Filmi Geek

Goliyon Ki Raasleela Ram-Leela (2013)

गोलियों की रासलीला राम-लीला

Dir. Sanjay Leela Bhansali

Bhansali films have been a mixed bag for me. For instance, while I am very fond of Khamoshi and Bajirao-Mastani, Saawariya hits some terribly wrong notes, and my seething hatred of Devdas is well-documented. Bhansali's aesthetic sense is strong, and even if he doesn't always pull it off, it's clear that he always has a grand vision in mind. In Ram-Leela, Bhansali fires on all cylinders.  Everything that Bhansali sets out to do in all his films with such mixed degrees of success, he achieves in Ram-Leela - his fairy-tale settings, his superstars so sexy it almost hurts, his visuals so splendid they are almost edible. For me, Ram-Leela turns out to be a nearly flawless film, and one that has only improved with repeated viewings. 

"Inspired by Romeo and Juliet," as the title cards put it, Ram-Leela sets its love story in the fantastical city of Ranjaar, and like any good fairy tale, it is firmly fixed neither in place nor in time. Ranjaar sits on the Gujarati seacoast, although bits of it are quite recognizably shot in Udaipur. And while the characters carry mobile phones and talk about Twitter, nearly all wear elaborate, traditional-style dress, dhotis and shawls and turbans. Only Ram Rajadi (Ranveer Singh), the rising scion of one of Ranjaar's two warring families, wears jeans and button-front shirts.  And from the moment Ram comes rolling on screen, reclining in a beefcake pose on a motorcycle that seems to drive itself, propelled by Ram's awesome sexiness alone, it's clear that he's the black-sheep rebel of Ranjaar.

In Ranjaar, an astonished tourist tells his friend at the film's opening, guns and gun-sellers are as common as bhel puri and sugarcane juice stands in Mumbai.  The half-millennium feud that dominates this landscape pits the smuggling Saneras against the gun-running Rajadis, and no one, not even small children, is exempt from the fight.  Alone among both families, Ram longs to set down his weapons and make love, not war. In pursuit of this noble goal Ram strides boldly into a holi celebration in Sanera territory, and a few colorful and smoking-hot flirtation scenes later, is bound in love to the Sanera scion, Leela (Deepika Padukone).  

But you can't grow up in an environment steeped in toxic masculinity without absorbing some of it into your own blood, and Ranjaar is nothing if not a sultry breeding-swamp for testosterone-fueled violence. It is the kind of place where completely absurd and reckless dick-fights routinely end in bloodshed. In one such contest, instead of dropping their dhotis and breaking out the measuring sticks, a group of virile young Rajadis and equally manly Saneras each decide to prove their superiority by shooting bottles off of the others' heads, William-Tell style. Unsurprisingly, Ram's brother is killed. In response, the peace-loving Ram loses his cool, and pumps Leela's brother full of bullets.  In the aftermath, Ram and Leela flee, vowing to end the cycle of violence. But their families scheme to put a quick end to their elopement, and thus comes the thin end of the wedge that drives our lovers apart.

Ram-Leela puts one entertaining twist on its testosterone-soaked fever dream: The leader of the Saneras is a woman, Dhankor Baa (Supriya Pathak), Leela's mother. Dhankor is as vicious and ruthless as any of her deputies. She is also a treat to watch. Supriya Pathak both chews scenery and adds subtle emotive touches that keep her grounded. As hot as Ram and Leela are, Dhankor is the real scene-stealer of their movie, alternating carefully calibrated bursts of vicious temper with unctuous displays of measured wryness.  It is a brilliantly controlled melodramatic performance.  On a recent rewatch I found myself wondering what Ram-Leela would look like with Shabana Azmi in the role of Dhankor; I quickly realized that such a movie exists, and is called Godmother.  Like Rambhiben of that movie, Dhankor Baa operates far outside the sphere of traditional femininity, wielding nearly incontestable power and commanding terrified respect.  But Rambhiben is embedded in a matrix of realism, while Dhankor resides in a fable. And that gives Supriya Pathak a little more latitude to have fun with her menacing role.

 

I didn't even get to mention Richa Chadda, almost unbearably hot and fierce as Leela's bhabhi. 

Though the film at first hews pretty closely to the Romeo & Juliet outline - warring families, clandestine balcony rendezvous complete with an adaptation of the "rose by any other name" line, brothers slain in revenge, secret elopement, even a suitor for Leela (a hilariously bumbling NRI archaeologist) - in a rather thrilling embellishment, Bhansali ups the stakes with events that propel both Ram and Leela to the heads of their respective families. And so the final showdown begins as a face-off and negotiation between Ram and Leela themselves, standing for Rajadi and Sanera in toto - an intense blending of business, vengeance, and passion.

The film is full of sequences like this, full of amped-up explosive intensity.  Ranveer Singh pulls off this kind of barely-restrained mania like no other actor, and with both his oiled pecs (Leela actually makes fun of Ram's perfectly hairless chest) and Deepika Padukone on the screen, there is almost too much beauty to bear.  They look amazing together, and while this worked well enough in Bajirao Mastani, it is off the charts in Ram-Leela. The color palates of Ram-Leela are gorgeous as well; there is a running metaphor involving peacocks, and at times the whole film seems peacock-colored, shimmering blues and deep blood reds.  In one of the film's generous complement of songs, Priyanka Chopra looks good enough to eat on a backdrop that is somehow both infinitely parti-colored and soothingly pastel blue, a set that puts the excess of Devdas to shame in the way it successfully layers more and more and more and yet stays just this side of too much.

If there is a flaw in Ram-Leela - and this is such a nitpick - it is some ill-advised choreography.  In one song Ram and his army of background dancers do (and overdo) a move that must have been lifted out of a dandruff-shampoo commercial, flapping their palms on the backs of their heads long enough that you start to feel a little embarrassed for them. In another, Ram and Leela recall the 90s with some very goofy side-by-side dancing worthy of Govinda-Karishma or Jeetu-Sridevi.  Still these are such minor complaints. The songs themselves are marvelous, now recalling Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam, now Devdas, and all visually dazzling. The film is just pure joy to watch, and to watch again - sexy, beautiful, gripping, and damn good fun.  

 

Kapoor and Sons (2016)

Dir. Shakun Batra

I have a good friend whose family is in the habit of lying to one another and keeping secrets. Don't tell my sister that my other sister's son is gay - it will kill her. Don't let your brother find out about that trip abroad you're planning - he will be furious. Don't tell mom I'm seeing someone - she will ask a million questions.  This is their default mode of interaction, concealing the truth to stave off direct confrontation. And all too often when the truth does come out, it is that much more explosive for being compounded with deception. 

This is not to criticize my friend's family - to paraphrase Tolstoy, each dysfunctional family is dysfunctional in its own way, and more of us than not have something unhealthy in our families' interaction. But before the end credits of Kapoor and Sons were done, I had pulled out my phone and texted my friend. "You ought to see it," I said.  Because this film is about a family where everyone keeps secrets from everyone else.  Though it's clear from the start that the family bricks are held together by lots of love, the mortar is cracked and pitted. And when the secrets start pouring out, the entire structure crumbles.

The family gathers when its elderly patriarch (Rishi Kapoor) has a heart attack, and almost immediately the knives come out. The early scenes are staged effectively with brisk wit as barbs fly across their kitchen table.  The marriage of Harsh (Rajat Kapoor) and Sunita (Ratna Pathak) is on the edge of a meltdown. The couple is dogged by money troubles, and Sunita openly accuses Harsh of having an affair. Of their sons, Rahul (Fawad Khan), a successful author living in London, is the golden boy who can do no wrong, while Arjun (Sidharth Malhotra), an aspiring author and bartender in New Jersey, is the family loser. 

Even more than in the recent Dil Dhadakne Do, which also extracted comedy from family tensions, these characters - with the possible exception of Harsh - are deeply sympathetic and likable. Writers of fiction say that success requires being cruel to your characters even though you love them. Likewise, Kapoor and Sons makes you like its characters before doing awful things to them, and the result is deeply effective.  Both young men chafe at their roles in the family hierarchy.  Fawad Khan and Sidharth Malhotra are both very gentle and appealing as actors, and each renders his character with his own hue of vulnerability. Rahul is uncomfortable with his favored position in the family, and assuages the guilt of it with solicitousness toward his brother and with attempts to solve all the family's problems; he arranges one-on-one chats with each of his parents, imploring them to treat each other with more kindness and patience. When Harsh thoughtlessly invites the woman Sunita suspects is his lover to the family home for a party, Rahul attempts to defuse the fight by claiming responsibility for inviting her. For Arjun's part, he mistrusts his brother's offers of kindness, and takes his parents' constant critiques with adolescent petulance. Only once the depth of betrayal he perceives becomes too much to bear does his hurt become explosive. 

Sunita, too, is affecting and sympathetic, the only woman in this tempest of masculine resentment. Sunita longs to establish a catering business, and Harsh's dismissal of the idea comes from a bitter mixture of financial fear, disrespect for Sunita's acumen, and wounded pride. Yet Sunita is not innocent; she hounds Harsh relentlessly, and her own pride causes a furious response when Harsh suggests borrowing money from his own brother. Sunita bears the most difficult burden as well, when the secrets begin to emerge; her own secret is perhaps the most terrible and damaging to the family foundation, and her reaction to Rahul's revelation is devastating. Is it the lie that hurts or the truth, Rahul asks Sunita, and there is no answer.  Even in this film packed with engaging and emotional performances, Ratna Pathak is a show-stealer.

At a slight remove from the emerging disaster is the patriarch, Rahul and Arjun's Dadu, an adorably rakish old man. Dadu spends the first part of the film in the hospital, where Arjun shows him how to access porn on his iPad; he is not at home to witness the growing tension. Even on the day the family shit finally hits the fan, Dadu doesn't hear much of it; he sits perplexed on the lawn outside the house, waiting for the family to gather for the portrait he dreams of having taken, while the storm of Harsh and Sunita, Rahul and Arjun swirls through the rooms of the house. But Dadu is not so much marginal to the disagreements as he is above them. In the end, when Dadu implores the family to set aside their arguments and come together for his sake and theirs, he does not act as mediator or arbitrator. He never weighs in on the substance of their disagreements.  Dadu is not there to say who is right or who should apologize to whom; he is there to say that none of it matters. 

If you press me to find some flaws in the film - and it's not an easy task - I'd have to point to the moments when it veers a little too close to family-movie cliche; the sudden illness that brings the far-flung family together is a tired device, and the sudden tragedy toward the end even more so. And then there is the matter of Alia Bhatt, who is in fact a fine performer (someone pointed out to me how like she is to her mother, Soni Razdan), but through no fault of her own, still looks far too young, like a teenager playing with makeup. Here she has some sexual tension with both brothers, and she doesn't pair well opposite two men who look, and are, in their thirties.  And for a final quibble, there is no need to obscure Rishi Kapoor's face behind effects makeup; he's old enough, and cute enough, to have played Dadu as he is.  But these are minor, minor complaints. Kapoor and Sons is a lovely film.  I can't wait to find out what my friend and her family think of it. 

Bajrangi Bhaijaan (2015)

Dir. Kabir Khan

Salman Khan is certainly a subject of much controversy, what with blackbuck hunting, deadly driving, and rumored physical abuse of former lovers.  But he is also a sort of Teflon superstar; the controversies don't stick, at least not enough to tarnish the love of his legions of devoted fans, nor enough to bite into the bottom line.  I've acknowledged before that I have an incongruous soft spot for him - for his onscreen persona, I mean, which belies with teddy-bear sweetness all the self-absorption and violence of the trouble he's gotten himself into off screen.  And in what the cynical will surely see as a calculated masterstroke of public relations, his titular character in Bajrangi Bhaijaan is nothing if not the apotheosis of Khan's childlike, gentle giant avatar that, despite myself, I do find quite appealing.  

If you can't bring yourself to watch Salman Khan films because of one or the other rotten thing he's likely done, I won't argue with you about it - it's a reasonable position to take, and I won't begrudge it or judge it or attempt any argument in his favor.  But I also advise you not to read any further, because I have nothing more to say about the matter. I have only squeeing delight at the lovable fun that is every minute of Bajrangi Bhaijaan.  It is a genuinely entertaining film.(*) 

Among its pleasures is a soundtrack that runs the gamut from a couple of terrific traditional qawwalis to a chicken song danced by Khan and Kareena Kapoor; a satisfying fight scene in a brothel that is sufficiently stylized (and bloodless) and crafted with a touch of humor as to have the flavor of a throwback to 70s masala; and a mute little girl with the cutest smile you've seen in the movies since maybe Jugal Hansraj in Masoom.  That's right, Salman Khan, the big lug, gets his heart strings pulled by an adorable little moppet, and so do we: Bajrangi Bhaijaan is about as emotionally manipulative a narrative as you'll ever see.  But it's no criticism to call this out.  Most films are emotionally manipulative, in the sense that they aim to make you feel something, and use craft to varying degrees to achieve that end.  Bajrangi Bhaijaan makes no pretense about being emotionally manipulative, and the manipulation itself is so satisfying that submitting to it is a pleasure.  

Indeed, Bajrangi Bhaijaan is a most Rajkumar-Hirani-esque movie, with its capacity to entertain with cleverly crafted humor while preaching life lessons that ought to be obvious but are somehow charming and leave you grinning like a dope the whole time.  It posits a fantastical sort of world, in which innocence is protected and cherished rather than taken advantage of.  In this world, love conquers prejudice and even the dourest doubter can be won over just by the desire to put wrongs to right.  The title character (whose name is actually Pawan) is Salman Khan's most bhola-bhala incarnation ever, so committed to honesty that he blurts out all kinds of uncomfortable truths - even the little girl, Shahida (Harshaali Malhotra), is sometimes exasperated by his complete lack of self-preservation instinct.  (She acquires an adorable gesture with which she expresses this exasperation, a face-palm followed by extending the hand in helpless questioning.)  Yet somehow, Pawan's open-faced earnestness makes people want to help him in all kinds of improbable ways.  In the world of Bajrangi Bhaijaan, Pawan succeeds not by guile, but by utter guilelessness.   

When Pawan meets Shahida, he doesn't know she is a Muslim, or from Pakistan.  He takes her for a Brahmin because, he says, she is fair-skinned; underlying this is his assumption that his beloved Bajrang Bali wouldn't spark such an emotional connection in him to one not of his caste and community.  This bias is not presented as an angry or hateful one, but rather a product of Pawan's naivete. (Contrast the blustery spouting of the same prejudices by Pawan's soon-to-be father-in-law, in whom it is wholly unsympathetic.) It is a slow process of correction by which Pawan comes to see the truth about Shahida. Pawan is stunned to find Shahida eating meat, but he rationalizes this discovery by concluding that she must be a Kshatriya - not Brahmin, but still sufficiently savarna as to not be too different from his sphere.  And after he recovers from his initial shock, he and Rasika (Kareena Kapoor) take her to a restaurant that serves chicken a hundred ways, and sing a whole delightful song to her about it.  Later, to Pawan's horror, Shahida trots off into a mosque, and finally the truth comes out when she commits the most egregious blasphemy of all: rooting for the wrong side in the India v. Pakistan cricket match.  (She is, after all, named for Shahid Afridi.)  And so Pawan's prejudices, and the path he takes to overcome them, are presented lovingly, as the opening of a heart that is already more open than one might have thought possible. Indeed, when Rasika finally makes explicit the implicit message here - that casteist and communal prejudices are stupid - she tells him that she wouldn't expect that great big heart she fell in love with could ever harbor such small-minded notions.  

But the real reason that Pawan can adjust his worldview to make room for Shahida is because by the time he figures out her origins he is completely in love with her.  And so are we.  Shahida looks out at the world through saucer-sized eyes, and flashes a mischeivous, radiant smile delicious enough to upstage the high-wattage star power that mills around her.  I would say that she is the true delight of Bajrangi Bhaijaan, but that would undersell the other terrific performances in the film, like Nawazuddin Siddiqui as Chand Nawab, a two-bit TV reporter  in Pakistan (think the "Danka TV" guys from Tere Bin Laden) who, like many others in the film, is won over by Pawan's purity of heart and joins his quest to reunite Shahida with her family.  Nawab, too, is happy to join in the movie's fantasy world, a respite from our much harsher, more cynical world.  

And then there is Salman Khan, delivering all this innocence joyfully, which makes him charming to watch when his character is happy, makes you feel like an indulgent older relative when he's stupid, and wrenches you when that innocence is taken advantage of.  It may be a calculated move on his part, shielding himself with an adorable little girl the way a criminal uses a hostage.  But it is a sweet, sweet movie, and its messages of love and unity are simple and pleasant.  It is a lot easier to watch the movie and let it do its magic than to think too hard about whether doing so is a kind of complicity in Salman Khan's misdeeds.  And on a sweltering July afternoon, I'm happy to take the easier path. 

(*) I still can't get my head around the fact that this gentle, delightful story was written by the same screenwriter responsible for the bombastic, unappealing heroics of Baahubali.

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.

 

Parents' nightmare: Mardaani (2014) and Siddharth (2013)

By coincidence, in the span of one weekend I watched Siddharth (dir. Richie Mehta) and the latest Yash Raj production, Mardaani (dir. Pradeep Sarkar), two films both nominally concerned with India's terrible child-kidnaping and child-trafficking scourges.   A title card at the end of Mardaani notes that on average, a child is abducted every eight minutes in India.  This is almost too staggering to contemplate, and both films help you get your mind around this horrendous fact by personalizing it, giving name and face and voice to the children or the families.    And yet the two films could not be more different.  Siddharth, contemplative and meticulous, is a sad study, focused on one family's loss rather than the fate of the missing child.  Mardaani takes a broader view, making explicit what in Siddharth is left to the imagination.  And, it taps an emotional vein of vengeance more than pity.  Mardaani, brash and unsubtle, is all about rage.  

As Mardaani begins, the cop at its center, Shivani Shivaji Roy (Rani Mukherjee) Dabanggs around Mumbai, all swagger and bravado. Unlike Chulbul Pandey, though, she is incorruptible - perhaps Shivani is more like Ajay Lal, the tough cop described in Suketu Mehta's Maximum City who broke the 1993 bombings.  Shivani uses interrogation techniques described in that book, like the merciless feeding of sweets without water, to wrest information from the criminals she collars.  She leads a dramatic raid on a medium-time gangster, earning exasperated sighs from her by-the-book commander, and spontaneously breaks up a politico-religious mob trashing a shop, slapping around its stunned ringleader, a guy twice her size.  But Shivani shows a motherly side too; she and her husband are raising a niece whose parents have died, and she serves as a surrogate aunty for an orphaned kid, Pyari, whom she rescued from the streets and and placed in a shelter.  Pyari goes missing, and the investigative trail that Shivani follows to find her leads to a child trafficking ring led by an arrogant psychopath who calls himself Walt (Tahir Bhasin).  Shivani's mission to break up the ring is professional, and it becomes increasingly personal too, as Walt taunts her with phone calls and worse. 

Rani Mukherjee, with a good script and in capable directorial hands, is a very good actor, and she handles the challenge of Shivani Shivaji Roy with an appropriate blend of cocksure strutting and vulnerability.  It is not an easy task.  Shivani's Chulbul Pandey routine edges on the cartoonish, and it might have been tempting to balance the brashness of it with exaggerated squishiness in the film's more emotional scenes.  For the most part, though, Rani handles both with adequate coherence, showing a consistent theory of Shivani's character.  At her best, she blends them perfectly, as in a scene right before the interval where, on the phone with Walt, she keeps her voice even and confident for his benefit, while her face twists with the beginnings of tears in a display of vulnerable emotion that only the audience can see.  Shivani Shivaji Roy talks a tough game and packs the punch to back it up, but in moments like these she is a human being too, and holding herself together through this chase does take some effort.  

And in the end, arguably, Shivani Shivaji Roy breaks.  The end of Mardaani, like the end of Mrityudand, is a sort of triumph of female will, a catastrophic bursting of the dam of oppression and suffering in a torrent of revenge.  It is not clear whether one is intended to cheer at this turning of the tables, or be appalled.  It is a terribly bleak idea, that the only way for a weak and oppressed class - children, or women, or both - to wrest power from merciless, violent men is to play the game on the same terms they do, with more merciless violence.  The mardaani of the title may refer to the kind of masculinity that endorses and patronizes and profits from the vile treatment of Pyari and the other kidnapped girls, who are dolled up, groped, auctioned, raped, and more.  Or it may refer to the kind of masculinity that Shivani works so hard to embody in her small, strong frame, the kind that speaks the language of the fist and the firearm.  Indeed, it may refer to both.  But it is grim and sad to think that the only way to defeat the exploitative type of masculinity is to adopt the values of the savage, bloodthirsty kind.

And yet, if the repugnant child exploitation of Mardaani is taken as a proxy for the horrendous high-profile rape incidents that have driven India's discourse about gender for the last couple of years - as I think it must be - then perhaps it reflects more than just the general statement that the only way the powerless can save themselves is to take up the weapons of the powerful and bash their heads in with them.  It reflects the tremendous unanswered rage that many women must feel in the face of one outrageous rape case after another.   In Mardaani, politicians patronize Walt's services, pawing and assaulting and dehumanizing the girls.  In the real world, politicians and judges make outrageously demeaning statements about women who ask for it by not keeping to their place.  In that world it's not entirely unreasonable to start to doubt the effectiveness of a political solution.  In that world, headlines about women striking back, attacking and beating and emasculating their attackers, become increasingly common.  Mardaani taps into a vengeful strain of the zeitgeist, and expresses it in a filmi form that is undoubtedly as satisfying for some as it is unsettling for others. 

***

Unlike Mardaani,  Siddharth leaves to the audience's imagination the fate endured by its titular boy.  Siddharth's father, Mahendra Saini (Rajesh Tailang), sends him from their home in Delhi to work a stint at a trolley factory in Ludhiana.  The boy never returns, and Mahendra sets out to find him, on a journey that takes him as much through his own heart as it does from city to city.  

Mahendra, a melancholy zipper-repairer struggling to make ends meet, is at first perplexed at the notion that there is anything irresponsible in sending Siddharth off into illegal child labor.  Why have a son, he asks, if not to put him to work?  As the story progresses, though, Mahendra bends under a growing burden of guilt.  Whatever Siddharth is enduring is left unnamed - the closest he comes to knowing that is a sort of urban legend given to him by another boy at the Ludhiana factory, that the children who vanish wind up in Dongri.  Mahendra, who lived all his life in Delhi, has never heard of this Mumbai neighborhood, and neither does anyone he talks to for a good while.  Dongri begins to take on a mythical quality, both the mysterious, sinister end-of-the-line for abducted kids and the mystical holy grail of Mahendra's search.  

Mahendra's distress is not just for the unknown whereabouts of his son, but also the anxiety endured by his wife Suman (Tannishtha Chatterjee in a hard-eyed, tense, excellent emotional performance) and their little daughter (Khushi Mathur).  And so Mahendra grows increasingly determined to find Siddharth, though following the trail to Ludhiana and eventually Mumbai imposes great financial strain on the family.  At one point, Mahendra humiliates himself to an extortionate thug (Mukesh Chhabra) for the right to work the neighborhood near the Delhi rail station, hoping to find someone who knows where the mythical Dongri might be.  He sells Suman's jewelry, too, and reluctantly accepts cash from relatives. 

Siddharth is shot and acted in a street-level, realistic style that draws you right in to the swirl of the city.   Most scenes have no background score (save a few montage sequences with oddly swelling Western strains), so that when Mahendra sits on a streetcorner the ambient sounds of Delhi are vividly present; the constant honk of horns of all sizes, the putter of tuk-tuk motors, the clatter of bikes and scooters, the squeal and rumble of buses, the shouting of people.  Low camera angles put you on the ground, crouched beside Mahendra as he fixes zippers for people like him and people much wealthier, or inside the house beside Suman as dust motes swirl in lone rays of sunlight that find their way into the gali where they live.  

This is enormously engaging, this Delhi presented in unstylized style.  But the palpable realism of Siddharth also makes its grim and unresolved ending inevitable.  And yet the movie is so absorbing  that anything else would be gratingly false.  Like a Shyam Benegal film, it makes mind-boggling injustice accessible by projecting it on a human scale, a close focus on a small number of people deeply affected by a something that most people are accustomed to thinking of as a "global issue," described in human-rights reports in terms of vast numbers and statistics.  The result is a beautiful, harrowing film, deeply sympathetic, that exposes the raw realities left behind by a child abduction in a way that Mardaani, for all its explicit exhibition and all its fantastical acts of vengeance, cannot.