Filmi Geek

Jugnu (1973)

जुगनू

Dir. Pramod Chakravorty

Jugnu is a super-satisfying masala film built around a title character who is part Batman, part Robin Hood. Batman, because Ashok Roy (Dharmendra) is a wealthy, respected member of his community who moonlights as a disguise-wearing do-gooder. And Robin Hood, because the good that Ashok's alter ego, Jugnu, does is robbing other rich people to finance the orphanage he runs for apparently hundreds of little boys (little orphaned girls are on their own, I guess). As Ashok, he is always nattily dressed, a man about town. When he transforms into Jugnu he might impersonate a sardar or a pathan, defraud a bunch of smugglers out of their booty or creep into a heavily guarded museum to pinch the jewel-encrusted treasures within.  Ashok Roy leads a very busy life.

And the movie about him is a ton of fun, about as satisfying masala as there is, seasoned with a few borrowings from the spy-movie and heist-movie genres.  In one sequence, Jugnu goes after a bejeweled fish sculpture, protected by the most high-tech security system that the movies can offer: the criss-cross cage of invisible beams that, when breached, trigger an alarm. In Jugnu, the beams become visible to anyone who dons a special viewer that looks suspiciously like a swim mask, and thanks to the film's budget the beams themselves look a whole lot more like neon tubes than ephemeral beams of infrared radiation.

 

After a jaunty song (of course) distracts the museum guard long enough for Jugnu to climb onto its roof, there is a bit lifted right out of my favorite heist movie, How To Steal A Million (which for all I know lifted it from somewhere else).  Jugnu uses a strong magnet's pull through a wall to manipulate a key off its hook and into its keyhole just like Peter O'Toole. Sadly, it isn't followed by setting off the alarm with a toy airplane or making out with Audrey Hepburn in a broom closet, but that's really not a strike against Jugnu.  Because who needs Audrey Hepburn when you have Hema Malini, who is as much of a badass in this film as ever?  When we (and Ashok) first meet her character, Seema, she is giving a sharp-shooting demonstration with a pair of pistols that charms Ashok right out of his snakeskin shoes. Later, she holds her own in a melee scene or two, something that Hema Malini does more and better than any heroine of her era.  She even gets to pilot a helicopter.  A HELICOPTER.  Seema is also a superior dancer - of course - providing the opportunity for just one of Jugnu's fantastic songs. Another one of those great songs comes when the jealous Ramesh (Prem Chopra), hoping to make a fool of Ashok, spikes a glass of soft drink that is naturally consumed by Seema instead.  The result is something magical: not merely a drunk song, and not merely a rain song, but a drunk-in-the-rain song.  Bada maza aaya, indeed.  

 

Ramesh's relationship to Ashok is a tangled masala microcosm in itself; after Ashok's grandfather (Nasir Hussain) becomes estranged from Ashok's father (Pran), he is defrauded into believing that Ramesh is his long-lost grandson, and raises the boy with all the love and privilege that should have been Ashok's. In the meantime, Ashok's mother is murdered and little-boy Ashok kills her murderer in revenge; this guy turns out later, of course, to be Seema's father. No masala element is spared in the construction of this magnificent narrative. 

And there is more, so much more.  Jugnu is an epitome of all the reasons we watch masala.  There's Dharmendra's cute patriotic song, performed with the help of a hundred adorable little boys and capped by "Jai Hind" written in fireworks.  The theme of patriotism is flogged rather hard throughout, in fact; Ashok's father was a freedom fighter, and though Ashok never knew him, Ashok himself frequently proclaims his loathing for traitors.  There's a comic sidekick as well, Mehmood, who gets his apotheosis while wearing a clown suit and evading a prowling tiger. There is even Ajit as the head bad guy, menacing about his stylish tricked-out lair with a steel lobster claw in place of a hand.  Jugnu just pulls out all the stops in the name of paisa vasool, and it doesn't disappoint - not for a minute.

 

 

Dil Dhadakne Do (2015)

दिल धड़कने दो 

Dir. Zoya Akhtar

Films about rich folks are nothing new in Hindi films.  For decades, from Tere Ghar ke Samne to Waqt to Hum Saath Saath Hain, the movies have offered stories about universal emotions - such as romance and loss, family and sacrifice - and lent them an escapist quality by setting them in the sparkling, enormous mansions and the shiny left-hand-drive convertibles of the colossally rich.  

Zoya Akhtar's Dil Dhadakne Do does the same, attempting to update the template for the cynical multiplex era. Her characters are not good-hearted innocents who undertake well-meaning but ill-fated deceptions on their way to happily-ever-after.  They are self-absorbed, manipulative, controlling, damaged modern people.  This doesn't take the movie in the dark direction of, say, Ang Lee's The Ice Storm, one of Hollywood's better forays into the privileged-people-doing-selfish-things narrative realm - rather, Akhtar plays these foibles mostly for laughs, only edging toward old-fashioned filmi heart-tugging at the very end.  And for the most part, it works pretty well.  The film has a few silly devices and can't consistently maintain the snappy pace of its best sequences, and it does not have anything profound or subtle to say.  But on balance it is highly watchable and even, in some moments, shines quite brightly.

Most of that shine is carried by Ranveer Singh, who is charming and funny as Kabir Mehra, scion of the wealthy-but-faltering Mehra family.  Kabir is perhaps the film's most delicately crafted character; he is part people-pleaser and part rebel, which if you think about it is not an easy combination to pull off.  He has no interest in taking over his father's failing manufacturing business, nor is he willing to marry the young woman his parents have chosen for tactical reasons (her father's quid-pro-quo investment could save the company), but he can't bear to hurt anyone's feelings in asserting these independences.  Too, he is a romantic, and he cannot resist either falling in love himself, or taking the opportunity to help another young couple get together.  And so in negotiating these competing aspects of his personality, he ties himself into the knots that drive much of the film's plot.   Zoya Akhtar has done a nice job inserting Singh's comic talent to break the tension of nearly every confrontational scene in the film.  Perhaps less intentionally, he's also the breath of air that revives the movie whenever its flags.  

Ranveer Singh doubles down on all that charm and energy in Kabir's romance with Farah (Anushka Sharma, tearing up the screen again in her third film of the year), the lead dancer in the stage show on the cruise ship that the Mehra family has commandeered and on which most of the movie takes place.  Kabir and Farah shine brighter than anything else in the film, with joyful and mostly unselfconscious energy.  The picturization of "Pehli baar" is the film's best sequence, though the song itself sounds peculiarly borrowed from 1980s bubblegum pop.  It begins with Kabir dancing goofily while Farah laughs, and ends with the couple tumbling joyously into bed - delightfully, still singing to one another.  Its magical silliness makes it more romantic than any slow jam and sexier than any item song.  

Compared to the energy between Kabir and Farah, much of the rest of the film feels somewhat flat.  The narration delivered by Kabir's dog (voiced by Aamir Khan) is a miscalculation.  The dog's "thoughts" (ugh, it makes me cringe just to write that) add exactly nothing that we viewers could not deduce from simply watching the story unfold, and it would been a less patronizing film without the "gee whiz, humans are funny" running gag.  As for the human performers, their work is all solid, and neither distracts nor detracts (except for the perennially irritating Farhan Akhtar, whom I wish would go back behind the camera and stay there).

On the other hand, there isn't much to the characters, either.  The cruise ship is populated by two generations of the Mehra family and friends, gathered nominally to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Kabir's parents, Kamal and Neelam (Anil Kapoor and Shefali Shah).   For the Mehras, though, the cruise is more a matter of keeping up appearances that their marriage is perfect and that their business is flourishing.  They are serviceable, but not particularly incisive or insightful, characterizations.  Kabir's sister Ayesha (Priyanka Chopra) is also saddled with a familiar conflict; she has both business acumen and ambition, but is pinned back by the old-fashioned values of her parents, who would never consider putting her in charge of the manufacturing firm.  She's also laced in by her husband Manav (Rahul Bose), an uptight chauvinist who is in denial about just how much trouble his marriage is in.  (This is a great role for Rahul Bose, whose skin is pulled so tightly across his skull that he looks tense and high-strung even when he isn't.  Bose also delivers an outstanding comical moment - all expression and body language, no line - when Ayesha beans Manav with a ferocious racketball shot.)  Like her parents' arc, Ayesha's is solid and not especially fresh, but in its deft execution Chopra again supports my theory that she is a real actor when she's given a real role.

Apart from Manav, the characters are firmly divided on generational lines - all the older folks are old-fashioned, sexist, and controlling of their children, while all the young folks are chafing, rebellious,  and progressive.  It might have been clever to have some character defy this clean division.  But the young people are fun, and fairly well-drawn in the limited screen-time they get.  Like Kabir and Ayesha, they are all boxed in by their parents' expectations.  Nagged to dress the right way, act the right way, show the right interest in marriage, they skulk along with sullen submission; only in their midnight gatherings on the top deck, amongst themselves, do they snap to life.  There's a hint here, too, of a thread that Akhtar might have wanted to suggest but not tease all the way out: One of the young women, judging by the way all the young people squirm whenever the adults discuss finding her a husband, is plausibly (and also plausibly deniably) a lesbian, though no one dares say it out loud.(*)

Even the progressive points that the movie does make out loud are watered down.  When Manav brags that he is such a forward-thinking guy that he has given his wife permission to run her own business, he is challenged by a character who points out that the marriage is hardly equal if Manav retains the power to grant or deny such permission.  The house in my Boston theater, packed with young expat desis, cheered at this line.  But the line is delivered by Sunny (Farhan Akhtar), Ayesha's ex-flame.  Ayesha spends the whole film trying to assert herself, to get the credit she deserves and the respect she craves, but nobody who matters listens until a man comes along to speak on her behalf.  (This is arguably not the movie's fault, but rather a reflection of reality.)  In Dil Dhadakne Do's favor, its bumpy climax leaves the Mehra family tentatively bonded, but we don't really know what will happen when their boat reaches the shore.  In a film that deals so superficially with the tensions that pull at people too concerned with their own image and their own needs to really listen to each other, too much resolution would have been far too facile. 

(*)  The same could be said of Zoya Akhtar herself - I have long suspected that she is Reema Kagti's partner in more than scriptwriting, but the internet is remarkably silent on this point.

 

Revolver Rani (2014)

Dir. Sai Kabir

The film world is all abuzz with praise for Kangana Ranaut's work in Tanu Weds Manu Returns, and when I wrote about that movie I added to the chorus, even though I'm not in love with the movie as a whole.

But in light of all the accolades, it's time to take a look at another of Ranaut's outstanding performances, one in a film that came and went without much notice:  Revolver Rani.  Her mad and memorable rendering of the narrative's focus, the deranged and charismatic Alka Singh, helped make Revolver Rani more than just a nutso political satire.  It's a film with a rich, layered narrative and a tragic heart.  

I'd like to see more people talk about this underappreciated film.  Please have a look at what I wrote about it in my latest column in Outlook:  Killer Kangana.