FLAWED YET HEART-WARMING
Hindi films about the elderly are almost always focussed on suffering—uncaring children, loss of loved ones, illness and the fear of mortality etc. Such preoccupations are no doubt inevitable with advancing years but our cinema doesn’t allow characters to live, grieve or die with dignity like in Michael Haneke’s Amour (2012), which achieves all of the above to devastating effect. Writer-director Sanjay Tripathy’s Club 60 manages it in parts (although any comparison with Amour is inappropriate); but the good parts work as much on account of the lead pair’s restrain as the sensitive delineation of these scenes.
Unfortunately there’s another half (or more) of the film that follows the familiar trajectory of the maudlin ‘suffering-with-forced-stoicism’ formula. It’s meant to offset the protagonist’s inability to come to terms with his loss and bring him to his senses, but the screenplay in these portions is too watery to justify his acceptance of the oddball geriatrics he’s thrown together with.
Tariq Sheikh (Farooque Shaikh) and his wife Saira (Sarika) are both doctors who’ve lost their only son in a cinema hall shootout in the US. She takes charge and goes back to work after they wind up their life in Pune and relocate to Mumbai with the avowed purpose of drowning themselves in the cacophony. All he can do is fall to pieces, brooding into the sunset and turning his back on the world. In a poignant opening monologue he reflects on the nature of life and death and confesses to his inability to cope. She asks their psychiatrist if she loved her son less because she hasn't crumbled.
Sarika and Shaikh bring to this relationship a lived-in quality often lacking in our movies. They fit like a pair of warm socks so that when they fight and she bursts into a well of tears accusing him of being selfish, you feel like an intruder on an intimate domestic scene. Fortunately the director allows these moments to play out in long takes and in doing so, redeems himself.
But things start going wrong with the arrival of their upstairs neighbour Manubhai (Raghubir Yadav, miscast as a latter-day Anand in tight T-shirts with a repository of hackneyed jokes and Mallika Sherawat’s picture on his drawing room wall) who cuts through their solitude with the subtlety of a bulldozer.
While you can understand Saira’s eagerness in encouraging Tariq to accompany Manu to Club 60—the gymkhana where he plays tennis every morning with a bunch of friends (Satish Shah, Tinnu Anand, Sharat Saxena and Vineet Kumar)—his eventual integration with this cheerful group is rendered implausible by the contrast between Shaikh’s decorous presence and the superficiality of the proceedings around him.
It’s not the actors’ fault (though Yadav overdoes it) but that Tripathy takes recourse to clichés, giving each of them a convenient sob story and filling the gaps with pointless interludes. Here’s a film that actually offers Saxena a sizeable role before reducing him to the butt of a pitiful joke, right after we’ve watched him crying in the bathroom and empathised with his loneliness. Suhasini Mulay and Zarina Wahab are wasted and Shah is relegated to a caricature stingy-Sindhi-with-a-heart-of-gold.
Yet in a small way Club 60 conveys the isolation of the elderly, physically or emotionally distanced from their children. But it comes nowhere near the robust intelligence of The Barbarian Invasions (2003), the thoughtfulness of the French comedy All Together (2011) in which a group of old friends decide to live together and support each other in their sunset years, or even the emotional resonance of Saraansh (1986) which never loses sight of the protagonists.
On the other hand, this is Shaikh’s second lead role of the year, and in that a cause for cheer. We don’t write mature characters and our stars refuse to age gracefully so that stalwarts like Naseeruddin Shah and Om Puri are exiled to sidekick status in dreadful films. You watch Sarika, for instance, and wonder why nobody offered her anything substantial after Parzania (2005) except as forgettable prop in last year’s ham fest, Jab Tak Hai Jaan.
For the sake of its marvellous lead couple Club 60 ought to have been a better film. Then again, for them alone, it’s worth watching anyway.
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