Cinemaah

If there is a story just waiting to be told, be sure there will be a director just waiting to slaughter it. 26th July at Barista is one of those—amazing, that nobody before Mohan Sharma (and his writer Rahil Qazi) saw the potential of making a movie with the great deluge of July 26, 2005 as a backdrop, and what a pity the film turns out to be such an unwatchable dud.

If there were any people in the cinemahall at all, it must have been because a) they had nothing better to do b) remembered that day of horror and wanted to see what the filmmaker had done with it. After the mandatory voiceover, Sharma collects a rather clueless bunch of random people at a coffee shop, with kind and helpful staff (the likes of which this reviewer has never encountered at Barista!). You don't know what hour of the day it is, presumably late afternoon, by which time the city was already deep under water; but some people walk in and out, as if nothing happened, and some look terror struck. The ones inside the café wake up in fits and starts.

There's a worried Sikh couple, waiting for new of their kids, who went for a picnic, a film writer, a struggler, two singles looking for love, some others, who wander away never to be seen again. The struggler sits like a statue in corner with her legs crossed, the Sikh woman wails sporadically, the writer glares at everyone, and the singles alternately flirt with each other or try to help others caught in the downpour.

It is obviously a shoe-string budget effort, so there are a couple of very fake looking flood scenes staged, some news footage, a couple of scenes of families worrying for those marooned in the café. At some point the power goes off, but since they couldn't shoot in the dark, an urchin drops by a cache of fat candles, because, as he says, his life is in the dark. "Oh, and you still spread light," says someone.

Absurdly, a cop strolls in to investigate a robbery in a bank next door and terrorizes everyone; a gang-rape victim comes in sobbing to express concern for the men who did it, because she has AIDS! And so on.. everything about the film so laughably inept. As a break from the bunch of unknowns cast, Rohini Hattangady, Raju Kher and Amita Nangia get a scene each. And then the film ends as abruptly as it started, with none of the stories getting any closure.

If the film was meant as a branding exercise for the café in its title, then it badly misfires!

Labels: Cinemaah

The theme of terrorism has become as much of a cliché in Hindi films as, say, the gangster film. Every aspect has been covered already, and there really isn’t much left to say on the subject… so someone who wants to make a film on it, has to come up with a fresh or startlingly bold take.

Subash Ghai’s Black and White tries very hard to put forward a ‘secular’ point of view, which is well-intentioned and all that, but everything about it seems picked from other films—including his own Khalnayak, made in full blown commercial style, but talking of a bandit being transformed by love.

The plot is from Devil’s Own(which has already been cannibalized by Raj Kanwar as Badal), the old grandpa seems to have come out of Naseem, the angry young man from Dil Se (which had an angry young woman) and so on… all placed in the ambience of Delhi’s Chandni Chowk, in itself a cliché of the Muslim ghetto.

Into this old Delhi area, comes Afghan militant Numair (Anurag Sinha), pretending to be a victim of the Gujarat genocide and lives in the haveli of an old poet (Habib Tanvir). His mission is to blow up the Red Fort on August 15. Numair has some vague back story involving a sister and a destroyed house, but otherwise his insane hatred for Hindus is left unexplained.

Numair always has a scowl and a clenched jaw, and has ‘terrorist’ practically stamped on his forehead! Strange that he goes about shooting his own teammates (for not being good Muslims) and stages a shoot-out to endear himself to Chandni Chowk’s only Hindu couple, the excessively secular (if there can be such a thing) couple – Rajan and Roma Mathur—and the cops seem to ignore the carnage.

Rajan (Anil Kapoor) is an Urdu professor, his wife (Shefali Shah) a shrew, who is always up in arms against something or the other, at one point stopping mid-tirade to send someone to “go wake-up the sleeping TV crews at Jama Masjid.” And what do you know, there is a group of TV reporters dozing there—waiting for a riot to take place, or what? It’s such weird stuff that prevents one from taking Ghai’s ‘love the terrorist’ spiel seriously.

Without the ‘spoiler’ of revealing what happens, suffice to say, Ghai’s formula is to bring the terrorist home, feed him buttered parathas and cute homilies—and lo and behold, the problem will go away. The Muslim youth might even through down weapons and form a Sufi band, like Roma’s other protégé Rahat (Jaimini Pathak).

A character who abets terrorism says when the cops catch up with him, “You have to understand why terrorists are born, and then there will be no terrorism.” Indeed? And what’s Ghai’s take on that? One never finds out.

Labels: Cinemaah