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)

Review: Issaq

Direction: Manish Tiwary
Actors: Prateik, Amyra Dastur, Ravi Kishan, Neena Gupta, Makrand Deshpande
Rating: *

Over the years, Shakespeare’s famous star-crossed lovers have found themselves in various forms and in various places — classic, award-winning dramas (a famous 1936 version, and one in 1968), a musical about New York gangs (West Side Story), Baz Luhrmann’s guns-blazing punk version (Romeo+Juliet), even as warring garden gnomes (Gnomeo & Juliet), among several others.

Yet, seldom have they been associated with as nonsensical a mess as Manish Tiwary’s Issaq. The story opens with a man relaying an eyewitness version of a gunfight between rival sand mafia — the Kashyaps and the Mishras. Who is this man? How does this event fit into the plot structure?

The film evades such issues of logical progression. Instead, what you get is a hodgepodge of stereotypes (rigid patriarchies, corrupt cops, even an evil Naxalite leader who sprays bullets and shouts ‘Lal salaam’) and flavouring borrowed from stylised, new-age Bollywood films set in the hinterland.

Yes, you do have a romantic hero in Rahul Mishra (Prateik), who’s more than adept at Parkour-ing over walls and climbing balconies, a prerequisite for Romeo, no doubt. 

Yet, you’re left wishing that he also had the ability to emote, a department in which Prateik is left direly wanting. His Juliet, then, fittingly, is played by an amateurish Amyra Dastur (as Bachchi Kashyap). She is all mistimed facial contortions, and sports an accent best described as too-posh-to-pull-off-rustic.

A slew of side characters are thrown in to add heft and armed hands. Anurag Kashyap does it in Gangs of Wasseypur, largely to good effect. Tiwary, however, clearly out of his depth, doesn’t know what to do with his massive cast.

So he kills some off and relegates others to the background. Strong actors like Neena Gupta and Makrand Deshpande are wasted as insipid nannies and caricature-ish sadhus who levitate without rhyme or reason.

The setting is Benares, Tiwary will have you know with a collage of aartis, boats floating on the Ganges and, of course, our hero jumping over low roofs. Yet, the randomness that is Issaq could have played out anywhere.

It’s a pity that Issaq joins remarkable films like Maqbool, Omkara and Angoor on the list of Bollywood adaptations of Shakespeare. In a time when works of literature are judged by their TV and film versions, it could even give the Bard a bit of a bad rep.

-Sarit Ray

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

Review: Ramaiya Vastavaiya

Direction: Prabhudheva
Cast: Girish Kumar, Shruti Haasan, Sonu Sood
Rating: *1/2

Ramesh Taurani has produced some of those 90s romances. Now, he decides to make one for his son. However, the formula is stale and Ramaiya Vastavaiya rehashes older stories rather than create a new one. It borrows liberally from two Salman Khan starrers - Maine Pyar Kiya and Pyar Kiya To Darna Kya. 

Sona (Shruti Haasan) is the poor girl and Ram (Girish Kumar) is the rich boy who must win her over and Sonu Sood, the strict brother who stands in their path.  It's a showcase film for Kumar so the boy must show his much-bench-pressed body and shake a leg. His dancing, unfortunately is only slightly less stiff than his acting. Haasan acts and looks like a porcelain doll. In that, they make a perfect match.
Rich boy, poor girl, inevitable romance and the trials in the path for 'true love'. The formulaic love story was in the 90s what south remakes is in today's Bollywood. It raked in money, made women believe in archetypical romantic hero willing to kill and be killed was real and launched the careers of some today's biggest stars.

-Sarit Ray

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

Review: D Day

Direction: Nikhil Advani

Cast: Irrfan Khan, Huma Qureshi, Arjun Rampal, Rishi Kapoor
Rating: ** 1/2

Any self-respecting Hindi film buff can rattle off names of half a dozen films on Dawood Ibrahim. D-Day is the latest. And it comes from unexpected quarters. Nikhil Advani is known for elaboraltely woven love stories (Kal Ho Na Ho, Salaam-E-Ishq). His only prior attempt at action (Chandni Chowk To China) was universally shot down.
Yet, Advani shows command over the genre in D-Day. The action is slick, the settings credible and the cinematography impressive (DOP Tushar Kanti Ray also shot Dhobi Ghat and Shor In The City). And till halfway point, the film is thoroughly gripping. Post that, however, the story unravels so fantastically, it demands tremendous suspension of disbelief.
References to actual events (1993 Mumbai blasts, 2013 Hyderabad blasts) build premise rather than root the story in reality. The R&AW despatches a team to Karachi to nab India’s ‘Most Wanted’ criminal. Iqbal Seth, aka Goldman (Rishi Kapoor) is obviously Dawood, with rose-tinted glasses, moustache, even some lines in Marathi.
But the film invests more in the agents’ stories than in Seth’s. Wali Khan (Irrfan) is the most fleshed-out character — an undercover agent with a family he cares and fears deeply for. Irrfan, unsurprisingly, is also the strongest actor. Arjun Rampal (agent Rudra Pratap Singh) brings to the role what he brings to every film — good looks and a standard brooding expression. Huma Qureshi (Zoya Rehman) gets plenty of screen time, but has little to do. As does Kapoor who, when not getting yanked around at gunpoint, spews one-liners like “trigger kheech, maamla mat kheech” (pull the trigger, don’t stretch the matter).
Yet, the matter does get stretched, till plot lines wear thin and reason dies a bullet-riddled death.

-Sarit Ray

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

Review: Ship of Theseus (indie)

Director: Anand Gandhi
Cast: Aida El-Kashef, Neeraj Kabi, Sohum Shah, Vinay Shukla
Rating: ****

A blind photographer; an idealistic monk refusing treatment for liver cirrhosis; a stockbroker who seems to evaluate the world in profit-and-loss margins, and who’s just undergone a kidney transplant. Their respective worlds are so disparate, they’d be unlikely to ever meet or cross paths. Yet, debutant director Anand Gandhi manages to put them, well, in the same boat. “Where does the individual end and his environment begin?” the young lawyer Charwaka (Vinay Shukla) asks. Ship of Theseus explores such abstract, metaphysical ideas. It is, no doubt, an intellectual exercise, the sort festivals films often indulge in. Yet, the narrative is lucid, and the stories are simple and deeply moving. And it’s all captured in stunning frames, as colourful and evocative as varied in range – from Mumbai’s cramped alleyways too narrow for well-fed men and their sedans, to solemn monks in white against an expansive view of the dusk along its sea face.

Gandhi’s prior directorial experience is with shorts. Here, too, he tells three stories. The first is the sharpest – that of the blind photographer Aliya Kamal (Aida El-Ashaf), who seeks moments through sound rather than sight. Her transformation – and her epiphany – is also the most ironic. Post-surgery, she gains sight, but seems to lose the artistic eye. Next, we meet the monk Maitreya (Neeraj Kabi), who refuses treatment, and is willing to die rather than sacrifice his ideology (he’s fighting a legal battle against pharmaceutical companies). The third story is that of stockbroker Navin (Sohum Shah), who after being reassured that his kidney isn’t stolen from the poor man at the hospital, still takes up cudgels on his behalf.

Gandhi cleverly, if obliquely, ties the stories together through the conceit of Theseus’s Paradox (if all the parts of Theseus’s ship were replaced, was it still the same ship? And if those parts were used to build a new ship, which was the real ship of Theseus?). Cleverness, however, comes with a propensity to show off. So the dialogue is at times overwrought and unreal. At one point, a conversation between Charwaka and Maitreya is so contrived, they seem not so much individuals as on-screen mouthpieces for the director’s didacticism. Maitreya’s story is also the most long-winded, and an ill-timed interval (added for Indian audiences’ benefit, one imagines) does it no favours.

Yet, the film truly impresses, as much for its assured direction as for its ability to make you think. Ship of Theseus is perhaps too far removed from the Bollywood mainstream to make a splash at the box office. Yet, hopefully, when its young, talented crew goes on to other ships (with star casts and bigger budgets), it’ll take a bit of Theseus with them.

-Sarit Ray

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

   

Review: Bhaag Milkha Bhaag

Director: Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra
Cast: Farhan Akhtar, Pavan Malhotra, Divya Dutta, Sonam Kapoor
Rating: **

For a film about sprinting and clocking shortest timings possible, Bhaag Milkha Bhaag moves at a snail’s pace and goes on for over 3 hours. And while the protagonist purportedly possesses tremendous focus, the film seems to lack that very quality. Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s “biopic” (the word has been reiterated by the makers at every interview opportunity) on Indian sprinter Milkha Singh is at best a meandering, indulgent version of a real story. And though it touches upon uncomfortable incidents, it painstakingly seeks to justify and glorify its hero, with melodrama, dramatic camerawork and slow-motion shots of ripping muscles.  

The film begins from the point in Singh’s career that’s best known in public memory – his defeat at the 1960 Rome Olympics. It was a race he led for the most part and yet finished fourth in. In the film, Singh (Farhan Akhtar) turns back mid-race and sees a fragment of a disturbing memory, in slow-mo, of course. Who knows what actually happened. But Mehra seems willing to endorse Singh’s viewpoint from the outset.

An exercise in the defence of Singh unfolds in two-stage flashbacks – his days in the army and lengthy training period; and glimpses of childhood in Pakistan in, surprise, surprise, sepia-tinted shots, where the CGI clouds and blood spill could do Zack Snyder proud.

However, clichés notwithstanding, Farhan’s performance is sincere and, at times, beautifully nuanced. His (much-flaunted) physique is only the most obvious manifestation of his prep. His accent is spot on. And he’s delightful as the naïve jawan – who apes other sprinters’ routines and daydreams foolishly before a mirror. As he runs a cross-country race while clutching a side stitch – his incentive is just the promise of eggs and a glass of milk – he manages to be endearing and funny.

However, such moments are rare in a screenplay that trundles along, overburdened by needless song-and-dance, distractingly detailed episodes and a bevy of flat supporting characters. While Pavan Malhotra, as Singh’s coach, is the only other actor worth mention, Divya Dutta is wasted as the melodramatic sister. Sonam Kapoor as a teenage love interest is little more than a cameo, while Dalip Tahil’s Nehru is so poorly sketched, it becomes caricature-ish.

Predictably enough, Singh is vindicated in the end, and with it, the tiresome story tumbles over the finish line and comes to a halt. 

-Sarit Ray

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

Review: Policegiri

Director: KS Ravikumar
Cast: Sanjay Dutt, Prachi Desai, Prakash Raj
Rating: *

Policegiri is less of a movie and more of a business idea. The commodity being sold is Sanjay Dutt, an ageing star with still a sizeable, and presently nostalgic, fan following. So it opens with a statement of solidarity towards Dutt, and a collage of his photographs. Short of shooting time, and quite clearly, ideas as well, a decade-old hit Tamil film, Saamy, has been shoddily rehashed with flavouring shamelessly borrowed from Dabangg and Singham.

Dutt plays a seemingly corrupt cop with Herculean strength and an overtly divine name (DCP Rudra Adityadevraj). He’s more of a gun-toting sheriff out to rid a hapless town of its outlaw, a don named Nagori Subramaniyam (Prakash Raj). Raj, of course, is creating a Bollywood career out of playing caricature-ish supervillains, a space that belonged to Gulshan Grover or Shakti Kapoor in the ’90s.  

Things explode from the word go, villains crash through glass with incredible frequency and Dutt punches, kicks, shoots and shouts, sometimes all at the same time. However, the 50-plus actor no longer has the physical agility or the bulging biceps of a Salman Khan or an Ajay Devgn. So he keeps his fluorescent shirts on. Thank god for that.

The women in such potboilers are invariably irrelevant. So you have Prachi Desai as the insipid love interest. It might still have worked if their pairing looked a tad more glamorous and a tad less young girl-sugar daddy.

The music is bland, and the south-inspired action repetitive, giving you little to take away (headache notwithstanding). Policegiri is entirely forgettable. And that may be a good thing. For the audience, as much for Dutt’s reputation. 

-Sarit Ray

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

Review: Lootera

Director: Vikramaditya Motwane
Cast: Ranveer Singh, Sonakshi Sinha, Adil Hussain, Vikrant Massey
Rating: ***1/2

It is hard to pigeonhole O Henry’s The Last Leaf. Is a love story – a pathos-filled culmination of something longer? Or is it about the human psyche that causes dreams and desires, mired in the monotony of survival, to express itself in ways beyond rationalising? A short story is, by definition, short. To transform it into a feature-length film brings with it the challenge (and the freedom) of conjuring up convincing motivations and back stories. Motwane decides it’s a love story – arguably the easier route to take. And he creates powerful vignettes that aren’t all pretty and rose-tinted, but also guilty and angst-ridden. However, he sacrifices logic and motivation when convenient, and in that lies Lootera’s shortcoming.

Motwane’s familiarity with his settings is commendable. In Udaan – a superlative debut film – he depicted the sameness of an industrial small-town. A period film requires more research, and money. Motwane (and Anurag Kashyap, who once again co-wrote and co-produced this one) seems to have both. He captures the fading glory of zamindars in 1953 Bengal. It is lavish, but not kitschy, unlike Bhansali’s Devdas.

He also creates a powerful heroine, the likes of whom rarely inhabit mainstream Bollywood. The privileged zamindar’s daughter Pakhi (Sonakshi Sinha) is Santiniketan-educated, recites poetry and channels contemporary Bengali actresses (a young Suchitra Sen perhaps from Sharey Chauttor; 1953). She is, however, fragile, and at times, irrational – the Johnsy of Motwane’s Last Leaf. Post-transformation, again, Sinha deftly plays the frustrated writer and disillusioned romantic, making you wonder if this is the same actor from those masala potboilers.   

In contrast, the lootera himself, Varun Srivastav (Ranveer Singh) is more predictable. He’s a retro Ricky Bahl, a charming conman keeping it à la mode with double-breasted shirts, slicked-back hair and an Ariel motorcycle. Posing as an archaeologist, he earns the zamindar’s trust with incredible ease. Predictably, Pakhi falls for him. They stroll through leafy lanes and sit by lakes, making flirting in the ’50s seem like a painstaking and sluggish affair. Varun’s decision then to depart is abrupt, making the central revelation on which the plot hinges a weak one. 

An incredible coincidence makes the protagonists cross paths again. The film briefly becomes a chor-police action sequence – an aberrant ingredient – before settling back into a languid pace. A talented supporting cast, meanwhile, is largely wasted as side characters that flit about without direction.

Flaws notwithstanding, Lootera is of a standard that’s inarguably higher than the Bollywood average. Here’s a director to watch out for. Behrman’s masterpiece came in The Last Leaf. Motwane’s is yet to come.

-Sarit Ray

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