Film Impressions

REVIEW: Golaberij

GRAVE INUSTICE TO A GREAT MAN'S MEMORY

Back in the '80s when there was no alternative to Doordarshan and television was a much nicer place than it is today, there ran a series called Nivadak Pu.La. in which Maharashtra's favourite author, P L Deshpande, would stand before a live audience and read his famous essays and character sketches. This was stand-up comedy before its time; Pu.La. spoke at breakneck speed smoothly switching between characters and voices, the laughter track wasn't inserted in the edit and it was half an hour well spent, once every week. But you could also read Pu.La's portraits in books or listen to audio recordings -- Chitale Master, Sakharam Gatne, Peston kaka and Antu Barva are timeless figures in our collective imagination.

Putting them out on screen was bound to be a dicey proposition, and even more so, trying to weave them into a biopic of the celebrated, multi-faceted writer, composer, actor -- a personality too firmly etched in the hearts of audiences to accept anything but the best. Sadly, Kshitij Zarapkar's Golaberij fails miserably not just in evoking memories of his most loved caricatures, but also in giving us a sense of the man and his life.  

REVIEW:Players (2)

THE BOTCHED JOB

A moll has a gun to the hero’s head and announces, “Get ready to die.” Players is that kind of film. All talk, lots of action, no fun.

‘Director Duo’ Abbas-Mustan have made their careers ripping off bad Hollywood films and Indianising them, with a fair degree of polish and some chutzpah. But when they do an official remake of The Italian Job, they make such a hash of it. If they had done a frame-to-frame job, they might have produced a decent thriller, considering there was no lack of resources—Players is shot at locations all over the world, and nowhere does it look like the budget ran short.

The problem is that today’s audience is used to, and expects a certain degree of sophistication, so hogwash like stealing a shipment of gold to fund an orphanage in India is laughable. Or that annoying side track about the paraplegic daughter of one of the thieves. And all that chatter that never stops! The original film was a comic caper without such baggage. The central idea was simple and audacious, to carry out a heist by causing a traffic jam and using small getaway cars (cute Mini Coopers to be exact).

Anyway, so here’s Charlie (Abhishek Bachchan) who, with his accomplice Riya (Bipasha Basu) goes about the world stealing—and of course, high security jewellers in Amsterdam have Indian managers (Johnny Lever, if you please) and open windows without grills, so that the hero (and he says at one point that he is the hero, in case anybody doubted it) can steal priceless necklaces. Well, it’s that kind of film. Now Charlie wants to steal a fortune in Romanian gold being shipped on a train from Russia back to the country of origin. With the help of the imprisoned Victor Dada (Vinod Khanna), who is the wise man wearing a black coat over the jail uniform and teaching adoring cops how to catch thieves, he puts together a crack team to work on the job—Ronny (Bobby Deol) is an illusionist, Bilal (Sikander Kher) is the explosives expert, Sunny (Omi Vaidya), the prosthetics expert, Spider (Neil Nitin Mukesh) the computer hacker. One of them turns out to be a traitor, steals the gold and kills Victor. So his daughter Naina (Sonam Kapoor) also a computer wiz, joins the team to steal the gold and take revenge.

Players has all the boring details of planning heists and a love triangle too (both woman vying for Charlie!) but a complete lack of humour and the winking wit that goes with absurd plots of this kind, that allows for suspension of disbelief and enjoyment of the madcap action. The added masala... songs, dances, half clad women, grand mansions, voice activated techno dens, and location hopping—do nothing to lift the film from the tedium it falls into rather quickly. There are two versions of The Italian Job—the 1969 one and the 2003 remake, which reworked most of the plot, without losing the entertainment value. Players is not The Italian Job, whoever bought the rights can demand their money back, or sue for desecration... it has been Bollywood-ised beyond recognition. To make it worse—bad performances, clunky dialogue hopeless music.  

REVIEW: One Room Kitchen

AN OLD-FASHIONED MIDDLE CLASS STORY

Back in the 1970s, filmmakers like Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Basu Chatterjee and a bunch of their lesser clones made films about the aspirations, complexes and problems of the great Indian middle class. Many of these films were set in Bombay's chawls, housing societies, clerical departments of offices, buses and trains. Think Amol Palekar-Vidya Sinha, or Farooque Sheikh-Deepti Naval. Now, over three decades later, Bombay cinema has shifted its gaze to foreign lands, the chawls have disappeared and the middle class is hanging in an indeterminate space too fuzzy for filmmakers to grasp. 

Interestingly though, what happened in Bombay a generation ago, seems to have filtered down to smaller cities like Pune, now going through their own rush of economic prosperity, burgeoning population and a real estate boom. Mahesh Tilekar's Marathi film One Room Kitchen tries to make sense of this transition from being a sleepy middle-class town to an individualistic consumer society. The idea is promising, its exposition not quite as insightful and rewarding as it could have been.

NOSTALGIA: Umbartha (1982)

Smita Patil’s closest friend Jhelum Paranjape recalls how when the actress immersed herself in a role, she often ‘became’ the character. Given Smita’s affinity towards women’s issues and concern for their disadvantaged status in contemporary society, the part of Sulabha Mahajan in Jabbar Patel’s Umbartha (The Threshold) was especially close to her heart. More so, because the character of the intense and fiery social worker adapted to screen by noted playwright Vijay Tendulkar from Shanta Nisal’s Marathi novel Beghar (Homeless), seemed so much like her mother, Vidya Patil, a dedicated social worker. While playing Sulabha, Smita married her mother’s poise (evident in her precise body language), with her own passion and vulnerability. It may not have fetched her the National Awards Bhumika and Chakra did, but won enough acclaim to warrant a special retrospective of her films in France and earned her recognition as a feminist icon.

REVIEW: Paulwaat

A LOST WORLD

Paulwaat is a fable about philosophical issues that human beings have grappled with forever and will do so till the end of time. The purpose and meaning of life, aspects of love, relationships, struggle, success and so on. At this level it's a wonderful film that throws together a bunch of characters, not bound by blood or any conventional ties, who develop inexplicable bonds with one another. Their own families and engagement with the world at large receed to the background and become almost inconsequential beyond a point.

The protagonist Anant Dev (Subodh Bhave), a struggling singer from Sangli, comes to Mumbai to pursue a career in the music industry. His friend brings him to Akka (Jyoti Chandekar) a lonely widow who lives by herself in a sprawling house (where, in Mumbai are there such wonderfully idyllic houses and not even enveloped by the cacophony and bustle of the city?). She takes him in as a paying guest. Her next-door neighbour, Nene, is her only friend. Nene's niece Revati (Madhura Velankar Satam) lives with him and she completes the picture of this quasi family. 

REVIEW: Deool

THE GODS MUST BE CRAZY

Umesh Kulkarni has a sharp sense for satire (evident in his directorial debut Valu a few years ago). As does Girish Kulkarni, who has penned the script and screenplay of Deool. Together they display a keen understanding of complex social issues and for the first half of its running time, Deool is an absolute riot. It's crisp, witty, thought-provoking and moving. The idea of the village simpleton Kesha (Girish Kulkarni) getting a vision of lord Brahma while napping under a tree on a hot summer afternoon and the mayhem it unleashes isn't highly original. You know what to expect. The innocent protagonist goes around telling people about his experience without anticipating its consequences.

DVD REVIEW: Dahan (1997)

WOMEN ON THE VERGE

Rituparno Ghosh's Dahan (Crossfire), is as scathing a critique of middle-class society and its hypocrisy as anything one has seen on the Indian screen. Using subtle melodrama—unlike Rajkumar Santoshi's Damini (1992) which is its thematic predecessor—he takes sharp stabs at the edifice of respectability that an educated but self-serving and cowardly mass wears with misplaced pride and self-righteousness.

It is also a distinctly feminist text, for in the order of this world women's identity is strictly determined in relation to the men in their lives, their families and society at large, but never as individuals with any right to self-determination.

DVD REVIEW: Paromitar Ek Din (2000)

KINSHIP OF THE SUFFERING 

Aparna Sen's Paromitar Ek Din (House of Memories in English) explores female bonding between two formidable women trapped in a rigid patriarchal family. While the edifice of this oppressive system is crumbling as gradually (but surely) as the old mansion the family occupies in North Kolkata, these two women must pay a heavy price for their individuality in the meantime.

The film opens with a framed photograph of Sanaka (Aparna Sen) and then on to a bright courtyard where her death rituals are being performed. Against the backdrop of a priest chanting mantras, we see Paromita (Rituparna Sengupta) sitting quietly in a corner observing the scene playing out before her, but mostly lost in her own memories of the deceased. The narrative, which travels freely in time taking the shape of Paromita's reminiscences is framed entirely from her point of view, beginning with her entry into the Sanyal house on her wedding day as Sanaka's younger daughter-in-law.

The entire film Paromitar Ek Din is now available on Youtube on the Rajshri Channel.

DVD REVIEW: Dosar (2006)

 MARRIAGE AND MORALS

Shot entirely in black and white, Rituparno Ghosh’s Dosar (The Companion) opens with Kaushik Chatterjee (Prasenjit) and his colleague and lover Mita Roy checking out of their weekend retreat in a riverside resort. On their way back to Kolkata they meet with an accident. She dies on the spot while he is critically injured.

Cut to a dingy hospital corridor where Kaushik’s wife Kaberi (Konkona Sen Sharma, brilliant) is trying to find the right expression to mask her anguish and display her indignation over her husband’s infidelity. She even tries (a little comically) hiding behind dark glasses and refuses to sign the hospital form as a mark of protest. Her friends from the theatre troupe where she works, Bobby and Brinda, are by her side and try to persuade her to be reasonable.

REVIEW: Fakt Ladh Mhana

POPULIST AND PUERILE

Sanjay Jadhav's Fakt Ladh Mhana has Mahesh Manjrekar's stamp all over it. It's loud, unimaginative, and has a ragtag bunch of goons at its centre. Like most of Manjrekar's cinema, it also tries to tackle a contemporary socio-political issue without approaching it with any seriousness. In this case, the proposed SEZs in the Konkan region and the plight of farmers caught in the quagmire of land aquisitions by large corporations (there's an industrialist in the film who's ranked 7th of the Forbes international list, and no prizes for guessing who that's meant to be) facilitated by greedy politicians, forms the central conflict.