Cinemaah

Kismat Konnection


The appeal of Aziz Mirza’s films lies in their simplicity and timeless message about preserving honesty and kindness in a materialistic world—Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman, Yes Boss and Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani all spoke of human values over personal ambition.

They were fairy tales rolled into cautionary fables for modern times. His latest Kismet Konnection also follows the Mirza formula, but now a bit of commercial compromising has crept in, which is why the film falls flat like a soufflé with some important ingredient missing.

Problem one--fakeness of the Toronto setting. Everybody there is Indian and speaks Hindi? The protagonist with a Shah Rukh-Yashraj name like Raj Malhotra (Shahid Kapoor) is an architect with all Indian college mates (he lists quite a few), the builders he goes to meet are all Indian, so are their employees. The old folks in the community centre the do-gooder heroine Priya (Vidya Balan) wants to save from builders is peopled mostly by Indians. The only non-Indian with a speaking part is a tall trophy blonde married to an Indian and she is a vampy type. Even a clairvoyant (Juhi Chawla) hawking her skills on Canadian TV speaks in Hindi.

Then there’s the character of the hero’s buddy (Vishal Malhotra) – Raj may be a loser, but why is this fellow stuck to his side like a leach all the time, taking crap from him? Don’t hero’s friends in films have lives and jobs of their own?

Raj, who is having a run of bad luck, is told by the clairvoyant, that his lucky charm is around and it could be a person. He realizes that it is Priya, with whom he has fought every time they met, but also been lucky in her presence. He starts wooing her furiously, even though she is engaged to another man (Amit Varma).

The project he is angling for from builder Gill (Om Puri) is a mall that will displace Priya’s community centre, so he lies to her about that. The elements of a romcom are there—mostly taken from Just My Luck and Two Weeks’ Notice—but there is a laboured quality to Mirza’s direction, as if he really couldn’t care less.

Not only is humour and a lightness of touch missing, there are unrealized sub-plots-- like the Russian mafia who lend Raj money, and the glib villain who tries to steal Raj’s contract.

Shahid Kapoor madly copies Shah Rukh Khan, but just ends up looking like he is trying too hard and still not getting it right—it takes great effort to make a lying, cheating guy lovable, and SRK does that with his eyes closed. Vidya Balan (dressed so badly it hurts to look at her clothes) is fine in the dramatic portions in the end, but otherwise looks like she wandered into the wrong film.

Aziz Mirza’s films usually have wonderful music and song picturisations (remember Gumshuda in Chalte Chalte?), but Kismat Konnection falls short there too. It’s okay as a weekend date movie, but we expect much more from Mirza.




Contract

Even before the film was released, Ram Gopal Varma watchers were saying, “Again a gangster film?” The difference, apparently is that Contract is about the “underworld meeting terrorism?” It’s not something Varma discovered, even though he is such an expert on the Indian Mafia by now. (Black Friday, for one, based on real incidents, said it all.)

Then, in scene one of Contract, Varma loses control. An armyman has his gun trained on a wanted terrorist Sultan (Zakir Hussain), and pauses indefinitely to listen to the man rant on about how a terrorist kills with a purpose, while a soldier simply follows orders from a cowardly line of command. So Sultan escapes and the commando Aman (Adhvik Mahajan) quits the army and becomes the kind of apathetic civilian who says “change the channel to MTV” when the Delhi blasts are shown on TV.

When he is approached by a cop Ahmad Hussain (Prasad Purandare) to go undercover and help destroy the mafia-terrorist link, he refuses. He doesn’t care for the country, only for his wife and daughter. So much foreshadowing is fatal—we can guess the family will be killed and he will take up the assignment. We can also guess pretty much what will happen afterwards—Varma’s films have seldom been this predictable.

The underworld is represented by an “NRI” don RD (Sumeet Nijhawan), parked in a luxurious sea-front bungalow somewhere in the Orient, and his chief rival Goonga (Upendra Limaye) living on a boat in the sea with Indian Intelligence men and a garrulous wife (Amruta Subhash) for company.

Aman is given a new identity—Amaan-- and planted into RD’s gang. He eliminates Goonga’s men with great ease—he even makes an encounter cop (Kishore Kadam) run naked in the streets. Of course there is corruption in the police force, and eventually the blame is laid at the politician’s door—they arrange for terrorist attacks at election time. Really now!

Aman kills Goonga and all his boat guys and Sultan’s men single-handedly, or with a little help from RD’s weird sister Iya (Sakshi Gulati). Who blows up RD and gang is not clear, and who kills the creepy home minister? Never mind, Varma has left room for a sequel or two. Because Aman promises to cut the whole tree of which Sultan is just a branch.

The plot is reminiscent of Drohkaal, but that is the least of the film’s problems. Most characters are ridiculous caricatures. The dons are so dumb, how do they even run such crime empires—Aman makes calls to Ahmad Hussein all the time, from RD’s house, without arousing any suspicion.

Varma has given people inexplicable quirks. Ahmed Hussain is always seen with a coffee mug, and when he is at home, there is kid running around aimlessly and a wife in the background. The female police commissioner (looking like she will burst out of her uniform any minute) bounces a ball and once has a kid perched on her desk making a racket. One gangland bloke goes into the kitchen in the middle of a conversation and beats up an invisible woman.

Possibly in response to criticism that women in his films just hover around silently serving meals, Goonga’s wife is always shrieking and in-your-face. It’s as if Varma decided to keep every frame ‘busy.’ That is when the hand-held camera is not shooting close-ups so tight that the pores on the actors’ faces can be counted. Not to mention the noisy soundtrack.

If there’s a worthwhile discovery in the gaggle of new faces, it is not the kohl-eyed, stone-faced Adhvik Mahajan, but Sumeet Nijhawan who plays RD with an easygoing charm.

Labels: Cinemaah

Mehbooba took close to a decade in the making, and it must have taken a great deal of patience on the part of director Afzal Khan and everyone else involved, to see it through. The stars change sizes and hairstyles from one scene to the next, the costumes are clearly dated, but the somehow, the thread of the plot (such as it is, borrowed from a hundred films) is not lost.

We can snigger at the awful costumes, the garish interiors, the tawdry dance numbers, hokey emotions and long-lost Kader Khan, but some years ago, this is what our mainstream films used to look like. Now some of our films have acquired the spit and polish look of Hollywood, but think back to hits like Saajan, Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam and maybe Hum Aapke Hain Koun and this film fits right into that bracket. New York girl Varsha (Manisha Koirala) turns down the advances of rich play boy Shravan (Sanjay Dutt), slaps him in public and huffs that all women are not saleable commodities. Shravan plans an elaborate revenge, pretends to reform, proposes to her, seduces and ditches her.

Varsha changes her name to Payal and goes to start life afresh in Budapest (shot lovingly by Ashok Mehta) —must be because Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam was shot there, or it could be any place; folks speak Hindi anyway! There she is chased by Karan (Ajay Devgan) an artist, who claims she is the women of his dreams—his kitschy paintings bear witness to it. On the insistence of her uncle (Kader Khan), she agrees to marry Karan—not once, it seems, pausing to ask for his surname!

The scene shifts to a huge palace in Rajasthan, and it is revealed that Shravan and Karan are brothers – so close that they sleep in the same bed, bathe in the same tub, drink booze from the same bottle and lust after the same mujrewali. "Their tastes are so similar," says the fond mother. The two go "meri wali is better" (by this time Shravan is really in love with Varsha) and audience is supposed to feel a twinge-- the "meri wali" is the same, what's going to happen now?

Time was when Bollywood audiences cared for such spurious suspense, even though they knew exactly how the story would end. Now we just look at our watches, alarmed that the film has gone on for three hours, and hadn't it better end? At least the two male stars are still big, though Manisha Koirala has faded out--if released ten years ago, Mebhooba might even have been a hit. Now it's the equivalent of a museum piece.

Labels: Cinemaah