Friday, July 30, 2010
Once Upon a Time..
Once Upon a Time in Mumbaai
The family of Haji Mastan need not have gone to all that trouble and expense to halt the release of Once Upon A Time in Mumbaai; Milan Luthria’s film all but canonizes the man.
The film is a well-made trip into seventies nostalgia, with enough real characters and incidents to feed the publicity machinery, but with enough fictional masala to escape being called a boring documentary.
The good things first—the dialogue (Rajat Aroraa) of a quasi-poetic quality that sounds wonderful to hear, even though high-flown Urdu from the mouths of Catholic and Tamilian characters is odd. The production design, visual quality, costumes—all must have taken hard work. (And before others can praise it, the team has been going though a self-congratulatory binge in the media for months!)
The film harks back to the innocent times when smugglers dealt in gold and electronic items. Drugs, weapons, extortion, supari killings and militancy were still far away from the horizon. Gangsters like Haji Mastan, Karim Lala and Vardarajan – all of whom have been immortalized by cinema—are now seen in retrospect as benevolent dons, who looked after their ‘people.’
Sultan Mirza (Ajay Devgan) is a criminal who does not believe in violence and loves the city enough to want to keep it clean. His weakness is a starlet Rehana (Kangana Ranaut) who has Zeenat Aman glamour and Madhubala hole in her heart! Mirza picks up a cop’s son Shoaib (Emraan Hashmi) as a protégé—who was a problem kid with a sharp tongue-- complete amoral and ruthless in his ambition to become a ‘bada aadmi.’
Mumbai, the crowded by-lanes of Dongri, the docks and the sleazy cabaret dens of the period come vividly to life. The film is narrated in flashback by a disheartened cop Agnel Wilson (Randeep Hooda) who believes he let loose the Shoaib (Dawood Ibrahim) monster, as a result of which Mumbai went into a slow decline and erupted into violence, greed and communal hatred, for which this gangster with grandiose ‘Don’ aspirations was responsible; while the idyllic seventies were peaceful and prosperous because of the bhais. Which may be giving a little too much importance to criminals. Constantly referring to them as kings of Mumbai is perhaps unjust to the millions of hard-working, law-abiding citizens of Mumbai. Rarely is a film about gangsters able to stem this gush of admiration. As a character in the film says, why wouldn’t a gangster be a young man’s idol? He has power, money and a film star at his side.
The film with a surprisingly low level of violence, moves at a leisurely pace, with conversations taking the narrative forward, and the romance—Sultan-Rehana, Shoaib-Mumtaz (Prachi Desai) sweetly old-fashioned, yet modern in the live-in sense.
The music (Pritam) is pleasing and the performances outstanding. Ajay Devgan may have done the laconic macho thing before, but there’s nobody better at it than him. Emraan Hashmi plays the cheeky, brash, vain character with obvious relish. These two are a pleasure to watch on screen, still capable of unpredictability.
Once Upon a Time In Mumbaai may not be the definitive Mumbai underworld film—in fact fictional scripts have made better films that this kind of half-realism-- but Luthria has made a strangely engaging film, that gives youngsters a glimpse of the past… the rest can soak in nostalgia.
The family of Haji Mastan need not have gone to all that trouble and expense to halt the release of Once Upon A Time in Mumbaai; Milan Luthria’s film all but canonizes the man.
The film is a well-made trip into seventies nostalgia, with enough real characters and incidents to feed the publicity machinery, but with enough fictional masala to escape being called a boring documentary.
The good things first—the dialogue (Rajat Aroraa) of a quasi-poetic quality that sounds wonderful to hear, even though high-flown Urdu from the mouths of Catholic and Tamilian characters is odd. The production design, visual quality, costumes—all must have taken hard work. (And before others can praise it, the team has been going though a self-congratulatory binge in the media for months!)
The film harks back to the innocent times when smugglers dealt in gold and electronic items. Drugs, weapons, extortion, supari killings and militancy were still far away from the horizon. Gangsters like Haji Mastan, Karim Lala and Vardarajan – all of whom have been immortalized by cinema—are now seen in retrospect as benevolent dons, who looked after their ‘people.’
Sultan Mirza (Ajay Devgan) is a criminal who does not believe in violence and loves the city enough to want to keep it clean. His weakness is a starlet Rehana (Kangana Ranaut) who has Zeenat Aman glamour and Madhubala hole in her heart! Mirza picks up a cop’s son Shoaib (Emraan Hashmi) as a protégé—who was a problem kid with a sharp tongue-- complete amoral and ruthless in his ambition to become a ‘bada aadmi.’
Mumbai, the crowded by-lanes of Dongri, the docks and the sleazy cabaret dens of the period come vividly to life. The film is narrated in flashback by a disheartened cop Agnel Wilson (Randeep Hooda) who believes he let loose the Shoaib (Dawood Ibrahim) monster, as a result of which Mumbai went into a slow decline and erupted into violence, greed and communal hatred, for which this gangster with grandiose ‘Don’ aspirations was responsible; while the idyllic seventies were peaceful and prosperous because of the bhais. Which may be giving a little too much importance to criminals. Constantly referring to them as kings of Mumbai is perhaps unjust to the millions of hard-working, law-abiding citizens of Mumbai. Rarely is a film about gangsters able to stem this gush of admiration. As a character in the film says, why wouldn’t a gangster be a young man’s idol? He has power, money and a film star at his side.
The film with a surprisingly low level of violence, moves at a leisurely pace, with conversations taking the narrative forward, and the romance—Sultan-Rehana, Shoaib-Mumtaz (Prachi Desai) sweetly old-fashioned, yet modern in the live-in sense.
The music (Pritam) is pleasing and the performances outstanding. Ajay Devgan may have done the laconic macho thing before, but there’s nobody better at it than him. Emraan Hashmi plays the cheeky, brash, vain character with obvious relish. These two are a pleasure to watch on screen, still capable of unpredictability.
Once Upon a Time In Mumbaai may not be the definitive Mumbai underworld film—in fact fictional scripts have made better films that this kind of half-realism-- but Luthria has made a strangely engaging film, that gives youngsters a glimpse of the past… the rest can soak in nostalgia.
Labels: Cinemaah
