Review: Court

Direction (and writing): Chaitanya Tamhane
Cast: Vivek Gomber, Geetanjali Kulkarni, Vira Sathidar, Pradeep Joshi
Rating: ***1/2

A day before Chaitanya Tamhane’s award-winning multilingual film (Marathi, with Hindi, English and Gujarati), Court, is to release in theatres, there’s news that the censor board asked for two lines to be deleted. One concerns a propaganda Marathi play, dealing with the anti-north Indian sentiment; the CBFC has an issue with the term ‘aai-mai’ (mother-sister).

It could be a scene from Court, which deals with intolerance and censorship. We live in strange times, where expressing dissent has consequences, where everyone is quick to take umbrage. It makes Tamhane’s film that much more relevant.

A sewage cleaner, Vasudev Pawar, has died, ironically, by falling into a sewer. A rebel poet, Narayan Kamble (Vira Satidhar), has been arrested on grounds of abetment of suicide because, allegedly, he stood nearby, Pied Piper-esquely singing about suicide.

It is an absurdist premise. Pawar is arrested frequently, on little pretext, because his anti-establishment songs are seen as dangerous. In the way his case drags, unendingly, illogically, it reminds you of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Even more acutely, in its sharp satire of a dystopian system, it shares sentiments with Tagore’s Tasher Desh (The Land of Cards).

In Tagore’s play, a rigid, unquestioning regime is governed by redundant laws. In Court, the prosecutor (Geentanjali Kulkarni) is the agent of such a system. She reads out long legal notes impassively; says “I strongly object” with no emotion; and refers to redundant Victorian laws; and when faced with logic, argues, “but the law is there”. Tamhane lends a dry humour to the procedural scenes. At one point, the judge rejects the case of a certain Mercy Fernandes because she’s wearing a sleeveless top, considered “indecent” in court.

Yet, it’d be myopic to say that the critique is of the judiciary alone. It is symbolic of a systemic rot – in governance and education. So, sewer cleaners work in inhuman conditions, even as products of rote learning debate in court why the victim chose not to wear protective gear.

There are no villains, since we’re all products of our milieu. The film attempts to establish that by following the central characters out of court. Yet, herein also lies the film’s weakness. Glimpses into the lives of the judge, the prosecutor and the defender Vinay Vora (Vivek Gomber, also the producer) – each representing different social strata – encourage the audience to judge them on the basis of clichés.

The prosecutor leads a mundane life comprising household chores, a diabetic husband, and propaganda plays by means of entertainment. Vora is the polar opposite – the urban elite who shops for wine and cheese, and hangs out at pubs where songs from Brazil spark conversations about foreign holidays. The weakest portrayal is that of the judge, who advocates numerology and astrological gemstones, and slaps a kid who plays a prank. A statement about rash justice and power structure, perhaps, but a simplistic one.  

Yet, National Award-winner Court does several things right. The understated performances, not just from the principal cast (the support cast comprises non-professional actors), are a departure from the usual histrionics in courtroom dramas.  The cinematography is exemplary. An abundance of fixed, wide-angle shots provide the perspective of an observer at the back of the room.

Above all, Court does brilliantly what a lot of cinema aspires to do. It holds up a mirror to society; and it makes you worry about what you see.  

Review originally published in Hindustan Times

Review: Bobby Jasoos

Direction: Samar Shaikh

Actors: Vidya Balan, Ali Fazal, Kiran Kumar, Rajendra Gupta

Rating: ***

Bobby Jasoos isn’t an Indian version of Sherlock Holmes or James Bond. It’s not even attempting to be one. Bobby (Vidya Balan) — or Bilkis Bano — desperately wants to be a detective. But she’s not trying to emulate those suave, mysterious Hollywood heroes. She doesn’t even watch them on TV. Indian soaps play in her middle-class Indian home, so the girl from Moghalpura in Old Hyderabad has homegrown heroes drawn from that never-ending show, CID, and from an old Doordarshan series.

The fictional detective Karamchand played by Pankaj Kapur in the ’80s may, in fact, be responsible for a childhood fixation; the sort most kids gets over, but one that Bobby held on to.

The fixation, however, has a larger purpose, for Bobby must prove her independence and her worth in a conservative family where the men earn and provide and the women stay home and look to get married. That is why, with no training, little education, and in defiance of a vehemently discouraging father (“My house will not run on women’s incomes,” he says), Bobby holds on to her dream of becoming a jasoos.

She has little going for her in terms of work experience or capital. But things change when a mysterious rich man (Anees Khan, played by Kiran Kumar) seeks her out and offers her a case.

Bobby has a fair bit of wit, and more gutsiness than perhaps all the male characters put together. But her approach is more hit-and-miss than clinical, and she stumbles and goofs up on occasion. This only serves to make the amateur detective more credible. And it provides a few moments of humour.

The casting decision by director Samar Shaikh was a no-brainer. Bobby isn’t just a reversal of Moghalpura’s notions of the woman’s role in society, it is also a reversal of the stereotypical notion of the Bollywood heroine.

The men around Bobby serve as mere props and sidekicks. As she calls oblique romantic interest Tasawur (Ali Fazal, playing a TV anchor) into a narrow alley and puts a hidden mic and earphone on him, telling him what to do, she’s the boss, while he shows the kind of vulnerability normally reserved for female characters in our films.

Other than the father (played by Rajendra Gupta, credible as the old man rigid in his ways), no one else is fleshed out.

Balan, of course, has done such films in the past. She has toppled social barriers and battled stereotypes. She deserves credit for pulling it off again.

At times, the film moves sluggishly, and suffers such clichés as an aberrant dream sequence. The overall story, and Bobby’s escapades, remain simplistic. But they serve their purpose — of shining a light on a community that is underrepresented in Bollywood films, and extracting a positive story of hope. And, of course, of showcasing Vidya Balan.

 -Sarit Ray

Review originally published in hindustantimes.com (click here to see)

Review: Ek Villain

Direction: Mohit Suri
Cast: Sidharth Malhotra, Shraddha Kapoor, Riteish Deshmukh
Rating: **

It is as true of chefs as of filmmakers: Even when you're being experimental, throwing ingredients together to make something new, you need a sense of what goes with what.

In Ek Villain, director Mohit Suri takes slices from a variety of genres - romance, crime, murder, revenge, all of which he's dabbled in previous films, with varying degrees of success - and tosses them in the blender. The result resembles one of those slushy green smoothies, where no one element stands out and the overall flavour is, at best, unpleasant.

 Some of the ingredients are actually decent - there's a well-executed domestic squabble, and some good action sequences. But in the overall blend, they leave no real impression.

Suri doesn't just borrow elements; he borrows actors from previous works too, and evidently gives them the same brief as before. So you have Shraddha Kapoor (as Aisha) playing the love interest with a knack for picking broken/depressed men and then trying to fix them (remember Aashiqui 2). This might have worked, had Kapoor's emoting range extended beyond that of a talking doll. But she runs through her lines monotonously, like an actor in a school play who remembered the script but forgot to actually act.

A tragedy, right at the outset, sets the ball rolling. A revenge story follows, with angry young man Guru (Sidharth Malhotra) trying to mete out punishment to the titular villain. A story of this sort requires pace and focus -- incessant flashbacks ensure that it has neither.

Surprisingly, the film has no mystery either. No effort is made to hide the identity of psychotic serial-killer Rakesh (Riteish Deshmukh), either from the audience or the protagonist. With what should perhaps have been a climactic meeting occurring instead before the interval, the story is stretched thin for the rest of the two hours, with flashbacks used as fillers, more fight sequences, and a serious dearth of new ideas.

The lead actor, too, seems confused about the director's vision (or lack thereof). He plays the stubbled, tattooed bad boy with a standard scowling expression, irrespective of whether he's exchanging kisses or kicks. Which is a shame, because Sidharth's brooding demeanour would have been apt for the thriller that the trailer somehow promised.

Rakesh, then, is the only engaging character. He's convincing as the doormat-like husband who is thrown out of the house by his wife and exacts misdirected revenge on other women, killing them and collecting their belongings as presents for her. He may not be original - think Chip (JimCarrey) from The Cable Guy. As the inconspicuous telephone repairman, he may also be a younger version of contract killer Bob Biswas from Kahaani. Yet it's tremendously refreshing to see Riteish in this role, a departure from the slapstick he usually chooses to do.

If the film had just focused on him, it might even have amounted to something. Unfortunately, it is crippled by a plot that ranges from the mediocre to the bizarre, including a leitmotif of smileys drawn on balloons, masks and even on frosted car windows. A sign of lurking evil? An ode to the Comedian's badge from The Watchmen? Who knows? You can never tell in those green smoothies, can you?

 -Sarit Ray

Review originally published in hindustantimes.com (click here to see)

Review: Humshakals

Direction: Sajid Khan
Cast: Saif Ali Khan, RiteishDeshmukh, Ram Kapoor, Bipasha Basu, Tamannah Bhatia
Rating: 1/2

Humshakals opens with a 43-going-on-23 Saif Ali Khan trying his hand at stand-up comedy. He has a rich-boy name — Ashok Singhania — and lives in London, of course. What other city is worthy of a super-rich Indian who owns a Karan Johar-set-like mansion, to which he commutes in a private chopper with a tacky golden ‘S’ emblazoned on the side?

So Singhania is a hotshot industrialist, but is apparently also passionate about upsetting audiences with terrible jokes (told in Hindi, no less). Ironically, he is the perfect representative of writer-director Sajid Khan, whose own low-IQ films are peppered with sad, often offensive jokes. This latest seems less a work of cinema and more a social experiment to test the lowest threshold for what can be passed off as entertainment.

Logic exists hastily, along with Ashok’s audience, and the hero, his sidekick Kumar (Ritesih Deshmukh) and their heroines (in dresses one size too small) proceed to dance through the streets, to some terrible lyrics. Later, they will dance again, this time through Kumar’s mansion, in nightclothes.

Clearly out of new ideas, and having burnt his fingers with Himmatwala, Khan is now lifting set pieces from his own slapstick comedies, films that inexplicably had house-full runs.

A two-and-a-half hour assault on your intelligence, Humshakals was not content with just one Saif hamming and trying desperately to look young. Thanks to a shady scientist and some gobbledegook about chromosome restructuring, you get three Ashoks, three Kumars and three Ram Kapoors. Which brings us to Sajid Khan’s greatest feat as a director — being ambitious enough to try and fit them all into one frame.

The characters run around in circles, making stupid faces, cracking pathetic jokes and dressing in drag. Predictable confusion passes for plot.

What is truly baffling is why Saif would pick such a ridiculous role, again (wasn’t Bullett Raja a lesson?), and why Riteish continues to play the goofball in film after film.

Jokes rain down incessantly — increasingly unfunny, disparaging dwarves, the LGBT community, people from the north-east and the mentally challenged. Production values go down the drain; the filmmakers didn’t even bother to edit out the scenes where the lead is clearly wearing height-enhancing shoes while dancing.

As social experiments go, this one tests patience rather than intelligence. It takes every ounce of the former not to take the cue from Ashok’s audience at the outset and leave.

-Sarit Ray

Review originally published in hindustantimes.com (click here to see)

Review: When Hari Got Married (documentary)

Direction: Ritu Sarin, Tenzing Sonam

Rating: ***

There’s a saying in Hindi about how the taste of water and the language spoken changes with every new town or village in India. The same could be said of wedding rituals.

Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam’s documentary (75 mins) looks like it’s been made for an international audience, but to its credit, it does not attempt to glamourise its subject.

The subject is an Indian wedding — not the lavish song-and-dance-in-Manish-Malhotra-lehengas that Bollywood has sold extensively, but a simple, village affair that provides a truer, more democratic picture.

Hari is a taxi driver in Dharamsala, and he’s agreed to an arranged marriage just because he knows it will make his father happy. In choosing to trace a male protagonist, the film avoids a cliché – that it’s only the woman in small-town India who makes compromises in an arranged marriage.

Hari’s met the girl just once, and he regrets that he wasn’t even able to see her face. All he remembers is how short she is, and that bothers him. He’s no Clint Eastwood, at 5 ft-something, but he’s worried his to-be-wife is “not even 4 ft…people make fun of short people”.

Hari’s no trained actor, so his spontaneity before the camera is remarkable. He chats with the girl on phone, flirts even (their only way of getting to know each other, he says), speaks broken English and shows clarity of thought – “India is a magic country for foreigners because the dollar multiplies,” he says.

Though the rituals are unique, the expenses, the worried father, the spontaneous happiness that weddings bring are familiar. You wish, however, that there was a little less of the filmmakers on screen, and the questions they ask at times were not so generic.

Yet, as documentaries go, Hari… manages to do its job — capture a real story with a lot of honesty.

The documentary manages to do its job — capture a real story with a lot of honesty.

-Sarit Ray

Review originally published in hindustantimes.com (click here to see)

Review: Chor Chor Super Chor (indie)

Direction: Rajesh K
Cast: Deepak Dobriyal, Priya Bhatija, Anshul Kataria, Anurag Arora
Rating: **

Commercial masala films bring star-studded casts, gravity-defying fights and glossy romances to the table. Indie cinema must compete by sheer dint of ideas. Lead actor Deepak Dobriyal is a powerful actor and convincing as the ‘super chor’. Yet, as far as ideas go, they are just about as novel here as the film’s title.

The canvas (once again) is Delhi, its narrow lanes juxtaposed against its glossier malls and metro stations. Yet, this story of petty criminals could have played out anywhere. ‘Beware of pickpockets’ is a warning to heed even on Mumbai’s local trains and Kolkata’s rickety buses.

Satbir (Dobriyal) is a conman who wants out. He’s a romantic, and hopelessly in love with a girl who’s out of his league (TV actor Priya Bhatija as Neena). That apart, we know little about him. What are his motivations? What led him to the profession? The film glosses over such things. There are no back stories or insight into the criminals’ lives. Acts of theft, and a police-criminal nexus, merely make for comic set pieces. A Punk’d-style reality show, however, provides some novelty.

The film reminds you in parts of Dibakar Banerjee’s Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! That’s about the highest compliment one can accord debutant director Rajesh K’s work. Dobriyal, on the other hand, deserves some praise. His acting is earnest and understated. He belongs to that new crop of impressive Bollywood actors who, alas, only get supporting roles. This is his chance to play hero, which seems to have been his biggest motivation.

The film is, however, well-shot. And the editing is crisp (it clocks an impressive 99 minutes).

Exciting things are happening in the indie space. Films like Ship Of Theseus, even BA Pass to an extent, are proof. Chor Chor..., however, is a below-par effort.

-Sarit Ray

Review originally published in hindustantimes.com (click here to see)

Review: Bajatey Raho

Direction: Shashant Shah
Cast: Tusshar Kapoor, Vinay Pathak, Ranvir Shorey, Dolly Ahluwalia, Ravi Kishan
Rating: **

Bollywood has made up its mind. What the underworld drama has been to Mumbai, the slice-of-life comedy must be to Delhi. The Punjab-isation (of weddings, accents, songs and sense of humour) in our movies isn’t new, but it’s a better fit in the Capital. There’s natural contrast afforded by the middle-class lives in the narrow lanes of Lajpat Nagar, versus the brazen display of wealth in sprawling Chhatarpur farmhouses. Add a corruption angle, some jugaad and jhol (concepts so indigenous, they are hard to translate), and you’re ready to roll. Bajatey Raho weaves in these elements, but unfortunately, does so in a story that’s rather pat.

Predictable meets implausible as the widow Mrs Baweja (Dolly Ahluwalia), her son Sukhi (Tusshar Kapoor) and co hatch plots to steal money back from the businessman Sabharwal (Ravi Kishan, hamming it as usual) who wronged her husband. So, among other set pieces, you have a sting operation, and a fake raid that suddenly reminds you of Special 26. A half-baked romance and needless song-and-dance are added to the mix.

The film does, however, have its moments. The neighbourhood uncle who requests the cable guy for the ‘English picture’ at night is rather real. As is a kitschy Sherawali version of a Desi Boyz song. Ahluwalia is as natural playing a Punjabi mother here as she was in Vicky Donor. And you can trust Vinay Pathak and Ranvir Shorey to handle their parts maturely, even if you’ve seen them in such parts before.

Shashant Shah’s Dasvidaniya (certainly a better film) lacked in originality of idea, but had good treatment. In parts, you could say the same of Bajatey Raho. Yes, it’s predictable. But if you’ve got to go see a new Hindi film this week, this is your best bet.

-Sarit Ray

Review originally published in hindustantimes.com (click here to see)