Cinemaah

Yes They Can

More often than not, our cinema exists in its own alternative reality; if something in the world can be turned into a saleable element (like terrorism) then it will be picked up, otherwise the real world seldom intrudes into the reel world.

That’s why it is pleasantly surprising to see a film that has global recession as a theme. What’s more, it makes no greed-is-bad dire predictions, but turns it into a comedy.  If there are people in the audience who don’t know what the fuss about global recession is all about, and how it impacts the common citizen in mofussil India, Subhash Kapoor’s Phas Gaye Re Obama (he makes an appearance with his “Yes We Can” speech on TV)  tells them the bitter truth, rolled into a bundle of laughs. 

In the US,  Om Shastri (Rajat Kapoor) is badly hit by the financial meltdown.  His business is low, his loans unpaid, the bank threatens to snatch his home. The only way out is to sell his ancestral haveli in Uttar Pradesh.

He lands up there, without money even for a return ticket. And conditions are so bad in his home town, that his extended family is parked in the haveli,  the real estate agent is sceptical about selling in a recessionary market, his wife in the US is hysterical, and then Om gets kidnapped.

The bunch of decrepit gangsters who abduct him, are so badly hit—people can’t afford to pay ransom for their kidnapped relatives—that they have no bullets in their guns and no petrol for their jeeps.  Kidnapping an NRI is their dream of wealth and escape from the indignity of their low life existence.
You actually feel sorry for the luckless Bhaisaheb (Sanjay Mishra), the ambitious Ani (Manu Rishi) and their cohorts, who think they have hit the jackpot but end up with a victim worse off than they are.  Desperation has made Om Shastri shrewd, and he negotiates a series of ‘deals’ through a bigger gangster, to a dacoit (Neha Dhupia) to the kingpin, a crooked politician (Amole Gupte).

It would be spoiler to reveal how he does it, but is all actually ends well, and the audience gets one hell of a funny ride, even though a large-ish tract of it is repetitive.  The lines are witty, Sanjay Mishra and Manu Rishi are amazingly good, and you don’t really mind that there are no stars, no lavish production values… nothing that would tempt audiences to buy tickets.  But unless they are willing to take a chance, they are going to miss a very funny film.

Text-book History


The most commendable thing about Ashutosh Gowarikar’s Khelein Hum Jee Jaan Sey, is his selection of the subject—a long-forgotten chapter from India’s freedom movement. It is based on Manini Chatterjee’s book about the Chittagong uprising—and the interesting part  is that some of the participants in this anti-British revolt were alive when the book was written; one of them still is at a 100 years of age. There are photographs of most of the characters portrayed in the film,  so, somehow, one expected a sense of excitement, if not immediacy, when watching this saga unfold. Unfortunately, the film is only slightly better than a droning, boring old-style Films Division documentary.

When recreating a historical event that has no real relevance today, it is important that the audience is drawn into the story. The characters should be fleshed out, the conflict heightened and a point of view established.  But Gowariker tells the story with the intention of crossing every t and dotting every it, till audiences starts to feel oppressed by the information thrown at them, about characters they don’t particularly care about.

The time is 1930, a bunch of kids in Chittagong are angry because their football field is taken over by the British army. They approach revolutionary Surja Sen (Abhishek Bachchan), who, along with his band of followers, is planning a big armed operation against the British in their town.
He recruits the teens and two courageous women Kalpana (Deepika Padukone) and Pritilata (Vishakha Singh); they are trained, the simultaneous attacks coordinated and carried out. But things go wrong… not that the sense of tension and urgency is communicated to the audience. 

You don’t know who Surja Sen is,  what drives him, who the kids are—what the episode does to tender minds, is there a debate or dilemma about using children for dangerous missions? The British are just a marginal presence, not menacing enough as villains who generate such a fearless, self-destructive kind of patriotism. The film is just a tedious recreation of events without comment.
After that it is how beefy-looking white extras chase the kids and their leaders and round up all of them over a period of time. 

The production design is meticulous, some of the performances are sincere, but the film seems like an interminable preparation for an examination—difficult to see it as entertainment.