Tuesday, June 05, 2018
Veere Di Wedding
Delhi Fairy Tale
This is the film about the problems of rich young women who have no problems. They can afford to sit around smoking, drinking, swearing, talking of sex and acting just like badly-behaved boys. Anyone who expects a real film about female bonding and independent women will have to wait, Shashanka Ghosh’s Veere Di Wedding is not it.
But even as a film about four shallow young women—perfectly made up and coutured—and their relationship issues, it is remarkably superficial, and considering where urban women really are at in terms of achievement, it is very Sex And The City dated.
Mostly set in South Delhi, because where in Mumbai do people like in such lavish homes, it is full of stereotypes of cackling aunties, overfed Punjabi families (with generic Malhotra, Sharma type of surnames), creepy louts, garish weddings and wedding lehengas for which to quote a character, you’d have to sell a kidney.
Kalindi (Kareena Kapoor Khan, the only pitch perfect performance) and Rishabh (Sumeet Vyas) live in Australia and do god-know-what, when he decides that they are so different that they have to get married. So they move to India, where the couple is crushed under the endless rituals of a family wedding. It’s telling that Rishabh is called “Shishu” (infant) by his mother, because once in the midst of family, he seems to lose his adult spine. “At least I have a family,” he tells the stricken Kalindi, because she comes from broken home; her mother is dead, her aloof father has remarried, and is fighting with his brother over property. If at all there is something ‘today’ about this film is a gay couple living together happily.
Kalindi’s childhood friends are substitute for family – Avni (Sonam K. Ahuja) is a lawyer, whose mother odiously nags her to get married with insults like “we will have to freeze your eggs” though she has no husband in sight. Sakshi (Swara Bhaskar) is the daughter of rich parents who gave her a five crore wedding which is now on the rocks, so she spends her days smoking and drinking alcohol ‘neat’. Meera (Shikha Talsania) had eloped with a ‘gora’ for which her family disowned her; she has a baby and is the only one with an ‘imperfect’ figure.
They all rally around the dithering Kalindi and desperate Avni. When the singing and dancing and dressing up around the wedding is on, the friends take a trip to Phuket, just so they can parade in resort wear and visit strip clubs.
No matter how bold the talk may be, at heart the film believes in the traditional happily ever after; nothing wrong with that, this is a fairy tale after all, where small suitcases magically eject endless designer outfits, credit cards never max out and the prince does turn up in the end-- mother and aunts in tow. It’s as watchable as a fashion catalogue is readable.
Bhavesh Joshi Superhero
V For Vigilante
A superhero in a movie, comic, or graphic novel is meant to be a larger than life figure, who has to save the world. In Vikramaditya Motwane’sBhavesh Joshi Superhero, the masked crusader is a clumsy young man, who starts as a jokey vigilante along with his friends, targeting motorists breaking signals or men peeing on walls.
Bhavesh (Priyanshu Painyuli), Siku (Harshvardhan Kapoor) and Rajat (Ashish Verma), who, as students were inspired by an anti-corruption movement (the reference to AAP is clear), grow up into corporate nerds. Their own little Insaaf channel on Youtube, where they go around with brown paper bag masks smacking minor civic offenders, grows serious when Bhavesh uncovers a water scam (shades of Roman Polanski’sChinatown) that stars at the municipal ward level and goes up to a corrupt corporator, cops on the take and a minister (Nishikant Kamat).
His friends try to dissuade him, but camera in hand, he embarks on a mission to expose the water mafia, with a fearless zeal, while Siku gets set to pursue his career in the US. Bhavesh’s murder goads Siku into wearing a self-made costume and zoom around on a tinkered-with bike and take on the villains. (A techie is stupid enough to walk around showing his face, not realizing that there are CCTV cameras everywhere!
Motwane’s film is sincere, but too long, grim, unoriginal and self serious-- it lacks the magic that allows for suspension of belief in a superhero film, the humour that lets the viewer see the futile thrashing of a green-behind-the-ears fellow, who needs constant rescuing, or even a grand scheme that makes the effort worthwhile. But there is an awful item number and a half-baked romance to add masala that the film could do without, and then an unlikely character quoting Greek mythology at length!
It’s not clear what made Harshvardhan Kapoor pick this role; he is not the titular character, and for large parts of the film he either has a bandage on his nose, or a ridiculous mask covering his face. So Priyanshu Painyuli turns out to be the scene stealer, and when he gets off the screen, the film collapses, because Kapoor can’t hold up his end of it.
Phamous
Clueless In Chambal
If someone were to ask what Phamous is about, it would be difficult to answer, except that it is about the unchecked gun culture in the Chambal Valley of Madhya Pradesh, whose ravines, for many years harboured bandits and outlaws. At one time there was a spate of daaku films in Bollywood, which died out as the old-style dacoits either surrendered or were killed.
Kadak Singh (Kay Kay Menon) wants to rule over this little patch of the ravines, because he hopes gun power will make him “phamous.” His cohorts are a randy politician Ram Vijay (Pankaj Tripathi) and his brother Babban (Jameel Khan). Radhe (Jimmy Shergill) is a mild-mannered admirer of Kadak Singh, who had once saved his life by refusing to identify him in a police lock-up.
Radhe is married to the sulky village belle (Shriya Saran), in fancy costume, who has a disreputable past, but like many other tracks in the film, this is left unexplored. Jackie Shroff turns up as a man whose daughter was killed on her wedding day when Kadak tried to kidnap her, and he wants revenge after spending years in jail. (Strange that people are shot at in broad daylight, but a man is sentenced when he fired to fend off a bandit attack.) The scales falls from Radhe’s eyes when Ram Vijay demands his wife, and Kadak Singh plays Raavan on his behalf by abducting her.
In spite of its fine ensemble cast, the convoluted and confused script render Phamous ineffectual… and insufferable.
