Movie Review (2013)
Film:

Rating: ★★★★☆ 

Picture this. A mother watches her young son being wheeled into the operation theatre for a minor operation. The child never returns.

Medical negligence is passe. Medical arrogance is the new menace. Enter a high-end seven-star hospital and you’re bound to run into the incredibly arrogant Dr. Asthana (Kay Kay Menon, back in fabulous form), who addresses the media as though he was obliging them by giving out information and who tells his junior, “Medicine is not just about healing. It’s also about making money. Who pays the bills of those who can’t afford them? The rich of course.”

But of course.

The pragmatism underscoring the Hippocratic Oath bypasses the young idealistic Rohan(Arjun Mathur), the intern who dares to speak out of turn to question Dr. Asthana’s supreme authority in the hospital.

Taking the conflict between the blase megalomaniacal medicine-man and the idealistic intern as the central point in the plot, Vikram Bhatt has written a script that is partly a conscience-pricking morality tale, and partly a racy thriller set in the spick-and-span corridors of a high-end hospital where, for the record, an eminent surgeon has just goofed up.

But shhhh! No one in his intimidated medical team is allowed to speak of his horrid faux pas.

The “Ankur Arora Murder Case” is one of the most gripping moral dramas in recent times. The deftly crafted script raises the question of right and wrong in the medical profession without getting peachy or hysterical. Somewhere, Dr. Asthana’s medical arrogance connects with each one of us who has in one way or another encountered deadends in healthcare.

Looking at Kay Kay Menon’s brilliantly underscored emphatically italicised performance, I finally understood what was meant by the Biblical proverb, “Physician, heal thyself”.

Many portions of the pacy plot would seem excessively racy. The post-interval helping seems specially eager to seek out unexpected twists and turns. And that’s fine. The idea of making a film on medical ethics is to ensure that audiences’ participation in the proceedings never flags. To that extent, director Suhail Tatari (who earlier directed the gripping thriller ‘My Wife’s Murder’), keeps the large array of conflicted characters in a constant state of self-questioning anxiety. It’s cinematically a terrific space to be in. Tatari explores that space with intelligence, sensitivity and some charm.

While not allowing us to forget that we are watching a medical thriller, Tatari also gives deepened shape to various inter-relationships in the plot. The characters are convincing and yet distant from what we generally perceive to be authentic cinema. The narration moves on two different levels: the headline-inspired pseudo-documentary and the sprawling soap opera that life often throwns open in situations that we see as too unreal to be happening.

The performances in both the first-half (the medical drama) and the second-half (the courtroom conflict) are all supremely poised. The actors assume brilliancy without getting compromised by the need to shine. Tisca Arora’s bereaved mother’s act is so real and restrained! She gives us goosebumps when after her son’s death, she gets busy on her smartphone to fob off the terrible reality of the tragedy. Really, Tisca is one of our most underrated actresses.

Kay Kay Menon rediscovers the awe-inspiring actor within himself with a performance that leaves us repelled and fascinated. Arjun Mathur as the daring intern who takes on the mighty medicine man exudes integrity without brimming over with righteous indignation. In an era when all our filmy heroes are growing stubbles and trying to look mean, Arjun plays a true-blue old-fashioned hero (the kind who used to fight for the truth) in a very contemporary context and style.

Paoli Dam, who had played a sexually intense role in “Hate Story”, undergoes a personality volte face. As a lawyer battling on behalf of the powerful medical mafia, she pitches a poignant but strong performance. Some of the film’s most powerful moments feature Paoli with her courtroom opponent (Manish Chaudhury, brilliant) in bed and on the brink. The way Paoli and Tisca connect as two grieving mothers, is a masterstroke of scripting.

Indeed, this is is a far cleverer, wiser and relevant film than most of what we get to see these days. At a time when Bollywood is raining bubbles and effervescence about
‘jawaani deewanis’ and ‘yamla paglas’, this sobering clenched disturbing medical thriller comes as an invigorating cloudburst. The film makes out a scathing and rousing case against medical malpractices.

Bursting at the seams with acting talent, director Suhail Tatari’s restorative drama hits us where it hurts the most. The conscience.

ians

Movie Review (2013)
Film:

Rating: ★★★★☆ 

Love, as the sages say, is a many-splendoured thing. You can look at it as an occasion for stress and heartbreak (which is why we fall, never rise, in love). Or love can be a celebration of life.

Director Prem Raj’s debut film “Main Aur Mrs Khanna” took a quaint capricious look at love during times of adultery. On this occasion (‘Ishkq In Paris’) he takes flight in a Parisian paradise where two strangers, both single attractive and commit-phobic, spend the night together.

No, not doing what you think in your dirty minds. They roam the cobbled mysterious pleasurable lanes of Paris in pursuit of a good time and then decide “never” to meet again.

If you’ve seen how Kareena Kapoor affects the sober, staid and repressed Shahid Kapoor in “Jab We Met”, you’d know that feminine exuberance is a hard aphrodisiac to resist, specially if you are a closet-romantic like Akaash (Rhehan Maliek) who in no time at all (first five minutes of this crisp and delightful slice of love-life comedy) is eating out of Ishkq’s lovely hands.

Ah, Ishqk! She is that kind of a girl. Half-French and fully desi, Ishqk fills up the frames with an unbridled joie de vivre. I can’t think of a role better written for Preity Zinta. Missing from the screen for a couple of years, she bounces back with a performance that derives its zing and sparkle from the actress’ inbuilt zest for life.

Preity takes her character Ishqk beyond her own personality. From Frame one we see Ishkq as a girl trapped in self-deceptions that leave her unnecessarily wary of relationships. Ishkq hides her real emotions in romantic nonchalance. This is not the first time Preity plays a repressed character. In Nikhil Advani’s “Kal Ho Naa Ho”, Preity had to make a ‘spectacle’ of her character Naina to bring out her commitment phobia in the absence of a father, who abandoned her when she was young.

Here in this Parisian homage to all things romantic, Preity’s character blossoms before us without props and yet looking immensely fetching. It is a non-accessoried performance, very basic and liberated from humbug.

Preity brings out the highs and lows in her emotionally awash character without taking flamboyant leaps of on-camera conceit. It’s a beautifully written and directed part, replete wth restrained resonances that give the actress a chance to show her skills in subtle ways.

Rhehan as Preity’s ‘other’ gives the actress just the right cues. Confident and yet not cocky, Rhehan seems poised for a satisfactory innings in Hindi films.

Looking at how well Rhehan partners the screen-filling Preity on the screen, one wonders if this big-hearted romantic-comedy would have worked with any other two actors! These two may not be mad for each other (at least, not until we leave them at the end of the film). But by Cupid, they are definitely made for each other!

Prem Raj allows the couple plenty of space to let their feeling breathe freely and easily into the narration. The two protagonists may be in a hurry to get somewhere, the film is not.

The exquisite camerawork by Manush Nandan sweeps languorously through the neon-lit seductive night-life of Paris and the daytime bustle of the streetside cafes without getting into touristic awe.

One shot where Preity treats Rhehan to the wondrous sight of all the lights coming alive in the Eiffel Tower stays with you. If only love could be captured and frozen in its most majestic manifestations!

Interestingly the narration is fashioned like a fable with the legendary French actress Isabelle Adjani telling us about Ishkq’s brief encounter with Akaash and its aftermath without letting us in to her own role in the romance. It’s a cute little secret kept away from us for a while in a film where the main protagonists play out their emotions in full view and with disarming transparency.

Preity, Paris and Prem Raj whip up a souffle romance. Fresh, frothy feel good and, yes, look good, and with a solid undercurrent of emotional frisson to guide the love story to its heart-warming culmination “Ishkq In Paris” makes you thankful for that thing called love. The tone of narration is umistakably European.

Welcome back, Preity. And yes, bon appetite to all moviegoers. Go, tuck in.

ians

Movie Review (2013)

Rating: ★★★★☆ 

Sapna se badaa apna hota hai…It’s okay to sacrifice one’s dreams for the sake of those you love. This is a recurrent thought in this hard-hitting family drama about fatally flawed people who flock together, in search of a happiness that is snatched from them by a fate far more cruel and savage than what we generally see as destiny.

The destiny that seems to underline the lives of writer-director Atul Sabharwal’s drama of family feuds is as flawed as it is rich in resonances. And why not! Perfection is as boring as it is unbelievable. Sabharwal spreads out a hectic hefty horizon of dark grey black and ominously immoral people who share a common genealogy but are not afraid to kill one another for personal gains.

Welcome to the world of unstoppable ambitions. Half-realized dreams thread their way through Sabharwal’s intricate plot, much like those gigantic cement-mortar-glass skyscrapers that kiss the sky in half-constructed questionable glory in the film’s excellently-composed frames. The cinematography by N. Karthik Gnaesh provides a panoramic view of Gurgaon’s super-affluent landscape. It also provides us an insight into the anxious souls of half-finished lives trapped in the mirage of their absurd aspirations.

Each moment in “Aurangzeb” tells a heartbreaking story of betrayal and bloodshed, of men and women who have forsaken a life of peaceful sleep to pursue wakeful dreams that leave them famished and restless.

At first “Aurangzeb” seems plotted with too many twists and turns. And then as you watch the tale of twin bothers (Arjun Kapoor, very much in character) and a stepbrother, played by Prithiviraj, who turns out to be the moral foundation of this empire of compulsions, you fall into the rhythm patterns of Sabharwal’s quiet volatile and implosive storytelling.

The film’s grand design subsumes a scintillating galaxy of memorable moments. Nothing in the film is what it seems. There are illegitimate relationships and business interests jostling with their more constitutional counterparts. The twins-device serves as a vivid indication of the moral ambiguities that undercore the world of corporate deals.

Supreme power and supreme wealth are what the characters seek in this film. Funny, how they end up nullified or dead at the end. None more so that the all-powerful cop played by Rishi Kapoor. A closet-extortionist, this powerful policeman’s family-mafia runs parallel to Jackie Shroff’s vast empire of drugs and other criminal activities.

Arjun Kapoor crosses comfortably into both the nefarious kingdoms. Playing the traditional ‘Ram Aur Shyam’ game, he seems to nail the brotherly mirror-image into a slide show of shifting loyalties. It’s a compelling double whammy from an actor who made a sizeable impact with his first film last year.

Prithviraj who made his Hindi debut with the disastrous “Aiyya” last year, springs a stunning surprise as Arjun’s half-brother. He is the voice of this vast plot’s nebulous conscience. It’s finally Prithviraj who redeems the film’s shifting moral values to recover a moral centre for a world that seems to spin out of control with its penchant for power and greed for wealth.

I’ve to make mention of the very talented Swara Bhaskara who plays Prithiviraj’s wife. The super-talented girl has just two brief sequences. But she wrenches your heart. Tanve Azmi’s motherly act has its moments. Amrita Singh as a scheming she-devil is the traditional home-breaker. It’s a stereotypical bad-girl role, given a reined-check by the actress’ ingrained grace. Sasheh Agha in a role clearly inspired by Parveen Babi in Yash Chopra’s “Deewaar” is cast in a role that deserved a far better actress.

Atul Sabharwal’s direction bears ruminative remnants of the mighty filmmaking legacy of Yash Chopra and Mani Ratnam. The script outwardly sounds like a potboiler about the shifting equation between the legitimate and the outcast. But the tone adapted to tell this potboiler tale is authentic, underplayed and constantly credible. It’s as if Manmohan Desai suddenly decided go the way Shayam Benegal did in “Kalyug”.

The film is a marvel of impeccable casting. Every actor gives his best, none more so than Rishi Kapoor who as the illimitably corrupt cop pulls off yet another masterly antagonist’s part.

“Aurangzeb” springs many unexpected surprises. It is a work which doesn’t shy away from screaming silences and penetrating whispers. The softspoken words delivered in a natural even pitch is often so far-reaching in their implications that we keep returning to the dialogues much after the characters have spoken them and moved on.

Yes, much in “Aurangzeb” is imperfect. The ambivalent tone of authenticity in a plot that seems inpired by the melodramatic blockbusters of the 1970s is really an exercize in self-indulgence. It’s as if the director wants to prove his intellectual superiority over the material he has chosen to deconstruct. But the contradictory tone somehow works in a way we’ve never seen before.

Gurgaon on the outskirts of Delhi becomes a hotbed of intrigue and drama. But underneath the conspiracies and the killings is a tragic tale of blood unnecessarily spilt for advantages that finally mean zilch in the absence of loved ones to share the loot with.

“Aurangzeb” has an epic sweep to its storytelling. But it’s also an intimate portrait of family values gone to waste. It is really the sound of stifled sobs that we carry home of characters who thought they knew it all only to realize at the end that they somewhere lost track of their inner self in pursuit of distant dreams.

ians

Movie Review (2013)
Film:

Rating: ★★★☆☆ 

The trouble with a well-meaning film such as this is it cannot take the story and characters to their logical conclusion and somewhere ends up ‘tale’-diving at crucial junctures in the plot.

To begin with, we are introduced to Yuvaan and his college friends in Delhi whose only passtime is chasing dreams. The ogling, gawking, giggling, nudging, and winking references to campus courtship, though neatly filmed by cameraman Saurav Vishwakarma, occupies too much space in the first hour of the story when we are told, with far less subtlety than needed, that Yuvaan is an incorrigible flirt.

Yuvaan says he believes in “sex at first sight” and he isn’t joking. Later, when he gets into a sexual situation with a girl, he jumps off his bedroom windowsill.

Enter the NRI beauty, all sweetness and kindness played by newcomer Chetna Pande. Now here’s where the plot needed to get piping hot. We wait to see Yuvaan soften the innocent campus queen, a sort of Delhi University version of Rani Mukerji in “Kuch Kuch Hota Hai”, and push her to do things she and he would regret later.

Instead the film goes into long-winded explanations on how Yuvaan doesn’t really mean any harm even when he ends up making sexual advances towards the trusting girl. Where the script should have shown Yuvaan as a young sexually over-active lout who takes advantage of the guileless girl, it instead shows Yuvaan too as a victim and places all the blame for the MMS scandal on the over-zealous electronic media for over-sensationalizing the recorded clipping that “accidently” gets on Yuvaan’s phone and “accidently” leaks out.

Though the efforts to portray the perpetrator as a victim are way too feeble and unconvincing, the film does make some hard-hitting comments on the excessive scandal-mongering of television channels.

The predicament of a hapless unsuspecting girl whose intimate clipping with her boyfriend gets leaked out, was far more poignantly put forward in Anurag Kashyap’s “Dev D”.

“I Don’t Luv U” tries to balance out too many moral issues and ends up neither here nor there. Nonetheless, tackling a theme as provocative as a sex scandal is not easy. The film tries to weave a tender gentle love story around an MMS scandal. Thought provoking but not salacious, the film derives a modicum of credibility quotient from Ruslaan and Chetna’s sincere performances.

Ruslaan does the emotional scenes far more fluently than the campus flirt act. That’s the problem here. The film takes up a sexual theme, but its heart is just not in it.

ians

Movie Review (2013)
Film:

Rating: ★★★☆☆ 

“Babli badmash hai”, sings Priyanka Chopra in one of the 3 utterly wasted item numbers in this film about blazing guns, flaring nostrils, sanguinary revenge and bleak atonement.

Babli is not the only one who’s a badmaash here. The characters are all hardened players of the underworld from the 1970s. They all mean business in the business of being mean.

They sport the right clothes dialogues and attitude.

Yes, the detailing is deft.

Wordsmith Milap Zaveri, who is the real hero hero of this film about fascist solutions to the conundrum of urban chaos, pulls out all stops to spread out an orgy of rhetorics and rhetorics all across the narrative.

Everyone speaks as if they are reading out a copywriter’s wisdom from billboards and hoardings. Everyone is a smart ass in this film.

Take a character with an unmentionable name, played with energetic fervour by debutant Siddhant Kapoor. At some point in the trigger-happy proceedings he explains why if he was Shah Jahan he would have built the Qutub Minar instead of the Taj Mahal.

“Because it’s so old and yet it stands so erect!”

Ahem. Here’s to the celebration of phallic freedom. The men in Sanjay Gupta’s film are actually boys who never grew up. They fight, scream, throw tantrums and draw blood when all fails. These are attention-seekers whose moms should have delivered solid spankings during their childhood.

This is director Sanjay Gupta’s return to direction after a longish hiatus. He is in a tearing hurry to sweep us into the vortex of his violent kingdom.

Mumbai as seen through Gupta’s expertly sketched images, is a kingdom of the damned. Men pull put guns and knives as the background music (by Amar Mohile) settles scores. Tempers run high. The body-count matches the exacerbated emotions.

To his credit, Gupta knows this world of internecine wars as minutely as Coppola knew his Sicily. The mood in the cat-and-mouse game is forever defiant and belligerent.

There’s no room for dull moments in Gupta’s storytelling. The cat and-mouse game tends to get breathless but never wheezy even when characters such as the one played by Manoj Bajpai splutter to a gruesome end.

Gupta keeps a firm grip on the proceedings on his out-of-control characters, all played by actors who understand the close link between oppression and violence.

“Shootout At Wadala” reminded me of two recent films – Karan Malhotra’s “Agneepath” and Anurag Kashyap’s “Gangs Of Wasseypur” where the law of the lawless prevails.

Sameer Arya’s camera and specially Sabu Cyril’s art work (which blends bloody reds with nostalgic sepias) recreate an era of fathomless violence.

A great deal of thought has gone into creating a mood of anarchy. Every frame is saturated with colours and atmospherics. Almost every frame and dialogue is darkly underlined and emphatically italicized. There is no room for thought, let alone silence, in the narration. And why should there be, when the characters pull out their guns faster than John Wayne and Clint Eastwood did in the Wild West?

The performances reflect the absence of a moral equilibrium in the lives of the characters. While Anil Kapoor makes his ‘encounter cop’ a combination of the quirky and the kinetic, John Abraham in the author-backed central role tries very hard to remain in character. Going shirtless on a BEST bus in the bustle of Mumbai in the early 1970s is perhaps his idea of being in character. Wonder what the real Manya Surve would think of being in a body that unmistakably belongs to another millennium!

While Anil Kapoor and John Abraham in the central parts succeed in building an atmosphere of clenched crisis that threatens to blow apart their lives any minute, Sonu Sood, Manoj Bajpai and Ronit Roy shine in briefer roles.

As usual Gupta invests a lot of time and attention to the images of violence. Shootouts and flare-ups in various public spots of Mumbai are shot with the arresting impunity of a storyteller who is profoundly fascinated by the violence that underscores suburban life.

Except for Manya Surve’s anxious and physical love interest (played by Kangna who looks annoyed throughout as though she wasn’t happy being in her character’s space), we hardly ever see the characters in their domestic space.

Do these killers and cops ever sleep? “Shootout At Wadala” is a bludgeoning saga of bloodshed, vendetta and ricocheting nemesis peppered with picturesque dialogues and episodes of frenetic aggression.

This is Gupta’s big-ticket comeback. The sound and fury certainly signify something significant in the history of gangsterism in our cinema.

ians

Movie Review (2013)
Film:

Rating: ★★★★★ 

A girl on a railway station who croons Lata Mangeshkar songs with aching luminosity, a stoic gluttonous ostrich, a flirty cocky gay entertainment journalist, a closet actor, a little boy who likes to dance like Katrina Kaif and a man from Allahabad who just wants to meet Amitabh Bachchan for a few seconds … Such are the engrossing characters that populate the unforgettable world of “Bombay Talkies”.

“Bombay Talkies” is that rarity, which makes us thankful for the gift of the movies.

Four stories directed by four contemporary Bollywood directors emerge and merge with seamless splendour into a pastiche of pain and pleasure. Like four scoops of ice cream, one yummier than the other, “Bombay Talkies” serves up a flavourful quartet of delights that leave us craving for more. It’s like that song written by the immortal Sahir Ludhianvi – “Abhi na jao chhod kar ke dil abhi bhara nahin”.

No, that song isn’t part of the film. But there are songs of the melody queen Lataji which haunt your senses as the restless edgy protagonists, each in search of an emotional liberation that strikes them in unexpected ways at the end of every story, seek a slice of cloudburst to nourish their parched spirits.

So on to the first and my favourite story directed by Karan Johar where a sterile marriage between an urban working-couple played by Rani Mukerji and Randeep Hooda is shaken by the arrival of young ebullient homosexual who enters their frozen marriage in a most unexpected way.

This story more than any other, pushes Indian cinema to the edge to explore a theme and emotions that have so far been swept under the carpet. Karan, whose most brilliant film “My Name Is Khan”, was also about a marginalised community, strips the urban relationship of all its shock value. He looks at the three characters’ frightening spiritual emptiness with a dispassion that was denied to the characters in his earlier exploration of crumbling marital values in “Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna”.

Thanks to the unsparing editing by Deepa Bhatia, a gently arousing background score by Hitesh Sonik, deft but credible dialogues penned by Niranjan Iyenger and camerawork by Anil Mehta that sweeps gently across three wounded lives, Karan is able to nail the poignancy and the irony of his urban fable in just four-five key scenes. This is his best work to date. Rani delivers another power-packed performance. It’s Saqib Saleem who steals this segment with his unmitigated spontaneity and reined-in ebullience.

The second story by Dibakar Bannerjee features that wonderful chameleon actor Nawazuddin Siddiqui as a man who would have been an actor if only life’s drudgeries had not overtaken his life. Dibakar is a master-creator of vignettes from everyday life. Here his detailing of chawl life is unerring.

Nikos Andritsakis’s cinematography doesn’t miss a single nuance in Nawaz’s sad yet hopeful, bleak yet bright existence. The sequence where Siddiqui washes clothes with the chawl’s women is savagely funny and poignant, as is his life-changing moment when Nawaz gets to perform one shot with Ranbir Kapoor. No we don’t see Ranbir, we just feel his presence, and we also hear filmmaker Reema Kagti giving orders from the directorial chair, but we don’t see her either.

Nawaz in Dibakar’s deft hands, takes his character through a journey of profoundly saddening self-discovery without any hint of self-pity. This segment is quirky funny and tragic. No one is allowed to feel sorry for Nawaz’s character. Not even Nawaz.

Ebullient and enchanting are the descriptions that come to mind while watching Zoya Akhtar’s film about a little boy (Naman Jain, brilliant) who would rather dance to Katrina Kaif’s song than become a cricketer or a pilot, as per the wishes of his tyrant papa (Ranveer Shorey).

The household brims over with song, dance and giggles between the Katrina-enamoured boy and his sibling and confidante (a very confident Khushi Dubey). Charming warm humorous and vivacious Zoya’s film serves up a very gentle moral lesson. Let a child grow the way it wants to. Zoya’s film makes our hearts acquire wings. And yes, it immortalises Katrina Kaif.

Finally, Anurag Kashyap’s homage to the unmatchable stardom of Amitabh Bachchan. A simple fable of a man journeying from Allahabad to meet Bachchan, this segment is more baggy and loose-limbed than the other three tightly-edited stories. This is not to take away from its power. As played by Vineet Kumar Singh, the Common Man’s devotion to the Bachchan aura is manifested in the tongue-in-cheek spoken lines and the casual energy of Mumbai’s street life.

Anurag captures the sometimes-funny often-sad bustle around the Bachchan bungalow with warmth and affection. The segment certainly doesn’t lack in warmth. But it could have done with a tighter grip over the narrative.

“Bombay Talkies” is segmented and layered, yet cohesive and compelling from the first frame to the last. While unravelling the magic of cinema and its impact on the minds of audiences, “Bombay Talkies” also displays how much cinema has evolved over the generations.

This is a beguiling, beautiful and befitting homage to 100 years of Indian cinema. It’s also proof that different stories in an episodic film could comfortably have directors with different sensitivities staring in the same line of vision.

If you watch only one film a year make sure it’s this one.

Yup, thank god for the motion picture.

ians

Movie Review (2013)

Rating: ★★★½☆ 

It’s no coincidence that this surprisingly moving film is inspired by Frank Pierson’s 1976 drama “A Star Is Born”. And I deliberately mention the funky psychedelic 1976 version and not the older (1954) version of the same story.

In spirit and in the way the two principal actors perform their parts of two soul-mates and singers torn asunder by their allegiance to the same competitive spirit of showmanship, “Aashiqui 2″ is robustly reminiscent of the Kris Kristofferson-Barbra Streisand film where he discovers a co-singer who steals his heart and also his career.

Hrishikesh Mukherjee made his melodious “Abhimaan” on the same theme. It was easy for Hrishida to portray Jaya Bhaduri as a better artiste than Amitabh Bachchan quite simply because she sang in Lata Mangeshkar’s voices. In “Aashiqui 2″ the two protagonists are pretty much left to their own devices to create that unbearable frisson between two people whose love is trapped in the whirligig of showbiz. For their love to be liberated from the rituals of competitiveness, one of the lovers must make a huge sacrifice before the end.

For love to live the lover must die. It’s a curious tradeoff and one carried off in this film with an exuberance of emotions.

The premise for the plot presumes love to be selfless all-giving and unconditional. Just to see Shradha Kapoor’s eyes melt in mutating emotions of unflinching devotion to her alcoholic star-on-the-skids lover is a vision that makes us believe true love still exists. This petite beauty with eyes that never stay silent gives to her part so much heart, you want to just embrace her and protect her from her self-destructive mentor-turned-tormentor.

Aditya Roy Kapoor as a rock star who is rapidly slipping from the charts gives all of himself to the character. And then some more. In Aditya’s persona, Rahul becomes a metaphor for all the success in showbiz that goes awry. In pursuit of pleasure derived from the bottle his character becomes a cross between Shah Rukh Khan’s Devdas, Ranbir Kapoor’s Rockstar and Kris Kirstofferson’s John Norman Howard.

Like all the heroes of Mahesh Bhatt’s cinema, Aditya has to portray a man who frequently creates a scene and embarrases the person he loves the most. This young actor is not afraid to look compromised on screen. A fearless actor, Aditya falters in the higher notes.

But then as I said, the singing here is not quite what we heard Lata Mamgeshkar, Mohammad Rafi and Kishore Kumar do in “Abhimaan”. Having said that it must be admitted that the music by Jeet Ganguly, Mithoon and Ankit Tiwari stands by the characters and never lets them down even when the pitch gets really steep. The finely written poetry also helps to furnish the lovers’ journey with a feverish and fecund pitch.

“Aashiqui 2″ is a film with its heart in the right place. There are many moments of pure cliche between the lovers. And these moments, so deeply entrenched in the conventions of our cinema, blossom into fresh statements on modern love. It’s a joy to see writer Shagufta Rafiqui and director Mohit Suri ferret out those feel-good places in the script where the protagonists plonk their emotions with a confidence and conviction that reaches out to the audience.

Is that really acting that we see each time Aditya into Shradha’s eyese

If cinema is all about faking human emotions, then I must admit this film does a very competent job of making us believe that true love still exists in this world.

Man, woman, music,ambitions, dreams and despair… Director Mohit Suri traverses the angst-soaked territory with a sincere and deep understanding of the dynamics that destroy love and trust between couples in the glamorous and competitive profession. Yes, there are some clumsily-written episodes in the love story, for example the character of intrusive struggler who barges into the plot at the start during the opening music concert and again in the climax almost as if he was waiting impatiently in the margins of the screenplay.

What lifts the film beyond the realm of the routine are the jagged edges that the film constructs around the central relationship without wounding the film’s fragile core. Full credit to the actors who fill up the screen with a measure of voluptuousness allowing the emotions to spill over without creating an excessive drama. Aditya Roy Kapoor is impressively implosive while Shradha Kapoor plays off against him with a steel willed vulnerability that echoes Jaya Bhaduri in “Abhimaan”. Another fine performance comes from Shaad Randhawa as Aditya’s friend and manager.

Watching this smoothly-oiled drama of disintegrating love I couldn’t help remember Rahul Roy and Anu Aggarwal’s wooden performance in “Aashiqui”.

Our cinema has a come a long way, and not always in the right direction. “Aashiqui 2″ makes us grateful for the movement of the love story away from the standard Romeo & Juliet format into the dark destructive domain of “A Star Is Born”.

Sometimes love is just not enough.

ians

Movie Review (2013)
Film:

Rating: ★★★★☆ 

Do you believe in the supernatural? Even if you don’t this fabulously effective take on the wages of renewable evil would prompt you to look nervously over your shoulders the next time you pass through a dark, shadowy corridor.

So right away, a round of applause to producer Vishal Bhardwaj and first-time director Kannan Iyer for a scare fare that goes way beyond the mundane terror gimmicks of Indian cinema’s much-abused horror genre to search out the very core of the human nature.

Why do we fear the unknown? And could it be what we consider to be the supernatural is actually a manifestation of our own deep insecurities?

“Ek Thi Daayan” enters the world of the supernatural with a finesse and delicacy rare to the horror genre.

The first hour of the storytelling when we are taken back to the magician-hero Bobo(Hashmi)’s seemingly well-ordered childhood, is splendid, warm, funny and, yes, ominous.

The child actor Vishesh Tiwari who plays the young Hashmi and the little girl who plays his baby-sister are delightfully unaffected. The bubble-waiting-to-be-burst world of the two children is steeped in a distant sorrow and a vague terror, as though to say, we who believe Good triumphs would have to suffer a whole lot of evil before we arrive at that state of moral liberation.

More than the somewhat scattered second-half, it’s in the early sections of the storytelling where director Kannan creates a feeling of fabulous foreboding through hints and whispers rather than red-herrings and shrieks.

The creaky lift descending into “hell” with the two children clinging on for dear life, the creepy lizard on the wall which might be much more that what it seems, the hints and signs of diabolism are strewn across the length and breadth of the breathtaking frames.

But then again, the “witch” could just be a scared little boy’s terror of a stepmother. Who knows why we fear what we do?

For crying out loud, this is such a normal seductive world! To see it shatter with supernatural aberration is a heart-shattering experience.

The nimbly-knitted script builds evil into the world of normalcy and innocence. The narrative’s gaze never falters as it sweeps across the characters’ lives making inroads into the anatomy of evil without charting a course that has been green lighted by the cinematic horror conventions.

“Ek Thi Daayan” is far more delicately delineated, much more “caste”-effective than other films of the horror genre. The actors act terrified but they don’t run around screaming blue murder. They are too shaken to act suitably scared.

Emraan Hashmi as the magician who finds his world torn apart by events his wand cannot pretend to control, brings an anguished tension into the plot without stumbling over the dark edges of the plot.

But the film clearly belongs to the three luscious ladies. While Huma Qureshi and Kalki are seductive and impish, it’s Konkona who clearly takes possession of her part and of the film with authority.

The fact that her father Mukul Sharma has written the original story could have played a part in establishing Konkona’s comfort level with the eerie environment. But you suspect it’s more inherent. Talent finds its level.

Saurabh Goswami’s cinematography takes care of the rest. This is one helluva good-looking film that lights up not just the characters and their surroundings but also sheds luminous light on the darkness within the characters that reveals itself fits and starts, to cast a splendid spell over the audience.

“Ek Thi Daayan” re-defines the spook genre. It’s at once eerie and enchanting, soft, subtle, dark and yet powerful and persuasive.

Tonally rich, vibrant and sensuous, the performances including Pavan Malhotra as Hashmi’s bewitched dad and Rajtava Dutta as his bewildered shrink, boost the beauty of the witches’ tale .

More treat than trick no matter “witch” way you look at it, “Ek Thi Daayan” is in one word, “daayan-mic!”

ians

Movie Review (2013)

Rating: ★★★☆☆ 

If it is any consolation, Rohan Sippy’s latest presentation is far more cohesively constructed and sure of its raison d’etre than his last film “Dum Maro Dum”, which bumped off its protagonist half-an-hour before ‘The End’.

Thankfully, no one dies during “Nautanki Saala!” — not even the audience laughing. This one is just not funny enough to qualify as a LOL (Laugh Out Loud) spree. At the same time, the bum-chum camaraderie between Ayushmann Khurrana and Kunal Roy Kapoor is so pronouncedly pungent that we cannot but chuckle at the gambolling antics that take this desi French Friday special to the level of bearable humour.

Oh, didn’t I tell you? “Nautanki Saala!” is a remake of a 10-year-old French film “Apres Vous”, which I had the good fortune of seeing.

While the French film, directed by Pierre Salvadori, is far more nimble-footed in the telling of a quirky ‘One Fine Evening…’ plot, the “official” remake (unofficial ones went out of vogue with stringent copyright laws) scores for the sheer joie de vivre (don’t miss my French appreciation!) that Ayushmann brings to the table.

Kunal — as all of us who have seen that homage to horniness called “Delhi Belly” know — is an actor with notable comic acumen. Here as the spaced-out suicidal stranger, who blows into Ayushmann’s theatrical existence, Kunal confers a sense of hectic audacity to his intruder’s part.

Ayushmann bequeaths a clenched vitality to his character. Here’s an actor who knows how to milk a situation or a line and exactly where to stop before it goes over the top. As the reluctant exceedingly altruistic host to a suicidal guest, Ayushmann goes beyond his “Vicky Donor” debut to show some hefty mettle.

Unfortunately, the writing just doesn’t give Ayushmann, Kunal or the three pretty female actors a chance to breathe easy and let their characters acquire their own volition. Not that the screenplay is in a hurry to get anywhere. Rather, it takes its time to get somewhere that we don’t really reach in spite of the film team’s best intentions.

It remains a mystery why Sippy — whose earlier films, for whatever they were worth, were originals — would now want to remake a mediocre French film. This is not as inexplicable as a remake of “Himmatwala”. But then again it does make you question the scarcity of original screenplay writers in our cinema.

On the plus side, the original French film’s restaurateur’s realm is relocated into the bustling theatre world. And that is a cue for some eye-catching visuals and in-house humour.

Sippy’s eye for theatrical detail can’t match what R. Balki did to the restaurant business in “Cheeni Kum”. But then, who’s comparing?

The cinematography is a refreshing synthesis of gritty realism and flights of colourful fantasy, quite like two worlds off and on stage that Ayushmann’s character grapples to come to terms with.

All said and dumb, the comic timing of the two lead actors does keep the narrative on track most of the way. Ayushmann and Kunal dig happily into their derivative roles of the saviour and the loser from the French film. The duo whips up a wicked humour in this comedy of errors filled with a reined-in blizzard of boyish bacchanalia and banter.

While you are mildly amused by their antics, you don’t come away overwhelmed by this comic outing on the downside of spontaneous hospitality.

Oh, Sippy had desecrated the R.D. Burman classic “Dum Maro Dum” in his last film. Here he goes at the Anand-Milind track “Dhak dhak karne laga”.

Frankly, it doesn’t make a difference.

ians

Movie Review (2013)

Rating: ★★★½☆ 

Without the risk of exaggeration we can ‘safely’ say Vidyut Jamwal takes the kind of risks in his action scenes that we haven’t seen in any screen-hero from any part of the world. The choreographic precision with which Vidyut flips, somersaults, and fells his adversaries is a sign of an exceptionally skilled action-hero.

Te be sure, a star is born in “Commando”. We saw Vidyut completely upstage John Abraham in the hand-to-hand heart-in-mouth fight scenes in “Force”. Now, Vidyut proves himself a maestro of unequalled sinewy skills, gliding rather than fighting, pre-empting the adversary’s moves almost like a chess game.

With tongue firmly in shriek mode, Vidyut in one of the early stunts scenes of the film rips open a poster of “Force” and attacks the baddies. The action never stops. And the song breaks, especially an item song in the second-half by Nathalia Kaur, are unwelcome speed breakers.

We really don’t want to see Vidyut romance the pretty Punjabi damsel in distress played by Pooja Chopra who seems a tad too well-groomed for the rigours of the jungle.

Not that we care. We just want to see Vidyut take on the bad guys, full-force. And boy, does Vidyut deliver!

Admaker-turned-feature film director Dilip Ghosh keeps the plot wisely simple ramrod-straight and to the point.

Apart from those utterly annoying song breaks, there are no digressions from the dynamics of instant score-settling. It’s a straight one-to-one fight-to-finish between the silently simmering Commando and a satanic goon from a small-town in Punjab with no eyeballs and apparently no balls either, who believes the power of the gun and the strength of Santa-Banta SMS jokes can be co-ordinated in one range of activity.

Jaideep Ahlawat, last seen giving a riveting performance in Kamal Haasan’s “Vishawaroop”, gives to the goon’s part a wacky spin. The man is half-devil half-imbecile. The goon makes Simrit (Pooja) an offer – either a suhaag-raat with him after the wedding, or a ‘suhaag raat’ with him and all his battle-stained cronies right away? Hmmm?

Is it any wonder that the pretty spunky Punjabi lass makes a run for the jungles rather than accept the goon’s marriage proposal. Predictably, Simrit runs into the banished army-man, our commando-hero, who seems to have seen the collected Rambo series back-to-back at least eight-10 times.

The first time Vidyut plays the saviour at a bus stand, we know he means business. He is not just a one-man army, he is also the Indian army’s favourite bete noire. Despite the heavy burden of playing protector to country and the leading lady, Vidyut’s fights manage to bring in a lot of warmth and some humour in their execution.

The narration is an unabashed homage to Sylvester Stallone’s jungle-survival saga. And yet, thanks to Vidyut’s powerful screen presence the combat between the commando-hero and the goons never slackens in pace. The physical combats, which are undoubtedly the crux of the theme, propel the plot forward in leaps of inspired action.

Happily for Vidyut, his opponents are not shown to be ineffectual jokers. The back-and-forth of fists and rhetoric are uniformly engaging. Though we know exactly where the protagonist’s one-man battle against his enemies is heading, we never lose interest in the plot.

The film is shot on some interesting locations. The backwaters of Punjab and the thick jungles serve as just the right ambience for the rugged actioner.

Vidyut takes care of the rest. His action definitely speaks louder than his words.

Sejal Shah’s cinematography and Ritesh Shah’s dialogues constantly add to Vidyut’s fist-power, imbuing his combat to the finish with some unexpected flourishes of serious socio-political comment towards the end when we are told we need to clean up our act if we want to protect the country from external threats.

It’s a one-man-show off all the way. Pooja shows flashes of talent when she isn’t busy brazenly aping Kareena Kapoor’s voluble-Punjabi act from “Jab We Met”.

Not her fault. If the hero is a silent seething ball of implosive fire, and the heroine is a talkative Punjabi girl who runs away from home to escape an unwanted marriage, ‘phir toh boss “Jab We Met” banta hai’.

To its credit “Commando” creates a climate of clenched conflict for the hero to vent his voluminous talent as a martial artiste.

Indeed, a star is born.

ians