The Heart of the Matter

Today's Mumbai Mirror column:

Rich people do think about money, suggests Dil Dhadakne Do. And sometimes, it seems, they even have feelings.

Through the looking glass: Anil Kapoor and Shefali Shah in a scene from Zoya Akhtar's Dil Dhadakne Do (2015)

For that category of Zoya Akhtar fans who have been waiting for a return to the understated charisma of Luck By Chance, the arrival of Dil Dhadakne Do tells us what we've been refusing to believe: Woh director na milegi dobara. DDD, which plays out almost entirely on an ocean cruise, has much more in common with Akhtar's second offering, Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara. Other than replacing sun-kissed Spain with Turkey, Akhtar has substituted ZNMD's male friendship with a focus on family bonding. 

The family, needless to say, is fantastically rich. The Mehras -- salt-
and-pepper-haired Kamal (Anil Kapoor) and trying-to-lose-weight Neelam (Shefali Shah), both rather fine -- are celebrating thirty years of marriage by inviting close friends and family on an all-expenses-paid luxury cruise. The fact that it's a marriage both parties have pretty much checked out of doesn't seem to matter much to anyone, least of all the gossipy ladies who seem to hang out with Neelam only so they can make catty remarks behind her back. Even the Mehra progeny -- Ranveer Singh and Priyanka Chopra, both effective in their respective roles as hangdog and tightly-coiled siblings -- seem not to particularly care that the anniversary is just an excuse for their parents to conduct a lavish display of wealth. 

There's nothing wrong with the premise. In fact, Akhtar makes things interesting by telling us that Kamal Mehra's plastic-container-manufacturing firm is making losses. It makes the expensiveness of the cruise a kind of Jalsaghar-style last dance, before the Mehras are forced to publicly acknowledge impending bankruptcy. It also increases the level of fakeness with which we're now dealing. Plus I enjoyed the idea that someone who thinks nothing of inviting three dozen people on a two-week-cruise can simultaneously keep zealous tabs on how much champagne is being drunk.

One of the unexpected things about DDD as a rich-people film is that the rich people in it aren't oblivious to questions of money. Kamal Mehra's self-made businessman (nouveau riche if you're being snooty) is full of resentment at the people living off the wealth he thinks has been produced by his talent and hard work, and the scenes in which this comes to the surface -- with his wife and son respectively -- are some of the film's most brutally honest. I wasn't quite as convinced by the idea of Ayesha's being self-made because she sold her jewellery to start a business: there's a bizarre obliviousness here about khandaani capital as what helps create capitalists. 

But the film's take on these business families is so ridiculously monochromatic that one has the sneaking suspicion that this is the Bombay person's unreconstructed view of the Delhi rich.Whereas in both of Akhtar's previous films, one felt she wasn't harsh enough with her characters, here it seems that she doesn't like them at all. The men's golf-playing camaraderie involves snarkily pulling each other down on business deals, while the lunching wives do the same on personal matters. Ranveer and Priyanka's likeable characters are saddled with familial expectations whose unreasonable burdens Akhtar is clearly sympathetic to, being the inheritor of a weighty family legacy herself. But Akhtar's account of the Delhi elite stops at the lowest level of caricature: uncles who mispronounce English words, and aunties who have nothing better to do than matchmake their daughters, or those of others. And oh God, is it possible that a business scion distressed about selling his private plane would have a mother trying to comfort him with a Nirula's Hot Chocolate Fudge? The whole of the parental generation is shown as so dull, manipulative and narrow-minded that it's not at all clear how their children are managing not to be like them. 

These are the distant, controlling rich parents we've met in many a Hindi film (think of Shenaz Treasurywala's parents in Delhi Belly, or Imran Khan's in Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu), and I applaud Akhtar's desire to scale up them into full-fledged characters. Anil Kapoor is brilliant in comic mode - wait for the moment when he hides behind a tree, or the smug grin with which he sits up from a hospital bed. The tragically under-used Shefali Shah is better in the bitter moments, but even she has some exceptional scenes of black humour: "Acting kyon kar rahe ho?" she says to her suddenly romantic husband, deadpan. "Koi nahi dekh raha."

Such constant transitions from humour to high drama are not easy, and the actors do a fine job, even if the film doesn't always pull it off as a whole. Even Rahul Bose, cruelly miscast as Ayesha's preachy illiberal bore of a husband, manages some decent physical comedy on the tennis court. It's clear that Akhtar is aiming for something that sits between our love of melodrama and a sharply funny undercutting of it. The signature scene that exemplifies this is probably the one where a character threatens to cut her wrist -- with a butter knife. The deliberately dramatised climax, too, is of this ilk.

But when you've spent a whole film showing people as hypocritical control-freaks who're only concerned with what 'society' thinks of them, it's hard to believe in their last-minute changes of heart. No matter what the film's most ridiculous device -- the family dog Pluto, pontificating on human foibles in the voice of Aamir Khan -- tells us, it's hard to believe these unpleasant people have a dil that dhadkos after all. We can but try.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 8 June 2015. 

Film Review: Cocktail

Ever since Farhan Akhtar captured the zeitgeist and (re)defined the genre with Dil Chahta Hai (DCH), Hindi movie friendship has never been the same. Vows and tears and pledges of loyalty (a la ‘Yeh dosti hum nahi todenge’) are now irredeemably old school. In new-age Bollywood, friends are people who hang out together, make fun of each other’s failed romantic encounters and preferably go on sunkissed ad-film vacations that will forever define their memories of youth. The invariably privileged young people who populate Akhtar’s universe — and made an updated appearance in his sister Zoya’s Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (2011) — have a carefully cultivated coolth which does not allow them, even when in the midst of earth-shattering events, the old-world luxury of drama.

Homi Adajania’s Cocktail has much in common with those films. It’s astoundingly good-looking, filled with seductively-shot songs and fun montages of friends doing goofy things together. Life for our three protagonists seems like one long round of parties — a weekend jaunt from London is a trip to Cape Town, and money is clearly no object. So Deepika Padukone’s Veronica is a self-declared “rich bitch”, but the other two don’t seem to have real work lives either: Gautam, the flirt (Saif Ali Khan), lands contracts by declaring love at first sight to potentially difficult clients, while the mousy Meera (Diana Penty) snares a graphic design job with a big UK company without us being shown any sign of her experience or talent—or effort.
But Cocktail has something frank and warm about it that distinguishes it from the manicured, too-perfect vibe of those other films. It has the requisite coolness, but it has vulnerability, too. It has a finely tuned sense of the ridiculous, but it doesn’t shy away from drama, or darkness. And it is never coy.
The censors may have seen fit to beep the “bed” out of Veronica’s explanation for seeing Saif (“He’s great in bed”), but the scene’s amusing, comfortable vibe—including Diana’s slightly grossed-out “I didn’t need to know that” response—is that of a real moment of conversation between two women: such a pleasant change from the puerile nudge-nudge wink-wink stuff that passes for sexual liberation in films like Jodi Breakers. In fact, Cocktail’s first applause-worthy achievement is that it gives us a full-fledged female friendship—a whole 12 years after DCH’s portrait of male camaraderie first sparked the desire for a girl gang version. Admittedly, two women do not a girl gang make (and even this relationship is only snuck in via the love triangle route), but the scenes between Deepika and Diana will strike a chord with any woman who’s ever been in an intense and tumultous friendship.                      

Image courtesy in.com

Rich London party girl Veronica, so popular a visitor at her favourite nightclub that she bypasses the long queues with a breezy kiss to the bouncers, may seem an unlikely companion for the quiet, salwar-kameez-clad Meera, whose hapless status as a rejected mail-order bride is a trifle hard to believe in anyway. But there’s an undeniable energy injected into the proceedings by having the two women come from such different backgrounds—women that most Hindi films wouldn’t dream of bringing together in the same frame. Deepika, glorious in smoky eye makeup and wild hair, looks the part completely and turns in her most affecting performance. (Though she struggles to sound natural when being forced to say impossibly colloquial lines like “Saanp ko doodh pila rahe ho beta”, Homi Adajania must get some credit for the fact that her dialogue delivery is so much better than in, say, last year’s Aarakshan). Diana, playing demure and lovely foil to the other’s overt sexiness, successfully imbues her character with a sense of unvoiced guilt and confusion.

The third component of the cocktail is Saif Ali Khan, playing the easy come, easy go Gautam Kapoor, a Delhi-born, London-based 32-year-old whose mother still calls him Gutlu and sends him pics of prospective brides. Saif looks (and is) much too old to be reprising the flirtatious loverboy role that he cut his acting teeth on. But at least he’s had so many years to refine his technique that he can get by purely on charm. Gautam’s in-your-face pick up lines may appear over-the-top, but for me his charm lies precisely in the fact that he knows quite well that he’s performing. And he can laugh at himself. He can, while lolling about on the couch and stuffing popcorn in his face, answer the question “What are you doing here?” with “I’m oozing charm”… and all of a sudden, it feels sort of true.

Adajania’s only previous film, Being Cyrus (2006), based on a script he wrote himself, was a strange and quirky little film which had space for humour and lust and murder—but very little for love. Cocktail, based on a script by romance-master Imtiaz Ali, feels radically different in tone. But Adajania repeats his lead actor—Saif was Cyrus in that film—and also casts Boman Irani and Dimple Kapadia again. Boman and Saif achieve a rare and wonderful camaraderie as layabout uncle and nephew, and the dynamic between the 50-plus but still-assumed-to-be-irresponsible younger brother (Boman) and the bossy elder sister (Dimple) is hilariously accurate in a way that has rarely found its way onto our screens. The scene where Boman gets caught mimicking Dimple (“Tinku, bulub change kar do…”) is hysterically funny. Dimple is superb as the theth Punjabi mother who arrives unannounced from Delhi, throwing the cosy threesome into a tizzy. The scene where she insists on handing over a pair of kadas to her prospective daughter-in-law is simply superlative, stitching humour and pathos and  affecting sentiment into a seamless yet textured whole.

In fact, the film manages to segue beautifully between emotional heft and hilarity, allowing its characters to make the heavy-duty confessions that a younger, hipper director might have felt compelled to steer clear of—but letting them make fun of themselves as they do so. So when Veronica makes an uncharacteristically sentimental appeal to Meera to stay on in her house, she follows it up by asking Meera if she’s convinced yet — “ya aur thoda melodrama ka scope hai?” In a style that feels recognizably similar to Love Aaj Kal, Imtiaz Ali’s superbly crafted screenplay leavens almost every emotional interaction with an understated, half-ironic sense of humour. But perhaps Cocktail’s crowning achievement is that it also frequently manages the opposite: shoehorning us into a space where all the cues point to laughter, and then interrupting with a moment of quiet that stays in your mind long after the giggles are gone.

Published in Firstpost.

Cinemascope: Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara; Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - 2

My Sunday Guardian film reviews this week:


Airbrushed Spain is strangely lifelike
ZINDAGI NA MILEGI DOBARA
Director: Zoya Akhtar
Starring: Hrithik Roshan, Farhan Akhtar, Katrina Kaif, Kalki Koechlin, Abhay Deol
***

The trailers of this film had me expecting a three-hour-long Spain Tourism advertisement, with some of our very own beautiful people thrown in to tailor it to the Indian market. I can now vouch for the fact that ZNMB is indeed the perfect Spanish guided tour, moving from stunning underwater coral reefs and green patchwork countryside to now much-touristed traditional events, like the Tomatina festival – a town-wide mock-battle with tomatoes – and the famous Running of the Bulls, where young men race through the streets of Pamplona followed by a bunch of bulls. And the beautiful people, of course, appear even more so in this sunkissed, carefully careless avatar.

If you don't have an allergic reaction to the airbrushed sun-and-sand fantasy-world quality of this whole set-up, or to the underlying premise that to discover themselves, these young Indian men must first leave India for a place that, as Zoya Akhtar said recently, "is just like India" (except it's squeaky-clean and entirely white), to let their hair down in a festival that's "just like Holi" (except that it's firang, therefore fashionably exotic) – then this film can be fun to watch. Really. Akhtar and Rema Kagti have written a rather decent bromance (though it is not clear why Zoya Akhtar chose, of all the things in the world she could have done, to make a Dil Chahta Hai redux). Farhan Akhtar as the attractive prankster Imran plays nicely off the way-too-seriously-ambitious Arjun (Hrithik's most convincing performance since Zoya's own Luck By Chance). The initial tension between them (rooted, of course, in some long-ago girl) actually seems real, as does the sense of an old camaraderie slowly resurfacing.

The women, perhaps as is to be expected from a male bonding movie, are more metaphors than characters: Kalki Koechlin plays high-strung possessive fiancee to Abhay Deol's laidback nice guy (read: confinement), while Katrina Kaif gets to be the free-spirited Carpe Diem girl who'll teach uptight Arjun how to live (read: liberation).

But what's truly admirable about ZNMD is that it manages to take a contrived script involving scuba-diving, sky-diving and bull-running, punctuated by a few truth-or-dare moments, and make it feel – just a little bit – like life.


Era ends, at Hogwarts, and for us all
HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS - PART 2
Director: David Yates
Starring: Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint
***

The final film in the Harry Potter series is a fittingly grand finale to a decade-long cinematic adventure, providing much-awaited closure to the story of Harry's long-standing war against the evil wizard Voldemort. Like with any epic battle, though, there's never any doubt who will win. So much of the pleasure lies in allowing ourselves the luxury of seeing how it happens, with all the emotional charge provided by identification with our heroes. The fresh-faced 11-year-olds of Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone (2001) – Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), Hermione (Emma Watson) and Ron (Rupert Grint) – are now in their twenties: still fresh-faced but now marvelously familiar. And there is something indescribable about watching a film with characters whom everyone in the hall is not just cheering, but watching out for.

The plot is simple. Harry must destroy the Horcruxes: magical objects in which Voldemort has hidden fragments of his soul. After a deliriously vertiginous descent into Gringotts to break into the evil Bellatrix Lestrange's vault (watch out for Helena Bonham Carter playing Hermione playing Bellatrix), Harry, Hermione and Ron return to Hogwarts to begin their search for the last Horcrux, whose form they do not even know. Voldemort discovers Harry's presence, and launches an attack on the school which must be held off by the combined magical efforts of all the good professors, including the wonderful Minerva McGonagall (Maggie Smith).

In the middle of this relentless array of magical acts of war – blazing fires, self-destroying bridges, grotesque creatures sent either to defend the school or destroy it, from soul-sucking Dementors and foot-thumping giants to Voldemort's hissing python Nagini (unfortunately pronounced N'geenee rather than Naaginee) – is Harry's final realisation of the real roles that Albus Dumbledore, Severus Snape, Voldemort – characters we've been seeing from the beginning of the series – played in his parents' lives and deaths, and in Harry's own life as it has since played out. The realisation flashbacks are nicely done, but it is Harry's meeting with Dumbledore in a heavenly version of King's Cross Station that steals the show, with Dumbledore summing up in a single line the power of fantasy itself: "Of course it's happening inside your head, Harry? Why should that mean it's not real?"