Cinemaah

Insufferable Sequel

Vishwaroop was a mostly well-made espionage thriller, which left scope for a sequel; sadly, Vishwaroop 2 looks like it was done just to capitalize on the success of the first, and it would have been better if the computer had deleted the script, such as it is.

The first gave Kamal Haasan—writer, director, star—something to do. From an effeminate Kathak teacher in New York, to an undercover RAW agent in an Al-Quaeda camp in Afghanistan, to a suave spy.  In Part 2, which reuses chunks of the earlier film, he goes about with a bandage on his face, and a clueless look.

The straying wife Nirupama (Pooja Kumar) is now a compliant assistant; the saucy intelligence agent Ashmita (Andrea Jeremiah), is back too, following him around making wisecracks; his handler Colonel Jagannath (Shekhar Kapur) worriedly deals with bureaucrats who callously talk of collateral damage (Rajendra Gupta), or sell out to the enemy (Ananth Mahdaven). As the film keeps going into long flashbacks, it gets a bit tough to keep track of the incoherent plot and suffer many boring bits.

Wisam Ahmed Kashmiri (Haasan), flits about from Delhi to London to the English countryside, trying to prevent the terrorist Omar (Raul Bose--hammy) and Salim (Jaideep Ahlawat), from first trying to drown London using a sunken World War II ship (totally giggle-worthy), and then bomb Delhi out of existence. They seem so indifferent to their task—one of them is more interested in eating jalebis than pressing the trigger—that one wonders how they even managed to get this far in the terrorist food chain.

Instead of keeping the pace brisk and building tension, the plot keeps meandering all over. With any other actor, the scene with Wisam going to meet his mother suffering from Alzheimer’s disease would have been the death of an action thriller, but Waheeda Rehman brings such grace to her part, that this portion is actually the most watchable, flashback and all.

Kamal Haasan can be depended on to give a searing performance at least, but the director fails the actor too in this film; maybe it’s about time he stopped trying to be Bourne and did films worthy of his immense talent.

The Nation Needs To Know

It is heartening to see a mainstream film take up an issue right out of the headlines. Seen as a straightforward drama about one family’s trauma, Anubhav Sinha’s Mulk is a mostly engaging. But then taking up a subject like terrorism and the discrimination of Muslims means there will be some subtext—intentional or not—and the director has to be careful not to let the contrivances show.

The family of Murad Ali Mohammad (Rishi Kapoor) is traditional—going by their clothing and appearance—living cheek-by-jowl with Hindus in Varanasi. They live in complete harmony with others in the mohalla, but there is some unexplained tension in the home, between Murad Ali and his brother Bilal (Manoj Pahwa--brilliant).  Murad Ali’s London-based son has married the Hindu Aarti (Taapsee Pannu-- sincere), and they are having some differences over the religion of their unborn children.

It is possible, but not likely, that a boy from such a family will become a terrorist, but Bilal’s son Shahid (Prateek Babbar) does, and is responsible for a bomb blast that kills many people. It is obvious that in an atmosphere like this, the cops will treat the family harshly. If the investigating officer Danish Javed  (Rajat Kapoor—remarkably effective) happens to be a Muslim himself, he will be even harsher to prove that he is not one of ‘them.’  The main point of the film is about Us and Them, but it is twisted to mean Hindu and Muslim, when it could well mean two factions of Muslims. If a young man kills in the name of religion, how can the family not come under the suspicion? How can the neighbours and friends –of both religions-- not distance themselves?

The one who comes as the family’s savior is the daughter-in-law, and the decision of the director to make her a  Hindu has political connotations too. So do some of the ancillary events. Like, when Shahid’s terrorist links are revealed, the neighbours suddenly start asserting their Hindu identity with a jaagran.

The court scenes, where the sneering prosecutor Santosh Anand (Ashutosh Rana) paints all Muslims with the same brush, it is easy for Aarti to deflect him with sensible arguments, especially when the judge (Kumud Mishra) is amazingly level-headed. These scenes have a kind of dramatic power, but the complexity of the situation is outside the scope of this film, that just wants to noisily proclaim its secularism. It is, undoubtedly, very important to do that, which is why Mulk is worth watching.

Rishi Kapoor towers over the film with a performance that is intensely felt; Manoj Pahwa’s Bilal gets the sympathy because his suffering is there to see, but Murad Ali’s anguish is that of a man whose belief systems are being ripped apart and he does not know whether to hold on or let go. It is very tough part, and Kapoor deserves all the awards there are!

One For The Road

Karwaan is a lightweight road movie, meant to be life-altering for the characters, and amusing for the audience, but the Akarsh Khurana-directed film is neither too funny nor profound enough. It coasts along on the charm of the actors and breathtaking beauty of the Southern landscapes not seen too often in Hindi films. Audiences today are pleased with much less.

Bangalore-based Avinash (Dulquer Salman--earnest) is a leftover from 3 Idiots—he wanted to be a photographer, is forced by his father into a secure IT job. The estranged father is killed in a bus accident, and Avinash want to get the last rites over with quickly, when he discovers, much to his annoyance, that his father’s coffin has been exchanged with that of the mother of a Kochi-based woman, whose rebellious daughter Tanya (Mithila Palkar) joins the trip.

The solemn Avinash, inexplicably, has a friend in an older garage owner Shaukar (Irrfan), who offers to transport the coffin in his van part of the way, but the journey keeps getting extended, and not all diversions are interesting.  (Why, for instance, would Avinash not leave a package to be delivered at the home of the recipient who is not in, and insist on going out of the way to a wedding, where he is to be found!)

Shaukat is a man with too many chips on his shoulder—he takes off on foreigners, scantily clad girls (“my van is not a dance bar”) and people who drink.  But he has been given the best lines (some credit to dialogue writer Hussain Dalal), and even an old-fashioned romance. Tanya is a bit of a caricature too, millennial girl means she smokes, drinks, sneaks out of the boys’ hostel, wears tiny shorts and is so spaced out that she forgets all about her grandmother’s death.

Dulquer Salmaan gives an effectively unobtrusive performance as opposed to Irrfan’s show-offy wisecracking. However, the good and bad thing about having Irrfan in the film is that he gets all the laughs, but when he is not on screen, the movie seems to deflate.