OK Jaanu: Review

Now that it’s in a film title, does that mean it’s acceptable to call someone jaanu in public? This term of endearment has always struck me as the sort of thing one would mutter, in a suitably embarrassed fashion, under one’s breath. Kanmani is a beautiful word, tripping off the tongue, affectionate and warm and fun. Jaanu, on the other hand, sounds like something people who wear friendship bands are liable to call each other.

After working as an assistant director on Mani Ratnam’s Dil Se.., Shaad Ali made his directorial debut in 2002 with Saathiya, a Hindi remake of Ratnam’s Alaipayuthey. Having since assisted Ratnam on two features, and directing three of his own (Bunty Aur Babli being the most notable), Ali has returned to reworking his mentor’s hits with OK Jaanu, an adaptation of OK Kanmani, a 2015 Ratnam film. I haven’t seen the original, which is probably for the better; Saathiya was fine, but only if you weren’t comparing it to Alaipayuthey.

For better or worse, OK Jaanu is one of the most uncluttered films in recent memory. The entire running time is given to the exploration of one simple idea: that a boy and girl can forge a deep emotional connection and yet be ready to snap ties when the time comes to advance their careers. Adi (Aditya Roy Kapur) and Tara (Shraddha Kapoor) first lay eyes on each other at a railway station. They then bump into each other at a church wedding, which results in a whimsically lovely scene, with a phone conversation conducted across the aisle. Soon, they’re flirting and doing Mumbai things like scaring pigeons and lip-synching on the steps of the Asiatic Society library.

It’s when they decide to move in together that the film, ever so slightly, raises the emotional stakes. We already know that Tara, an architect, wants to move to Paris, while game creator Adi is eyeing fame and fortune in the US. They’re on borrowed time—something that Ali and dialogue writer Gulzar underline through the example of the elderly couple subletting a room to Adi. Charu (Leela Samson) has Alzheimer’s; she’s hesitant but still mentally present, except for worrying episodes in which she wanders off alone. Her husband, Gopi (Naseeruddin Shah), knows she’ll be lost to him soon, but puts on a brave face. It’s a reasonable, if somewhat pat, parallel: an imposed expiry date for one relationship, a self-imposed one for the other.

For a film about people who’d rather move up in the world than make the kind of compromises relationships require, there’s one significant stumbling block: no viewer with a grip on reality would mistake either Adi or Tara for the career-obsessed sort. What will the millions of young people who actually have to juggle relationships and their careers make of these two, barely breaking a sweat, receiving nothing but congratulations from their bosses, with nothing as prosaic as a late night in office to disturb their pursuit of fun?

OK Jaanu is more froth than coffee— sweet and diverting, but lacking the kick of emotion. Apart from Baadshah’s version of "Humma Humma"—a remake within a remake, and a crime against nature—the soundtrack, with A.R. Rahman reworking his OK Kanmani tunes, screeches and thrums beautifully. Kapoor gives what might be her best performance (though there isn't much to choose from), the conflicting emotions on her face in the latter stages hinting at a complexity the film just doesn’t possess (Kapur prefers to submit one emotion at a time). All in all, a film that fits snugly into a category coined by critic Andrew Sarris: lightly likeable.

This review appeared in Mint.

The best Hindi films of 2016

If we’re being honest, 2016 wasn’t a great year for Hindi cinema. Last year, a list of noteworthy films might have stretched to 10, maybe even 15. Pickings were a lot slimmer this time around, though the predominance of mid-budget titles on the list is, perhaps, cause for some cheer. Here are our top eight films that released in theatres this year.

8. Jugni
In another year, Jugni would have placed amongst the also-rans: a modest film, with individuality and charm and some evident flaws. First-time director Shefali Bhushan drew from her own life to tell the story of Vibhavari (Sugandha Garg), a music producer who travels to Punjab to record a local artist, Bibi Saroop (Sadhana Singh), and ends up being fascinated by—and fascinating—her son, a singer named Mastana (Siddhant Behl). The city-dwellers aren’t as well-etched as their small-town counterparts, and the film’s third act, which unfolds in Mumbai, is a bit of a mess, but as long as the film is in rural Punjab, Jugni is a blast, full of salty dialogue, Clinton Cerejo’s crackling Sufi music and a star-making turn from Behl as the motormouth Mastana.

7. Phobia
Pawan Kripalani’s Phobia uses the refractive lens of genre to explore ideas of consent, women’s navigation of urban spaces and the weight of societal judgement—issues tackled much more bluntly in one of the year’s most talked-about films, Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury’s Pink. Pink had little time for genre, or frills, or for anything that distracted from the task at hand. Phobia, on the other hand, addresses issues, but at a remove—you could watch it as a straight-ahead horror film and come away satisfied. Not everything adds up, but the psychological grounding of the central character’s agoraphobia is fascinating, and Radhika Apte is compellingly frayed.

6. Dangal
The first hour and a half of Nitesh Tiwari’s Dangal is as close to perfect as mainstream Hindi film-making got in 2016. After that, the film’s attempts to keep its lead actor central to the story hamper the narrative, but there’s still plenty to enjoy: juicy comic performances from the young actors and Aamir Khan, observant, witty writing and direction, and some blistering fights. A fitting coda to a year in which Indian women athletes, including a Haryana wrestler, shone at the Olympics.

5. Aligarh
Professor S.R. Siras, dismissed by Aligarh Muslim University after a video of him in bed with a man surfaced, was the public face of a movement, and a most reluctant figurehead. This dichotomy is at the heart of Aligarh, which is at its best when sticking close to the retiring academic. The lopsided scenes in court and in the TV studio cannot compare with the quiet power of the conversations between Siras and Deepu Sebastian, the reporter who becomes his friend. The film derives much of its power from Manoj Bajpayee’s extraordinarily delicate portrayal of Siras, and from Rajkummar Rao’s sympathetic supporting turn.

4. Udta Punjab
The film no one could agree on. Did it go too far, or not far enough? Did you go in expecting Trainspotting and get Traffic, or vice versa? Like Abhishek Chaubey’s previous films, Udta Punjab was profane, eccentric and ramshackle, jaundiced in its view of humanity but also capable of bursts of unexpected warmth. As a look at a society ravaged by drugs, it was harrowing, and the contrasting styles of the film’s lead actors generated its own tension. Controversy seemed to dog the project, from the Central Board of Film Certification asking for an unprecedented number of cuts to reports that the plot was very likely inspired by Ben Elton’s novel High Society.

3. Neerja
If you liked Airlift well enough but felt that the film worked too hard to sanctify its central character, Neerja is the antidote. After a soft-focus opening (necessary, in the larger scheme of things), Ram Madhvani’s film becomes a lean, largely unsentimental Paul Greengrass-like thriller. Sonam Kapoor plays Neerja, a character based on flight purser Neerja Bhanot, whose quick thinking saved the lives of 359 passengers aboard a Pan Am plane stormed by hijackers at Karachi airport on 5 September 1986. As the hijacking unfolds, the film interjects scenes from Neerja’s abusive marriage, which she eventually walked out of. It’s a moving tribute, illuminating not one, but two, moments in an otherwise ordinary life when courage sprang up, unbidden.

2. Waiting
Anu Menon’s film, about a young wife and an old husband whose spouses are comatose in a Kochi hospital, could easily have been soppy or morbid. Instead, it’s funny and sharp, eschewing the high drama of sickness and hospitals and exploring their tedium instead. Naseeruddin Shah’s Shiv has tended to his comatose wife for so long that he has almost turned into an amateur physician himself, to the profound irritation of her actual doctor. Once Kalki Koechlin’s spiky Tara turns up, he becomes a sort of hospital coach for her, while she gets him to loosen up. Life lessons are learnt by all, but Menon’s tart script (co-written with James Ruzicka and Atika Chohan) and low-key directorial style, and a beautifully fractured performance by Koechlin, steer the film clear of TV drama cliché and towards a clear-eyed empathy.

1. Kapoor & Sons (since 1921)
The dysfunctional family drama is a subgenre most commonly associated with American indie cinema. Yet, given the complexity of our family structures, it’s ideally suited for adaptation here. In recent years, various film-makers have responded to it in different ways: Piku, Dil Dhadakne Do, Titli. Shakun Batra’s Kapoor & Sons doesn’t cast the genre in a new light, but it might be the most satisfying exploration, in recent Hindi cinema, of a family held together by duct tape and hope. Long-standing resentments surface and assorted neuroses brush up against each other, but Batra avoids the preciousness of genre staples like Little Miss Sunshine, finding a brittle, bright tone of his own. A wonderful ensemble–Alia Bhatt, Rajat Kapoor, Rishi Kapoor, Fawad Khan, Sidharth Malhotra, Ratna Pathak Shah—brings it all back home; the scenes where everyone’s yelling at each other are more propulsive and thrilling than anything

While this hasn't been a particularly fruitful year for Hindi cinema, it has yielded moments and characters that'll stick: the collective sigh that greeted Fawad Khan's first scene in Kapoor & Sons; Kumud Mishra's bureaucrat in Airlift; Salman Khan (!) looking disgustedly at his reflection in Sultan; the determination of Swara Bhaskar and Sonam Kapoor, the nervous energy of Radhika Apte and Kalki Koechlin, Alia Bhatt's calm interiority; Nawazuddin Siddiqui crying wolf in Raman Raghav 2.0; "Tum hote kaun ho mere liye kuch bhi karnewale" (Fan); the lyrics to Haanikaarak Bapu; the way Kanika Kapoor sings "Khabardaar rahiyo rahiyo ve"; the 'Purushottam' segment in Island City; Anuritta K Jha screaming at Siddhant Behl in Jugni: "X-ray kar liya tha uss chudail ka"; the humanity in the comedy tracks of Pankaj Tripathi (Nil Battey Sannata) and Rajeev Ravindranathan (Waiting); Jimmy Shergill in Happy Bhag Jayegi, never funnier than when he's not getting the girl.

A shorter version of this piece appeared in Mint Lounge.

Dangal: Review

During one key moment in Nitesh Tiwari’s Dangal, the national anthem plays. Not the full thing, maybe three-quarters, but enough to get the theatre audience I saw it with thinking. Were they supposed to stand? Were they bound to? What would happen if they didn’t? Writing this now, I’m still conflicted. If I mention that I didn’t stand, could that be used by someone to have me arrested?

I probably wouldn’t have mentioned this burst of national feeling (the anthem was followed by a “Bharat mata ki jai”, coming, thankfully, from the screen) if it had felt in some way integral—or at least in tune with—the film. But Dangal has little use for country before this juncture. The moment feels shoehorned in, like an item number or a comedy track. It makes you wonder: is this the price of making movies in hyper-patriotic times?

Until well into the film, Geeta and Babita Phogat don’t want to win medals for their country, or for themselves. They don’t want anything, really, except their childhood back. But this has been whisked away by their father, a former grappler named Mahavir Singh Phogat (Aamir Khan), who’s got it into his head that his two older daughters will be champion wrestlers—all because they beat up a couple of schoolboys who were teasing them. And so he wakes them up at five every morning and runs them ragged. He monitors their diet, rations their leisure time. When they protest, he cuts their hair. Eventually, he begins to teach them how to wrestle, also enlisting his hapless nephew in the cause.

There’s a grim, Foxcatcher-like film somewhere inside Dangal, about a father who ruins the lives of his girls by pushing them to make good on his own unfulfilled dreams. But Dangal’s attitude towards Mahavir’s regime is light-hearted—even if he is a tyrant, the film seems to argue, he’s the right sort. The film can afford to paint Mahavir as unyielding and cruel because we know what’s to come: Geeta and Babita will go on to become professional wrestlers as that’s what happened with their real-life counterparts, both national champions and Commonwealth Games gold medal winners.

Because there are no women wrestlers to compete against, Geeta and Babita are pitted against boys in the local dangal (tournament). The build-up to Geeta’s first fight is leisurely, and I found myself wondering if the film—charming as hell up to this point— was going to squander its gains by not being able to make a convincing show of wrestling. Most Bollywood sports films slow down the action, cut it up, use close-ups to hide the actor as much as possible. Dangal, however, observes large portions of its bouts at a distance, enough for the viewer to realise that they aren’t faking the entire thing. The choreography is tremendous, arms hitting bodies and bodies hitting mats with satisfying thwacks and thuds.

As long as it stays in the Phogats’ village of Balali in Harayana, picking up on little details and wisecracks, Dangal is near perfect. In time, however, the older Geeta must move to the National Sports Academy in Patiala to continue her training. At first, this lends the film some useful friction, as the freedom she finds there clashes with her father’s set ideas. But then Dangal loses its nerve and becomes another Bollywood film that won’t allow its lead actor to slip into a supporting role.

The film nearly hobbles itself in its efforts to keep Mahavir relevant. Geeta’s new coach (played by Girish Kulkarni, memorable as the police officer in Ugly) turns out to be incompetent and vindictive, all so her father can swoop in and save the day. (One particular act of villainy committed towards the end belongs in a Tom and Jerry skit.) It might have been more intriguing to see Geeta try and reconcile the techniques she learnt growing up with the demands of the international arena. But the film doesn’t trust the audience to handle any complexity; old good, new bad—end of discussion.

Luckily, even as the Mahavir track becomes increasingly desperate, Dangal never loses interest in the girls. Tiwari, who made the charming Chillar Party, has a knack for getting younger actors to relax on-screen, and the four leads—Zaira Wasim and Suhani Bhatnagar as the younger Geeta and Babita, Fatima Sana Shaikh and Sanya Malhotra as the older versions—respond beautifully to the physical and emotional demands of their parts. Apart from a few flashbacks in which he’s implausibly muscled up, Khan lumbers around a huge gut and an expression of supreme disgust. He’s never been the most natural of comic actors, but Dangal reveals something undeniable: he’s the perfect straight man.

This review appeared in Mint.

Rogue One: Review

How fitting it would be for Gareth Edwards were hired to direct a DC movie. He loves the dark. He hasn’t any particular sense of humour. His ear for dialogue is about as finely tuned as Christopher Nolan’s: exposition, clunky stirring line, repeat. After his no-budget breakthrough Monsters, he made Godzilla—occasionally spectacular, but lacking in wit and rather a slog to get through. The same is the case with Rogue One, the first Star Wars spinoff, of which DC’s favourite villain might reasonably ask, “Why so serious?”

Rogue One begins with a sequence that’s reminiscent of the protracted opening of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. This is not a useful comparison for Rogue One to bring upon itself: Tarantino has penned few better things than that initial pas de deux, while the writing in Edwards’ film has, at best, a meat-and-potatoes solidity. Perhaps there were too many writers involved—the screenplay is credited to Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy, the story to John Knoll and Gary Whitta. Then again, Casablanca had a roomful of writers and that worked out fine.

Rogue One is set in the period preceding the events of A New Hope. The film is built around a solid kernel of an idea: the Death Star is being conceived and for that, the Empire needs a former employee, scientist Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen), who’s hiding out on a deserted planet with his wife and daughter, Jyn. An Imperial squad, headed by Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn), tracks him down, but Jyn manages to escape. Years later, she’s tracked down by the Rebel Alliance, a ragtag group battling the Empire. An Imperial pilot (Riz Ahmed) has defected and is carrying a message from her father concerning the Death Star. Jyn (Felicity Jones) is sent to track him down with the help of Rebel officer Cassian Andor (Diego Luna).

Anyone who’s seen A New Hope will have an idea where this story must end. This makes Rogue One more of a ‘how’, rather than a ‘what’, film—nothing new for the franchise, which includes George Lucas’ prequel trilogy, the longest ‘how’ in cinema history. We know that the Death Star was eventually constructed, and that details of its weakness were eventually smuggled to the Jedi. The only questions left are mundane ones. Will Jyn ever crack a smile? Can you fell multiple Stormtroopers with a stick, as Chirrut Îmwe (Donnie Yen) does so spectacularly? Is Moody Cassian the new Emo Kylo Ren?

It’s rare for Hollywood franchises to sport genuinely multiethnic casts (the Fast and Furious films are exceptions), so all credit to Rogue One for including British Asian (Riz Ahmed), Mexican (Diego Luna), Danish (Mads Mikkelsen), Australian (Ben Mendelsohn), Chinese (Jiang Wen) and Hong Kong (Donnie Yen) actors in key roles. Yet, very little comes of all this. Luna and Jones are fine dramatic actors, but they can’t seem to access the lightness of touch necessary to power a film like this; the charm of Daisy Ridley and John Boyega in The Force Awakens is sorely missed. Mikkelsen is too subdued; Whittaker could do with some subduing.

I did enjoy Yen, one of Asia’s biggest action stars, as a blind man who wields a mean stick—his character seems to be a tribute to Zatoichi, the classic blind swordsman of Japanese cinema, though it also returns the Force to its zen-wuxia roots. There are also a couple of city- and planet-levelling explosions that are incongruously beautiful. But moments like these, when the screen comes alive, are rare. Maybe fans of the franchise will appreciate Edwards’ attempts to add to Lucas’ universe without playing spot-the-reference, as J.J. Abrams did shamelessly but entertainingly in The Force Awakens. Speaking for myself, by the time the galaxy was done being saved, I’d drifted far, far away.

This review appeared in Mint.

China girls and future nostalgists

In film lab parlance, a “China girl” was the image of a woman that appeared in the countdown leader of a reel. It was used by technicians to match skin tone and colour density. No one is sure how the term came about, but the most widely accepted origin theory is that, sometimes, instead of women, porcelain figures (hence “china”) were used as models.

In his documentary Electric Shadows: Journeys In Image-making, Avijit Mukul Kishore juxtaposes one China girl with another: Helen dancing to "Mera Naam Chin Chin Chu" in Shakti Samanta’s 1958 Hindi film Howrah Bridge. Clothed in a cheongsam, eyebrows arched, Helen is a delightful Orientalist cliché, no more Chinese than the women on the film leaders. It’s a potent comparison, one that uses film history and technique to point to the medium’s capacity for deception.

In 2011, a film festival called You Don’t Belong: Pasts and Futures of Indian Cinema was organized by West Heavens Project, a cultural exchange programme. Kishore, whose Snapshots From A Family Album was part of the line-up, travelled to Beijing and Shanghai. The plan was for him and the other film-makers from India to make a film on the festival. That film never materialized, but Kishore was sufficiently intrigued to return in December 2014 to shoot a documentary of his own. Along with architect Rohan Shivkumar, he travelled to Beijing, Shanghai and Kunming, interviewing a range of people, from film curators to Mao-era memorabilia shop owners. This became Electric Shadows, whose title is the literal English translation of the Chinese word for cinema—dianying.

Even with its slight running time of 40- odd minutes, the film manages to touch upon Bruce Lee, Mani Kaul, The 36th Chamber Of Shaolin, state censorship, 1920s Shanghai and Jawaharlal Nehru and still find time for a sequence in which Kishore flies over fields and cities dressed like a warrior out of a Zhang Yimou film. When I met him and Shivkumar, Kishore told me that he’d set out to explore how image-making and propaganda affects culture. The film also shows easily we can reduce a culture to its most popular export, like the scene in which Shivkumar gets requested for photographs by a series of young girls who either believe he’s Shah Rukh Khan or feel he looks close enough for it not to matter.

Electric Shadows suggests that the long-standing embargo on culture during the Party years left the Chinese people somewhat unmoored. Johnson Chang, director of the West Heavens Project, speaks of his frustration with what he sees as a loss of contact with Chinese history. “Because of that we get indigestion from what is coming in from the outside,” he says. “The way the Chinese consume images, it’s like the image has no history at all,” Shivkumar says. As a young man from Shanghai puts it: “It’s a nostalgia only for the present.”

This statement seems to be the jumping-off point for the other Kishore film screening this month. Nostalgia For The Future, co-directed with Shivkumar, is a meditation on home and belonging, architecture and the nation—themes Kishore has explored previously in documentaries like Vertical City and Snapshots From A Family Album. It explores various houses, from the Laxmi Vilas Palace in Vadodara to B.R. Ambedkar’s modest dwellings in Mumbai, and through these, various ideas of “home”: as raw communion with nature (Le Corbusier’s designs), as pure spirit (Gandhi), as engineering (government housing in Delhi).

As Kishore points out, the film has something else in common with his previous work: it’s exploration of film form. Kishore is a cinematographer; he majored in the discipline at the Film and Television Institute of India and has shot, apart from his own films, Ashim Ahluwalia’s John & Jane, Shivendra Singh Dungarpur’s The Immortals and several others. In Nostalgia For The Future, he mixes digital with 16mm footage and clips from Hindi films and old Films Division documentaries. The 16mm interludes, in black and white and colour, tie in with the title of the film: they’re present-day scenes, but the hazy images and the rounded corners of the screen impose a nostalgia of their own.

Nostalgia For The Future isn’t a difficult film, but it’s definitely a thoughtful one. Though he’s used a voiceover for the first time, Kishore refrains from imposing any definitive conclusions. You could get happily lost—as I did at times—in the beautifully precise images, or you can try and unpack the ideas about architecture, philosophy, nation-building, city planning, class and caste that keep coming at you. Sometimes, you may find the film triggering a personal response. As I heard Nehru defend the architecture of Chandigarh by saying that sometimes India needs to be hit on the head in order for it to think, it struck me that I’d heard similar sentiments voiced in the last few weeks by supporters of the demonetization drive.

If you live in Mumbai and are interested in documentary, chances are you’d have run into Kishore and Shivkumar. They frequently take on curatorial work: for the Movies at the Museum sessions at the Dr Bhau Daji Lad City Museum and, in the past, for the Mumbai Film Festival and Films Division’s happily revived weekly programme, FD Zone. I ask them whether they agree with something Chang says, that to be a film curator you have to be optimistic. “You have to be an optimist, period,” Shivkumar says, laughing. Kishore agrees, adding, “There are so many films that will never make it to the market. What is possible to do is more important than what you might not be able to.”

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.

Befikre: Review

Befikre begins with "Labon Ka Karobaar" – literally, the business of lips – a musical number that would appear to double the number of kisses that have ever taken place in Hindi cinema. It’s a Benetton advertisement’s-worth of making out: kisses cutting across race, age, sex. And there’s more kissing to come in the film – chaste pecks, fairly carnivorous attacks, sloppy ones that make you want to avert your eyes – most of it accompanied by swoony camera movements. A kiss, no matter how much Aditya Chopra would want you to believe, isn’t just a kiss, it’s an event.

Having introduced one major theme (in France, people kiss a lot), the film immediately sets about establishing another (relationships are messy). Dharam (Ranveer Singh) and Shyra (Vaani Kapoor) are having a knock-down-drag-out fight that ends not with her throwing a TV out of the window, surprisingly, but with him calling her a “French slut”. She leaves, and the film jumps back a year to show us how they got together in the first place. You know how it goes: two Indians meet in a European city, hook up/make out, decide later that they’ll just be friends. Cocktail had the carnal version, Tamasha the chaste one. More worryingly for Befikre, Ae Dil Hai Mushkil explored similar territory little over a month ago.

While the copious smooching (and a split-second shot of a bare behind) will probably be cited as evidence of Befikre’s progressive outlook, there’s more substance in Dharam unexpectedly apologizing for his slut remark. It was my inadequacy that made me judge you, he tells Shyra. You expect such a sentiment from Ranbir Kapoor, a star with an unusual propensity for exploring weakness, not so much from the cocksure Singh.

For the first hour, Befikre goes back and forth in time, tracking the pair’s progress from hook-up to live-in couple, and returning periodically to their uneasy present. Watching Singh and Kapoor try and out-brazen each other is amusing at first (there’s a whimsical scene, built around a cornflake, which takes place in a department store) but eventually, I began to wonder when the stakes would be raised, if there were to be stakes at all. Complications do surface, but Dharam and Shyra, with their dares and their rebellion and their annoying energy, are more t-shirt slogans than characters in whom one can emotionally invest. For a film about relationships, there’s little insight offered into why we behave the way we do in love and lust, just a reiteration of that old chestnut: former lovers can’t be friends.

Befikre is set entirely in France, and doesn’t seem to have any qualms about resembling a glossy travel ad, building scenes around the Eiffel Tower and the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont Bridge. At one point, it’s announced that the characters are headed to the “exclusive region of Picardy”. This love of all things French is matched by the film’s disdain for all things Delhi. Whenever Dharam says something unfortunate, Shyra retorts with “Kar di na Dilli waali baat (There’s that Delhi thinking again)”. I’m surprised that a film with such a monumentally shoddy (and casually cruel) final set-piece can afford to point fingers at anyone else’s thought process.

When the Befikre trailer released, a friend told me she was worried Kapoor would be playing a version of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. She isn’t, and there’s a directness to her gaze and her speaking voice that suits the forthright Shyra. If there’s a manic pixie in the film, it’s Singh, who preens and struts around like he’s on uppers. They’re well-matched, these two actors, and it’s unfortunate that the material they’ve been handed is so slight. A parting plea: could Bollywood directors reign in the self-referencing? There are three explicit nods to Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, which only serves to remind those who aren’t charmed by self-homage that Chopra’s reputation as a director rests almost exclusively on a film made 21 years ago.

This review appeared in Mint.

Kahaani 2: Durga Rani Singh: Review

Kahaani 2: Durga Rani Singh isn’t a sequel to Kahaani, but it may as well be. I’m not talking about the shared setting (West Bengal) or lead actor (Vidya Balan, playing Vidyas in both) or genre (urban thriller). Instead, the films are inextricably linked because the narrative tricks of the first colour the viewing experience of the second. The 2012 film hinged on a lying flashback: protagonist Vidya Baghchi’s memories turned out to be deliberately—and significantly—misleading. The film was a success, but from point on, Ghosh had been put on notice: he’d cried wolf once.

If someone has lied to you before – and a false flashback, no matter how clever, is a cinematic lie – it’s difficult to put the thought out of your mind that they might do it again. This, at least, was how I made my way through Kahaani 2: two hours and ten minutes of second-guessing and waiting for the other shoe to drop. I actually spent the intermission trying to convince my friends that Jugal Hansraj’s blatantly obvious villainy was a smokescreen, that his hamming was a subtle hint that we were dealing with an unreliable narrator. I won’t tell you if my guess was right, but if one of Ghosh’s goals as an artist is to mess with his viewer’s heads, then he’s totally succeeded with me.

In a film that’s essentially one twist after another, it’s difficult to separate the spoilers from the bare bones of the plot. Here is my attempt at parsing. Vidya Sinha (Balan) is living with her wheelchair-bound daughter, Mini (Tunisha Sharma), in the small West Bengal town of Chandannagar. They’re almost set to leave for the US, where Mini has been slotted for an operation that could restore the use of her legs. But the girl is kidnapped and Vidya, running frantically to reach the address texted to her by the abductor, is hit by a car.

Things become even knottier when Inderjit (Arjun Rampal), the cop assigned to Vidya’s case, recognises her as someone he knew named Durga; fitting, considering Balan was a figurative Durga by the end of Kahaani. Soon, we’re in a flashback derived from Vidya’s diary entries— a perfectly reasonable storytelling device, but one that set off a series of unreliable narrator alarm bells in my mind. The film cuts between the two storylines, adding characters along the way: Inderjit’s comical boss (Kharaj Mukherjee), Jugal Hansraj and Amba Sanyal as Mini’s relatives, and a female assassin who isn’t a patch on Bob Biswas, the sad sack killer of Kahaani.

At times, Kahaani 2 is a little too reminiscent of Kahaani for its own good. It’s almost as if Ghosh is convinced that these films (and perhaps Te3n, which he produced, and which has plenty in common with Kahaani 2) constitute a franchise, and that he has to live up to the expectations of fans who’d be disappointed if the new film didn’t have an assassin, two cops (one straight ace, the other morally compromised), and a moment of high drama that turned out to be visual deception. It’s not that Ghosh doesn’t have a fresh story to tell — some of the subplots in this film could sustain a whole feature by themselves. Still, by the time the (fairly shaky) denouement arrives, you can feel the narrative strain to top Kahaani’s final reveal.

Ghosh’s eye is just as keen as it was four years ago. There’s a wealth of visual detail scattered across the film; one of my favourite throwaway moments is when Inderjit chases a fake-passport supplier through his workplace and we catch a split-second glimpse of art forgeries stacked in a room. You can’t fault the pace either: editor Namrata Rao, a Kahaani alum, hurries the scenes along. You can fault some of the acting: Hansraj is very broad, as is the actor playing the assassin. Balan is convincingly harried, but the spark of a few years ago is somewhat dimmed. Rampal’s low-wattage performance, though, might be his best.

Compared to the vivid Kahaani, this film has a blanched look, perhaps in keeping with its dark subject matter. It’s a frenetic 130 minutes, but I never really felt for Vidya Sinha the way I did for Vidya Bagchi. Perhaps I was just too caught up waiting for Ghosh to fool me twice.