The Straight Dope

My Mirror column. 

Udta Punjab may not always fly as high as it wants to, but its portrait of the drug-fuelled state steps fearlessly off the edge. 

There's a moment in Udta Punjab when one of the film's primary characters, an otherwise easygoing young cop, suddenly decides he can no longer be a willing cog-in-the-wheel of the terrible drug chariot rolling through the state, crushing people in plain sight. 

Before his companions guarding the naka know what's hit them, Sartaj has cracked open the headlights of a truck carrying the latest illegal consignment and bashed up its driver instead of letting him through. When his boss manages to get him back under control, he takes Sartaj aside and says to him, deadpan: "You beat up the man, I can deal with that. But why damage the truck?" 

That line of dialogue is a pithy pointer to the tragic state of Punjab today, where the gainers guard a corrupt system — like that truck — at the cost of a vast population. Cheap drugs have made inroads into the smallest hamlets, eating through the innards of a once-prosperous state. From the political big man to the small-time operator, the gainers worship at the altar of money, closing their eyes to the human wreckage piling up behind the throne. 

Sudip Sharma, who wrote the superb and harrowing NH10, joins forces with director Abhishek Chaubey to write this ambitious but not completely successful script. Unlike NH10, which channels our fear of the other, creating a chillingly believable war in which the battlelines are drawn by patriarchy, Udta Punjab asks us to suspend our disbelief as its disparate characters unite across barriers of class, language and experience, against drugs. 

The quietly winsome Punjabi star Diljit Dosanjh plays Sartaj Singh, a policeman who has no problems being on the take until he's shocked and then taunted into a change of heart by a personal situation — and by Kareena Kapoor's saintly but sharp-tongued activist-doctor Preet. Alia Bhatt plays an unnamed Bihari migrant labourer whose attempt to use drug money to engineer her way out of her circumstances goes terribly awry. And finally, but most importantly, we have Shahid Kapoor as the seriously unstable Tommy Singh, a rockstar whose highs and lows as a performer are no longer extricable from his highs and lows as a coke addict. 

There is nothing wrong with the characters per se. In fact, Sharma and Chaubey make a wise choice by deciding to keep the focus on each character's personal battle with drugs—the only one who seems to be acting purely out of the goodness of her heart, Kareena's Dr Preet, is the least fleshed-out (though Kareena isn't terrible, and she even has some sweet scenes with the effortlessly effective Dosanjh). 

But I found it hard to believe in the ease of the romantic alliance between the highly qualified Preet and the largely uneducated Sartaj—perhaps if we'd had more time with these people, it would have seemed less convenient, less pat? Bhatt dives enthusiastically into her harrowing role, but despite her valiant efforts at Bhojpuri, neither her body language nor her accent allowed me to believe she was anything but Alia Bhatt in brownface. As for her character's hockey-playing past, I wish it had had more play—it's certainly easier to imagine Bhatt as an aspiring rural sports star than as a landless labourer used to working in the fields. Who knows, I may even have believed in a rockstar falling for her. 

Shahid Kapoor gets the best written role, but he also puts body and soul into it. His Tommy Singh is the film's crazed, throbbing heart: careening wildly through both his concerts and his life, and dragging us willingly with him. It is Tommy — and the darkness of his life in the spotlight — that gives Udta Punjab that edge of madness, of devil-may-care-ness, that is so threatening to the powers-that-be. And certainly there is an unapologetic use of gaalis and cusswords -- not the only thing about the film that seems Tarantinoesque. 

But other than the lyrics of a song like Chitta Ve —dedicated to the 'White One'—you'd be hard put to find something in Udta Punjab that could be construed as "glorifying" drug use. But while Chaubey is obviously gifted in his ability to make narrative use of songs (think of Dil Toh Bachcha Hai Ji in his marvellous first film Ishqiya), songs in our cinema do sometimes have a tendency to become breakaway units, declaring their independence from the film that houses them. 

On the whole, Chaubey's film makes it absolutely clear which side of the fence it's on, showing us a whole gamut of utterly depressing examples of people and families gutted by addiction: in homes, in jails, in hospitals and de-addiction centres, and most scarily, in the thousands of empty sheds and barns and brick shelters across the state in which young men and boys lie about, shooting up all day. 

It is the smaller characters that make Sharma and Chaubey's script really speak—from Sartaj's sharp-eyed boss Jujhaar Singh, who counts himself amongst the gainers, to the creepy rapist (Vansh Bhardwaj) who takes selfies with his drugged victim before injecting himself with another dose of something. 

Udta Punjab isn't a perfect film, perhaps not even a great one. But it has an unstoppable energy, and a fierce honesty of purpose that almost always manages to stop short of preachiness. That's worth a great deal.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 19th June, 2016.

A Very Jagged Little Pill

My Mumbai Mirror column today:

A choppily-directed, gimmicky film about gender roles, Ki and Ka shows how far we have to travel. 

The smoothest radical statement in the otherwise bumpy Ki & Ka comes right at the beginning. The single, successful corporate career-wali Kia (Kareena Kapoor) is attending a wedding. Having looked wistfully at the groom and bride (some desire for coupledom is acknowledged in that lingering glance), swigged some whiskey at an uncleji's urging and refused an enthusiastic dance companion with a too-loud reference to having her period, she gets on the phone to someone. "I'm at my friend's shaadi. The last day of her life as an independent human being," she declares in mock-mourning. "Because after this she is going to become a khamba." 

After decades of Hindi film romance in which (after the requisite paeans to kaajal and zulfein) a man's search for True Love ends in finding a female pillar of support, Balki's new film has an undeniably fun premise. In Kia, we finally have a heroine who balks at being the wind beneath anyone's wings - she's clear she's going to do the flying herself. 

Unfortunately, that's where the newness ends. The film decides that to enable Kia to "achieve her dreams", she needs a partner who can be that wonderful, invisible, supportive presence in the life of every successful high-flier - a wife. And Balki thinks he's serving up something terribly revolutionary by making Kia's 'wife' - read 'non-ambitious support structure' - a man. 

But Ki & Ka is so intent on the assumption that a non-careerist man is an unbelievable oddity that Kabir (Arjun Kapoor) must have his present-day choices explained by past trauma. So we learn that his housewife mother died young, unappreciated by his brash and enormously rich father. 

What the film tells us is that Kabir thinks his mother was an artist, and he wants to be like her, creating a home -- rather than climbing a stressful corporate ladder whose final rung is inevitable early death in an expensive nursing home. 

What it doesn't tell us -- but makes screechingly apparent -- is that his wanting to be a house-husband is as much about emulating his mother as the standard-issue son's desire to undercut the father. Which might be read as a very masculine rite of passage. 

Balki's other target, it seems at first, is the whole mainstream definition of success: Kabir's wooing of Kia involves mocking her corporate ambitions and suggesting that these external criteria of 'Vice-President' and 'CEO' and lots of money may not necessarily make one a contented, happy person. But his bracing critique apparently doesn't mean he's looking for someone who shares his world view. Nor that he's going to try and help his partner shed such constricting ambitions. Nope, it just means he's going to be the backroom boy egging her on! And oh, before you cast any doubts on Kabir's own capabilities in the corporate direction, Balki makes sure we know he's an "IIM-B" graduate: because you know, we can only respect someone for non-competitiveness if they've won the competition. 

If the film's supposed critique of the corporate rat race is rather muddled, so is its challenge to gender stereotypes. First of all, Balki's script is so jittery about his hero's nurturing of his 'feminine' side that he provides ceaseless markers of 'manliness' to counteract it -- Kabir loves whiskey, Kabir loves women, Kabir can fight like Dharmendra. Then, Kia and her mother (the sweet but quite wooden Swaroop Sampat) going to work while Kabir keeps home, is meant to be the film's central provocation to the existing gendered division of labour. But in fact, the film is so embedded in a received gender dynamic that its 'role-reversal' actually reinforces the idea of a complete separation of spheres. According to Ki and Ka's vision of the world, a successful career means no time to look after one's own diet, let alone one's ageing parents. And conversely, taking care of a home must be a full-time job, where all that's allowed to stimulate your brain is diet plans and books about bread. 

But why assume -- as Swaroop Sampat's tiresome climactic monologue does - that the only way to resolve our living arrangements is a total division between the home and the world? Why is it necessary that only person's work is in the public domain, while the other remains singlehandedly responsible for the private domain? Why can't men and women both contribute to the home, both from within and without? Someone who has never had to clean their bathrooms or cook their own meals can never appreciate the work that goes into keeping a home running. And conversely, someone who has never had to deal with an impossible deadline or a tiring daily commute is unlikely to understand those stresses. 

The film dimly recognises that the crux of the problem is the visibility and invisibility of different kinds of labour. But it fails to acknowledge the main reason for that difference: money. Only work outside the home gets economic recognition and confers social status. And those who do not earn it must deal, in one way or another, with the insidious accusation of freeloading. The solution to this does not lie in switching who does what, but in encouraging both genders to do their share of both. And in the meanwhile, giving domestic unpaid labour a little of the respect it is due -- without needing it to be done by a man giving a Ted-X talk.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 3 March 2016.

Film Review: Heroine falls flat on its Big Bad Bollywood face

Madhur Bhandarkar has already made his trademark salacious forays into the worlds of bar dancers (Chandni Bar, 2001), pavement dwellers (Traffic Signal, 2007), journalists and socialites (Page 3 2005) big business (Corporate, 2006), fashion (Fashion, 2008) and criminal lowlifes (Jail, 2010). With Heroine, he turns his attention to the film industry, a world in which he himself has operated since at least 1995, when he landed an Assistant Director’s job and a small role in Rangeela.

You might think, if you are an optimist, that this, finally, is a milieu Bhandarkar actually knows. You might hope that his insiderness will somehow translate into a more nuanced film than the cliché-ridden creatures he has been trotting out for years, to be whipped by our collective righteous indignation. Reader, you would be wrong.

Heroine contains every single one of the Bhandarkarian tics we have come to watch out for over the years. Beautiful, successful women who are incurably insecure. Tick. Gay fashion designers whose real purpose is to provide gossip to said insecure women. Tick. Unprincipled bitchy journalists who care only about their next scoop. Tick. An endless parade of high-society parties in which every effusive airkissing photo-op comes with its own catty onlooker: oh, where would we be without those? Caricature is the name of Bhandarkar’s only game, and he can’t give it up so easily.

So we get our tragic heroine, Mahi Arora played by Kareena Kapoor. She’s gorgeous and young and rich and at the top of the Bollywood stakes, so really she ought to be pretty happy with her life. But she’s in love with a married superstar who still hasn’t got his divorce, insists on keeping their affair a secret and doesn’t do anything to “control” his catty wife when she’s being nasty. This apparently is enough to drive poor lovely Mahi up the wall, out of the relationship and then, quicker than you can get the tears into your eyes, to the fringes of the industry of which she was the reigning queen.

And why is this supremely successful woman so ridiculously vulnerable? Ah, it’s because she comes from a broken home, which in Bhandarkar’s book apparently also explains how and why she rose so quickly up the film industry ladder. But perhaps that’s nothing to be surprised about, because Bhandarkar’s vision of the film industry is not about actually providing believable portraits of flawed, real-life human beings. It’s about stringing together a bunch of stereotypes and sensational incidents that will let us, the middle class audience, sit back and bask in the warm glow of being so much better off—and just plain better—than the scum of the earth that sit about in the award functions we watch enviously on television.

So we’re informed that actors only perform in award functions if they’re guaranteed an award themselves, that top heroes (and their wives) can push heroines in and out of big banner projects based on how obliging (or harmless) they are on the sexual front, that character artists are treated as second class citizens—even when they’re lifetime awardees.

But somehow, the more he attempts to shock us, the flatter Bhandarkar falls. Perhaps it’s the ridiculous overstatedness of his vision, which singles out the film industry as den of evil, as if gender hierarchies and power games and hypocrisy and corruption are somehow the sole preserve of Big Bad Bollywood. Perhaps it’s the bizarre excess of some of what he wants to feed us: a rival actress gets her boyfriend to offer himself up to a bisexual businessman so she can take a jewellery endorsement away from Mahi; Mahi later gets her own back by getting her embroiled in legal trouble for misreporting her age on her passport.

Or perhaps it’s just because Bhandarkar is not content to show us all this, he has to also announce it at intervals of about five minutes. “Is glamour industry mein kaun fraud nahin hai!” says one party commentator. “Confidence ke saath bolo to film industry jhooth ko bhi sach maan leti hai,” says Mahi’s PR agent. “Film stars ki friendship tumse nahi, tumhari position se hai,” says Mahi to bitchy journalist, etc, etc. Or perhaps it’s simply the fact that there is a law of diminishing returns operating here. Like Randeep Hooda’s cricketer character who unnerves Mahi at a party by knowing her favourite colour, drink and holiday destination without ever having spoken to her, we already know far too much about film stars.

How can an industry whose most minor peccadilloes are fed to us in bite-sized pieces every day, by newspapers and magazine gossip columns and 24-hour-news television, still continue to shock us?

Heroine shows occasional glimpses of another sort of film, the film it could have been if it abandoned its showy histrionics and sensationalising generalisations for something quieter and more specific. Kareena’s Mahi is most believable, for example, when she’s shown dealing with her mother (Lillete Dubey)—freezing Dubey’s politician love interest when he tries to win her over with offers of a Padma Shri, or being annoyed and defensive when her mother lectures her about her love life. Her rocky relationship with superstar Aryan Khanna (Arjun Rampal in an almost subtle performance) is not bad in its quieter, sadder moments. Kareena has always been decent at total emotional collapse—think the once-bubbly Geet’s pale, stony-faced, in-shock avatar from Jab We Met, and you have a sense of how this film will end.

The depressingly bad character actors who destroy the first hour or so of the film are replaced—not wholly but very substantially—by others who lift their one-note roles into watchability by dint of sheer presence. Govind Namdeo as Kareena’s quietly devoted oldstyle manager Rashidbhai plays off the contrasting image of Divya Dutta as the hard-as-nails, new-age PR manager who turns Mahi’s career around. As for Ranvir Shorey, I can’t think of anyone who could have made a stereotype like the Bengali ‘art film director’ as endearing as he does. And then there’s Shahana Goswami, who lights up the frame from the moment she enters it, filling out a thankless role as the ‘art film actress’ Promita with a natural ease that makes Mahi’s actorly inferiority to her seem all too real.

Watching them all, one wishes Bhandarkar would actually act on the homilies he’s just delivered about character actors and unfair hierarchies in Bollywood. But that, of course, will never be.

This review of Heroine is also up on the Firstpost site, here.

Film Review: Ek Tha Romance

My review of Ek Tha Tiger, on Firstpost:

First, the good things: Ek Tha Tiger is the least annoying Salman Khan movie in ages. Coming after the ceaseless assaults on the senses that were Bodyguard and Ready, Salman’s performance in Ek Tha Tiger feels almost subtle. There are no bordering-on-obscene dance moves, no grotesque family members, and – believe it or not – only a single scene where he takes his shirt off.

Salman plays a RAW agent, which in the Ek Tha Tiger universe means that fans can have the pleasure of watching him perform stunts in various exciting locations, from Afghanistan to Dublin to Havana. Some of these action sequences are rather fun. The film opens, for instance, with a slow-mo Salman ridding the earth of a traitorous colleague, followed by a rather enjoyable chase through cobbled Afghan streets – director Kabir Khan, who made several documentaries in Afghanistan before making his feature debut with Kabul Express, knows how to exploit this locale.

After much catapulting from rooftops and tobogganing backwards down a flight of stone steps with a gun in each hand, Salman does a noton ki baarish with the late colleague’s ill-gotten gains, creating a nicely choreographed quasi-riot through which he can then escape.

We get the bare bones of Tiger’s home life, but it’s nicely done. The introductory scene placing him in his Delhi neighbourhood is most enjoyable: women of all ages failing to tear their eyes away from the mysterious bachelor who reappears after long absences to stand at his front door in his banian and take milk from the doodhwala. The scene with his boss Shenoy (Girish Karnad) is also a fine one, even if it hinges on some predictable farz-versus-mohabbat lines. Karnad at least has not gone the sleepwalking way of Naseeruddin Shah (Maximum) and manages to bring a bit of spark to his scenes.

The real surprise of this film is that Salman actually has a romance track that isn’t played as broad comedy or tacky trophy-wife acquisition. It may be slightly silly (witness bad jokes about Zee and Doordarshan), but it has moments of real tenderness that one would have thought Salman had forgotten how to deliver. If this return to romance has something to do with the fact that the object of his affection is played by real-life ex Katrina Kaif – well, more power to her.

Katrina is an asset to the film – as British Asian student Zoya, she not only achieves the gigantic feat of making Salman Khan appear ‘in love’, she manages to look absolutely glorious without looking synthetic. She is also about a hundred times better at action than the last desi heroine I watched try her hand at a spy thriller – Kareena Kapoor in Agent Vinod.

That brings me to the inevitable comparison between the two films, and here Ek Tha Tiger comes off rather badly. As a spy thriller, Agent Vinod was infinitely cleverer. Sriram Raghavan, too, used an implausible spy story to take us on an unapologetically colourful ride around the world – but every exotic set piece had a place in the plot. If Raghavan took us to St. Petersburg, there was an actual Russian villain and the heroine performing a dance number to distract him; if the Moroccan sequence began with Prem Chopra killing off his pet camel, there was a reason why we saw him do it; and conversely, if the director felt like giving us an old-style double mujra, we found ourselves at a glittering Karachi wedding.

In contrast, Ek Tha Tiger, though not badly shot, saunters through its locations like a contented tourist, rarely making any effort to create plotlines or characters specific to place. Even when it does – like casting Roshan Seth as a crabby old Indian scientist who lives and works in Dublin – the script gives him almost nothing to do. Ranveer Shorey, as Tiger’s colleague Gopi, is yet another instance of a marvelous actor given fairly little to chew on.

If Ek Tha Tiger is meant to be a spy thriller, it’s a disappointingly soft-boiled one. There is precisely one twist – one involving Katrina Kaif that you can see coming from a mile away – after which the film becomes an increasingly soppy, ever more unbelievable romantic saga, occasionally punctuated by fights in foreign locales.

Perhaps this should not surprise us, for this is an Aditya Chopra story, and romance must rule. And perhaps — as the box office failure of Agent Vinod and the record-breaking success of Ek Tha Tiger forces us to conclude – even when making spy thrillers, we just prefer soppy Indo-Pak romances to cleverly plotted scripts with a twinkle in their eye.