Cinemaah

Twin Trouble

First the good news:  Anees Bazmee’s Mubarakan is not offensive. No double-meaning jokes or toilet humour. The bad news is that for a comedy of romantic mix-ups, it’s a bit heavy-handed. You can see the gags coming from a mile away, and the only two actors who have comic timing – or are allowed to display it amidst all that noise--are Anil Kapoor and his white sidekick.

Set mostly in London (lots of top shots to prove it’s not Film City) amidst a family of noisy Sardars (are there any other kind in Bollywood films?), it’s about orphaned twins Charan and Karan (a two-expression Arjun Kapoor)—one brought up by his aunt (Ratna Pathak Shah) in London and other other by his uncle in Punjab (Pavan Malhotra). Their other uncle Kartar Singh (Anil Kapoor), is a rich bachelor and their go-to guy to solve their romantic problems.

Karan is in love with Sweety (Ileana D’Cruz), but when his wedding is fixed by his family to a business associate, he does not know how to wriggle out. So he sends Charan instead to meet the girl, Binkle (Athiya Shetty), and her folks in London. But Charan is in love with a Muslim girl, Nafisa (Neha Sharma), and does not have the courage to tell his family.

They both tell Kartar and he promises that he will not let the Charan-Binkle match go through. In the process, his siblings and the twins’ foster parents fight and break off relations. To complicate things, Charan’s match is fixed with Sweety, but he has now decided he loves Binkle and wants to marry her.

All the characters shift to London at Christmastime for the weddings, and run riot there. Kartar has a large farm that he calls Mini Punjab, and that aforementioned lungi-wearing, Punjabi speaking, white valet. Of course, this is reverse racism, but Bollywood does not see the irony. (Kartar’s car bumper reads: Buri nazar wale tera munh gora).

The film has its funny moments, but Bazmee needed to cut the slack, trim the needless melodrama and make it crisp. The best lines are in the promo, everyone knows how it will end, so why stretch it till it snaps, more so because the older actors chew up the scenery and the young actors can all but stand around mouths agape. Athiya Shetty get nothing to do except make cow eyes at Charan.

If Mubarakan achieves something, it is to give NRIs a blingy wedding wardrobe for men and women to copy. And one Hawa Hawa number to dance to.

History Retold

There are not enough films on India’s freedom movement, and the role of Subhash Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army has been portrayed in just a handful of films. Tigmanshu Dhulia’s Raag Desh is about the trial of three INA soldiers, and the whipping of nationalistic fervor at the time. Two years later, India did get independence, and the INA became a footnote in history.

The film has been made out of edited footage from a TV series commissioned by Rajya Sabha TV, which perhaps explains the repetition, uneven pace and inconsistency.  There is a surfeit of information about the INA and the Red Fort Trial of Prem Sehgal (Mohit Marwah), Sarfaraz Khan (Kunal Kapoor) and Gurbaksh Singh Dhillion (Amit Sadh). It is a story that needs to be told, but not in the soporific, history lesson manner that Dhulia adopts.

Netaji Bose (Kenny Basumatray) had the right idea and the charisma to attract thousands to his cause, but his revolution failed, he retreated and was killed in a plane crash (there are several theories about what happened) and his army was taken prisoner by the British.

The noteworthy issue in the story is that soldiers of the INA were a breakaway bunch from the British army and when they fought against them, they were forced to kill their own countrymen. If they were anguished about this, it is does not come across strongly enough. The three men were tried for conspiring against the king and for murder.

Their skilled lawyer, the great Bhulabhai Desai (Kenneth Desai), used historical precedents to get them off the murder accusation, and they were let off on the other charge because the British rulers were afraid of the rage of the Indian public if they hanged the three accused. This is portrayed by some slogan shouting and the refusal of a shopkeeper to serve an Englishman.

The film meanders along, taking in a romance between Sehgal and Captain Laxmi (Mrudula Murari), and comes together a little too late, in the last scenes of the trial and acquittal, but it does not succeed in engaging the viewer emotionally (which the recentDunkirk, did, just to give one example). Leaders back then believed in unity and harmony—Bose does not enter a temple till a Dalit man is allowed inside to, and rubs off a red pooja mark from his forehead so that he is not seen as favouring one religion. This is something today’s divisive politicians need to learn.