The big, bad Indian wedding

Today's Mirror column:

Even as we (and much of our cinema) continue to bask in the reflected revelry of the band-baaja-baaraat, a few films are beginning to suggest that something is rotten in the state of the shaadi.

When we first meet the eponymous heroine of Dolly ki Doli, she seems sweet as saccharine, pushing her Jat boyfriend away with convincing good-girl-ness as he moves in for a kiss, even as she bats her eyelashes jauntily and eggs him on to confront her ex-army dad. Within twenty minutes or less, the full family drama has unfolded, the shaadi has taken place, and the groom and his parents are waking groggily up to a house emptied of all its valuables. Because Dolly is not what she seems - she may tailor herself perfectly to play the part of the sundar susheel agyakari bride, mildly tweaked to fit different families, but she is actually on the Delhi Police 'Wanted' list under the tag of 'Looteri Dulhan'. 

The film starts well but gets repetitive, Sonam Kapoor tries but really just isn't capable of providing interiority for a complicated character like this one, and there are liberal loopholes in the plot. But what I'm interested in here is the fact of why the idea of a bride-who-wasn't feels like such a particularly good one. 

Nearly a hundred years after Margaret Mitchell created Scarlett O'Hara, there's still something powerfully subversive about a girl smart enough to reel in the boys hook, line and sinker, simply by letting them think they're smarter. But what makes Dolly's triumphs so astonishingly satisfying is watching her sheath her claws as the ostensibly obedient, repressed creature a good bahu is meant to be, only to let it rip at the mummyjis when the time comes. And unlike real life, or a saas-bahu serial, there isn't half a lifetime to wait: in every case, payback time is just the morning after. 

But wait, they haven't done anything to Dolly, so what is she paying them back for? Aren't these boys and their families just innocent dupes? Ah, therein lies the rub. The success of Dolly ki Doli, like Habib Faisal's Daawat-e-Ishq (2014), depends on it being commonly understood that marriage in India is a market, and a market loaded so heavily and unfairly in favour of the bride-takers that the bride-givers are being driven to illegalities. 

Daawat-e-Ishq established the unpleasantness of Indian bride-takers with its very first scene: the sour-faced mother-in-law-to-be demanding unpayable amounts of dowry, even as the grotesquely out-of-line son quizzes his prospective bride (Parineeti Chopra) about her sexual experience. 

To our great joy, Chopra's feisty Gullu kicks that lot out of her house, and several other arranged marriage parties. But when a boy she's actually in love with turns out to be no better than the rest, Gullu decides that hereon, she's going to be the one doing the duping. This leads up to the film's most entertaining sequence, as the lower middle class mall salesgirl and her law clerk father (Anupam Kher) pretend to be a Dubai-returned heiress and her millionaire dad - fictitious prize bait, in effect, for greedy dowry-seekers. 

Faisal's film succumbed to a love story as its resolution, pitting the angry-at-the-world Gullu against the genuinely in-love-with-her Taru (Aditya Roy Kapur) and forcing Gullu to melt. Dolly ki Doli doesn't do that, but it does serve up a half-baked back-story about having been stood up by a bridegroom as part-explanation for Dolly's life as a trickster. There is a faint echo here of Queen, another film from last year where being ditched at the wedding mandap ends up being the trigger for a till-then-innocent young woman to turn her life around. 

Queen is probably the most well-conceived of these films, perhaps because it doesn't set out to have a sting in its tail -- and so we're not disappointed when all Kangana Ranaut's Rani does to her prospective mother-in-law is to tell her she isn't coming along to join the stuffy life of her stuffy household anytime soon. 

Dolly, unfortunately, is made to mouth much more radical sounding lines as "I'd rather be in a real jail than in your shaadi ka jail", which Sonam Kapoor doesn't quite make believable, even when the film steers successfully clear of a romantic cop-out ending. 

Daawat-e-Ishq deprived us of an individual villain in the end, by gifting Gullu a young wealthy man who loves her for herself. But like in Dolly, there was some uncomfortable laughter in the cinema as people watched their money-grabbing, son-inflating, bride-taker selves held up to ridicule. Whatever one thinks of the ethics of Gullu and Dolly, Hindi cinema is onto a malaise that's real. And laughter might be what makes the medicine go down.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 25 Jan 2015.

Of Dowries and Denouements

Yesterday's Mumbai Mirror column:

Dowry had almost vanished from our cinema, even as it continues to rock real lives. Daawat-e-Ishq takes on a messily difficult subject, and despite many misses, hits upon some inconvenient truths.

Parineeti Chopra and Anupam Kher pretending to be Dubai-returned millionaires in Habib Faisal's Daawat-e-Ishq 

The trailers of Daawat-e-Ishq were intent on making us believe it was a film about food and love. The film, on the other hand, is intent on making us believe that it is a film about dowry. Depending on how sympathetic you are to the imagined pressures on a fine filmmaker like Habib Faisal (and how susceptible you are to the imagined pleasures of a fine biryani), you might accept Daawat-e-Ishq as both these things -- or neither. 

If you intend to watch the film, this paragraph contains spoilers. Parineeti Chopra stars as Gulrez "Gullu" Kadir, a Hyderabadi "school topper" who works as a shoe salegirl and dreams of training in the US as a shoe designer. Gullu and her court clerk father (a marvellously subtle Anupam Kher) spend the film's first hour or so dealing with the humiliating dowry demands of largely unsuitable boys. Then Gullu devises a two-birds-with-one-stone scheme, with which she will both fulfil her American dream and take revenge on the male species. Father and daughter assume fake identities as Dubai-based millionaires, and head to Lucknow to find a rich bakra whom Gullu will first marry and then file a dowry harassment case against, under Section 498A of the Indian Penal Code. But the lamb to the slaughter is restaurant-owner Tariq "Taru" Haider, a rather winsome fellow who turns out not to be the money-minded brat they'd set out to phansao... you get the drift. 

In the much-maligned 1980s, when filmmakers did decide to make a film about dowry, at least they didn't beat around the bush. Anwar Pasha's Dulha Bikta Hai (1982), for instance, cast a woebegone Raj Babbar as a cash-strapped elder brother who marries off two sisters without dowries by pretending that he will marry the sisters of both grooms. When the hapless girls are turned out of their marital homes, Babbar must raise money by selling himself as a groom. It is a heavy-handed drama with a bizarre denouement, but as with many other 1980s films, DBH does not shy away from depicting the nastiness and violence of the Indian family. One sasur maligns his daughter-in-law's morals and beats her up with a cane; another mother-in-law is actually shown trying to set the daughter-in-law on fire. Of course, we were as invested in happy endings then as now, but filmmakers seemed to trust us with digesting some brutal stuff along the way.

This seems no longer to be the case, at least not in mainstream Bollywood. Think back to the Hindi movie weddings you've watched in the last few years. Even if one sets aside love marriages, where let's assume dowry plays no role, we've had quite a variety of views of arranged marriages, from wedding planners (Band Baaja Baaraat) to the paid fake baraati (Shuddh Desi Romance). Intentionally or not, these films provide a pretty good sense of the economics of weddings. But dowry almost never comes up. (I'm not counting the ridiculous -- eg. Humpty Sharma ki Dulhaniya, with an entire plot driven by Alia Bhatt's quest for a Rs 5 lakh wedding lehnga.) 

Before Daawat-e-Ishq, I can think of one film this year that dealt with dowry: coincidentally another Alia Bhatt starrer, Two States. There Bhatt got to do a bit of grandstanding as the feisty TamBrahm who shows the money-minded Punjabis how not to behave. I'm all for showing down dowry-seekers, but making it seem that dowry figures only among rapacious Punjabis belies the fact that dowry harassment cases are high (and rising) all across India, including Tamil Nadu. (In 2013 alone, Tamil Nadu recorded 118 dowry deaths, and 6,008 women in the state filed harassment petitions against their spouses with district collectors, police and dowry prohibition officers, under the Dowry Prohibition Act.) 

Daawat-e-Ishq doesn't have that problem. As a new-age Muslim social (the second this year, after the charming Bobby Jasoos), it seems keen to both create a recognizably Muslim universe and simultaneously have it pass as pan-religious. So, for instance, we have a whole film about dowry among Muslims -- like BJ, D-e-I chooses not to have non-Muslim characters -- without any mention of meher: the mandatory gift of money or property given to the bride by the groom in a Muslim wedding. The meher can be a token amount, or it can be a significant sum, but either way, director Habib Faisal appears to want not to distract audiences with such complicated facts. 

One wishes Faisal, whose previous work includes the middle class comic gem Do Dooni Chaar and the flawed but memorable Ishaqzaade, wasn't trying so hard to be uncomplicated. Because the dowry issue isn't. For one, dowry takers and dowry-givers aren't as clearly separable from each other as we'd like -- as Dulha Bikta Hai's 'exchange' solution showed, the same family might be a chest-thumping recipient for their son, and revert to supplication when it comes to their daughter. All of society is in on the game. 

Daawat-e-Ishq tries to take a more consciously woman-centric position, grounded in a view of our society as skewed against women. The film's understanding of 498A is muddled, and tragically misinforms its audience. But by showing the frustrated ladkiwale consciously choosing to abuse a legal provision created to safeguard women against domestic violence (including but not limited to dowry-related harassment), it unwittingly reveals how the law is often treated as another weapon in the sad battlefield of Indian marriage.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 21 Sep 2014

Film Review: Ultimately, Ishaqzaade fails us

With his new film Ishaqzaade, Habib Faisal takes a brave leap away from the aspirational middle class Delhi terrain he ploughed so expertly in Do Dooni Chaar (his directorial debut) and Band Baaja Baraat (which he wrote).

In Ishaqzaade, set in the fictional small town of Almore, the dreams that drive Faisal’s characters are no longer the little desires of little people: a new car, a bigger binness. What the Chauhans and the Qureishis are fighting over is Almore itself: a place whose location in the badlands of North India is announced as clearly by the swirling clouds of dust that rise from its roads as by the gunshots that casually punctuate every sentence – alongside the gaalis. The game might be grubby, but the stakes are high.

Faisal’s arresting opening scene – the children of both families pelting stones at each other going home from school – sets the tone of the very adult war to follow: epic, but also down-and-dirty. The film opens in the run-up to an election, in which the Chauhans are determined, by hook or by crook, to wrest power back from the currently-in-power Qureishis. Among the grown-up children of the two families, each now plotting the political downfall of the other, are Parma and Zoya.

Zoya is the spirited daughter of the Qureshi khandaan, the only girl in a houseful of boys. She is the sort of girl whose eyes sparkle more at the sight of guns than jhumkas, a girl whose complete confidence in herself seems to come as much from a familial sense of entitlement as a purely physical absence of fear.

Parma (debutante Arjun Kapoor) is a long-limbed wild-haired young hooligan who thinks it’s a lark to set fire to a poor man’s shop if he so much as suggests selling some of his diesel to the Qureishis. Oh, and it’s also a defence of his family’s honour. The more the Chauhan patriarch thinks of his youngest grandson as an incompetent, impractical fool who can do nothing right, the more Parma secretly swears to make his Dadda proud.

Needless to say, Zoya and Parma hate each other. Until they decide to fall in love. One of the successes of Ishaqzaade is the way Faisal establishes, with just a few strokes, the transformation of this relationship from mutual disdain and prejudice to grudging admiration – and then, unabashed attraction. He is greatly helped by his leading lady, Parineeti Chopra, who follows up a wonderful debut as the plumply petulant Dimple Chadda in last year’s Ladies vs. Ricky Bahl with a superb performance here.

As the tomboyish Zoya, taking large strides even in a heavy sharara, commanding her beau to hold her sharara as she climbs into a train “ladies first”, Parineeti embodies the natural, incandescent assurance of a young woman who doesn’t know what it’s like not to get her way.

But the place of women in this world is too precarious for that tenuous status to last. “Mardon ki haveli, mardon ki zubaan,” says Dadda proudly, registering but not quite apologising for the many behen-sprinkled abuses that greet a mere non-functioning generator in his family home. The impending tragedy here is apparent, and it is one that Faisal’s film unpacks with clear-eyed exactitude: in this world of men, no amount of indulgence and spoilt-daughter status is enough to secure a woman’s dignity, her place in the household, or even her life.

Zoya’s first encounter with her innate vulnerability as a woman – I will not give away the plot by telling you what causes it – makes her incredibly angry, at first. But as it becomes clear that her seemingly implacable position in this universe was nothing but an illusion, a rug pulled from under her feet, rage gives way to sorrow.

Parma’s widowed mother, with her uneasy position in her father-in-law’s household, subject alternately to accusations of having devoured her husband and displays of patriarchal generosity in having given her a roof over her head, is the film’s other example of a woman whose indomitable spirit and staunch values cannot defend her from a world weighted so heavily against her.

The necessary outside of this patriarchal world of ghar-grihasthi is another kind of female presence: Chand, the local kothewali, a sinuous charmer with a soft spot for Parma. It’s easy to see what Habib Faisal is trying to do here, setting up the brothel as the one place where the bitter Hindu-Muslim feuds of the world outside have no purchase. It’s a cliched idea – the whorehouse as the place without prejudice, the great equaliser – but it might still have worked if it were written with more nuance, or given more meat by the sadly underwhelming Gauhar Khan. As it is, Faisal gives us a one-line depiction of the way women from these worlds eye each other with suspicion (“Hum dance waliyon ke munh nahi lagte,” says Zoya to Chand) – and then proceeds to break the barriers down with an ease that defies belief.

Ishaqzaade has many strengths. The locales – from crumbling railway sheds to a vast school chemistry lab – are nicely used without drawing attention to their own artistry. Faisal’s usually impeccable dialogue is occasionally overbaked, but it has undeniable grit: which recent Hindi film has had the courage to have a protagonist calling his lover a Musalli? Arjun Kapoor plays his combination of machismo and childish stupidity with exaggerated gestures that annoyed me rather than winning me over, but Faisal’s central characters are still more sharply realized than most directors can manage. And anyway, the film is worth watching just for Parineeti.

But ultimately, Ishaqzaade fails us. Not just because it gives us a climax that feels like a cop-out, even as it strains desperately to be epic. But because its final tragedy is triggered by Zoya’s still surviving faith – in herself, the world, and the lout she so inexplicably loves – while we who are watching can only wonder why she didn’t give up on all of it long ago.

Cinemascope: Ladies vs. Ricky Bahl

In an early scene in Ladies vs. Ricky Bahl, a lean, limber young man with floppy hair and a winsome smile appears at a Delhi businessman's doorstep with the businessman's 20-something daughter passed out in his arms. It's the middle of the night, and the parents look worriedly at each other and their sleeping daughter. But when the young man – who's just introduced himself as Dimple's boyfriend and her gym trainer – makes to lay the sleeping girl down on the living room sofa, the mother says to him, "Beta, oopar hi lita do..." (and after a minuscule pause that already contains an undeniable trace of admiration for her daughter's catch) "Bodybuilder ho na?"

As you watch Ranveer Singh carry the pleasantly-plump Dimple Chaddha effortlessly up the stairs, and then effortlessly charm the pants off her gun-toting dad on his way down them, you can't help but think of the last captivating burglar who appeared on the Hindi film screen: Abhay Deol in Oye Lucky Lucky Oye (2008). In establishing his conman protagonist as the sort of supremely affable guy who can walk into strangers' homes and out with their televisions (or their daughters) because everyone just trusts him at first sight, it's clear that director Maneesh Sharma is channelling Dibakar Banerjee. But it's equally clear that Ricky Bahl (whose name we know from the title but never hear until the film's final scene) is a kind of Lucky-lite. Ladies vs. Ricky Bahl is quite obviously intended to be a much more light-hearted film than Oye Lucky ever was. If Lucky was all about the nuanced, perfectly narrated backstory – complex relationship with a dominating but distant father, needy childhood, desire to join the English-speaking "gentry" – then Ricky is very deliberately a man without a past. So deliberate, so total, in fact, is this characterisation that the one time we hear Ricky speak of childhood, deprivation and emotional attachment to family (okay, to a family bungalow on Delhi's Barakhamba Road), we pretty much know this has got be a con.

Maneesh Sharma has made a breezy, fast-paced, intricately plotted film which wouldn't be half as much fun if its conning hero had depth and interiority – if we already knew what he was really like inside, how would he ever surprise us? So we don't know, and neither do the ladies he turns the charm tap on for: Dimple from Dilli, the pampered, wilful daughter of a "self-made" Punjabi businessman; Raina from Bombay, the hard-headed, no-nonsense executive with a reputation for making the impossible possible; and Saira from Lucknow, the demure young widow who works in her in-laws' small textile store.

Forging these three very different women from their madly different backgrounds into an unlikely sisterhood against the man who conned them is a masterstroke, and provides a lot of great moments. Though there is no doubt that the film's makers, including the inimitable Habib Faisal of Band Baaja Baraat and Do Dooni Chaar fame, who's written the dialogue here too, know the Dimple-from-Dilli milieu a hundred times better than the other two, so much so that poor Raina-from-Bombay (Dipannita Sharma) and Saira-from-Lucknow (Aditi Sharma) don't have much of a chance. They do perfectly well in their well-cast and competently-written little parts, but it is debutante Parineeti Chopra as Dimple who walks away with the trophy. From her first moment on screen, pulling irritatedly at the deep neck of her blingy blue top to show some cleavage before she reluctantly wears a choli over it for the benefit of her parents who think she's going to a sangeet, to her genuine disbelief that any boy could ever choose another girl over her, Dimple has us eating out of her hands. We might laugh at her continued schoolgirlish besottedness for the 'Sunny' who stole her heart and then her father's money, or at her unsophisticated blabbermouth ways even when faced with the cool and collected Raina, but she's the one person in this film we know inside out. And we can't help but love her.

Without giving away too much that you haven't already guessed, let me say that Ranveer and Anushka Sharma get to rework something of their Band Baaja roles: here too they become business partners in the third meeting, and are meant to be entirely professional about it before emotions get in the way. Anushka is perfect as a super-chirpy Hometown salesgirl who can sell anyone anything (even if this channelling of her inner aspirational Punjabi girl could start getting tiresome if she does it one more time). And she and Ranveer, even though they don't get anywhere near the surprising goosebumpy chemistry of Band Baaja, do achieve an easy, believable camaraderie that most Bollywood couples never will.

It's a really fun film overall, and like I said, it's not setting out to be profound. Though between the Hometown section, with its hilarious references to people buying things they don't need, and the other brilliant episode where 90-rupee Goan wines are packaged in vintage bottles and cheap factory seconds sold off as Prada, it feels like the film might just have a secret message about conmanship after all.

Published in today's Sunday Guardian.