Udta Punjab (2016)

Director: Abhishek Chaubey
Writers:  Sudip Sharma, Abhishek Chaubey
Cinematographer: Rajeev Ravi
Cast:        Shahid Kapoor, Alia Bhatt, Kareena Kapoor, Diljit Dosanj 
Language: Hindi 

I really don't think a synopsis is necessary for the film because of all the controversies surrounding it due to Pahlaj Nihlani's infamous 89 cuts. It is set in Punjab which is facing a severe drug crisis with an estimate that 70% of its youth is affected by it.

Rather than having the drug problem as a backdrop for the story, the film is just about it in the most unsubtle way. Then it becomes a big problem if you don't have any depth. You have a drug fueled rock star, who sings about the stuff he takes, getting reformed of sorts when he meets a couple of his fans who killed their mother for drugs. Then there is the hilariously naïve police officer who also grows a conscious after he finds out that his brother is also hopelessly addicted. He has got for company, a very blandly portrayed doctor character played by Kareena Kapoor who also moonlights as an exposition device. Then there is this tremendously irritating, whenever she has to deliver more than two lines together, Alia Bhatt as the token representation from the lower economic strata. The best way to describe the film would be is that it is incredibly sterile. It works like a Doordarshan sermon with very high production quality. The tone doesn't change as we move from the tobacco warning ads, sanitation advise etc to the actual fucking film.

I was not planning to watch this film but decided to give it a go after the certification body copy of it was leaked, presumably deliberately to sabotage it. Guess, I've another reason to hate Pahlaj Nihlani for. A friend of mine, with whom I watched it, quipped that Nihlani might have done it a favour with the 89 cuts of his. I agreed.

PS: I hate the fact that I was able to watch it in my hometown when I have to travel 35Kms tomorrow to catch the Malayalam film that was deemed the best from last year by the state jury. It is a sad state of affairs.

Rating: 1.5/5 

Titli (2015)

Director: Kanu Behl
Writers:  Kanu Behl, Sharat Katariya
Cast:       Shashank Arora, Shivani Raghuvanshi, Ranvir Shorey
Language: Hindi

In the badlands of Delhi's dystopic underbelly, Titli, the youngest member of a violent car-jacking brotherhood, plots a desperate bid to escape the 'family' business. 

It was great year for Indian cinema last year with three of its films- Masaan, Court and Titli doing very well in the international film festival circuit. Due to the success of Masaan at the Cannes, it was forgotten that 'Titli' also managed to get a screening there in the 'Un Certain Regard' section. Both of these films have got a similar theme with their central characters trying to break free from the situation and the society that they were born into. In Masaan, it was the extreme conservatism of small town India while Titli is set in the modern urban hell-hole that is Delhi. The title translates as butterfly in English and like a butterfly, the titular character wants to transform himself from the form he was born into in terms of his settings and break free. 

I had no idea as to what the film was about and going by the poster, with the central couple in a scooter, I was expecting it to be an intense story of forbidden romance. It was anything but and what I got was a black comedy with a great central performance from Shashank Arora who is making his debut in this film. Performances from all concerned are excellent to be fair. It took me a bit of time to figure out what the family business was about and we realize it along with the new member of their family, Titli's wife that was arranged for him by his family. The film could have gone multiple ways from there, similar to 'Badlands' and 'The Edukators' or like a road-revenge film. In the end, it kind of reaches a predictable conclusion but the way it gets there is good enough for it to work. The claustrophobic way that it was filmed reminded me of Latin American films like 'Amores Perros' and 'City of God'. The Indian cities are inching towards the state of Latin American cities with extreme poverty and affluence living in close proximity and similar kind of violence fueling them. 

To sum up,  it is a great watch with great performances from all concerned. It was a directorial debut for Kanu Behl, who had previously assisted Dibakar Banerjee. The latter also served as a producer for this film and Anurag Kashyap was involved in promoting it. It is good to see their progeny doing as well and arguably even better than them. As for the films that I mentioned earlier, I would rank them as 1. Court, 2. Titli and 3. Masaan. All of them were great and it is just amazing to see us churning out films that can be classed along with the best from the rest of the world.

Rating: 4.5/5

मसान (Masaan) (2015)

Director: Neeraj Ghaywan
Writer:    Varun Grover
Cast:       Richa Chadda, Sanjay Mishra, Vicky Kaushal
Language: Hindi

Four lives intersect along the Ganges in Varanasi: a low caste boy hopelessly in love, a daughter ridden with guilt of sexual encounter ending in a tragedy, a hapless father with fading morality, and a spirited child yearning for a family. The first two characters long to escape the moral constructs of this small-town. 

The film begins with a couple engaging in sex in a hotel only to be raided by the Police. The boy commits suicide and the police inspector takes the video of the girl in the arrested state as a tool to extort money from her father, who is a Sanskrit translator with a small shop on the river banks. This is not a surprising thing in most parts of the country where the state, in this case the Police, acts as an extortion racket and the 'family-honor' is valued so highly that people will kill for it. Parallel to this story is the story of a low caste boy who is in love with a richer upper class girl. The girl in the first story want to leave the place to escape from its morality as well as for better economic opportunities. The boy in the second story want to get a good job so that he could escape from the caste system which is much more entrenched in places like these. What the film does best is capturing the small town life and its mentality. It is made in such a way that you won't sense being lectured on the oppressive nature of Indian society. There are no cartoonishly villainous characters and even the police officer who is doing the extortion does it in a matter-of-fact fashion. 

Performances are really good and the only negative I can find is that there is a degree of convolution in the second story-line to add some artificial poignancy to the proceedings. It is exquisitely shot but not in a tourist post-card fashion. The Indian selection for Academy Awards this year, Court, also deals with similar kind of issues but from a larger societal view-point instead of the character driven model of Masaan. Both of them are great films. Masaan premiered at Cannes this year where it won two awards including FIPRESCI Prize in the un certain regard section. The English title of the film is 'Fly Away Solo', which captures the ambition of the two main characters, and the Hindi title of the film means 'Crematorium' as per google. Neeraj Ghaywan, who previously assisted Anurag Kashyap in Gangs of Wasseypur, made his directorial debut with this film and it was indeed some debut.

Rating: 4.5/5

The Lunchbox (2013)

Director: Ritesh Batra
Writers:  Ritesh Batra, Vasan Bala
Cast:       Irrfan Khan, Nimrat Kaur, Nawazuddin Siddiqui
Language: Hindi

A mistaken delivery in Mumbai's famously efficient lunchbox delivery system contacts a young housewife to an older man in the dusk of his life as they build a fantasy world together through notes in the lunch box. She is in a loveless marriage, which is a very common phenomena in India due to societal compulsions, and he works in a government company and is close to retirement. Their exchange of notes rejuvenates both of them from their drab middle class life. Their relationship develops into romance, predictably, and ends in an unresolved note leaving us to speculate on whether they will get together or not. 

It is basically a very predictable feel-good film which takes an interesting idea and runs with it. 'Will they, won't they?' aspect goes along in a very conventional fashion, with him deciding not to meet her personally in the first instance and then regretting it later, by the time she decides to leave the place as well. The predictability of it doesn't matter though since there is a whole world building attached to each of the characters and it is something that many of us could easily relate to. There is this 'Govt Babu' aura to the world around Irrfan Khan's character and it seems his personal traits have also been influenced by it. Nawazuddin Siddiqui plays the role of his pestering understudy, who gradually wins over him so that he could be taken under the wings of much senior officer. We are not sure whether it is a normal retirement or whether he has taken a voluntary retirement from the job but I suspect it is the latter. Nimrat Kaur's homemaker character has a young kid and she is trying to please her husband through her cooking as a way to arrest her flailing marriage life. She has a mentor like neighbor aunty, from the flat above her apartment, with whom she communicates through shouting as well as exchanging things through a basket tied to a rope. We never see the neighbor in person. All the characters exhibit subtle traits and mannerisms which makes it a fantastic watch on the whole despite its predictable nature. I was reminded of Wong Kar Wai's 'In the Mood for Love' in some places and it is mostly to do with them discussing their personal lives, albeit with notes rather than in person.

Anurag Kashyap was involved as one of the producers of the film along with several other studios, many of them being foreign. It was screened at Cannes, where it won Critics Week's viewers choice award also known as Grand Rail d'Or. It also got a nomination at the BAFTA awards in the Non-English language category. It was widely expected to be India's entry for Academy's  Awards in the Foreign Film category, but the Gujarati film 'The Good Road' was selected ahead of it, creating considerable bemusement. I haven't seen that film to comment specifically on its quality, but Oscars is not really about quality and 'The Lunchbox' had a much bigger potential to do well there due to its crossover qualities. Anyway, Paolo Sorrentino's 'The Great Beauty', a favorite of mine, won it that year beating the likes of 'The Broken Circle Breakdown' and 'The Hunt'. So, there wasn't much chance of 'The Lunchbox' winning it and it did quite well anyway financially, grossing around $13 million on a budget of under $2 million.     

Overall it is a great watch and at under 100 minutes running time and the way it is filmed, it looks more like a foreign independent film rather than something from India. Struggling middle class is something that is touched rarely by Bollywood and mainstream Indian films in general. Performances from all concerned are excellent and you expect that anyway from the likes of Irrfan Khan and Nawazuddin Siddiqui. Nimrat Kaur, a theater artist, landed the job through auditions and she does a great job in a role where she portrays a normal Indian woman. Ritesh Batra made his directorial debut with this film. A third of its box office collection was from US alone and I suspect it was not the usual NRI crowd alone that were watching.

Rating: 4/5

                                                                      

Haider (2014)

Director: Vishal Bhardwaj
Writers:  William Shakespeare (Based on Hamlet), Basharat Peer, Vishal Bhardwaj
Cast:       Shahid Kapoor, Tabu, Kay Kay Menon
Language: Hindi

A young man returns to Kashmir after his father's disappearance. As he seeks answers for his father's disappearance, he ends up being tugged into the politics of his state which is reflected in his family as well with his uncle being on the other side of it. It is a modern day adaptation of William Shakespeare's 'Hamlet', set amidst the insurgency-hit Kashmir conflicts of 1995 and civilian disappearances.

I haven't read Hamlet or, in fact, any other works of William Shakespeare and my only familiarity with his works is through the film adaptations that I have seen. To be honest, I don't remember many of them either because of my unfamiliarity with Shakespeare's work and the only one I can say for sure is Akira Kurosawa's 'Ran', which is supposed to be an adaptation of 'King Lear'. Haider is supposed to be the third one in Vishal Bhardwaj's Shakespearean trilogy with the other two being 'Maqbool' and 'Omkara', both of which I have not seen. In fact I haven't seen any of the films from the director prior to this.

The film doesn't shy away from showing what happened/is happening in Kashmir and doesn't try to portray Indian state and its army in a good light. I was pleasantly surprised by the frankness with which it dealt with those issues without having to add caveats everywhere. The only time that it does is during the end credits where it says it has been relative peace there during recent times and Indian Army did great work during the recent Kashmir floods. It is a testament to the democratic credentials of Indian state that we allow such films even though there were some twitter campaign asking for the boycott of this film. I also doubt whether such films will be tolerated in the immediate future under the current right-wing regime as they have installed people from their nationalistic/jingoistic fold into the film certification board since. 

Coming back to the film, the first two-thirds of it is just great up till the wedding scene of Haider's mother and his conniving uncle. Then the director decides to go full Bollywood on us using a song sequence in which Haider dances to a song, whose lyrics tells the tale of betrayal in a laughably melodramatic fashion. From then on the film involves too many twists and turns, all of which leaves us feeling a bit jarred by the experience. Still, there are some great scenes during that as well. I don't know if the director decided for all these convolutions to stay true to the original play but it doesn't feel like a tragedy at the end.   

I read up a bit on the character 'Hamlet' from wikipedia and it seems he is someone with philosophical & psychological complexity. You don't expect all of that in a film adaptation which is constrained by other factors like making it work in a modern sense. Still, the director manages to add things like iconic dialog of 'To be or Not to be' and the Oedipal relationship between Hamlet/Haider and his mother. The latter is quite subtle in the initial stages of the film but reveals itself fully prior to the wedding when the mother (Tabu) reminisce that when he was younger, he used to say that he would marry her when he grows up. Freud had analysed these aspects in Hamlet by stating that Hamlet's hesitation in killing his uncle was due to his desire for his mother and was sub-consciously thankful to his uncle for getting rid of his father. To that level, the film doesn't go since Haider is shown to be too fond of his father and some silly religious reasoning is given in that scene where he spares his uncle. 

Overall, Haider is a pretty good watch even though its first half is much superior to its rather average second half. Cinematography is excellent, capturing the beauty of Kashmir well in a realistic fashion without resorting to 'tourist post cards' kind of methods, and is well-acted on the whole. Tabu's character is given the most complexity and she carries it well. Haider/Hamlet is quite binary. Irrfan Khan has an extended special appearance and the first instance when he arrives on screen, just before interval, is kick-ass. They have used/stole the initial bit from Moby's 'Extreme Ways', from the Bourne Series, during couple of pivotal scenes which didn't work at all because of my familiarity with that piece of music. There is also a nice reference to 'The Godfather' with the hiding of pistol behind the flush tank scene. Prakash Jha could learn something from that scene because that is how you do it in a subtle manner in stead of his 'References Overload' in 'Rajneeti'. Haider was on the whole a financial and critical success, earning five national awards as well as some international ones. Good to see a mature Indian film set in Kashmir dealing with the politics of it without being manipulative at all.

Rating: 3.5/5