Thursday, July 07, 2016
Sultan
Salman Strikes Again
First the good news, Salman Khan does not sleepwalk through Sultan, he has given his best performance in a long time; since the director Ali Abbas Zafar and his DOP has shot him in a lot of tight close-ups, there is no cheat—the star was involved in the part he played with all his heart. And it is only Salman Khan’s superstardom that lifts the film --which is collection of every sports movie cliché possible—several rungs higher. Take him out and the film would collapse.
Zafar realizes that there is nothing new the underdog-to-winner story, so instead of concentrating on the ‘what’ he concentrates on the ‘how’—and this is where the film scores. It is set in rural Haryana, and the characters use the local dialect. The much-reported on phenomenon of Haryana women turning into champion wrestlers (the true story of the Phogat sisters will be told in Aamir Khan starrer Dangal) is used rather effectively.
When the good-for-nothing Sultan (Salman Khan) bumps into Aarfa’s (Anushka Sharma) bike while he is chasing kites, he raises a fist to smack the rider, only to get helmet-whipped and rebuked by a young woman. It’s love at first sight for him, but Aarfa is a wrestling champ, and publicly berates Sultan for his lack of a goal and rejects him for being unworthy of her.
At a relatively late age (there is a reference to him being thirty), he picks up the ropes of wrestling from Aarfa’s father (Kumud Mishra), who is a coach and starts winning tournaments. Aarfa agrees to marry him, and in a nice touch, both of them go on a medal-winning spree.
Then tragedy strikes and they part—this section could have been a better written, enveloping gender roles, the man’s arrogance, the accomplished woman’s resentment, sacrifice, regret and grief. The film also loses its grip from this point onwards. Sultan’s comeback into a new, more aggressive kind of spectator sport, follows the rut—just throwing a variety of foreign fighters against him and raising the level of the obstacles he has to face. The homily that is repeated often is that the fight is actually within a man; he doesn’t fight the opponent, he fights himself.
Zafar make sure to retain a strong romantic and emotional core plus a son-of-the-soil rhetoric that will go down well with Salman Khan’s fans. There is a smidgen of progressiveness in the way Aarfa is portrayed, though even a woman whose boasts of hathoda (hammer)instead of a hand is not immune to stalking. Anushka Sharma lends strong support in a film that is all about Salman Khan, along with Anant Sharma as Sultan’s loyal friend, Amit Sadh as a sports promoter and Randeep Hooda as his trainer. Wrap all this with good music, and there’s a blockbuster all set to break box-office records.
Labels: Cinemaah
Sunday, July 03, 2016
Shorgul
What a Racket
In these times, fraught with communal tension, only new or non-established filmmakers would attempt a political drama. The film by P. Singh & Jitendra Tiwari went through its share of censor troubles—and got little or no support from the industry—but Shorgul remains at the level of a bullet that missed its mark.
In Hindi films, politicians have been caricatured and demonized over and over again—which, considering the kind of leaders we have, it not difficult to do. But repetition has turned the crooked politician into a stereotype, who is expected to dress, speak and behave in a particular manner.
Shorgul starts out as an expose of the Muzzafarnagar riots of 2013—a generic communal clash forgotten as one amongst many—and falls into the familiar pits of simplistic rhetoric.
The town is renamed Malihabad, and is a typical lawless Uttar Pradesh killing field, also overused in films by now. Ranjit Om (Jimmy Shergill) is a dapper politician of a right-wing party (no prizes for guessing who he is based on, and which real party it resembles), as hypocritical as they come, his personal life being quite different from the traditional avatar he projects There has to be rabble-rousing Muslim to represent the other side, and there’s Alam Khan (Narendra Jha).
Ranjit wants to somehow discredit Chaudhary (Ashutosh Rana), a respected Gandhian leader in the town, and the opportunity presents itself when his son Raghu (Aniruddh Dave) falls in love with Muslim neighbour Zainab (Suha Gezen). She is engaged to Salim (Hiten Tejwani), a liberal Muslim, and trouble is bound to follow.
While it is true that it takes very little to instigate communal riots and Hindu-Muslim romances have been the cause of quite a few skirmishes, Shorgul does not even try to go into the bigger issue of religious fundamentalism of all hues.
It is critical of the politics of hate, but diminishes its own stand by portraying the chief minister of UP as a clean cut Mithilesh Singh Yadav (Sanjay Suri), which would invite chuckles of disbelief from anyone in the audience that knows even a little about the workings of the UP government. If maintaining law and order was such a priority, the state would not have been in such chaos.
Maybe unvarnished truth and nuance is too much to expect from a film, and, indeed, why would a filmmaker even stick his neck out? So, all that it delivers is earnest performances from Ashutosh Rana and Jimmy Shergill and not much else.
Labels: Cinemaah
