Filmi Geek

Aag (1948)

आग

Raj Kapoor's Shree 420 is one of my all time favorite movies. It strikes a marvelous balance between entertainment and message, between substance and spectacle.  It took Kapoor a few tries to master that mix, however.  Awara, a few years before Shree 420, is too dire, plodding, serious.  And his first film as auteur, Aag ("Fire"), misses the mark entirely. It is weak on substance and poor in entertainment, but loaded with pretension and dripping with self-importance.

Aag tells the story of Keval Khanna (Raj Kapoor), a man gripped by two obsessions that trace to his childhood: a passion for the theater, and an idealized love for his childhood sweetheart, Nimmi. Both these obsessions stem from the same formative event; the young boy version of Keval (played deliciously by Shashi Kapoor) stages a play with Nimmi, complete with elaborate sets and other accoutrements of a real theater. But on opening night, Nimmi never shows - her family has suddenly moved away from their village - and Keval is left heartbroken, without a heroine, laughed at by a packed house of mean, mocking children.

The grown Keval spends the rest of the movie trying to recreate this event and rectify his loss.  He bucks his father's expectation that he will study law and follow a conventional path, instead forging a life in theater and searching for his Nimmi.  Keval works his way through several Nimmi candidates, molding each one in his mind to match the fantasy he has constructed of the girl he hasn't seen since childhood.  The first surrogate Nimmi, Keval's college classmate Nirmala (Kamini Kaushal) abandons him just as his childhood Nimmi did, this time to engagement.  Later, Keval meets a dejected woman (Nargis) who has lost her home to Partition.  Eager to put that trauma in the past, the woman insists that she does not even have a name. (In Aag's favor, it is noteworthy that the rifts of Partition are already appearing in the movies, at a time when the wounds are still bleeding and fresh.)

Keval is taken with this sad, nameless woman, whom he of course dubs Nimmi, and stages a play around her.  Keval's business partner Rajan (Prem Nath), an artist, also sees in her the woman he has long dreamed of painting.  This is the great art of Aag - two men each projecting their idealized fantasy onto this woman, so conveniently without identity of her own to get in their way.  The audition sequence in which Keval rejects a parade of women, one after another, with nothing more than a superficial glance, is bad enough.  What is over-the-top just revolting is that the idealization of Nargis's character by both men is presented as triumph of art, rather than the despicable objectification and usurpation of a vulnerable woman's independent existence.

Yecchh.

Kapoor attempts to lend the movie some depth with a disjoint pair of bookends in which Keval, disfigured by the titular fire (which he sets in a fit of lunatic rage at the very idea that Nargis's character might not be exactly the woman he has projected upon her), laments that he is hated for his ugliness as much as he used to be loved for his beauty. This Keval, incidentally, is not a modest man - his own supposed beauty is as much an obsession for him as his Nimmi.  And what is with Kapoor's fascination with beauty disfigured by flame? Between Aag and Satyam shivam sundaram, it seems this notion had special resonance for Raj Kapoor.  At any rate, the scenes do not relate much to Keval's twin passions that make up the rest of the film, and Aag  is too far up its own ass for this tacked-on attempt at a message to be anything but flimsy.

If there are reasons to endure this festival of pretension, they are Nargis and little boy Shashi Kapoor. Nargis is simply wonderful with her wildly frizzy hair and wide-eyed beauty.  It is such a long way from this unadorned natural gorgeousness to the meticulously styled and coiffed heroines one usually encounters in the movies.  In one of Aag's rare charming details, Keval is often shown playing with an arrant lock of Nargis's hair, smoothing the curls with his palm or twirling one around a finger.  As striking as she is, though, the almost feral rawness of Nargis's character leaves her that much more ripe for asborbing the indentities that the two men construct for her.

  
They just don't make them like this any more. 

As for proto-Shashi, some 9 years old when the film was shot, he is just plain adorable.  He gets so many scenes of substance, from delight to inspiration to anxiety.  When he sasses his mother, the cheeky mannerisms that made him an explosive charmer 20 years later are already on full display.  One sequence in which the young Keval tries to sneak out of the house to watch a play, evading discovery by his intimidating father (Kamal Kapoor), is especially delightful.

 
Cho chweet!

The unfortunate fact, though, is that Aag plummets rapidly downhill about half an hour in, as soon as Shashi's scenes are done.  The movie might be worth sitting through for the cuteness of Shashi, the beauty of Nargis, some notable cinematography, and some lovely songs.  But don't expect the sparkle and immersive charm of Raj Kapoor's best movies.  His vision for Aag was clearly expansive, but his pretension even more so.   It's enough to leave you growling "Aaaaaaargh!"

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. 

 

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.  

 

Namak haraam (1973)

नमक हराम

Many Hindi movies celebrate the powerful bonds of friendship between men.  And many explore  the plight of poor working folk exploited by the rich.  But few movies tackle both these themes at once.  Namak haraam ("traitor") does not simply examine both.  It pits the two themes against each other; it asks whether the bonds of friendship can survive the strain of one man's awakening to social injustice caused at the hands of the other.

The friendship at the center of Namak haraam is intense, even by filmi standards.  Vicky (Amitabh Bachchan) is wealthy and impulsive.  Somu (Rajesh Khanna) is the sort of buddy who goes where Vicky goes and does what he does. Early on, the film gives many ways in which Somu is Vicky's "chamcha," as other characters call him - Somu defers to Vicky's preference in nautch-girls at the kotha they visit, and even walks out on his job as a junior lawyer, when the indolent Vicky does the same.  In return for this excess of loyalty, Somu and his entire barely middle-class family get the benefit of Vicky's wealth, as Vicky puts both Somu and his sister through school. 

So deep runs this connection that Somu is willing to go undercover as a shop worker, to help Vicky settle an irrational score with the shop's labor leader, Bipinlal (A.K. Hangal).  Vicky, who has taken over business operations from his ailing father (Om Shivpuri), feels that Bipinlal has humiliated him, and thirsts for revenge.  Somu's plan is to gather intelligence and ingratiate himself among the workers, so that he can undermine Bipinlal and become the new labor leader while secretly shilling for Vicky.  This scheme - not to mention Vicky and Somu's relationship - is challenged when Somu begins to feel real sympathy for the workers, for the suffering and sacrifice of their hand-to-mouth existence.

Somu is in a unique position to be torn between his loyalty to his friend, and the moving stories of the workers:  Somu is from the middle class.  Vicky's father believes that the middle class cannot be trusted.  They have designs on our wealth, he says, and the desire to be important; yet they are also burdened by a conscience that will inevitably lead them to betray us.  In this declaration - the assertion that conscience requires the middle class to betray the interests of the rich - Vicky's father explicitly admits that the conduct of the business elite is inherently amoral.  Vicky, at least at this point in the film, is oblivious to that conclusion.  But Somu, removed from the insulation of Vicky's great wealth, and living, working, and drinking with people who struggle for survival, sees a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I connection between himself and the beleaguered poor.  He is genuinely shocked to meet a worker who his thankful to have lost his hands in an accident on the job, because the modest settlement Vicky pays to the worker allows him to get his daughter married.  And Somu begins to question how he and Vicky can so cavalierly drink a month of such a worker's wages in one glass of imported whisky.

Somu's developing conscience is indeed what ultimately drives him.  Whether Somu can transfer that conscience to Vicky, via the vector of friendship, is less clear.  When Vicky chooses to go to prison for a terrible crime committed by his own father, he does not take the fall out of conscience.  Rather, it seems to come from the same overinflated urge for revenge that sent Vicky scheming against Bipinlal earlier in the film.  The serene, contemplative Vicky who emerges from prison - his girlfriend (Simi Garewal) calls him a "philosophy professor" - seems finally to have learned how to let the benefit of others inspire his actions, instead of being driven by the desire to destroy.  Friendship, it seems, can teach populist values - but it takes a lot of time.

Hrishikesh Mukherjee's movies are often distinguished by a delicacy of performance, a touch that is tender and relatable, gentle and real.  Namak haraam delivers this in parts.  Surprisingly, the most off-kilter notes are sounded by Amitabh Bachchan.  He is usually so compellingly intense in his pre-stardom roles.  But the intensity is too manic here, and too weird.  His responses to everything - to friendship, to perceived humiliation, to perceived betrayal - seem disproportionate, and is maturation likewise disproportionately beatific.

Rajesh Khanna, in contrast, who can be so offensively beatific at times, is very effective here, registering in pensive expressions the dawning realization of the true hardships his fellow workers and slum neighbors face. The real scene-stealing performances, though, are among those workers and neighbors.  Asrani always shines in his supporting roles, and he delivers here as one of the shop workers.  Rekha steals Somu's heart in a small but pleasingly earthy part.  And standing out above all - even upstaging Rajesh Khanna - is Raza Murad, playing Alam, a depressed and drunk poet and kitemaker whom Somu befriends.  His angular, striking face is utterly compelling as he delivers the sad poetry of working-class hopelessness to an awed Somu.  Namak haraam is a good enough movie, and Vicky's journey from clueless trust-fund baby to sensitive socialist is not without its appeal.  But I would pay twice to see the story told again from Alam's perspective. 

 

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.

 

I Can't Think Straight (2008)

I have to admit up front that the desi content of this movie is so minimal that it doesn't strictly belong on Filmi Geek.  But what the heck, I'll write about it anyhow.  I crave stories about love between women, and I crave stories in which women in patriarchal cultures (including my own culture, I must point out) find the value of asserting autonomous control over their own sexuality.  Shamim Sarif's I Can't Think Straight at least attempts to offer both.  And with my interest in the rich, diverse cultures of both the Middle East and India, this romance between a Jordanian aristocrat (Lisa Ray) and a London daughter of middle-class Indian immigrants (Sheetal Sheth) should have hit all my sweet spots.  Instead, it's a warty, often cringe-worthy production.  But I can't bring myself to shred it mercilessly.  I Can't Think Straight is a movie whose ham-fisted unsubtlety is punctuated by occasional moments of smart and sexy.  It's a movie, in short, that is a lot like me. 

To its credit, I Can't Think Straight has some sweetness to it and strikes a few good targets.   The relationship between Tala (Ray) and Leyla (Sheth) starts off contrived but becomes more believable as the film progresses.  Early on Tala's brash confidence overwhelms the tentative Leyla.  But it becomes clear that Tala's numerous broken engagements are not the result of strong-headed wilfulness - to the contrary, they are the detritus of her confusion, uncertain attempts to be what her overbearing mother wants her to be.  In the meantime, Leyla's arc takes the opposite trajectory - as she comes into her own as a writer and as a lesbian, her uncertainty transforms into absolute strength and confidence.  "You have to admire her guts," says a mutual friend of the two women (Rez Kempton), and he's quite right.

And so the two women don't just feel attraction to one another, but they do deeply change one other.  Tala challenges Leyla's  already shaky adherence to her Muslim faith.  In return, Leyla inspires Tala to stand up to the culture that Tala feels limits her choices so severely.  When Tala insists that she cannot pursue her love for Leyla because Jordanian high society is closed-minded and conservative, Leyla points out that "it will stay that way, as long as no one is willing to challenge it." 

These are the movie's strengths.  Unfortunately this simply moving story is embedded in a distracting matrix of cliché, stereotype, caricature, and unsubtlely that requires an entire tray of freshly-baked eyerolls to get through.  Tala's mother Reema (Antonia Frering) is a cartoon witch of a Middle-Eastern socialite, making her daughters miserable with constant harping on their weight and fashion choices, and barking orders at staff who despise her.  ("Where is my husband?  And where is my coffee?")  Leyla's mother (Siddiqua Akhtar) is even worse, hitting every stereotype of the provincial, fresh-off-the-boat NRI housewife.  Her performance is dreadful, full of mealy smiles and nahin-faces that would be better suited to a saas-bahu serial than to a movie that appears to want to be understated.  This is the only remotely desi content in the film, and it's just cringe-inducing.

The early stages of Tala and Leyla's relationship are particularly fraught with facepalm moments of dreadful writing.  Leyla seems perpetually to attract bits of lint that Tala is compelled to pluck off of her, leading one to wonder why Sarif could not come up with other excuses for the two women to touch.  A tennis match provides an especially corny and heavy-handed metaphor for their growing attraction, complete with a breathlessly panted "That was amazing!" at its conclusion.  Tennis is not effete enough to convey Tala's aristocratic milieu, so she also plays a polo match, leading to one of the film's most nauseating exchanges:

Leyla (practically batting her eyelashes): I was worried you were going to fall, leaning across the horse like that!

Tala (with forced nonchalance): I like to take chances.

Filmi Geek:  Puke.  

Moments like this are bad enough, and the unsubtlety just gets thicker and thicker.  At its nadir, Leyla's sympathetic and proactive sister Yasmin (Amber Rose Revah) tries to figure out what's troubling Leyla, before the latter has come out even to herself.  The astute Yasmin notices a stack of books on Leyla's dresser - Jeanette Winterson, Sarah Waters, even Martina Navratilova's autobiography - and a k.d. lang CD nearby.  Really, Sarif?  Really?   And finally, the entire movie may be one extended setup for this chestnut of a punchline uttered by a gossipy Middle Eastern lady in its denouement:  "She's what? But some of my best friends are Lebanese!" 

The weak writing - both for the caricatured parents and the lovers themselves - hog-ties all the actors into stiff, formulaic performances. In contrast to all this woodenness, the movie's sex scenes are outstanding - fluid, passionate, and downright hot.  It seems that when Sarif cuts her actors loose and lets them just be and feel, they can do a lot more than when constrained by the fetters of Sarif's unnatural scripting.

The movie's 80-minute running time, while merciful, also forces it to short-change anything more than superficial examination of how either woman's cultural and religious heritage affects their prospect for life together.  Tala asserts that her reluctance to lead the "difficult" life in a lesbian relationship is due to the strictures of Jordanian society, but her family is so outrageously wealthy and her life so apparently divorced from Jordanian society that her reasoning is suspect.  Even a white American child of such a socially prominent and controlling mother would have a hard time rebelling against parental expectations; there is nothing especially Middle Eastern about this.  Meanwhile, Leyla's struggle against her culture is painted in the color of stereotype and seems to resolve itself the moment she comes out to herself and her family.  If the dialogue weren't so painful, it would be nice to have 40 minutes more of it, to give some more depth to aspects of these characters' lives that could have been more particularly Arabic and desi.      

Still, I wouldn't devote so many words to complaining about the weaknesses of a movie that doesn't also show a lot of potential to be better.  For all those stiffly executed, lazily written scenes, I Can't Think Straight offers moments of delicate thoughtfulness and sympathy for its characters.  These (plus the terrific sex scenes, which are worth watching again, for research purposes of course) make it worth cringing through the worst parts, if stories about love between women are as close to your heart as they are to mine.   

Chor sipahee (1977)

चोर सिपाही

When I read about how Hindi movies were made in the 1970s, I can't help but be impressed by the alacrity with which the Bombay studios churned out product. Actors shuttling between three shootings a day and dubbing sessions in the evening; dialogue writers cranking out lines on set; stories resketched on the fly as actors' schedules conflicted or productions ran out of money - it's miraculous that movies of any quality were produced at all. Many a masala movie with an exciting cast and a promising first hour falls casualty to the risks of that kind of improvisational, shoestring filmmaking. The "curse of the second half" bumps more such movies than I can count right off the rails.

Chor sipahee ("thief and officer") is a textbook case of this, stylish fun masala with a lot going for it before it disintegrates into incoherence. You can feel the production becoming more rushed and careless as the film wears on. Twists in the story become more ad hoc and less clearly rendered; characters recede into the background or disappear altogether. And yet there is enough of both style and substance to redeem these sins of sloppy production, yielding sufficient reward for the masala connoisseur.

On the side of substance, Chor sipahee - like all the best masala films - hangs its wacky trappings on a profound social theme. In this case, the theme is the nature of criminality and redemption, and whether punishment or rehabilitation is the better philosophy for stopping and deterring criminal behavior. Shankar (Shashi Kapoor), a maverick but effective police inspector, believes so firmly in the principle of rehabilitation that he actually undermines attempts to punish criminals. When he encounters Raja (Vinod Khanna), an unrepentant gang leader, Shankar sees the ultimate opportunity to put his views into practice, and vows to reform Raja. Shankar is willing to go to great lengths to secure Raja's turnaround - he joins Raja's gang, renounces family ties, and apparently becomes a vicious evildoer himself. This is a subterfuge intended to show Raja the error of his ways.

Naturally, the plan is effective, and by out-badding the bad guys (including Ranjit as a gang leader who is either an Arab or peculiarly Arabophilic), Shankar convinces Raja that a life of crime is no life worth living. I would be lying if I said I understood the logic here, either of Shankar or of the script. For an alternate view, though, do see the excellent exegesis by Post-Punk Cinema Club, which finds remarkable depth and coherence in what seems to me slapdash filmmaking at its most joyously ad hoc.

On the side of style, Chor sipahee is 70s masala at its full-bore best.  From Vinod Khanna's superb high-heeled boots, to Shashi Kapoor's badass leather jacket (he is decked throughout in fantastic costumes designed by his wife, Jennifer Kendall), there's no shortage of awesome to feast your eyes on.  It's almost  a waste to write a review of a movie such as this when I don't have a DVD to take screencaptures from.  Fortunately Post-Punk and Memsaab are both on the case; see their posts for the full complement of visual goodness. 

No masala movie worth its salt is complete without an outlandishly-costumed qawwali, and Chor sipahee delivers with "Duniya hai aati jaati," in which Shashi Kapoor and Vinod Khanna, in identical qawwal outfits, repeatedly exchange places via cleverly executed backflips. This song, only about 45 minutes into the movie, also marks the last interesting thing my beloved Shabana Azmi gets to do in it. 

 

As often happens in her masala turns, Shabana Azmi is woefully underused in Chor sipahee.  She has a terrific scene very early in the movie, in which she outwits Raja while he tries to rob her father's safe.  (At this point in the film it must be admitted that Raja doesn't seem terribly smart for a successful recidivist crook.)  Parveen Babi gets a bit more substance to her role, as Raja's righteous sister Bharti.  In a delightful bit of masala melodrama, Bharti, disgusted by Raja's criminal pursuits, refuses his angry demand that she demonstrate her love by tying a rakhi on his wrist.  Durga Khote gets a marvelously filmi turn as well,as Raja and Bharti's mother.  In one terrific scene, she demonstrates her loving forgiveness for Raja by fixing him a bowl of kheer, and he demonstrates his unrepentant viciousness by refusing to eat it.  Fortunately for everyone, Shankar turns up and eats the sweet with relish, to mother's wide-eyed delight.

On reflection, especially after reading the other reviews I've mentioned, I feel I should have found Chor sipahee more satisfying than I did.   As Memsaab enumerates, it hits all the required masala elements and then some.  70s masala is a little bit like pizza - even when it's mediocre, it's still pretty good while it's happening.  Chor sipahee is a good time, even if there's not much to remember the next day.  And Shashi Kapoor does look mighty groovy when he dons appropriate threads for joining a smuggling ring:

(Thanks to Memsaab for the shamelessly purloined screencaptures.)

Lamhe (1991)

लमहे

Reading obituaries after Yash Chopra's unexpected death last weekend, I was surprised to realize how many of his movies I counted among my absolute favorites - movies like Deewaar, Kaala Patthar, and Waqt.  These films were groundbreaking, trendsetting, with an intensity and attention to moviemaking craft that makes them stand up, even decades later, as classics.

Other Yash Chopra movies that I have seen do not rise as loftily.  Silsila is thoughtful and mature in its exploration of extramarital passion, but somewhat flawed in its resolution. Kabhi kabhie is mopey, dull, and downright stupid at times (although I admit that a recent conversation with a friend gave me some new perspectives on it, that may demand a rewatch).  And Dil to pagal hai is nearly forgettable, save Madhuri's mesmerizing smile.

So it was with some tempered expectations that I turned to Lamhe ("moments") to commemorate Yash Chopra's career on the day of h is death.  In recent reviews (Satte pe satta, English Vinglish), I have given thought to the power of nostalgia, and the special appeal that films cherished by desis as childhood favorites have for me, as an outsider and a student of modern Indian cultures.  Lamhe is one such beloved film - as with Satte pe satta, when I tweeted about watching it, I received many comments from desi women of roughly my age who hold it close to their hearts.  But I was prepared, from other commentary I had read (such as Beth's hilarious response) to not relate that well to the movie myself.

As it happens, I do not hate Lamhe.  But I do not particularly like it, either.  I suppose that in its time - coming as it did in such a dire and violent era for Hindi films - it was refreshing, different, exciting. For me, though, without that perspective, it's just puzzling and lackluster.  It falls very close to Kabhi kabhie on my Yash Chopra spectrum - a dull film with a few nice songs and a great deal of moping by people whose decisions and dilemmas are not terribly relatable.  Lamhe is remembered as one of Hindi film's great romances. But it is a romance that I find it hard to get behind, because neither of principals' great lifelong loves does anything much to move me.

As a young man, Viren (Anil Kapoor) falls in love with Pallavi (Sridevi), the daughter of a family friend who lives in the next palace over from Viren in Rajasthan.  It's not hard to see what Viren loves about Pallavi - she is beautiful, sassy, bold, and a whole lot of fun.  After Pallavi's death, though, Viren clings desperately to her memory for nearly two decades.  Rather than coming across as romantic, Viren's obsession rings to me  joyless, self-indulgent, and tiresome.  It's terribly depressing, and it's difficult to imagine the spirited Pallavi would have been much impressed by Viren squandering his life in such incessant, intolerable moping.

This, I suppose, is an example of theme I don't quite get because I did not grow up immersed in desi culture.  The notion that each of us is allotted only one great love, and that our joy is finished when that love is gone, is seen often in Hindi movies - at least as a source of dramatic tension, if not the ultimate message of most movies.  But the theme has little resonance for me, being as I am a person who falls in love early and often.  I just cannot relate to a character who refuses to see beauty in anyone other than the frozen memories of a long-dead girl. 

And then there is Pallavi's orphaned daughter Pooja (also Sridevi). Raised in apparent isolation by Dai Jaa (Waheeda Rehman), Viren's own surrogate mother, Pooja is bound to be more than slightly dysfunctional.  But her lifelong love for Viren is not just unmotivated - it's anti-motivated.  As far as the movie shows us, Pooja never even meets Viren until she is 18; he worked assiduously to avoid her throughout her life.  Despite this, she is convinced she loves him, enough to tolerate his gloominess, his ongoing neglect, and the particularly appalling slap across the face that he delivers to her when she confesses her love. This is more the girlish fantasies of a maladjusted young woman than a deep, substantial love.

I have been told that part of what makes Lamhe shocking and significant is the notion of romance between a guardian and his ward, a man in loco parentis to the woman he pairs with by the end of the movie.  But of all the aspects of Lamhe that set wrong with me, this is the least.  Viren is not Pooja's guardian in any substantive sense.  He provides for her financially but has no relationship with her whatsoever.  And so there is as little substance to their parent-child relationship as there is to their romantic relationship.  Viren's about-face in the movie's end, his sudden love for Pooja, is just as unmotivated as her lifelong passion for him. This is passion by fiat, love that exists merely because the script says there should be love.  Romance movies always have a disadvantage - we know how they are going to end.  A movie that makes us wait a couple of hours for that inevitable result had better back it up, and make the couple's trajectory to togetherness interesting and compelling.  Lamhe doesn't manage this.  Viren's sulking and Pooja's girlish squealing - punctuated by the forced comedy of Viren's friend Prem (Anupam Kher) - make for a long, dull slog.  Yash Chopra may be the king of romance, but Lamhe just plods. 

If Lamhe has a redeeming feature, it is of course the marvelous Sridevi herself.  Amrita said of her in this moive, "Sridevi was just this magical creature to us who could do no wrong."  This goes a long way to explain why this dull movie with its bizarro story is so fondly remembered by desi women my age.  Supriya Nair, in her wonderful article about Sridevi (which I referenced in my review of English Vinglish) talked about the resonant appeal to contemporaneous young girls of Sridevi's woman-child characters like Pooja.  But for me, Pooja is strange, puzzling, even unappealing.  As charming and gifted as Sridevi obviously is, Pooja's terminal ingenuousness is a turnoff, as is the notion of her paired with the middle-aged, gloomy Viren.  Sridevi is far  more appealing as the bright, clever Pallavi - I would have thoroughly enjoyed a movie about that character. 

There are a few nice songs in Lamhe -  the best of these is Sridevi's gorgeous rain song, "Megha re megha," which I had to back up and watch several times over before I could continue the movie.

 

Another sure crowd-pleaser is the medley of old songs that Pooja, Prem, and Dai Jaa perform in an attempt to get a smile out of the perpetually pouting Viren.  This is interminable, and eventually nearly insufferable, but Waheeda Rehman dancing to "Aaj phir jeene ki tamanna hai" is such a deliciously pleasurable filmi in-joke as to make it all worthwhile.

But the movie as a whole?  I'm afraid I have to say I miss the appeal.  As much as I respect Yash Chopra's contributions and the groundbreaking classics he created, the specialness of Lamhe is lost on me, with my outsider's perspective on its themes.  There is always more for me to learn.