Cinemaah

Hair Hassles

In its quest to explore unseen-- in cinema— places in India, Qasim Khallow’s Gone Kesh goes to the small hill station of Siliguri, though the story of a young woman’s travails could have been set anywhere. 

It’s a charming but too realistic story, that is limited by the narrowness of its scope—losing hair could be traumatic for anyone, but once it is established that Enakshi Dasgupta (Shweta Tripathi) goes through most of her school days being mocked for her bald patches, there is not much more to add to that ordeal. 

Enakshi and her loving parents (Vipin Sharma- Deepika Amin) do all they can to find a cure, but their biggest concern revolves around the question: Who will marry a bald girl? And sure enough Enakshi keeps getting rejected by potential grooms.

Khallow portrays the mundane existence of the middle class Sengupta family, with a marked lack of dramatic highs and lows; there is one mildly funny scene in which a man who has come to see her, requests her to dance to a Bollywood song, but the darkly comic potential of the story is never realized. Neither is the self-esteem crushing of a girl’s vanity portrayed with any depth.

The parents take her to a succession of doctors, and one of them diagnoses her condition as alopecia--which is hardly a rare condition! The hormonal cure is worse than the ailment, and finally Enakshi realizes the drain her hair problem is on her father’s meagre resources, and accepts the inevitability of wearing a wig.

She works as a salesgirl in a mall, has a silent admirer in Sujoy (Jitendra Kumar) and hopes to be a dancer, but her baldness holds her back. Strange that the viewer is told about her passion for dance—she quits her job to participate in a competition-- but she is never seen dancing.  Her happily-ever-after is centred around the love of a man who is not put off her condition.

Still, the film is appealing because everyone who understands how hung-up on looks today’s society is, would sympathise with Enakshi. The parents, with their modest ambition of travelling by plane once and seeing the Taj Mahal, are utterly endearing. Sharma and Amin are quietly impressive, without hitting a single false note.  Tripathi and Kumar deliver confident performances too, well cast as the boy and girl next door, who are heroic in their own way.

Just Half Truths

The murder of Australian missionary Graham Staines and his two young sons in 1999, by a group of right wing goons had shaken the conscience of the country, and revealed the tip of Hindu militancy that is rearing its ugly head with increasing regularity now.

To remind an audience of the horrors of fundamentalism alone, revisiting the two decade old incident is worth the effort. Aneesh Danei’s film, The Least Of These: The Graham Staines Story, however, goes off on another tangent, and is seen through the eyes of a foolish journalist, Manav Banerjee (Sharman Joshi).

Manav moves to an Odisha town with his pregnant wife (Aditi Chengappa) and hopes to land job at the newspaper edited by Kedar Mishra (Prakash Belawadi), if he can come up with the story he is assigned to chase. Mishra wants proof that Staines and his team are illegally converting tribals to Christianity by paying them.

Manav sees that Staines (Stephen Baldwin) and his wife Gladys (Shari Rigby) work selflessly for leprosy patients, and despite all his clumsy attempts at snooping, he cannot find proof that there is either coercion or bribery involved in conversions.

 Mahendra (Manoj Mishra) is the troublemaker, who uses Mishra’s hate, and twists Manav’s words to carry out the horrible killing of innocents. The film seems to suggest that it was Manav’s ignorance and eagerness for sensationalism that led to the heinous murders, and not the sustained misinformation against the work of missionaries by vested interests.

Mishra is shown to have a hidden agenda (which turns out to be a bit far-fetched), while Manav is portrayed as an idiot, who blames ‘karma’ for the plight of leprosy patients and screams when he is in the proximity of one, as if he were a dangerous beast.

The Least Of These should have been a tribute to Staines and his courageous wife, who had it in her to forgive the men who were heartless enough to burn alive small children; it should have been moving and terrifying, but its superficiality destroys any noble intentions it might have had.

Bungle In The Jungle

Chuck Russell (The Mask,  Eraser, The Scorpion King) has been imported from Hollywood to direct a laughably simplistic and old-fashioned film, that anybody local could have made just as well, or perhaps better. Junglee seems to have been made just to turn Vidyut Jammwal into an action hero.  His chiseled body is certainly more expressive than his face.

It took half a dozen writers to come up with the skinny plot of Junglee—when the story of human and beast had so much potential-- Jodi Picoult’s Leaving Time and Sara Gruen’s Water For Elephants come to mind immediately; why even the old film Haathi Mere Saathi packed more of an emotional wallop than this one. Junglee was probably made with a kiddie audience in mind, and happens to release in India at the same time as Tim Burton’s Dumbo, which makes it look so much worse.

Raj Nair (Jammwal) had left his father’s (Thalaivasal Vijay) elephant sanctuary (supposed to be in India but shot in Thailand) in a huff and broken all contact with him. He practices as a vet in Mumbai, and reluctantly returns, for his mother’s tenth death anniversary. He is followed by a journalist, Meera (Asha Bhat), who wants to do a story on the sanctuary.

Raj immediately connects with his childhood friends—the elephants Bhola and Didi, and humans Shanku (Pooja Sawant), who is now a mahaut, and Dev (Akshay Oberoi), son of his Kalaripayattu guru Gana (Makrand Deshpande), is a forest ranger.  Meanwhile, a gang of poachers is after Bhola’s magnificent tusks, and their leader Kotian (Atul Kulkarni) is particularly cruel towards these gentle beasts.

When his father and Bhola are killed, and  Raj framed, he breaks out of jail and goes after the gang, who are about to sell the tusks to the highest bidder – an unintentionally comic Chinese man with a blonde bimbo girlfriend.

 Russell has concentrated on the scenes of Jammwal flexing his muscles, and breathtaking panoramic views of the forest and the elephant herds. Fine actors like Kulkarni and Deshpande are wasted in thankless roles. The star attractions are, of course, the elephants-- and they deliver what little entertainment the film manages to rustle up.