Category Archives: Review

June 14, 2013 · 11:00 am

Review: Zack Snyder’s Man Of Steel

man-of-steel-ew1

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

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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

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First published Rediff, May 31, 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)

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First published Rediff, May 24, 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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April 26, 2013 · 10:00 am

Kiss Kiss Clang Clang: Iron Man 3

It’s easy to forget just how much that suit weighs.

briefcaseAnd that’s because it looks so, so good. Aerodynamically magical and ergonomically perfect, the suit is a technological marvel in red-and-yellow — it’s as if Jony Ive worked for Ferrari. Everyone’s favourite sequence in the last Iron Man film, in fact, featured the suit extending itself (Pictured above) — going from a briefcase to sheathing all of Tony Stark’s body in a matter of very sleek seconds. In the latest film the suit goes even further, peeling on and off bodies in motion, mid-air and even clamping itself on piecemeal. It’s a jawdropper all right.

And yet it is only in Shane Black’s Iron Man 3 that we actually get a sense of the suit’s perceptible weight; of how goddamned heavy it must be as it protectively rearranges itself around Gwyneth Paltrow’s body during an explosion — and how helpless she looks, pirouetting as the suit yanks itself off her and goes to find its master. Her neck twirls like a twig as the suffocatingly secure red and yellow leaves her, safe but decidedly with her brains puréed. Tony now has more suits than a man could need (even Barney Stinson will agree) but this is a film where we see him also as a fallen knight, dragging his armour through the snow. The message is clear: his armour is also his prison.

ironman3kingsleyAll messages, in fact, are clear as a plexiglass visor. In a world after the last Marvel megamovie, “subtlety,” as a character in this movie says, “has kinda had its day.” It’s true. Tony Stark might be playing with suits, but there’s a cartoonishly fearsome fundamentalist loon on the horizon called The Mandarin, and he’s sending parable-filled messages and revelling in making America crumble like a fortune cookie.

Meanwhile, Stark himself is suffering from anxiety attacks. Following the climax of last year’s blockbuster which saw him almost dying before he suggested everyone try shawarma, Tony’s apparently shaken up. “Nothing’s the same since New York,” he broods 911istically about what might have been. Best friend Colonel James Rhodes is less impressed, complaining about how Stark is frequently “off with the superfriends.” Yup, it’s a movie where sincerity is met with a wisecrack, a movie where snappy lines cut each other up like swordsmen on steroids, a movie that builds its energy from its banter. (The arc-reactor inside Shane Black must be a VHS tape of The Odd Couple.)

Rhodes has reason to be upset. His old-school grey War Machine suit has been painted red, white and blue, and he’s been rebranded Iron Patriot. This sets the stage for some delicious Riggs-and-Murtaugh style repartee between him and Stark, no surprise coming from Black who wrote the Lethal Weapon movies. Iron Man 3, then, is a film about Tony talking to people: To Rhodes, to an impressionable young kid, and to his girlfriend Pepper. And when someone like Black’s writing words for Robert Downey Jr to say, we’re in business. Kiss Kiss, Clang Clang.

Yet what glorious clanging it is. Iron Man 3 boasts of the headiest of action setpieces, long and spectacular bits of movie wizardry dreamed up by grown men who like pushing their action figures to the limit. A lot of superhero movies look alike now, with increasingly incoherent action populating most of them, but this is a pleasure: these set-pieces feel like big, expansive, boastfully huge splash-pages — the kind of pages created by a master storyteller and a truly gifted artist, the kind of pages where there’s a clear idea behind the explosion, where the scene and its contents truly merit the riotous RAKABADOOOOM sound where the letterer goes to town. The kind of pages that you stare at for a while, refusing to flip ahead, grinning at it all.

(The kind of pages, also that don’t really need 3D conversion; I recommend you watch this film without the big glasses.)

Cheekiness seems to be Black’s mantra, thankfully. Things get a bit sloppy near the end, and it is often that the film recklessly veers towards Deep and Meaningful, but there’s always enough of a wink to ensure things stay entertaining. Even when the climax gets far too long drawn out, you know who to root for because of the crackling narrative and, of course, the actors.

ironman31Gwyneth Paltrow’s Pepper Potts is an increasingly important part of the Iron Man franchise, and this installment lets her bring some serious spunk to the table. Plus she really knows how to nail a line, delivering it flat, cold, with brutal brilliance. The beautiful Rebecca Hall is mostly wasted as one of Stark’s onetime flings, but, after watching Scarlett Johannson in the last film, those of us Iron Man fans who love Vicky Christina Barcelona must start petitioning Marvel to get us Penelope next time.

Don Cheadle’s Rhodey is reliably strong, and Jon Favreau’s Happy Hogan as likeable as can be. On the other end of that spectrum stands overzealous scientist Guy Pearce, hamming it up unimpressively. It is Sir Ben Kingsley’s Mandarin who turns out to be a truly clever construct, a character written for another time and cannily made relevant today, and Kingsley plays him with great flair. A young man called James Badge Dale is quite terrific as an evil henchman, and Ty Simpkins, playing the kid who befriends Tony, is spot on.

And then there’s Robert Downey Jr, immaculately inhabiting both suit and smirk. The actor has taken the character and really, really run with it, and his version of Iron Man — younger than the comics, less of a drunkard, as much (or more) of an egomaniac — is now more definitive than the character in the books. He does the impossible: playing it cool and yet coming off grandiose. Bravo. Tony Stark seems as much a part of RDJ’s personality as he does a mask, and perhaps the actor inside the armour will find it hard to imagine leaving the character, this wonderful career-altering character, behind. For now, though, he’s our Iron Man. No two ways about it.

And he’s in the best hands. “I got you,” Pepper says as she saves Tony, in an echo of that most unforgettable scene from Richard Donner’s Superman, the most iconic man-woman moment in all of superhero cinema. Stark looks up at her, refuses to blink, and says “I got you first.”

Classic.

From one True Believer to another, thank you, Shane Black. Iron Man has never soared higher.

Rating: 4 stars

~

First published Rediff, 26 April 2013

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April 19, 2013 · 10:10 am

The Ek Thi Daayan review

I never quite understood that old saying about witches having feet the other way around. Does it mean that their feet are backwards (toes to back, heel to front) or does it mean that the left foot is in place of right foot, like hurriedly discarded flip-flops? Not knowing specifics, however, didn’t keep me from knowing the lore. The supernatural fascinates us all, with children often more drawn to the ideas of the fantastical because they gullibly (and willingly) believe, yes, but also because they are steered away from dark and morbid imagery, imagery deemed inappropriate for them. So naturally it becomes something worth eavesdropping, whispering, finding out about.

etd1Kannan Iyer’s Ek Thi Daayan, based on a short story by Mukul Sharma, avoids the usual set of Bollywood cliches about tanktriks and shraaps — all that bhootiyapa, if I may — to introduce us to fear through a child’s eyes. The line, between what we actually believe and what is conjured up by the feverish imagination of a young boy desperate to believe in legends, is blurred very effectively, and that is what makes this film so cleverly creepy, so intelligently eerie. It is, in many ways, a children’s film populated with grown-up scares. And for this originality it deserves applause.

The mood is set with the opening disclaimer, one that assures us that the film isn’t intended to promote witchcraft. Okay then. The opening credits are seriously old-school, bassnotes thumping through faded green images of Bombay with Rekha Bhardwaj singing a song that wouldn’t be out of place in Mahal. Emraan Hashmi plays Bobo The Baffler, a highly successful stage magician in this fictionalised version of India where stage magicians can actually be successful. Like I said, old-school.

He’s a spiffy enough conjuror — one of his big tricks even involves a switch between twins, as seen in Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige — but visions of his past peskily get in the way. It is a traumatised past, he concedes to his girlfriend sketchily, before confiding in a hypnotherapist instead. This leads us to a flashback which lasts through the first half of the film, and makes for pretty riveting cinema.

We first meet young Bobo aged around 10, in checked trousers and with an Afro. His kid sister, Misha, is hopefully devoted to him. Their names sound like they’ve come straight out of a Russian children’s book, and their story is as intriguing: Bobo pores over an old leathery tome about witchcraft and is convinced their elevator is haunted, and Misha laps up everything he says. Their single father hasn’t yet, to the children’s delight, gotten them a stepmom. (“Do all stepmoms have to be evil?,” asks Misha. “They can be good,” Bobo concedes, “But they aren’t.”) Except one day the father meets a young lady in the lift, gives her a lift, and soon enough the stepmom void is filled.

This entire first-half — while sounding like a great backstory for an over-committed barber with highly fetishised ponytail-hatred — is excellent. The narrative is constant, thrilling and filled with tiny detailing, supported by uniformly great acting and sharp, neat writing. Hashmi is remarkably comfortable in his own skin and plays the role of an inevitable loner with a compelling masochism. He is the kind of man who will switch the lights off despite being spooked by shadows, and the kind of man women with long-tresses would do well to keep away from. Especially when he has a butter-knife within reach.

The three leading ladies — Konkona Sen Sharma, Huma Qureshi and Kalki Koechlin — are smashing in their roles, and I refuse here to tell you who plays who. Each plays their given role with frighteningly good flair, and each deserves a big hand. Much of that applause is justifiably stolen by little Visshesh Tiwari as the young Bobo, while Sara Arjun’s Misha is irresistibly cute. And, as is the norm, Pawan Malhotra (as the father) and Rajatava Dutta (as the whiskey-swilling, tennis playing shrink) are top-notch. Cinematographer Saurabh Goswami is challenged by a film that lives too much in the dark, but aside from an occasionally too-shaky camera, he manages much artful framing (my favourite moment is when the kids high-five each other by torchlight.)

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It is as the film winds past the halfway mark that the cobweb appears to stretch past breaking point. There are too many false-scares, terrifying jolts that quickly turn tiresome considering they come from dreams, injected in an injudicious attempt to say boo. This is the sort of creep-fest which is better creating an uneasy buildup than at actually scaring the pants off you, and perhaps it should have stayed goosepimply instead of going for the jugular. Ek Thi Daayan isn’t a truly scary film — though it will provoke nightmares in the young, and I strongly recommend all parents keep their children away from this one.

As if losing confidence in the narrative, the film tries to do too much in the second half — with suddenly oscillating variations in tone and mood — but thanks to performances and craft, it chugs along well enough. An ominous character called Lisa is introduced quite inventively into the story, and the film appears to hit the next level when that wonderful Yaaram song takes on a different meaning.

Alas, it is here that things start to go aground. Clues point so determinedly in one particular direction that they convince us the film must take the other route, merely for twist’s sake, and the climax unforgivably descends into B-movie territory. Suddenly there is too much malarkey and, worse yet, too much talking about malarkey. A lot of which makes absolutely no sense. A film that started off smartly restrained sadly ends up cacophonic and, frankly, more than a little silly. By the time the actual end comes around, it’s hard to care.

Ek Thi Daayan, therefore, isn’t the scariest of horror films. It is, though, smartly crafted, highly original in its approach and a strikingly ambitious effort for the genre. The end is a let-down, but the film remains a fine directorial debut for Iyer. As Bobo tells Misha while giving her a glimpse into subterranean hell, ‘don’t be scared, look.’ “Daro nahin, dekho.”

Rating: 3 stars

~

First published Rediff, April 19, 2013

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April 5, 2013 · 2:34 pm

Review: Sai Paranjpe’s Chashme Buddoor

cb3There is a scene in Sai Paranjpe’s Chashme Buddoor where Farooque Shaikh and Deepti Naval are on their first date. Despite coffee and tutti-frutti ice-cream, and her cooing enthusiasm for him studying Economics, there isn’t much to really talk about. And the shy Shaikh sheepishly confesses to having stalked her, to lurking outside her music school based on timings she’d let slip when they last met. Biting her lip, Naval grins that the reason she’d spoken of her schedule in such detail was precisely that he may notice. They laugh in awkward relief, instantly and acutely aware of having both acted on the same impulse.

It is a simple scene and yet — as can be said for a majority of Paranjpe’s cinema — within it lies a masterclass. Shaikh’s Siddharth Parashar is endearingly guileless, baring his first-ever gambit because it comes unnaturally to him, and because he’d rather not lie to the first girl he’s ever struck up conversation with, but also because he is, funnily enough, proud of his effort. It all shows in Shaikh’s grin as he looks away from her. Meanwhile, there is a joyous giddiness to Naval’s Neha, a girl only too glad to express her gladness. She’s flattered, thrilled, and positively glowing as she eases his confession with hers, following which he expansively orders more coffee and ice-cream, markedly more confident as he overrides her protestations. It is an exquisite piece of acting naturalism, one of the finest of them all. And the writing is flawless.

Chashme Buddoor, digitally remastered and brought to screens in a spanking new version, might have needed the cinematic scrubbing but remains a film glorying another time. 1981. A time when 500 rupees went a really long way and cigarette companies merely wanted you to relax. A time when posting pictures on one’s wall was a very literal activity (and a striking Shabana Azmi was a pin-up girl). A time when a character’s parents lived or vacationed in Nairobi. And a time when it seemed appropriate to shoot green and lovely Delhi with an uncynical, tender eye.

As time-capsules go, it’s one of the best and brightest. Chashme Buddoor is a masterpiece, and even 32 years after it first came out, I can safely declare what this is the best Hindi film you’ll see in theatres this year.

The characters are magnificent. Ravi Baswani makes his screen debut as the cavalier Jomo, a dedicated Lothario who believes in equal-opportunity flirting: no woman is spared from an attempt, albeit a harmless one. His side of the room he shares with two other Delhi University bachelors has the Azmi pin-up alongside many others, plus tall black boots he shines meticulously, and even when he’s swallowed a few punches and is bolting out of a farcically dangerous situation, Jomo stops to gather up his cigarettes and his sunglasses.

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Rakesh Bedi’s chubby Omi, on the other hand, believes in muscle-magazines and injudiciously short shorts. He’s failed college a few times, sure, but he loves his ghazals and a spot of shaayari, and — truth be told, while he may not admit it to Jomo — prefers watching a play than chasing pointlessly after a girl.

But he talks a very big game, which leads us to the film’s finest moment: when a dejected Omi returns home, puffing thoughtfully on a cigarette and then — suddenly — throws it down and twirls dramatically on it, jumping up with an instant spring in his step as he gallops home to regale friends with a grand tale of a conquest that never was. In the snap of his fingers lies sheer, unadulterated movie magic.

Siddharth is the straighter one, the studious one mostly willing to foot the bill for his freeloading friends. There’s Gandhi on his wall and his shelves, and even the chair he sits in happens to be marked Aristotle. And, as mentioned, his artlessness is remarkable: he patiently picks out a whole new outfit and then, when his girl is impressed and comments on it, he smugly says he’s just been shopping. And he’s just waiting to be told to quit smoking.

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Naval, on the other hand, imbues her Neha with such effervescent heart that it’s impossible not to fall for her. She memorably hawks detergent door-to-door to pay for music classes she diligently refuses to ever miss (well, almost ever) and the amount of unaffected joy the actress brings to the film livens it up miraculously. And she looks dazzling, by the way — even when imagined as Chhoti Bahu, in black and white.

And that, by no means, is all. There’s neighbourhood paanwala Lallan Mia, played by the amazing Saeed Jaffrey, a genial soul who couldn’t resist peeking at the girl in the pink salwaar-kameez as she strolled by early on, giving the film its plot. He harangues the trio for never paying for their cigarettes but his threats are but barbs; he threatens to confiscate an LP from the lads but scornfully hands it back. And how he exults about the addition of a bright table-lamp in his shop.

Because Chashme Buddoor is, above all, a film about small joys. About letting a pack of cards decide who gets first crack at a girl. About admitting that a bracelet is indeed too expensive. About friends with interchangeable wardrobes, all borrowing from each other. About flying kites in the park. About finding inspiration in Amitabh Bachchan movies. And about a brilliantly placed nail to hang a censorious towel on, whenever needed.

Chashme Buddoor is a marvel. Watching it two nights ago made my jaws hurt with laughter, predictably, but also my cheeks ache from constantly smiling. It is a wildly ebullient wonder of a film, very special and soaked in far more warmth than we are currently used to. It’s a treat, and like tutti-frutti ice-cream that is far harder to find than it should, we should lap it up while we can, gratefully and ravenously. Go to theatres now.

Rating: 5 stars

~

First published Rediff, April 5, 2013

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March 22, 2013 · 2:08 pm

Review: Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained

Some slant their glasses as they pour out their beer. Some pour it straight but fastidiously slow. Some others like their brew topped with foam. And then there are those — like a German dentist working as a highly efficient bounty hunter in the American South — fill their mugs to the top and then slice off the foam by the neck: in one swift motion, Dr King Schultz beheads his beer.

django1Routinely fascinating, every little thing Schultz does is magic: theatrically flamboyant and effectively surprising. Played marvellously by Christoph Waltz, Schultz uses loquacious language to flummox and to wheedle, to sneak and to stun. His gestures are deliberate and confounding in equal measure: he takes a fair while to wear his glasses and peer at the written word; he takes significantly less time to cave to temptation and shoot a man down. With a gun hidden, as it were, up his sleeve.

And as Quentin Tarantino’s extraordinary new movie begins in the year 1858, the good doctor buys a slave called Django. As fortune (and filmmakers that believe all too gladly in legend) would have it, Django has a wife with a German name, her horrible story echoing the German folk tale of Brunhilde and Siegfried. Schultz says it isn’t every day that a German gets to help a real-life Siegfried, and feeling as he does some awkward guilt and misplaced responsibility towards Django, partners up with him to help him bring back his wife, his “Broomhilda” from her living hell, the worst slave plantation there is. The fireworks are obvious.

Yet Tarantino’s concoction is so much more than spaghetti, with an awful lot of red sauce and a far more enduring aftertaste. His explosive, inflammatory anti-bigotry crusade takes no prisoners as it shockingly and plainly tears away genteel notions of the antebellum south and presents it to us in all its grotesquerie. (Gone With The Wind, for one, can never feel the same again.) We are made to laugh at the ridiculousness of hooded racists on horses and savagely shown how slaves are treated while white men sit in their parlours musing on superiority. And looming above all is the grand villain of the piece, the monstrously silken Calvin Candie. With bowls of jellybeans for him in each room, the amusement-park name for his plantation — Candyland — not softening the sting of the whip on the backs of his slaves.

This is a brutally violent movie, yes. Men are ripped apart by rabid dogs, women are baked naked in sundrenched coffins, and the wealthy make spectacle — like in the 1975 movie Mandingo — by pitting slaves against each other in bouts of bloodsport. That said, the words are sharper, crueller, stormier still. A black maid is told to treat Django like a free man, but not, indeed not, like she would treat a white man. Broomhilda is “wheeled out” for Dr Schultz because she can speak German, and when she speaks a line of the language, the hostess’ eyes widen with disbelief. (“Astonishing”, Schultz remarks, his sarcasm uncharacteristically unhidden.) “Talented as they are in the kitchen,” Candie says icily, “from time to time, adult supervision is required.”

It is a wildly entertaining but bitterly sobering film, a film reflecting on past shame while stabbing at the remnants of racism that remain within. Tarantino’s last film, the revisionist-history masterpiece Inglorious Basterds (where Hitler is burned down by Jews in a movie theatre) was a far sexier and more stylised film; Django Unchained is cruder and less finessed, feeling more like a chokeslam than an elegant uppercut. There is style, certainly — and cinematographer Robert Richardson is quite the master, especially when photographing blood splattering onto unplucked cotton — but this is, above all else, an angry film. (An older character from the Tarantino Universe given to Bible quoting might have called the new film, quite simply, “righteous.”)

The performances are all larger than life, and universally thrilling. Jamie Foxx smoulders as Django, saving his swagger for when he finally deems himself deserving, all the while playing a more subdued character while everyone around him is wallowing in flash. Schultz hands him a beer and Django sips at it incredulously, trying to keep it together but unable to help curling his lips up into a half-smile: it is quite likely his first drink, and he nods with approval. His character — named after the hero from 1966’s Django, with that hero Franco Nero in a flawless cameo here — has to act as a black slaver, the sort of man he loathes more than anything, and this he does with a natural alacrity that borders on the frightening. At one point, establishing his authority, he calls a white cowboy ‘Moonlight’ and barks the words “that means you” to put him in his place, moments after big boss Calvin Candie has used the same words to one of his strongmen.

django2Leonardo DiCaprio, in turn, is magnificently mercurial as Candie, a blustery slave-owner, an articulate and slimily, devastatingly decorous Francophile who holds court with a chilling discourse on the misled ‘science’ of phrenology while sawing into a skull. As with Django but for purposes much shallower and self-gratifying, much of Candie’s behaviour — from his exaggerated bellows professing love for his sister to his meticulously chosen words — is an act, an attempt to create character and stay in it. He even snarls the word “splendid.” And when he holds a hammer in a bloodied hand, he makes the shivers come.

The only man who has the measure of Candie is his head slave, Stephen. Laying it on nightmarishly thick, Samuel L Jackson conjures up a truly fearsome character, the film’s most hideous takeaway. It is a sickeningly good performance, one that blurs the lines as effectively as Tarantino likes. Stephen controls the slaves with an iron grip while enjoying an unparalleled friendship with Candie, sipping brandy with him in his library, at least in private. In public, he stands by the master with dogged loyalty but never gives an inch more than he must: he might not know what the word ’panache’ means but grasps it swiftly and uses it perfectly soon enough.

As with all of Tarantino’s films, so much of Django Unchained is about words, words perfectly used and perfectly picked, words that actors like Waltz and Jackson take to a different level and words that, once used, can’t be replaced. Words that result in a couple of immaculate lines about d’Artagnan and Dumas, the single best bit of dialogue on screen in years.

And Django suffers only from the filmmaker not letting in enough of his own words.

Tarantino has spoken of his film scripts as novels in their own right, as scripts he works on till they are so good they should be able to stand alone and tempt him into not making them into movies. And they truly are: reading Tarantino is a very special pleasure, and I urge fans to look up the lushly-detailed screenplays he leaks regularly onto the Internet. And by that measure — because Tarantino is a genre onto himself — I find Django Unchained a far better script than it is a film.

django3And this isn’t merely a question of slavish loyalty (though the Basterds adaptation barely left out two scripted scenes while Django omits massive and vital chunks) but one of storytelling. Kerry Washington’s character Broomhilda suffers massively from losing her entire, wonderful backstory, for example. There are some positively frightening but stunning Candie moments in there that I hate to see unfilmed and while the argument can obviously be made about length, this is the man who made two Kill Bill movies. The format bows to the master and it must not be the other way around.

Most vitally though, Django stumbles in its final act because — unlike in the script — Django’s heroics are already showcased in the film well before the finale, and also because there is a gratuitous pre-climactic action flurry that — in terms of gallons of blood used — outsplatters the eventual climax and renders it less effective. Lighting the same powder-keg twice never works quite as well. (Oh, and then there’s a far-too-casual cameo from the director himself, using a peculiarly comical Australian accent. Tsk.)

But that, in terms of the big bloody picture, is nitpicking. Despite that final fanboy caveat, Django Unchained provides more entertainment than most genre films can dream of, and more of a wallop than the most ambitious of dramas. It is a vulgar, gorgeous, wild piece of untameable poetry (which mostly doesn’t rhyme, except when Schultz gleefully says “Candieee” like “whee!”) and there is, quite simply, no other film in the world like it. Drink up.

Rating: 4.5 stars

~

First published Rediff, March 22, 2013

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March 8, 2013 · 10:10 am

Review: Tigmanshu Dhulia’s Sahib, Biwi Aur Gangster Returns

The title means nothing, you know. Sahib Biwi Aur Gangster was fine, cheeky and homage-y but this added Returns, a grammatically incorrect English word at the end of a Hindi title? (Instead of, say, Sahib Biwi Aur Doosra Gangster? Ek Aur Gangster?) It is this anything-goes approach that carries itself on to the opening credits — with oddly tacky graphics of tossed coins and guns, as if to rub the film’s lack of finesse in our faces — and to the characters, who are introduced with no subtlety whatsoever: the word Gangster shows up with a funny gong sound, the Biwi appears to wailing B-movie siren sounds in the background.

Thus does director Tigmanshu Dhulia make it clear that he’s plunging us into a world of pure and unashamed schlock, and this film is meant to be terrifically tawdry. From the background score that often features infant screams a la bad horror films, to scenes resting heavily on obvious metaphor, to the protagonists speaking exclusively in clever and applause-seeking dialogue, this is a film that aims to thrill and do so in the delicious language of the lurid. Saheb Biwi Aur Gangster Returns is a theatrically indulgent entertainer, one that makes no bones about its pulpiness and stays well and truly juicy.

In the land of the Uttar Pradesh kings, where all moustaches are twirled up with flair, a once-wealthy royal sits in a wheelchair and plots his second marriage, deciding that arm-twisting is as good a seduction tactic as any. Saheb (Jimmy Shergill) wants what he wants, which is to humiliate everyone around him, bring them to their knees.

sbgr1Meanwhile, his sloshed yet serpentine wife (Mahie Gill) lashes out: for help, for money, for company and for her queenly honour, whatever that last one means. There is an abducted young princess (Soha Ali Khan) and her vengeful lover (Irrfan Khan, this film’s Gangster) and much, much skullduggery afoot: this is a film where women sing old movie songs in their haveli at night, but even that romantic song about embraces comes from Woh Kaun Thi, a film of cruel conspiracy. And of double-crossing women.

Rife with their own internal motivations, none of the mains can be trusted. We are never sure just how much each protagonist knows, and what their next move is — or what, indeed, they want. Their fascinating amorality keeps the narrative tense and genuinely unpredictable, and a very solid ensemble coupled with tremendously entertaining dialogue — not to mention Dhulia’s irresistibly quirky gallows humour — makes this a very rollicking film.

Take, for instance, the lush queen. Mahie Gill’s Madhavi is all sarees and seduction, sure, but she’s made to play the drunk and desperate character cartoonishly over the top. She may or may not be bad, but, like Jessica Rabbit, she’s just drawn that way. Jessica Rabbitch, then. She’s hurt and wounded as well as hot and hungry, and Dhulia uses her cunningly, to evoke disgust and pity and love. And yet to keep us guessing.

The film’s dialogue is exceptionally good. Not just the taaliyan-at-a-baithak lines about how everyone looks the same in a wheelchair and why men swear more (because they sob less), but also the telltale lines that winkingly give away bits of the game. A policeman measures out the future in terms of the next year, the next election, the next Shah Rukh Khan film. While a politician (in what will inevitably be the film’s most quoted moment) triumphantly calls himself a sensitive tomato.

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The air is heavy with metaphor, as mentioned, but it’s handled most entertainingly. A man with killer aim starts to wield a camera, a sharpshooter learning to shoot. A veteran actor known for on-screen lasciviousness is the only one woefully out of place during a trashy dance sequence. A princess stands on her lover’s toes; a wife needs hands to steady her. One character ambitiously reads the constitution while another, attempting to forge and caress an unlikely romance, reads Shrabani Basu’s Victoria And Abdul, about the clerk who loved the queen.

The performances are unanimously strong. Irrfan, with several quivers full of the dialogues he likes, is a riot at first, and then a delight to watch gradually unravel. Mahie is intentionally exaggerated but performs with significant flair, and makes sure her barbs sting. Soha has the stateliness for the part but plays naive in almost childlike fashion, which is great. Raj Babbar and Pravesh Rana are very well cast. And we must also single out Rajeev Gupta as the film’s funniest character, the theatrically inept politician, the tomato.

But the film belongs, as it were, to Shergill. He dominates proceedings with delicate nuance and wonderful presence; it is as if he finds more dynamism from being strapped in a wheelchair. It is his lines that ring the loudest, and his eyes that do the film’s talking. This is a rendition that deserves a salaam.

Despite finding a lot to individually love, I wasn’t very sold on the first Sahib Biwi Aur Gangster, largely because of the way it stretched out, its uneven tone, and the fatal misstep in attempting to pay tribute to Sahib Biwi Aur Ghulam by mirroring the classic. The new film is much sharper, more assured, and, unencumbered by a classic to stand beside, a far better film.

Like the crooners aware of which guests to keep away from the tipple and the aides who wait till the master’s lips touch drink before letting their own, it is clear Tigmanshu Dhulia knows what he’s doing. This has, in fact, never been clearer. Which itself is worth drinking to.

Besides, how could one resist a film where even drawers opening and closing sound like guns being cocked?

Rating: 4 stars

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First published Rediff, March 8, 2013

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