Cocktail: Review

Dir: Homi Adajania. Cast: Saif Ali Khan, Deepika Padukone, Diana Penty, Boman Irani, Dimple Kapadia.

Cocktail dangles before its audience the prospect of seeing three leads in a living arrangement that’s best described by a phrase that begins with “ménage” and ends with “trois”. It’s never happened before, but if it had to, it would probably be in the year with the film about the sperm donor, and the other one with the catchphrase “keh ke loonga”. One might reasonably expect, in this bold new age of Hindi cinema, a man and two women to live under the same roof, and share and share alike.

Cocktail certainly starts mixing it up quickly. Gautam (Saif Ali Khan) hits on Meera (Diana Penty) at the London airport, unaware that she’s married. A few minutes later, she isn’t – her new husband Kunal (Randeep Hooda) leaves her to fend for herself, citing plot exigencies. She goes to the restroom for a good cry, where she meets Veronica (Deepika Padukone), who invites her to stay in her flat. This is accomplished in roughly ten minutes. It takes another ten for the two women to spot Gautam, play a prank on him, bump into him again at a party (apparently Indians in London keep crossing paths), and for Veronica and Gautam to hook up. Gautam ends up moving in with them, and though Meera hates his guts, one can’t help feeling that a home-grown Jules and Jim might be on the cards.

A predictable surprise visit  by Gautam’s mother (Dimple Kapadia) has him lying about his plans to marry Meera. Surprisingly, Meera goes along with this charade; Veronica, amused by their predicament, has no problems either. The quartet, plus Gautam’s sympathetic uncle (Boman Irani), repair to Cape Town, where things get nicely out of hand when Gautam and Meera fall for each other. This is the point at which the film needed to decide whether it would take the road hinted at, or the road well-travelled. Disappointingly, it opts for the latter. Veronica is informed that she’s the third wheel now – she’s fine with that, but only until she breaks down in a club in the next scene. Meera, upset for having come between them, leaves Gautam, Veronica and the flat, and disappears. The rest is contrivance, tears, a diluted version of the mesmeric Coke Studio Pakistan track “Jugni”, and a trip back home.

Those who remember Adajania’s first film, 2006’s Being Cyrus, will be struck by how different Cocktail is. Cyrus was dank, claustrophobic, cynical; Cocktail, for a while at least, is sunny and sensuous. Khan plays yet another wisecracking, shallow, essentially harmless flirt, but no one can sell a bad joke like he can. Padukone looks supremely relaxed in the first half as the straight-shooting, pants-shunning Veronica, while debutante Penty manages to keep Meera from becoming a sacrificing bore. Adajania and veteran editor Sreekar Prasad, working from a screenplay by Imtiaz Ali and Sajid Ali, keep things zipping along, even though after a point they don’t go anywhere we haven’t been before.

A version of this review appeared in Time Out Delhi.

Teri Meri Kahaani: Review

Shahid Kapoor’s last film, Mausam, mapped the trajectory of a relationship by catching up with the lead pair at different points in their life. Teri Meri Kahaani has similar time-hopping tendencies, but one couple obviously wasn’t challenging enough for its makers. So you get Kapoor and his Kaminey co-star Priyanka Chopra playing different characters in three separate stories; the first set in 1960s Bombay, the second in present-day England, and the third in Lahore in 1910. Structurally and thematically, Teri Meri Kahaani recalls Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 2005 film Three Times, which featured Chang Chen and Shu Qi in stories set in the 1910s, 1960s and 2000s.

Of course, three stories is just a smokescreen for the fact that writer-director Kunal Kohli and co-writer Robin Bhatt have no one story that’s worth telling. The specific details of each plotline hardly matter, since this is all that really happens: Kapoor and Chopra meet, begin to like each other (cue song), whereupon a silly plot contrivance pops up to derail their love. We’re never sure whether the two are playing variations on the same characters, though the cross-cutting between plots towards the end seems to suggest so. In place of anything that might explain why we’re being told the same story thrice, Teri Meri Kahaani  gives us a kurta-clad lead spouting bad poetry (shades of Aamir Khan’s character in Kohli’s Fanaa), the freedom struggle as a slapstick sideshow, and a largely white crowd responding enthusiastically to a speech that’s half-Hindi. The two leads try and act their way out of a few scenes, but it’s a losing battle. Only Prachi Desai ends up deriving some mileage from her cameo as an impossibly forward ’60s girl.

This review appeared in Time Out Delhi.

The Whistleblower: DVD review

Larysa Kondracki’s film is, as one might expect from its title, based on a true story. Kathryn Bolkovac was a United Nation police officer with defence firm DynCorp in war-torn Bosnia. She stumbled upon a slavery ring operating there, with members of her own corporation involved and UN officials turning a blind eye. When she sent a dossier to her employers, she was first transferred from the case, and then fired.

In the film, Bolkovac is played by Rachel Weisz, who’d turned down the role once, but then agreed when she found out no one was willing to make the movie. This isn’t surprising: the horrors Bolkovac witnesses and betrayals she faces make for unrelentingly gloomy viewing. Two senior UN officials (Vanessa Redgrave and David Strathairn) offer small amounts of assistance, but for the most part, this is a lone-woman-against-the-system saga. That The Whistleblower pulls no punches, especially when dealing a topic that often gets swept under the carpet, is commendable. However, the film is hampered by the grim claustrophobia of its own subject matter. In the end, the issues loom larger than the characters, who are – with the exception of Bolkovac herself – very one-sided. The DVD comes with no special features.

This review appeared in Time Out Delhi.

Beginners: DVD Review

Plot summaries you don’t hear everyday: Mom’s death causes dad to come out of the closet to son at age 75. Yet, this is exactly what happened to director Mike Mills, who turned the incident into a film about love, loss and commitment. Beginners released last year, and won Christopher Plummer a Supporting Actor Oscar. Plummer plays Hal, an octogenarian who, having lived a lie for most of his life, decides that he doesn’t “want to just be theoretically gay”.

Beginners opens with Hal’s death, and then switches back and forth in time. We see his son Oliver as a child, then as an adult dealing with his father’s homosexuality, and, post Hal’s death, as a commitment-phobe trying to maintain a relationship with French actress Anna (played by French actress Melanie Laurent). Ewan McGregor plays graphic artist Oliver, a character modeled on Mills (down to his love for dogs, the brief making-of feature confirms), who’s designed album sleeves for Sonic Youth, Air and Beastie Boys.

The psychology of Beginners is a bit pat – it transpires that Oliver can’t maintain long-term relationships as a result of his parents’ strained marriage. But the film piles detail upon winsome detail until it becomes very difficult not to like. Some are Sundance-ready crowd-pleasers, like the Jack Russell with subtitled thoughts. Some are plain and simple good taste – any film that uses Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust” is fine with us. And though the predominant mood is one of gentle melancholia, Beginners isn’t above a little fun. Most of this comes via Hal’s belated attempts to live a fully gay life before he dies of cancer, though Mills also takes a dig at himself when he has Oliver turn up as Freud at a costume party. The three leads (four, if you count Cosmo the dog) do a fine job, especially Plummer, whose flowering in character parts over the past decade is proof that it’s possible, if one tries, to escape the shadow of Captain von Trapp. 

A version of this review appeared in Time Out Delhi.

Kick-Ass: DVD Review

Kick-Ass was an important step in the evolution of the geek wish fulfillment fantasy industry. What this film said to comic book fans, the driving force behind the superhero movie industry, was: “You own us anyway, so why don’t we give you a starring role.” Thus, you get nerdy, nondescript Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) putting on a silly green costume and heading out to fight crime as self-titled superhero Kick-Ass. After a video of him barely fending off some thugs goes viral, he becomes famous. Soon, for reasons that barely register, the mob is gunning for him.


When this movie, directed by Matthew Vaughn and based on Mark Millar’s comic of the same name, released in 2010, it caused a stir because of its un-PG-13 tendencies. Until then, even darker comic book movies had kept a lid on cussing and violence. Kick-Ass ripped that convention apart by giving its youngest character, a more capable superhero called Hit Girl (Chloë Grace Moretz), a foul mouth and a capacity for creative bloodshed last seen in Uma Thurman’s Bride from Kill Bill. The scene where Hit Girl takes out a mini army in a hallway, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts’ “Bad Reputation” playing in the background, was as guilty a pleasure as Hollywood provided that year.


Kick-Ass is best digested as a nasty-minded, kinetic piece of entertainment (Vaughn’s past work has been in the same vein; he directed the gangster flick Layer Cake, and was producer on Snatch). Yet, there’s something not quite right about a film which celebrates average school-going geeks as superheroes and yet excludes a majority of them from its audience (the film was released with an R-rating). Vaughn’s next directing job was X-Men: First Class, an entertaining summer flick, sure, but as conventional as they come. So much for rattling the cage. 


This review appeared in Time Out Delhi.

The Shins - Port of Morrow

For a while, The Shins were the indiest of the indie. Pitchforked, quite literally, into the limelight, they released three albums that melded the nervy lyrics of frontman James Mercer to sublime lo-fi pop. However, when Mercer fired keyboardist Marty Crandall and drummer Jesse Sandoval in 2008, it left him the only original member of the band, and forced fans to come to terms with the fact that the Shins was now effectively The James Mercer Project. Port of Morrow is therefore likely to be judged not only on its own merits, but also in terms of its adherence to or departure from the Shins sound.

For this album, Mercer’s called upon some of his old bandmates, members of his current touring outfit and a few hired killers. One of the guests is former Sleater-Kinney drummer Janet Weiss, whose backbeat lends “The Rifle’s Spiral” and “Simple Song” a solidity that wasn’t there on the band’s previous albums. Shins followers might point to this and other evidences of a tightened pop structure (especially on the ballady “It’s Only Life”) and moan that Mercer’s been listening to too much American Idol. It’s true that Port of Morrow mirrors indie’s steady drift towards the mainstream. But there’s enough of the old Mercer in here as well. His falsetto on the Portishead-like title track makes for a refreshingly weird closer. And in the shimmering “Bait and Switch”, he sings “High from my psychic derailer/ Drive this car to the sea/ Spend the night as high as a cannon, a towering hemlock.” Can’t see Michael Bublé covering that. 


This review was brought to you by Time Out Delhi, home to the worst coffee in the capital. 

Mirch Masala: Not so hot

Mirch Masala has been called an ‘important film’ and a ‘classic’, but I doubt its supporters would be able to explain why without throwing an anthropology textbook at the reader. I can just visualise a review of the film that talks about subaltern tradition and the reformist movement and the idea of woman as avenging goddess. The truth, however, is that there’s less here than meets the eye.

The film is a strange blend of two disparate genres – the social reformist drama and the Western. The first is in plain sight from the start, as unsubtle attempts are made to tackle several ‘big’ themes: women’s empowerment, rural education, caste and class consciousness. The second emerges gradually; you can see it in the film’s borrowing of that stock Western situation – the posse holed up awaiting the enemy’s attack – as well as in the way a lot of the action is staged. There’s also a definite Morricone twang to the music in the second half, which actually goes quite well with the traditional Rajasthani music on the rest of the soundtrack.

It all starts when a subedar (tax collector) played by Naseeruddin Shah lays eyes on village girl Sonbai (Smita Patil) and decides, twirling his moustache, that he must have her. She resists his advances, even as  the villagers try and convince to sacrifice herself for the greater good. After a slap and an impressively constructed chase sequence through a sea of drying red chillies, she takes shelter in a warehouse presided over by an old man with impossibly bushy eyebrows, who on closer inspection turns out to be Om Puri. Most of the other women in the village are also in there, and Mirch Masala neatly turns from class oppression to a battle of the sexes.

You could say that the male population of the village asking Sonbai to give herself up is a metaphor for the abandonment of the motherland in the face of foreign oppression. Even if it is, does it really matter? Metaphors that heavy-handed are best left to idealogues. I doubt it’s a coincidence that the headmaster’s spectacles are shattered in the same fashion that the old woman’s in Battleship Potemkin are. Potemkin’s director Sergei Eisenstein used his visuals to drive home a simplistic worldview, albeit with great power. Mirch Masala is just as simplistic, but what is its point? That women in rural India are denied their rights? It’s hard to believe that this came as a surprise to viewers in 1987. Yet, instead of approaching the topic from a new angle, this film uses stock characters to espouse themes that other directors had already tackled in the decade past with more subtlety and insight.

For all its misfires and manipulations, Mirch Masala isn’t devoid of appeal. The camerawork is insidiously good at times; note the masterful swivel and pan around a group of villagers sitting with the subedar. There’s the blanched colour palette highlighting the fiery red of the chillies. Smita Patil and Deepti Naval battle patriarchy, tradition and the limitations of the screenplay to come up with defiant performances. Om Puri is fine as the grizzled gunslinger; his relative composure makes Naseer’s over-the-top subedar seem all the more ridiculous. No one, though, embarrasses themselves as much as Raj Babbar in a bizarre freakout scene that had me wondering why he’d want to exert himself so if he was just putting in a guest appearance.  

Mirch Masala is proof that alternative cinema in this country is by no means immune to a good cliché. Hindi cinema has gotten by for so long without subtlety that very few filmmakers seem to think it necessary, or even desirable. This will not change until we start to re-evaluate our ‘classics’, and decide which ones actually deserve to carry that label.