Cinemaah

Looking For Logic

  

This is a film in search of good actors, a sensible plot and a script that is not so convoluted that it trips over its own cleverness.

 So Kaashi (Sharman Joshi) is the daft corpse-burner on the Benaras ghat, who doesn’t find it strange that a big city journalist Devina (Aishwarya Dewan), claims to fall in love with him. Then, his sister Ganga disappears and there seems to be a conspiracy afoot to keep him from tracing her. When he goes to the cops, they don’t pay any attention; the college where Ganga supposedly studied claims there is no student by that name.

Then a classmate of Ganga reveals that she was in love with the son of a politician Balwant Pande (Govind Namdev), and they are planning to get married in secret because of the father’s opposition to the match. 

Kaashi and Devina hunt for the boyfriend in Mussourie, where, they land straight into a drug den with scantily clad women woman and masked men are dancing, which is an excuse for a song; all the tuneless numbers are randomly stuffed in, and serve no purpose but to further slow down an already sluggish film.

One thing leads to another and Kaashi is arrested for murder in court, two of the hammiest actors possible (Manoj Joshi, Akhilendra Mishra) play the opposing lawyers before a bored-looking judge (Manoj Pahwa).  As the sneer and rant, the trial moves away from proving Kaashi’s guilt to questioning the existence of Ganga. This leads to the most bizarre twist imaginable, which, if one gives it a thought, doesn’t make much sense.

This is the kind of slapdash film in which, when a character goes into flashback mode, she includes songs and conversations between two people she could not possibly have known about.

Sharman Joshi probably found the narration intriguing, and signed up for this film. He must have realized that he is the only star around, and overacted so much on behalf of all the others blank faces, that you feel sorry for him.

Dalal Street Blues

Back in 1987, Gordon Gekko had declared “greed is good” in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, in which an ambitious young stockbroker is dazzled by a corporate trader and lets go of his scruples till bitter reality hits. It took a director of the calibre of Stone to make a dry subject like the stock market into a suspenseful and emotionally involving movie.

Years later, Gauravv K. Chawla attempts his version of that film with Baazaar, and make a watery mess, with Saif Ali Khan trying to pass off as a dodgy “Gujju” trader, Shakun Kothari, throwing a few lines of Gujarati around, but not even scratching the surface to get to the intended slimy cunning.

Rizwan Ahmad (Rohan Mehra-- earnest) is an Allahabad boy, for whom Mumbai is heaven and Kothari his god. He is prone to dialoguebaazi like “I not come here to struggle, but to settle,” but when it comes to the crunch, he is quite dumb. He manages to get a job in a brokerage firm, and rises with help from a co-worker, Priya (Radhika Apte--passable), who has her own motives for giving him valuable tips.

After an encounter in a hotel bathroom, where Rizwan supposedly proves that he has the ability to make money, Shakun takes him under his wing, and shows him the good life. Obviously, he has an ulterior scheme and no qualms about using and discarding Rizwan.

It’s a script with no element of surprise, and no ability to draw the viewer into the world of high finance; instead there are the clichéd corrupt ministers and a sole SEBI investigator (who comes too late into the picture to make any impact).

Chawla has added some Indian touches to it, like the Gujarati businessman’s use of the ‘angadiya’, a Jain ritual of “micchami dukadam” chanting as wheeling-dealing goes on in another room. But Kothari’s family life (his stoic wife played by an indifferent Chitrangada Singh) is portrayed with dull strokes. Rizwan sporadically speaks to the camera, and every time Shakun says, “Let me tell you a story,” there are audible groans in the theatre.

The lesson to be learnt with Baazaar is also a cliché now—don’t mess with a classic.