Cinemaah

Grey-Shaded Love

A willful girl has just left her lover and married a man chosen by her family. Later, her grandfather asks her if is okay and she replies, that the love has not ended and the marriage has not begun. It’s a problem many a woman faces, still, Anurag Kashyap’s Manmarziyaan is not able to create a complex or even likeable character out of his protagonist, Rumi (Taapsee Pannu). 

Rumi is constantly irritable and rude to everyone except her grandfather. She gets into a volatile affair with a local DJ, Vicky (Vicky Kaushal), after meeting him on Tinder.  But when it comes to commitment, he dithers. Surprisingly, for a woman who is so headstrong, she actually expects Vicky to look after her. When she bullies him into eloping, she asks him where they will live and on what? And he rightly replies with bafflement that it was her idea to run away. So Rumi across as the kind of hyprocrite who pretends to take the lead and then relinquishes responsibility for her actions.

Which is why her shocking meanness towards Robbie (Abhishek Bachchan), the gentle guy she agrees to marry after Vicky lets her down, makes her even less sympathetic. Filmmakers are seldom able to handle women who are truly unconventional, and their idea of bold is a woman, who smokes, drinks, is ill-mannered and inconsiderate.

Vicky tries to grow up, while Robbie gathers up his reserves of patience for a woman who talks to him only when she is slightly drunk. At one point she asks him, if he was always the “Ramji type.”  As if decency is a flaw in a man.

Kashyap and his writer Kanika Dhillon capture the Amritsar language, sights, sounds and surprising broadmindedness. Nobody condemns Rumi outright for her bad behavior; when caught with Vicky in her room, all her grandfather calmly tells Vicky is to wear his T-shirt right side out. No swords are brandished or family honour invoked.

Kashyap quirkily uses twin dancers as recurring motifs, in the song sequences—and Amit Trivedi’s music is a highlight.  What fails the film is its predictable, done-before plot (Swami, Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam, etc), and a woman who is all bluster, no substance—though Taapsee Pannu plays her with a vulnerability that is not written into her actions. Vicky Kaushal is marvellous as the man-child, but Abhishek Bachchan portraying the quiet strength of Robbie steals almost every scene he is in. Manmarziyaan is the kind of film that is watchable and disappointing at the same time-- like so much of Kashyap's work.

Human trafficking is not just an Indian phenomenon, but Tabrez Noorani’s Love Sonia, well-meaning though may be, is a film made for a Western audience; so there’s Mumbai in all its slummy infamy.

There is nothing new in the story of village girls being sold into prostitution—this film is very similar to Nagesh Kukunoor’s Lakshmi (2014); in Love Sonia too, an indebted farmer (Adil Hussain) sells older daughter Preeti (Riya Sisodiya) to the landowner (Anupam Kher), who passes her on to a procuress (Sai Tamhankar). The younger girl, Sonia (Mrunal Thakur) follows on her own, to hunt for her sister, and ends up in a squalid brothel, run by Babu (Manoj Bajpayee). Among the other women there are the older, cynical, cruel Madhuri (Richa Chadha) and Rashmi (Freida Pinto). Escape seems almost impossible, since the cops are on the take. And as Rashmi says, where would they go? Their families won’t have them back.

The film them follows Sonia’s story through her ordeal at the Mumbai brothel and later, when she is sent outside the country in a shipping container. The problem with a film like Love Sonia is that it cannot show the real brutality of the flesh trade, so resorts to clichéd scenes and lines, some of them bordering on comically grotesque (like Babu screaming about virgin village girls, or Sonia’s encounter with an American customer).

 Rajkummar Rao turns up in a tiny cameo as a social worker who helps rescue and rehabilitate the girls. Demi Moore appears in a scene, as head of the American women’s shelter for victims of violence. Noorani obviously has the resources and clout to get such an ensemble cast of well-known actors. But the film remains mostly superficial, the intended shocks being mild, and just a few scenes that are genuinely moving. Hardly any films about prostitution—after the titillating scenes of the girls’ trauma are done-- seriously take a look at what happens after they are rescued; do they succeed in getting back into the very society that shuns them. Love Sonia stops short of that stage too.

Dreary Romance

In the age of Tinder and casual hook-ups, a filmmaker attempts an update of a classic romantic tragedy—it gets the hopes up. But Sajid Ali’s imagination (and that of co-writer Imtiaz Ali) is unable to create a modern day love story without packing it with commonplace characters and Bollywood clichés.

Ali sets his film in Kashmir, with a token nod to politics but absolutely no indication of the trouble in the state. But for fancy cars and cell phones, the film could have been set half a century ago, when Kashmir used to a popular Bollywood destination. Unless the new Laila and Qais are different from today’s superficial youngsters, what is so appealing about their story?

Ali’s Laila (Tripti Dimri) is the town flirt, who throws her lipstick smeared tissue out of her car window, for the boys to pick up and fight over. When she meets Qais (Aninash Tiwary), she says to her constant companion (Sahiba Bali) who follows her around with a worried expression, that she is just looking for experience till she has an arranged marriage. How their love deepens to the level of madness is not portrayed with any depth; the shortcut Ali takes is to have Qais say that their story is pre-ordained.

Since their fathers are enemies, Laila is married to a creepy cousin Ibban (Sumit Kaul, the only one who puts on a Kashmiri accent) and Qais sent to London. No indication of what he did there, but when he returns for his father’s funeral and glimpses Laila, he suddenly starts to lose his mind. He also has a devoted brother (Abrar Qazi), who takes him away to a distant village to recover.

Due to unexpected circumstances, Laila is within reach, but a short wait sends Qais off the rails altogether as he turns into Majnu (mad) of the legend. The whole idea of going crazy in the quest of the beloved is lost, and Ali gives it a spiritual twist a bit too late into the film.  The idea of depicting madness is Qais having visions of Laila dressed in white, and dance around with abandon, as the local villagers look on in alarm.  

With the material at hand, the staggering beauty of Kashmir and uses of folklore, poetry and Sufi philosophy, Sajid Ali could have made a really stirring love story that transcends the corporeal.  He has an outstanding and totally unselfconscious actor in Avinash Tiwary, who is capable of real intensity. As it is now, what works for this contemporary Laila Majnu is the lead actor and the music.

After making Border and LOC Kargil, JP Dutta has the war film formula down pat, and knows that no matter how boring or bombastic such films may be, it is almost a patriotic duty to applaud them.

One does cheer for the real soldiers fighting at the front under tough conditions, but these ripped action figures that Dutta conjures up in his latestPaltan may look all macho and gym trained, but sound as if a bad Bollywood scriptwriter was telling them what to say amidst the gunfire and dust of the battleground.

Paltan, starring Jackie Shroff, Arjun Rampal, Sonu Sood, Harshvardhan Rane, Gurmeet Choudhry, Luv Sinha and Siddhant Kapoor, is based on a real encounter between India and China in 1967. This was a triumph soon after India had lost the Indo-China war in 1962, and Dutta believes—rightly so—that this story needs to be told. Maybe just not in his noisy, paint-by-numbers style.

Indian soldiers stationed at the border in Nathu La in Sikkim want to avenge the 1962 defeat and teach those evil Chinese a lesson. The Chinese are all cartoonish; the Indians are all brave and honourable. They are characters we know from other movies—as the film keeps cutting to their personal lives, perhaps to humanize the almost robotic soldiers shouting “Sarvada Shaktishali” as they face the enemy.

Major General Sagat Singh (Jackie Shroff) orders Lt. Col. Rai Singh Yadav (Arjun Rampal) to head the Rajput Battalion and protect the Nathu La Pass, as the Chinese blatantly encroach on Indian territory. The two sides exchange words and stones, squabble over a fence; it takes too long to come to the real battle scenes, where Dutta finally shows his skill.

A generic war film cannot be said to be entertaining, but it could be watched as a tribute to the men who risk their lives to protect our borders.

One of these rats is Khuddoos (Manoj Bajpayee), who has lived in a shabby house all his life, while his family “escaped”—he says this to the brother who comes to visit him after years, with a selfish agenda. So isolated is Khuddoos that he has no idea of the location of his brother’s house.  He keeps track of the neighbourhood through a complicated network of cameras. His only touch with the outside world is his friend Ganeshi (Ranvir Shorey), who drops by with food and advice.

Running parallel to this story is that of Idris (Om Singh), who lives with his sweet mother Saira (Shahana Goswami) and autocratic father Liakat (Neeraj Kabi), who tries to bully the boy into learning the butcher’s trade. Khuddoos hears sounds of distress through the walls and becomes obsessed with saving the boy, though, without Ganeshi’s constant intervention, he is unable to save himself from hostile neighbours. Idris also has one loyal friend Ginny (Arbaas Khan), who accompanies him on video-parlour excursions that are a relief from his bleak life.

The two tracks come together in a contrived way, but the plot is not the strength of the film. This is a filmmaker’s film in which he plays with his craft, turning the inescapable labyrinths of a decrepit Chandni Chowk area (shot byKai Miedendrop with an unerringly astute eye) into a study of urban misery. Gali Guleiyan seems like a nightmare that suffocates Khuddoos and Idris. How can anyone live in those dank homes and remain sane?  Om Singh’s blank face and Manoj Bajpayee’s haunted eyes answer that question. The slow and fragmented film may not appeal to everyone, but Bajpayee’s Khuddoos is a master class in acting.