No Smoking

Written and Directed by: Anurag Kashyap
Produced by: Vishal Bharadwaj and Kumar Mangat
Cast: John Abraham, Ranvir Shorey, Ayesha Takia, and Paresh Rawal

The protagonist of No Smoking, K (John Abraham, in a namesake role as Franz Kafka’s protagonist in The Trial) is a smoker who refuses to give up. His family and friends try every means to get him off it while he cannot see what the fuss is all about. However, when his wife (Ayesha Takia) threatens to leave him for good, he agrees to get help from one Baba Bengali (Paresh Rawal), referred to him by his best friend (Ranvir Shorey). Baba Bengali runs an underground quit smoking laboratory, and once caught in his scheme of things, life becomes a nightmare for K. K’s surreal journey from there on defies logic, and the world, with all its friends and foes, seems to be closing in on him. Baba Bengali spells out a series of brutal rules, on what punishment K will be given for every cigarette he smokes. With the all-seeing, policing eyes on him, K has nowhere to hide and take his daily dose of cigarette. He tries to run away, even retaliate, but he doesn’t have a chance. The paranoia and the frustration splits K’s consciousness. And finally even his soul is taken away, just like Baba Bengali had warned.

K’s exasperation, confusion and desperation will be delightfully familiar to those who have ever smoked. However, it may also be frustrating for an audience if No Smoking is seen as just series of plots aimed at making K quit his habit of smoking. On a thematic level, No Smoking is an absurdist’s view of the Universe. The film showcases a universe where nothing is what it seems, where the idea of freedom is illusory, where the boundary between real and imaginary has collapsed, where family threatens, friends betray, society abandons, and one’s own memory plays tricks. Man here is a trapped animal. He can run to Siberia or stand in the middle of Nowhere, he is still being watched and his actions monitored. He would be a fool to think he can choose. He can control his life no more than Hemingway’s ants. It’s Man against Institutions and however much he may try he will not win, for the rules of this game are inherently tyrannical and loaded.

K’s smoking may be an unhealthy habit, but it is also an act of choice, an assertion of independence. His journey from resistance to partial or forced conformism is also a revelation of how the oppressive institutions and rules of society leave no space for individual choice. His family uses emotional arm-twisting to force him to come around their way, his friends hide behind masks of concern and goodwill to ensnare him, and religion persuades him with promises of salvation or threats of damnation into giving up his independence.

In this absurdist’s universe, language too has lost its meaning. Communication is difficult, with the result that what one says doesn’t need to be true, and what one really feels, one cannot say. K and his wife speak to each other in expletives and often in internal monosyllables that appears over their head as text in comic-book balloons! K’s brother, J speaks to him in German, and Baba uses a deceptive and religious phraseology K cannot decrypt. The alienation is complete – the world thinks K is crazy, K thinks the world has gone nuts. No Smoking ends poignantly, showing how the institutional and societal processes eke out the souls from human bodies, and they’re left dummies conforming to the existing rules. To further its point on brutality of these processes, the film shows that it is not the ‘sin’ of smoking that killed our rebel-hero, K’s soul; K’s soul is instead forcefully gas-chambered by Baba’s religious cleansing squad.

John Abraham as K and Paresh Rawal as Bengali Baba give convincing performances. The art and camerawork successfully create the surreal and smoky atmosphere so essential for this film. The photography by Rajeev Ravi is first-rate and the framing imaginative. There is excellent production design by Wasiq Khan (Baba Bengali’s underground laboratory , the call centers, canister-filled alleys, execution chambers, and police interrogation booths remind one of the set pieces from Terry Gilliam’s apocalyptic films like Brazil [1985] and Twelve Monkeys [1995]). The film is supported by well-composed songs. However, the lyrics could have been used to shore up the thematic aspect of the film; presently they work only at the literal level of the narrative.

No Smoking does not fit any popular film genre produced in Bombay. What complicates the reading of the film is it’s inaccessibility. For narratives that work on two levels- literal and symbolic- it is essential that both work independently. That is, the smoker’s story should be strong enough to work on its own without the support of the absurdist interpretation, and vice versa. However, in No Smoking the two often get mixed up, so the smoker’s story gets surreal at times where as human condition, supposed to look meaningless, occasionally acquires meaning! Also, Kashyap should have made use of topical allusions for the audience to relate to the film better. Contemporary and recognizable issues could also have greatly improved the narrative’s accessibility of No Smoking (for example, Kafka and Beckett texts contain references to the oppressive police state).

Nonetheless, this is not a film that can be written off, though some reviewers will try. Try they will, for, often, incomprehension leads to rejection. Anurag Kashyap’s achievement lies in refusing to compromise (making the film’s subject even more apt) and in creating what he believed in. And for helping him produce this novel work, the entire team of No Smoking should be congratulated.

This review now also appears on Passion for Cinema website: http://passionforcinema.com/author/padmaja/

Jab We Met

Director: Imtiaz Ali

Producer: Dhilin Mehta

Cast: Shahid Kapur, Kareena Kapoor, Kiran Juneja, Dara Singh

Watching Jab We Met in a theatre one could not help noticing that for a group of youngsters sitting behind me, the film had turned into an interactive game. Taking turns, they kept guessing the next scene and sometimes even the dialogues. And they got it right most of the times. Why is a film that borrows its plot from half-a-dozen other films, called fresh, and that too repeatedly?

Jab We Met is about Aditya Kashyap (Shahid Kapoor), who has been ditched by his girlfriend and Geet (Kareena), who has plans to run away from home to marry her boyfriend, Anshuman. Aditya and Geet meet on a train and Aditya falls in love with Geet. However, he must still help her get to her boyfriend. When it is time for her to marry her boyfriend she realizes that she actually loves Aditya. So she marries Aditya. Watching the film, you get a sense of déjà vu: instances from Dil Hai Ki Maanta Nahin, Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, Walk in the Clouds… constantly flash before you.

With this thin and as-fresh-as-your-morning-breath plot the film tries to sustain itself on the constant chatter of its heroine Geet. What is even stranger, though, is the willful plotting.

The film opens with Aditya in a shock. His father is dead, his girlfriend is getting married to someone else and his company is in trouble. So he walks out of his own life with a dazed look. It is not made clear which of the above three reasons are actually troubling him or if it is all the three. In any case, in a state of daze, Aditya makes his way to the nearest railway station and boards the first train that moves. On the train, he meets Geet (or Bhatinda ki Sikhni, if you please) who banters away for the next several minutes. She doesn’t know him from Adam but gets down from the train in the middle of the night because Aditya did so, and they both miss their trains! And by some strange logic, the responsibility of getting Geet to Bhatinda falls on Aditya. So they share hotel room, become friends, exchange their life histories and sing their way to Bhatinda. Since it is Punjab (Bhatinda), the extended family of Geet take it upon them to force their warm hospitality on Aditya, have him drinks lassi and do bhangra.

Another forced twist in the plot makes Aditya and Geet run away together and yet again the responsibility to get Geet, this time to her boyfriend Anshuman, falls on Aditya. Geet goes to Anshuman and Aditya goes back to his life a completely changed person.

Now that Aditya is in love with Geet, he sings for his staff in the office and addresses a conference peppered with Punjabi jokes. His joie-de-vivre works such wonders that within a few months, the company starts to flourish beyond imagination! For long, Aditya does not try to find out what happened to Geet after he left her. When he does, he finds out she is not with Anshuman. So, Aditya tries to sort out the differences the two (but then also admits his love for Geet). The quarrel with her boyfriend over, it’s again time for another trip to Bhatinda. In a painfully stretched climax, where everyone talks and no one listens, the heroine is given ample time to make up her mind on who she wants to marry. It is strange she needed so much time to know her mind, for we knew it all along! Decision made, the Aditya and Geet break into an item number on their own wedding!

Kareena Kapoor does a convincing act with her spunk and if it gets tedious at times, it’s probably the script. A few of her dialogues do earn the distinction of being the only fresh things in the film. Shahid Kapoor starts off awkwardly with an unconvincing dazed walk, but his performance is satisfactory afterwards. All other actors are playing stereotypes and they do what is expected of them. Within the scope of the film, the director, Imtiaz Ali extracts credible performances and tells this concocted tale simply and without any pretensions.

What is the point of making a film like Jab We Met? What were the director and the producer thinking? Safe bet and easy money, I guess!

Laaga Chunari Mein Daag

Yash Raj Films’ latest offering Laaga Chunari Mein Daag had a lot going for it, despite its regressive-to-the-point-of-insulting title. It had Pradeep Sarkar, a director who had shown promise in Parineeta; it had three good actresses from different generations – Jaya Bachchan, Rani Mukherjee and Konkona Sen-Sharma; it had a talented music director in Shantanu Moitra and an interesting lyricist in Swanand Kirkire; it had the rich locale of Banaras to explore; and it had loads of money. Perhaps the last was its undoing. Was it the production house that sealed its fate or was it Pradeep Sarkar? After all, the director always has a choice – to make the film he wants to or to not make the film he does not believe in.

The trouble is not as much with the story – of a woman who turns to prostitution to save her family – as with the way it is told, which is clichéd, sexist and dubiously plotted. The film is a record of sorts in its collection of stereotypes. The suffering, weeping mother (Jaya Bachchan) on the sewing machine, the passive father (Anupam Kher) pining for a male child who has a heart attack whenever he is expected to act, the wise and responsible elder daughter, the innocent and carefree younger sister (Konkona Sen-Sharma), the villainous chacha (Tinu Anand) in the village, the ravenous employer in the city, the ‘friendly’ soul who gets the heroine into prostitution and, not to forget, Prince charming coming to rescue with just the right dialogue, ‘Pehle to main tumse pyar karta tha (complete with beat, focus shifts, crane up and down), ab main tumhari izzat karne laga hoon’ [Earlier I had only loved you, now I have begun to respect you]!. And as if these stock characters were not enough, the film is full of stock situations and song-and-dance routines.

With the same impudence with which the filmmaker lines up his stale characters and situations, he also eschews every logic and reasoning in telling his story. The Sahay family is shown in financial mess (the struggling family abode happens to be the palace of the ex-Maharaja of Banaras. The choice is either an unintentional commentary in irony to show what has become of the Maharajas of India – their palaces now need repairs, families in such need of money that they are selling away books, their children driven to prostitution and so on. Or this is how big production houses imagines poverty, like the fabled comment by Queen Marie Antoinette of France, who reflecting on paucity of food for her citizens had suggested, ‘if you don’t have bread eat cakes’). In any case, the Sahays have so little money that their elder daughter, Vibhavari (Rani Mukherjee) is not able to complete her schooling (disregarding the fact that the government schools charge next to nothing); instead she sits at home, and occasionally makes a few deliveries for her mother who runs the household by stitching petticoats! And then suddenly, this conventional family agrees to send their daughter all the way to Mumbai on a paper-thin pretext? How the events unfold in Mumbai is all the more implausible. It is not surprising that Vibha takes up prostitution (though not before she changes her name to corrupt and anglicized Natasha). With the kind of money she needs, that too quickly, perhaps prostitution is logical. But what defies logic is her overnight transformation. Soon she not only starts speaking English, but has opinions on Trademarks and Patents! She has a client who gifts her a posh flat without ever being seen enjoying her services (it is also difficult to imagine Vibha/ Natasha being good at her job: she is perpetually shown guilt-ridden and cold to men). The same client (Murali Sharma) gives her a business class ticket to Switzerland and then when she is there, he walks away with two firang babes by his side in a seedy 70s-style (this sub-plot being a pretext for Vibha to meet her rescuer in Abhishek Bachchan). Her sister and father never find out what she does for a living but a cousin (Sushant Singh) from Banaras finds her exact charges for a night. The questions are endless and most remain unanswered.

The film that apparently is about ‘a woman’s journey’, starts on a flawed premise – the patriarchal and tastelessly hypocritical idea of the ‘purity’ of women. The same idea of ‘purity’ that has enabled generations of men to control women’s desires and freedom and so often picked up by its wrong end in Bombay films. The world of Laaga… is controlled by men. The weak and sexist father controls his daughter in a way that she feels forced to prove her worth to him. The evil chacha and his son drive the Sahay family women to despair, the mother has the courage to stop them but cannot do so without her husband’s support. It’s a man that helps Vibha look for a job and it’s a man who sexually exploits her by promising her one. Vibha’s money and pleasures and tortures all come from men. She has a huge flat, sends loads of money home, travels to Europe but is instantly brought to her knees by her cousin’s blackmailing. She is powerless in front of the society and even her family- they can stop her from attending her sister’s wedding. Her family’s acceptance of her is satisfying but short-lived, for the threat of the evil cousin and through him the society, is hanging like Damocles’ sword. And who but a man can save her from a lifetime of ignominy? So, in the end it’s not the sisters, Vibhavari and Shubhavari who come out to confront their uncle and fight for their honour; this job is to be done by their men suitors. The end of the film is as disappointing as the title. Is the filmmaker trying to establish the heroine’s purity by having the hero accept her? Or is he trying to establish the special-appearance-hero’s (Abhishek Bachchan ’s) magnanimity? Whatever the filmmaker’s intentions, what the film says is that without a man’s acceptance and support a woman cannot find her place in society.

The music composer, Shantanu Moitra loses a sense of balance in trying to put local flavour in the songs. So while the Benaras numbers are weak copies of local tunes (in fact, Kacchi kaliyan… is more akin to a Punjabi hip-hop), the ones in Europe are impossible to recall. Something similar happens to Kirkire’s lyrics. The only one that you remember paying any attention to is ‘Hum to aise hain bhaiya… ’. However, this song that presumes to talk about the way of life of the Banarasis seems ill-placed when mouthed self-consciously by the Banarasi sisters themselves.

Some well-intentioned sub plots didn’t fire away as intended. One such plot could have been of the local courtesan (Hema Malini) in Banaras seen with envy by young sisters in the beginning, and who receives the innocence-lost Vibha with knowledge and understanding. In a film as un-original and hackneyed as this, what were the actors supposed to achieve? Nonetheless, Konkona looks natural next to the melodramatic Rani Mukherjee. But Jaya Bachchan is the one who excels in trying to convey the woes and fears of middle-class north Indian women trying to run difficult homes, by being difficult, on other member of the family too but mostly on themselves. To appreciate Jaya’s achievement, one will, however, need to see her act removed from the incredulous situation her character is put in and lines she has to mouth. In a film that is failing at several fronts this must be some accident and is bound to go unnoticed.

Book Review: The Gendered Nation

The Gendered Nation: Contemporary Writings from South Asia
Author: Neluka Silva
[Sage Publications, New Delhi. 257 pp. Rs. 320. Published 2004]

“The feeling of nation-ness is the most legitimate value in the political life of our time.” Neluka Silva quotes Benedict Anderson to underline the importance of a debate on nationalist discourses in South Asia. The contribution of the use of nationalism in recovery of colonized peoples’ identities is now a well-discussed subject. However, as Tharu and Lalitha (1993, 52) have pointed out, ‘nationalism is not the awakening to self-consciousness of a nation and a tradition that already exist at some deep level. Nations, like traditions and works of art, are (artificially) made, built, created and imagined.’ The processes that construct national identities using ‘pre-determined differentials’ (Silva 2004, 15) such as religion, language, ethnicity and also gender, entails favouring of one factor over the other. In the context of South Asia, the hegemonic constitutions of identities will typically marginalize low-caste groups, working class, minority religious groups and women.

Neluka Silva’s thesis is on gendered underpinnings of nationalist discourses in South Asian countries, particularly on how they are reflected in the literatures of these countries. She also analyzes feminized images of the nation in popular culture, political rhetoric and media, where terms like ‘motherland’, ‘mother tongue’ and ‘mother country’ are naturalized in every day language, literature and cultural idiom. She observes that while the nationalist iconography is predominantly feminine, the practice of nationalism remains a male prerogative. The image of nation as a female body comes with corresponding images of men as the actual actor and protector - as soldier, administrator and fraternal figures. Furthermore, the idealization of motherhood has excluded all non-reproductive sexualities and assigned women the responsibility of preserving and transmitting a nation’s culture. Female body images and references are used as terrains where nationalist battles are fought to create distinction between the submissive and ravaged colonial period and the resurgent purity and newfound strengths of the post-colonial period in South Asia. Silva argues that, when looked closely, the power structures in the post-Independence phase have, however, remained the same, with mere reinvention of the modes of domination.

Neluka Silva usefully illustrates her arguments by choosing specific moments from post-Independence ‘nation-building’ phases in India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh. She highlights two registers of gendering: one in which there is a recurrent pattern of women heads of state who rise to power through male family connections, and the second, in which women are ‘constructed as the emblems of the authentic community’ (Silva 2004, 35). She discusses certain literature-texts by native and émigré South Asian writers, to both produce evidence for her arguments and help decide ‘the place of literature in constructing, reinforcing or challenging nationalist ideologies’ (ibid. 44).

For example, Silva traces Indira Gandhi’s rise to power, and her political maneuvers to design a political mask for herself by adopting a cluster of gendered images - daughter, wife, mother and widow. Neluka Silva draws resemblances between Indira Gandhi, Benazir Bhutto and Chandrika Kumaratunge, the women heads of the state in South Asia who confirmed to the patriarchal codes of behaviour and political practice. They adopted gendered images for political purposes but largely dissociated themselves from women’s issues. Silva argues that co-opting mythical or familial or religious icons for political expediency is ultimately disempowering for women because these icons are fundamentally constructed and situated within patriarchal discourses. She discusses two texts that critique the type of political discourses deployed by Indira Gandhi. Nayantara Sahgal’s ‘Rich Like Us’ exhibits how the national emergency period in India (1975-1977) had challenged and destabilized gendered identities in the country. The effects of Indira Gandhi’s leadership and policies are felt by characters ranging from elite middle class to the subaltern woman. Silva also appreciates the complexities created by the multiple identities of the Widow in Salman Rushdie’s ‘Midnight’s Children’. While pointing to the book’s misogynist underpinnings, Silva admits that the Widow character has been effectively and innovatively used to portray the male protagonist’s sense of betrayal and the masculine reaction to the threat posed by a woman (and a widow at that) who gains power and agency. Similarly, Silva’s discussion of the literature from Sri Lanka reveals the denial of histories of multi-ethnicity and cultural mixing. The question of identity becomes the central issue in contemporary Sri Lanka, where the ideal of the ‘pure woman’ works against women who are of mixed ancestry. Indu Dharmsena’s play ‘It’s All or Nothing’ unveils popular prejudices against the Burgher woman while Michael Ondaatje’s ‘Running in the Family’ deals with the impossibility of a fixed, homogenous and natural identity in Sri Lanka.

The role of religion and language in the process of formation of nation’s and individual’s identity is Silva’s main concern when she discusses texts from Bangladesh. The valorization of mother tongue (Bengali) as being central to one’s notion of self, and women’s marginalized position in the liberation struggle is the subject of Munir Choudhary’s plays. Sangari and Vaid too have pointed to how language can become a reason for contest and pivotal in identification of class and gender. They cite the case of the purification of female vernacular in the nineteenth century Bengal, where linguistic sophistication becomes a marker for social status and gender (Sangari and Vaid 1989, 12). Through discussions of Rushdie’s ‘Shame’ and Rukhsana Ahmad’s ‘We Sinful Women’, Silva illustrates how religious fundamentalism impinges on the rights and identities of women both at the level of culture and national polity in Pakistan. Silva elaborates on Rushdie’s concept of ‘palimpsest’ and its subversive potential to expose elements that are suppressed or erased in the nationalist rewriting of history. In ‘We Sinful Women’, the woman author is argued to have used a traditionally male-dominated genre to expose the patriarchal devices of manipulation. Neluka Silva’s discussion of the various aspects of the nationalist debate is well informed and detailed. However, at times it threatens to go beyond the stated agenda of analyzing its gendered underpinnings. A less detailed description of the background of the context of the source texts would have given Silva space for including more contemporary writings from South Asia. The texts she has chosen well reveal how literature can be used as a tool to challenge the nationalist ideologies. However, there is little evidence that shows how literature can be used also by the state to construct and reinforce gendered national identities (as is one of the stated aims of her book). Also, a discussion on the place assigned to women in the nation’s economy and analysis of claims of the nationalist ideologues on women’s role in reform and development would have enriched the author’s arguments. Nonetheless, the book makes a valuable and original contribution to the existing debates on gender and nationalism. The strength of the book lies in the insightful details and the connection it makes between the common past, culture and political traditions of the South Asian countries. The book should interest academics and students of gender studies, postcolonial theory and cultural studies.

[This review was published in Progress in Development Studies journal, UK, 2006]

Naina

Naina is the story of a girl living in London who lost her eyesight and her parents when still very young. As a young woman now she is offered a chance to see again through a cornea transplant. After the operation she discovers that she can see a lot more than she is supposed to. She sees dead people and those who are going to die. When she discovers that the image she sees in the mirror is not hers she decides to find a reason to it all. That takes her to Gujrat from where her cornea had been flown in. she finds out that her eyesight had come from a girl who could foresee other people’s deaths and was branded a witch by the villagers. Cursed and abused by her mother in a moment of anguish she committed suicide. Only by laying her soul to rest can Naina find peace. Despite doing that she retains her ability to foresee death and tries to save hundreds of people in a London tube accident where she too loses her eyesight. At the end she is happy for though she has lost her sight she has also lost the visions of death. Does the story remind you of some other film? Sixth Sense? That’s one of the greatest problems with Naina; so much of it has been taken from elsewhere. The posters remind you of The Ring, the story and many scenes remind you of The Sixth Sense, another episode is taken from Dark Waters, and so on.

The story is weak and is sometimes spread so thin that the dialogues go ridiculous. The first half is episodic and tells you little, just so many incidents of Naina seeing ghosts in every nook and corner of the city, though funny in a way because these ghosts look familiar, like visitors from other famous horror flicks. The second half has some interesting scenes of Naina’s counterpart Khemi in the rural Gujrat. Here too, the cultural difference between the two girls, Naina and Khemi, and the resulting potential for complexity is not utilized by the director. On the whole the film looks like the director was hoping to stretch a two line story idea into a two hour film with some spooky ghost scenes as fillers.

On the acting front, it seems difficult to decide who is worse, Anuj Sawhney, the Doctor or Kamini Khanna, the Grandmother, who single-handedly reduces the film to a B-grade television drama? Urmila Matondkar is only marginally better, what with her continuous jaw-dropping. Despite all these weaknesses the film is worth seeing once, if only to shame our cinematographers and visual effects supervisors. The visual effects are so clean, the editing so silent, it makes other Bollywood films look like belonging to the stone age. The entire technical crew is non-Indian. I would hate to think that is the reason for the high technical standards. And yes, Naina mercifully, has no songs.

written on 20 May 2005

Hazaaron Khwahishen Aisi…

Director: Sudhir Mishra
Producer: Rangita Pritish Nandy, Etc
Cast: Kay Kay Menon, Shiney Ahuja, Chitrangada Singh, Ram Kapur

The title of the film, taken from a Ghalib couplet, aptly describes the hopes, dreams and disillusionments of a generation that saw itself as harbingers of change. The naxalite movement, two decades after the Indian Independence, was fuelled like all other movements and revolutions, by the ideals of justice and equality, and like all great movements ended in bloodshed, disillusionment, hopes crushed and dreams abandoned. It is surprising how naxalism (and Emergency) have failed to excite the imagination of our film-makers. Hazaaron… was a tale waiting to be told. Fortunately it found one of the best story-tellers around.

In a classic fashion, Mishra’s film begins at the very beginning. By pointing out the sentimental and somewhat indulgent fallacies in Nehru’s vision of India, Mishra opts for an involvement that lends credibility to his story without getting propagandist. The three main characters in the film reflect as much of their class concerns as their individual love conflicts. Siddharth has an identity crisis and tries to find a mooring in ideology. Vikram feels he cannot afford to get distracted by ideologies or ethical concerns in his struggle for social and financial security. They are both in love with Geeta who, trying desperately to keep her love and relationship with Siddharth going, makes sincere efforts to understand the cause Siddharth is fighting for. She is rational enough to see some of the discrepancies in the intellectual- ideological vision of the college going intelligentsia who fail to relate to the simple-minded, uneducated masses they are fighting for (there is a Sholay-esque question from a man in a crowd, “Who was Hitler?”).

Seeing revolution and love as exclusionary, Siddharth chooses to part ways with Geeta. The characters go their separate ways. Geeta marries an IAS officer, Vikram climbs the social ladder while Siddharth begins his lessons in reality in the villages of Bihar. In a delightful sequence where a mob of unruly villagers turn from being blood-thirsty to deeply concerned for their exploitative zamindar, Siddharth learns something about the people he is fighting for - only he cannot figure out what. The sequence is full of humour and irony and very few directors can pull it off the way Mishra does.

Geeta leaves her husband and makes the journey from the comforts of city to the violence- ravaged village. She starts doing her own bit here; not by helping Siddharth and his group in slitting throats of Zamindar’s henchmen, but by teaching in a village school. When the national Emergency is declared state institutions become instruments of repression and destroy whatever freedom remained. In Bhojpur village, the police become the naked manifestation of institutional power. Siddharth and Geeta are taken into custody where Siddharth is beaten to pulp and Geeta is brutally raped in front of him. People around them are casually butchered. Siddharth comes to see death in the face for the first time in reality and has his moment of self-realization. Vikram travels to the village to help his friend and ends up at the receiving end.

Siddharth moves to London and Geeta stays in a village school. Why? You ask. The rich boy, after his brief, confused affair with the proletariat, moves out of the mess he has helped create to the comforts of a foreign land; while the middle class, unwilling participant in this revolution, Vikram, ends up paying the real price. Vikram, of course, is not blameless. He has been a clog in the system without realizing, or perhaps ignoring the inherent violence of power. Geeta can never go back to the old comforts, for she is the one who has most closely felt and experienced this violence.

There are always more questions than answers at the end of any revolution. But isn’t asking questions a clearer sign of freedom and democracy? Sudhir Mishra’s film makes us conscious of the times we live in, and wonder whether it is better to fight for a lost cause or not having a cause to fight for. Yes, the generation of Hazaaron… is idealistic, confused and angry. But is the present generation any wiser with its quick distrust of ideologies and revolutions? When Vikram raised a toast to the revolution the audience laughed well before Siddharth did.

It is unfortunate that more films like these are not being made. You can only imagine what Mishra must have gone through to get this film produced and released, because he himself graciously avoids that story in his interviews. But some of the pressure of production shows in a couple of unclean cuts in the film. And also, the scenes on Emergency are not as hard-hitting as one would have expected. The political situation is not just a background to the love story, it is what shapes it. Mishra need not downplay the politics in the film. It should not worry him that a part of the audience is more interested in the love story. Good films, unlike government billboards on female foeticide, need not be understood by everybody.

written on 22 May 2005

Main Aisa Hi Hoon

Director: Harry Baweja
Producer: Sanjay Gupta, Etc
Cast: Ajay Devgan, Sushmita Sen, Esha Deol, Rucha Vaidya

After having made half a dozen mediocre films with indistinguishable titles (Dilwale, Diljale, Diwane), storylines and songs, Harry Baweja graduated to making an action thriller Qayamat (2003) a copy of Michael Bay’s ‘The Rock’ with Sean Connery and Nicholas Cage in lead roles. Now comes Main Aisa Hi Hoon. What made Harry Baweja choose ‘I am Sam’ from all the other potential-for-copying films doing the rounds in Bombay. A closer look tells you why? The film is about an autistic man and his seven year old daughter. The mental age of the father is seven years, and as his daughter crosses that age an important question is raised. Can he raise her beyond this age? While ‘I am Sam’ was widely criticized for emotional manipulation (was called a cross between ‘Rain Man’ and ‘Krammer versus Krammer’), Sam’s acting performance was seen as its only redeeming feature.

Now over the top stories are not a bad sign in Bollywood. Harry’s main task was to find somebody to play Sean Penn’s character, which well, was hardly a task. His muse, actor Ajay Devgan who too has made a climb from being a B-action flick star to doing well-reviewed roles, must have seemed just suited for playing Sam. Sorry, doesn’t work. Ajay Devgan is no Sean Penn. He cannot support a weak film on his shoulders alone (Kaal is another example). Sushmita Sen plays Michelle Pfieffer in a flavour that reminded me of a cross between Shah Rukh Khan and Anoop Jalota’s raaga at the end of which you feel forced to clap. In a recent interview headline, Sen even claims to have beaten Michelle Pfieffer (Pfieffer was asking for it, wasn’t she?). Child actor Rucha Vaidya is fresh and sincere and it would be unfair to compare her to Dakota Fanning.

However, Main Aisa hi Hoon has succeeded in carrying all the drawbacks of the original. The storyline was weak to begin with, but the adapted screenplay and Hindi dialogues don’t help it either. The heavily criticized product placement of Starbucks in the original is replaced with Café Coffee Day (though there isn’t one in Simla). Hand held cameras are used here too; only that the cameraman of Main Aisa… gets so involved with Devgan that the camera pans violently and shakes rhythmically every time he enters the frame. But wait, everything in the film is not a copy. Harry Baweja is too conscientious to give himself credit for the film and not lend some originality to it. So, there are again half a dozen forgettable songs. There are nauseating hugs and tears. There is a humanitarian confusion of how stupid an autistic should be. There are those great Indian crowd scenes. And yes, the hero and heroine get married.

written on 23 May 2005