Journalism Blues

My Mirror column:

Noor’s fluffy portrait of a thoughtless journalist made this columnist think about other films that have dealt with the media’s murkiness.

Sonakshi Sinha's portrait of a journalist in Noor (2017)

Last week, I wrote in these pages about the 1986 film New Delhi Times, in which Shashi Kapoor’s ethical Delhi news editor finds himself pushed to the edge by political pressure and physical threats. Rakesh Sharma’s under-watched film traced the beginnings of a threatening climate for honest journalism. So it felt strangely serendipitous this week to be watching a film which might be said to bring Hindi cinema’s portrait of the crisis in journalism up to date.

Noor Roy Chowdhury, the titular protagonist of this week’s release, Noor, works as a journalist at something called The Buzz. We’re told she wants to be the next Barkha Dutt, but director Sunhil Sippy’s targeted vibe for her is more desi Bridget Jones. Noor trips clumsily on her way into her office, cribs constantly over her maid not getting the geyser fixed, obsesses loudly over her weight (which – this being Bollywood – seems totally under control), and makes louder faux pas as she waits for the hot boyfriend and big story of her dreams.


Our heroine’s blissful obliviousness about most things – journalistic and otherwise – is put to the test when a real scandal falls into her lap, pretty much alongside the much-desired hot boyfriend. Goggle-eyed with excitement at the thought of catching a big fish, Noor pushes hastily forward with the story – only to have to repent at leisure.

It’s interesting that something very similar happens to Shashi Kapoor’s character Vikas Pande in New Delhi Times – although unlike Sonakshi Sinha’s Noor, Vikas is both seasoned and conscientious, and his failing is not thoughtlessness but an inability to see that he is being used – until it is too late. Although thirty years apart, and hugely different in intent and tone, both films focus on journalists so caught up in what they thought was the big picture that they sacrifice the individuals at the centre of their story.

In the same period as New Delhi Times, Jagmohan Mundhra’s Kamla – based on a script by the legendary playwright Vijay Tendulkar – also tells an acerbic tale about a journalist intoxicated on his own power. In Mundhra’s film, Marc Zuber plays a star reporter called Jaisingh Jadhav who decides to ‘buy’ a young woman from a tribal area in Madhya Pradesh and bring her back to Delhi. His reason, he says, is “Desh ka aam aadmi jo bhayaanak nashe mein jee raha hai, usse jhatka deke jagaana hai.” Which is all very well. But right from letting Kamla believe that he’s ‘bought’ her, to cruelly forcing her to wear her ragged saree to a press conference that ends up as a sexist free-for-all, Jadhav’s insensitivity to the bewildered, childlike Kamla belies all his high-minded statements. If it is the tragic state of humanity he is out to expose, one begins to feel, he should perhaps have started with himself.

Kamla’s depiction of Delhi’s journalistic world is bleak. The film’s Press Club scenes have journalists either sitting around playing cards, or talking trash. Once a female journalist is seen retouching her lipstick before her supposed meeting with a minister – who is ‘Suresh Darling’ to her. Later, in the drunken, orgy-esque ‘press conference’ (which contains no sex but the pervasive suggestion of it being on people’s minds), far from offering the poor tribal woman a buffer against a horde of camera-wielding men, the same woman emerges as the flag-bearer of the press’s urban middle class hypocrisy, making crude remarks about Kamla’s adivasi way of wearing her sari as her ease with ‘displaying her body’. 

Meanwhile, Jadhav’s penchant for sensational exposes is juxtaposed with the old-school journalism of his wife’s uncle Kakasahab (AK Hangal), who makes a caustic remark that rings truer now that it probably did then: “Haan bhai, nowadays a man is as successful as the number of phone calls he receives”. Later he makes the point that journalism cannot only be about showing us ‘how’ and ‘what’ is happening – it must also try to say ‘why’.

Cinematic censure against journalism, of course, reached its peak in Madhur Bhandarkar’s 2005 hit drama Page 3, in which Konkona Sen Sharma’s Madhavi tries her best to move from covering high society to exposing its grimmest underbelly – which turns out to be child prostitution: it was a Madhur Bhandarkar film, after all. Naturally, her big story is nipped in the bud. Over a decade later, Sonakshi Sinha in Noor is struggling to make a similar leap, and after a difficult interlude that is actually much more difficult for her informant than herself, she triumphs – with the aid of social media.

Page 3, Kamla and New Delhi Times may feel dated, but in their clear-eyed pessimism, they seem much more in tune with the journalistic present than Noor is.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 23 Apr 2017.

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.