Filmi Geek

Golmaal (1979)

गोलमाल

As much as Delhi Belly is not my sort of comedy, Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Golmaal ("confusion") is a movie made for me.  Light, smart, and downright funny, Golmaal is a story of clever people improvising their way through a thoroughly ridiculous series of deceptions.  It is a simply delightful movie, similar in feel to Hrishida's equally charming Chupke chupke. 

With his freshly minted degree in accounting, Ram Prasad Sharma (Amol Palekar) needs a job.  To land a position with the stern businessman Bhavani Shankar (Utpal Dutt), Ram plays up his studious, serious side - dressing in traditional clothing, spouting aphorisms about the value of hard work, and concealing his passion for sports.  After Bhavani spots Ram skiving off work to watch a hockey match, the quick-thinking Ram invents a no-good, layabout twin, whom he calls (of course) Lakshman, and convinces Bhavani that the fellow he saw at the match was Lakshman, not Ram.  Bhavani, wanting to favor his protege's family, insists that "Lakshman" tutor Bhavani's daughter Urmila (Bindiya Goswami) in music.  Now Ram has to play two roles for Bhavani - the earnest respectful Ram, and the modern loudmouth, Lakshman.  Other improvisations force Ram to enlist an amateur actress, Kamla Shrivastav (Dina Pathak) to introduce to Bhavani as his mother.  Soon, when Kamla runs into Bhavani at a party, she too invents a twin for herself, so as not to blow Ram's cover.  It's not long before all hell breaks loose when Bhavani decides that the hard-working Ram is a perfect match for Urmila - she, of course, prefers the free-spirited Lakshman.

It's hard to say what is most to love about Golmaal.  It's crisply paced and smartly scripted, full of the sort of linguistic humor that I especially love (and that was also in Chupke chupke) - Ram graces Bhavani with such upstanding shuddh Hindi that Bhavani can't quite keep up.  The physical humor is hilarious and masterfully performed.  Utpal Dutt pulls a diverse array of magnificent expressions as Bhavani - wistful as Ram praises the value of the mustache, horrified as Bhavani listens to Urmila recite shamefully modern lines from a play she is acting in.  Amol Palekar, too, is charming, adorable, and very, very funny as he squirms every which way to convince Bhavani that his two sides are two different people.  One cute running physical joke has Ram constantly tugging at his uncomfortably short kurta.  The kurta itself is the result of another of Hrishida's favorite devices, movie in-jokes.  Ram borrows the kurta from his childhood friend, the actor Deven Verma (playing himself), on a movie set - it's short because it's Asrani's kurta, settled on after rejecting Amitabh Bachchan's as too long, and Sanjeev Kumar's as too wide.

Golmaal has too many funny set-pieces and running jokes to call them all out, but a few bear mention.  In one great sequence, Bhavani's widowed sister overhears Urmila rehearsing the melodramatic lines from her play, and concludes that Urmila is pregnant by a man who is now abandoning her.  Much hilarity ensues.  There are very funny running jokes about Ram's mustache.  Bhavani is nearly obsessed with the idea that the mustache makes the man, and Ram is equally attached to his own, which he sacrifices for the sake of his double life.  Every interaction between Ram and Bhavani is hilarious, whether showcasing Bhavani's over-the-top paternal affection for Ram Prasad, or his equally extreme disdain for Lakshman. 

The greatest joy of Golmaal is that even in its comedy of errors, it resonates with everyday experience.  Ram is neither as earnest as Ram Prasad, nor as breezy as Lakshman - his true character is a blend of both.  But most of us find that different aspects of who we are emerge in our interactions with various people.  I do not show the same face to the head of my department at work as I do to my closest friend.  By amplifying this sort of common multiplicity and taking it to an absurd extreme, Hrishikesh Mukherjee makes Ram - and Golmaal - supremely relatable.  Add in a lot of laughs and a few catchy songs, and the sum is just a thoroughly delightful movie. 

Delhi Belly (2011)

I recentlty read Neal Stephenson's new novel, Reamde, which is about (among other things) regular people who get swept into the circles of very dangerous criminals, and find themselves in desperate situations doing very desperate deeds.  Watching the recent dark comedy Delhi Belly, I was struck by the similarities of its basic outline to that summary of the novel. Most of us will never find ourselves face-to-face with the likes of the movie's diamond smugglers or Reamde's panoply of international gangsters, terrorists, and spies.  But there is something nevertheless compelling about such stories; even with its veneer of silliness, it's hard to watch Delhi Belly without thinking, what would I do if that happened to me?  

Tashi (Imran Khan) is a young, unambitious Delhi reporter who lives in squalor - borne more of laziness than necessity - with his two roommates, the lecherous photographer Nitin (Kunal Roy Kapoor), and a depressed commercial artist named Arup (Vir Das).  Tashi's breezy fiancee Sonia (Shenaz Treasury) has cluelessly agreed, as a favor to friend, to deliver a package that is quite obviously (to the audience, at least) contraband.  Sonia asks Tashi to complete the delivery, but thanks to a series of mishaps the package is confused with a stool sample of Nitin, who is afflicted with the filmi's titular ailment.  Needless to say, the intended recipient, a diamond smuggler (Vijay Raaz) isn't too pleased with the delivery.  And when the young men discover that they have a cache of stolen diamonds, they make a series of spectacularly bad decisions that lead to them chasing all over the city trying to sell the diamonds and, later, recover them.  Tossed in the mix is a colleague of Tashi's, the worldly Menaka (Poorna Jagannathan), whose homicidal ex-husband Rajiv (Rahul Singh) is violently jealous of Tashi - as if Tashi's life isn't complicated enough, an attraction is developing between him and Menaka.

Delhi Belly is, in an objective sense, a very good movie.  It's well crafted, nicely paced, and genuinely funny at times (despite a generous helping of toilet humor).  The three young men in their filthy apartment evoke a sort of parallel-universe version of Chashme buddoor, where post-modern ennui and bitterness replace the dreamy innocence of the trio in Sai Paranjpe's charming movie.  The characterizations are mostly lively, even if the characters are not always likeable.  The acerbic Menaka is especially appealing, though (partly because she is an older actor) she seems at times to belong to a different movie with more mature characters.  Tashi is the least lively; he moves through the film in a nearly emotionless haze.  This is probably intentional, as he seems rather buffeted and passive in his life, bullied into marriage by Sonia's family and shoved into a violent underworld he isn't at all prepared to handle.  And so even his dazed performance is engaging in its own way. 

And yet, despite Delhi Belly's strengths, I can't exactly say I enjoyed it.  Usually I relish high-fidelity renderings of Indian life, and this movie offers a very unusual serving of that, with its young urban atmosphere, its salty language, and its open, realistic, and often funny sexuality.  But perhaps I am simply too old for a movie like this one.  There are for sure some Hindi movies I like more than I would like their Hollywood counterparts, simply because they are Hindi movies.  Delhi Belly, though, is mostly in English, and while I can take some interest in it as an Indian movie, perhaps the overwhelming ways in which it is a youth movie leave me, teetering on the brink of middle age as I am, somewhat cold. 

Then there is the question I raised in the opening paragraph - what would I do in Tashi's situation?  The characters in Reamde do violence I could never imagine myself doing, but in the simple morality of that story the correctness of their actions is never really in question.  In Delhi Belly, by contrast, Tashi and his friends, motivated entirely by selfishness, take steps that ensure their bad situation gets worse and worse.  While that could arguably add an interesting shade to what is essentially an absurd sort of comedy, it does make it harder for me to root for them unconditionally.  And that leaves me feeling that I missed the point - that if I were younger, with nothing to lose, I would sympathize with them and be more willing to get into the spirit of the movie. 

 

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.

Dhobi ghat (2011)

धोबी घाट

Aamir Khan productions come with a lot of baggage, given his reputation for being self-consciously highbrow, condescending toward the cinema traditions that made him famous, and caring too much about what the West thinks of his movies.  Whether that's deserved or not - I don't follow his interviews closely enough to weigh in on that - his latest release stands on its own merits.  Written and directed by his wife Kiran Rao, Dhobi ghat ("washerman's wharf") is at its best an engaging meditation on the ephemeral nature of life in Mumbai.

Shai (Monica Dogra) is an American-born banker on a sabbatical of self-discovery in Mumbai.  An aspiring photographer, she combs the city looking for subjects to shoot.  She befriends a hard-working washerman named Munna (Prateik Babbar), who introduces her to some of the city's grittiest and most colorful quarters.  She also meets a brooding artist, Arun (Aamir Khan) - they have a one-night stand, and after an awkward, angry morning-after parting, she retains an attraction and curiosity about him.  Meanwhile Arun, moving into a new apartment, discovers some video letters shot by a girl named Yasmin (Kriti Malhotra), intended for Yasmin's brother but evidently never sent.  Arun becomes engrossed in Yasmin's story, raptly studying the letters, taking inspiration for his new set of paintings, and eager to discover what happened to her. 

One of the themes of Dhobi ghat is that the city exists in multiple layers, both physical (shore, gutter, house, high-rise) and class (rat-killer/dhobi, servant, wealthy educated classes).  The movie happens in the spaces where these strata meet and slide against each other.  Only the American-born character, Shai, willfully and self-consciously disregards this stratification, nudging herself into Munna's spaces.  Apart from Shai, the only customer who invites Munna into her home is a dour woman who, it is implied, wants him for sex, and dismisses him as a dhobi when she realizes he will no longer provide that.  For upper-class Mumbai-walas, Munna is a service provider, not a person.  Shai uses him as well, in her own way, but she also genuinely cares for him, especially by the film's end.  Yet their friendship, like nearly everything else in the film's Mumbai, is transient.

Indeed, the loveliest moments in Dhobi ghat are its many symbols of the transitory nature of city life - characters move house and leave scant artifacts behind; names are scratched in sand and washed away by the waves; construction sites stand for the relentless pace of change.  Even the videos, paintings, and photographs that drive the film's stories can only imperfectly capture moments; the records may remain, but like Arun's elderly neighbor they are mute and leave questions unanswered. 

The weak link in the script is Arun; the brooding, temperamental, loner artist is a cliche and just a flatter character than the others.  His obsession with Yasmin's letters is meant to add depth, but it doesn't tell us much about Arun, it's not personal enough to him - who would not be bewitched by such a vibrant young woman, by the mystery of her unsent letters and her unknown fate?  Arun only takes on dimension at the very end of the film, as he deduces the logical conclusion of Yasmin's story and wordlessly struggles with the possibility that the art she inspired him to make is an exploitation of her suffering. 

The performances in Dhobi ghat range from adequate (Aamir Khan, Monica Dogra) to exquisite (Prateik Babbar and Kriti Malhotra); the latter do as much with their faces as their dialogue and are as engaging and believable as the script allows.  Kriti Malhotra renders especially well the slow choking of Yasmin's spirit, as her bright, vivacious smile early in the film fades to a haggard exhaustion by its end.  At any rate, criticizing minor weaknesses in characterization or performance feels like nitpicking a film that is as much impressionist painting as tightly-woven text.  On balance, Dhobi ghat is delicate, touching, visually rich, a pastiche of engaging stories very well told. 

 

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

Tere Bin Laden (2010)

तेरे बिन लादन

I am not sure I have ever seen a movie quite like Tere Bin Laden (a pun meaning both "your Bin Laden" and "without you, Laden"). It takes what could be a charged, angry, minefield of a premise and turns it into a film that is light on its feet, absurd, and utterly charming.   

Ali Hassan (Ali Zafar) has dreamed of emigrating to America ever since he was a little boy in Karachi, Pakistan.  After an unfortunate misunderstanding puts the brakes on that dream, Ali is stuck as a beat reporter for the tin-can outfit Danka TV.  He knows a guy who can give him a new identity and a false passport, but it's an expensive proposition.  While covering a cock-crowing contest in a nearby village, Ali discoveres a guileless chicken farmer named Noora (Pradhuman Singh), who is a dead ringer for Osama Bin Laden.  Ali hatches a plan - fabricate a fraudulent Bin Laden video and sell it to finance his American dream.  He enlists the help of his cameraman and best friend Gul (Nikhil Ratnaparkhi); the hapless Danka TV tech Lateef (Chirag Vohra); a makeup artist named Zoya (Sugandha Garg) with big dreams of her own; and a drunken revolutionary underground radio jockey Qureishi (Rahul Singh), who is all anger with very little substance.  The video is a big success - bigger than Ali bargained for, as it unleashes a war that threatens to put the kibosh once again on his trip to America, and brings a CIA manhunt to his doorstep.  Ali and the gang have no choice but to undo the mess they made, in a hurry.  

After watching the darkly wry Peepli Live, I suppose I expected similar bleakness from Tere Bin Laden.  The film's opening scenes - in which Ali, on a flight to America just days after 9/11, is presumed to be a terrorist and arrested - made me squirm, wondering if I was in for a (not at all undeserved) scathing comic attack on my country's attitude toward brown people. In the terrific song that plays over the opening credits, "Ullu da pattha," Ali is booked and interrograted.  He stands in a line-up bearing a sign reading "South Asian" - along with a black man whose sign reads "African," a Latin man whose sign reads "Mexican," and a white man whose sign reads "Peter."  This commentary on the way white America treats its own versus how it treats perceived outsiders is certainly both astute and cleverly rendered.  But it also hit a little too close to home, and I feared the film would be difficult for me to watch.  Lucky for me, these opening scenes do not set the tone, nor reflect dreamy, idealistic message of the rest of the movie.

Instead, the movie is relentlessly silly, with a finale that is so sweetly ridiculous as to obliterate any hints of political critique that might have been lurking after that introductory scene and song.  There could be some  implied crticism of American foreign policy in the backdrop, hinted at in the news reports of the bombings ignited by Ali's fraudulent Bin Laden video.  But if there is, it is more than balanced by Ali's own unwavering love for Amreeka.  Even the film's one American character, the CIA man in charge of the hunt for Bin Laden, Ted Wood (Barry John), tempers his bluster with some genuine savvy - he's not merely a big man with big guns.  He seems to respect his Pakistani assistant Usman (Chinmay Mandlekar), delegating real authority to him.  And when the fraud hits the fan, Wood is smart enough to listen to Ali and work with him. 

This lightness and balance leaves the audience free to laugh all the way through - and in my case as an American, unburdened by a great deal of "it's funny because it's true" guilt and discomfort.  And even without a heavy political message, Tere Bin Laden has plenty to offer. Packed with laughs and slapstick, the movie rides Ali Zafar's pop-star charisma from beginning to end.  He is simply adorable in this role - gentle, idealistic, and earnest.   The scenes where he volunteers to pay the fines levied on Lateef by their tyrannical boss Majeed Khan (Piyush Mishra) are genuinely touching.  Pradhuman Singh as the utterly ingenuous Noora is also a revelation; he even manages to be loveable, rather than creepy, as he sweats and prays for control of his desires when Zoya gets close enough to apply his makeup.

The other characters in the gang add color and depth, resulting in a movie that is smart, light-hearted, and simply great fun.  At just a little over 90 minutes running time, it's easy to squeeze in as an apertif or a late-night snack - I've already watched it twice, and it's an instant favorite. 

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).  

Katha (1983)

कथा

With Sparsh and Chashme buddoor, director Sai Paranjpe had already proved to me her great skill at presenting down-to-earth, real, sweet stories about believable characters, so I came to Katha ("fable") with high expectations.  I was not disappointed.

Rajaram Purshottam Joshi (Naseeruddin Shah) lives in a chawl, a kind of boarding house common in Bombay.  A hardworking office clerk, Rajaram is pleased when he is promoted to permanent status at his company, and looks forward to celebrating with his neighbor Sandhya (Deepti Naval), a charming girl with whom he is quite obviously smitten.  Soon Rajaram's childhood friend Vashudev (Farooq Shaikh) - he prefers the hip nickname "Washu" - arrives, and casts a spell over all the residents of the chawl - including Sandhya.  He even cons Rajaram's boss, landing himself a job as Rajaram's superior.  Rajaram sees through his friend's slick-talking charm, but with his gentle demeanor he is powerless to stop the juggernaut that is Washu in pursuit of something - or someone - that amuses him. 

Just as in Sparsh and Chashme buddoor, Sai Paranjpe shows her gentle touch in Katha, offering characters who are real, relatable, and engaging.  In particular, just like Chashme buddoor, Katha offers adorable humor without outlandishness, real-life believable situations that make the audience laugh because it's not difficult to project them onto ourselves and our neighbors.  The portrayal of life in the chawl is particularly charming and satisfying, and is itself a reason to see the movie for anyone interested in workaday Indian life.  The chawl is a tight-knit community is like a small village or, as one character in the film analogizes, a great joint family, in which individuals and families live in small flats centered on a common courtyard and shared water and other utilities.  There is a bitter barren woman who yells at children playing in the courtyard; a newlywed couple who rarely emerge from their rooms but whose giggles can be heard through the closed shutters; a disabled man who asks incessant favors from every visitor; a grandma who cooks yummy snacks for every young visitor she receives; a couple, whose son is a doctor in Canada, who love nothing more than to show off their richly appointed flat and their refrigerator and television; and more.  Paranjpe paints the inhabitants of this microcosm with great vividness and affection, and their interactions are tremendous fun to watch. 

The enjoyable bustle of the chawl forms a delightful backdrop for the interactions of the main players (they even serve as a Greek chorus of sorts, especially in the film's wonderful songs).  The principals' performances are all executed without flaw, especially those of Naseeruddin Shah and Farooq Shaikh.  Naseeruddin Shah is at his droopy, sad-sacky best; Rajaram wears his frustration physically as Washu runs circles around him, projecting a confused and adorable mixture of disdain and admiration for his friend's antics.  And Farooq Shaikh nails Washu's puff-chested confidence to perfection.  In Chashme buddoor, Farooq's character was charming in part because despite being marginally smarter and more competent than his friends, he was still mostly a dork.   The same is true here, with a faintly sinister edge since Washu is, at base, a con-man.  But the joke which Paranjpe lets the audience in on - a joke that escapes Washu - is that Washu is nothing more than a small-time con, not half the player he thinks is.  For example, while Washu both cons and cuckolds Rajaram's boss, it's established early on that the boss is a weak target, not a very bright guy to begin with.  The result is a sense of desperation and cheapness about Washu, as if he's conned his own low-watt self right along with the easy marks he chooses.   

And so, as in the titular fable that provides the film's bookends - the story of the tortoise and the hare - Katha ends with the satisfying feeling that the wheel will turn and both Washu and Rajaram will get what they deserve from the universe.  And we, the audience, get a warm, delightful, and utterly charming film, another very, very fine feather in Sai Paranjpe's cap.