Panga: Review

For such an unhurried film, Panga has a bracingly violent start. All of Bhopal is sleeping, except for Prashant (Jassie Gill), who’s getting kicked by his wife, Jaya (Kangana Ranaut), in bed. These aren’t light kicks either. Ranaut isn’t an actor given to half-measures and I’d wager Gill left the set that day with more than a few bruises. Not only are the kicks satisfyingly hard, they have a certain rhythm and coil to them. They’re athlete kicks.

It’s a nice detail, because Jaya is an athlete, or at least was one. A national-level kabaddi player, she quit the sport to take care of her son, born prematurely and with low immunity. She never returned to kabaddi, working instead at a railway ticket counter and investing all her energy in her precocious school-going child and loving husband. She feels a pang now and then, but tells herself that neither her umar (age – she’s 32) nor kamar (waistline) would allow a return to the game.

In Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari’s first film, 2016's Nil Battey Sannata, a working mother joins her daughter’s school so she can first learn and then tutor her in math. Panga, too, has a mother risking embarrassment for her child: once the boy learns that Jaya left kabaddi for him, he badgers his father to persuade her to make a comeback. In a montage scored with an Annu Kapoor comic number, Jaya starts training again, with the intention of giving up in a month. But when the time comes, she can’t. She left kabaddi, but kabaddi never left her.

It’s barely a surprise when the super-supportive Prashant – an endearing, if slightly wishful, creation – insists she try and make her way back to the national team. Tiwari and co-writer Nikhil Mehrohtra carefully unpeel the various levels of social indoctrination that someone like Jaya must overcome before they can follow their dreams, not only practical problems (Prashant is inept around the house) but her own guilt at what in her mind amounts to abandoning her child.

For a sports film, this is a timely idea to be grappling with (Sultan, in 2016, also dealt with it). There are more prominent Indian women athletes today than perhaps ever before, and some like Mary Kom and Sania Mirza have returned to their sports after becoming parents. But in a more general sense, the film is an empathetic look at the social cost of continuing with one’s life after marriage and children. That Jaya should consider herself lucky – that she actually is lucky, as she’s told by several women – to get to do the thing she’s good at, is one of the more poignant reiterations of this film.

Nitesh Tiwari is credited with additional dialogue and screenplay, and there’s a hint of Dangal’s unnecessary villain in the figure of national team captain, who for no reason keeps slighting Jaya. I can see why the film tries to introduce a late-stage antagonist, though; Panga is easy-going to a fault. It’s not often one gets to say this about a Hindi film, but there are moments when it could really use some drama. The kabaddi isn’t badly executed but because the film takes its time building to Jaya’s comeback, the final championship is both rushed and predictable.

After a series of high-strung, if often brilliant, performances in Rangoon, Simran, Manikarnika and Judgmentall Hai Kya, it’s a relief to see Ranaut play in a more down-to-earth style. Jaya is more comfortable in her skin than Rani Mehra, but Queen does come to mind: it’s the same homemade-sweater-wearing, chaat-eating, cautiously progressive middle-class milieu. Gill does little but look lost and smile broadly – a surprisingly winsome strategy. Richa Chadha, in a very Richa Chadha role as an outspoken coach and friend of Jaya’s, is supremely relaxed. She even gets to do a little shout-out to her own line from Gangs of Wasseypur: “Ghoor kaahe rahe ho?" The best adaptation of a famous line, though, is by a character who’s there in just one scene, the doctor who tells Jaya, “Ab goli kha".

This review appeared in Mint.

1917: Review

A couple of days ago, Rian Johnson tweeted that Sam Mendes told him how, when they were shooting 1917, if anyone made a mistake they’d go right back to the beginning. The second part of the tweet made it clear Johnson was having a little fun: “They paid Cumberbatch to show up every day and wait in that room… He was there 6 months." Still, there’s something about this that cuts to the heart of the discourse surrounding 1917 and our tendency to appreciate certain films not for how they turn out but for how they were made.

Sam Mendes’ World War I film is designed to seem like it’s a single continuous shot. There’s one obvious cut, when the screen goes black and a few hours pass in seconds; there are probably several more ‘invisible’ joins. But it shouldn’t matter if the film is one shot, or two, or a dozen. The question, rather, might be: What are the artistic dividends offered up by telling this particular story in a continuous-seeming shot? Johnson’s vision of the crew restarting if someone made a mistake may not have been true for 1917, but Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2002) and Sebastian Schipper’s Victoria (2015) were actually shot this way. Both, to my mind, are superior to 1917, not because they are ‘purer’ but because both transfer more successfully the exhilaration of the long take into their breathless narratives.

The film begins with lance corporals Tom Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Will Schofield (George MacKay) slumbering in a field in France. They’re woken and told to report to General Erinmore (Colin Firth), who orders them to hand-deliver a letter to a battalion not far away, about to launch an attack on German forces who they think are on the run but have actually made a tactical retreat and are lying in wait for the British. The attack will result in the loss of 1600 men, one of whom is Tom’s brother. It’s practically a suicide mission, but Tom and Will have no choice but to set off, across fields strewn with bodies and the detritus of battle.

1917 is a remarkable technical achievement. A continuous shot is a challenge to map out and execute even when it’s a couple of characters in a closed space. To do so with the backdrop of war, with a hundred moving parts at any given moment, is an almost imaginable level of difficulty (Birdman, with fewer pieces to move around, took its stitched-up long takes to a Best Picture Oscar in 2015). Nevertheless, a viewer shouldn’t have to laud a film because it was an obstacle course for its makers. Beyond the difficulty of achieving the impression of a single shot, 1917’s accomplishments seem slight.

Imagine 1917 as a traditionally cut film and its flaws become easier to spot. The writing, by Mendes and Krysty Wilson-Cairns, is strictly functional: a century of distance from WWI should be enough to come up something more lucid than “There is only one way this war ends. Last man standing." Placing interesting speech in the mouths of characters who aren’t well-spoken or are pressed for time isn’t too much to ask for – but the film’s betting everything on its near-constant movement.

It’s almost as if the novelty of technique pushed the makers to seek tradition in other places. The British are brave and stoic, the one French character is helpless and grateful, there’s even a virtuous Sikh soldier, but the German character repays kindness with desperate violence, as if it’s in their blood. There’s a war-film-by-numbers feel to some of the scenes, like when Will stumbles upon the French girl and the baby she’s taking care of. He sings a lullaby, gives them his food; she theatrically says “Don’t go" when he’s leaving. The sequence after that – a dazzling night-time run through the ruins of a bombed-out building – obliterates the memory of the scene; it was only later that I realized its awkwardness reminded me of the Peanuts strip where Snoopy, in his flying ace avatar, is offered shelter and soup by a French girl.

In an interview to Vox, Mendes said the film wasn’t designed to draw attention to itself. “I don’t really want people to think about the camera. If you’re aware of it for the first 10 minutes, then hopefully thereafter you forget about it, and you just watch the story." I can’t speak for anyone else but I often found my thoughts straying to Roger Deakins' camera and the planning that was making its spectacular runs possible. Cinema is never closer to a feat of engineering than when a long take is unfolding. But engineering is not art, and it is entirely possible to be awestruck by one while lamenting the absence of the other.

This review appeared in Mint.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood: Review

Like most Indian viewers of A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, I didn’t grow up with Mister Rogers. I did, however, grow up with Tom Hanks. Woven into my childhood and adolescence are memories of watching, for the first time, in some haphazard order, Splash, Toy Story, Apollo 13, Philadelphia, Forrest Gump, That Thing You Do, Sleepless in Seattle and Saving Private Ryan. And so, in the absence of any deep association to Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, it was Hanks’ craft and innate decency I responded to as I watched Marielle Heller’s film.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood has a simple, slightly self-defeating, foundation: it begins with the assumption that Fred Rogers was a saint. A cynical journalist, Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys) is asked to profile him, and decides to turn up something that will puncture the beloved children's show host's image (Vogel is based on real-life journalist Tom Junod, who profiled Rogers for Esquire in 1998). Vogel is the only person in the film who doesn’t venerate Rogers, but the host seems intrigued by him and his troubled relationship with his alcoholic father. In his gentle, persistent way, he hammers away at the writer’s defenses. Vogel’s ostensibly the master interviewer, but it’s Rogers who seems to unlock his psyche every time they meet.

An American institution himself, Hanks has been playing other American institutions of late. His Walt Disney in Saving Mr Banks was unmemorable; his riff on newspaper editor Ben Bradlee, in The Post, tart and bracing. Hanks has been compared to Jimmy Stewart for most of his career but in A Beautiful Day, with his side-parted hair and sweater, he actually looks like the old Hollywood star. In one scene, he does a voice that sounds an awful lot like Stewart. And he opens one sentence with “I… I… I… I… I" – the heart of any Stewart impersonation.

Hanks stretches his already relaxed speech rhythms to match the TV host’s, but doesn’t strain to transform himself further. This would be a benign turn if it wasn’t for the actor’s watchfulness, the sense he gives that Rogers is peering into the soul of whoever he’s speaking to. Heller perhaps pushes the idea too far by employing frequent closeups of Hanks and the stricken-looking Rhys, the saddest face on TV in six seasons of The Americans. But the way Hanks uses little more than perfectly timed pauses to suggest the intelligence and determination beneath Rogers’ avuncular persona is nothing short of masterful.

Vogel’s unhappiness is straight out of the Hollywood playbook: he resents his father (a blustery Chris Cooper), a drunk who abandoned his late mother, and who’s now dying. The film’s suggestion that deep-seated emotional scars can be unlocked and cured with puppets and kind words feels disingenuous – and very Oscar season. Heller’s use of stop-motion to make actual events look like Rogers’ show’s set is whimsically pleasing, but doesn’t cohere into an idea. There are, however, small moments of warmth: musicians surprising Rogers with a pizzicato version of one of his songs; Hanks struggling with a tent in a brilliant bit of physical comedy; a train compartment spontaneously breaking out into “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?"

Nothing in Heller’s film is as moving as the adults who see Rogers and are transformed, for an instant, into children taking instruction. The man himself ends the film as he began it: known to everyone and yet unknowable. The last scene is Rogers at the piano, playing as the set is dismantled. He stabs the lower keys – his way of releasing difficult feelings – before returning to the melody he was playing. The film spends all its time exploring the darkness in Vogel, but the real challenge might have been to show the occasional violent pounding, however fleeting, in Rogers.

This review appeared in Mint.

Dream a brittle dream: Binnu Ka Sapna

There has been an explosion of short film-making in India over the last couple of years. Some of it has been of high quality, aided by superior production values and committed performances. Yet, there’s a nagging feeling that most directors are angling, through these shorts, to prove what a competent job they would do with feature-length films (some have successfully made the leap). The tradition of using the short film as a sketch pad for radical ideas and techniques has not been in evidence.

Kanu Behl’s Binnu Ka Sapna, streaming on Mubi till 21 January, flies in the face of the safe, accomplished Hindi short. It perhaps helps that Behl doesn’t have to break into features; he has already made the superb full-length Titli, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2014. Binnu has similarities with Titli—at the centre of both is a young man trying to negotiate an oppressive familial environment. Both have a grimy look and scuzzy soundscape: I remember the feeling of wanting to wash Titli off me when I first saw it. But you can see Behl pushing the form in Binnu, seeing what works and filing the results away for his unmade features.
.
The first words we hear in the film are Binnu (Chetan Sharma), in a voice-over, telling us of his father’s temper. “Laplapa jaate the (he would be livid)," “Tattad-bhatad karte the (he would break things)"—innocuous-sounding words that hide, as we soon discover, a legacy of pain. Binnu has grown up hearing about the time his father slapped his mother for emerging, laughing, from a room at the same time as her brother-in-law. We see this curdled idea of masculinity passed on from father to son, as Binnu replicates the patterns of jealousy, inadequacy and violence in his own relationships.

It’s a simple idea, made provocative through form. There’s barely any dialogue in the film. Sneha Khanwalkar’s music (eclectic as always, with the highlight a beautiful moody ghazal) is woven into the nightmare sound design—the industrial buzzing that grows before the fateful slap recurs through the film. Binnu’s voice-over is affectless, even though his mental state is roiling. He’s like the frustrated Indian male in microcosm: unable to speak to his crush in college, unwilling to accept the frank interest of a woman later on, paranoid about what his girlfriend is wearing and whom she’s talking to.

The latent violence of the protagonist is reinforced by the film’s varied aesthetic assaults on the viewing experience. The aspect ratio is 1:1, an unusual square format which seems to box the characters in. Even more jarringly, some scenes—like the one in which a Facebook page fills the screen—give the impression of the image being violently cropped. From time to time, the frame freezes without warning. The slap is repeated thrice in quick succession, each time with a little pause. These can be seen as Behl’s efforts to unsettle, to jerk the audience out of its comfort zone to better appreciate the discomfort his characters are in.

“A short, at its best, can be like a haiku," Behl told La Brasserie Du Court, the blog of the International Short Film Festival, in February, adding a little haiku of his own: “It holds order, and within the order juxtaposition, and further within it is chaos." If you extend this to Titli, it could be an apt description of Behl’s cinematic style: tightly constructed, emotionally unruly, an ordered chaos.

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.

Tanhaji: The Unsung Warrior: Review

The flipside of all the racial stereotyping in recent Hindi historical films is that the antagonists are turning out more interesting than the heroes. Without Alauddin Khilji’s perversity and parrot noises, Padmaavat would have been 160 minutes of Rajputs telling each other how great they are. And Panipat would have been hollower without Sanjay Dutt’s attempts to wrest some dignity for Ahmad Shah Abdali from the film's savage conception of his character.

Udaybhan Rathod, a Rajput general in Aurangzeb’s army, is only Mughal by allegiance. This is enough, though, for him to be saddled with what Hindi cinema would have you believe are Mughal characteristics: rapaciousness, cruelty, sadism. The only problem is, the more outrageous his villainy, the more enjoyable Udaybhan becomes. The film needs this gleeful villain, played to the hilt by Saif Ali Khan, much more than it does Ajay Devgn’s dull, dutiful protagonist. Who would you rather watch: the guy singing devotional songs and keeping promises to his father and wife or the one tossing soldiers off ramparts and grilling crocodiles over a fire?

In the late 17th century, Mughal emperor Aurangzeb is trying to make inroads into south India. He sends Udaybhan to assume charge of the strategically important fort of Kondhana, which the Marathas had had to give up. In response, Maratha ruler Shivaji sends the general Tanhaji to recapture it (there’s a bizarre scene where Devgn dresses up as a priest in order to convince his king to allow him to go and fight). The ensuing battle is a storied one in Maratha history – though the film leaves out one particularly crazy story: that the formidable walls of the fort were scaled with the help of a rope attached to a monitor lizard.

Unlike the recent Panipat, which took pains to lay out its historical context, there isn’t much political or social knowledge to be gleaned here. Everything’s rendered in broad strokes, and Raut and co-writer Prakash Kapadia don’t mind repeating things for the inattentive viewer. One bit of crosscutting results in this sparkling exchange. Udaybhan: “We’ll travel via Shirdhon." Tanhaji to Shivaji: “Shirdhon. Shirdhon. He’ll go from Shirdhon. Shirdhon."

Still, with its Prince of Persia physics and Amar Chitra Katha aesthetics, Tanhaji is surprisingly enjoyable. Raut is a fluent director of action, transforming ideas that must have seemed bizarre on paper into persuasively choreographed sequences (credit, also, to cinematographer Keiko Nakahara). The bees-and-bungee attack early on is as freakishly inventive as anything since Baahubali. If Hindi cinema is to keep churning out violent historicals, the least they can do is get the fighting right. Tanhaji, which has the same feel for bodies in violent motion as Padmaavat did for sari drapes, represents one kind of way forward.

The film is never far from silliness, but there’s often a reason attached. Tanhaji, on a recce mission, leads a celebration at Kondhana and a delighted Udaybhan mimics his moves. He’s captured, of course, but the point isn't sensible tactics; it’s a nod to the Hindi cinema tradition of the climactic dance. When an elephant trunk is sliced off, it’s a reminder of the scene at the start where a human hand is cut off, and a premonition of a later dismemberment. The one flashback in the film is used productively, giving us a look at a more human Udaybhan.

The mention of Brahmin janeu by Tanhaji’s wife, Savitribai (Kajol), in the trailer has been replaced by a line that isn’t caste-specific. But Muslim rulers and their collaborators, from the 12th century to the 18th, continue to be fair game. Aurangzeb and another king play a game of human chess ending in actual casualties. Udaybhan may be Rajput but he dresses like a Mughal. He eats meat off the bone, an insidious differentiator used in just about every recent Hindi historical. He captures a Hindu princess and places her in chains. He steps on a carpet that has a map of India on it. Traitor. Anti-national. If only he wasn’t so much fun.

This review appeared in Mint. 

Chhapaak: Review

In Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy’s Oscar-winning 2012 documentary short, Saving Face, a Pakistani acid attack survivor returns to the room where her life was destroyed. She indicates the door that her husband locked shut as she writhed in pain. “Whenever I’m here I remember the day I was burnt," she says. Obaid-Chinoy then cuts to the husband, grinning uncertainly, saying he never threw acid but that she spilled oil on herself.

Meghna Gulzar’s Chhapaak also returns to the scene of the crime, and because it’s a feature film, we also see the gruesome act and its aftermath. Yet, there's nothing in it quite as disturbing as the smiling man in Saving Face. The film is an earnest and urgent look at the horror that is acid violence. The issue looms over the film, which does well by the subject without transcending it.

Chhapaak begins in 2012, seven years after acid is thrown on Malti (Deepika Padukone) by a jealous acquaintance named Babbu. A journalist covering another attack – the Delhi rape that sparked protests across the country – finds out about her and, after a cursory interview, puts her in touch with a grumpy activist, Amol (Vikrant Massey), who works with acid attack survivors. Malti is in and out of court, fighting the case against Babbu and filing a PIL to see the open sale of acid banned. After seven reconstructive surgeries – possible only because her father’s employer pays for them – her face is less scarred than most of the other volunteers at Amol’s organization, something the film alludes to quietly in one scene.

Gulzar’s last two films, the true-crime story Talvar and spy thriller Raazi, operated in a fascinating grey zone. Chhapaak is more black-and-white in its moral landscape, but you can feel the pull of the thriller grip Gulzar for a spell, as the film turns the arrest of Babbu into a taut 20 minutes (there’s smart use of what seems like the usual police insensitivity as a red herring). The rest of the film doesn’t have the same urgency, but it’s still populated by recognizable Gulzar character types: Irrfan Khan’s dry, determined striver from Talvar paralleled by Malti’s lawyer (the excellent Madhurjeet Sarghi), Jaideep Ahlawat’s brusque mentor from Raazi replaced by Amol. Amol is such a killjoy that he inspires the film’s best line, when Malti tells him: “You act as if acid has been thrown on you. But it’s been thrown on me. And I want to party."

Screenwriters Gulzar and Atika Chohan juggle the chronology of Malti’s story (based on the real-life case of Laxmi Agarwal): we first see her years after the attack, then enduring its aftermath, and then through her many years of legal struggle. But we’re only shown the pre-attack Malti towards the end of the film. I can see why they'd do this: the audience till now has been denied the Deepika they know, because to start the film with the character unscarred would be to place in the viewer's mind the idea of Padukone playing Malti. Yet, beyond a smart callback to Kal Ho Na Ho, the film doesn't earn this extended flashback. There's nothing from these scenes that adds to the Malti or Babbu we already know. Considering we've already seen the attack play out earlier, this passage comes close to an attempt to milk sympathy.

There are some sharp ideas in Chhapaak. Malti’s lawyer telling her to be ready for a long fight is followed by a cut to the lawyer’s daughter, several years older than when we last saw her. Other battles come and go on the edges on the narrative: women’s safety in general, the apathy of the state, the ease with which eggs can be banned but acid can’t. Padukone's quiet portrayal of Malti’s determination is moving, but I missed the poetic flourishes of Talvar and Raazi, and the little cameos that enlivened those films. Though Malati’s surgeon, her parents and brother, and her former boyfriend are each given the contours of a character, none register vividly. Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy’s music leans on the viewer in a way the film doesn’t – the harsh title track doesn’t warrant being played four or five times.

Chhapaak opens with the sound of a crowd chanting “We want justice". A few minutes in, young protesters are being lathi-charged by the cops, something we’ve seen a lot of in the last month. A few days ago, Padukone stood quietly with the students of Jawaharlal Nehru University who'd been attacked by masked goons, an unexpected – and seemingly unpremeditated – act of solidarity. The film is careful to keep its central character in focus and its star and producer under wraps, but it’s impossible not to think of Padukone in the moment when Malti is asked “ladna hai?" – up for a fight?

This review appeared in Mint.

Cats: Review

My only prior association with Cats was committing to memory TS Eliot’s “Macavity: The Mystery Cat" and “Skimbleshanks: The Railway Cat", both of which were in our junior school syllabus. But I hadn’t seen or heard Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical in any form – until this morning, when I, along with a young couple (who bailed at halftime) and an older Caucasian woman (who walked in half an hour late), watched Tom Hooper’s film adaptation. If you’re in the UK or the US and are finding Cats too weird for words, imagine what it must look like in countries that have an entirely different culture of stage musicals and for whom “Memory" is a Maroon 5 song.

Just because it’s on the big screen, does that mean it’s cinema? I don’t think I’ve seen another commercially intended movie which sticks to its stage origins so determinedly. Even the Hollywood musicals of the 1930s and ‘40s – made at a time when musical theatre was popular culture – would throw in some backstage banter and a romantic track between numbers. But Cats only has songs, with nothing to glue them together. I emerged with the uncomfortable sensation of having watched a 100-minute music video.

That’s not the only reason for discomfort. The idea seems to have been: Cats, but sexy. The problem is that Hooper is a deeply unsexy director, whose last three films, The King’s Speech, Les Misérables and The Danish Girl, have anti-aphrodisiac properties matched only by the films of Christopher Nolan. Rebel Wilson’s Jennyanydots lying on her back, scratching her thighs, unzipping her cat costume to reveal another cat costume beneath, is scarring (though think what John Waters would have made of it). For all the preening and sashaying, there’s little actual heat. With the exception of Steven McRae’s Skimbleshanks, who looks like he’s stepped out of a Kenneth Anger film, this might be the most heterosexual musical ever filmed.

Spare a thought for the cast, who are not only asked to perform show tunes in body-hugging costumes, but are seemingly left to their own devices by Hooper. There’s no apparent consensus on whether they’re supposed to be exhibiting human or feline behavior – so they do a bit of both (unless they’re Ian McKellen and Judi Dench, in which case they can’t be bothered). They have tails but no claws. They have fur all over, except on their hands, which are human hands. Some of them wear clothes, some don’t; some make cat sounds, some don’t; there are no rules.

After a point, the film gives up the ghost of cinema, moves indoors and becomes a filmed stage musical. There’s a dance-off which somehow made me think of Gaspar Noe’s Climax, another musical made in defiance, maybe even contempt, of its audience. But that film had exceptional dancing and a filthy, unflagging energy. Cats has nothing to show for 100 million dollars except a dedication to making the worst possible aesthetic decisions at every step. Then again, another musical did the same thing not long ago. It was called Bohemian Rhapsody and it made 900 million dollars.

This review appeared in Mint.