Laal Kaptaan: Review

For the second time this year, Hindi cinema takes a run at a revisionist Western. Laal Kaptaan doesn't come together as satisfyingly as Sonchiriya, perhaps the best theatrical release of 2019. But that film still had the broad framework of the daaku film to play with, whereas Navdeep Singh heads into largely unmapped territory with some hunting dogs and a history book for company.

Laal Kaptaan is set in the late-1700s, a time of fantastic tumult in India. The Battle of Buxar has taken place, the Mughals are losing their grip and the British are on their way to taking control of the country. North India is a mess of competing interests: Afghans, Marathas, assorted tribes and clans. Into this bubbling stew, Singh drops a naga sadhu, played by Saif Ali Khan, who has unfinished business with a warlord named Rahmat Khan (Manav Vij).

The Western is strong in this one: there are Moriccone bells and choruses, and the sadhu is a nod to both the Lone Ranger (in that he looks like Tonto) and the Man With No Name (everyone just calls him “gosain", the term for Shiva-worshipping ascetics). But Laal Kaptaan is also a chase film, a genre Singh experimented with in NH10. Gosain has been pursuing Khan for 20 years and is finally within striking distance. Also pursuing Khan are the Marathas, whose money he’s run off with. And there’s a tracker played by Deepak Dobriyal, who’ll hunt down anyone, Gosain or Khan, for a fee.

There are shades of Aamir Khan’s trickster from Thugs of Hindostan in the tracker, but thankfully there’s more that separates than unites these two films, even though both are set in north India in the late 1700s. This is a more convincing snapshot of what the region must have been like, with everyone looking out for themselves and national identity barely a gleam in anyone’s eye. There's a wealth of eccentric period detail: for instance, the Pindaris – plunderers and foragers of the time – who set off after Rahmat Khan are presented as the film’s equivalent of commedia dell'arte or a nautanki troupe.

Singh and co-writer Deepak Venkatesha create a gritty, unstable world; even the most sympathetic character, a widow, played by Zoya Hussain, acts decisively and without mercy when she has to. The use of incremental flashbacks, though, doesn’t work as well as they might have hoped. Every 30 minutes or so, we’re shown fragments of events that went down in Buxar: rain, a boy and his father, prisoners, British soldiers, a hanging. We get a little more information with each one, so by the time we learn why the gosain is after Khan, it’s not that much of a revelation, unlike that expertly deployed, heart-stopping flashback in Sonchiriya.

The film is held back in other ways. You wish someone had given Singh and cinematographer Shanker Raman a bit of a budget for the set-pieces – there are a couple of good ideas (the Afghan ambush, for example) but little cohesion or fluidity. The performances are a strange collection of accents and attitudes. Saif Ali Khan, buried under dreadlocks, a beard and sacred ash, seethes and grimaces a lot. Vij seems to be trying to channel Pankaj Kapur in Maqbool; there’s a scene when I genuinely couldn’t make out if the source of a loud grunt was Vij or the horse or camel standing nearby. And while it’s nice to see Dobriyal get prominent billing, his clowning is one-note and his part underwritten.

And yet, Laal Kaptaan is the sort of film I wish there were more of – an exploration of the richness and weirdness of old India, one which doesn’t try to smooth the edges or create a Disney-esque franchise. Recent films have used our nation’s distant past as a reflecting pool of orthodoxy (Padmaavat) and proto-nationalism (Manikarnika). Singh, on the other hand, admits that we’ve always been a complicated, fractured country, and that entire lives can be defined by nothing more than a desire for revenge.

This review appeared in Mint.

The Sky Is Pink: Review

A film about the impending death of a terminally ill child, narrated by the dead child from beyond the grave. You can’t lose with a setup like that: even a strictly competent director could push the required buttons and reduce viewers to a sniffly mess. But you can’t win either. No matter how much you pare it down, there’ll always be someone accusing you of manipulating tears from the spectacle of a dying kid. Shonali Bose’s The Sky Is Pink errs on the side of caution, keeping the impending tragedy in view at all times, but wrapping everything in good vibes and the kind of courage you have no option but to admire.

On the roof of an Old Delhi house, Aditi (Priyanka Chopra Jonas) wakes up her husband, Niren (Farhan Akhtar), to the news that she’s pregnant. After a quick spell of blaming each other – something that’ll recur through the film – they’re faced with the question: what next? Aditi wants to keep the baby. Niren wants to abort – with good reason. They’d once had a daughter, who died soon after she was born. They found out she had severe combined immunodeficiency, a condition which leaves its victims extremely vulnerable to infections. Any child of theirs would have a one in four chance of being born with the same.

Aisha – whose voiceover breezily informs us that “the end" has already happened for her – does, indeed, have SCID, which requires her to be in London for treatment. She grows up there, alone with her mother at first as Niren heads back to India to earn a living; then with both of them and her older brother, Ishaan (Rohit Suresh Saraf), on the outskirts of London; and finally back in a farmhouse in Delhi. Her condition makes normal life almost impossible, but she still manages to go to school (for one scene at least), paint, write, fall in love, and allay parental concerns with dry comic barbs.

Bose worked with similarly heart-tugging material in 2014’s Margarita With A Straw, about a young woman with cerebral palsy. Her new film (screenplay by Bose and Nilesh Maniyar; dialogue by Maniyar and Juhi Chaturvedi) is comfier, less jagged. The reaction shots of baby Aisha yawning and gurgling are an early indication that there will be plenty of sugar to help the grim premise go down. The long goodbye is eased by the good life, with teens lounging by the pool and domestic staff bringing them double espressos, and a bit of Zoya Akhtar-esque deep-sea diving (having Aisha come face to face with a sea turtle, a creature known for its long life-span, is a neat idea). Mikey McCleary’s score is the shiniest object of all, its jauntiness mostly at odds with the delicate emotions in play.

Zaira Wasim is a rare young actor who doesn’t go hunting for the audience’s sympathy; she plays Aisha as calm and funny instead of angry or tragic. The focus, though, remains on her parents – which is just as well, since it would have taken a different sort of film to explore the psyche of a dying teenager. In its best moments, The Sky is Pink is a perceptive look at the pressures that descend on a marriage when there’s a seriously ill child involved. The scenes with Niren and Aditi laying into each other are emotionally volatile in a way the rest of the film isn’t. Both actors respond beautifully, especially Chopra, who is believably fraught, determined and frayed by turn.

Bose’s film is based on a real-life story: there really was an Aisha Chaudhary, born to Niren and Aditi, who died at 18. This is a touching tribute to a life cut short, even if the experience is less wrenching than what one might expect. After Aisha dies, the next scene is her funeral, with loud country music trampling over the goodbyes we’ve just witnessed. It reminded me of the ending to The Broken Circle Breakdown, a 2012 Belgian film about a couple who lose their young daughter to cancer. It ends with the wife on her deathbed, the husband and their bluegrass band playing her on her way out. It’s a desperately sad scene to begin with, but as the music picks up the band members start to smile and whoop. The Sky Is Pink has similar reserves of emotion, but nothing breaks through its manicured surface in so electrifying a manner.

This review appeared in Mint.

War: Review

War. What is it good for? For starters, it answers a question too important to remain hypothetical any longer: Who comes out on top in a Hrithik-Tiger dance-off? It also poses a question of its own: what if there was a film in which Hrithik and Tiger were in love with each other but couldn’t admit it and sublimated this longing into a nation-love bordering on the pathological?

This is all subtext. Sort of. When Indian super-soldier Kabir (Hrithik Roshan) goes rogue, his protégé Khalid (Tiger Shroff) offers to bring him in. His commanding officer isn’t convinced, saying, “You love him, Khalid." “I love my country more," Khalid replies, but his eyes tell a different story. In the flashback that follows, those same eyes stare for what seems like a whole minute at Kabir alighting in slow motion from a helicopter. Later, a colleague jokes about running off with Kabir and getting married. Khalid mutters: “Get in line."

War, which pingpongs from Malta to Marrakesh to the Arctic Circle, barely bothering to justify the location changes, is the best big dumb Hindi action film in a long time. Screenwriters Shridhar Raghavan and Siddharth Anand (also the director) fashion a silly-smart narrative that’s nothing but expansive setpieces joined by inventive, preposterous twists. It’s never subtle – a solid page of information is imparted on a boat that might as well be called the SS Exposition – but there’s considerable charm in the film’s commitment to glossy uptempo mayhem.

There’s also Abbas Tyrewala on dialogue duty – a canny hire. He does the standard action movie patter (“You are in hell now") but also comes up with poetic flourishes that draw on mainstream Hindi cinema traditions. When Khalid’s mother meets him at camp, she tells him she asked god for himmat (courage) for him and izzat (respect) for herself. He tells to ask for barkat (good fortune) next time, lightening the mood with a joke. “Aadmi pahaad se takra sakta hai, parvarish se nahi (a man can go up against a mountain, but not his own upbringing)," Kabir warns – a line which could have been written anytime in the last six decades.

Like almost every film made this year, War makes a lot of noise about country and security and sacrifice. Yet, on one occasion, it subverts its own macho patriotism. Attempting to get Naina (Vaani Kapoor), a “civilian asset", to participate in a mission, Kabir appeals to her sense of duty as an army daughter. “Not everyone’s taken a pledge to save the country," she replies. “Some just want a better life for their daughter. This is the war in most ordinary lives." She eventually agrees, but a quiet – and rare – point has been made.

Anand knows the audience isn’t there for subtle undercutting of patriotic fervor. So he gives them a jeep driven out of a plane in mid-air; a pas de deux with brightly coloured cars in the swirling snow; Roshan and Shroff driving bikes towards each other at top speed and, just as they’re about to pass each other, clasping arms. Several of the setpiece ideas are taken from the Mission: Impossible films, and while War doesn’t come close to that level of choreography, it’s more than competent, which is about all you can ask of an Indian action film (it wipes the floor with Saaho, made on a much higher budget).

When Kabir refers to Khalid’s chehra, it reminded me of Roshan uttering the same word 19 years ago in his first film, Kaho Na Pyar Hai. War is a reminder that, as far as big-budget action goes, there are still few better. He seems to relax in these movies in a way he isn’t able to when he’s being a Serious Actor. Shroff, who never looks relaxed, appears very much in awe of him. “Khalid used to be my student," Kabir says. “Perhaps he now thinks he’s surpassed the teacher." No one is likely to leave with that impression.

This review appeared in Mint.

Joker: Review

The edgelord with 300 Twitter followers. The skinny kid you knew back in college who’d get drunk at parties and insist on sitting with his feet dangling over the window ledge. The millionaire comic who complains about there being no takers for his provocative jokes. The shadow version of Gus Van Sant’s Elephant in which the high school shooters are mistreated, misunderstood boys.

Joker is all these things, and a few more. It was the Golden Lion winner at the Venice Film Festival. It’s being monitored as a potential instigator of gun violence. It’s infuriating and deeply disturbing, a sneer that’s also an animal howl of pain.

Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) is an aspiring stand-up who works as a professional clown, performing on street corners and at children’s hospitals. His shifty manner and a verbal tic – a high, cackling laugh he can’t control – have reduced his daily existence to a series of escalating humiliations. Fleck (how easily the noun attaches itself to dirt, or blood) has no friends, or prospects, or talent. He’s prone to tremendous rage and tremendous self-pity – a flammable combination even without his mental health issues and the gun a coworker casually hands him.

Arthur lives with his mother, who once worked for billionaire Thomas Wayne and still believes he’ll lift them out of their sad lives (a scene with young Bruce is all the fan service this film provides). But Wayne is more concerned with his mayoral run, which hinges on a promise to rid Gotham City (a stand-in for New Jersey) of poverty and crime. If an unhinged loner obsessed with a politician running for office sounds like another film you know, well, that’s not the only Taxi Driver reference in Joker. The Gotham of this film, set in 1981, is a hellscape resembling Scorsese’s '70s New York, all garbage and strip bars and despair. Arthur has the same inarticulate anger as Travis Bickle; both find purpose in violent action. But Travis’ violence finds a specific target, whereas Arthur is lashing out against a society that he feels deserves it.

Does the film agree with him? Joker doesn’t seem in control of this crucial detail. Director Todd Phillips would probably argue that his film is a critique of gun control in America, that it demonstrates how even the mentally ill have always been able to easily access firearms. Yet, there’s so much justification provided for Arthur’s rage that when it explodes in a shocking scene on the subway, we’re clearly meant to explode with it, to cheer the transformation of put-on clown into potent Joker. The critique sits uneasily with the catharsis, as we see again when another brutal bout of violence is alleviated by a comic ending.

Phillips is best known as the director of Old School and the Hangover trilogy. Apart from 2016's War Dogs, he’s shown little inclination towards dramatic material till now, which might be why, instead of working out his own aesthetic for this film, he simply borrows Scorsese’s. The Taxi Driver moments feel less like tributes than wholesale lifts, from Arthur’s rants about a filthy, immoral city to his fooling around, gaunt and shirtless, with a loaded gun in his home. Scorsese’s The King of Comedy casts a similarly long shadow, with Arthur obsessed, as Robert De Niro’s aspiring showbiz-hopeful was, with a talk show host. Both films have the central character admit to perpetrating a crime on live TV. And the host in Phillips’ film is played – holy metanarrative, Batman! – by De Niro.

Between the griminess of Lawrence Sher’s photography and Hildur Guðnadóttir sawing violins, Joker is impressively queasy for a studio film. Phoenix’s turn, too, is anti-beauty: greasy hair, twitchy manner, nails-on-blackboard laugh. It’ll be interesting to see if he’s canonized like Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight, his pronouncements printed on T-shirts. Ledger’s Joker had wit and invention, whereas Phoenix’s creation is so pitiable and unappealing that anyone proclaiming themselves a fan might consider asking themselves what exactly it is they’re admiring.

“I just hope my death makes more sense than my life," Arthur tells a social services employee. Later, he complains: “I don’t think you ever really hear me." You could string together a dozen of his lines and get a suicide note, or something more sinister. “For my whole life, I didn’t know if I even really existed," he says. “But I do, and people are starting to notice." This is mass-shooter language.

This review appeared in Mint.

Hustlers: Review

It makes sense that Adam McKay is a co-producer of Hustlers. Lorene Scafaria’s film could almost be a vignette from The Big Short, which had a scene where a stripper tells Steve Carell’s character about how she’s been flipping houses. McKay’s film was about a few men on Wall Street who predicted, and benefitted from, the 2008 US financial crisis. Hustlers is about a group of women, dancers in a New York strip club, whose lives are derailed by the same crisis, and who take to crime to support themselves.

When Dorothy (Constance Wu) takes up stripping, she doesn’t get anywhere initially: she’s not an especially good dancer and there’s a lot of competition to take money off the Wall Street types who come in. Her luck changes when she meets Ramona (Jennifer Lopez), who takes her under her wing, shows her how to work the pole and, more importantly, how to identify big spenders and keep them happy. Just as their lives are looking up, the economy tanks in 2008. Suddenly, most of the rich patrons are in jail or out of jobs, and Dorothy’s boyfriend has left her with their baby.

When they run into each other again, Ramona lets Dorothy in on a scheme she’s running. She and her friends find a suitably flush mark, slip a mixture of ketamine and MDMA into his drink, rendering him almost comatose, then run up huge bills at the strip club, of which they get a cut. Dorothy, despite her reservations, joins the gang.

Hustlers, which is based on a 2015 New York magazine article, has the same rude energy The Big Short did, but there’s one difference. Scafaria’s film has an unwavering emotional throughline: Ramona and Dorothy’s friendship, genuinely touching, even when it frays. The scene where they talk for the first time – right after Ramona burns up the floor dancing to Fiona Apple’s "Criminal" – is perfect in its simplicity. An awestruck Dorothy bums a light off Ramona, who’s sprawled on the roof. Noticing the younger woman doesn’t have a coat, Ramona calls her closer, and wraps her in the magnificent fur she’s wearing. It’s an apt gesture – the film is unsentimental, but Ramona has an enveloping warmth.

Ramona’s plan is so direct and uncomplicated it allows Hustlers to sidestep the winking intricacies of the Danny and Debbie Ocean films, or even those of Logan Lucky, whose characters belong to a similar economic milieu. The viewer’s attention is focused time and again on characters and performers: Lili Reinhart, Keke Palmer and Madeline Brewer as Ramona’s partners-in-crime, crowd-pleasing cameos from Cardi B and Lizzo (with flute), and the late-2000s setting driven home by the presence of Usher (as himself) and Julia Stiles (as a journalist).

Wu’s low-wattage warmth creates the space for Lopez’s barnstorming performance. Ramona is a complex creation – driven, impetuous, maternal, materialistic – and Lopez plays all the shades simultaneously. It’s an exhilarating lead turn in a breakneck movie, which – despite its crazy premise – is filled with more rage and emotion than you’d imagine. This is an unremittingly tough world, filled with abusers of various stripes, neglectful parents, callous employers, rapacious businessmen. All that’s offered in return is a bit of hopeful advice: lean on a friend.

This review appeared in Mint.

The Zoya Factor: Review

Early reviews of The Zoya Factor seem to agree that the film is either ‘breezy’ or ‘frothy’. As someone who isn’t averse to a light breeze (or a little froth), I found myself reasonably charmed by its opening half hour, in which adwoman Zoya (Sonam K Ahuja) meets up with the Indian cricket team, on tour in Sri Lanka, for a campaign. But then Zoya, upon receiving a list of instructions on how to behave with the Indian skipper, looks straight at the camera and says, “Is this Nikhil Khoda the captain or prime minister?" And the charm dissolves apace.

In scene after scene, The Zoya Factor builds to the point where a punchline is demanded. And just about every time, it comes up short. Romantic comedies live and die by their wit. If Abhishek Sharma’s film has shades of Notting Hill, it’s missing those horses and hounds. Writers Anuja Chauhan, Neha Rakesh Sharma (screenplay) and Pradhuman Singh (dialogue) try everything: daydream jokes, Baahubali jokes, post-dentist cottonmouth jokes. To use a sportsperson’s metaphor, they float like butterflies instead of stinging like bees.

The central conceit of this film (based on Chauhan’s eponymous novel) is that Zoya, born on the night of India’s first World Cup win, is a cricketer's lucky charm. All she needs to do is breakfast with players on the morning of a game, and they invariably win. Her luck rubs off sensationally on the out-of-sorts national team in Sri Lanka. Against the wishes of captain Nikhil (Dulquer Salmaan) – who’s fascinated by her but irritated by the press ascribing their wins to luck – she’s offered a position as official mascot for the duration of the upcoming World Cup.

Ahuja does well in delineating the contours of Zoya: under-confident, romantic at heart, somewhat of a goof. But the film overdoes her simple-mindedness, making her fall for a paper-thin conspiracy by Nikhil’s jealous teammate, Robin (Angad Bedi, always angry). You can see the film root about ineffectually in search of conflict. Salmaan’s easy charm actually works against the film – when it’s time for Nikhil to be angry with Zoya, there’s no edge to the antagonism.

It doesn’t help that The Zoya Factor hasn’t the slightest feel for cricket. The on-field action, even edited down to a few key movements, looks preposterous. These are national teams, but they look like club sides, which begs the question: why not set your cricket film at a less exacting level, where wildly swinging batsmen and military medium bowlers might not be so out of place? Worse, though, are the narrative contrivances that reveal the film’s fundamental misunderstanding of the sport. Would a bowler who asks his captain for song recommendations before starting an over ever play for his country again?

There’s a smarter, sharper film somewhere inside this one, with insightful things to say about fandom and celebrity and superstition. As it stands, however, The Zoya Factor offers little cheer to those invested in the return of the Hindi romantic comedy or the halfway-decent post-Lagaan cricket film.

This review appeared in Mint. 

Twentieth century women: 'Delayed Rays of a Star'

Amanda Lee Koe’s novel takes its title from a line in a Roland Barthes essay, in which he describes the radiation from a photograph touching the viewer “like the delayed rays of a star". In this case, the light emanating is from a publicity still of Leni Riefenstahl, Anna May Wong and Marlene Dietrich, taken by Alfred Eisenstaedt in 1928 in Berlin. Koe follows this diffused beam across time, expertly using it to illuminate little corners of the 20th century.

Though the two Germans would soon eclipse her fame, Wong was the biggest star in the photograph, having played Tiger Lily in Peter Pan and starred opposite Douglas Fairbanks in The Thief of Bagdad. Riefenstahl was then an actor, known for her nature films; she would soon catch the eye of Hitler and turn to film direction. And Dietrich wasn’t a star at all, still two years away from Josef von Sternberg unleashing her distinct brand of smoky sexuality in The Blue Angel.

With the photograph as a jumping-off point, Koe proceeds to make dizzying leaps across time and space. After starting in Berlin, we’re suddenly in Paris, with Dietrich as a cantankerous, elderly recluse; next we’re in China, following the journey of her maid, Bébé. In one stunning chapter, we follow a wolf from a forest in Czechoslovakia to the Leipzig zoo to the sets of a film Riefenstahl is shooting in the Bavarian Alps. Sternberg is moved to tears by a noh performance in a Tokyo monastery. A Smiths fan attends a Joy Division gig in London and serves David Bowie drinks in a Paris bar.

Despite its expansive canvas, Delayed Rays trips lightly and confidently from incident to incident, character to character. Much of what happens in the book is anchored in fact, but the embellishments are Koe’s. A meeting between Wong and German critic Walter Benjamin is imagined over the space of a chapter. As I ran into one obtuse word after another, I realized with delight that Koe’s prose had taken on the qualities of Benjamin’s fussy language (“he found himself unwilling to verbalize to her how the extemporaneous interpolation of various spheres of her being…"). Later, a winding sentence describing Sternberg’s travels in Asia has the same exotic detailing as the director’s films.

In a 2017 interview, Koe said that shuttling between her native Singapore and New York felt like “a split existence". “I guess when you’re away you always see the other thing more clearly. So it is interesting to have that dual perspective as well." Whether by design or not, Delayed Rays abounds in dualities. Dietrich—German but also American; lover of men and women—is described by Sternberg (himself suspended between American and faux-Continental) as having a “lust for bothness". Wong is American, but in the eyes of Hollywood she’s Chinese, forced to adopt Oriental clichés. Riefenstahl’s biggest supporter is Hitler and her funder the Nazi government, but she thinks of herself as an apolitical artist, pure (hearing this last descriptor from Hitler’s mouth is chilling).

Though Delayed Rays is mostly concerned with fame in the first half of the 20th century, several of the issues it grapples with are bracingly modern. Riefenstahl practically begs us to separate the art from the artist, to call her a genius for Olympia (completely deserved) but gloss over Triumph of the Will’s deification of Hitler. She also corrects a reporter who calls her the first female film-maker, saying she’s just a film-maker. Then there’s the matter of representative casting in Hollywood. More than half a century before Scarlett Johansson became a meme, the part of O-Lan in the adaptation of Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth went to a white woman. Wong, for whom the part seems tailor-made, is deemed “too Chinese to play a Chinese" by the studio.

Koe writes beautifully about cinema and its effects. If you haven’t seen Shanghai Express, I would recommend watching two isolated scenes from the film, both of which are on YouTube. The first is a comic one, with Dietrich putting down a supercilious woman, and Wong joining in with the punchline. The second is even more thrilling, an action scene with an erotic charge. Koe imagines how these must have unfolded on set, with the autocratic Sternberg (Dietrich’s lover) and the two stars, also lovers once (in the book at least). Elsewhere, Sternberg tells Riefenstahl that cinema is “time on the axis of sight", a description so perfect that it sounds like it came from the real Sternberg, though it’s probably Koe writing in Sternberg’s voice.

When Riefenstahl is called by Hitler for a final meeting, he asks her for a favour. She’s surprised to learn that even with defeat imminent, he’s concerned about the unreliability of film stock and would like her to work on a more durable material after the war. That Koe finds a way to make Hitler a film preservationist is the sort of unexpected delight this book regularly passes on from writer to reader. Style never hesitates, we’re told at one point. Style necessitates. Koe finds her style from the start, and never looks back.

This review appeared in Mint Lounge.