Film Impressions

REVIEW: Dishkiyaoon

SHOOT AT SIGHT

Most ageing actors are forced to resort to self-parody to remain relevant. So one walked into Shilpa Shetty's maiden production Dishkiyaoon hoping to see Sunny Deol put his dhai kilo ka haath to good use. That and the promise (?) of watching Harman Baweja’s ‘revamped’ avatar. Confession: I’ve never seen the man on screen before, having miraculously escaped his debut debacle and thereafter…

REVIEW: Youngistaan

A MIDDLING EFFORT

Debutant Syed Ahmed Afzal’s Youngistaan gets my vote for two reasons—its makers had the grace to play a special tribute to Farooque Shaikh at the start of the film, and in its own ham-fisted way it exhorts the youth to vote. The film’s politics though is strictly elementary school level. So that when Abhimanyu Kaul (Jackky Bhagnani) the 28-year-old interim Prime Minister of India stands before the United Nations to make a speech about his nation's pride in being a 'Sovereign Socialist Republic' it comes off as a passage from a 5th standard civics text book.

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: Bewakoofiyaan

THE NAME SAYS IT ALL

Worse than senseless films are those with the germ of a great idea squandered in pursuit of easy gratification. Nupur Asthana’s Bewakoofiyaan falls in this category. It picks up a topical theme and fails to make a halfway decent watch of it. 

Look all around and you’ll see young people living aspirational lifestyles—branded clothes and accessories, lavish parties, fancy cars, foreign holidays and so on—sometimes beyond their means and often without putting aside for a rainy day the old-fashioned way. Habib Faisal’s script pitches the two protagonists perfectly in this paradigm.

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.