Gabbar Is Back: Review

Hindi movie villains have said some pretty weird things over the years. Still, I don’t think I’ve ever heard a catchphrase as un-catchy as the one Digvijay Patil (Suman Talwar) wields in Gabbar Is Back. “I am a brand,” he yells time and again. With a statement of villainy this underwhelming, you’d expect our hero to top it easily. Not so. “I am a bigger brand than you,” Akshay Kumar yells back. They start fighting after this exchange, though they could just as easily have compared stock prices.

Gabbar’s back. Sort of, anyway. Kumar plays a vigilante hero operating under this epochal alias. He has a beard. He utters a couple of Amjad Khan’s lines from Sholay. And that’s it, really. Kumar and his director, Krish (Radhakrishna Jagarlamudi), are utilizing Hindi cinema’s best-known villain as a crutch, using his outsize personality to obscure the fact that they have little of their own. Apart from being pathetic, theft of this sort is also self-defeating. Every time the film references Gabbar, it only serves to remind the audience of what they’re missing.

The number of Bollywood films expressing disgust with the state of the nation and proposing vigilante solutions has increased markedly in recent years. A key film was Neeraj Pandey’s A Wednesday! (2008), which traded in fears of another terrorist bombing; its combination of self-justified anger and quick-fix solutions has been borrowed by films less skilfully manipulative. Gabbar’s methods are similar to those adopted by Randeep Hooda’s gang in Ungli (2014): Identify wrongdoers, kidnap and try them. But in an upping of the ante that is disturbing even in a film this ridiculous, Gabbar goes ahead and kills the most corrupt ones. However, unlike NH10 or Badlapur, which dealt head-on with the messiness of taking the law into one’s own hands, Gabbar Is Back is cartoon activism at best.

No one watches an Akshay Kumar film for the writing, but Gabbar Is Back (story by A.R. Murugadoss, additional screenplay and dialogues by Rajat Arora) is in a class by itself. “Our system is like an infant’s diaper,” Gabbar deadpans to the camera (Kumar delivers nearly half his lines this way). “Get me information on all the Adityas in the country,” Talwar’s baddie demands unreasonably. “Who is Gabbar?” a police inspector asks, staring at a chart with a blank face and a “?” sign on it. “Question mark.”

Who green-lights rubbish like this? Question mark.

This review appeared in Mint.

Jai Ho! Democracy: Review

Ranjit Kapoor was responsible for much of the eminently quotable dialogue in Kundan Shah’s Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro (1983). He also wrote the dialogue for Shekhar Kapur’s Bandit Queen (1994), introducing a tougher, earthier screenwriting idiom that took about a decade to catch on. His directorial debut, Chintu Ji (2009), had a song whose chorus was simply "Akira Kurosawa, Vittorio De Sica", repeated four times. These are all signal achievements. Jai Ho! Democracy is a signal failure.

The film, co-directed by Kapoor and Bikramjeet Singh Bhullar, has a mildly promising first half-hour. A chicken has wandered into no man’s land on the India-Pakistan border and soldiers on both sides are convinced that it belongs to their country. The Indian contingent sends a man to retrieve it, but he’s fired upon by the enemy and forced to take cover. News of the incident reaches New Delhi, where a special parliamentary committee is appointed to look into the matter. The rest of the film concerns itself with the infantile bickering in the committee and the skirmishes on the border.

Kapoor has come up with silly gags in the past—the telephone scene from Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro is funny precisely because it’s so ridiculous—but they had bite, an element that’s sorely missing here. Jai Ho! Democracy aims at everything in sight, from overzealous TV anchors to porn-watching MPs, and misses every time. The weak writing and stagy direction (a possible by-product of Kapoor’s work as a theatre director) is further compounded by the miscasting and misuse of the actors who make up the parliamentary committe: Seema Biswas, Om Puri, Adil Hussain, Satish Kaushik, Grusha Kapoor and Aamir Bashir. Only Annu Kapoor, in full Mehmood-in-Padosan mode as chairperson of the committee, manages a couple of laughs.

There’s a desperation to most of the film’s scenes, as if the writers were being forced to come up with material on the spot. I’m not sure why Om Puri agreed to act in a film in which his character is forced to do 17 squats by way of apology, but he did, and it’s brutal. But the film really begins to lose its marbles when a Pakistani army cook risks his life to bring food and water to the Indian fowl-fetcher in no man’s land. Ending a film with Indian and Pakistani soldiers in each other’s arms is the laziest kind of daydreaming imaginable.

This review appeared in Mint. 

Dream double bills

The concept of the double feature originated in the US in the 1930s. Movie houses would screen the main feature—the A-movie—along with a cheaply made, often more schlocky, B-movie (this is how the genre got its name). Though the practice of screening an A and B movie together began to die out in the 1950s, it was adopted by arthouse theatres and film programmers, who saw it as an opportunity to juxtapose films, tease out connections or simply play two of their favourites one after the other.

There are hardly any dedicated repertory houses in this country, so film pairings are usually limited to one’s house and a couple of cinema-crazy friends. The planned opening of FilmBay, the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) film centre, in Mumbai at the end of the year offers some hope for well-curated double bills in the city. Here are a few suggestions.

Film as a sigh: Brief Encounter and In The Mood For Love

The ultimate unrequited love double bill. In David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945), a housewife and a doctor fall for each other but never summon up the nerve to carry out an affair. Wong Kar-wai’s In The Mood For Love (2000) also has two lonely souls contemplating adultery after they realize their spouses are cheating on them with each other. Seen side by side, the films offer contrasting studies in reserve. The almost-lovers in Lean’s film are trapped in the stifling environs of late 1930s Britain: not giving in to their impulses seems about right in this repressed, grey world. In Wong’s film, though, the shimmer and noise of Hong Kong in the 1960s mocks the reticence of his leads, as much as Maggie Cheung’s cheongsams seem to physically restrict her from loosening up (Wong’s initial treatment would have had his characters give in to their passions, but he scrapped it for a more melancholy outcome). The films may look poles apart, but the themes are the same: adultery, repression and regret.

Middle-class marriage blues: Dum Laga Ke Haisha and Sara Akash
Along with Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Basu Chatterjee was the greatest director of middle-of-the-road comedies Indian cinema has produced. Yet his first film, Sara Akash (1969), was only intermittently funny and not at all comfortable to watch. Mixing kitchen-sink bleakness with experimental touches (flying opening credits, freeze frames), the film tells the story of an overly serious college graduate in Agra who is forced into an arranged marriage by his parents. Sharat Katariya’s Haridwar-set 2015 comedy Dum Laga Ke Haisha has almost the same plot, with the added wrinkle that the bride is on the heavy side and more qualified than her husband. The mental cruelty exercised by the bride’s in-laws, the suicidal thoughts of the groom, the claustrophobia of joint families: These details ring as true in Chatterjee’s film as they do in Katariya’s, even though they’re separated by 46 years; a depressing bit of commentary on small-town life and marriage in India.

The rise and fall of Urdu: Mughal-e-Azam and Dedh Ishqiya
In an article in the Frontline magazine in 2013, poet, director and lyricist Gulzar wrote, “Our films have kept Urdu alive.” He then went on to lament that the current generation of directors “make Hindi films but they have been to public schools and most of them come from urban India. They do not know much Hindi, and they know no Urdu”. K. Asif’s Mughal-e-Azam (1960) released at a time when audiences could still appreciate a well-judged (and delivered) dialogue in Urdu. Though the film isn’t entirely in Urdu, its greatest lines derive their poetry and grandeur from the language. The extended battle with elephants and thousands of extras on horseback is all very well, but the best fight scene in the movie is the verbal face-off between Akbar and Anarkali. If Asif’s film was one of the high points of Urdu screenwriting in Indian cinema, Abhishek Chaubey’s Dedh Ishqiya (2014) might be its last great moment in the sun. Setting the film amongst the fading, shayari-loving royals of Mahmudabad gave Chaubey and co-writer Vishal Bhardwaj (one of the few directors today whose Urdu Gulzar might approve of) the excuse to unfurl some of the chewiest Hindustani dialogue heard on screen in years. The film released in Mumbai with English subtitles, an indication of Urdu’s foreign language status in Indian cinema today.

Looking back, telling lies: The Usual Suspects and Kahaani
In his book-length interview with François Truffaut, Alfred Hitchcock spoke about the scene that opens his 1950 film Stage Fright. It turns out to be a misleading version of events. “I did one thing in that picture that I never should have done; I put in a flashback that was a lie,” Hitchcock admitted. The idea of the unreliable narrator was taken to rococo extremes by Bryan Singer in his gangster neo-noir The Usual Suspects (1995), which unfolds for the most part as one long flashback and hinges on the identity of one Keyser Söze. Söze turns out—dramatically, if rather conveniently—to be the person who has been narrating the story all along, forcing one to go watch the film again for clues (which is a pleasure). Sujoy Ghosh’s Kahaani (2012) played similarly with the audience, giving Vidya Balan’s avenging heroine a pregnancy and a backstory that’s revealed to be false in the end. The film has a lot to recommend it, but the lying flashback wasn’t the most convincing of tricks.

The new monster movie: A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night and Under The Skin

Two indie films paired for their ability to be simultaneously seductive and unsettling. Scarlett Johansson’s alien drifts through Under The Skin (2013) in much the same way Sheila Vand’s hijab-clad vampire does in A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (2014). Neither film provides anything like the expected amount of information about its characters, allowing the audience room to contribute back- stories and motives. Both borrow cleverly from genre cinema: Under The Skin from the creature feature and the found footage film; A Girl Walks Home from classic horror and the Western. You can “read” Under The Skin as a reversal of the 'male gaze', or A Girl Walks Home as a parallel universe Iran where women make the arbitrary decisions and men suffer the consequences. Or you can surrender yourself to the weirdness and let the films envelop you like a beautiful, deathly fog.

Fast is funny: His Girl Friday and 99
Howard Hawks made two crucial decisions before making His Girl Friday (1940). The first was that the Hildy Johnson character would work better as a female (he was a man in The Front Page, the play this movie is based on). The second was the idea of committing to a frenetic pace that wouldn’t let up—not for the ends of characters’ sentences, not for the audience to finish laughing. The film, which starred Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, is now regarded as one of the quickest screwball comedies ever made. In 2009, Krishna D.K. and Raj Nidimoru made 99, a film which attempted to smuggle that level of comic pacing into a Bollywood production. Working with a very game cast that included Kunal Khemu, Cyrus Broacha, Boman Irani and Mahesh Manjrekar, they squeezed in more lines per minute, and more jokes per line, than any Hindi film in recent memory.

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.

Avengers: Age of Ultron: Review

How many Avengers is too many Avengers? In the first movie, at least one superhero seemed superfluous: Jeremy Renner’s Hawkeye, whose bows and arrows seemed silly when placed alongside the physicality of the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) and Captain America (Chris Evans), the superpowers of Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Robert Downey Jr’s Iron Man (Black Widow might have been superfluous too, only it's Scarlett Johansson). Hawkeye even became the subject of a Saturday Night Live sketch, and director Joss Whedon, ever attuned to the shifting winds of pop culture, has turned Hawkeye’s non-importance into a running gag in Avengers: Age Of Ultron, the sequel to 2012’s The Avengers.

He may be a joke, but Renner’s still very much there, putting in the hours, earning his pay cheque. So is everyone else. You have the six Avengers. You have a new villain, Ultron. There are the super-siblings, Quicksilver (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Scarlet Witch (Elizebeth Olsen), who seem to have wandered in from an X-Men movie. There are superheroes no one really cares about (War Machine, The Falcon). And there are the appearances—so dear to fanboys, so perplexing to regular viewers—by sundry characters from various corners of the Marvel Universe (Erik Selvig, Peggy Carter).

With so many characters to keep track of, the narrative could have become ridiculously convoluted, but Whedon avoids this by trimming his plot of any complexity. At a Hydra base the Avengers overrun in the fictional country of Sokovia, Iron Man comes across some advanced research on artificial intelligence. Informing Bruce Banner but not the rest of the team, he tries to harness this power to activate Ultron, a planned defence shield of sorts. As anyone who’s ever read a comic knows, when you mess with science, you get a supervillain. Sure enough, Ultron comes to life as a killer-bot, and in James Spader’s even tones, declares that his mission is to save humanity (by killing everyone).

Whedon does all he can to keep the various balls in the air. And, to an extent, he succeeds—but there’s something missing. The Avengers worked because Whedon brought something of his wisecracking screwball personality to the genre, which was then in its dour, Nolan-inspired phase. But the action sequences in Age Of Ultron are interminably long, and the banter has lost a lot of its bite; there’s something depressingly Ocean’s Twelve about watching Hulk, Iron Man et al try and lift Thor’s hammer at a party.

It’s disappointing to see a director as playful as Whedon—the creator of Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Firefly—resist the chance to mess with Hollywood formulae. Age Of Ultron unfolds like every other comic book sequel you’ve seen: an opening battle, victory, complacency, cracks within the team, a “back to the basics” speech, rebuilding, and a final battle that decides Earth’s fate.

There is some fun to be had. The odd verbal jab hits home (Captain America has loosened up), Spader’s voice work is terrific, and two Avengers are contemplating the most ill-advised workplace romance ever. But the best you can say about the film is that it’s efficient. It certainly isn’t inspired.

What next for Whedon and his all-stars? Guardians Of The Galaxy stole the wise-ass superhero template; Ant-Man is likely to push in the same direction. TV’s Daredevil is bringing Raid-like grittiness to the form. Will the Avengers movies to come be of anything more than academic interest—how many millions spent, how many made? And if they aren’t, will Whedon become a cautionary tale: the talented showrunner whom Hollywood threw money at and ruined?

This review appeared in Mint.

Court: Review

It’s unlikely anyone will be going in with measured expectations to see Chaitanya Tamhane’s Court. For months, there have been articles and op-eds praising the film’s originality, deconstructing its motives. There have been interviews with the director, producer, cinematographer, even distributors and sales agents. Looked at one way, it’s great that a film like this—an indie with a snowball’s chance in hell of a release—has any kind of hype surrounding it. Yet one has to wonder: Is the actual film likely to resemble the one viewers have built up inside their heads?

Don’t get me wrong. I think Court is absolutely worth raving about, and that it might be one of the most original films to come out of the country in a long time. But its insights are hard-won: You have to be willing to wait and watch until the point of each scene—and there is always a point—reveals itself. Most of the scenes look like someone just switched on a camera and recorded whatever quotidian scene was unfolding. Do not be fooled—even when you’re watching someone doze off or shop or sit in silence, there’s a reason.

Court revolves around the trial of one Narayan Kamble (Vira Sathidar), a man of few words and a singer of transformational power. The case against him, as his lawyer, Vinay (Vivek Gomber, also the film’s producer), finds out, is that he abetted, through one of his performances in a Mumbai slum, the suicide of a local sewer worker. The public prosecutor, Nutan (Geetanjali Kulkarni), points to evidence of suicide, but also to Kamble’s earlier hearings for sedition and suggests links to anti-national groups.

The film draws on the real-life experiences of singer-activists like Sambhaji Bhagat, whose musical numbers are featured in Court, and cultural groups like the Kabir Kala Manch, whose members were charged under The Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. One realizes after a while that Kamble isn’t guilty, that the worker died because it is terribly dangerous work carried out with minimal safety precautions. And that’s when the film becomes less about the case than the court and the people who populate it.

By following the main players—the two lawyers and the judge (Pradeep Joshi)—home from work, as it were, Tamhane reminds us that concepts like “justice” and “equality” derive from the people that work within the system, and that these people have prejudices and blind spots just like the rest of us. Vinay, a well-to-do bachelor, is visibly passionate about the law, speaking at seminars and going out of his way to help the taciturn Kamble. He can afford to be idealistic in a way that the more middle-class Nutan can’t. When she goes home, she has to cook, run a household and study her casebooks; Vinay can have a drink and fall asleep in front of the TV. One particular contrast is devastating. At one point, Nutan and her husband and children watch a xenophobic stage comedy (and enjoy it). Later in the film, Vinay finds himself a victim of similar small-mindedness, manifested as a kind of street theatre.

Court observes its characters minutely but never judges them, and Tamhane finds a filmic grammar that matches this attitude. Most of the scenes are shot with a static camera. Cinematographer Mrinal Desai, who uses his background in documentary film-making to give the film a very convincing naturalism, sticks mainly to medium and long shots. In this age of fast cutting and hyperactive camerawork, stillness of this kind is almost jarring. Though many of the scenes are as formally brilliant—and difficult to execute—as a flashy Steadicam shot, the audience’s willingness to embrace the lack of movement may determine how long the film can extend its theatrical run. Court has already had a great run on the festival circuit. It would be very exciting if regular film-goers took to it as well.

This review appeared in Mint. An earlier piece I'd written on the film's global journey.

Dharam Sankat Mein: Review

Fuwad Khan’s Dharam Sankat Mein starts brightly, hits some beautiful high notes towards the middle, and then proceeds to let itself down. At half-time, I was half-expecting this to be the next Tere Bin Laden, a film that’s satirical and perceptive, but doesn’t take itself too seriously. At an hour and 45 minutes, I revised my expectations down to Vicky Donor levels: great premise, strange ending. By the time the film crossed the 2-hour mark, I would have settled for anything better than the aman ki asha climax of PK.


PK and Dharam Sankat Mein have a lot more in common than an inability to close well. Both are satires about religion as practised in modern India, but from differing perspectives. The central conceit of PK was that only an alien could show us how silly and corrupt organized religion really is. Aamir Khan’s alien was the ultimate outsider, whereas Paresh Rawal’s Dharam Pal is a reluctant insider. The 50-year-old head of a catering business in Ahmedabad, Dharam is a Brahmin who enjoys the occasional drink, wears a sacred thread but pokes fun at his son for becoming overly devout in order to impress his potential father-in-law. It’s a canny portrait of a certain type of middle-class Indian: religious on the surface, but actually just trying not to make waves.

What makes Dharam representative of a certain kind of Indian thinking is that he—while basically uninterested in religion—is also casually communal, evident in his conversations with his wife and, more explicitly, in an argument with his neighbour, the lawyer Nawab Mehmood Shah (Annu Kapoor), when he suggests that the man move into a Muslim neighbourhood if he doesn’t like the one he’s currently in. The film flips this instinctive but unthinking attitude on its head when Dharam finds out, some 20 minutes in, that he was adopted as a boy, and that his biological father is Muslim. He also discovers that his father is alive and living in a home for the aged. When Dharam goes to meet him, the imam who runs the establishment (the menacing, soft-spoken Murali Sharma) tells him he must become more visibly Muslim before he meets the old man. He turns to Shah, who agrees to coach him. And thus the movie’s brightest stretch begins.


The paraphernalia of religions—the rituals and tics that mark one out as a believer, and separate from believers of another feather—was the object of affectionate ribbing in PK as well, but Dharam Sankat Mein works better because the emotional stakes are higher. This is all credit to Kapoor and Rawal, who take an essentially slapstick scenario and add shades of deep hurt and confusion to it. Kapoor has a whale of a time with his character’s grandiose way of expressing himself: He speaks like a lawyer in an Urdu courtroom drama. But he also conveys, without explicitly saying so, the toll it must take if you’re the only Muslim in a Hindu neighbourhood in post-2002 Ahmedabad.

Rawal does something almost as interesting with a less virtuous character. Dharam gets over his religious mental blocks, but he’s no more interested in being a good Muslim than he was in being a devout Hindu. To him, adopting “Muslim mannerisms” is simply like putting on a disguise, a way to reach his father before he dies (much is made of the significance of holy caps in the film).

Dharam Sankat Mein would have been a lot easier to digest if the ultimate message had been in sync with Dharam’s character: the idea that many Indians today use religion as a means to an end, a way to fit in. But the film ends up siding with dharam, not Dharam’s sankat (which is to meet his dying father), and sacrifices its emotional raison d’être. By the end, it disintegrates into bland liberal pieties, unconvincing depictions of communal tension, and the unrewarding slapstick of the subplot involving Dharam’s son and the godman Neelanand Baba (Naseeruddin Shah, parodying MSG, perhaps a touch too much). It’s a pity, because when Rawal and Kapoor are on song, you want it to go on forever.

This review appeared in Mint.

Barefoot To Goa: Review

That Praveen Morchhale’s Barefoot To Goa finally has a theatrical release almost two years after it was shown at the Mumbai Film Festival, is both good and bad news. Good, because every film deserves to be seen by a wider audience. Bad, because a paying public deserves well-made films, and Barefoot To Goa is very far from one.

From the very first scene, it’s clear that Barefoot To Goa will be the kind of film that will demand your tears, instead of working to earn them. The film is about a brother and sister who travel from Mumbai to Goa (not barefoot, for the most part) to visit their grandmother, who has been abandoned by her uncaring son and daughter-in-law, and who is—drum roll—dying of cancer. The children, who must be somewhere between the ages of 6-10, make the trip with the minimum of fuss: hitching rides, finding shelter with kindly rural folk and not being kidnapped or sold into slavery in any way.

I take no pleasure in running down a film that’s obviously been strung together on a minuscule budget, but couldn’t everything have been thought through a bit more? The screenplay trades in the worst kind of virtuous-villager/seeing-the-face-of-God-in-a-child clichés. The camerawork is all over the place, favouring close-ups when none are required and occasionally shifting to shaky, hand-held shots, with disastrous results. The colour scheme is too dark, though even when you peer through, there’s nothing of interest to see. The actors playing the children are neither good nor embarrassingly bad, something that cannot be said for the parents. Only Farrukh Jaffar, who’d played Amma in Peepli (Live), manages to transcend the material in a near-silent performance as the grandmother.

This review appeared in Mint.