Below the Belt

My Mirror column:

It might not always succeed, but Abhinay Deo’s Blackmail is an ambitious comedy with a pretty dark view of the world we live in.

With Blackmail, director Abhinay Deo returns after a longish interval to the comic territory he made so volubly his own with Delhi Belly (2011). Although it deals with the ‘mature’ topic of marital infidelity rather than a screwed-up diamond heist, Blackmail makes clear that the more puerile of Deo’s preoccupations are alive and well. Shit doesn’t have quite the starring role it did in Delhi Belly, but there are enough potty jokes woven in to make sure we recognise the hand of the auteur. Sometimes literally, as when Deo manages to weave the phrase “the touch of the hand” into a silly scatological subplot. Blackmail’s central protagonist Dev (Irrfan Khan) works in a toilet paper company headed by a ridiculous boss (Omi Vaidya), who is evangelical about trying to wean Indians from water for their ablutions. This also successfully incorporates what seems to be another of Deo’s pet themes: water shortage. (Remember the boys sleeping through their municipal water timings in Delhi Belly?)

Stuck between a dead-end job and a dead marriage, Irrfan’s Dev leads a life of unvarying routine – breakfast consumed to the dull thud of pending EMIs, late nights in the office to the automated ping of video games, and then plodding back home to a solitary dinner left on the table by his disinterested wife Reena (Kirti Kulhari). The one time Dev decides to vary his behaviour, arriving home early with a bunch of roses, he stumbles onto a secret he’d rather not have known. His wife has a lover: Arunoday Singh in what might be his best role ever, as the red trackpant-wearing, clever-but-foolish Ranjit.

As with Delhi Belly, the tone Deo is aiming for is not realistic but blackly surreal. That surreality is most vivid when translated from the subconscious space of the hero’s mind onto the screen. So for instance, as he peers at Reena and Ranjit through a crack in the wall, Dev imagines — for a few satisfying seconds — thrusting the fruit knife into Ranjit’s buff, muscular back. Then the pleasurable fantasy recedes, and instead he gathers up the flowers and his jacket, leaving the house as unnoticed as he had entered. The violent fantasies continue, becoming a recurring comic motif in the film — until they start to come true, and we keep laughing.

The surreality of Blackmail also plays out in Dev’s workplace. Between the horny imaginings of his colleague Anand, Dev’s own antics involving stealing desk photographs of colleagues’ wives, and some insinuations that the boss might have an interest in Dev, the office emerges as a place of suppressed sexual fantasy, without actually showing us any sex.

In the middle-class cinema of the ’70s (Ghar, Chhoti Si Baat, Rajnigandha, even an eventually sad film like Gharonda), the office had a warm, collegial air. Colleagues and bosses in those films often offered a space of faux-kinship to young men and women carving out a new kind of urban life. That innocuous world of gossip and friendly banter has been gradually replaced by a space of corporate alienation and suppressed viciousness, even when there might be an occasional real relationship built there. In this regard, Blackmail follows films as different in tone as Trapped, Pyaar ka Punchnama, Island City and Tu Hai Mera Sunday. Deo makes at least one explicit reference to this sea-change in our cinema — he names a new female employee Prabha (the name of Vidya Sinha’s character in Chhoti Si Baat), activating and then gleefully subverting the old-school expectations of that name.

Blackmail has a perverse, madcap quality that remains rare in Hindi cinema, and it pulls off this lunacy to a great extent. Kirti Kulhari’s Reena could have done with some more interiority, but I thoroughly enjoyed the darkly comic exchanges between the brazen Ranjit and his disbelieving wife Dolly (the marvellous Divya Dutta), starting with her calling him Tommy (“Toh kya seedha kutta hi bol dun?” she says sarcastically when he objects). There are no confidences unbroken here, and no redemption. Any love that might exist remains unrequited, and thus eventually turns into vengefulness.

As he did in Delhi Belly, Deo creates a world bubbling over with politically incorrect laughs, with most emotion buried deep below the surface. But the chain of mutual exploitation is given rather too literal form, for instance in a dustbin marked ‘Use Me’ that becomes a leitmotif. Textual messaging, in fact, is Deo’s directorial weakness, with neon signs, video games and mobile phones alike being frequently used to deliver emotional cues or commentary. If you can ignore this cinematic equivalent of hitting us over the head with a blunt instrument, the poker-faced performances in Blackmail do manage to gesture to a deep core of despair.​

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 15 Apr 2018.

Dismissed with Prejudice

My Mirror column today:

Pyaar ka Punchnama 2 returns to the premise of its 2011 predecessor: a supposedly comic investigation into modern love in India, conducted entirely from the male perspective.

Luv Ranjan's first paean to the pain of men appeared four years ago. The original Pyaar ka Punchnama (2011) centred around three Delhi lads and the horrendous women they try earnestly to woo. Pyaar ka Punchnama 2, released last week, repeats the premise. The men spend the whole film being manipulated by the women, and end by revolting against the shackles of relationships - just as they did in the last film. 

Perhaps this repetitiveness is something of a sign: If men learn nothing from bad relationships, they're condemned to repeat them. 

As with the previous film, Ranjan's men may conform to type, but they are portrayed with warmth and a degree of accuracy. The original PKP had the guitar-playing stud (Raayo Bhakhirta), the sweet boy (Kartik Aaryan, then Kartikeya Tiwari) and the argumentative nerd (Divyendu Sharma). The new film retains Kartik Aaryan, now playing the saucier Gogo, and has replaced the other two actors with Omkar Kapoor as the strong, silent, sexy Thakur, and Sunny Singh as Chauka, the golden-hearted type you can always depend on. 

The scenario is largely the same as before - the three male protagonists are close friends who work in corporate jobs, and share an apartment. The black leather couch and guitar of PKP has been replaced by a more sophisticated beige sofa, while a motorcycle is parked at the edge of the now un-messy living room like some totem of imagined freedom. There are other signs of settling down: the older PKP framed romance as relief from deadening jobs, but the new one doesn't show them chafing at the bit, except if it's to start out independently. 

The women - the same actors as before - are given even less complexity to play with here. On the surface, Ranjan appears keen to establish that his women aren't old-style cliches - he gives them all the external accoutrements of being modern: They drink, they talk back, they have sex before marriage. Their positions on things seem entirely rational at first - Kusum (Ishita Sharma) asks Thakur uncomfortable but reasonable questions about why he's always the one shelling out cash for the trio; Chiku (Nusrat Bharucha) insists to Gogo that a platonic male friend isn't a threat to their relationship; Supriya (Sonnalli Seygall) tells Chauka it's a good idea to introduce him to her conservative parents as a friend before springing him on them as son-inlaw. 

But if you dig just a little deeper, PKP 2's women are just as unattractive as in the older film. Chiku is a rich brat, who when she's not bitching her boyfriend out to her bimbo-esque friends, seems to spend all her time going shopping, partying, or painting her nails. Worse, her interest in the male friend turns out to be not-so-platonic after all. Supriya leads a double life - she gets Chauka's attention by demanding whiskey at a shadi-wala secret car-o-bar, but turns out to be a gutless liar who can't gather up the courage to tell her conservative father that she's dating him. Ishita Sharma, whose Charu spent the 2011 film manipulating Divyendu Sharma's poor Liquid into paying for her, again plays the manipulative, money-minded fightercock as Kusum. (Though here she gets to be in-your-face sexy rather than retiring violet.) 

The original film had at least a certain brutal comic accuracy, even if it insisted on showing all its men as pure victims, with not a dishonest bone in their bodies. The new film is much less funny: What had some lightness earlier now feels dull and heavy. The female stereotyping here - the endless shopping trips, the "you didn't pick up my phone" guilt tripping, the shrill attention-seeking - has a bitter edge. 

There is certainly something complicated and interesting about the sort of women the film depicts, who seem caught between an old world and a new one. These are women who have jobs but not careers, who don't earn as much as the men they date, and channel any ambition they have into their boyfriend's careers. If they're well-off, it's because they have family money, and then they're spoilt brats (that version of the mollycoddled life is nicely captured by the invisibilised, unspeaking domestic help who appears with plates of cut fruit every time Chiku enters). They're bold enough to experiment with alcohol and sex, but not to fight an actual arranged marriage. They make gestures of equality - in terms of money, or sexual freedom - but don't live up to their side of the bargain. 

It is not as if there are no women in the world who might act as these ones do. But Pyaar Ka Punchnama 2 is not the film to explore their actions with some complexity. It simply tars them as duplicitous. And as with the previous film, the men take no responsibility-- neither for the emotional miscommunications they allow to fester, nor for the women they've chosen. The film has a perfunctory line of dialogue about the ridiculousness of 'love at first sight'. But in fact, that's how all our heroes choose their partners. 

Whether it's a perfect posterior at the gym, a curvaceous kamar at a wedding, or a dancing vision of loveliness at a party, hotness is the one and only criterion that matters. It makes sense, then, that none of these relationships have anything beyond sex to make them stick. Lest you think I'm being too harsh, the film makes an open admission that men only put up with relationships for sex - which women are accused of holding out as a bribe. "Isse toh accha hai apne haath se hi shaadi kar lo!" declares a frustrated Gogo. Given how instrumental, how tragically limited, this vision of relationships is, perhaps that's really not such a bad idea.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, Oct 18, 2015.

Cinemascope: Pyaar ka Punchnama; 404.

My Sunday Guardian film review column, 22nd May 2011.

Dose of unapologetic Delhi humour
Pyaar ka Punchnama
Director: Luv Ranjan
Starring: Kartikeya Tiwari, Raayo Bhakhirta, Divyendu Sharma, Sonalli Sehgal
**1/2

Three young men looking for love, a bachelor pad full of overflowing ashtrays, the streets of Delhi – once upon a time, these were ingredients that led to Chashme Buddoor: a film full of joie de vivre, as memorable for the charming encounter between tentative salesgirl Deepti Naval and bashful bachelor Farooq Shaikh as for the fun moments where hopeful layabouts Rakesh Bedi and Ravi Basvani are told where to get off by potential love interests. But that was 1981.

Thirty years later, the same ingredients have produced Pyaar ka Punchnama. The changes in set-up are revealing: the three young men are not starving DU students any more. They're just out of college, but they've got (boring) jobs that pay. So they live not in a tiny barsaati with a couple of mattresses, but in a well-appointed flat complete with open kitchen, black leather couch and guitar. And none of them – not the guitar-playing stud (Raayo), not the sweet boy (Kartikeya Tiwari), not even the argumentative nerd (Divyendu Sharma, nicknamed Liquid "kyonki woh phailta zyada hai") – are anywhere near as clueless about wooing women as their cinematic predecessors. And this when none of them has ever been in a relationship before.

So the wooing goes well enough: one affair is kindled by a karaoke night that turns competitive (maybe authentic but bloody awful), the second kicks off in a party, while the third is an office romance that seems constantly on the verge of happening. It's what happens after that the boys can't deal with. Whether it's the loving girlfriend (Nusrat Bharucha) who is first clingy, then control-freak, and finally manipulative, or the she-knows-she's-hot exhibitionista (Sonalli) who swings like a pendulum between new lover and old, or the office 'best friend' (Ishita Sharma) who seems the most harmless but turns out to be the most exploitative of the lot, the women in this film are every man's worst nightmare. I would recommend this film for its well-etched performances and unapologetic Delhi humour, but I find it deeply disturbing that the director seems to think men are emotional victims, with no role in the breakdown of their relationships.

Carefully woven psychological thriller
404
Director: Prawaal Raman
Starring: Rajwir Aroraa, Imaad Shah, Satish Kaushik, Tisca Chopra and Nishikanth Kamat
**1/2


404 opens well: a grand old medical college somewhere in the hills, a sincere new batch of students, a bunch of seniors who insist on ragging even though it's forbidden. Unlike recent depictions of ragging – eg. Anurag Kashyap's Gulaal – 404 involves little physical violence. An early scene involves the taking-off of clothes, but the sense of sexual and bodily violation is kept at arm's length: instead we have a stripping episode that's almost matter-of-fact; things only turn serious when the warden (a wonderfully wry Satish Kaushik) appears and new boy Abhimanyu (impressive Rajvir Aroraa) decides to tell on the raggers. Keen to prove a point to his oppressors, and encouraged by a star professor he admires, Abhimanyu insists on a hostel room that's seen as haunted since a student killed himself there three years ago.

Director Prawaal Raman's decision to keep the physical drama turned down a notch may have been a deliberate one in this film, which concentrates its energies on mindgames. Despite Raman's previous experience – Darna Zaroori Hai (2006) and one segment of Darna Mana Hai (2003) – he chooses not to milk the standard horror movie staples here: there are no creaking doors, no hands reaching out where there shouldn't be any, no gross creepie-crawlies. Admittedly, there is a banging door with no-one there, a ringing telephone and reflections in the mirror: but these are all carefully woven into a psychological thriller where what you're thinking matters more than whether you're jumping out of your skin.

It's unfortunate then, that Raman's research seems not to have included the very basic difference between bipolar disorder – the disease that 404 revolves around – and schizophrenia. Bipolar disorder, in which periods of unnaturally elevated mood (mania) alternate with stretches of depression, does not involve hallucinations; it is schizophrenia in which people are unable to tell the difference between real and unreal experiences. Still, there are real reasons to watch 404: a carefully nonchalant Imaad Shah, Mumbai Meri Jaan director Nishikant Kamath as the professor who goes from cocksure to jittery and back again – and the requisite twist in the tale.