the preamble to his young son's death, conjuring several alternate histories in which Shekhawat makes different choices that prevent the accident.  This is a man rotting from the inside with his own guilt. 

But this delicate, promising thread is rendered a red herring by Talaash's twist.  As a hallucination, as a manifestation of Shekhawat's troubles, Rosie could have helped lead him toward insight or even redemption.  As a ghost, though, she is just so much voodoo woo-woo with no connection to what happens in Shekhawat's troubled mind, nothing to say about coping with deep grief, a mere plot surprise for its own sake that sheds no light on the central drama of Shekhawat and Roshni's life.  All of that careful psychological exploration is unsatisfyingly wasted.

As alternative to pure psychological study, Talaash could have left its resolution to the viewer.  Part of the thrill of a movie like Inception is that no one knows for certain what really happened in the narrative.  Rewatchings and endless debates lend the movie lasting value - a gift from the filmmaker that keeps on giving.  Talaash, though, leaves no such open questions.  Instead, it is unambiguous that we are to interpret Rosie as a real ghost; Shekhawat finds her body right where she tells him it lies, including the distinctive ring that her apparition wore.  Talaash could have offered a rich array of puzzles to chew on - if Rosie is Shekhawat's figment, what caused Armaan Kapoor to drive his car into the bay?  What does it mean that Shekhawat had a nearly identical accident?  Instead, there's nothing left to debate. 

Thus Talaash is doubly unsatisfying - once in cheating the viewer out of the lasting pleasure of ambiguity, and again in that the certainty it presents is so improbable and lame.  Rosie as vengeful spirit, exacting punishment from those responsible for her death is boring and unsatisfying.  Worse, it is without meaningful connection to Shekhawat and Roshni's grief-stricken, troubled marriage.  Indeed, that Rosie is a ghost implies that the mysterious letters they receive from the dead boy are real as well.  Thus Shekhawat and Roshni are absolved of coming to grips with their son's absence, allowed instead to continue to communicate with him. This is not character development; it is a dreadfully facile non-resolution.

It has been pointed out to me that another Reema Kagti film, Honeymoon Travels Pvt. Ltd., also includes a supernatural element - one of its couples has very real superpowers.  Despite the goofy unreality of that device, I unreservedly adore the movie.  There is an important difference in tone, however.  Unlike the gritty street realism of Talaash, Honeymoon Travels has the air of a fable, and each of the couples' stories can both be viewed as a literal vignette and read as a metaphor for some aspect of communication between spouses.  Aspi and Zara's superpowers, which they both had and hid from one another since childhood, stand for all the secrets one keeps from one's partner out of fear of being misunderstood and judged.  In Talaash, Rosie too could have been a rich metaphor.   Instead, she is nothing more than a middling spook, barely worthy of campfire story or urban legend.

Talaash wastes all Reema Kagti's well-crafted moods - the restlessness of the night in Mumbai's red light district, the oppressive dimness of Shekhawat and Roshni's apartment, the creepy wide-eyed friendliness of Roshni's neighbor, Frenny (Shernaz Patel), who claims to speak with the dead.  The movie squanders some marvelous performances too, especially those of Rani Mukherjee and Nawazuddin Siddiqui.  Rani is achingly sympathetic in as mature, real, and unglamorous a role as she has ever done (her work in Yuva compares).  For all I love Rani's effervescent cuteness in romantic comedies, there is no doubt that she has the chops for a role like this one, and I love to see directors give her the chance to use them.  Siddiqui is fascinatingly physical and diminutive as a hungry errand-boy who opportunistically gets involved in a blackmail scheme connected to Shekhawat's investigation of Armaan Kapoor's death.  It is a shame that Talaash wasted all these great efforts with its supernatural faffing about.  What had all the makings of a very memorable movie is considerably weakened instead, to a merely passable ghost story.

 

English Vinglish (2012)

As the opening date of Sridevi's first movie in 15 years approached, I began to notice a rising pitch of excitement and anticipation among desi women of a certain age. So many of my friends and acquaintances in their 30s and 40s were beside themselves, unable to contain their delight at the prospect of their childhood favorite returning to the big screen.  An outstanding article by Supriya Nair captures what Sridevi means to that generation. (It also includes a fascinating discussion of Sri's masterful song from Mr. India, "Hawa hawai.")  

As an outsider, I  have no childhood memories of Sridevi to draw on to fuel my anticipation - only an admiration for Sridevi's obvious gifts, which to my eye are so often far out of proportion to the horrible movies she graced with them.  Nair's nostalgic exploration traverses the many faces of Sridevi - her comedic radiance, her raw ingenuous vulnerability - that captivated and confused a generation trying to find its voice in a nation transitioning to modernity.  Reading this piece helps me understand why the women I know awaited the new movie, Gauri Shinde's English Vinglish, with such thrill and expectation.  Seeing the movie made real for me all the praise I'd ever heard for Sridevi.  She is a gifted, empathetic, and thoroughly charming performer. And English Vinglish is a beautiful, lovable movie, fully worthy of her gifts.

Sridevi's Shashi Godbole is an overworked, underappreciated Pune housewife who, like the classmates Supriya Nair remembers from her school days, also finds her voice in a confusing world.  Shashi's family unthinkingly undermines everything she does from which she might derive a sense of pride or accomplishment.  Shashi's husband, Satish (Adil Hussain), has no problem with modern women in his working life, but it's clear that he prefers a submissive galley slave at home.  He tells her in so many words that he only bothers coming home from work because of her cooking.  More than that, he belittles and discourages her from pursuing her independent business, hand-crafting and delivering laddoos.   Shashi's preteen daughter sasses her, as young girls will do to their mothers - but the girl's embarrassment has an edge that gets under Shashi's skin.  She is disgusted by what she perceives as her mother's backwardness - especially her inability to speak English.  When a business meeting keeps Satish from a parent-teacher conference, Shashi attends in his place, to the girl's utter mortification.  Shashi is elated after a charmingly successful discussion with one of the teachers, but her daughter destroys that elation in a single verbal stroke, leaving Shashi bruised and uncertain.

One has the sense - thanks both to taut scripting and Sridevi's masterful performance - of a woman bursting with intelligence and creativity, a woman who harbors a flickering sense of her own power, as yet unable to find a suitable outlet for it.  When preparations for a family wedding land her in New York with a month to herself, Shashi sees an opportunity and leaps at it, signing up for an intensive English course.  What follows is a delightful and touching adventure, as Shashi discovers the capacious strength and courage that has been in her all along, and presses these into service of her pursuit of respect for everything she is and can do. 

I crave stories like this, stories about mature women finding ways to express themselves independently, tapping into strengths they may not even have been aware they had.  And in this, English Vinglish delivers beautifully.  This is Sridevi's movie from beginning to end, and she is simply outstanding.  She is in every scene, and her famously huge eyes fill the screen with emotion and sensitivity.  The physicality of Sridevi's performances is legendary, but her work in English Vinglish is entirely different in character from her comedic physicality, on display in iconic pieces like "Hawa hawai," with their nods to the tradition of Lucille Ball.  Here, rather than comedy, Sridevi's body language conveys broadly ranging emotion.  Beaming with delight after her conference with her daughter's teacher, Shashi visibly deflates under the girl's mocking words.  In a later scene, Shashi talks with her sister about the latter's great success  as a businesswoman in New York.  While her sister sits straight-backed and confident, Shashi slumps in her chair.  Later, though, Shashi's posture and stride grow more sure as she navigates the subways and streets of the city daily on her way to class.  How satisfying to see her strut down a crowded avenue wearing a trenchcoat over her gorgeous Sabyaschi sari, clutching a cup of coffee.

Another delight of English Vinglish is that it doesn't take a romance for Shashi to find her confidence. There is a romantic element - one of Shashi's classmates, the dashing Laurent (Mehdi Nebbou), falls for her quite hard - but there is little sign that Shashi returns his feelings beyond friendship.  Indeed, Shashi seems to find Laurent's romantic interest somewhat frustrating and beside the point.  Instead of being inspired by male attention, Shashi is inspired by recognition and respect.  When her English teacher (Cory Hibbs) tells her that her laddoo business qualifies her as an "entrepreneur," Shashi glows with wonder as she tries the word on for size - and walks unnoticingly right past the smitten Laurent.

Recognition and respect is exactly what Shashi does not get from her husband Satish, who is a first-class jackass.  Even when attempting to pay her a compliment, he belittles her - as when he exclaims "My wife was born to make laddoos!" after dismissing the business earlier in the film as a frivolous waste of time.  But here the script and Shinde's direction again achieve flawless balance - Satish remains just this side of mustache-twirling cartoonishness, even as his maddeningly demeaning comments make one want to punch him in the head.  The disrespect from her family makes Shashi's climactic speech about the vitality of support for one's family - delivered, of course, in slow but increasingly confident English - all the more satisfying.

If I have to lodge even one complaint about English Vinglish, it's that the movie shortchanges Sridevi's wonderful dancing.  She does dance a little in the film's final song, and while her bashfulness at doing so is entirely consistent with Shashi's character, it would have been nice if she cut loose for more than a few seconds once that tentativeness is established and overcome.  But this is such a small nit to pick about a movie that is a true delight.  The journey that Sridevi takes us on with Shashi, learning to flex her strength and her voice, is beautiful.  It's one that I am sure I will revisit again and again - an instant favorite.