Saturday, September 20, 2008
Three More This Week!
Welcome to Sajjanpur
If today's entertainment-seeking multiplex crowd can be lured into a film set in a village, then Shyam Benegal's Welcome to Sajjanpur, could well turn out to be the filmmaker's biggest hit.
Charming, earthy and witty it is one of the few comedies in the eminent directors vast and varied repertoire. And it boasts of the best dialogue in recent Mumbai cinema—by Ashok Mishra. Set in the fictional, idyllic village of Sajjanpur, the sweet and sour happenings are seen through the eyes of letter-writer Mahadev (Shreyas Talpade), who uses his thwarted literary ambitions to write colourful letters for the illiterate folks of the village.
From urban India, it is tough to envisage a part of India that has "23 hour power cuts," so many illiterates, and very little contact with the modern world. Hilariously, a hick with a mobile phone, needs Mahadev to send and read smses for him. Mahadev's love for a simple potter Kamla (Amrita Rao) leads him to try to fudge her letters and wreck her marriage with her husband (a star making a surprise appearance) in Mumbai, but his repentance and reparation is touching too. Around his mostly uneventful life, is the romance with the compounder (Ravi Kishen) with a widow (Rajeshwari Sachdev), a mother's (Ila Arun) worry about her 'manglik' daughter (Divya Dutta) and the local eunuch (Ravi Jhankal) taking on the 'sarpanch' (Yashpal Sharma) in the elections.
The recreation of the village milieu is authentic—the houses as well as the costumes—and shot lovingly by Rajan Kothari. The problem with the film is that the central track is too slight, and the subsidiary characters not suitably fleshed out. Caste, class and community that are so strong in rural India, barely raise a head, even during the election episode. The tragedy of the widow and her suitor is too briefly dismissed. And the songs just hold up the narrative without adding anything to the film.
Benegal always has got very good performances from his repertory of favorites (like Rajeshwari Sachdev and Ila Arun), but he manages to make Amrita Rao to get out of her simpering act and deliver a lovely performance as the shy and lonely abandoned bride. Ravi Jhankal is impressive as the eunuch, but it is Shreyas Talpade, eyes brimming with mischief and unruffled body language, who holds the film together.
With its minor flaws, Welcome to Sajjanpur is enjoyable in a very gentle, offbeat way—don't expect Priyadarshan style comedy here. Give it a look.
Hulla
Urban housing, traffic and noise are subjects ripe for satire, and Jaideep Varma picks two of them for his debut film Hulla.
Stock broker Raj Puri (Sushant Singh), moves to a distant suburb of Mumbai with his wife Abha (Kartikadevi Rane), in the hope that the peace and quiet will compensate for the longer commute. Raj finds that he is unable to sleep because Mathew the old watchman (Chandrachoor Karnik) of the building blows a whistle at night, on the instructions of the society's secretary Janardhan (Rajat Kapoor). A small request to stop the watchman making a noise blows up into an ego issue between the two men.
Raj gets increasingly obsessed with his need for quiet, picks quarrels with other members of the building and gets no moral support from his wife or friends. It's like road rage—totally irrational, yet in some way justified--- why can't a man be allowed to sleep in peace? Raj's lack of sleep has far-reaching and needlessly tragic consequences for him, Janardhan and the watchman.
The first half of the film is funny and every harried Mumbaikar will identify with it, but it remains a one-idea film, and there's only this much it can be stretched. Varma is unable to turn into a full-blown absurdist farce, and the protagonist's cantankerousness starts grating, even though you sympathise with his plight. Instead, Janardhan comes across as sad, powerless man with a nagging wife, forced into helpless compromise in his business—in fact this track is never fully explored. In the end, it's always the poor and weak who are crushed and the innocent watchman turns out to be the victim here.
Hulla is humorous, poignant, but falls far short of its potential, despite fine performances by Sushant Singh and Rajat Kapoor.
Saas Bahu Aur Sensex
Shona Urvashi's Saas Bahu Aur Sensex is one of those films that has you furrowing your brow in puzzlement. What is it all about? Was it a TV serial condensed into a film?
Set in a Mumbai housing society, like this week's other release Hulla, this one's full of stereotypes and caricatures. The building where newly divorced Binita Sen (Kirron Kher) comes to reside with her sulky daughter Nitya (Tanushree Dutta) has a bunch of overdressed women from several communities, who speak with exaggerated accents and do nothing but mind everybody else's business.
Binita's encounter with a Parsi stockbroker Firoz Sethna (Farouque Shaikh), gets her interested in shares, and also a possible middle-age romance. The other building women (including Lillete Dubey and Sharon Prabhakar, both wasted) drop their TV soaps and get drawn to the stock market too. But all this is done very cursorily, while the film wanders off to follow a tepid love triangle between Nitya, her neighbour Ritesh (Ankur Khann) and the building hottie, the gold-digging Keerti (Masumeh). To add to the boredom, the TV is on somewhere or the other, either analysing the stock market or doing a nonsensical spoof on TV soaps called Saas Bhi Kabhi Kanya Thi.
It's all quite tiresome and unwatchable, so not even Farouque Shaikh's careful Parsi mannerisms and Kirron Kher's wardrobe of lovely Bengali saris can salvage it.
If today's entertainment-seeking multiplex crowd can be lured into a film set in a village, then Shyam Benegal's Welcome to Sajjanpur, could well turn out to be the filmmaker's biggest hit.
Charming, earthy and witty it is one of the few comedies in the eminent directors vast and varied repertoire. And it boasts of the best dialogue in recent Mumbai cinema—by Ashok Mishra. Set in the fictional, idyllic village of Sajjanpur, the sweet and sour happenings are seen through the eyes of letter-writer Mahadev (Shreyas Talpade), who uses his thwarted literary ambitions to write colourful letters for the illiterate folks of the village.
From urban India, it is tough to envisage a part of India that has "23 hour power cuts," so many illiterates, and very little contact with the modern world. Hilariously, a hick with a mobile phone, needs Mahadev to send and read smses for him. Mahadev's love for a simple potter Kamla (Amrita Rao) leads him to try to fudge her letters and wreck her marriage with her husband (a star making a surprise appearance) in Mumbai, but his repentance and reparation is touching too. Around his mostly uneventful life, is the romance with the compounder (Ravi Kishen) with a widow (Rajeshwari Sachdev), a mother's (Ila Arun) worry about her 'manglik' daughter (Divya Dutta) and the local eunuch (Ravi Jhankal) taking on the 'sarpanch' (Yashpal Sharma) in the elections.
The recreation of the village milieu is authentic—the houses as well as the costumes—and shot lovingly by Rajan Kothari. The problem with the film is that the central track is too slight, and the subsidiary characters not suitably fleshed out. Caste, class and community that are so strong in rural India, barely raise a head, even during the election episode. The tragedy of the widow and her suitor is too briefly dismissed. And the songs just hold up the narrative without adding anything to the film.
Benegal always has got very good performances from his repertory of favorites (like Rajeshwari Sachdev and Ila Arun), but he manages to make Amrita Rao to get out of her simpering act and deliver a lovely performance as the shy and lonely abandoned bride. Ravi Jhankal is impressive as the eunuch, but it is Shreyas Talpade, eyes brimming with mischief and unruffled body language, who holds the film together.
With its minor flaws, Welcome to Sajjanpur is enjoyable in a very gentle, offbeat way—don't expect Priyadarshan style comedy here. Give it a look.
Hulla
Urban housing, traffic and noise are subjects ripe for satire, and Jaideep Varma picks two of them for his debut film Hulla.
Stock broker Raj Puri (Sushant Singh), moves to a distant suburb of Mumbai with his wife Abha (Kartikadevi Rane), in the hope that the peace and quiet will compensate for the longer commute. Raj finds that he is unable to sleep because Mathew the old watchman (Chandrachoor Karnik) of the building blows a whistle at night, on the instructions of the society's secretary Janardhan (Rajat Kapoor). A small request to stop the watchman making a noise blows up into an ego issue between the two men.
Raj gets increasingly obsessed with his need for quiet, picks quarrels with other members of the building and gets no moral support from his wife or friends. It's like road rage—totally irrational, yet in some way justified--- why can't a man be allowed to sleep in peace? Raj's lack of sleep has far-reaching and needlessly tragic consequences for him, Janardhan and the watchman.
The first half of the film is funny and every harried Mumbaikar will identify with it, but it remains a one-idea film, and there's only this much it can be stretched. Varma is unable to turn into a full-blown absurdist farce, and the protagonist's cantankerousness starts grating, even though you sympathise with his plight. Instead, Janardhan comes across as sad, powerless man with a nagging wife, forced into helpless compromise in his business—in fact this track is never fully explored. In the end, it's always the poor and weak who are crushed and the innocent watchman turns out to be the victim here.
Hulla is humorous, poignant, but falls far short of its potential, despite fine performances by Sushant Singh and Rajat Kapoor.
Saas Bahu Aur Sensex
Shona Urvashi's Saas Bahu Aur Sensex is one of those films that has you furrowing your brow in puzzlement. What is it all about? Was it a TV serial condensed into a film?
Set in a Mumbai housing society, like this week's other release Hulla, this one's full of stereotypes and caricatures. The building where newly divorced Binita Sen (Kirron Kher) comes to reside with her sulky daughter Nitya (Tanushree Dutta) has a bunch of overdressed women from several communities, who speak with exaggerated accents and do nothing but mind everybody else's business.
Binita's encounter with a Parsi stockbroker Firoz Sethna (Farouque Shaikh), gets her interested in shares, and also a possible middle-age romance. The other building women (including Lillete Dubey and Sharon Prabhakar, both wasted) drop their TV soaps and get drawn to the stock market too. But all this is done very cursorily, while the film wanders off to follow a tepid love triangle between Nitya, her neighbour Ritesh (Ankur Khann) and the building hottie, the gold-digging Keerti (Masumeh). To add to the boredom, the TV is on somewhere or the other, either analysing the stock market or doing a nonsensical spoof on TV soaps called Saas Bhi Kabhi Kanya Thi.
It's all quite tiresome and unwatchable, so not even Farouque Shaikh's careful Parsi mannerisms and Kirron Kher's wardrobe of lovely Bengali saris can salvage it.
Labels: Cinemaah
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