Filmi Geek

Mixed Doubles (2006)

Dir. Rajat Kapoor

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dhobi ghat (2011)

धोबी घाट

Dir. Kiran Rao

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)

Dir. Shyam Benegal

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

Dir. Abhishek Sharma

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. 

Chori chori (2003)

चोरी चोरी

Dir. Milan Luthria

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

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

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

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

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