Filmi Geek

Golmaal (1979)

गोलमाल

Dir. Hrishikesh Mukherjee

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

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

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

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

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

Delhi Belly (2011)

Dir. Abhinay Deo

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

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

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

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

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

 

3 Idiots (2009)

Dir. Rajkumar Hirani

Raju Hirani movies are thoroughly modern and yet still express a uniquely Bollywood sensibility.  He does not shy away from melodrama or big unambiguous messages.  Yet he still puts entertainment first, with an attention to detail and characterization that yields truly loveable and fun-to-watch movies.  As Lage raho Munnabhai before it, 3 Idiots leaves you grinning like a dope even as you're thinking about ways to make the world a better place.  And there is no doubt that his approach resonates hugely - Lage raho Munnabhai was a massive hit, and the success of 3 Idiots eclipsed it.

When they were classmates in engineering college, Chatur (Omi Vaidya) and Rancho (Aamir Khan) were rivals.  Or, at least, Chatur was - competitive, materialistic, and rote, he chafed at Rancho's playful attitude and seat-of-the-pants, intuitive approach to engineering.  Now, 10 years later, Chatur gathers Rancho's best friends from their college days - Farhan (Madhavan) and Raju (Sharman Joshi) - and sets off on a quest across India to find Rancho.  Chatur wants only to gloat, to flaunt his success over Rancho, whom none of the men have heard from since school days.  Farhan and Raju, though, just want to find their cherished friend, whose influence was immeasurable.  As they travel, they flash back to memories of the school days together.  Rancho's compassion and thirst for hands-on learning put him at odds with the college's stern, tyrannical dean, Viru Sahastrabuddhe (Boman Irani), whom the students called "Virus".  It also won him the heart of Virus's daughter, a medical student named Pia (Kareena Kapoor).  But Rancho disappeared after graduation, and as his friends drive from Shimla to Ladakh to find him, remembering how he changed their lives, they learn a puzzling secret about his past.

I've been told by people who studied engineering in India that 3 Idiots perfectly captures the stresses of the pressure-cooker, rote-learning environment of colleges like the one it portrays.  It's easy to see why the movie strikes a note so close to the audience's heart; the boys' situations are readily relatable.  Farhan studies engineering to only to fulfill his parents' expectations - his own dream is wildlife photography, an ambition that his father values not at all.  Raju's desire to succeed at engineering is more sincere, but he places on himself the great burden of rescuing his family from crushing poverty.  And who doesn't remember an irritating helium-handed brown-noser like Chatur from our own days in school? 

On top of these relatable themes, the movie is full of laughs that run the gamut from fart jokes to clever linguistic humor (as there also was in the Munnabhai movies). The most prominent example is Chatur's memorized speech in shuddh Hindi - Rancho tampers with the speech, and the unsuspecting Chatur pompously delivers an outlandishly bawdy oration before the whole school.  (The point is to illustrate the pitfalls of rote learning, but it also exposes a much-needed, humanizing flaw in the otherwise godlike Rancho's character - that humiliating others is acceptable to him so long as it furthers his principles.)  But there are subtler plays on language as well, such as a cross-linguistic play on suffer/safar (the latter meaning "journey"). 

The language play is just one aspect of the terrific level of detail in this tightly crafted film.  Other nice touches include Virus's introductory speech to the students, which "Millimeter," the young boy who runs errands for pocket change, recites verbatim.  Another is that Raju's poor urban family is shown in black & white, a wink to the echos of 1950s-filminess of their situation.  There are too many more to mention. 

It feels nitpicky to point out flaws in such a well-crafted movie.  Still, there are a few.  One that gets under my skin just a little is that the story is overwhelmingly male.  There are female students in the college but they are just visual backdrop - none has so much as a line of dialogue.  Pia is a smart, level-headed medical student, but her only story arc is deciding which man she should marry.  Nevertheless, no movie can be about everyone, and so it's a forgivably small irritation for me. 

The movie's overarching message, too, is delivered with a cudgel, even by filmi and Hirani standards.  One student committing suicide would have been enough to convey the toxicity and destructiveness of the college environment - but the movie doesn't stop there.  Instead, there is one suicide, a plot reference to another earlier suicide, and a suicide attempt by a major character.

Yet the preachiness - along with a few extremely filmi, over-the-top plot twists - is forgivable, even charming, in such a good movie overall, especially with the loveable performances of all the actors.  The naturalness of these (except for Irani, who exercises his typical wonderful broad comic physicality) tends to offset the extreme aspects of the story, tempering the shrillness of the melodramatic turns.  The result is a movie firmly grounded in Bollywood's melodramatic roots, yet offering natural, breathing characters who are relatable and modern.  And the twist at the movie's end is so marvelous and satisfying that anything less than perfect about what went before is readily forgiven.

Dhobi ghat (2011)

धोबी घाट

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