Paa: Of matters paternal, progeric and, err.. political

★★★★★★☆☆☆☆

One of the most eagerly awaited film of the year by a long shot, Paa turned out to be an alpha-gamma movie at best. Following the story of Auro-a kid with progeria (genetic disorder where ageing is sped by a factor of 10 and life seldom stretches beyond the thirteenth year), Balki-the director-writer pens a screenplay around the what-if scenario of such a kid being fatherless. So the final act’s emotional crescendo isn’t the predictable lovable-kid-with-terminal-illness-dying but a moment of grace at seeing his biological parents stop acting like high school teenagers and hold hands. It is a sublime moment no doubt, but such virtuoso writing evident in the film’s final minutes is hard to come by in its dramatically spent preceding minutes.

Thing is, as much as I want to laud Balki for thinking out of the box and giving a fresh arc to Auro and his immediate family, he’s rammed a potentially sensitive drama with a supremely grating take on the fourth estate. Turning Auro’s dad, Amol into this milkwhite spotless virtuous MP son of an erstwhile politician who takes on the irresponsible media of the country by staging a vendetta on live TV bores the wits outta you and is really so shrill it has no business being here in this already-choked-with-incident drama. One high-concept a film please, Balki. The whole subplot involving him re-allocating slum-dwellers into a whole new appartment building and then his noble gesture backfiring by a typical crony opponent who soughts out the typical unethical media-houses to brew up their staple sensational gibberish to fill air-time would probably have sunk deeper if it was left as it is: a sort of a background worry for our sagacious young leader. But then we have the whole farce of him tying things up, resolving them and tiring us unsuspecting audience with a sermon of “media in crisis” in Dolby Digital Surround. I don’t mind the virtuosity, I don’t mind the social commentary (Why I absolutely adored the opening montage of a line-up of art models by kids about their vision for India). It’s just when it’s ramrodded down my throat all the way down until I can taste the popcorn-cola sludge which was sloshing wistfully in my stomach uptil now, something’s not right. And Abhishek doesn’t sell me the persona well enough. Does he have the chops or the screen charisma of Anil Kapoor to pull off a Nayak? Sadly no. I just wasn’t convinced that from one minute to the next he goes from the wet-behind-his-ears social servant to an astute politician who uses his clout to witch-hunt the very reporters who blabbered bile about him and manages to run an exposé on television (complete with a misdirecting ad in the newspaper) to get the attention and elicit the requisite reaction from the masses.

It’s a neat ploy, but it grates on the big screen because I lost the number of times I caught Junior AB enacting this role, and also, essentially the macabre stunt is basically making a big deal about reporters behaving and reacting like normal mortals do when they have their private space invaded. The hyperbole offered obviously, and rather gratingly, with Abhishek looking straight at the camera is that the government’s not immune to reacting when it’s property is encroached, just like the media persons. Nobody’s around him to tell him to go storm the studios and offices of media-houses instead, but that’s another story. We are going for a broader black-and-white stroke here with the tone being that the media is abusing its power. Let’s face it: Balki is no Rakesh O Mehra who’d go the extra mile and question if the socially conscious commentary serves a purpose in the story (although even the latter screwed it up by going overboard in Rang De Basanti IMHO). In his head maybe it does. Well according to him, even this character does when to me he just doesn’t.

So poof goes Paa, like Cheeni Kum did since R Balki is our new social-commentator in town. And poof goes another potentially splendid chance to make something timeless. In Love Aaj Kal parlance, Paa would have had ten times the impact had the actual Paa been an aam-aadmi, you know, a mango guy. Or even if he had to have a high profile, some other less attention-grabbing profession, so our writer saab could focus on building the backstory of Auro’s parents with a little more care. Amol Arte here and his whole political shenanigans belong to a different movie altogether.

Let me tell you why Cheeni Kum, for all its flaws made for a delightful watch. It was the courtship between these two characters with an age-gap as wide as an autobahn that was written with such casual wit, such innate maturity and such freewheeling banter that it was nothing short of a revelation. So I was more than appalled when I saw the scattershot treatment of the love angle in Paa. Yes, this is a different film, but this is the same guy who showed a thing or two about two actors playing off each other (remember BigB coaxing Tabu for a nookie for the whole of Jaane Do Na) and now he comes with something as pitifully tepid as Mudhi Mudhi, shot in the style of a flashy 30 second commercial and it made me angry. Not the least because the whole bloody backstory between the supposed lovers is trash-canned in these two minutes (reminded me of the similar sacrilege done in Aaja Nachle when they compressed a specatcularly important and potentially interesting backstory of a rebellious small-time Madhuri who makes it as a single mom and choreographer in NYC in 5 minutes). So NOT DONE. I was just baffed at his directorial choices in the first half, and the fact that the second half obsesses over this couple’s standoff routine, you don’t give a damn because well, you don’t have any reason to.

So with such lax character development, you are left with Auro. Who thankfully is written with now-trademark-Balki irreverence and wit. Amitabh makes Auro work like anything despite being caged in a severely unrelenting prosthetic package as he unassumingly invades the spontaneity and physicality of a twelve year old, at the same time managing to totally convince you of the disorder. Like in Cheeni Kum, Balki makes you contemplate about age and how our paltry obsession with the number has reduced ageing to kitsch. How old are you? What’s the age gap between those two? Do this by this age and that by that. Does it really matter? These labels-how far do they take us? I love him for that, and everytime the camera lingered longer on Auro’s face, it had me going. And for all its predictability, those words spoken in that nothing-but-Auro’s voice: Maa and Paa as he hugs them, I wish I had the option to look away. Double thumbs up for BigB for being such a sport in not only kiddofying his own baritone but enjoying the littlest of scenes like only he does: oh didn’t I enjoy his jabber on all matters scatological or what! And that chimp dance routine. So Auro.

Another Balki trademark is how he characterises his kids. I was supremely cheesed off by this supposedly precocious kid in Cheeni Kum who’s terminally ill but had a lip on her that was nothing but crass and completely negated the adult-like “mature” conversations she was having. But in Paa, this works as it’s all for humour. So even if all these bawdy 12-year boors behave and talk like people double their age and are cringeworthingly affected, it’s all to get a few laughs. And laugh I did. Essentially, Auro’s arc is pretty much the same as the cancer-inflicted Sexy (rolling my eyes at her memory) of Cheeni Kum– dying kid vying to get scorned lovers to embrace each other in plain sight as he/she breathes their last. Still, the contrivance somehow is well put-together this time, although on a related note I did not care for the said lovers here. But I was happy for Auro.

And how can I end this review without a high five to Vidya Balan? All that promise she showed in Parineeta and Eklavya, it’s wonderful to see her adorn a persona that is so her. So quintessentially Indian and she just owns it. That casually hanging chignon or plait on her shoulder, that blithe drape of the saree and those sharp eyes: one look and you just believe her as the mother. Someone write a film around her pronto, such bonafide acting talent we have amidst us. And although she’s at her best, the stilted character she invades doesn’t give her much scope to really bare her fangs. Okay, it’s much better than being suffocated in Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s indulgent vehicles, and watching her do the saat pheras as Balki’s camera captures that sideways glanceof hers as she looks at Auro (encore Tabu from Cheeni Kum) is more than any female performer managed this year, but in the wake of BigB and progeria, her work might go overlooked completely. But this is so her turf. Just give the girl a few trophies so she doesn’t feel insecure enough to associate with drivel like Kismat Konnection or Heyy Baby. And thanks Balki for casting an unknown face (a theater thesp from what I hear) Arundhati Nag as her mom. The BigB-Balan-Nag trio more than undo the damage by the super sincere but perfectly inadequate Abhishek who sort of tanks the first half (with ample help from the abysmal writing) and bolsters himself somewhat in the second when he’s playing off his real-life dad but ten years on and I still see a performer so gratingly self-conscious when cast even a shade against his type, it doesn’t impress me. Performers clearly aren’t made or bred, they’re born.

So finally coming back to Balki, I’ll be looking forward to his next sure, and hopefully third time will be a real charm if he spares us the lecturing. If not, well I’ll accept that he’s doing a good thing and I am not his target audience. Shame, I know.

PS: I actually didn’t mind the goofy titles. Jaya Bachchan rattling on the cast and the crew’s names sitting on the steps, sometimes just dropping the first-name hinting at a possible acquaintance and smiling all the while, sometimes at the memory of their company, sometimes at getting the name right- it was something new. Then again, I am in the minority who adores her maternal self on the big screen, yes, complete with all the enigmatic contortions her wrinkles are capable of.

Inglourious Basterds: Not dastardly enough!

★★★★★★☆☆☆☆

Now this was disappointing. Nowhere as uproariously kickass as one’s made to believe it is [the publicity machine, the trailers, the interviews... everything], but still, has enough chops and enough amusing detail with casually humoured irreverence for it to be counted one of the best of the year (yes that’s how mediocre 2009 has been for the movies). What’s rather amusing is that in the wake of recent findings with regards to Hitler’s demise and all the speculations of his whereabouts in the final days, this is as much a plausible watch as the morose Das Undertang (Downfall).

Tarantino’s obsession with exposition and his care for the conversations that his characters have is admirable considering that he is a juggernaut of a popular icon, but since Kill Bill he isn’t able to imbibe the consistent wit that his earlier works sported [Okay by "since Kill Bill" I really mean Kill Bill Vol.1 and 2, and would exclude Death Proof which had some of the most phenomenal lines spoken by the baddest-ass females in Hollywood history], but really here, some of the interactions could have been shorter by atleast 10 minutes and would have lost none of the impact and atmosphere. The good thing is when Tarantino makes these talkie scenes work, it is at key plot-points. Like the opening scene where a Jew-hiding remote Frenchman is quizzed by SS Officer Hans Landa the “Jewhunter” or the introductory Inglourious Basterds interrogation and “scalping” or the lengthy scene at the tavern which smugly extends for about half an hour in the middle of the movie. Even though most of these sequences are going for the quiet-lull-before-ammunition-and-bloodstorm conceit rather exagerratedly, especially for Tarantino-regulars who have unravelled the panning-out before it all pans out. they still work. As do the two-three interrogation scenes of Landa.

But my main grouse with the film is it wasn’t as crazily misogynist or as full-throttle a primordial action-comedy as I wanted it to be. Yes, Tarantino and his writers do a splendid spin on the whole Nazi and Führer spectre, have gone wild penning two disparate threads of conspiracies to assassinate the moustached devil but there’s a nagging feeling they’ve taken themselves a tad too seriously and let the less amusing parts stretch on to overbear on the actual Basterds with their thuggish Nazi-homicide-shenanigans.I would have loved to see the latter track dunked in more action as Tarantino directs action like a pro. The two-three sequences he lays his teeth bare and gets his boys gun-toting and blowing things up-he’s in his element.

In stark contrast to when he’s tapping into a runaway-Jew’s anxiety as she sits across the table and being interrogated by the officer who mutilated her family which comes across as unnecessarily maudlin, predictable and poisons the purpose of this “alternative” historical piece.

All’s not lost because he’s got a super-efficient cast. Christopher Waltz is simply glorious as the slimy multi-lingual silver-tongued SS officer nicked as the Jewhunter and gives us the year’s most devious and memorable villian by taking every line of Tarantino and turning it into movie-magic. His scenery-chewing charisma is matched by a soaringly photogenic and unassumingly winsome turn by Melanie Laurent, whose track of a Jewish-lass-in-vengeance-mode is downtoned to almost-Schindler’s-List-grimness and contrasts the whole Tarantino badass mood, but she still managing to hold her own.

In what are extended cameos, Brad Pitt and Eli Roth as the key Basterds bring down the house with how much they are enjoying the lines they’ve been given, and by the end of it all, you WISH you saw more of these, and I am going to hold this against Tarantino bigtime. Awfully funny characters with a rabidly street-smart sense of humour and memorable antics, with more thought and development of these characters would really have turned these Basterds glorious, but alas, Tarantino wants us to take him seriously and take us on a joyride. Which is weird because the whole world takes him seriously when he takes them on a joyride.

So there you have it, some misdirected ambition of an auteur brings down a potential masterpiece as a flawed-above-average action-historical-spoof with a dream of a premise but flanked with more drama than it can handle. Still, this is some of the most fun I’ve had at the movies. And yes, the production design, the look and the detailing absolutely add to the experience. Motifs like glass of milk, wrist-mounted mini sling-guns, combustible film reels and subtitles for not one but three European languages go a long way in giving this film a flavour all its own. And since this is a Tarantino venture, rest assured it will be referred and referenced ad nauseum countless times whenever coffee-table conversations turn towards the Holocaust films and nostalgia for the 90s hard-as-nails Tarantino of Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs fame.

A Christmas Tale (French): Dysfunctional family h(e)aven?

★★★★★★★★☆☆

Now how unassumingly elegant is this! Imagine The Royal Tenenbaums [without Wes Anderson's screaming "oh we are so quirky and dysfunctional, look at us: we are so funny!"] meets Noam Baumbach via some over-plotting courtesy Almodovar. Apologies for the references to communicate this movie’s flavour, but Arnaud Desplechin’s work has eluded me till now, and I was so humbly surprised at the gorgeous, equipoised kitchen sink drama he’s created with such heart-rendingly warm strokes, I just had to say I absolutely heart the guy’s work.

A couple next door has a son with a rare lymphoma. He dies and they go on and have three more. They all grow in different directions, two boys and a girl, eliciting varying degrees of love, attention from their parents and each other, until an inexplicable hatred takes form between the sister and the elder brother and takes such a shape that when we meet these two characters some 20 years on, as the sister is bailing out his brother by paying all his debts in court, she explicitly keeps the condition of never seeing him from that day on. Banished from the family, the brother [played by Mathieu Amalric] already reeling from his wife’s death, drifts about until five years later when the materfamilias of the main family is diagnosed with a rare cancer which sends all the kids and the grandkids into blood and marrow testing frenzy to find a compatible donor. With Christmas on the anvil, the father of the family decides to invite all the three kids with their respective families, and as is predictable, a good amount of dirty linen gets cleaned over the four-five days.

The film is endearingly patient and the director’s out to capture the littlest of ways family members seek out to each other: reacting to each other’s idiosyncracies; having dinner table arguments; scoffing, sharing, insulting, entertaining, confronting, punching, persecuting, then reconciling; reveling in each other’s fortunes and misfortunes in the year gone by; getting exasperated and finding oxygen by driving each other mental with grudges of the past and  snuggling into the warmth of some random shared nostalgia respectively: it’s all here in this true-to-life snapshot of three generations brought under one roof for five days. All of it suffused by Desplechin’s feather-light touch, his use of snug interior glow to light up shots, and some beautiful background score [it helps the family in question-Vuillards, everyone plays an instrument].

The psychological accuracy and eloquence one witnesses in a disillusioned brother’s letter to his embittered sister or the way the head of the family quotes from a work alluding about the nature of knowing oneself when asked by his daughter what she’s lost and why she’s so misunderstood are just some of the choicest moments when you get to appreciate how beautifully written this film is.

The rest of the running time, just watching members of this family interacting with and interpreting each other  is where the movie draws almost all its charm. And the good thing is they all have a terrific sense of humour. The whole ensemble is natural to the core. Catherine Denueve as the mother-head is class personified, Mathieu Amalric who I thought I could never visualise as anything but as Jean-Dominique Bauby in the last year tour-de-force Diving Bell and the Butterfly seamlessly melts into another compelling male-portrait and is everybit the misunderstood brother/ignored son as Herni could be, and as the seething with bile sister Elizabeth, Anne Consigny manages to elicit sympathy. Besides, I’d wonder who could watch JP Rousillon and not reminisce about their own grandparents. What’s also endearing is Desplechin’s care for detail for all the distressful medical procedures that the family members have to go through, so you have Amalric flashing his bandaged derrieré, Denueve getting her sternum marked and stabbed for bone marrow biopsy and a small montage of meiosis under a microscope.

So there you have it, a supremely identifiable tragicomedy about lymphoma, schizophrenia, diametrically opposite siblings, Christmas, overmelancholic parents, brothers deciding amongst themselves who’s most deserving of a girl they all have fallen for (or slept with) and also about Christmas wine, Christmas decorations, dinners, Midsummer’s Night Dream on TV, long night walks in snow, midnight masses and moms connecting with their boys’ girls and wives and grandads giving grandchildren warm baths and uncles forgetting their nephews’ names. Cinema verité of the most universal resonance.

Sublime, honest and absorbing, Un Conte De Noel AKA A Christmas Tale is one film to cherish. Released in 2008 amidst some other equally compelling dysfunctional family dramas like Rachel Getting Married and Margot at the Wedding, catch its trailer here:

What’s Your Raashee? : A yarn well spun!

★★★★★★★★☆☆

After Delhi 6 and Luck By Chance earlier this year, if there’s another movie that’ll slip under the radar before you could recover from a festive weekend it is What’s Your Raashee? Unlike the other two, it hasn’t sent the so-called critics fighting or raving. It is given a unanimous thumbs down from the niggling, finicky intelligentsia that would rather revel in ho-hum life lessons of two “fuck-ups” on a road trip in remote America to work out what it takes to be parents: yes I am talking about Sam Mendes’ twee and slight Away We Go, a film he started and completed while doing post-production for his infinitely superior Revolutionary Road. Now I am a fan of Mendes and all, and I have seen Away We Go, but it is nothing more than a bittersweet familiar-quirky indie that is less profound and funny than it thinks it is, but what has really gotten to me is how everyone on the desi writing scene has trumped and patronised this over a well-scripted, painstakingly mounted and performed homegrown socio-comic drama like What’s Your Raashee? Yes, opinions are like belly buttons and all but the unfair amount of snobbery WYR has and will be putting up is just befuddling. More importantly, it is quite disorienting to think that in their over-analysis and hyper-dissecting ways, even reviewers who one assumes to discern good cinema from bad, cannot be trusted to spot a good film when they see one. Pardon the overtly righteous tone here but I was at loss of words when I came out of the cinema at the number of misgivings I had about this. It swells my heart no end to see a director telling a story so well. Ashutosh Gowariker has again crafted a piece of motion picture that is wholly suffused with heart and pathos and imagination and is so quintessentially Indian and all the more original for that, that it will find appreciation as days, months and years go by. Or atleast that is what I hope. It is not cinema gold, and it is certainly not his best but it is definitely close, and not far behind, respectively. To compare what Gowariker makes when he is on a break to what Mendes does is just something to ponder upon as both the auteurs’ recent work hits the screens simultaneously.

Yogesh is an NRI-boy who’s being emotionally blackmailed to fly back and then forced to marry in ten days to get his big brother out of debt-the scheme being an exacting-for-virtue grandad who’d will all his assets to Yogesh the day he ties the knot. He lands and after casually shrugging off the hoodwinking, finds an Indian Linda Goodman-esque paperback snuggled between spines of Gujarati literature during a jetlagged insomniac night and in a Eureka moment, infuses this obligation for the family with his version of incentive by looking for twelve brides in ten days with the notion that this will offer him a chance to make the journey to the decision less arduous, more fair and infinitely more interesting [we are led to believe that our affable leading guy isn't all that "into" the fantasy-world of soothsaying horoscopes, sunsigns, kundlis and more such ilk]. Clearly,WYR has an imaginative ring to its premise and it delivers from the word go.

Even in this first half hour of the first act of this movie, there are moments of such touching sublimity, like what compels Yogesh to say yes to the parade that is an Indian arranged marriage in that moment where he’s served water by his sis-in-law who just glances teary-eyed and in that look lays bare of how hapless and humiliated she is of being tied to a dork like Yogesh’s big brother. Even Yogesh’s attitude towards his family, regardless of how infinitely different their viewpoints on marriage, partners and life might be, is commendable. There isn’t any indulgent rebellion or wallowing in tiresome despair, just moving on to the next step of trying to make the best of what is presented to him. I found this inherent curiosity of his to see “where it all leads to”, the spring-in-step embracing pacifism really mature and endearing. Besides Harman’s underplay really helps the cause. He’s a good-humoured, assured geezer who doesn’t wag his ass back to Amreeka at the ludicrous proposal being put in front of him (essentially a lose-lose proposition for him) where if he doesn’t wed, the debt-ridden family will be forced to go into hiding and if he does hitch up, the chances of him truly ending up with The True Love of his life are next to nil given the time constraint.

And so his journey starts with an awkward Arian, and I won’t solemnly dissect her awfully funny quirks here, but just that she attempts to smoke, drink, drop awkward English syllables to impress. And is caught. There’s a touching minute of sentimental confession that reveals how she went along with her dad to tutor herself with stereotypical personality paraphernalia [listed above!] to impress an NRI boy. Then there’s the upfront Aquarian who reveals she’s taken and it would be better if she’s rejected after a facile drive around town, which reveals Yogesh’s got much up his sleeve with vocals and guitar as a terrific male-aria fills the auditorium, Jaao Naa (only jarring moment being the husky chorus-y vocals that Priyanka’s cords elicit are unintentionally hilarious). And then to a Gemini overgrown teenager, with whom Yogesh, clearly in his element with locking and popping at her college festival, in a telling moment reveals how he’d react if his other half is switched off impressing the young lady who’s obsessed with screen/romcom versions of love. Then there’s the cryptic Cancerian who’s aggrieved by an ex who walked over her to knock someone else up. Decked up in ashen pink and Dabur Vatika tresses, you’d think she’s a doe-eyed starlet trying her best to look convincing in a Star Plus soap, but she’s not. What’s more, it takes just one interaction on the balcony to intrigue Yogesh how deep the pathos runs in an otherwise integrity-laced maiden. Then the Libran corporate vixen with a 24/7 attached to her hip and a business-approach to marriage replete with pre-nup who sets the scene for a thoroughly imaginative and enjoyable absurdist-scifi-comic-fantasy dance. Followed by a creepy reincarnation-believer with an overbearing dad who, in another expository fantasy (where the Sridevis and Madhuris are channeled in a cliffside windy routine and Piggy Chops gets to heave a requisitely padded bosom) later, when reveals on feeling suffocated in the room is greeted by a fabulous comeback by a creeped out Yogesh who comments on feeling suffocated in his body. The comedy is fabulously toned-down, timing terrific, writing just crisp enough. And interactions have space to breathe. It might last a good 192 minutes but the movie’s characters, its 12 girls, Yogesh’s family and their conflicts and joys during the space of this one month stay with you.

Post-intermission, a split-personality Scorpion, an underage Capricorn [10 minutes of this is more effective than the heinously exploitative and shamefully regaled-as-the-next-big-thing TV soap Ballika Vadhu], a virtuous Virgo doctor, a slutty Sagitarean pujarini, a rumbustious theatre performing Leo who gives an earful to Yogesh for giving the roadside ice-gola a snub or finally a princess Taurean playing cuckoo to dissuade suitors with a wanton eye… What’s Your Rashee? is forever engaging. Sometimes with its broad farce, sometimes with its ever-so-pertinent character-elaborating ditties where the things unsaid and the spontaneous flights of emotion get a musical voice, and sometimes with its wholly convincing drama. It doesn’t fail to baffle me in how many ways WYR could’ve gone wrong and unspooled as a tired mess, and how it never does. Of its many triumphs, foremost is its writing. Like it should be for a drama as seeped in surreality as in reality. Then be it the emotional heft given by the family’s whole debt-ridden theatrics, or the comic froth risen by the illicit dalliance of the matchmaking uncle of Yogesh which besides adding to a pre-climactic Wodehousian ruckus of sorts cushions the unpredictable meetings of Yogesh with the girls with a continuous comic sponge.

The organic nature of all the meetings: some ending abruptly, some on an ugly note, some suffused with feel-good but truncated by priorities; it just adds so much plausibility to the proceedings, you believe in Yogesh’s journey. Vignettes hardly exceeding fifteen minutes sure, but within their on-screen time constraint they mimic the slippery slope of state of affairs that an arranged marriage always is. And yes, the impact of first impressions, the first dates, first encounters: every glance, every smile passed, every tear-swollen eye, every anecdote shared and every sarcastic remark pointed demands attention here, which thanks to Gowariker’s keen eye, gets it. The guy wears his social conscience on his sleeve alright but never for a moment plods on with it. Accessible, trendy and rooted, his male protagonist, Yogesh’s reactions to his 12 hopefuls is as interesting as a single actress’s enactment of the 12 disparate girls replete with quirks, aspirations, pasts and futures. It taps into the gravitas and grandeur that comes with an institution like marriage with the traditional joint family is evoked as lovingly as in the early Barjatyas and his winking-smirking magic-realistic touch to cast a singular face in twelve different visages is a celebration of and a comment on the diversity of the 21st century Indian female experience on one level besides the more obvious one of every girl’s essential sameness from a curious groom’s vantage point is downright fantastic. Plus is there a guy who captures everyday kitchen-sink, drawing room interactions as lovingly as he does without resorting to easy caricaturism? Straight up, No.

Priyanka Chopra’s spectacular turn as the twelve wholly disparate characters are filled with enough nuance and meticulous, tasteful subtlety (when she could have so gone for a broader, straighter, cartoonish OTT version to ram the character in the audience’s psyche given she barely has 15-20 minutes to leave an impression on us and her on-screen to-be groom) that deserves nothing but accolades. The gorgeous and intuitive lass is going from strength to strength and we are all the more thankful she’s constantly up for a challenge. And Harman Baweja is everybit the sincere Gowariker hero that this script asked for. In one of the many self-referencing moments in the film, he’s your non-steroid-buffed, ethical and moral hundred percent Indian male. All my skepticism of the boy’s talent has been laid to rest by his confident, charming underplay. Poor man’s Hrithik he might be, but then this film did require an everyman persona with some Bollywood flourish. Both these, or rather 13 of these main characters are scaffolded ably by a whole motley of Gowariker-staple character actors and theatre and TV thesps each of whom retain the uproariously funny, inconsolably Gujju and often mesmerisingly sublime tone of this upanyaas of a flick. The production design is detailed (Nitin Desai, I heart you), Priyanka’s looks supremely entrenched in the milieu her 12 characters inhabit, the music very situational but jeweled by Jaao Na, Kitne Chehre, Aa Chal and Su Che, and the ode to performing arts other than the movies along with the ample jazz inserts and detailing is slick. Moreover it breaks new ground by taking two extremely over-shot and over-commented aspects in the romcom genre: compatibility and marriage, putting a whole new spin of archaic tosh about horoscope on this and somehow managing to deliver something that flows, and has a thing or two to say about the times we live in.

In all, a genuinely feel good social dramedy filled with good people making sensible choices and elevating their life experience, this is one movie you can enjoy with your family.

Ghostwritten by David Mitchell: Splendifantabulicixcellent!

★★★★★★★★★☆

This is sheer awesomeness on the printed page. An un-put-downable epic contemporary odyssey spanning whole continents and fusing themes as disparate as gas attacks, global terrorism, geopolitics, Eastern mysticism, quantum mechanics, looming apocalypse, ghostwriters, radio jockeys, transmigrating incorporeal spirits, futuristic robots in moral dilemmas: all these  with such alarming surefootedness and erudition, it instantly earns the masterpiece badge. If I had to allude this multi-layered work, I would use the analogy of blood-the ubiquitous fluid seemingly flowing smoothly through our arteries, veins and capillaries in a homogenous liquid form, but once centrifuged, separates elegantly into its constituents in vitro.

For the life of me I cannot believe I let something as seminal as this just pass below my radar for so many years now. Besides the fact that it is so intellectually accomplished and informed, the anticipatory tone in the thread of global terrorism and politics is oddly chilling given that the book’s publishing year is 1999 and consequently, the way things panned out right from the first year of this decade.

Contemporary almost to a fault, I am in a fix whether I should string a bouquet of adjectives for Mitchell’s prose or for being a stylist-extraordinaire as Ghostwritten’s first major triumph is its structure. The hyperlink format of seemingly unconnected characters and narrators scattered across the world linked slimly-almost amorphously [sometimes by a chance encounter, at other times a distant metaphor, or as a faraway acquaintance or just as a passing, unlikely knowledge or suggestion], any lesser author would have bludgeoned the format to ramrod the connections home. Mitchell crafts these connections as delicately as a miniaturist and as unceremoniously as a clerk, making you half-smile in awe at the sheer subtlety.

And then there are the stories themselves, each one mounted with milieu, atmosphere, tone and dialogue so contrastive, it is almost like reading nine separate, self-sufficient novellas. The attention to detail never slips. MItchell, almost like a polyphonic ventriloquist adopts wholly different and convincing voices and leaves you spellbound.

Also noticeable is how much heart he invests in the conflicts of these characters. Be it the disorientation of a criminally brainwashed rookie gas-bomber in Okinawa, or a saxophonist in Tokyo in a dilemma of taking the plunge in love, or your average exec-next-door in Hongkong losing it one fine day, or the desolation and despair of a female trapped in a Tea Shack in a remote Chinese province all her life: with Mitchell’s pen everything from the most personal of hallucination to the most epic sweep of national politics, nothing passes by without creating a ripple of the most personally profound version. Soul-vibrating so to speak. Sharp and effective, as he shifts his scenes later to Petersburg, then to Trans-siberian Express, then to the arid expanses of Mongolia to posh suburbs of London, his delivery no matter how divergent, never falters. And so do his human stories. Peopled by real, complex characters throughout, they all feel like they belong where Mitchell puts them.

I cannot get that transmigrating incorporeal entity flitting from person to person in the parched expanses of Mongolia to find the source of a story integral to its existence out of my head or the Big Brother-esque cyborg conjured by fantastical quantum cognition cybernetics called “Zookeeper” calling up a late-night radio show and laying bare his ethical predicaments and laying on thick the detail and quality of sensitive information and views he has at the snap of his fingers. Even the most ethereal creatures here present with such identifiable ruminations, you are beguiled all the way.

Then another virtue here is that drama’s potency isn’t intruded upon. Ever. Like in the Ireland thread, there’s the welling emotion as we follow the story of a moral physicist-turned-global-fugitive in the wake of her scholastic research and her expertise being bound to service militaristic objectives of Uncle Sam and how acutely she misses her loving blind husband, her bright son and her caring town as she’s running for her life. That care is never messed with. No matter how many stylistic traps he employs, for example here his flitting between different timelines of the same character his care for the human figures and their existential, emotional, intellectual conflicts resonates through, making formidable characters you root for.

The style always complements the emotion and the machinations of real memory, real life reminisces, real life thought-speech, besides adding a distinct personality to every one of the nine stories. Like there is the wizened 30-something bloke from London whose indulgent and hilarious internal monologues on everything from London Underground to ghostwriting in general had me in raptures [Mitchell's humour is on full show when he remains inland], but as the final sequence unfolds with him betting away the only money available to him, I could feel the tension and the stakes as he responded to every spin of roulette. It is that honest and liberated. Plus in true Murakami style, I completely fell for his winsome, unfussy stream-of-consciousness style and jazz-affinity in the Tokyo storyline.

In all, this was one breathtakingly ambitious work that intrigues, charms, challenges, enlightens and completely mesmerizes with its sheer sheer sheer sweep! After Murakami’s Hard Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World and Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, I never thought I would come across anything in this definition-defying genre. Mitchell, as Murakami’s successor proves me wrong, to my relief I must add. I am really keen to see if he himself can better this bold and big absurdist-science-fiction-cum-socio-poitical-contemplative-fantasy-drama-esoterica-medley with his Cloud Atlas, for I cannot think of an equal.

A really original book that has re-written the rules of how mainstream fiction can be written, Ghostwritten is a stylistic tour-de-force and a genuine saga of our times that affirms one’s belief in the mind-numbing complexity and similarity of human experience!