Saturday, July 22, 2017
Lipstick Under My Burkha
Desperate Rebellions
If Lipstick Under My Burkha hadn't been caught in a censorship tangle, it probably would not have got so much attention.
Alankrita Srivastava's film is set in Bhopal and portrays the narrow-mindedness of provincial India, particularly when it means controlling women. So whether it is the widowed Buaji Usha (Ratna Pathak Shah) who is expected to be pious and sexless at 55, to the teenage Muslim girl Rehana (Plabita Borthakur) who wants to get out of her stifling existence to freedom, which, to her means smoking, drinking, wearing jeans and making out with boys.
In between are Shireen (Konkona Sen Sharma),who has an unfeeling boor of a husband, and Leela (Plabita Borthakur), who dithers between a sexually exciting boyfriend and boring fiance.
There is nothing new that the film says about the condition of women in India, nor is there anything positive or revolutionary about the women's method of escape. It's not that fake optimism is expected from a filmmaker, but if a so-called feminist film does not even provoke a bit of thought-- over and above the obvious flag-waving-- then it just ends up preaching to the converted. And since when is smoking considered a symbol of freedom?
However, not even the most emancipated woman would say that Leela’s or Rehana' s rebellion is anything but self-destructive, and Buaji' s passion for a young swimming instructor, fuelled by adolescent pulp sex books is anything but immature. None of the stories have hope or a future, and all of them revolve around the acceptance or lack of it by the men around them. Far from being empowering in any way, the sex is just sordid and somewhat demeaning for the women.
Still, a film that even acknowledges women's sexual desires is brave. And Srivastava does get wonderful performances from her cast, and captures the suffocating milieu of a small city perfectly. Somewhere in the midst of all that chaos is a truly remarkable woman (Sonal Jha) who puts aside shame and raises her daughter by working as a nude model in an art school. Maybe that's a story that needs to be told.
Labels: Cinemaah
Tuesday, July 18, 2017
Jagga Jasoos
Tintin-esque Adventure
If a film aims at being a musical romantic action comedy then it is biting off more than it can chew, to begin with. The attempt behind Anurag Basu’s Jagga Jasoos is admirable—he started out wanting to make a Tintin and Harry Potter like kiddie-pleasing adventure, using a derivative Broadway-style musical format and bright comic-book colour palette. Somewhere down the line, he forgot about a coherent plot.
The story is narrated by Katrina Kaif, out of Jagga Jasoos comics, being performed and watched by a bunch of kids. After a prologue about an arms drop at Purulia in the 1990s, we see orphan Jagga (an utterly cute young actor) adopted by a man whose life he saved. The stuttering Jagga calls his foster father Badal Bagchi (Saswata Chatterjee) Tutti Futti, because of his accident prone ways—later described in a song as “bad-lucky.”
Since Jagga has a painful stutter, Bagchi advises him to sing, so he does, and everybody around him does too, which gets tedious after a point. The father vanishes one day, leaving Jagga in a boarding school and for years just sends him a Happy Birthday video.
The Manipur town is visited by a reporter Shruti (Katrina Kaif), an equally “bad-lucky” girl, who end up as Jagga’s sidekick, as he goes hunting for his father in lovely African locations, their antics watched by exotic animals looking as befuddled as the audience must be feeling. He is chased all over by a mysterious “intelligence” officer (Saurabh Shukla), but of the actual arms-dealer villain you get just a glimpse, because Basu must have planned a sequel.
The first half has Jagga (Ranbir Kapoor overage as a schoolboy, but you don’t mind that—he is just brilliant), zooming around on a bike that looks like a broom, solving local mysteries. It picks up when the hunt for Bagchi starts, and some action sequences are really well done. But the films does suffer from an overdose of cuteness, lack of humour, and the absence of a real menacing villain for Jagga to fight.
Ranbir Kapoor, throws himself into the role whole-heartedly and drags Katrina Kaif up by the bootstrap—if she can’t act, she can at least take the many pratfalls in good spirit. The film looks gorgeous, but for a musical, Jagga Jasoos does not have that one great number you come out humming from the theatre. It needed to have the pace and madcap spirit of a comic book, instead it is long and laborious.
Labels: Cinemaah
