Film Impressions

ESSAY: On Ankhon Dekhi and Nebraska

CRAZY OLD FOOLS

There’s a peculiar likeness between Woody Grant (Bruce Dern) of Alexander Payne’s Nebraska and Bauji (Sanjay Mishra) in Rajat Kapoor’s Ankhon Dekhi. Both are lost souls in a lost world. Woody’s much older, hence easier to dismiss as senile (with a King Lear-esque fuzziness about him). Bauji still works at a crummy travel agency selling foreign tours to strangers over the phone—the distance between the dreams he peddles and his own reality almost as impossible as the meeting of two parallel lines. When the boss asks him where he’s actually travelled, he can only think of Vaishno Devi. This proves to be a little problematic after he takes the drastic decision to stop believing things he hasn’t seen for himself.

REVIEW: Miss Lovely

THE REAL DIRTY PICTURE

There’s something disconcerting about Ashim Ahluwalia’s Miss Lovely and it’s not just the grim environs in which his tale of C-movie lowlife is set. Locations more authentic one hasn’t seen in Hindi cinema — literally squeezing out every ounce of glamour from the city of dreams to expose its ugly underbelly — nor cinematography that employs deliberate tackiness to force the action in your face. K U Mohanan achieved a similar look in parts of Reema Kagti’s Talaash, especially the opening montage; only it was more tasteful and less disturbing than this audio-visual overload.

REVIEW: The Lunchbox

NOURISHMENT FOR STARVED SOULS 

Ritesh Batra's The Lunchbox opens with a crisscross of overhead wires that keep Mumbai's lifeline––its local trains––running. Tracks intersect, seemingly randomly, taking people to their familiar destinations. Everyone who's lived here long enough has experienced this life at some point, journeying on trains to work and back, eating cheap, unappetising food, getting lost in the crowd, feeling hopelessly lonely, yet not knowing what else to do but get up the next morning to the same crushing routine. 

REVIEW: The Coffin Maker

THE PHOENIX RISES

If you’ve watched Naseeruddin Shah extensively on stage and screen it may be hard to fathom why this exceptional talent (honestly, I don’t have the vocabulary to qualify it beyond clichés) is squandering his reputation on embarrassing fare like Chaalis Chauraasi, Maximum, Sona Spa, etc. Of late even in middling films (The Dirty Picture, 7 Khoon Maaf and That Girl In Yellow Boots) his presence has been unremarkable, mechanical. What happened to that maverick who’d incarnate equally evocatively the inflexible blind principal in Sparsh, the eccentric Parsi of Pestonjee, or the desperate fugitive of Paar, a film I watched in childhood and still can’t erase the memory of his emaciated body herding pigs across a treacherous river? Shah could be passionate, angry, subdued, witty, and dominate scenes without affectation, routinely stealing a march on everyone around. Like he did in Zoya Akhtar’s posh fantasy Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara in a five-minute cameo that injected that soulless wonder of excess with a dash of genuine emotion.

Naseeruddin and Ratna Pathak-Shah in the film

ESSAY: Salaam Bombay - 25 Years And Counting

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE TRACKS

Mira Nair’s debut feature film Salaam Bombay which is celebrating its 25^th anniversary this year and had a limited re-release last week, begins like any other conventional film with an underdog hero. Young Krishna (Shafiq Syed with a brilliant screen presence), barely 12 years old, is abandoned by his boss, the manager of a circus, and left to fend for himself with hardly any money in his tattered pockets. He walks up to the nearest railway station, asks for a “bade sheher ka ticket” and arrives in Bombay. In popular cinema he’d have encountered kindly folk all around or stoked his angst to grow up as a messiah for other lost souls like himself, either becoming a smuggler/pickpocket or then, somehow managed to put together the 500 rupees he needs to take back to his village in Karnataka before his mother will accept him back (he ruined someone’s bicycle and has been sent off to make good the loss), his makeshift family bidding him a teary farewell. 

Shafiq Syed as Chaipau and Chanda Sharma as Sola Saal 

REVIEW: Listen Amaya

SAATH SAATH ONCE AGAIN

Millions go to the cinema to watch the likes of Salman Khan in trashy movies week after week, year on year. Some of us have waited decades to see Farooque Shaikh play the lead in a film. Just to hear the man say, "I love you" to his longtime screen companion Deepti Naval is well worth the price of a ticket for Listen Amaya. Why? Because when he speaks, the feeling gushes to the surface effortlessly and transcends the stagey atmosphere of this film.

REVIEW: Ship Of Theseus (2)

The review was written during the Mumbai International Film Festival 2012.

CONTEMPLATIVE CINEMA AT ITS BEST

Simply put, the Ship of Theseus paradox raises the question of whether an object which has had all its component parts replaced, remains fundamentally the same object. A later corollary asks that if all the parts of the said ship were re-assembled to create another ship, would it be restored to its original self? In philosophy, this paradox is linked to the basic existential question––who we are––and how much we change over the course of a lifetime, including perhaps, the very essence of us.

Aida El-Kashef soaking in the sounds of Mumbai. PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY TIFF

Anand Gandhi’s debut feature film applies this paradox to create a work of rare philosophical depth and acute compassion towards the dilemmas of human existence, fraught with the burden of a thousand choices and awareness of the inherent inequities and injustice of modern society. The best of us, then, are liable to succumb, and yet, each of us has the potential for redemption.

REVIEW: Ship of Theseus

The review was written during the Mumbai International Film Festival 2012.

THE ESSENTIAL TRUTH

Through an aquamarine-tinted glimpse of an unseen Mumbai that is delectably photographed and appears to be thriving under the dust and the mayhem, and a seamless narrative that masterfully ties together three separate stories with the same soul, right through to the film’s stunning denouement, first-time director Anand Gandhi’s Ship of Theseus provides us with evocative drama that is unhurried in pace but rich in emotional cadences—a slow trickle headed irrevocably towards a postscript that is flush with meaning.

A stirring potrayal by Aida Al-Kashef. PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY TIFF

The central paradox on which Ship of Theseus hinges its narrative is derived from Plutarch’s query—whether a ship restored by replacing all its planks remained the same ship. Inversing it somewhat, Mr Gandhi applies the premise to the realm of organ donation, tracing a reverse genealogy of organs from a single man, recently deceased, which have been used to replenish other lives. Aida Al-Kashef, an Egyptian filmmaker in her first acting role, plays a photographer, startlingly expressive in her work when blind, but struggling with a perceived loss of spontaneity even as her restored eyesight allows her more tangible control over her craft. Neeraj Kabi is a monk who revels in his intransigence, refusing treatment for liver cirrhosis, because most pharmaceutical companies, whose drugs could cure him, have a track record of flagrant animal abuse, to which he objects stringently. Sohum Shah, also the producer of the film, is a stock-broker recently in receipt of a kidney transplant, who feels compelled to track down a laborer’s stolen kidney that he initially believed to be his own.

REVIEW: Shahid

The review was done in November 2012 when the film was screened at the Mumbai International Film Festival.

THE MAKING OF A HERO

One walked into Hansal Mehta's new film Shahid at MAMI with hesitation. Mehta's track record was hardly reassuring––his best work before this was the uneven and only mildly amusing Dil Pe Mat Le Yaar with Tabu and Manoj Bajpayee, and that too was over a decade ago. Besides, there were four other films one could have chosen from.

Then again, there was the enigmatic Shahid Azmi, a 32-year-old criminal lawyer and human rights activist, killed in his Kurla office nearly three years ago, after he'd made a successful career of defending those he believed were wrongly accused and imprisoned for alleged terrorist activities without enough evidence to justify their seemingly endless incarceration. In newspaper reports one often read of his 'controversial' past, involving a prison sentence, among other things. In short, Shahid was a fascinating character, although Mehta's film comes with a disclaimer that the narrative is a mix of fact and fiction. 

Raj Kumar Yadav in and as Shahid

REVIEW: Chittagong

BAND OF BOYS

While watching Ashutosh Gowariker's dud Khelein Hum Jee Jaan Sey a couple of years ago, one was left wondering why the director missed the most obvious narrative hook––to tell the story through the eyes of one of the impressionable young boys Surya Sen led to an astonishing and audacious uprising against the British Raj in Chittagong in the early 1930s. For one night and one day, the ragtag Indian Republican Army comprising a handful of committed leaders and a few dozen teenagers took over the entire city after they attacked the police lines, telephone exchange, railway line and armoury.

There were two crucial impediments to their complete success––they couldn't find the machine guns they badly needed in the armoury and because it was Good Friday, the European Club they'd planned to attack was deserted.

Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Manoj Bajpayee as Nirmal Sen and Surya Sen