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Wednesday, June 24, 2009

PG and Let's Dance 

Paying Guest

Move 1966 Mumbai to 2009 Bangkok, and you have a remake of Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Biwi Aur Makaan. That film was reportedly a remake of Bengali Jaya Che Kali Boarding and was later made into a Marathi film called Ashi Hi Banwa Banwi by Sachin.

Maybe the men in drag as a comic device needed a fresh plot to make it work. Paritosh Painter’s Paying Guest, may have been based on a successful play, but as a film, it starts off at a disadvantage. The plot is old and totally predictable. The audience’s willingness to see the film, then depends on their curiosity—do they really want to see Jaaved Jaffery and Shreyas Talpade parade around as over-dressed women?

Four friends (Ashish Chauhary and Vatsal Sheth are the other two) live together in Pattaya, and happen to be thrown out of their jobs and rented home on the same day. At the only other paying guest joint (a swanky villa, actually) they can find, the landlords Ballu (Johnny Lever) and his wife (Delnaz Paul) insist that they will rent out rooms only to married men, In desperation, two of them get into drag (hideous) and pretend to be the wives.

It is really lazy scripting then, to include such tired gags as the landlord being the former boss of one of the ‘drag’ guys, and the girlfriend of one of the ‘husbands’ landing up as a friend of the family. If it is still marginally funny, it’s because the actors seem to enjoy the tomfoolery, and some of the lines are witty—one suspects a lot of them ad libbed.

There are the mandatory song-and-dance breaks, for which four leading ladies are duly provided (Neha Dhupia, Celina Jaitly, Riya Sen, Sayali Bhagat)—and not one of them leaves any impression. What do you make of a Gujarati character (Paul), who mangles her English, and a villain (Chunky Pandey) who lisps? Just that the writers and director couldn’t even be bothered with thinking up some fresh material…do they have so much contempt for the audience?

Let’s Dance


A young woman, who loves dancing aspires to be in a music video; and her appearance in one, makes her a ‘star’? Aarif Sheikh’s Let’s Dance may have got a few dance steps right, but everything else is off kilter.

Even if you didn’t know it was a straight lift of Jessica Alba starrer Honey, you’d suspect it’s origins were not entirely local…though it has echoes of Naach, Rangeela and Aaja Nachle.

Suhani (Gayatri Patel) teaches dance to a bunch of street kids (they don’t all look like urchins), fighting to keep her rehearsal space, which the landlord wants to sell. For someone with no regular income and no family (at least none mentioned), she shares a large apartment with a TV reporter friend (Sugandha Garg), who has a profession that is convenient to the script.

Her only desire is to be in a video by RJ (Aquib Afzal), and she miraculously gets the opportunity. While she becomes a ‘star’, she also gets to romance a dhabawala (Ajay Chaudhary) across the street. She tries to get a rude teenager (Aabhaas Yadav) who dances beautifully, to join her class, but the slum boy would rather peddle drugs. And when she does make a breakthrough by springing him out of jail, she is blacklisted for resisting RJ’s advances.

Much too easily (in a city with real estate problems), she is gifted a large hall, where she decides to stage her own dance show, to give the street kids a chance to display their talent. The TV reporter roommate comes in handy to whip up support. And for added melodrama, the rude bloke’s kid brother ends up in hospital in a coma.

Surprisingly, for a film based on dance, the music is not peppy—except for the Taare tod ke la number—and the choreography consists of mostly hip-hop and breakdance moves, with a lot of energy very little grace.

Newcomer Gayatri is earnest and confident, but as she says in the film, she is not Madhuri Dixit—and not even she could do much with a soggy Aaja Nachle kind of script. Aquib Afzal (blinding wardrobe) can’t act, Ajay Chaudhary hasn’t enough to do, the only other bright spot is Aabhas Yadav as the slumdog with attitude.

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KKD+2 

Kal Kisne Dekha



Nihal Singh from Chandigarh (that’s how he is referred to all the time), played by newcomer Jackky Bhagnani in Kal Kisne Dekha, comes to Mumbai to study science, in a college with an enormous campus and a building with gigantic Doric columns—which couldn’t possibly be in Mumbai, but that is the least of the film’s problems.

In the only time NS from C, enters a classroom, he asks his physics professor (Rishi Kapoor—why this?), who is teaching post-grads about Newton and the apple, “Why do we dream?”

The rest of the time, he sings, dances, races bikes, chases spoilt rich miss (Misha Vaishali Desai), gets into scraps with college bullies, and generally poses around in various foreign locales, where his father (Vashu Bhagnani), the producer of the film, could afford to splurge on shoots.


When it’s almost interval time, the director Vivek Sharma (or someone else) must have asked, “But where’s the story?” And so, Nihal’s ability to ‘see’ the future is dusted and trotted out, as he tries to prevent some vague terrorists (Rahul Dev and moll) without a cause from blowing up Mumbai. Even as he runs about, with Mumbai’s police force behind him (since when do they go entirely by some college student’s intuition and not their own intelligence?), he pauses to sing, dance etc., at various pretty places, flinging his arms out a la Shah Rukh Khan and trying to look soulful. Meanwhile, the professor grins evilly and a loony don (Riteish Deshmukh) with gay sidekicks does nothing in particular. And there’s Archana Puran Singh, shrieking around too, unrecognizable and not at all a rustic “bebe” type.


If Jackky Bhagnani and the over-made up, badly dressed Vaishali Desai have any talent or star quality, it’s not visible in Kal Kisne Dekha. In fact, if a producer dad wanted to deliberately sabotage his son’s acting career, he couldn’t have done a better job that this.


Karma - Crime, Passion, Reincarnation

The film’s title is a dead give away, and in scene two, if a character sees a ‘ghost’ wandering in the woods, any regular Hindi moviegoer can figure out the rest. Not to mention that the plot of Karma - Crime, Passion, Reincarnation is that of Chetan Anand’s Kudrat with cosmetic changes.

New York based Vikram (Carlucci Veyant), visits his father Ranvir (Vijayendra Ghatge) in Ooty after many years, accompanied by his wife Anna (Alma Saraci). Vikram is angry with his father and wants to go back as soon as possible.

But Anna starts getting visions, and seems to know Ooty well, though she has never been there before. It doesn’t take to figure out that there is reincarnation involved, and that the ‘ghost’ (Claudia Ciesla) is Linda, who was murdered thirty years ago, and has been reborn as Anna.

Vikram does not believe his wife at first, but an internet search (would papers even archive a snippet about the disappearance of a tourist so many years ago?) he also sets about trying to unravel the mystery.


The plot, old though it is, has enough interest to keep the viewer interested, director M.R. Shahjahan has worked in a competent paint-by-number mode, without a touch of freshness or any surprises. If at all there are a few convenient coincidences, like Linda’s friend and compatriot still around in Ooty, after what happened, and not aged a bit in thirty years.

Alma Saraci has an innocent charm that is appealing; the rest of the cast do their parts adequately. Hindi cinema has had so many excellent films on the theme of reincarnation (most of them studded with exquisite songs) that for an Indian viewer, there is absolutely no novelty here, though the film has been making the round of foreign film festivals and even winning awards.


Zor Lagaa Ke Haiya


The heart and mind are in the right place—a film that sends out a ‘Save the Trees’ message—but the script is not.


Zor Lagaa Ke Haiya is just the kind of film the Children’s Film Society used to (and presumably still does) churn out regularly, hoping to uplift kids with moral sermons. Girish Girija Joshi has got together a cast of energetic kids, some well known grown up actors in tiny parts and Amitabh Bachchan to do a voiceover, but his film is long, mostly dreary and, in the end, not even all that moving or inspiring.


Four kids living in a suburban high rise, fight with a homeless beggar (Mithun Chakraborthy—effective get-up) for some flimsy reason, and build a ‘house’ in the only tree in their building, to keep an eye on him; they do so at all hours of the day and night, with no parental intervention. In fact, parents are hardly seen, and the building doesn’t even seem to have a watchman. Helping these kids is Ram (Ashwin Chitale ) the son of a labourer working on a construction site nearby—the unselfconscious friendship between kids from diverse backgrounds is a really nice touch.


Predictably, the villains are a builder (Gulshan Grover) and his henchman (Mahesh Manjrekar), who want to cut down the tree. By now the beggar and the kids have become friends, and they unite to thwart the builder’s axe-wielding underlings.


It’s all very well to get all huffy about one tree, but the idea conveyed is that any random bunch can actually stop any project for eccentric reasons. The kids want to save the tree not for aesthetic or environmental motives, but just because their little wooden look-out is on it. And they manage to save it, not by convincing others that it is important not to cut trees, but by using the ‘religious’ excuse that is so often pulled out to prevent perfectly legit developmental projects. As film meant for children, it just sends out confusing signals.


The film may win awards for its simplistic environment conservation lesson, but is hardly likely to win a kiddie fan following. Which is a pity, because rarely do so many actors (Seema Biswas, Mahesh Manjrekar, Riya Sen, Raj Zutshi) come together just for a cause, and the purpose is not even served.

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Anubhav 

Anubhav: An Actor’s Tale

The title of the film makes it sound as if it is about an actor’s experiences in the film industry, but what the eponymous protagonist goes through, can happen to anyone.

Rajeevnath’s Anubhav: An Actor’s Tale is about an actor (Sanjay Suri), who struggles along with his friend Adi (Anoop Menon—also the writer of the film) to get a break, whiling away the time doing inane TV serials.

Because she saw him in a rather tacky production of Macbeth, rich girl Meera (Gul Panag) pursues him relentlessly, till they get married. Adi manages to get a producer for his version of Hamlet, with an item-number, but the moneybags dies before the film can be completed.

Meera gives birth to a child who needs an operation that would cost Rs 20 lakh. The doctor (Mita Vashisht), who admits to being a “bad woman” sends Anubhav to a pimp (Ran Zutshi) who turns him into a highly paid gigolo. Anubhav hides from his wife the fact that their daughter survived and is undergoing treatment, and pretends he has a job when the money starts coming in.

The director makes no attempt to understand the social conditions of a gigolo’s profession, assuming that everyone who sells their body must have a ‘majboori’ behind it, and instead of a look at today’s sexually open lifestyle turns the film into a Laga Chunari Mein Daag kind of melodrama with the genders reversed. At one point Anubhav expresses disgust at the kind of women he has to bed, and even there the director is bit off the mark—women who can afford to pay for a gigolo will hardly have body odour and “dirty necks”. And the women he is seen with look pretty glamorous—including the one (Sudha Chandran) who plays his mother in a serial.

You hardly sympathise with Anubhav’s plight, when helpless husbands thank him for doing a socially important job and then, miraculously, a satisfied client conveniently dies and leaved him a fortune. He becomes a star and starts over with a clean slate. It swings from implausible to simplistic, with just an unsavoury mess in between.

Rajeevnath is a fairly well known director from Kerala, so manages to get stars like Nedumudi Venu, Bharat Gopi and even Jackie Shroff for meaningless cameos, but the most giggle-worthy performances are by Mita Vashisht (who ought to have known better) and Raj Zutshi. Sanjay Suri must have thought he was being very brave doing this role, but it won’t take his career anywhere.

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