Saturday, March 08, 2014
Queen
Springtime in Paris
Vikas Bahl’s Queen is a very
enjoyable chick flick and that’s a compliment. Because women are likely to come
out of the film still rooting for the lead character, and perhaps, feeling
good about themselves.
The ordinary Delhi girl with a commonplace name like Rani transforms
herself into Queen, by just being herself—the good Indian who obeys her parents
and never does anything wrong. She is slightly dazed when a smart engineer woos and decides to marry her. But Vijay (Rajkummar Rao), callously dumps
her a day before the wedding, because he thinks his London trip has made him
superior to her.
For
a girl from Rajouri this can be a severe trauma, but after Rani has wept her
eyes out, she decides to go on her honeymoon alone. She has never gone anywhere
without her kid brother as chaperone, so she and her parents are understandably
nervous, but it’s her grandmother who gives her courage.
In
Paris—and this is a script convenience—she meets the half Indian, “hippie
type” Vijaylaxmi (a luminous Lisa
Haydon), who takes Rani under her wing and shows her a good time. Rani retains her innocence even when she is
going through a life-changing experience, and video chats with her family “ten
times a day.” (She is connected on the net, yet calls up her mother late at night to ask the English word for hing. She could have looked it up... but it makes an amusing scene.)
Then
she goes on to Amsterdam, where, much to her shock she is expected to share a
room with three men—one Russian, one Japanese and one black. Now the film takes on an English Vinglish feel, and starts to get too cloying as Rani turns
the three into family and has a crush on a dishy Italian chef, who is floored
by her gol gappa making skills.
What’s
utterly charming about the film is that apart from one mugging incident, Rani
floats through a remarkably safe and kind world; even in the notorious red
light district of Amsterdam she meets a hard-working Urdu-speaking hooker. She
has a romance with herself, and you hope when she returns to Delhi—changed but
still the same—she will be able to resist the ‘desperate housewife’ fate of her
friends. This one really needs a sequel!
Kangana
Ranaut (also credited with additional dialogue) acts with a fresh-faced
sweetness that is almost like a debut. For an actress in MCP-ish Bollywood to
get a part in which she is not propped up by a hero is a small miracle—for
Rani, the film deserves to be a hit.
Labels: Cinemaah
Gulaab Gang
What A Waste
There is a scene in Soumik Sen’s Gulaab
Gang, in which a female politician wants to humiliate a minion, and makes
him crawl between the legs of a woman, who stoically lifts her sari and spreads
her legs—makes you wonder just who is being humiliated here and why. In another
scene, a bunch of vigilante women want to punish a man, so they make him wear a
sari and dance, underlining the common notion that there’s no worse insult for
a man than to be called a woman. So how come this film dares to say that it
espouses the cause of women?
The film does take its idea of a gang of pink sari clad women from
Sampat Pal’s much documented and feted Gulabi Gang (see Nishtha Jain’s superb
documentary released last month), but then goes on to make complete hash of it.
Sen’s film has no sense of the region, the problems of rural women or
even how the system functions in the vast Indian mofussil belt. All he does is
collect a gang of women in pink homespun saris led by Rajjo (Madhuri Dixit) in
low-backed ikat blouse, break into
dance or get into totally unbelievable action sequences.
Just who is this Rajjo (there is a clumsy flashback about a kid
determined to study and her nasty stepmother torturing her) and what she is all
about, you never know. Why this woman who is not even known to the collector of
the region is such a threat to an all-powerful politician Sumitra (Juhi Chawla,
dressed like Sushma Swaraj) is not clear either.
Once in a while a woman is battered, raped or killed, the man is
attacked by the Gang (Chatterjee, Divya Jagdale, Priyanka Bose, etc) and elsewhere,
Sumitra sneers or snaps at her cowering followers. There is not much plot, no character
development, and certainly no social comment.
Juhi Chawla steals every scene she is in, while Madhuri Dixit struggles
with an ill-defined role; her only brief seems to have been “be a heroine” so
she wears an ‘R’ shaped bindi, lots of kohl, sets her hair in waves and has a
kid pay tribute to her stardom by humming “Ek
Do Teen.” The best bits of this film
are in the promos—that’s all there is to it.
Labels: Cinemaah
