ABSOLUTE MASTERPIECE

Guide, based on a short novel by RK Narayan is one of those rare films about which it cannot be said that the book was better. Director Vijay Anand wove such cinematic magic around the story of an ordinary man’s spiritual awakening, that its literary origins could hardly be discerned.

Anand recalls advising his brother Dev Anand not to touch to the book, he was planning to film planned as a Hindi-English bilingual, with well-known author Pearl Buck doing the English script. Vijay Anand almost didn’t direct the film, but when Raj Khosla (nixed by Waheeda Rehman) and Chetan Anand (busy with Haqeeqat) were unable to do it for Navketan, Vijay Anand was reluctantly roped in again. His condition was that he would rewrite the script and brook no interference (he hated the English script, and said in an interview “The first scene had Marco and Rosie disembarking at the station and encountering Raju. And in the next shot Rosie and the guide were in bed together. Who would accept such a hero in our country, even if he turned into a saint later?  Marco would walk away with all the sympathy that goes to a cuckolded husband.”)

 
The director of the English film, Ted Danielewski, made such a hash of it, that Dev Anand found it tough to sell the Hindi version. When it was finally released with great difficulty, industry folk were sure it would bomb. Mercifully they were proved wrong.

When Waheeda Rehman took on the role of Rosie in Vijay Anand’s Guide, she was certain she would never work in the Mumbai industry again. The character of a woman who commits adultery, puts her career over her marriage, dumps her boyfriend when he starts to stifle her, was just too strong for traditional Indian audiences. Rosie is not a heroine, she is vamp, the actress was warned. But she did it, and gave Hindi cinema one of its best female characters.

When she dances like a woman possessed to a frenzied piece of music, laughingly breaks a mud pot singing “Dil woh chala”, stands in the caves her scholar husband is studying and screams, “Marco main jeena chahti hoon,” she spoke for millions of Indian women who were suppressing their talent and suffocating in bad marriages. Rosie was a breaker of rules in a society (and by reflection a cinematic tradition) in which docile, sacrificing, suffering women were (are) the ideal.

The film, though, is not about Rosie but about the spiritual degradation and resurgence of a small town tourist guide Raju (Dev Anand). Researcher Marco (Kishore Sahu) comes to the town to visit and investigate some ancient cave sculptures, accompanied by his unhappy and neglected wife Rosie.

Marco has rescued Rosie from her disreputable surroundings, but treats her with contempt and forbids her from following her passion for dance. Raju’s streetwise charm, support and love comes at the right time, and Rosie leaves with him.

 
She becomes a famous dancer (and Waheeda danced like a dream with Master Hiralal choreographing some fabulous numbers), and quite daringly for Indian cinema, does not marry Raju, who manages her career. The relationship sours though, and due to Marco’s machinations, Raju commits forgery and goes to jail. Rosie feelings are expressed in the great number Mohe chhal kiye jaaye… dekho na saiyan beimaan, and Raju’s helplessness in Kya se kya ho gaya, bewafa tere pyar mein. A better use of songs (SD Burman surpassed himself) to deal with a highly dramatic situation and carry the narrative forward would be hard to find.

When Raju emerges from prison, he wanders into a village, where he is taken to be a sadhu. When the village faces famine, the people turn to Raju for succour and he vows to starve till it rains. His fame spreads far and the media descends on the obscure village to meet the mysterious “Swami”. Raju had not intended to keep his word, but the faith of the innocent villagers and his own conscience leads him to sacrifice his life for their sake.

Vijay Anand was completely non-judgmental about the characters—all of them, even in their moments of weakness came across as human and vulnerable. It’s not very often that one finds characters with so many complex shades in a mainstream Hindi film.

In spite of its offbeat plot and unusual characters, Guide was successful at the box office. It remains a masterpiece of popular cinema with direction, technique, storytelling, music, dance, drama, performances all coming together as a perfect whole.

INSIDE HELL

The Hurt Locker has already gone down in movie history for fetching the Oscar for its director Kathryn Bigelow, who is the first female director to have won it.

It is one of many films that have come out in recent times, criticizing the role of the US in the Middle East (this week’s other release Green Zone attacks the whole WMD fiasco), but it also makes a larger anti-war statement, and what the artificial machismo of the war zone does to the psyche of people —and never mind which side they are on (an Iraqi boy who calls himself Beckham plays an important part). The film looks disturbingly real, mainly because Mark Boal, who wrote the screenplay, was with a bomb squad in Baghdad.

Sergeant First Class William James (Jeremy Renner) is a team leader with the US'a Army's Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) unit in Iraq, having replaced a predecessor (Guy Pearce) who was killed on duty.  James does his job of defusing bombs with expertise, precision and certain reckless pride.  He works in high-risk conditions, almost relishing what he does, under the nose of the ‘enemy.’

Sergeant J.T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), heads the support team that accompanies James; it is his job to provide cover to James and give him constant audio feedback inside his heavy protective suit.  The third member of the bomb disposal squad is Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) and like Sanborn,  he too disapproves of James’s swaggering rashness.

The suspense is unbearble, which keeps the audience on tenterhooks.  This is a war film that depends not just on slam bang action, but by building layers of tension, and never losing sight of the details.
It is, what would traditionally be a man’s movie, but Bigelow doesn’t let gender get in the way.  Her point of view is humane, her observation surgical-sharp and her portrayal of the war zone has a carefully-recreated ‘everydayness’ – people, soldiers, even animals, simply go about their lives under the shadow of death.  This is what blows away the viewer… and probably won the film so much appreciation and major awards.

TRUTH HURTS

In Iraq, desperate people fight for water in a devastated.  And in the ‘Green Zone’, where the Americans are, bikini-clad women lounge by a pool, the battle raging outside is not even an echo on their luxurious haven.

Paul Greengrass’s Green Zone is scathingly critical of the US military role in Iraq, and it takes some courage to say that the Weapons of Mass Destruction that the US army went into the country to demolish, did not exist; the US government was aware of it, yet went ahead and took thousands of lives. Not only that, the men who came up with this web of deception did all they could to cover up their tracks.

The film does not claim to be based on facts, but now people are willing to believe the worst of the hawkish Bush administration, so true or not, the film works well enough as a thriller, shot in jittery documentary style, almost devoid of colour.

Matt Damon, who has done two Bourne films with Greengrass, plays Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller, who is bewildered when all their raids to find WMDs come up empty. He starts to question the accuracy of Intelligence reports and stumbles onto a conspiracy.  When he digs into the truth with the help of a local Freddy (Khalid Abdalla—terrific performance), obstacles are placed in his path.

The film has an Indian connection, it is based on Rajiv Chandrasekaran's 2006 exposé Imperial Life in the Emerald City.  The fictionalization does involve improbable co-incidences and excessive bravado, but it still makes one think.

Actors like Greg Kinnear and Brendan Gleeson turn up to play the guys who keep the wheels of US Intelligence oiled, and change sides if needed. In the murky mess, Matt Damon’s clean cut, earnest  good looks make for perfect casting. He is a brave and honest soldier, but he is not a brainless fighting robot.  Green Zone is recommended viewing.

KYON AAYI HAI?

Hindi films are usually quite verbose, but this one goes a step ahead— it tells and then shows.  Like, if a character says that ever since he was born, girls turned away from him, there is a shot of three babies in a crib and two of them turning away… the shot holds for sometime.  You get the point, but director Milap Zaveri shows the boy being rejected by girls in school and then teenagers too.

But the crucial piece of information—why is he such a turn-off—is never explained.  Does he have bad breath? Body odour?  Rajesh Parekh (Ritesh Deshmukh) does manage to turn the audience off,  because when he is not talking (and telling us what we can already see!) he is whining, or he is weeping, or he is goofing off with best friend Kaushal (Vishal Malhotra), who is obsessed with pornography—this generates a lame running game involving a porn DVD.

Still, Tara, a girl from Venus (Jacqueline Fernandez) visiting Earth to discover what Love is all about, chooses to land in Rajesh’s lap.  It is supposedly an advanced civilization—Tara can do some magic tricks—but the girl is dressed in bad cabaret dancer costume, and came to another planet without preparation. Don’t they have the intergalactic equivalent of Google on Venus?

Rajesh lives in a palace, but works as Farah Khan’s (as herself) third assistant and puts up with mistreatment, like tea being spat on his face.  He falls in love with the sister (Sonal Sehgal) of the film’s ‘superstar’ Desh (Ruslaan Mumtaz), but of course, she turns him down. So he falls in love with the alien, but to teach her about love, pushes her into Desh’s arms.

Don’t even ask why, this is not the kind of film that makes sense.  How did Zaveri (who preens on screen a couple of times) even get to make it, and garner a great deal of publicity for it?  After Aladin and now this Jaane Kahan… Ritesh Deshmukh must have figured out that he is better off doing multi-starrer comedies; one more Sad Sack act and his career will fly to Venus.   If there is an award for most annoying performance, it should go to Vishal Malhotra. And as for the one-expression-wonder Jacqueline Fernandez, maybe she could go to Mars and learn how to act.

LOST ACTION HERO

Kookie V Gulati's Prince is just as implausible as Sanjay Gadhvi's Dhoom 2. The primary difference between the two films is that Hrithik Roshan has the charisma to make the most outrageous and senseless sequences entertaining, while Vivek Oberoi doesn't have the personality to look like a action hero even when you can tell he's trying really hard. Prince isn't a film to be dissected for the quality of its content, but to be enjoyed for its sheer cheesiness. Everything from the opening diamond heist to the Hollywood-style death-defying stunts, dizzying aerial photography and high-speed chases, the villain with a mechanical arm and the three heroines (one doesn't know who they are -- except Nandana Sen in ill-fitting clothes and a tattoo on her chest -- but they're uniformly stiff) is part of the mindless thriller formula.

Prince wakes up one morning with total memory loss (a la Jason Bourne) and goes all over South Africa trying to trace the cause of his predicament. Which leads him to Sarang (Isaiah) who's in search of a 3000-year-old coin made with Ravana's blood and suffused with magical powers (yes, you've got to believe this). There are a few false leads strewn along the way (and if you've seen enough Hindi films, you'll catch each one of them), before the CBI (led by Sanjay Kapoor, who still hasn't learnt how to act!) and a secret intelligence unit called IGRIP (whatever that means) join hands with Prince and the real Maya (one of the three bimbettes) to vanquish the evil villain and restore Prince's lost memory.

It's evident the makers have spared no expense on Prince, not only from the locations, photography, stunts and special effects but also the tight leather jackets that everyone from the lead characters to the extras wear in every single frame. Oberoi gets an entire designer wardrobe to himself, a battery of fancy gadgets and endless screen time (since there really isn't anyone else to talk about), but his desperate lunge at superstardom is laughable, at best. It takes a different kind of aura to be a star and shoulder an expensive formula film. Oberoi just doesn't have it.

As a result, Prince ends up being a bad spoof of Hollywood thrillers rather than an entertaining film in its own right. You'd rather stay home and watch reruns of the Bourne series or a Bond movie instead.