June 14, 2013 · 11:00 am

Review: Zack Snyder’s Man Of Steel

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You’ll believe a man can sigh.

That’s what the godlike alien in Man Of Steel frequently does as he looks around, before he glowers and scowls and, perhaps most importantly, poses. There is very little of the winning, geeky smile we associate with Clark Kent — indeed, the eager yet shy journalist we know and love appears for one scene in the new film — and for a character named Superman who’s just turned 75, this feller doesn’t even have the spit-curl. Nope, this is the story of The Fresh Prince Of Krypton.

Zack Snyder, a man the early trailers for his own film dubbed a ‘visionary,’ starts things off on a Krypton that looks like David Lynch’s Dune and features some Giger gadgets leftover from Ridley Scott’s Alien movies. His vision might just lie in jewellery design: the headgear worn by creepy Kryptonian councilmen is most ornate, just like the exquisitely carved trinkets we’d seen adorning almost-slaughtered heads in his 300.

His approach to the Superman origin story is hamhanded and operatic, aided well by strong actors all around. Russell Crowe, mercifully not warbling his lines this time, makes for a particularly formidable presence as the Dad Of Steel, and his committed performance makes Snyder’s unsubtle theatricality appear compelling if never evocative: bland Guignol must do when the Grand isn’t at hand.

A young boy tossed Moses-like across the galaxy in a spaceship basket, Kal-El lands in Kansas, but we never see that. Instead we see him fully grown and alarmingly muscular, a gentle hulk going around helping folks and smashing the occasional truck. His earth parents, Jonathan and Martha Kent, are played by Kevin Costner and Diane Lane, and both are excellent in the way they guide him toward the truth of his origins, and to focussing his power. “Imagine my voice as an island,” Lane says, in one of the film’s most beautiful moments.

And this is where it must be stressed that Man Of Steel does have beautiful moments. Some are, as mentioned, conjured up by very fine actors, while others are visually pretty — even if somewhat Terrence Malick inspired. And, in terms of storytelling, while a lot of it might not truly make sense at all, it all happens commendably fast: the movie dishes out huge narrative chunks as if in a rush, hurtling past the Superman timeline in order to get to an endlessly long and considerably boring 45-minute fight — but wait, I’m getting ahead of myself.

Well before all the climactic cacophony we meet Lois Lane, self-praising Pulitzer-winner and one of comicdom’s most fearless women. Amy Adams is enjoyably credible as the pesky, relentless journalist, but after a bit of fun, the film — bereft of all the Lois/Clark romance — asks only that she look at Superman dreamily, and this she does. (The other big ask from her is a full-throated Wilhelm Scream, which too she delivers magnificently.) The musclebound wetsuit-wearing object of her affections, Henry Cavill, is but a dimple under a baseball cap — he has the look right and is adequately earnest, but the film affords him not the luxury to charm us. Instead, he gets to throw a million punches.

When Krypton was destroyed, prisoners exiled to a phantom zone escaped destruction along with young Kal-El. These disgruntled folk are led by Michael Shannon’s General Zod, who overacts rather delightfully. His fury is most entertaining, his eyes like apoplectic ping-pong balls, but purists will be heartbroken at the realisation that he never asks the hero to kneel before him. He reaches the Earth to hunt out Kal-El, who is, in turn, being guided rather conveniently by his dead father. Unlike Marlon Brando who was merely an interactive telegram (by way of floating hologram head) in the first, masterful Superman film, Russel Crowe’s Jor-El seems to have turned into a Siri-like helper who guides not just Clark, but Lois. And all for some MacGuffin that sounds like a cough syrup.

As you can probably tell, there is little room for simplicity and stark, shadowy moodiness now as the film juggernauts forward, crammed with much malarkey. General Zod tackles fighter planes like a livid quarterback, and Clark smashes into him, hard. They keep ramming at each other and creating giant sonic booms under them, again, and again, and again. This mindnumbing, increasingly frustrating sequence of city-tearing explosions — which feel just like waiting for friends to stop playing Mortal Kombat or at least hand you a controller — lasts for at least 45 minutes. This? This is why Snyder wolfed down huge bites of narrative? This is what we had to get to? It’s unforgivably bad (unforgivably Bay, even) and things aren’t helped by the fact that unlike in the Marvel movies where New York is New York, the fictionalised DC capital of Metropolis is stripped of all its character. So we have a skyline with lots of mirror-covered buildings, but no soul. Kinda like Gurgaon.

Oh, and while I want to rant on and on about the film’s last scene, I promise not to spoil it for you here. So when you get to the final moment, just remember there’s no possible way it can make sense after the rest of the film you just saw. No way.

man-of-steel-croweThere are, as said, small joys to be found in Snyder’s film: the early bits with Crowe, or with a young Clark who is literally too sensitive to function. There is Lois, drinking scotch and finding a way around her contract, and there’s Toby Zeigler, always a joy. The art direction is impressively detailed, as is the visionary bling, and the 3D never seems too dark. Plus, there’s a pretty good sight gag about toner cartridges.

But Man Of Steel (which invariably sounds, to me, like a rejected title for a gay-themed Remington Steele episode) never quite musters up the charm or the levity any story of Superman requires — and deserves. It looks good and is populated by fine actors (and we get a peek at trucks belonging to a bald man this movie could have used but doesn’t have), but the clunky Superman-as-Jesus imagery running through it all symptomises the problem with this narrative: too much steel, not enough man.

Rating: 2.5 stars

~

First published Rediff, June 14, 2013

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May 31, 2013 · 2:45 pm

Review: Ayan Mukerji’s Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani

When we can’t stand something a certain way, we’re instinctively prone to wishing it were the other way around, the opposite. This, naturally, is a huge fallacy, since the opposite is hardly ever what we truly mean. When we watch a Hindi film, for example, where the songs get in the way of the narrative and make the film longer than it should be, what we long for is a film where there are no songs, or one where the songs are truly a part of the storytelling. But that isn’t the opposite, no.

yjhd1The exact opposite of a film where a great narrative is disrupted by songs is, then, a film where perfectly good song-and-dance sequences find themselves hampered by a tedious narrative. And that admittedly odd description should be on the poster for Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani.

For this is a very good-looking film. It is a film with almost exclusively pretty people, each primped up and glossed and shot at their most flattering, and every time Pritam’s songs burst through the speakers, Ayan Mukerji’s film gallops into gear like the run-rate when the bowler has a towel tucked into his pants. There’s a zingy energy to the uptempo proceedings, the lead actors are at their most electrifying, and the sheer, heady enthusiasm is deliriously grand. Even the greatest heroine in all the land merrily shakes her caboose. It’s huge fun.

When the songs aren’t playing, however, this is a daftly childish film, one where most actors act half their age and the narrative stumbles forward inanely and gracelessly. What should have been a breeze turns into a pained plod, and while things still look all glossy, the songless part of the movie — the story, we dare say? — remains dismally predictable and awfully contrived, eventually becoming quite a bore. (Throw back the towel, say I; here is indeed need for a fix.)

Three chums from school (along with the class geek) hit the hills for a trek, and have the kind of riotously slapstick time that they do in the movies. So farce so good, and while Kalki Koechlin, Aditya Roy Kapoor and Ranbir Kapoor gamely put on their underage faces and walk the walk, things are made more than bearable by Deepika Padukone earnestly playing the shy wallflower, on the outside looking in. The film feels like her story, and the actress is refreshingly assured and blessedly restrained in the part. Enough to make us root for her.

And then, conveniently around the point of intermission, she whips off her glasses defiantly (as all movie geeks must do, to proclaim their newfound, myopia-beating wings) and becomes one of the gang. Which is all cheery enough except the story now becomes that of the boy. And truth be told, he isn’t worth talking about.

The hero, Bunny, likes to travel. His dreams are exploratory, dreams of soaring and falling and discovering, and he’s heading effortlessly towards his fantasy. He’s cracked the code but left everyone behind in the process — a fact nobody ever lets him forget, his dearest friends hitting him with guilt-trips and sighs instead of congratulatory high-fives the moment they learn of his awesome scholarship. And so this film becomes about Bunny being made to feel worse and worse for getting what he wants.

There is no conflict, you see. Bunny has the passport-scorching job, the life, the girls. He has parents that support him unquestionably, and friends who think the world of him. How then is a filmmaker supposed to make things weepy when the second-half of the film is set at a massively opulent Indian wedding, a backdrop made for kerchiefs and melodrama? Problems, therefore, are engineered: but despite the swelling background music, it’s all most trivial.

dp1yjhdThe girl, after discovering her cool side, is now always found by herself, feet frequently dipped into moonlit water. She has evidently been waiting helplessly, and no matter how much of a boor the boy turns into — one scene in particular has him being inexcusably horrid to one of her friends — she’s willing to wait, incredulous and hopeful. Tsk.

There are a couple of nice touches, but it needed more than a few stray smiles to save the catastrophically doomed second half, mired in boring convenience and poor plotting. The cast tries valiantly but, stuck in their one-note characters, they can’t do much.

This is the kind of film where a girl at her desk has her hair tousled by a wind-machine, and where Manali shacks look Amster-damn good, but despite glitzy unreality being the order of the day, seasoned character actors thankfully don’t seem to have been given the memo: Farooque Sheikh, Kunal Roy Kapoor and Dolly Ahluwalia are top-notch. Heck, Ahluwalia — who is inexplicably absent later in the film — could have livened up the second half all by herself. She’s magnificent merely saying the word “wild”, with utter derision, as she talks of a girl in hotpants.

Kalki’s at her shrillest and smiliest, while Aditya broods from behind a beard. They’re both good but unremarkable, as is Ranbir, except when showcasing his admittedly spectacular dancing abilities. By now he can play a rake in his sleep, and delivers some lines — like one where he calls the girl “vulgar” — with immaculate timing, but he’s strictly average here.

Deepika, on the other hand, plays it beautifully. She acts within herself and eschews exaggeration, and the results are impressive. Her Naina is intelligent and eager, impulsive yet tentative, and, while mostly timid, also a girl who can whack a ladder with gusto. This may be her most self-aware performance so far, and here’s to more of the same.

Now if only they’d have left out the story. Coulda been a helluva great Superhit Muqabla, this. For youth is wasted on the unsung.

Rating: 2 stars

~

First published Rediff, May 31, 2013

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May 30, 2013 · 3:06 pm

Rituparno Ghosh, tender as the night

rituparno2I met Rituparno Ghosh earlier this very month when he invited me on the sets of his new film, Satyanweshi, in Calcutta. Ghosh and I shared some common friends and had tweeted cordially to each other before, but I hadn’t met him till I got onto his set and he — a be-turbanned sultan comfortably in control of a period drama — turned to me and smiled. It was a big, genial beam, the kind that instantly draws you in, and I gratefully smiled back. I spent a little time with him over the next couple of days, trying my best not to get in his way, and now all of that — even the long conversations we had, and our interview about the new film and Bengali literature — seem horribly fleeting.

Over the last twenty years, Ghosh has been an incredibly important Indian filmmaker, a sensitive craftsman who did not allow his perfectionism to stand in the way of his dizzyingly prolific output. There are many films  — and we all have our favourites — but what characterises Ghosh’s filmography, in my opinion, is a certain tenderness to the whole. It was as if he genuinely loved the characters he peopled his films with, and dealt with them fraternally, maternally, and like close friends. Just because a minor character was a plot contrivance doesn’t mean they could be brushed aside. They mattered to RituDa, and especially in several silent bits of his films, this fondness clearly shows.

And when not silent, the words crackled. There might have been the occasional false beats in his dramas — some of which I’ve called overwrought in the past — but the man was a true master of dialogue. The running gag is that all his characters sound the same and talk the same way — which is to say, like him — but Ghosh always made the lines work magically. People spoke and we related to them, even when they spoke languidly and poetically, like we never would, or could. We related because he made us feel their love, their anguish, their melancholy.

And now he’s gone. He was 49, and he had so, so many stories to tell. There were ideas lined up for several films after the new one — which, by the way, stars Kahaani-director Sujoy Ghosh in the lead — but alas, we won’t be fortunate enough to see any of them. It’s a devastating bit of news to wake up to, not least because he remained relentless and stood, tall and bold, in a country that looks increasingly shorn of true storytellers. His shadow will linger on — and dramatically so.

Based on my very minimal interactions, RituDa was a warm, sweet person — even though these aren’t the most visible traits when a man is on the sets scolding his actors because he knows exactly what he wants. He was precise and unyielding, often grumpy in the quest for the right take, and his vision remained undimmed. He was also highly articulate and erudite, to the extent that our impromptu conversations made fascinated actors eavesdrop, just so they could hear him wax eloquent. The passion was tremendous, and striking.

I only hope Satyanweshi, which I believe he finished shooting just before his unfortunate passing, sees the light of day as he would have liked it. Given just how specific he was with the instructions on set — and how in sync his crew was with him — one hopes the film will emerge exactly according to plan. Just so he can smile at his swansong from above. Like I said, that shadow will linger.

Much love, RituDa. May the lighting up there be just the way you like it.

~

First published Rediff, May 30, 2013

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May 24, 2013 · 11:20 am

Review: Ishqk In Paris

Ah, Preity. When we first met Priety Zinta, we were bowled over by those sparkling eyes, those dimples and that genuinely fresh candour. When, in Dil Se, Shah Rukh Khan choked on his burger as she casually asked about virginity, we could relate. We rooted against the girl his character loved because of the character we invariably fell for, dooming the movie’s fate without realising it. And it felt worth it. What a girl, that fiesty, ebullient, Perk-eating Zinta.

20130524-103249.jpgThat was fifteen years ago. In this Friday’s release — the moronically spelt Ishqk In Paris — Zinta assails us with those dimples in the hopes that things haven’t changed. Tragically, she seems almost determined not to act. She straddles the line between French and Hindi clumsily, speaking in a bit of a supervillain accent. Her eyes sparkle with the eagerness of a jumpy squirrel, even when they shouldn’t. (Really, should anybody’s?) There is a bit too much enthusiasm, too much bounce to her character, who shrugs all the time and nods rapidly and constantly, like a big Preity bobble-head. Without a cricketer in embracing range, Zinta doesn’t seem to know what to do with herself.

This, as you should have guessed from the title or the posters or the heading of this review, is a bad film. Evidence can be found in the fact that the men in the film, having worked previously on truly dismal projects, decided to come to this one with names changed. Director Prem Raj was formerly called Prem Soni, and made a trainwreck called Main Aur Mrs Khanna; leading man Rrehan Malliek used to go by Gaurav Chanana and last starred in Himesh Reshammiya’s Kajra Re, a film that furtively ran in two Mumbai theatres for three days. This Paris project, then, is like their witness protection program, their chance to carve new identities. Not the best pick, alas.

Somewhere in the middle of all this mediocrity is iconic French actress Isabelle Adjani, playing a Parisian playwright called Maria. The film opens with her reading from a script she’s written, and just when we think that perhaps something interesting may unfold from this unquestionably talented leading lady, she switches from English to Hindi with a ghastly bit of dubbing — I have a feeling Adjani’s irritating Hindi voice belongs to the woman who dubbed for Nargis Fakhri in Rockstar. I might indeed be wrong, but no wronger than the filmmakers.

The story of Ishqk and Akash — for that infuriatingly spelt Ishqk is the name of a character — forms Maria’s latest play, and from what we hear of the play, it seems she had watched Jab We Met a few times and then felt Geet needed to be an imbecile. Maria, while beautiful, is clearly a hack, for the love story she describes is so unbearably generic that the script could have been assembled by putting together the outtakes from any number of romantic movies. Young fellow meets Manic Punjabi Dream Woman (ahem) in Paris, they Before Sunrise it for a night, and then Salman Khan pops up for a song. Textbook, truly.

Ah, but even this hunk-less hunky-dory state can’t last forever. In a laughably bad heel turn, the hero goes from sap to scumbag in the space of one scene, going from cooing to cursing and berating the heroine’s family. Which, it turns out, she and her mom don’t mind as much. Clearly these characters deserve one another.

“This is a rubbish love story,” Zinta says in the film’s most honest, self-aware moment. “I need a drink.”

Ditto, miss. And you best be buying.

Rating: 1 star (but she looks to be fading)

~

First published Rediff, May 24, 2013

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May 20, 2013 · 11:53 am

Nargis Fakhri: The World Is Not Enough

I couldn’t resist taking an umbrella along.

I mean, how often do you get to have a drink with a Nargis, anyway? It’s a name we don’t run into much, despite our legendary screen goddess. The girl sitting across from me, one film old, didn’t particularly dig the name as a kid — “I grew up with a lot of Spanish people around, and they would call me Nalgas, which means ass-cheeks” — but loved it later. “Nobody else had my name. And when I was modelling I would never use my last name. Ever.” She pronounces that name Fac’ry (like ‘factory’, without a T) and then, for my benefit, says it the way Shah Rukh Khan would approve of — Fakhhri — with much epiglottal grace. It’s clear she frequently switches accents depending on her audience, and even clearer that she has to: this girl is all about travelling. And about talking.

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“If you want to win me over,” she says, talking about how she doesn’t have a type, “all you gotta say is I wanna see the Great Wall of China, or climb the mountains of Machu-Picchu. He could be four feet tall with a limp, a little midget with a bike and I’ll be like ‘weally?’” The mock-swoon is dramatic but heartfelt. “It’s that big, the travel thing. I know someone who doesn’t have a passport, and I could punch that person in the face.”

Propelled by a globetrotting mother (currently in the Bahamas) who handed her a backpack at 15 and said the world is safe enough, Nargis has whimsically traipsed across continents without a plan. She’s gone randomly from Australia to Greece to Singapore, and doesn’t see it stopping. “If I ever give birth to babies I will strap them on my back like an African, and I’ll trek through the jungles of wherever, and I hope whoever my partner in crime is will feel the same way, and they’ll be strapping on the other one.” She then proceeds to do an impromptu fertility dance ‘blessing’ me with ten children. Ahem. But at least she promises to babysit. “I’ll be in New Zealand or Australia and have an organic little farm or some bullshit like that. You come visit anytime. I’ll take care of your kids.”

Hindi cinema, by that measure, is just another adventure. “Imagine someone from China came up to you and said ‘Oh my god, we love the way you look, we want you to be the male lead in our big Chinese movie. You have two months to learn Chinese. And to act.’ You never acted, you don’t know Chinese. Can you imagine doing that? With no family, no friends around. I’m insane for saying ‘Yes,’ but that I’ve established since I was very little, that I’m a bit loopy.” Worst-case scenario? She’d do badly, backpack around India and maybe “learn some Ayurveda.”

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Growing up in Queens, New York, she remembers her Pakistani father watching Hindi movies but she was never really into films. “Here you’re growing up on the dance moves, you’re doing Chikni Chameli at three! We went to some Kids Day thing and I was watching these young kids dance to item numbers and they’re actually lipsyncing and I’m shocked at how intense it is.” Part of saying yes to Imtiaz Ali and his 2011 film Rockstar was not knowing better.

“It was only when we started doing promotions that I realised how famous Ranbir was. People were crying and ripping his clothes off and throwing stuff at him,” she laughs, “And I’m like, ‘Is U2 here?!’” It’s hard to imagine anything preparing one for the facemelting front-page glare of the Bollywood spotlight, and Nargis bemoans the fact that one single film has left her unable to take buses and trains in India. “As wonderful as it is, it’s sad. I didn’t ask for this. I’m grateful that it came to me, but I’m still weighing it: how awesome is it, really?”

“I couldn’t say no to the idea of India, I’m not a scaredy-cat,” she says of the challenge and warming up to showbiz. “And after you start, you think ‘can I get better at this? What else can I do? What else can I play? What can come my way?’ Also, there’s nothing else that’s calling me at the moment. So maybe, someday, something else will intrigue me far more than this and I’ll be like ‘Okay, I gotta go, bye.’”

“You give your best and you know some people will like it, some won’t. If you like it, I’m happy and if you didn’t, I’m sorry for ya,” she laughs. “But I’ll try harder next time.” She’s already shot that next film, Shoojit Sircar’s Madras Cafe, and admits it was easier. “The biggest reason is that now I know what’s up. Now I have a notch on my belt.”

 What she also has is three different salads, her fork oscillating expertly between them like a virtuoso xylophonist. In one of them she finds a tiny bug. “This salad’s so good that if you weren’t here, I could just have eaten this guy up like a pepper,” she laments as the plate’s sent back. A masochistic repeat-offender, she’s been awfully sick on much street food but gone back for seconds. “It’s like when you’re in a terrible relationship, you’re depressed and suicidal and all your friends hate the guy, but after you break up and some time passes, you forget the trauma and remember only the happy stuff. So it took me a few more times to finally learn my lesson.”

Yeah, the girl can eat. She’s done alligator, frogs, snails and chocolate-covered ants. And she’s game for more. “I wonder what dog and cat taste like. I said that on a shoot and this woman squealed but then lamb or chicken, anything we eat is adorable, right? My friend had a pot-bellied pig as a pet,” she says, her eyes glazing over. “I love pork. It’s the best. I’m salivating right now, by the way.” I ask if she could date a vegetarian, and she says she’d turn vegetarian if he were good enough. “I was vegetarian for six months, and it was the healthiest time of my life.” Ah, but was she travelling? “No,” she confesses. “Six months later I went to Germany and they have all that wonderful meat, the bratwursts and weinerschnitzels, and the vegetarianism stopped when I landed. Okay, that might not work.”

“I demand a lot from my partner because I do so much, and I expect it back.” The problem lies in making time. “In this business I don’t know how you can be in a relationship. You don’t even have the time to get to know someone. So I don’t know what I’ll do, and that could actually be a reason to leave the business.” She scoffs at the idea of dating someone in the movies. “No! I want someone normal. Someone who has a normal fucking job, who goes to sleep at 9 o’clock at night and likes to go trekking and likes to cook.”

She didn’t always crash at nine, this girl who’d jet to Barcelona to party all night but is now almost ridiculously low-key in Bombay. “It’s because of what happened in the beginning,” she explains. “I remember I went out to Olive one night and didn’t even have one drink, and they wrote in the paper that I was partying like a wild animal. And people were staring at me, like I was a monkey. It’s awkward! You’re standing there and thinking ‘why the fuck are people looking at me?’”

Thus, Nargis stays in and reads (mostly about “human behaviour and spirituality”) and watches documentaries and YouTube clips and TED Talks. Oh, and Hindi movies. She hasn’t watched her namesake in any romances yet (which means my Shri 420-themed brolly bit fizzled, alas) but has cried many a tissue box over her in Mother India. Kahaani’s the first film she ever watched twice, and English Vinglish made her weep buckets. “I wake up in the morning with a bed full of booger-tissues. And I’m such a sap, I cry when I see a cute kid or puppy. So yeah, those movies, they got me.“

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Provided you don’t go someplace with exorbitant arugula, she’s a cheap date and, buzzed on a single glass of rosé, goes on about her fear of roaches, nude beaches in Europe and how she doesn’t want to ever be really fat. “But I will,” the salad-destroyer moans. “I’ll be fat when I’m old!” I tell her it’s fine, because fat folks are jolly. “Oh yeah, they are,” she grins, instantly reassured, peace brokered with inevitability. “And they want to feed everybody else. Awesome.”

I can’t help thinking she sounds like a pitch for a hit reality show. She agrees, thrilled. “Just get a Go-Pro and stick it on my head! And get me to travel and talk to people.” She insists she should be the interviewer, and, to prove she can ask personal questions, starts quizzing me about, um, fetish preferences. I order another martini. This is one tough rookie.

~

First published GQ, April 2013

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May 17, 2013 · 1:06 pm

Review: Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby

A famous Hindi film actor (who shall naturally go nameless here) once told me, while gushing about Baz Luhrmann’s work and cinematic flair, that he “is like Sanjay Leela Bhansali, gone right.” I laughed it off at the time, but there are few more astutely drawn parallels than between these gentlemen who insist on creating opera but staging it a la cabaret. Alas, it is with this new adaptation of The Great Gatsby — in which Luhrmann indeed borrows an actor Bhansali has used before — that the Australian director is tragically at his least heartfelt as he looks to smother F Scott Fitzgerald’s literary masterwork with tinsel butterflies. In 3D, no less.

gatsby 1Which isn’t to say it doesn’t look good. It is a massive piece of confectionary with Disney castles and gleaming yellow automobiles and flapper dresses and pink suits and champagne magnums filled with confetti, and Luhrmann shows off his world with brashly hallucinatory glee. A visual where the most beautiful shirts in the world are flung towards us like exotic birds is particularly gorgeous, for example. And this Gatsby is set in the 1920s but — despite the occasional and unintentionally hilarious swell of Gershwin (watch for the moment we first see the ‘hero’) — booms along with a cleverly used but highly modern, JayZ-filled soundtrack; even the Charleston challenges the subwoofer. That might well have been the Jazz Age but this is unmistakably the Baz Age.

And yet it all comes across as a pale Moulin Rouge imitation, as if that eye-poppingly original director was being reined in, perhaps by the very source material many have called unfilmable. The result is trite, a mess of restless marionettes — characters made wooden and visibly dying to burst into song but never allowed to — peopled by very fine actors forced to ham it up. Tobey Maguire’s Nick Carraway, for instance, talks of his cousin Daisy with the same saccharine awe he used as a 17-year-old in love with redheaded Mary Jane Watson. Which wouldn’t have been as problematic were he not this film’s narrator.

Ah, but far stranger things are afoot than merely contrived attempts at sincerity. In this film Carraway plays not just Gatsby’s friend but, inexplicably some sort of loony stand-in for Fitzgerald himself: Luhrmann’s whole film is a flashback from a sanatorium told in Maguire’s voice but heavy-handedly using Fitzgerald’s prose as if the character had come up with it. What this B-movie framing device adds to the narrative itself is unclear, save for giving the director opportunities to write words like ‘grotesque’ in cursive text and take us all for beautiful little fools.

gatsby2Then again, at least Maguire’s eyes are adequately soaked in pity. Carey Mulligan drowns her Daisy in such a state of melodramatic disrepair that the character never leaves an impact. Elizabeth Debicki’s Jordan Baker fares better and looks the part perfectly, shimmying even as she stands up straight. Leonardo DiCaprio’s Gatsby is — like most screen versions of the character — far too charismatic to be that hospitable bootlegger on the fringes and looking in, but DiCaprio manages to bring some vulnerability and authenticity to his Gatsby, even if sometimes channelling his own Aviator role a bit much. But Leo’s better moments (like one where he waits impatiently for Daisy, his white suit soaked but his enthusiasm undamped) serve only to throw the script’s inadequacies into sharp relief.

“Let’s get the wolf-pack back together,” says Tom Buchanan as the film opens, jarring us immediately by using that word now linked so tightly to the Hangover movies. Buchanan is played by the excellent Joel Edgerton, who the film takes pains to ensure we loathe, right from the get go. These pitiful broadstrokes are seen everywhere: in Isla Fisher’s caricatured version of Myrtle; in the satanically manicured beard on Amitabh Bachchan’s Meyer Wolfsheim… Bachchan’s bit is quite good though, to be fair, and a couple more scenes with him might have helped. (At the very least they could have prevented Luhrmann from going on and on, spelling things out about bootlegging and drugstores.)

The genuinely exasperating thing is, however, that this film indeed tries doggedly hard to capture the spirit of the book. Not just the vulgar excesses of Gatsby’s frequently flaunted wealth but also its sadness, its yearning. And while the visual circusry propels the first half of the movie to at least the level of an impressively exploding firework, the flourishes mostly dry up in the second half as Luhrmann tries to tell the story of a man and a woman with ill-judged restraint. The romance, told the way it is, comes across more infantile than fabulous.

There is style here, then, but not enough of it. Merely keeping things spectacular all the way might have sufficed. As it stands, I recommend smuggling a flask of gin into theatres in order to swallow the second hour easier. Fitzgerald (and Jay Gatsby) would have approved. What he might not have approved of, though, is the way Luhrmann appropriates and trivialises those exquisite, immortal last lines from the novel. Just so his film can look at itself in the mirror and preen some more.

Rating: 2 stars

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First published Rediff, May 17, 2013

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May 3, 2013 · 2:00 pm

Review: Bombay Talkies

Why do we love the movies?

Why do we stiffen with anticipation when that censor certificate flashes on the big screen, its signatures the size of couches, even when I may already be warning us that the film may be interminably long? Why does popcorn taste better when the lights go down? Why do we root for some movies and debate passionately against others? Why do we care about stray opinions expressed by people who don’t matter about our favourite actors who, clearly, do? Why do we let movies sunnily melt our cynicism or grimly erode our optimism with just a couple of scenes? And why, oh God why, does it feel so damned good when a movie makes us cry?

Bombay Talkies, a four-film collection of movies about Hindi cinema, is a portmanteau project that might not aim to provide a definitive answer to those questions, but is a film that certainly likes to wonder aloud, alongside us. There are four films, each roughly 25 minutes in length, made by four very different kinds of filmmakers, each a champion in their own right: Karan Johar, Dibakar Banerjee, Zoya Akhtar and Anurag Kashyap have made these films, and each, in a way, has unmistakably left a comfort zone behind in this commendable effort to high-five the movies.

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Johar’s film, which will invariably be the most talked about of the lot, is more statement than film. It is a bold, sensitively handled drama about an inert marriage and, perching on its fringes, a young man bursting with pluck and defiance. It is not about a homosexual, but one of the characters happens to be gay. It is a film about old Hindi film music, with Johar expertly reappropriating classic songs, classic lyrics, and making them heartbreaking in a whole new way. It is about overfamiliarity, friendship and about how a man can drag another to a place of sheer wonderment.

Saqib Saleem, who was last so impressive in Mere Dad Ki Maruti, is excellent here, playing it far too cocky in a bid to overcompensate for his fragility. It rings true while being anything but cliched. Rani Mukherji plays his increasingly indulgent boss, a woman who wears her blouses slinky and her eyes sad, and the actress is perfect in the part. Randeep Hooda, as her husband, is problematic: he’s suitably subdued but a bit too awkward throughout the proceedings — even a character steeped in self-denial should know something about himself.

Johar’s first scene is searingly explosive, a great cinematic jolt, following which it first hiccups with some on-the-nose overfriendly banter, and then steadies and settles into a more predictable narrative. And it could have been flat if not for the beautifully used music. Johar’s is a film that loves language — one “Come in?”/“Come out?” moment is particularly gorgeous — and the way he melancholically paints his frames to accompany the words “ki sabse door ho gaye,” is exquisite.

It is also a film made by a maker less sure of the format. The camera is tight and intrusive, as it should be, but perhaps too eagerly, too often. There are a few too many shots of a more ‘cinematic’ composition — of people looking on in loneliness from sea-facing balconies, for example — which sometimes jar with a narrative this stark. Because, stripped of its makeup — as savagely as its actress peels off her own, in one alarming scene — this is the most vital film of the lot.

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BT2A truly great director does not need trained actors, a fact which led the master Satyajit Ray to use lots of non-professionals in his films. It is a method frequently used by Dibakar Banerjee to terrific effect, populating his films with the unfamiliar and the awesome. It is this that might have led Ray to write the short story called “Patol Babu, Film Star” that Banerjee’s film is based on; and it is ultimately deliciously ironic that, with this very short, we discover just how good things can get when a brilliant director does indeed collaborate with a highly accomplished actor.

Nawazuddin Siddiqui, that wondrous chameleon, seems to get better with each cinematic bound, and he’s at his absolute best in this wily adaptation. Mopping up the floors as he talks to his wife, Siddiqui nimbly takes the mop and cleans under his own feet before he steps onto the freshly wiped floor. This is a film that revels in the most acute, the most magnificent detailing. Even in the chawl they live in, Siddiqui’s daughter sleeps beside a Hannah Montana pencilbox. It is a film of many and varied joys, one of the finest and quirkiest going by the name Anjali.

Siddiqui plays a failed entrepreneur who strays onto a film-set and is snapped up as an extra, and much magic follows, most of which I should allow you to experience first hand, without knowing what you’re in for. Siddiqui is spectacular, Sadashiv Amrapurkar (as his overbearing, omniscient father) is perfectly cast and quite special, and Shubhangi Bhujbal is spot-on as Siddiqui’s wife; a particular moment — when she assures him that nobody can turn him down by asking if she herself could say no to him — is one to cherish.

It’s a remarkable film, unmistakably carrying the auteur’s stamp in every frame. (No mean feat considering just how much it borrows from Ray; from his films and his fiction: Anjali constantly made me think of Big Bill, for example.)

The shots are desolate, beautiful, gorgeous and the writing is crafted excellently. It is about the magic-dust the movies sprinkle on everyone within range, but more than that it is about a director himself overreaching: taking a story from the master and cleverly doodling enough around the margins to make it his own, and also taking a song from Rabindranath Tagore and himself composing music to compliment a devastatingly good final shot. These are salutes that must in turn be saluted.

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I want to be a football, says a kid wearing a Lionel Messi jersey in the adorable opening montage of Zoya Akhtar’s film where children of various ages, shapes and heights tell the camera their dreams. (A  boy, wearing a fullblown superhero costume, is one I identified with the strongest.) This film isn’t about us, though, it’s about a kid who looks at the girls in tights longingly (not like that, no) while being forced into football practice; about a kid who wants to be Katrina Kaif.

It’s a simplistic fairytale of a film with clear-etched character archetypes — Strict Dad, Submissive Mom, Sweet Sister — and that suits both narrative and format. The youngster who dreams of glitzy outfits and high-heels is played by Naman Jain and he is simply fantastic, carrying the whole film off remarkably well.

Kaif has a cameo, wings and all, but her being chosen for this film is itself interesting, considering that till before Sheila Ki Jawaani — the song that makes this boy lean forward, agog — she wasn’t even considered a dancer. Dare to dream, but dream covertly, she tells the boy who drinks it in. It’s a sweet, escapist film — with understated ambition — featuring some great dialogues, that climaxes with simplicity and sunniness.

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Anurag Kashyap’s film does what most of us have done, at least at some point: it mythologises Bachchan to the hilt. The narrative is weak (the plot is very reminiscent of Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal) but the masala spirit more than willing, and Kashyap churns out something both nuanced and nutty. In that sense, there may be no better conceivable tribute to Hindi cinema.

BT1An Allahabadi youngster bolts from the Kumbh Mela to see his bedridden father who (after some top-notch Dilip Kumar mimicry) sends him off to see Amitabh Bachchan carrying a gooseberry, a solitary murabba in a jar. His mission: to get Bachchan to take a bite and bring back the half-eaten, megastar-indentured murabba so that the father can get better, bite by Big-B-endorsed bite.

The dutiful son (appropriately named Vijay, naturally) wears a scarlet, Coolie-coloured shirt and makes his way to Bachchan’s, thinking that the most famed of Juhu dwellers would take in all who hail from his hometown. The film is propelled by Vineet Kumar Singh’s stellar performance in the role, and while Kashyap crafts a nice-looking film with some delicious dialogue, this is a film that emerges half-baked. The struggle works but the end is a sham, and the cameo in the middle almost ruins everything. Or maybe the director was aiming for half-eaten?

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Right after Kashyap’s film ends, scram for the door. Because after all this, after four directors doing their best to celebrate Hindi cinema, the film’s producers massacre things by throwing in a horribly tacky song that starts with ghastly YouTube-style lipsyncing and ends with Bollywood at its most disposably shiny. Even if Anil Kapoor’s having fun dancing his Lakhan steps, nothing justifies this atrocity. Run, I tell you, hold on to your murabba jar of movie memories and flee.

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So then four films. Four statements. Four attempts. In the final reckoning, Bombay Talkies is mostly good, with one spectacular film and three that are, at worst, earnest: a collection that deserves to be watched for what it tries to celebrate more than what it ends up being. But like we say about so much of Bollywood, go for the magical bits.

Rating: 3.5 stars

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First published Rediff, 3 May 2013

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