Saturday, September 23, 2017
Newton
Yeh Bhi Hai India
Nutan Kumar, fed-up of the ragging he was subjected to all through school due to his feminine name, changed it to Newton—he is an MSc in Physics after all, he has some right to the ‘scientific’ name.
Newton (played by Rajkummar Rao), with his curly hair and nervous blink, seems to be rebelling against the petty-mindedness and greed of his family, that wants him to marry an underage, under-educated girl for her dowry. To his mind, a life-threatening assignment in a remote Naxal-ridden village in Chhattisgarh must be a kind of escape.
In Newton, a dark satire, Amit V. Masurkar takes the audiences into the heart of India, where poverty, apathy and violence are part of life. Newton is to be the presiding officer to conduct elections in the tiny hamlet with 76 registered voters—miraculously they have a voter’s card, but no great desire to vote. Which government has ever done anything for them?
Newton is accompanied by an older, cynical bureaucrat (Raghubir Yadav) and a sleepy assistant (Mukesh Prajapati) who came along because he wanted to ride a helicopter. At the location is a tribal school teacher, Malko (Anjali Patil) and armyman Atma Singh (Pankaj Tripathi), who has survived other trouble spots and intends to get out of Chhattisgarh alive. He sees Netwon’s insistence in carrying out his duty by the rule book for the farce that it is, but he cannot dissuade the man from trudging through the forest to a filthy little room—ostensibly a school with no students—which is the designated polling booth.
The Maoist Naxals are a constant invisible presence; the soldiers have to be vigilant about land mines and sudden ambushes, but Newton blunders in with the grand illusion that democracy will somehow be served if elections are held in this forgotten land. There is the untold story of Malko, who managed to get herself an education and a job, and does it as well as she can, without hope of acknowledgment or reward. If she simply collected her salary and did no teaching, who would notice or care? But, she believes in change, no matter how slow—“a jungle does not grow overnight,” she says. She herself is a small harbinger of that unhurried progress.
Very few Hindi films show the real India, with no embellishment; Masurkar and his crew shot at real locations, with real Gond tribals as the supporting cast, and keeps the audience in the film’s grip, till the curiously positive yet depressing ending. Everybody would want Newton to be successful and happy, but how far does an honest man go in this corrupt system? One would want to catch up with Newton Kumar perhaps a decade later and see what becomes of him…and of Malko.
Labels: Cinemaah
Haseena Parkar
The Sister Also Rises
Dragged to the police station every day and questioned when the Mumbai bomb blasts of 1993 took place, Haseena Parkar says her brother (never referred to by his name in the film) could not have done it because for him, “Mumbai is his first love.” When she asks him if he did it, he does not answer.
Left to Apoorva Lakhia, who shoots the Bhai in Dubai against opulent interiors, he would have laid out the red carpet for the don to come and rule the country!
Haseena Parkar is a biopic on the life of the sister, but has no particular point of view. At the end of the film the confusion is stated by a character—was Haseena a victim or an opportunist; was her life wrecked by her connection to her powerful brother, or did she take advantage of his power.
The film starts in a dingy Mumbai tenement where the Kaskar family lives—a police constable, his wife and twelve children. According to Lakhia, the brother was prone to violence and crime, but was pushed into the underworld by a cop, who used him to bring down Karim Lala and his Pathan gang.
Haseena is his favourite sibling, and he calls her “Beta.” Her married life with Ibrahim Parkar (Ankur Bhatia), a restaurant owner and film extra, was happy till the dark shadow of the brother fell on him, and he was murdered by a rival gang, soon after another Kaskar son Sabir. The killing is avenged by the murder of another Pathan, but the cops closing in results in the flight to Dubai and ostensibly an exodus of the family; only Haseena stays behind to look after her dead husband’s family and her own kids. She wants to keep her son away from crime, but cannot prevent it.
All she wants is to live her live in peace, though she is not averse to brandishing her brother’s name even in a chawl tap water argument. The bomb blasts push her into the becoming the Aapa of Nagpada, mediating in local quarrels and solving disputed between builders, of course, by referring to her brother.
The film is structured as a court case in which the prosecuting lawyer Roshni Satam (Priyanka Setia) crosses swords with the defence lawyer Shyam Keswani (Rajesh Tailang), without having any witnesses or a shred of evidence to prove that Haseena was handed the reins of her brother’s criminal empire.
It is this lack of focus and constant fence-sitting that completely dooms the film. Shraddha Kapoor is fine as a young bride and mother, but cannot carry off the older, heavier Haseena with the awkward stuffing in her mouth to fill out her face. Finally, why was this film even made? Haseena Parkar or her family certainly do not need a filmmaker in their corner, even one as obsequious as Apoorva Lakhia.
Labels: Cinemaah
Monday, September 18, 2017
Simran
Patel in Dullsville
For a young woman who thinks she is very smart, Praful Patel (Kangana Ranaut) is rather dumb, and that is a fatal flaw in Hansal Mehta’s Simran, a film about an Indian woman in the US, who is forced to take to life of petty crime.
Praful is a divorcee, who works as a chambermaid in a hotel, a dead end job if ever there was one. Her constantly nagging father (Hiten Kumar) runs a small business in snacks; her mother (Kishori Shahane), looks beaten by fate. This is the dark side of the American dream—not the ‘Potel’ kind of Gujarati success story. At the most Praful can dream of a ‘Minority Housing’ flat to escape the stifling atmosphere at home, but her father knows she is hopeless with money.
A chance visit to Las Vegas with her cousin, gets Praful into gambling, and suddenly, as she gets off the high, she has run up huge gambling debts, and has a couple of loan sharks after her. In desperation, she takes to robbing banks, and at least some of the humour comes out of the hysteria of the media, and the exaggeration of the people robbed, as they spin a legend around what looks like a teenage prank.
It seems strange than in this age of CCTV cameras, she gets away using minimal disguise and her own car. The cops in Atlanta are incapable of even lifting prints from her glove-less hands?
Praful knows that she cannot get away without paying the sharks, but there does not seem to be much of urgency or despair in her manner; when she should be scared and jittery, she has a flirtation going with sweet-natured Indian suitor, Sameer (Soham Shah).
This is by no means a ‘feminist’ tale; it does not evoke much sympathy for the leading lady, and not a shred of admiration. In spite of some stabs at humour, the film never reaches the level of screwball comedy it could have, with a protagonist as ditzy as Praful. Mostly without make-up, Kangana Ranaut acts the hell out of every frame she is in—too bad she is saddled with a damp squib part.
Labels: Cinemaah
Lucknow Central
Jailhouse Band Baaja
It would be truly amusing if a Chief Minister of UP were as funny and aspiring-to-coolth as Ravi Kishen in Lucknow Central. He wants to project his state as progressive; he also wants to be ‘trending’ and has with him two buttoned up sidekicks to advise him on social media. (Too bad that in real life, kids are dying in the state and crime is unmanageable.) So, he wants to hold a competition of jail bands, that will go viral, and impress Trump!
In Ranjit Tiwari’s debut film, Kishan Girhotra (Farhan Akhtar), an aspiring singer, who dreams of having his own band (“towns may be small, but dreams are big”), lands up in jail on a trumped up murder charge. He gets himself transferred to Lucknow Central, the venue for the big Independence Day inter-prison competition. Hovering around, looking like she has wandered into the wrong film, is Gayatri Kashyap (Diana Penty), a social worker looking into the welfare of prisoners, and constantly being told to drop it and get married
The jailor at Lucknow Central is a nasty fellow (Ronit Roy), who suspects that the so-called band is just an excuse for Kishan and his cronies to escape and he is right. Kishan’s resilience gets him through the gangs and violence of prison life, as he goes about putting together his band of unmusical men--Dikkat (Inaamulhaq), Victor (Deepak Dobriyal), Parminder (Gippy Grewal), Pandit (Rajesh Sharma), all of whom have a special skill that would help in the escape.
Shot in dark, filthy cells, the film’s realism ends there—Tiwari is not interested in showing the true state of Indian prisons. Watching this film, you’d think all the prisoners were innocent victims of the system, and the jailor, who is only doing his job, is the villain. He is cruel, but he is also the product of the same inhumane system; if a prisoner escapes, it is his neck on the line. Strangely, Tiwari paints life outside prison as unbearable for the men; inside they find friendship, trust and a kind of normalcy.
The camaraderie between the five band-mates works, as they move towards the rousing, if predictable finale. The film is loosely based on a real prison band that also inspired the recent Qaidi Band; this one is better, has decent music, and solid performances, even if Farhan Akhtar looks too polished to be an ordinary UP lad.
With a little more effort, Lucknow Central could have been meaningful as well as entertaining-- as it is, the film is just ‘timepass’.
Labels: Cinemaah
