Saturday, March 18, 2017
Machine
Rusted Parts
In the Nineties, when ‘Director Duo’ Abbas Mustan were at their peak, and making their twisty-turny thrillers with glamorous and grey characters, audiences enjoyed them. The pretty locations, swanky cars, plush mansions and hit music hid the many plot holes.
Now, with the formula creaking at the joints, and no stars to pull the film through, their latest, Machine, is an exercise in futility and unintentional hilarity. The film was made to launch Mustafa Burmawala (Abbas’s son)—at a time when talk of nepotism is rife—and though the young man has done the gym thing, he looks like he has come out of a mould that also spewed out two others in this film, and many others in the ‘struggler’ circuit, who think six pack abs and a good haircut is all it takes. If he has some real acting talent, it was not evident in this film. But if he has to utter lines like, “I will smudge your lipstick, but never your kohl,” who can blame the guy for looking nonplussed at all times?
The film begins with the animated inside of an ear (really!), which makes sense much later, as does the significance of the title. But most of the time, there is no attempt to even link one scene to the next. Why, for instance, does the film open with Sara (Kiara Advani—pretty and vapid) presenting a cheque to a nun? Why is she and the ‘hero’ Ransh (Mustafa Burmawala) car racers, it has no bearing on the story. How come the lead pair is seen in college one day and married soon after? Why is Sara so dumb that she loves and trusts a killer? What is Ronit Roy doing in this silly film in which he keeps asking Mustafa to give him a hug!
The lines are giggle-worthy—a guy shows Sara a video that is proof of a murder. Why didn’t you go to the police? she asks in a rare moment of lucidity. “Because I am a commando,” says the dude (Ehsan Shankar). At some point, Johny Lever turns up eyes popping, nostrils flaring, to add comic relief to a film that doesn’t need his overacting.
The plot borrows from Baazigar, Race and many other films and after a painfully extended climax, has quotes from Swami Vivekanand, Mahatma Gandhi, and Steve Jobs! Huh?
Labels: Cinemaah
Wednesday, March 15, 2017
Badrinath Ki Dulhania
The Woman Card
It may be a Bollywood romcom, co-produced by a mainstream production house (Dharma), with popular young stars, but what Shashank Khaitan's Badrinath Ki Dulhania does, is shine a light into India's heart of darkness, where the feudal khap mentality still rules; where men make the rules, women follow. When a young woman escapes this patriarchal hell, the order to is to go find her and bring her back so that she can be publicly lynched, as a warning to other girls with ambition.
That the film waves the feminist flag is good enough reason to cheer, even though it flies half mast-- not quite sure if a full on gender revolution would go down well in the B and C centres. Still it's a lot that in a Hindi film the leading lady says love is not enough, respect is important too, and waits out her suitor’s ardent stalking till he learns to respect her, and she him.
It may be a Bollywood romcom, co-produced by a mainstream production house (Dharma), with popular young stars, but what Shashank Khaitan's Badrinath Ki Dulhania does, is shine a light into India's heart of darkness, where the feudal khap mentality still rules; where men make the rules, women follow. When a young woman escapes this patriarchal hell, the order to is to go find her and bring her back so that she can be publicly lynched, as a warning to other girls with ambition.
That the film waves the feminist flag is good enough reason to cheer, even though it flies half mast-- not quite sure if a full on gender revolution would go down well in the B and C centres. Still it's a lot that in a Hindi film the leading lady says love is not enough, respect is important too, and waits out her suitor’s ardent stalking till he learns to respect her, and she him.
The conflict, refreshingly enough, is not rich versus poor (or rather middle-class), but male entitlement versus female ambition. Vaidehi wants to escape the suffocation of a small town with its built-in male chauvinism, Badri is an inherently decent guy who needs to get generations of patriarchal conditioning and its automatic response of violence out of his mind before he can win Vaidehi’s love and respect. If Badri does not come across as a creep, it’s because Varun Dhawan plays him with charm and vulnerability. Even if he breaks out into macho aggression a few times, his heart is not in it. In a funny scene (which would not have been so if it had been a woman), he is saved from molestation by a group of men, by Vaidehi and her friends.
Khaitan’s is observant of small town life, where material progress (swanky car showrooms, shiny new cafes) have not made much of a dent in the mindset as far as women are concerned, but it is equally true that a lot of women who are making their careers in big cities come from just these kinds of towns—Vaidehi is the rebel, her sister is pragmatic enough to realise that for her escape will be via marriage to a good (read mild-mannered) man. It would also not seem odd to a small-towner, that Badri hugs and hold hands with his best buddy (an energetic Sahil Vaid) rather than with the girl he loves—that’s the way it is in a Jhansi-like town. Badri, with his cheerful innocence, is in fact an aberration in that milieu—as he says to Vaidehi at one point, “I want to marry you, not make you my girlfriend,” quite unaware of the hypocrisy steeped into that declaration.
The combined talent of Varun Dhawan, Alia Bhatt and Sahil Vaid make the film enjoyable, but the Dhawan instinctively gets the contradictions of Badri’s personality right, and gives a fine-tuned performance.
Labels: Cinemaah
