Cinemaah

Ritesh Batra’s much-acclaimed film The Lunchbox, was about the unlikely connection between a middle-aged man and a lonely young woman. His latest, Photograph, could be described in the same words, only the circumstances are different—equally implausible—and the two actually meet.

 Rafi (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) is photographer at the Gateway of India, encouraging visitors with poetic slogan, to get a picture taken as a keepsake. Like the earlier film, the period in which the film is set it not specified, so in this age of the selfie, would his photos have any value? (There is a hint though, of the time, with a mention of Campa Cola, that stopped production around 2000).

Miloni Shah (Sanya Malhotra) seems to think so—that the picture he took made her appear prettier and happier-- for which, in today’s dangerous times, she places complete trust in a stranger. She is a class topper, forced to do a CA course she does not care for, rather than pursuing theatre at which she supposedly excelled. She is so passive, that her middle class parents and older sister routinely browbeat her.

Rafi lives in a squalid room with other migrants and sends money home to pay off his father’s debts. When his grandmother (Farrukh Jafar) insists that he get married, he sends her the unclaimed photo of Miloni, claiming she is his girlfriend, Noorie (because a song from the film was playing in the background).

The grandmother writes of her visit to Mumbai to meet the girl. Rafi stalks Miloni, and she is aware of it, making place for him in the bus when another passenger gets up. How he persuades her is off screen, but she agrees to pose as Noorie when Dadi arrives. Perhaps channeling her stifled sense of drama, she even comes up with a backstory for herself, in which she is an orphan living in a hostel.

After that, Rafi and Miloni meet regularly and she is exposed to the seedy side of the city that she would never have stepped into otherwise. Her timidity extends to going along with whatever Rafi and Dadi propose, including eating a roadside gola, that makes her ill.

When Miloni leaves a decrepit rat-infested movie theatre, Rafi comments that all film stories are the same anyway, which could be Batra’s sly reference to typical rich girl-poor guy movies made in Bollywood of the time.  But this Rafi-Miloni pairing is so far-fetched, that even though one appreciates the cinematic qualities of Photograph and the competent performances, it evokes unease instead of rosy-hued nostalgia.

Land Of Half Lives

News footage coming out of Kashmir is full of violence, and soldiers watching over an uneasy calm that could blow up in their faces if they lower their guard.

Aijaz Khan’s film Hamid captures the beauty of the state that has been wrecked by militancy. Soldiers face stone-pelting boys and shouts of “Azaadi” but also the guilt when they have to open fire and sometimes hit an innocent. They are seen as the “enemy” by the people of Kashmir, but they are also human, living away from families and mourning their mates killed on duty.

Seven-year—old Hamid (Talha Arshad Reshi) insists on batteries late one evening; his father, a boatmaker called Rehmat (Sumit Kaul) leaves the house to buy them and never returns. Hamid’s grieving mother Ishrat (Rasika Dugal), stoically makes the rounds or police stations and morgues, trying not to give up hope.  The incident also creates an invisible barrier between the boy and his mother, who blames him for the tragedy, even as she cares for him well in spite of the financial strain she goes through.

Hamid is told by a schoolmate that his father has gone to Allah; he figures out that 786 is Allah’s number and tries to call Him. (He is a bit too old to be so naïve, but that’s a minor quibble).  After many tries, the phone is answered by a homesick soldier Abhay (Vikas Singh), who is taken aback, then amused at being mistaken for Allah, but carries on a phone friendship with the child.

A separatist tries to indoctrinate young boys into militancy and the lure of a trip “to the other side.”  It is Hamid’s unshakeable belief in his Allah that keeps him out mischief. There are some moments of humour highlighting the boy’s endearing innocence.

Abhay is so charmed by Hamid’s faith that he does try to trace Rehmat, only to be pulled up by his superior officer—he is not supposed to be fraternizing with the locals.  The idyll cannot last,Hamid is cruelly forced to confront the reality of his existence.  The film—based on a play by Mohammad Amin Bhat, reportedly taken from a true incident-- is not a fairy tale; it is a coming of age story placed in a conflict zone, that tries to balance both sides and bring out the hopeful simplicity of the people pushed into circumstances not of their own making. The gun-wielding soldier is as much a victim of politics gone wrong, as the half widows and orphans left behind by the men who vanish without a trace.

Hamid is moving, has fine performances, striking visuals, and makes a plea for peace without waving flags or shouting slogans. 

The problem of a lack of sanitation exists in India, and Toilet : Ek Prem Katha brought it to the notice of mainstream cinema audiences, while documentaries continue to do so. One would imagine the funds spent on making another film (after Halka) on open defecation would have been better spent on actually providing Mumbai slums with usable toilets. 

Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s Mere Pyare Prime Minister has enough relevant material for a short film, to stretch it to full length, means subjecting the audiences to endless shots of people going to take a dump, squatting or returning from wherever they defecate—and one sick-making scene of a kid falling into a hole full of excrement—which do nothing to help the cause.

Kanhu (Om Kanoriya) and his single mother Sargam (Anjali Patil) live in a slum built on encroached land. He and his buddies, don’t go to school, they hawk things at traffic signals and goof around. (There  are a few unrelated, and inappropriate, scenes of a white woman using the kids to distribute condoms!) 

The women squat by the railway tracks in the dark, and one night, when she happens to be alone, Sargam is raped. Kanhu puts up a makeshift toilet, that collapses on him when it rains. He tries to get the municipal authorities to build a toilet in their slum, but according to the records, the basti does not exist.

So, he writes a letter to the Prime Minister (interestingly, no mention of the Swachh Bhrarat Abhiyan), and accompanied by two of his pals, makes his way to Delhi and to the PM’s residence, where he manages to give the letter to a sympathetic aide (Atul Kulkarni). If he had failed in his mission, there would be no film, so there are no surprises here.

Mehra pads the flimsy plot with a romance between Sargam and a puppy-eyed neighbour (Niteesh Wadhwa), whose idea of expressing love is taking her for a ‘gupt rog’ test, a Holi song, a quick look at the water mafia, and many scenes of slum kids squatting on pipes as planes take off and high rises are seen glimmering in the distance.

The kids are cute, the cast has some well-known theatre actors like Makrand Deshpande, Rasika Agashe and Nachiket Purapatre as basti dwellers, but the film is more or less unwatchable.