Saturday, February 20, 2016
Neerja
The Braveheart
This was a risky film to make. The story took place
thirty years ago, many of today’s audiences weren’t even born then and have
no emotional connect to the character who was a hero of her time. Since Neerja
is based on a true story, the tragic end is also known, so it all depends
on how the director Ram Madhvani handles the film.
In those days, terrorism as we know it today, didn’t
exist. The men who hijacked the Pan Am flight on which Neerja Bhanot was head
purser, were Palestinians of the Abu Nidal group.
The film begins by establishing Neerja (Sonam Kapoor) as
the life of the party and Rajesh Khanna fan. She has put an abusive marriage
behind her, has a flourishing modeling career, loving parents (Shabana
Azmi-Yogendra Tiku), a caring boyfriend (Shekhar Ravjiani) and at just
twenty-three is a head purser with an American airline. She is a girl her
mother prayed for after two sons, and is a cherished daughter. (A a bit of
flag-waving there, but not out of place.)
The happy family picture is interspersed with the
terrorists preparing for the hijack when the plane has a stopover in Karachi, which, keeping today’s security measure in mind, was ridiculously easy. Madhvani
has set a most of the film on board the airplane, but has cut to flashbacks
that show Neerja coping with her nasty husband and also getting her family’s affection
and support.
When the terrorists strike—one of them hot-headed and
trigger-happy (Jim Sarbh, effective)—the pilots flee and negotiators dither.
With remarkable grit and a “military-like”
(as her mother says later) sense of duty, Neerja looks after the
passengers, eventually helps rescue most of them and gives up her life to
shield three children.
Sonam Kapoor’s performance is outstanding; she does not
play Neerja as a fearless know-it-all, she is afraid, she feels helpless, but
even with a gun to her head, she is the only one who functions, as one of the
hijacker says. There is no over-the-top bravado and no suspense, but the film
is engaging in spite of its flaws. The terrorists, for instance, are just
shouting, glowering, gun-waving caricatures. The passenger are one faceless
mass, when there was some scope for a bit of diversifying-- or the film is just
about Neerja and the terrorists. And while admiring the realism in production
design and handheld camerawork, one can’t help wondering, did the passengers
just sit there for hours without a bathroom break?
The Rajesh Khanna line when Neeja’s body arrives in a
coffin seems to hokey to be true. But,
not to nitpick, the film leaves a lump in the throat and a sense of pride that
an Indian girl could stand up to armed militants. Why did it take so long for Bollywood to pay
tribute to Neerja Bhanot?
Labels: Cinemaah
Thursday, February 18, 2016
Fitoor
Lost In Translation
Charles Dickens’s novels exist in a certain time and milieu, which a reader can understand and appreciate, because that’s what great literature is all about; they do not necessarily work in another time and place, unless their spirit is distilled and transported, which is a task beyond the capabilities of Abhishek Kapoor. Still, it’s admirable that he attempted Fitoor, based on Great Expectations, Dickens looks better on the resume than Chetan Bhagat, and indicates a certain superior sensibility, but the obvious question would be why?
When Vishal Bharadwaj adapts the works of Shakespeare to Hindi cinema, it does not look phony; Kapoor needs a lot more experience to be able to bring the great masters of world literature to the Indian screen. What he has been able to do with Fitoor, is just take the bare bones of the plot and flattened the complexities, perhaps without realizing that without the finer points of the story, it is just any potboiler about star-crossed lovers and nasty elders. This kind of poor boy-rich girl plot was done to death in Bollywood at one time.
The film begins in Kashmir, looking stunning beautiful, with just a hint of its violent and troubled history. As a child encounters a militant (Ajay Devgan in a cameo)—this meeting was with an escaped convict in the book. Later, Noor accompanies his brother-in-law to the mansion of Hazrat Begum (Tabu), who has suffered the jilted-at-the-alter fate of Miss Havisham of the novel, but not her tragedy. Years later, Miss Havisham continues to wear her wedding gown and has left the house just like it was on the wedding day, including the cake on the table. The Begum is hampered just by her snobbery and bitterness.
Begum Hazrat is haughty, like aristocrats in our movies are supposed to be; obviously she does not want a commoner Noor to get close to her adopted daughter Firdaus. Noor is given a way out of his poverty by a mysterious benefactor and goes on to become an artist of note (Aditya Roy Kapur), when he meets the London-returned, red-haired Fairdaus again (Katrina Kaif); the fire of his love for her still burning, while she is cold. She is engaged to a Pakistani politician (Rahul Bhat).
Abhishek Kapoor tries to garnish the story and its class conflicts with a dash of politics, but seems too preoccupied with prettifying the frames to pay attention to the emotional inertia of his lead pair—both of whom are fabulously good-looking, but quite hopeless at conveying the depths of the love story that tries and fails at reaching epic proportions.
Tabu’s Begum Hazrat may not be as memorable as Miss Havisham, she is closer to her character in Haider, but she lends the film a gravity and some of the sense of purpose that it so badly needs.
Fabulous cinematography by Anay Goswami—the landscape often dwarfs the characters—and Amit Trivedi’s haunting music. Even if the expectations from the film are not quite fulfilled, it is still an honorable failure.
Labels: Cinemaah
