Theatre: The Winter's Tale

Two theatre directors add a bit of sparkle (and some masala) to a Shakespearean gem.



When Anirudh Nair first approached Neel Chaudhuri two years ago with the idea that they direct a play together, they didn’t know the collaboration was going to lead them to The Winter’s Tale. Or even Shakespeare. Having cut his teeth on ShakeSoc (as the St. Stephen’s College theatre society refers to itself), Chaudhuri admits, may have dulled his enthusiasm for Shakespeare -- or at least “the myopic reverence that seems to colour everyone's attitudes towards studying and performing Shakespeare”. In any case, says Chaudhuri, he was “dying to work on a Chekhov text”.

The desire to work with a straight-up classic was something new for Chaudhuri. As he put it himself, his trajectory as a playwright and director until now “seems to have studiously avoided any affinity for classical modes of drama and performance”. From the improvised vignettes of Positions (2006) to the rather adventurous Mouse (2008), an unsettling interaction between an ‘actor’ and a ‘director’ which unfolded at least partially in the dark, via the thoroughly remarkable A Brief History of the Pantomimes (2008), right down to the superbly realized Taramandal (2010) (which won the Hindu Metroplus award for playwriting), Neel Chaudhuri’s plays have been about storytelling with a certain economy. Even when the dialogue is absolutely crucial, the dominant sensation you take away from his productions is one of quiet. And even when his starting point has been a well-known text – in Ich bin Fassbinder (2011) it was Fassbinder’s epochal film Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, in Taramandal it was Satyajit Ray’s short story about thwarted ambition, ‘Patol Babu, Film Star’ – Chaudhuri’s way has been to push at its edges, or to create narrative echoes for it, never simply to take the text as is.

Nair, on the other hand, has been working a lot with Shakespeare over the past four or five years – on using physical theatre in Shakespeare and also studying original practice (working with the specificities of Shakespearean rhythms, pentameter, how to use the punctuation, and so on). Nair’s Wide Aisle Productions has also been working on a project that takes Shakespeare to schools, and many of the actors who’re part of that project are also part of the Tadpole Repertory. Tadpole, founded in 2009, is a loose confederation of talented actors in concert with whom Chaudhuri has produced pretty much all his plays.

Chaudhuri was excited about what he and the Tadpole actors could learn from incorporating Nair’s physical training and gesture work. So Shakespeare it was. The group decided they wanted a play that had possibilities as an ensemble piece, not centred heavily around one or two characters – this eliminated, for instance, Hamlet and Othello – and something that Indian theatre-goers weren’t likely to be familiar with – this meant Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, King Lear and The Merchant of Venice were all out. From a shortlist that included The Taming of the Shrew and Pericles, the final choice was The Winter’s Tale.

One of Shakespeare’s later works, the play is split into two: the first half is a tragic tale of jealousy that unfolds in the court of King Leontes of Sicilia, while the second, which opens 16 years later in the kingdom of Bohemia, is exuberant in both its comedy and its romance. “The duality was both beguiling and bewildering,” says Chaudhuri. “It struck us as quite unique – court and country, tragedy and comedy, death and restoration, tyranny and abandonment. After a point it seemed really clear to us that it was a play ripe for all our ambitions.” The production that unfolded amid the astonishingly apt lily ponds and landscaped grassy mounds of Zorba the Buddha in Delhi this March certainly realized those ambitions. The cast moved with marvelous felicity -- from one part of the open-air venue to another, between the play’s inherent binaries, and most admirably, from a never-stiff Shakespearian English to a glorious, mobile Hindustani.

The confidence of that linguistic decision lies at the root of what is most striking about the play. It plays off the duality that already exists, and creates new ones. Tanzil Ahmad’s superb translation is finely attuned to changes of register in the original, recreating both high and low – and within the low, shifting between “the playfully exaggerated, the bawdy and the mundane”. So the trickster Autolycus’s aside to the audience, “If the springe hold, the cock’s mine!” becomes “Idhar phanda laga, udhar murga phansa!!”; the Clown’s exclamation, “I’ the name of me—” becomes “Arre teri!”. There is even room for the occasional Hinglish moment, without it turning into a fetish or a quirk. And whether they are speaking in English or Hindustani, the actors successfully inhabit the dialogue, bringing to their speech the individual accents and styles that come naturally to them.

Despite what anyone might tell you, Shakespearean language takes a while to get used to. And yet when your ear accepts it, it can be more poetic and brilliant than anything you imagined. Nair and Chaudhuri’s production provides the wonderful sense of being at home, both in the language of Shakespeare and in a language a lot of us know but no longer really speak. This is a production that is both absolutely universal and yet utterly located in the here and now of 2013 India. There is something remarkable going on here. As Leontes says at the end of the play, “If this be magic, let it be an art/ Lawful as eating.”

Published in the April-May issue of Le City Deluxe, an international luxury lifestyle magazine that has recently launched in India (and was kind enough to want to publish a theatre-related piece).

Post Facto -- Celluloid Man: PK Nair & the future of our cinematic past

My Sunday Guardian column:

At one point in Shivendra Singh Dungarpur's affecting documentary — released on 3rd May to coincide with the centenary of Indian cinema — the octogenarian PK Nair stands in front of one of those old-fashioned weighing machines that you could find at every Indian railway station even until a decade ago. He inserts a coin into the slot, and receives in return the little rectangular piece of cardboard with his weight printed on one side, and a grainy B&W image of Aishwarya Rai on the other. Nair smiles, a smile of pure pleasure. He inserts a fresh coin, and the machine releases another card. As new cards (and actresses) tumble out of the machine, a voiceover has Nair reminiscing about collecting these cards as a boy. He collected cinema ticket stubs, too, he confesses happily. It's one of the moments of Celluloid Man that illuminate just how well-suited India's premier film archivist was to the job that consumed him for 30 years.

Paramesh Krishnan Nair, better known as PK Nair, is the man responsible for founding and managing the National Film Archive of India (NFAI). Having joined the Film and Television Institute in Pune as a Research Assistant in 1961, he did much of the spade work for an autonomous NFAI, which began in 1964. From 1965, when he was appointed Assistant Curator, till 1991, when he retired after nearly a decade as its Director, Nair acquired 12,000 films — 8000 Indian, the rest foreign. The numbers are impressive in themselves, especially for a government archive in a country where government institutions are notorious for their inefficiency and corruption. But if there is a single thing that Celluloid Man manages to convey, it is that that Nair's accomplishments cannot be measured in quantitative terms.

This is a man who lived his work: who legendarily screened and watched films from the late to the wee hours, and was never to be found in the theatre without his small torch and a notebook in which he meticulously recorded, reel by reel, the content and condition of every single film print. He didn't let his personal taste influence his collecting and he wasn't above making quick overnight copies of loaned international prints to serve the larger cause: as he says with a twinkle in his eye, "a true archivist should have the immunity to overcome such legalities". 

Nair combined this indefatigable, almost childlike enthusiasm for the cinema with a seriousness that daunted the frivolous student and unfailingly encouraged the genuinely interested. Jaya Bhaduri, for instance, proudly remembers being the only girl at Nair Saab's late-night screenings because he had told the hostel matron she wasn't using them as an excuse to "gallivant" around an almost-wholly male campus. Vidhu Vinod Chopra recounts the thrilling privilege of being allowed a few hours' access to the institute's print of Breathless so as to figure out how Godard achieved the "smoothness" of his cuts. Then there's the tale of how John Abraham — the late Malayali filmmaker — walked into Mr. Nair's house at 3 am and demanded to watch Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Mathew, and how Nair not just agreed but watched it with him. They then discussed John's plans for Amma Ariyan (it was to be his most remembered film), had breakfast together, and only then parted company.

These anecdotes craft a portrait of a man so in love with the cinema that he could imagine nothing better than to be able to share that love with young people just starting to discover its treasures, as well as with various different publics: the areca nut farmers and peons of Heggodu's Ninasam, and Pune residents whom Nair drew to his weekly NFAI public screenings by mailing invitations to addresses picked at random from the directory. But Dungarpur's film is also a portrait of an era. Perhaps PK Nair's life would be much more solitary if he were an archivist now, when students have digital access to classics that an earlier generation could only watch by Nair's grace.

The other set of stories tell of Nair's memorable acquisitions, with filmmakers and ex-students acting as his eyes and ears all across India. Mrinal Sen describes stumbling upon the reels of Kalipada Das's silent Jamai Babu while shooting Akaler Sandhane; Adoor Gopalakrishnan remembers how the second Malayali film made, Marthanda Varma, was discovered; Nair himself tells us about finding Dadasaheb Phalke's Kalia Mardan, even as he stands outside the unattractive shopping centre that has replaced Phalke's house. The nine Indian silent films now extant were singlehandedly salvaged by him. In a country where 1,700 silents were made in 36 years, nine may seem like nothing. But without Nair Saab, we might not have even those.

The film's best part is when Nair walks through the NFAI vault, glancing at the shelves and listing, with casual ease, his favourite scenes and songs from each — with precise reel numbers. The saddest is that it took Dungarpur eleven attempts to be allowed to shoot with Nair in the archive: the institution he built up "brick by brick", as Shyam Benegal puts it, now refuses him entry. Nair has done more than his due — and received less than it. Perhaps there can never be another PK Nair. But we don't even seem to understand how much we need one.

Published in the Sunday Guardian, May 2013.

Film Review: Bombay Talkies

 

Bombay Talkies is made up of four short films created by four different Hindi film directors as a tribute to the power of cinema in India. The first film, directed by Karan Johar, is perhaps the one least obviously ‘about cinema’.

Yes, Gayatri (Rani Mukherjee) is the editor of a filmi gossip mag called Mumbai Masala, her television news anchor husband Dev (Randeep Hooda) is a Hindi film music aficionado with a “special room” that’s a shrine to old songs, and Avinash (Saqib Saleem) – the new intern in Gayatri’s office – often climbs up on a railway overbridge to listen to a little street child sing “Ajeeb Dastan Hai Yeh”. But really, this is a tale about truth and love and sex and selfhood, and Johar leavens a clichéd gay coming-out narrative (which does exist) with more brutal honesty than one could have hoped for.

Of course, since this is still Johar, his ‘ordinary people’ are all rather too fetching – but he gets many things right. The actors are perfectly cast, and we’re right there with them from the word go. There’s the early shot where the husband and wife, dressing for work, look into the same mirror. Rani’s Gayatri is dressed to kill, her low-slung sari blouse revealing a shapely back. She looks longingly into the mirror, no longer at herself but at her husband, but he barely seems to see her. In the next scene we see her walk into her office and become the cynosure of all eyes. That appreciative glance that comes her way from a male colleague now seems to us her due.

The other thing Johar nails is the casual sexual banter upon which Avinash’s relationship with Gayatri is forged. A milieu in which a newly-arrived intern can greet the boss-woman with a remark like “Gale mein mangalsutra, aankhon mein kamasutra” may seem a little much, but it taps into the deliberate sluttiness so often cultivated in the new liberal workplace, with sexuality played up partly for laughs and partly to establish coolness.

But it is the little girl on the railway bridge who’s the scene stealer. There is something so intensely pure and true about the quality of her voice as she breaks into “Lag Ja Gale” that one is willing to buy completely into her later dialogue about honesty, however trite. And here Johar cottons onto something that really does exemplify Hindi cinema: the undeniable pull of the song lyric, the sense one so often gets of it’s being the truest thing you’ve ever heard, even if – perhaps especially when? – it comes wrapped in a cloud of emotional excess of the sort that is no longer allowed.

A child and a song also lie at the heart of Zoya Akhtar’s offering: a little boy who is obsessed with “Sheila ki Jawani”. But not in the way you think. This is a boy who gets a persistent furrow in his brow when he’s pushed onto the football field by his unseeing bully of a father (Ranvir Shorey), a boy who likes nothing better than gazing lovingly into the classroom in which his female schoolmates are being taught to dance. When his favourite Katrina Kaif – whom he really only knows as Sheila – comes on television, she seems to be speaking directly to him. Follow your dreams, she says, but keep them secret from those you know will be unsupportive. It is a narrative that brings to mind the wonderful 1997 Belgian film Ma Vie En Rose (My Life in Pink). It is marvellous to see a story like this – unfolding all around us and yet an absolute taboo topic for discussion in most Indian families – finally being told on the Hindi film screen. Akhtar draws superb performances from her child actors (particularly the dreamy-eyed, little Naman Jain), and their conversations are studded with lines whose casualness sometimes belies their eerie profundity. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” the little boy asks his elder sister. “Nothing,” she says. “Nothing?” he asks again. “Nothing. But I want to travel the whole world.” “Oh, so you want to be an air hostess?” “No,” says the girl, “I want to be a passenger.”

Anurag Kashyap’s film was the one by which I was disappointed. The premise is pleasurably cinematic: a young man from Allahabad comes all the way to Mumbai to make Amitabh Bachchan taste his mother’s murabba (sweet pickle) on his dying father’s bidding. He waits for days outside the Bachchan bungalow (the aptly-named Pratiksha) befriending the watchmen, the omelette-seller and the Amitabh-impersonator alike – but fails to meet the star. So far, so realist. What Kashyap does next – allowing the young Vijay, as the hopeful Ilahabadi is named, to actually meet Bachchan (and Bachchan another chance to trot out his carefully cultivated benevolent persona) – seemed to entirely dilute the until then powerfully documentary effect – and affect – of the film. There is a quicksilver change of tone attempted here (and later in the train sequence), jolting us deliberately between high tragedy and comedy. But it ends up neither here nor there.

The standout film, by far, is Dibakar Banerjee’s masterful reworking of a famous Satyajit Ray short story called ‘Patol Babu Film Star’. Banerjee takes only the central premise of the original: a very ordinary man who once had a passion for the theatre suddenly finds himself picked to do a scene in a film. Instead of Patol, the 52-year-old Bengali middle class man in a Calcutta of fifty years ago, though, we get Purandar, a 30-something Nawazuddin Siddiqui; a jobless family man in a present-day Bombay chawl. Right from the first scenes – Purandar lying unblinkingly awake much before his phone alarm rings out at dawn with a plaintive ‘Jaago’ and the sound of a cock crowing, the presence of a pet emu in his cramped little home – the film establishes a strange, surreal mood. That surreality is fully realized by the centrepiece of a scene in which he tries to prepare for his shot in the film: we see Nawazuddin from a great distance, surrounded by the gleaming, tall, white buildings of some fancy highrise, rehearsing the dialogues he has spent his whole life learning and will never need. And then, at the moment of greatest turmoil, he finds himself talking to his dead father, in whose theatre troupe he had once acted.

It is pure pleasure to watch the great Sadashiv Amrapurkar berate his (cinematic) son from beyond the grave – as my father said as he watched the film with me this morning, no-one is better at taana maarna than Amrapurkar. Siddiqui, of course, is superb – and the layers of cinematic meta-ness here are wonderful, as Bollywood’s latest poster-boy for acting plays the anonymous struggler he so recently was.

What Banerjee’s film achieves is a powerfully real sense of why the cinema feels like a vehicle of fate. The man of the crowd, picked out seemingly at random, might suddenly find himself illuminated – and yet it is entirely ephemeral. As the camera zooms out from Purandar’s room, he is back to being one of the tens of thousands of little people – framed ever so briefly in a flash of light, before being returned to the anonymity of the crowd.

This review was published in Firstpost.

Post Facto -- Cinema Non-Paradiso: Make-believe and the movies in Bellissima

A still from Bellissima uchino Visconti is universally recognised as one of the world's great filmmakers. His neo-realist works — the rough-edged La Terra Trema and the masterful Rocco and his Brothers — are on countless film school lists, and his lush literary adaptations — Lampedusa's The Leopard and Thomas Mann's Death in Venice — are regularly numbered among the world's best films. But his third film, Bellissima (1951), has never got the attention it deserves. Such praise as has come its way has been focused on the exceptional performance Visconti drew from its lead actress: the magnificent Anna Magnani, playing a movie-mad nurse obsessed by the idea of having her five-year-old daughter snag a part in a film. Magnani aside, the film has been relegated to the status of a 'minor work', a comedy. The great Pauline Kael, for instance, condemned it with characteristic pithiness as "full of contradictory impulses, and... marred by a too pat ending glorifying the wisdom of the common people". I can see what Kael means about contradictory impulses — Bellissima does seem to speak in multiple voices — but I think that is its strength (more in a bit about that). It remains, for my money, among the finest films ever made about the complicatedness of parental ambition — and about what the movies mean to us. Bellissima opens in Cinecitta, Rome's famous film city, where Maddalena (Magnani) has brought her little daughter Maria (Tina Apicella) to audition. But the child has disappeared, and we see Magnani wandering the grounds, searching desperately for her, even as a man with a megaphone announces the missing child's name over and over again at a piercing volume: "Maria Cecconi! Maria Cecconi! " From that frantic start, the film transports us quickly to the little girl being discovered placidly dipping her feet in a pool of water. The shift in tone is played for laughs. But it is also an instance of the multiplicity that seems to me to make this film so fascinating — the constant fluctuation between broad caricature and unbelievably nuanced characterisation, between a satirical distance and a warm, profound sense of empathy.

he most obviously caricatureish moments appear in the 'crowd scenes': Maddalena's nosy neighbours descending upon her as soon as they scent a domestic quarrel, or the masses of pushy mothers at Cinecitta, each trying to edge her child forward in what is clearly a cutthroat scenario. They all seem cut from the same cloth: petty and ridiculous, deliberately spreading rumours to dishearten the competition. They are not meant to elicit our sympathy or even interest — only our laughter. And yet, it was a real scene like this one that created the film: Bellissima (lit. beautiful) was conceived when Visconti was looking for a child actor for a different production and found himself surrounded by 4,000 mothers, each shouting, "Mine is bellissima!" But Visconti's achievement is to zoom in on a woman who is very much part of this crowd, and turn her into someone we cannot dismiss. Maddalena's frenetic attempts to cobble together money for whatever she thinks will get her daughter the part — a fashionable haircut, an acting coach, a crash course in ballet, a bribe to a man who offers to send flowers to the director's wife — may seem utterly irrational, and just the sight of the child's wan, tired face as she jumps through these hoops is likely to elicit outrage from a contemporary audience. But it is a tribute to the film's humanising of Maddalena that as one plan after another collapses, what we feel is not so much relief for the child, but disappointment for her mother. Maddalena's actions might seem short-sighted, but her gaze is set on a screen in her imagination. And seen in the light of that dreamscape, her frailties seem utterly and resolutely human. This is a woman like so many we know, for whom the drudgery of real life is made bearable only by the thought that there is another kind somewhere out there — illuminated, however briefly, in the dark of the cinema. "It's so not make-believe," she insists to her husband, her trustfulness both vulnerable and determined. The film's most devastating scene involves the shattering of that trust, with Maddalena watching in disbelief as the film crew dissolves into laughter while viewing her daughter's screen test. She stomps into the studio and tells them all what she thinks of them, grown men laughing cruelly at a child crying, but the damage has been done. The dream is broken. Visconti could have ended the film here. But he adds a second climax: the director sends word that the crying girl is the one he wants to cast, but Maddalena refuses to sign the contract, having seen through the illusion that is the cinema — or the world. I am loath to sound as dismissive as Kael, but my subconscious self seems to agree with her about the ending: I first saw Bellissima ten years ago. When I watched it again recently, it was as marvellous as I remembered — but my memory had erased the final scene, preserving the film as I felt it ought to have been. Published in the Sunday Guardian.

Mocking 'filmi-ness': more on Chashme Buddoor

A guest column I did for Business Standard:

A still from Sai Paranjpye's Chashme Buddoor (1981)

Sai Paranjpye's Chashme Buddoor, a light-hearted and mild-mannered comedy which also gave us an unforgettably sweet romance between a bespectacled, padhaaku Farooq Shaikh and Deepti Naval as the irresistible but real girl next door, was recently restored and re-released in theatres alongside a new David Dhawan remake. A distressed Paranjpye has charged Dhawan with having killed her delicately funny film by injecting it with double entendres, bawdy jokes and a general crassness so antithetical to the sensibility of the original that to call the new Chashme Baddoor a remake was a travesty.

I watched both films last week, and I have to confess that while the old one has lost none of its delicate charm, the new one is a rambunctious and rather enjoyable ride. The new film, like the old one, centres on a trio of young men (inaugurating a whole Hindi film tradition of male friendship movies since). One is the sincere student who reads Economics textbooks for pleasure, while the other two spend their time gadding about the empty leafy avenues of 1980s Delhi in search of girls. Or to adopt the celebratory whoop with which they greet every sighting of young female flesh - "shikaar!". The reference to prey may sound shocking, but there's something about Omi and Jomo's unthreatening comicness that makes it not just alright but hilarious. And yet the indiscriminateness of their attentions is enough to indicate the unabashedly joyful sexual basis of their interest. Paranjpye's world may have been innocent, but it was not coy.

That frank vision of youthful (male) hormones is a clue to what made Chashme Buddoor such a remarkable film: its absolute outsiderness to the conventions of the Hindi movie - and even more, the quirky, tongue-in-cheek way in which it chooses to play with those conventions.

In 1981 - the year in which Chashme Buddoor released - the top 10 grossers at the Hindi box office included four Amitabh Bachchan starrers (Yaarana, Kaalia, Naseeb and Lawaaris) replete with dramatic father-son battles and villainous villains on whom revenge had to be wreaked. Other films in the top 10 were a colonial fable involving revolutionary Indian pirates and evil Britishers (Kranti), a reincarnation-revenge-romance (Kudrat), and two stories of star-crossed young lovers (Ek Duuje Ke Liye and Love Story). This was the cinematic universe that Chashme Buddoor emerged into - a universe whose high drama and heroic stunts it both distinguished itself from, and gently but thoroughly mocked. From the first scene, in which the Mehdi Hassan classic of the scorched heart Yeh dhuan sa kahan se uthta hai plays as accompaniment to our heroes' silent communion over a shared cigarette, to having them imagine their romantic conquests as a medley of old Hindi film songs, Chashme Buddoor never stops making fun of our filmi-ness.

Sai Paranjpye was not unique in this sort of mockery. The urban "middle class cinema", represented among others by Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Gulzar, enjoyed poking fun at the more unreal aspects of Hindi films. One of their favourite things to mock was the ubiquitous double role. Gulzar pushed it to its limits (and returned it to source) with Angoor (1982), his superb adaptation of The Comedy of Errors, giving us not one but two pairs of twins. And Mukherjee's Gol Maal (1979) used the idea of fake identical twins as the masterful basis of its comic plot. (Rohit Shetty's reworking, Bol Bachchan, 2012, was grotesque, among other things, because it created a "real" humshakal for Asin - seemingly unaware that Gol Maal's humour was based on mocking the proliferation of twins.)

But Chashme Buddoor went further than those. There's the marvellous scene in which Amitabh and Rekha appear to demonstrate a Hindi movie-style wooing - and how "the technique" falls flat in real life. Earlier, Jomo (the late Ravi Baswani) pretends to be a Bombay producer "talent-scouting" in Delhi, and, in his imagination, Deepti Naval giggles delightedly to hear that "there's a bit of a vacuum in the industry after Jaya ji" that she can fill. In the scene as it actually unfolds, Jomo is crisply rebuffed: she never watches Hindi movies.

Yet, when Naval and Shaikh fall in love and find themselves in a flower-filled Delhi park, they cannot but burst into song. "How do those people in the movies think up rhyming words and tunes on the spot?" muses Neha to Siddharth, before seguing neatly into a half-jokey rhyming song, holding a large flower up like a microphone. And while the climax sets out to stage a kidnapping so that the hero can rescue the heroine filmi-style, Paranjpye decides to play with our now-established expectations by turning the fake kidnapping into a real one. We may laugh at Hindi movies, she seems to say, but we also inhabit them.

David Dhawan, self-declared acolyte of Manmohan Desai - a specialist in mistaken identities and long-lost reunitings if ever there was one - has made a much louder, filmi-er, lowbrow film than the original. But it is also a cheery, self-conscious send-up of the raucous comedies for which he became famous in the 1990s. And in that combination of self-consciousness and inhabiting lies his tribute to Chashme Buddoor.

Film review: David Dhawan's Chashme Baddoor

"Full disclosure: I have always been a Chashme Buddoor fan – the delicately romantic, hilariously funny 1981 film starring Farooque Shaikh, Deepti Naval, Rakesh Bedi and Ravi Baswani is one of my favourite Hindi films ever. And I have never been a David Dhawan fan. I spent the 90s avoiding the raucous comedies that Dhawan produced in quick succession, most successfully with Govinda – Aankhen, Raja Babu, Banarasi Babu, Saajan Chale Sasural, Bade Miyan Chhote Miyan. The only David Dhawan film I can remember laughing rather than cringing at is Hero No. 1, where Dhawan remade another classic of our quietly funny ‘middle class cinema’- Bawarchi. And Dhawan’s 2011 release, Rascals, starring Ajay Devgn, Sanjay Dutt and the unfortunate Kangana Ranaut’s cleavage, was among the most distressingly sexist, grotesquely tasteless films of the year.

So I went into David Dhawan’s remake of Sai Paranjpye’s classic expecting to abhor it. Imagine my surprise that I did not, and then my shock when I found that I was thoroughly enjoying myself."

Read the whole piece HERE.