Luck By Chance: Finally, Bollywood has its own “Extras”

 

 

It had to take new blood to infuse new life into cinema. And this is going to be a cracker of an year for the Bollywood, I can just feel it. The corporate bubble’s burst, the ridiculously over-paid and over-exposed male troika have whored their brand value to the point where their very name on the credits make discerning viewers shun the thought of seeing the movie on the big screen, and the turf is spectacularly fertile for new ideas, new ways of storytelling, new brand of acting and emoting. In all, Bollywood’s foray into avant garde cinema this time around will be more creative. It is an exciting time at the movies and what better movie to spearhead the new year than Luck By Chance.

LBC isn’t perfect but its sensibilities and aesthetic reek of refinement and level-headed-ness seldom seen in Indian cine,a. Chartering the graph of a struggling actor and a starlet in the world of Hindi film industry, it has the familiar trappings to eke out drama-success morphing a person, the familiar growing-up lessons where the protagonist gets carried away and then retreads his steps. But, and this is a huge one, the screenplay is unflinching in offering not redemption, but a bittersweet realisation. In fact it does one better and switches perspective completely in the final 10 minutes as we have the homecoming star doing a heartfelt guilt-ridden speech to his erstwhile sweetheart who believed in him when no-one else did. The girl buys the earnestness of the apology no doubt, but not the guy’s reasons and point of view. And she tells him outright, it is none of his fault either, it is really how some people are. Its all about them. The guy weeps. It is sad to be told that, especially in a weak moment. She looks away not wanting the emotion of the moment to cloud her voice of reason. And from then on, the whole perspective of the movie changes as we have a really wise monologue from the girl who’s at peace with who she is, what she has achieved in life and her definitions of “success” and “failure”, two words this movie and its characters are obsessed with. That, and luck. And rightly so, given the context of India and the soul-shatteringly competitive world of Bollywood. 

Other than the novel graph and the final act, the movie plays like an unpretentious insider’s view of the insider and is blessed with splendid wit and intelligence. I mean, the lady manages to pull a Gervais on Bollywood in her debut stroke. And so expertly at that. Just look at the credits of the four cameos-Aamir (playing himself as the uber-perfectionist auteur in a delicious period piece directed by Raju Hirani no less), ShahRukh (playing the familiar grounded superstar forever ready to spill life’s truisms), Kareena, Diya Mirza (the latter taking not even a dialogue to chew everything around her-her reaction at the grand inaugration party to Farhan’s character is piece de resistance) and Anurag Kashyap (watch him suggest an artsy script-addition at which he gets rebuked by Rishi Kapoor who takes dig at his festivalesque sensibilities or get vexed over the star-daughter’s Hindi pronounciation-so much so he has to change the word khoon to murder, clearly an in-dig at Javed Akhtar’s obsession with language). There’s Karan Johar and Manish Malhotra too spilling some inside beans or having a giggle on the in-jokes. You can even spot Javed Akhtar and Shabana Azmi (I think this is the first time I have seen her not say a dialogue on camera) sharing industry jokes. 

Not only that, it is the level of performance she has managed to juice out of every one of the actors that makes me admire her. Every character is perfectly cast or is cast and written around their strengths (Yea, I will stick to the latter explanation thanks to all those casting stories I have read in Zoya’s soundbytes in the last 4-5 years) and the end-result is excellent. The ensemble looks so comfortably cosetted in the film’s environment, you just believe them from the word go. Its difficult to choose who comes up trumps but the motley of 10 performers that people most of LBC’s frames all have their charms. Farhan Akhtar’s got the face of an actor-that which folds and screws itself up on every expression and he is intelligent enough to know it. His character arc is probably the most familiar but his underplay and approach to projecting emotions is refreshing, although his voice undoes quite a lot of his scenes which play like extensions of his ego-clashes in Rock On or the arguments he might have in real life. He is more or less playing himself in these movies and is lucky enough to have the clout who can write material around him. Still, there isn’t a dint of complacency and he’s sincere all the way through. For Konkona Sen, Sona is a cakewalk. She plays it straight mostly as her character requires her to, and I wasn’t bowled over by her characterisation at first which played as an extension of her other urban angsty characters, but the final showdown right uptil the credits is all hers. This extra layer of borderline-unlikeability of this now-hardened egg challenges you and it is to Koko’s credit, you are able to see this change in hers. That and the one scene where she slams the mag on the face of her snooping-journo-friend in his office has a believable dramatic flourish.

And then there are the supporting performers. All brilliant. All totally tuned-in and pitch-perfect to the last decibel. There’s Rishi Kapoor as the old-school-producer who can talk the talk but is exasperated by the present-day workings (watch him explain how much he paid the now-superstar in his first film and getting all animated, swivelling in chair for effect to Farhan–its comedy genius! Or when he refuses the skimpily clad Isha to not touch his feet, I died laughing!), then his airy-fairy numerology-astology-swearing socialite wife played with smiles-forever Juhi Chawla who just radiates the frame with her harmless, thankless presence only once coming to foreground to hold her husband’s hand in that one crucial moment he gets all sour with the world around him. Then there is Hrithik Roshan playing a warped version of himself (in true Extras style)- the superstar who secretly leaps on knowing a colleague’s been through an accident but is introspective enough to know the current project is proper sh*t on toast and what it would do to his image (the monologue to his producer-Rishi Kapoor is hilarious of why he can’t continue is well done). The star manages a time out with the urchins across the window of his 4×4 when he’s tired from whining about his delusory director and it made me glad no end that Mr Roshan finally did something as real as this after some 5 years of treating us with bloated, over-budget pap.

Sanjay Kapoor as the delusional debutante director who’s managed a break thanks to his influential brother (oh the in-digs never end!), and finally the fiery mother-daughter duo played with relish by Dimple Kapadia (watch her bare her fangs as a scoop on her debutante daughter makes it to a cinemag or revel in the ass-kissing courtesy Farhan, and her suspicions and the way she observes and reacts to people-ah just to watch this lady perform I can see LBC again) and Isha-Kisna-Shravani (Man, how my heart ached as I watched her do the ridiculous sidekick routine in last year’s stinker U Me Aur Hum and how it made me smile to see her perform so ably-she brings to LBC what Amy Adams brings to most of her movies-she’s at once gorgeous, hilarious, dumb, disillusioned-the insufferable hormonal bimbo with much beneath the surface, I loved her). Then there are the guys playing Farhan’s friends (one a depressing idealist, the other a lightweight opportunist) and then there’s this all-heart woman playing Aly Khan’s wife… I could go on and on.     

The movie’s canvas is very varied, and when it occasionally switches gears to pay ode to the ever-reliable dance routine it does it with a tinge of its own brand of craziness. Baawre is like Dholi Taaro imagined by Wachowskis. And I loved it. The whole carnival feel, the mad choreography, the funny lines, the hilarious choice of fabrics and Hrithik managing to make even the most audacious of moves look amazing. Attaboy! And yes, how can we not do without that one number playing in the background to manipulate us into feeling for the guy on screen? So we have an expected lyrical delight Sapnon se Bhare Naina as Farhan Akhtar enters the derelict audition studio which is chock-full with boys as driven, as struggling as him. And the whole realisation comes like a waterfall… there are loads like him, in fact worse off than he is and probably even more driven, how is he going to impress in this competition? Will his luck bail him out? Its a beautiful moment and thankfully pondered over for the whole five minutes of the terrific song.

And most of all the film’s tone, its visual and acoustic mood treads a fine balance between stark realism and escapist fun. It doesn’t take itself too seriously, nor has used the backdrop of Bollywood to extract laughs (I think I have had my fill thanks to OSO and the endless TV comedy shows). It manages to be something more- lofty (one’s path in life dictated by random strokes of chance or one’s choices or a bit of both?), surreal and wistful (the opening credits have to be seen to be believed).  What remains consistent throughout is the warmth in the movie’s tone. The characters are all lovingly sketched and it is a movie that has terrific repeat-value because its so well-written and so well-directed. Its not perfect, it feels at times a tad long and indulgent (nothing unusual considering this is Zoya Akhtar’s first labour of love), but its got the subtlety and understanding for the medium that it is inhabiting and satirising at once that exploitative jerks like Bhandarkar can’t even touch. Easily one of the most emotionally evolved and layered urbane dramadies to come out of Bollywood. Kudos to the Akhtar tribe for adding so much to Indian cinema.

My rating: *** and 1/2  out of 5   

Rock On (Hindi)

Grossly (and understandably) over-rated urban buddy drama that given the context of its release year and the current mindset of the Indian youth, is a cult classic already. Much of its victory comes, and that is one of the reasons I liked it, despite not a patron of the rock genre, is that its not self-consciously yuppie and it pursues what it set out to do, i.e. to chart a rock band’s journey with the honesty, understated warmth and believability that puts it squarely out of the wannabe category.

The fact that Farhan Akhtar’s a not-so-great vocalist only adds to the edginess and real-life factor of the rock performances each of which are splendidly shot. What I couldn’t make peace with is the lazy writing when it came to the characters whose profile read like extensions of DCH’s male leads. And even though the conflicts and the dilemmas and the stakes seem a little lightweight and the “issues” that this motley of 30-somethings are captured brooding over is more suited to guys atleast a decade younger, the actors (Rampal and debutante Farhan Akhtar) are convincingly real to give the movie’s graph a distinct resonance. And yes, as India’s first out-and-out rock film, this one deserves kudos!

Don-The Chase Begins: Movie Review

Don (2006): * and 1/2

How do you go about critiquing a movie which is so mediocre it doesn’t evoke any emotion from the viewer? Having just come out of the screening, I am so numb with disappointment, that there’s neither any incentive to praise this piece of crap, nor the energy left to bash it with junky adjectives. Since when did Bollywood mainstream movies become so utterly predictable and so totally boring? Have film-makers absolutely lost the sense of having a proper graph, having good dialogue and good characterisations? Where is the integrity in the screenplay, and where’s the feel or a sense of thrill, tension, pace and seeing something that isn’t simply staged and rehearsed? And all this when its actually a remake of a decidedly over-the-top (it was the 70s) yet taut-to-the-last-scene thriller of the yesteryears. Despite all the special effects and marketing gimmickery, the new Don is proof of Hindi cinema’s storytelling quality spiralling downward with such godspeed that if a few good films don’t release fast, even the most hardcore Bollywood devotees wouldn’t touch the stuff belched out of this industry with a bargepole.

2 hours later, after calming down a little, I was able to put together a few thoughts about why this movie simply didn’t work for me and have randomly stuffed them in a few points below:

1. I must have repeated this line so many times reviewing the biggies from Bollywood this year (Fanaa, Phir Hera Pheri, Krrish, KANK), its probably lost all its meaning. But still I’ll say it again–Don is unpardonably boring; a staged, fake bore-a-thon that’s neither got the pace nor the tension that a good thriller so badly needs. And for a mainstream movie, that is a sin. A cardinal sin. Its a general rule that whatever it takes, your prime focus should be to involve the audience in such a way that a common thread or theme keeps them intrigued with charismatic stars; elaborate, showy dance numbers; over-the-top melodrama; plot-holes so big you can ride road-rollers in and co-incidences to drive home the point under 3 hours only adding to the fun factor.

To start with, Don doesn’t have a common thread or theme to speak of. It starts off as a bland cat-and-mouse chase between the police and the ever-growing-self-professed-kingpin SRK, then quickly changes gears to this kingpin getting seduced and attacked by vengeance-driven women (aka Kareena and Priyanka) thanks to his itch of bumping off his right-hand men who always turn out to be seductresses’ bhais, then somewhere in between him getting bumped off and replaced by a UPite-bandwala twin by a cop (Boman Irani) who plants him as a mole in this stylised cocaine-land, and then a whole load of fuss about a CD containing all the account details and passwords of drug lords of the world the semantics of which are so braindead, my head hurts. There’s another angle of an IT security fella (Arjun Rampal) who’s had his wife and son held at ransom and when asked to rob hundreds of crores worth of diamonds, the guy obliges and gets caught by the same cop who’s leaving no stone unturned to expose the drug mafia. Unable to complete his part of the deal, Rampal’s wife is killed and his son, who’s left to fend on the streets, is adopted by the UPite bandwala twin of DON. The two big twists of the movie are *SPOILERS*–Is the cop really doing what we think he’s doing? And Is the UPIte twin of the DON really the one we think he is? I guess the tone of these two questions have given them off but since I am not recommending the movie anyways, I am not bothered. And the question really isn’t whether the two twists shock or not, its actually–do we care? The answer is a resounding no.

2. Shahrukh Khan is hopelessly miscast as the DON. As the shaking, spindly, anorexic, and irritatingly animated ganglord he’s basically the twitching loverboy who’s seen the old Don probably too many times. Not only is the actor crippled by his own physicality (its just the wrong baritone–lines like “I’m the king” are unintentionally funny, wrong physique–even Boman Irani and Arjun Rampal look more upto the job of bashing people up and indeed kick some serious SRK-ass) which makes him look eerily like a kid playing “let’s pretend” amidst hefty men; his perpetual pouting, and hyper-expressing gives away the lines much before he’s mouthed them. And there’s simply no presence or no meany threatful menace to this Don, which is quite saddening as SRK was really in his element when he played grey in Darr and Baazigar not forgetting his hilarious yet convincing turn as Baadshah. Now, everytime the fidgety SRK attempts a swagger, its more of a catwalk, and everytime he utters the supposedly tough-yet-cool lines from the old Don, it looks like a college teenager cheesily trying to make a pass. And this when the movie isn’t even a spoof. His now-routine attempts at sauve sarcasm and rustic tomfoolery fall totally flat not because they are badly written, but because he does them in a way that shouts “Can I have some claps for what I just did?”. Of late, he’s also mistaken acting for a collage of similar windblown close-up shots of his goggled face which is becoming very tiresome to watch. Its all disheartening as this character had some brilliant scope had it been done with silent, sauve unpredictability-words this Khan has flushed down his toilet sometime in the late 90s. Compared to him, both Boman Irani and Arjun Rampal pitch in far more believable performances.

3. The action sequences are a mess and not even remotely as swanky as the smartly edited preview would have you believe. The flash-cut-left-right-cut–centre-cut-top-flash technique sucks even the minutest bit of rawness or excitement, not to mention the fact that you see them coming much before they do. What’s even worse, when the camera remains still, the actors look like in the middle of a dance sequence than an action one (there’s a SRK-Arjun Rampal martial-art one-on-one which is possibly the fakest Bollywood fight I’ve had the oppurtunity to see. Not only are the actors unconvincing, the sound design and the camera angles are shockingly mundane). Also, the superhuman genes have been sprinkled generously to the whole male cast, and not just the hero. So there are scenes when Boman Irani, the cop, would get shot at visibly heart-level, blood would spurt out from both the holes in chest and the back and he would not only run but shout, strategise and point a pistol with both hands for the whole of the remaining sequence a hundred times before all of its conveniently forgotten.

Then there’s this sequence where an otherwise limping Arjun Rampal who uses a walking stick trots away on top of a 300 feet high walkway’s glass roof with his son on the back. There are shots of him slipping over the parapet often, but the guy’s agility with his otherwise lifeless leg can give circus tightrope walkers some competition. Fight-or-flight reaction is the probable explanation. And the grand daddy of them all is the one where during a fight in the plane (that’s transporting Don and his company to some godforsaken land I can’t be bothered to remember), Don himself pushes the lever of the emergency exit door mid-air and gets sucked out along with the poor Irish thug who had picked a fight with him. The funnier bit is, despite free-falling without a parachute much before the Irish guy who has suspiciously managed to get sucked into open air with one, Don’s perfectly able to pick a fight mid-air, exchange a few slaps and punches, snatch the parachute away and land safely without a scratch. And I thought I was dumb at physics.

The thing is, stunts and sequences so larger-than-life are a staple of this genre and can be easily digested if they flow with the plot or are a daredevilry showcase of a likeable character. With not even a remotest semblance of plot-graph or characters, over-ambitious scenes like these only add up the bigger joke that this movie is.

4. The only thing that tops SRK’s hamming and the outrageously embarrasing action sequences is the background score. The monotonous techno-trance music continues to thump away carelessly and endlessly with little credence for scene or situation, timing or mood compounding the headache. The music, when re-living past melodies from the old Don, is admittedly very well-orchestrated (Yeh Mera Dil’s tempo, rhythm and mood is light years ahead in sensuality than the original while Khaike Paan Banaraswala manages to retain the rustic cheekiness with electronic beats to boot), but the original melodies are plain mediocre. And despite having such names as Saroj Khan and Farah Khan in the credits, the choreography is not only downright ordinary but sometimes even shoddily put together. And we are talking of a film-maker who gave us Woh Ladki Hai Kahaan (DCH) and Main Aisa Kyun Hoon (Lakshya).

5. Now to my favourite part of the review–the girls. Like a good ole’ Bond movie, they look gorgeous and sumptuous, but within a defined range. Kareena would look utterly ravishing in some poses but is downright scary when she tries to overdo the come-hither-me routine (and boy does she overdo it or what!). There’s a veil of artificiality that never leaves Priyanka’s eyes for a good part of her screentime (with a character as shoddily written as hers, I wasn’t surprised) and her lollipop figure profile (large face and head atop a petite body) still freaks me out a bit , yet this talented girl thankfully puts an effort in creasing her facial muscles and selecting a better designer which helps in bailing out her performance as creditworthy overall. The one thing that Isha Koppikar always did with aplomb was move right but here not only she manages to look consistently bland, she hams like no tomorrow and her dance moves brought back some very painful memories of Manisha Koirala.

6. Finally I am once again, for the 5th time in a single year, shocked and infuriated as to how weak this movie is, how B-grade its treatment is, how it doesn’t even have the basic ingredients of an entertainer, how it completely fails even when compared to a tackily made original let alone contemporary police-n-spy thrillers, and how it all comes from the same guy who re-wrote the format of mainstream urban Bollywood movie hardly five years back.

I sincerely hope this movie flops miserably and leads to talented-but-now-over-confident guys like SRK and Farhan Akhtar do some soul-searching and return to their roots.

This Don really is one big yawn.