Friday, March 09, 2012
Kahaani
Ah Kolkata!
There are reasons to rejoice: it’s not often that film can be wholeheartedly recommended. Then, it’s yet another film with a woman at the centre and like Vidya Balan’s much-feted The Dirty Picture, it is likely win both awards and acclaim. Hopefully, it will help Bollywood traditionalists to give women more respect... since in showbiz, it’s all about money.
Sujoy Ghosh has hit his groove after a couple of misses (Home Delivery, Aladdin), and it is obvious Kolkata is his muse. Plus Vidya Balan of course, who sportingly waddles through the film (and at promotional events) with a huge pregnancy bump. It is the Kolkata of clichés, and if a film is not set during the madness of Durga Puja, it might as well be shot anywhere else. It is perhaps the clichés that give the city its unique character and Ghosh, along with his adventurous cinematographer Setu, jump right into it like deep sea divers, coming up with visual pearls each time. The noise, chaos, grimy beauty and warmth of Kolkata is seen with a connoisseur’s eye, as sharply drawn as the perfectly cast characters who come alive with just a couple of deft strokes.
Heavily pregnant Vidya Bagchi (Balan) lands in Kolkata from London, to look for her husband, clutching just one photo of Arnab Bagchi (Indraneil Sengupta). At Kalighat police station, a newly recruited cop Rana (Parambrata Chatterjee) takes a shine to her, and becomes her helper, sounding board and lock-picker as she goes from high tech offices to scary morgues to spooky old buildings trying to find clues about the man who seems not to exist. Then, tough-talking Intelligence Bureau man Khan (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) walks in, and there is added another layer or menace, intrigue and suspense. (The film does make IB men look like nincompoops!)
To reveal more would be unfair to the film, butKahaani is very enjoyable, even though the script (Ghosh, Advaita Kala, Suresh Nair, Ritesh Shah) does not quite stand up to scrutiny if you start wondering how and why. However, every aspect of filmmaking from camera to sound, editing, music and design come together to create a marvellous audience-pleaser. It is one of the best films in recent years and nobody can possibly dislike it—even after the ‘cheats’ are finally revealed in a somewhat predictable Durga-slaying-Demon climax that no Bengali director making a heroine-centric film in Kolkata can resist.
Vidya Balan is at a high point in her career and it is to her credit that she is picking films that are doing justice to her own talent and helping women in Bollywood films evolve. Parambrata Chatterjee, as the kind, gentle cop is adorable and so heartbreaking in his loneliness, expressed with just one tired “Aaschi” on the phone. Nawazuddin Siddiqui is amazingly expressive as the cop who wants to sympathise with Vidya, but can’t. Rana’s fat, jolly colleague, the ordinary insurance selling assassin, the smart kids, the guest house manager, the HR manager—all wonderful actors whose names one doesn’t know.
Never mind the small niggles, just go watch the film. If films like Kahaani succeed, only then will the state of Bollywood cinema improve. We owe it to ourselves.
Labels: Cinemaah
Paan Singh Tomar
Bandit King
Not that it will make any difference to bureaucrats (who don’t care), the media (that lionises cricketers) or the public (that follows the media), but Tigmanshu Dhulia’s Paan Singh Tomar is a slap on the face of all those who kill talent by ignoring it.
The film is a biopic of the multiple medal-winning athlete who was forced to become an outlaw—not a bandit, as he clarifies—because his achievements are of no use when he is faced with greedy relatives and apathetic government officials.
Army man Paan Singh (Irrfan Khan), belonged to the Chambal region of Madhya Pradesh, where outlaws abounded at one time, and many became folk heroes. Most of them were poor farmers, who found no way out of the crushing feudal system and turned to crime. Bollywood films have made the dhoti-clad, horse-riding, Chambal Daku into an anti-Establishment icon. That may have changed from Paan Singh’s time, but the instances of the ill-treatment of sportspersons at the hands of the bureaucracy still keep surfacing when the glamour-struck media chooses to highlight them.
Paan Singh was an ordinary soldier with extraordinary speed and stamina, who was sent to the sports side, because he wanted a better diet. There, under the training of his coach (Rajendra Gupta), he turned into a winning athlete.
But when he retired and returned to his village, he found that his cousins had usurped his land, and neither the local cops nor the collector do anything about it. The cop is particularly insulting. When the cousin’s men attack his home and kill his mother, Paan Singh picks up the gun, forms his gang and becomes an outlaw.
The first half of the film, that charts the rise of Paan Singh is fast-moving and inspiring. After he becomes a bandit, the film slows down and goes into documenting the life of outlaws in the Chambal ravines. However, Dhulia is not able to communicate to today’s audience the socio-economic, caste or political scenario of rural MP of that period, that bred dacoits. It also lacks in the high-powered drama of films like Mujhe Jeene Do, Dacait and Bandit Queen.
To his credit, Dhulia has made a very realistic and stirring film, without the trappings of commercial cinema—no item songs, actors who look like they belong there, the local dialect of the region, a dry, arid landscape and no romanticising the life of a bandit in the wilds. Except the needless device of having Paan Singh narrate his story to a quivering journalist (Brijendra Kala), the character is seen as an ordinary man, whose accomplishments on the track turned out to be of no value. He does not relish violence and does not want his son to follow him.
Irrfan Khan’s marvellous performance, from a callow young man to a weathered middle-aged bandit is the mainstay of the film, since none of the other actors has as much to do. With the exception of Mahie Gill’s brief appearances as Paan Singh’s wife, the other actors are lesser known or new, who fit their parts well. Irrfan is always convincing, sympathetic, perfectly attuned to the evolution of the man he portrays. His performance deserves awards, and the film deserves a watch—if only to support a good, honest film.
Labels: Cinemaah
