Cinemaah

Into RGV territory


The vast slum is called Bhool Bhulaiya, which is festering with crime and corruption—the dirtiest and the richest part of the city, as Faruk Kabir’s film Allah Ke Banday describes it.

The film in dark, RGV style follows the lives and criminal activities of two young criminals Vijay and Yakub (the kids playing them are excellent), who end up in a juvenile home, where they encounter violence and cruelty, emerging as hardened criminals (Sharman Joshi and Faruk Kabir).
They return to their slum, team up with their childhood cohort (Zakir Husain) and form their own gang.  There is more violence, mostly run-of-the-mill events, and then a kind of attempt at redemption. 

The first half of the film has some wrenching moments, in the way kids are treated in juvenile homes (Naseeruddin Shah makes an appearance as a nasty warden, and later, Atul Kulkarni as a reformer), but after that there is not much to grip the audience.

It’s not even as if the film is saying something new, or putting forward a clear point of view. It just seems as if it wants to use the darkness and violence as a curiosity. Still, it is a decent first effort, the performances are efficient, but it’s the lack of novelty that let’s  the film down. 

Is This Love?

What's the use of having a leading lady who utters rebellious word every time she opens her mouth; she smokes, drinks, presumably sleeps with her long term boyfriend, hates sentimentality, craves independence and a career… if in the end she has to feel sorry for her "immature" behaviour, kneel down in front of the guy  and beg him to marry her? What's worse, you know that is exactly what will happen even before the flimsy bonbon of a movie (which borrows a part of its plot from Love Aaj Kal) is a few scenes down.

Boringly, it begins with a wedding.  The hero Abhay’s (Imraan Khan) sister is going through one of those elaborate Delhi weddings with a hundred rituals, which is an excuse for Abhay and his childhood sweetheart Aaliya (Deepika Padukone) to dress up in various designer togs and dance, along with hundreds of similarly dressed extras.

Abhay and Deepika fell in love at the movies—his father (Navin Nischol) owns a cinema, she is the daughter of a former actress (Sharmila Tagore) who doesn’t want her to follow in her footsteps.  Everyone speaks in cute filmi dialogue, and the two lovers strike cute poses necking under a table.

Deepika wants to go for a year to Australia study, which causes a typhoon in her life.  Abhay throws a fit, her mother throws a fit and they make it sound as if she is being selfish and cruel, when it is perfectly reasonable move for a young person.

Anyway, she does land in Australia, squabbles with her stern aunt and miraculously gets to rent a beach shack owned by a cynical Nadia (Shahana Goswami) and her perpetually horny brother Cyrus (Yudhishtir Urs).  An insecure Abhay quickly follows her there, and soon enough a smothered Aaliya declares that she is through with him.

But a film that is about contemporary, urban, adults does not even consider the possibility that two people can fall out of love, see other people and maybe realize they have made a mistake.   Danish Aslam can populate the film with quirky characters (like the wise thrice divorced aunt played by Lillete Dubey), have characters mouth self-help-book profundities,  but it just never manages to be funny, and never reaches the level of melancholy it tries to drum up in its two shallow characters.

The background score drones away in the background, Deepika parades about in tiny shorts, Imran looks like he doesn’t know where he or the film is going, which is pretty much what the audience feels too.