Film Impressions

ESSAY: From Midnight Cowboy to Kaminey

THE BALLAD OF CHARLIE AND MIKHAIL

THE buddy film, so eagerly lapped up by queer audiences in the past, has in recent times been ‘found out’. In the past, these films provided a gay subtext that overpowered everything else going on on-screen, a subtext that, although almost snatched from the proceedings, had become the inexorable parables for the lives of gay men. What they were led to believe was that being embroiled in a strong self-sacrificing friendship could be a viable stand-in for a love match. This kind of cinema turned out to be the albatross around their necks that inhibited them from venturing into untested waters as gay men who wanted more than just the idea of another man as a heroic counterpart, but men in the flesh, who could be losers or slime-balls, men who were the objects of their carnal desire and a kind of adoration that wasn’t quite the stuff of epic films, men who gave them love-bites and nothing else besides, things that they hadn’t quite seen on celluloid. In this, the buddy films and their unflinching devotion to them have become somewhat anachronistic as gay men slowly learnt, without any help from popular culture, that love needed no surrogates. Gestures were more important than nuance and that stories of homosexual love needed no longer be seen as merely fine print, or be read only between the lines.

REVIEW: Badmaash Company (3)

FINALLY A WELCOME SUMMER BREAK FOR AUDIENCES

First a confession. If you are a style fiend, you will cringe at the clothes and shoes and sunglasses (so many of them!) that look great, but do not belong to the period the movie is set in. If you have traveled Air India in the 90s, you know they did not have blue blankets in cattle class, they have always used burgundy. I decided I will NOT look at styling in the movie after seeing the 2003 Takashi Murakami designed Multicolor Monogram Louis Vuitton shirt on Archie the smuggler in 1993/4.

REVIEW: Badmaash Company (2)

THOSE WERE THE DAYS

Not so long ago, before the retail boom, foreign goods came at a premium in India, and every area in Mumbai had a friendly neighbourhood smuggler, who provided goodies like jeans, t-shirts, branded shoes, watches, chocolates and cheese. The modus operandi was to send ‘carriers’ to Bangkok or Hong Kong, smuggle in these in-demand goods, in cahoots with the customs guys. The flourishing business came to an end with Manmohan Singh’s liberalization policy. It’s a very interesting social phenomenon, but a Badmaash Company in a film, smuggling shoes, doesn’t make for very exciting cinema.

REVIEW: Badmaash Company

MONEY RULES

Parmeet Sethi’s directorial debut, Badmaash Company operates in a warped moral universe. Its principal characters, a bunch of four friends, start off as ‘carriers’ of smuggled goods from Bangkok, then graduate to slightly bigger scams of their own, move base to the US, get carried away by different vices and part ways on a sour note. The protagonist, Karan (Shahid Kapoor) comes back to India, to suddenly realise what the ‘izzat’ that his not-so-rich father (Anupam Kher) has been talking about intermittently (but in a rather muffled voice, I think) means, and goes back to the US to earn an honest living.