Film Impressions

ESSAY: Mary Kom, From Book To Screen

AND WHY THIS FILM MATTERS

There is a sense of enormous struggle and emotional charge to Mary Kom's life that Omung Kumar's 'sort of' biopic (it begins with a disclaimer that the film draws from incidents in the boxer's life, suggesting that they've been modified/fictionalised) doesn't bear out. A reading of her autobiography, Unbreakable, confirms this suspicion and yet miraculously, the film still offers us glimpses into her remarkable journey. The signs are there, if only as markers.

REVIEW: Mardaani

SUPER COP

There's something very satisfying about Pradeep Sarkar's Mardaani. Not just that it has a female protagonist but one who is truly empowered and doesn't get compromised by the filmmaker at any point either to make her rise heroically from the ashes as in the Zakhmi Aurat-type revenge melodramas laced with exploitative situations or even to underscore the villain's menace. She isn't run down by her bosses, ridiculed by co-workers or lectured by her husband for being the cause of his suffering or putting family at risk in the pursuit of criminals.

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.

ESSAY: 'Queen' And The Birth of A New Heroine

ATTAGIRL!

An early scene in Vikas Bahl’s Queen reminded me of a similar one in Aditya Chopra’s Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995). A young woman wants to take a journey by herself for the first time and asks her father if he’d let her go. In DDLJ, the London-born and bred Simran (Kajol) must chant prayers and appeal to the patriarch’s emotional side to let her ‘live’ the last month of her life before she’s carted off to Punjab to marry a stranger. “Kya aap meri khushi ke liye, meri apni zindagi se ek mahina bhi nahin de sakte?” she asks. The old man yields with the famous declaration, “Jaa Simran, jee le apni zindagi.”

Implicit in this line is the assumption that marriage is the end of a woman’s life (pun intended).

ESSAY: Fandry And The Question of Social Inclusion

By Y.M.Deosthalee

The UPA Government has been aggressively propagating financial inclusion. They introduced schemes such as NREGA, compelled banks to open branches in remote areas, enforced priority sector norms for credit to underprivileged etc. But has this changed the country's social fabric? Have we forgotten caste, religion, and language-based differentiation? Has the dowry system been abolished? Have we won the war against superstition? Have we brought about real transformation in society?

REVIEW: Gulaab Gang

THESE WOMEN NO CRY

Instead of the regulation item song, the end credits of Soumik Sen’s Gulaab Gang roll to inspiring stories of women who’ve overcome disadvantages of birth and of patriarchal oppression to find ways to fulfil themselves and help others. It’s a welcome change. Sadly, the founder of the real Gulabi Gang, Sampat Pal doesn’t figure on this list. Her defamation suit against the filmmakers also seems justified since they've obviously drawn on her persona without permission, credit or compensation. Still, she needn’t worry about being cast in an unflattering light in this heavily-Bollywoodised version. Rajjo (Madhuri Dixit) is a hero and worthy successor to Mrityudand’s (1996) Ketki who rallies the womenfolk to take on a bunch of hypocritical men in a fictional Bihar village.

PROFILE: Sachin Khedekar

This article first appeared in Time Out magazine

What kind of work would an actor of Sanjeev Kumar’s enormous talent but modest looks have attracted in contemporary cinema? Surely he couldn’t have played the six-pack flaunting hero of youth-obsessed love stories or a member of the lowbrow comedy club. Today even character parts are caricatures mechanically executed by veterans like Rishi Kapoor, Om Puri and Anupam Kher. Fortunately for Sachin Khedekar, a man of equal gifts, Marathi cinema still offers a small but vital window for creative expression.

REVIEW: Highway

ROAD TO NOWHERE

This review contains spoilers

Dear Papa,

I am writing to you from my new home in the mountains where the air is so fresh, the water so clean, the sheep so adorable and the women in ethnic costumes with cool folk music on their lips so trendy! I now live in a mud house with cute little square windows and have even learnt to make tea on the chulha, sweep the floor and make my own bed. Of course, when it's warmer I sleep on the green grass and gaze at the white stars shining bright in the ink blue sky.

Alia Bhatt in the new film from Imtiaz Ali, Highway

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: Dedh Ishqiya

LOVE IN THE TIMES OF MUSHAIRAS

In Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine Cate Blanchett plays a down-and-out former heiress surviving on a staple diet of vodka, Xanax, rage and self-pity. She talks to herself and is rude to everyone in sight. But the character's vulnerability cuts deep and as you loathe her selfishness you also feel terribly sorry for her. In Abhishek Chaubey's Dedh Ishqiya, Madhuri Dixit-Nene is Begum Para (the name has such a delicious old-world ring!) the widowed queen of Mehmudabad (somewhere in UP) presiding over a decrepit haveli, whom we see in a private moment of revulsion as she consumes a sedative to calm her nerves and furiously scratches herself out of a photo album. I was waiting for the actress to draw me into the character's pain with the same fragility that Blanchett does.

Sadly, it wasn't to be.