Films 2009 – History Can Wait

The end of a calendar year provides for stock-taking and also satisfies our urge to analyze, categorize or generalize films as we attempt to tag and file this part of Bollywood’s past for recent history. For a year that started with an incredible mindless tamasha like Chandni Chowk to China (CCTC) and downed the shutters with Munnabhai-with-a-preachy-wrench-in-hand, the year 2009 in the long run would be just another year for movie-goers in India – while it’ll not lay claim to start a fresh chapter in Bollywood history, and yet squeeze-in a space in its thick folder.

2009 will perhaps be best remembered for the miraculous success of Slumdog Millionaire. The film was vibrantly paced with a feel-good ending, but for most part it was mediocrity wrapped up in finely crafted (& eventually marketed) package. Yet for the eagerness with which everyone co-opted with it and made Slumdog an overwhelming success, we all wished this was a core Bollywood production than a surprise gift from firangees.

This year saw a string of releases with eye-popping budgets and mind-numbing storylines that made one wonder if economic slow-down was a three-legged animal in Africa. Films like CCTC, Kambakht Ishq, Blue, Dil Bole Hadippa, Luck, Victory, Billu, Acid Factory and Tasveer lacked the minimal presence of cinematic creativity while their marketing team worked overtime to bring unsuspecting public to the screens on the opening days allowing the films to often open well. To splurge huge sums of money in such ill-devised star-vehicle films must have meant paucity of funds for making lower budget but better films.

2009 was a good year for Anurag Kashyap for it saw the release of two of his films. Dev D was more satisfying of the two; it was not only a good adaptation and a story well told in psychedelic, absurdist style but also achieved commercial success. Gulaal was a tad disappointing on both counts. Vishal Bharadwaj could not repeat the magic of Omkara, but managed a successful show with stylized treatment and excellent songs in Kaminey. Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s nostalgic over-indulgence in Delhi 6 smothered some very bright facets put together with honesty in what could have been an even better film. R. Balki’s Paa, distinctly half-excellent & half-average film, keeps up the hope of seeing more good stuff by him. If Shimit Amin’s Rocket Singh whets the appetite but does not satisfy its only because he himself set very high standards with Chak De. More disappointing were Imtiaz Ali’s Love Aaj Kal and Madhur Bhandarkar’s Jail. While Imtiaz’s direction is self-assured and consistent his material is sub-standard. On the other hand, Jail is a badly made film in every respect; it could easily be the most disappointing film of the year but for Ashutosh Gowarikar’s ‘What’s Your Rashee?’

This year-end also saw the release of much awaited ‘3 Idiots’. It was a good opportunity for Hirani to come out of the Munnabhai phase but it seems the director is happily stuck there. Only, he cannot keep up the whackiness and humour of the original. While Munnabhai’s street-smartness and humane wisdom were appealing, baba Ranchordas Chanchad’s pravachans are as tiresome as Ram Nikumbh’s in Taare Zameen Par. Every formula from the Munnabhai book is overdone and stretched with often good pay-offs in laughter and tears but ones that does not last once the film is over. In 3 Idiots, there’s not a single profile of students between the top two and bottom two and not a single teacher who knows how to teach. It’s Ranchordas all the way. The film could easily have been named ‘1 Idiot and 2 Stooges’ (it was amusing to see producer Vidhu Chopra tagging his name close to director Hirani’s whenever the latter appeared in credits). 3 Idiots reminded me of another formulaic film of this sort that worked, Ajab Prem ki Ghajab…’ and brought back the apparently desperate director, Raj Kumar Santoshi back into play.

There were some medium and small budget films this year that kept the torch of sensible cinema alive; these were the kind of films (despite their shortcomings) one would hope to see more of in the coming year. Nandita Das’s Firaaq would top my list here. Zoya Akhtar’s Luck By Chance, Ayaan Mukherjee’s Wake Up Sid, Sooni Taraporewala’s Little Zizou, Pankaj Advani’s Sankat City and Shashank Ghosh’s Quick Gun Murugan were some of the efforts that make movie-going worthwhile and also establish a saner voice in the cacophony of misplaced passions of films like New York or Kurbaan.

2009 would also be remembered for establishing the talents of actors like Ranbir Kapoor, Sonam Kapoor and Mahie Gil. Pritam gave some hummable tunes but could not beat the earthy appeal of Vishal Bharadwaj. A ‘Jai Ho!’ to Gulzar too (for Kaminey and Slumdog).

Older traditions of following the stars, ignoring the script, stealing ideas from Hollywood and elsewhere continued this year while some new ones also gained ground. One of the more conspicuous elements was the extremely aggressive marketing strategies that spent whopping crores that were not selling films but forcing them down the audience’ throats.

Paa – It is AB’s Baby (Sr., ofc.)

Paa’s promotions indicated that the film will make a miserable spectacle out of progeria – as Amir Khan’s Taare Zameen Par did of special children for most of the film and Bhansali’s Black did of its blind & deaf protagonists for an entire film. So it is a relief to see that Paa is selling not the disease but a story. It is told with sensitivity and humour that one has come to expect from R.Balki after Cheeni Kum, a film that stands, if at times unsteadily, on its own two feet.
The fear of being forced to shed tears for a 12-year old child dying of accelerated ageing fades as one begins to share his joie de vivre and his views of the world around him. Auro’s disease is rare, but so is his precocious sense of humour. Auro (Amitabh Bachchan) lives with his mother, Vidhya (Vidya Balan) and maternal grandmother (Arundhati Naag) in domestic bliss while his biological father, Amol (Abhishek Bachchan) and his father (Paresh Rawal) are seen fighting intense political battles and living a life under full public glare and scrutiny.
With Auro at the center, the film can be neatly split into ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ worlds on his each sides. (It cannot be a coincidence that Amol’s ‘family’ has no women and Vidhya’s has no grown up men.) While the former is associated with colossal ambition, public domain and cynical political activism, the latter is private and full of emotion, nurture, and domesticity. It is the intelligent and sensitive Auro, with his vision of a ‘white globe’, who brings these two worlds together.
We see how the feminine domestic environment has nurtured Auro’s world view into one that is full of humour and acceptance. And this is also a world the director seems most comfortable depicting. By dropping the syrupy, artificial, smothering mother-child depictions in many of our films, Balki has made the treatment far more intelligent and refreshing. Indeed, the mother-daughter and mother-son relationship in Paa is one of the most beautiful in recent Bollywood films.
However, the political/public ‘masculine’ world that Balki creates is shaky, simplistic, dated and unconvincing. There is too much talk, too much naïve earnestness. The long tirade against the media is simply misplaced in this story. In the context of the narrative, it is fitting when media is blamed for its attempt to make a spectacle of Auro, but to stay on media-politicians’ fight is an unnecessary digression and seems out of proportion. Even if it was Balki’s intention of showing a certain sterility in the ‘masculine’ world (as against a fecund & compassionate ‘feminine’ world), Amol-as-the-politician track sticks out like a sore thumb.
Something that further undermines the beauty of the film is its ‘happy ending’. There is nothing wrong in it being happy; Auro bringing the two symbolic worlds together could certainly be a plausible resolution. But all of it is treated too literally with the child putting the parents’ hands onto each other (like those dying spouses & mothers in old films), and the parents taking marriage pheras round their dying child seems taken from the ‘wring-tears-from-your-eyes’ chapter of the ol’ Bollywood rulebook that one had feared at the start and was happy to not see until the climax.
Amitabh Bachchan, Esq. gives a truly rare performance in R. Balki’s Paa. It should be every seasoned actor’s effort to go behind the character and lose his own self in it. It is not Auro’s mask or the make-up alone that Mr Bachchan has used to his advantage. He instead takes one of the biggest risks of his acting career, puts every bit of his talent and experience and meets one of the biggest challenges to come up with a career defining performance. It is Bachchan’s enormously generous and inspired performance (as against hammy and caricatured acts of Black and Eklavya to name just two recent films) that becomes the highlight of the film and actually makes other shortfalls of the film more visible. Indeed, it is because of his father’s brilliant performance that Abhishek’s own act as Paa looks dull and stoic. Vidya Balan is a picture of feminine sensitivity, both in her romance as a student at Cambridge University and as a single mother of a child with progeria. Arundhati Naag’s grandmother act is equally adorable.
Illayaraja background score is fitting though it gives the film a ‘southern accent’ when the film is based in Lucknow. The brilliant cinematographer, PC Sreeram’s work is noteworthy although one felt his ‘icy’ steel touch in the climactic minutes was drawing the blood out of the scenes and could instead have had more warmth and passion.
I wish Balki had stuck more around Auro even if this meant scaling down the film to a world as seen and lived by a 12-year old. In the end, Paa is Bachchan Sr.’s baby. He deserves acting awards in this year’s roll-call. If they get one too many, I’ll happily look away.
(first appeared on Passion for Cinema)

Kurbaan – Now Serving “Terror Concoction Vomit” Curry

You are a Pakistani national and now you wish to terrorize the US. How should you go about it ? Lets see, the most effective way for you would be to cross into the “friendly” neighbour country, India (here they let terrorists enter easily, remember Kasab et al.?). Here you romance, seduce and marry a Hindu girl, only make sure that you find one who has a job in New York (may Allah be with you)… Once married, tag along with her to the US (on a spousal visa, for which, er, you’ll need an Indian passport. Overlook this for the moment)! Now that you are in the US, you don’t go about terrorizing the Americans right away. First you get a job teaching Islamic Studies at an Ivy League University and get yourself called a Professor (apart from giving you some pocket money, this job will make you a cool terrorist. [To get the job you will need to have an excellent academic, teaching and publishing record. Also, what about a working visa? But again please overlook these for the moment and stay with me]). Now as you do long hours at the University, you let your new wife slowly discover that you are, well, a terrorist (how do you do that – put her in a trance make her stupid enough to walk into the neighbours’ house in the dead of the night, and, once she’s is there, have the neighbours discuss some big terror plans behind closed doors but loud enough for her to hear. Make her really dim so that she believes them and not laughs her head off… and then you make the ‘Im a Terrorist’ entry!). Professor Terrorist Dude. You realize you have done not much in the terror department since you left Pakistan; now you need to get on with it and terrorize people – so you start forking people to death (yeah! the cutlery) and as this much action does not seem enough you pick a dead body lying in your basement and drive it to dispose it somewhere (don’t allow anyone to say hey, hold on! why not dig a fcu*#g hole in the basement, bury the body there itself. Yeah make sure the neighbour-terrorists too are dim, very dim indeed). Give the wheels of the car carrying the corpse to the dimmest of them all, make sure he takes a street where there is police surveillance; on being stopped the driver must start to make alarmed faces leaving the Yankee officer with no option but to ask you two to step out of the vehicle. Your action part starts here, you kill a few policeman as a warm up to actual act of terrorizing the city. By doing so you would have given the police enough leads to have yourself and the terrorist neighbours nabbed. So trust your boss to come to rescue here – he decides to go for the kill right away. What do you do – you botch the whole thing up. No one is going to blame you though; it’s actually your wife who does you in. You see, the night before your D-day, she needed to get her hands on some terror information. She could have easily walked a few paces to the drawers in the living room where the papers with this information are kept. Instead this well-meaning but going dimmer-by-the-day soul takes a long circuited route (mildly recalls your own Pakistan-to-India and Find, Seduce & Marry NRI Girl routine). She first seduces you into going to bed with her, and as you sleep all tired, she tiptoes to the living room and gets the papers. The terror information is leaked out and you, on the other hand, get reminded how much you love her. As a result, none of the bombs go off in a way to do any real damage and all your terrorists friends get killed one by one. Again, not all of this is your fault. Some of your friends were dimwits, remember. They just forgot to blow themselves when they could easily have done so. Instead, they kept clicking their heels till the police could spot them,and then made a run, get caught and get killed. All of this should not worry you because when you reach the last fifteen minutes of the story no one is going to care any longer for the implausibilities on how you went about the job, they’ll be too absorbed just trying to catch up with the action. Only don’t let the climax action pause even for an instant for you would risk being tied in knots by the endless, gaudy contrivances that you story is filled with. Just one last thing, die smiling and we’ll make sure there is a massive publicity campaign supporting your story. Deal? Deal. Now go give it a try (may Allah be with you).

JAIL

Madhur Bhandarkar has made a name for himself as a realist filmmaker (this and that he has won 3 national awards always precede a piece on him). His films like Page 3 and Fashion broke the art film-commercial film barrier for him. Bhandarkar has comfortably placed himself as a ‘mainstream-realist’ filmmaker. After documenting the lives of bar-girls, corporates, the fashion fraternity and page3 people, he turns his camera on life in a prison or jail.

Jail is about the travails of a falsely implicated young man Parag Dixit played by Neil Nitin Mukesh. Through his story the film attempts to throw open a kind of life that most of us will know only through newspapers or films that have dealt with it. This film reinforces ideas we may already have of the overcrowded living conditions of Indian jails and the inhumanity imposed on the inmates who, not only put up with a lack of proper sanitation and food but also fight to survive the alternative system of unspoken rules imposed through connivance of imprisoned criminals and jail authorities. The dehumanizing physical examination of the protagonist in the very first sequence indicates a gritty portrayal of life in the prison. What follows is sometimes moving, but seldom very illuminating.

There is a hiccup in the beginning that grows only bigger and undermines the narrative integrity of the film – this is the constant shifting of narrative axis. In the beginning it seems one will experience the Jail-world with our declared protagonist, Parag Dixit. However soon enough, Nawab’s (Manoj Bajpai) voice-over is introduced which now points to a possibility of a second person narrative commentary. The two “voices” only get tangled as the film progresses. Furthermore, to deal with stories of other characters, the film assumes an omniscient narrative voice. Constant shifts like these, done without much care or purpose, confuse the audience and chip away at the flow of the story.

The story bit too has its share of problems. The crime that Parag Dixit is accused of and lands him in Jail is flimsy. Even if the charge of drug-peddling is serious, there are clear evidences that will speak in his favour and one wonders why it takes so long for him to get them out to the court (a stronger case-building ‘worked backwards’ in the narrative would have made this story more believable). Parag’s inability to utter a single word in his defense can be understood in the beginning as mark of confusion at the quick turn of events, but it soon gets irritating to see an educated man, intelligent enough to be doing well in his career, whimpering inarticulate half-words. Essentially, the protagonist story has only two plot points – his getting in the Jail and his getting out – between the two is a middle that is stretched so thin, it’s nearly invisible.

The plot of Jail is unlayered and uncomplicated. In this, Jail is much like other Madhur Bhandarkar films. Whether it’s Corporate or Fashion he keeps the stories and plots simple and relies on exposes to get the audience hooked. Placing fictitious characters who the audience can indemnify with in factual, thorny worlds has worked well in films like Chandni Bar and Page3. Except in Jail, Bhandarkar takes plain documentation far too seriously, so a good part of the film is squandered in introducing stock characters who neither have a role in the story, nor add any layers to it. This exercise seems all the more pointless because there is no originality in the characters – a cricket bookie, a neta, a cheat, a man who murders for his wife’s honour, an underworld bhai who conducts his business from the prison, and a mandatory gay pair – and all of them talk and behave as you would expect them to (from films you have watched earlier). For long periods nothing happens, you just watch the inmates eating, bathing and washing their clothes. Or worse, you see hordes of them amble aimlessly to provide the ‘passing’ crowd to our main characters who do nothing much either.

Unlike Page3 or Fashion, the director avoids getting his hands dirty. Are crowded cells, bad food and washing your own clothes the biggest issues for a regular inmate? Here there are underworld bhais but they mostly leave the people alone and deal with only those who go asking for help. This jail seems more democratic than the world outside and nobody bothers anybody unnecessarily. The inmates are all nice people (except one Joe D’Souza), victims of circumstances who seem to be having a fairly good time playing carom, telling fortunes and reciting bad poetry!

Neil Nitin Mukesh does a fair job. Manoj Bajpai starts well and would have given the audience something to talk about, but the script fails him. Starting as the sane voice in the prison mayhem he turns into some kind of moral police towards the end (a Bhandarkar trademark by now). He appears at Parag’s side, much like a guardian angel, every time Parag is tempted to go against the authorities. For good or worse, Bajpai character ends up like a mouthpiece of the establishment. Mugdha Godse looks attractive and does the needful. The surprise of the pack is Arya Babbar who comes up with a decent performance. The two odd songs in the film are regrettable.

Realist cinema is valued because it chooses relevant themes, shows us the world we live in and is thought-provoking. One cannot use the style without purpose and justify it as realist cinema. Bhandarkar’s Jail is a faded tapestry of characters, location and situations that hang about aimlessly without striking any real conversation among themselves or with us.

London Dreams

At the fag-end of a season of big-budget films (Aladin, Main aur Mrs Khanna, Blue, Acid Factory, Wanted) where you wondered at the smugness with which filmmakers insult the intelligent audience comes Vipul Shah’s London Dreams. I want to argue that London Dreams is different in that it tells an average story with a conviction and engages its “target” audience well. It is built on the popular, multi-starrer, 70’s films’ format and has no pretension to be world class cinema. The good Bombay films have always had their stories to tell in a robust manner, however simplistically.

London Dreams is the story of Arjun (Ajay Devgn) who has a passion for music and a single-minded devotion to it that borders on obsession. His only other emotional tie is his childhood friend Manjit or Manu (Salman Khan) who doesn’t want to grow up and makes light of his father’s attempts at giving him music lessons. Arjun’s dream is to succeed where his talented grandfather failed, and he devotes his life to this aim as he moves to London from his small Punjab village. His hard work and desperation for success make sure that he gets noticed and appreciated, and within no time he finds himself taking the first few steps towards his dreams. He brings Manu, who is wasting his time in the village, into his band only to make the life-shattering discovery of Manu’s genius. His jealousy and his heartbreak at the unfairness of it all is like that of a studious schoolboy, who toils away with the books the entire year and then watches the school truant walk away with the trophies at the end.

The film is touted to be ripoff of Milos Forman’s Oscar winning Amadeus and plots dosages from Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Abhimaan. Another regular trick in Bollywood films that presently goes without scrutiny, so the valid question is what you do with your ‘inspirations’. And London Dreams does a good job of theirs. The drama held well for me (except in a crucial scene at the Wembley stadium where it falters and almost creates an anti-climax). The film is full of classic Bollywood, broad-brushed, over-the-top dramatic tension that manage to keep the narrative together, with not much subtlety or complexities but that saves the audience from confustions and gives them a sound, palatable dose of their weekly cinema-fix.

I felt the recent Bollywood biggies should at least have strived to get to the standards that London Dreams achieves – story, plots and dialogues that have been (re)worked upon, heartfelt acting, a fair mix and match of characters and their setting and where the narrative moves at a steady, consistent pace. Ajay Devgn and Salman Khan are not exceptional actors, nor do they fit the age of start up pop singers (but when you are conditioned from having seen Rajendra Kumar, Manoj Kumar and Sunny paaji play college students when they were well in their 40s, you accept the need to cast big stars for the budget to be approved). Point is, once there the lead actors have gone all out to do a decent job. (Same can’t be said of Asin. She just fails to be the woman that both the intense Sagar and the eternal flirt Manu fall for.) Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy’s music seems toned down and only Khanabadosh and Barso Re manage to create some magic.

London Dreams is a robustly made, popular Bollywood drama that does not pretend to be otherwise.

Blue

Blue looks like someone successfully sold the idea of a large budget, first all underwater Indian film to the actors and producers, got the money and started without caring for a decent script. The result is a threadbare story with implausible situations with fiendishly tasteless and amateurish treatment.

To give the film a dazzling start, Akshay Kumar (Aarav) and Sanjay Dutt (Sagar) are put on a fishing boat when a shark tears its way into the fishing net. ‘A hole in the net is a hole in the pocket’, they say. And to save the situation they jump into the waters and proceed to tear another hole in the net. There must be other ways of chasing sharks away (or better keeping them away in the first place) but the filmmaker couldn’t resist the idea of having his heroes ride the shark. And when you have two heavyweight stars you have no option but to offer a shark-ride to both, one by one!

The narrative depends on a one-line story of people hunting for treasure underwater, which had to be stretched to film length. Around the time of Indian Independence Britain decides to a send a shipload of treasure to India as a gesture of goodwill (Howzzat!) but then for some unexplained reason the ships drifts westwards all the way to Bahamas before it sank. Now, more than half a century later a businessman, Aarav is looking for the riches for which he needs Sagar, an employee he has befriended. Sagar doesn’t want to do it because of a family tragedy so nearly two-thirds of the film is spent in Aarav trying out bringing Sagar in, which at the end turns out to be nonsensical methods.

The film is full of details that make you laugh with glee. When Sagar is attacked in his house by a gang of goons, he gears up by promptly putting on his sunglasses! And while the gunfire comes from the back, he spreads his arms with pistols in both hands and fires continuously on his sides as the lady love (Lara Dutta) advises, ‘hey why are you guys firing, can’t you all talk for a change’. Then you see the ol’ ship sitting clearly on a plain sea-bed but our heroes had to push and slither through vegetation covers and go into caves to get to it. You roar when you see the sunk ship has its name ‘Lady in Blue’ nailed on the sides as if was a nameplate outside a dentist’s practice! The ship itself is so small, a well-built man would get stuck inside (Sagar often does!). At the end of it the treasure turns out to be a small sandook with gold bangles and plastic artifacts straight from Manoj Kumar’s Kranti (apparently all the treasures that Britisher took away was what they could force out of our womenfolk!).

Most of the ‘underwater-shoot’ budget seems spent on picturising songs with Lara Dutta in skimpy bikinis with the camera moving between her legs and shots of her pants riding up her ass. There is a pointless Kylie Minogue song where our heroes take turns – as in the shark ride – to pick her up like in a Mumbai dance bar.

Much, way too much of money has gone down the drain in this underwater misadventure.
- Padmaja Thakore

Love Aaj Kal: Idealist then, Juvenile today

Love Aaj versus Love Kal’ is the kind of discussion you might enter if you had a couple of hours to kill, and nothing else to discuss. This may appeal to 50+ ‘generation’ with nostalgic reference to the past and perhaps as a way of coming to terms with the ‘fast’ present. In pitting the values of the past against the present one takes on very large issues and yet the results could be vague and inconclusive thus necessitating a nuanced treatment of the subject. Imtiaz Ali’s treatment of Love Aaj Kal is more of the glossy Sunday feature section kind, where ideas are rarely balanced and have conditioned opinions, unsubstantiated comments and forced conclusions.

Jai Vardhan Singh (Saif Ali Khan) has met Meera Pandit (Deepika Padukone) in London. They have had a great time for a couple of years without making any old-fashioned commitments. Then it’s time for Meera to go to India to pursue her career as a restoration artist. Jai’s career dreams can only be fulfilled in San Francisco. And since they are ‘modern’ couple they decide to part ways instead of working out a long distance relationship. So they throw a ‘break-up’ party and go separate ways. Here enters a restaurant owner Sardar (Rishi Kapoor) who is somehow convinced that Jai is in love with Meera and is determined to help him. But Jai is an unwilling disciple and takes his own sweet time to come to a decision. In the mean time he does exactly what they had decided not to do – keep a long distance relationship. And in between Jai’s long and warbled monologues Sardar ji manages to tell his love story – a story of stolen glances, cycle and rickshaw encounters, and rebellion against families – story of a time when professing love meant proposing marriage as it is popularly believed.

The title suggests both a comment on the state of love in the present day and a comparison with how it was in the good old times. If the two love stories were just that – individual stories from different times and cultural backgrounds they would have been kind of cute. There are indeed many good moments in both the story tracks. The problem is that the stories are given representational overtones and the matter worsened by sweeping, generalized observations and statements. It may be acceptable for a character in the film to say that the younger generation is afraid of commitments or that they use their heads not their hearts but can a film with any seriousness draw those conclusions?

The treatment of Raj-Meera relationship is light to the point of being flippant. Their scenes together give a comic quality to the first half of their story. As Jai’s story unfolds one can see certain foolishness in him. And when after much ado he admits to being in love, the error of his ways that was always clear to the audience is finally established for him. Had the treatment of the film remained comic this could have passed, but the film becomes dramatic and finally judgmental on the Bollywood lines that true love happens only once and must be honoured. A man and a woman wanting to pursue their dream careers and not wanting to pursue a trans-continental relationship, their breaking off in an agreeable manner is made to look silly, frivolous, even tragic.

On the other hand, the story of Sardar and Harleen Kaur is treated with uncritical reverence. This story has several beautiful moments but is shown with an authorial tint of romance and idealism – it’s like watching a museum piece, you admire it because it’s really old. The sardar’s story is forcefully coupled with the main story. It appears in conveniently placed conversations between Saif and Rishi Kapoor. Something else that bothered me is the role of the female protagonist Meera. Despite the effort to make her look and behave like a modern, emancipated woman, you don’t get to know what she is thinking. She is never a victim in that none of the decisions are forced on her, and she enjoys the life she has chosen. But on every critical occasion it’s Raj blabbering away while she looks on silently. What is going on in her head? Does she agree with him? Is she as confused as he is? Is she hurt, or is she simply laughing at him? And a non-actor like Deepika doesn’t help the problem either.

Imitiaz Ali continues to show certain talent with dialogues, ‘creating moments’ and extracting natural performances from his cast members. Saif Ali Khan has done very well in playing the sardar. He has worked hard to get the body language right, even if he is less impressive as Raj. The songs in the film are very good although they are not really essential to the narrative of film. The camera and production design make the film look rich and the pace and edit of the film tells you that the director is firmly in control.

Love Aaj Kal is a superior work to Ali’s earlier film, Jab We Met, where the protagonists were near loony; here they are only juvenile.

Book Review - R. K. Narayan by John Thieme

Book Review - Theime, J. 2007 : R. K. Narayan. Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press. 249 pp. ISBN 978-0-7190-5927-8

‘…what does one do with a novelist apparently so easy, whose plots are simple and views nondescript? Is it possible to say anything at all about him without sounding platitudinous?’ asks P.S. Sundaram (135) referring to R.K. Narayan. Critics, at times patronizingly, describe Narayan’s writing as ‘gentle’, ‘quiet’, ‘trustworthy’, ‘limpid’, ‘calm’ and then make almost apologetic comparisons to some Western writer to validate the attention he has received as a pioneer in Indian English writing. Narayan has been compared to writers as different as Chekhov, Shakespeare, Faulkner, Maupassant, O. Henry and others. Even Shashi Tharoor, who finds Narayan’s concerns ‘banal’, his prose ‘predictable’ and his vocabulary and experience ‘shallow’, calls him ‘India’s answer to Jane Austen’ (see Comedies of Suffering). Nonetheless, ever since Graham Greene announced his admiration for Narayan’s work saying, ‘Without him I could never have known what it is like to be an Indian’, his writings, especially his fictional town Malgudi, have become the touchstones of Indianness. Not only are Malgudi and its inhabitants authentic, they also represent what is truly and eternally Indian. And in this ‘Anytown’, as Geeta Hariharan calls it (The Man Who Invented Malgudi), the conflicts are seen to be simple and straightforward, like the one between old and new, between tradition and modernity, between good and evil.

John Thieme makes his way around the familiar pitfalls to bring us to a territory that is not virgin but is certainly less traveled. He begins by deconstructing the monochromic aura of authenticity surrounding Malgudi. He believes the projection of Malgudi as authentic India can only be ‘an expression of a dated Hindu-centered version of Indianness’ (p.2). Using Foucault’s idea of ‘heterotopias’ (those singular spaces to be found in some given social spaces whose functions are different or even the opposite of others) Thieme argues that far from standing for a stable, unified India, ‘the town is the product of a particular coming together of social, religious and above all psychic forces…’ and is ‘messy, ill constructed, and jumbled’. It only offers ‘the ‘compensation’ of apparent meticulousness and perfection’ to the Western readers who are looking to achieve ‘self-definition through contradistinction’. Thieme aims ‘to identify the range of discursive intertexts, as well as some of the social and personal contexts that inform Narayan’s novels… to pinpoint what constitutes their uniqueness’(p. 4-21).

What Thieme considers important for a study of Narayan’s novels is the writer’s cultural background as a Tamil Brahmin. It not only informs the writer’s worldview but also determines the structure of his novels. He concurs with Lakshmi Holmstrom’s suggestion (while admitting it could be reductive) that the development of Narayan’s protagonists usually follows the four asramas (or stages) of the ideal Hindu life and adds that the conflicts in the novels usually result from a quest for the appropriate dharma. And it is Narayan’s cultural background that helps him place the secular and spiritual, political and social all together, without any apparent contradiction, as an ‘aspect of maya, the illusion of existence’. For the purposes of discussion Thieme divides Narayan’s novels conventionally into Early Novels, Middle-period Novels and Late Novels. Perhaps these sections too relate to the varnasramadharma. The early novels are shown to deal with the first stage when the protagonists receive their education and towards the end of it make an attempt to enter the second stage – that of a householder. The middle period novels deal with Grihasthya and Vanprastha while the late novels deal with, among other things, ‘passage into the fourth stage’.

Although he doesn’t put it in so many words, Thieme seems to believe that Narayan wrote with an eye on Western readership. He discusses Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts, The Dark Room and The English Teacher as early novels and calls these ‘Narayan’s most ‘English’ work’ suggesting that the Tamil elements of his background ‘are not accorded a central role…to suit the perceived tastes of the British readers’ (p. 24). Although Thieme sees more Hindu or Tamil elements in the middle-period novels, he assigns it to Narayan’s ‘American ‘discovery’ (that) unleashed the possibility for according them centrality, thanks to the Orientalist vogue for eastern spirituality…’ (p. 102). Earlier in the book he had felt that in changing his name from Rasipuram Krishnaswami Narayan Swami to a very readable (to us Indians too) R. K. Narayan, the author ‘was willing, at least in part, to allow his identity to be trimmed to fit the perceptions about the reading public in England…’ (p. 24). At least in the latter case Thieme’s suggestion seems far fetched, for shortened first and middle names are quite common in India. And Swami (literally, a saint) in the writer’s name would have invited unwanted biographical associations.

The question of politics (or the lack of it) in Narayan’s novels has had varied remarks from critics. On the one hand Greene refers to Malgudi as ‘never ruffled by politics’ and Naipaul says with sympathetic amazement that Narayan ‘was not interested in Indian politics or Indian problems’ (deduced from Narayan’s comment that ‘India will go on’). On the other hand Wyatt Mason refutes Naipaul with passages from the novels to point out that ‘Narayan’s sly political sensibility is always just beneath the surface…’ (see The Master of Malgudi). Thieme himself traces political consciousness and an awareness of the colonial situation all through the early and middle-period novels. He reads ‘an implicit indictment of colonial education’ (p. 61) in The English Teacher, points to the ‘ambivalent response to Empire…hints of alternative ideological positions’ (p. 27) in Swami and Friends, and sees Waiting for the Mahatma ‘arguing for what Edward Said has termed ‘affiliative identifications’ as a replacement for ‘filial’ relationships’ (p. 96-97).

Thieme disagrees with ‘Naipaul’s privileging of the fabulist over the social’ because for him ‘Western social comedy and Hindu fable…are not exclusive in Narayan’. But he also clarifies that most of the social conflicts (between traditional Hindu values and modern alien forces) are primarily psychodrama. ‘The action lies inside the protagonist’s head’ as he tries to find a way to resolve the crisis. The crisis of course is seldom ‘resolved’ and the comic ambivalence adds to multiple perspectives. Thieme makes another very interesting observation about Narayan’s ‘concern with the dialectics of space’, pointing out how the author endows space and specific locations with ‘physical and psychic properties’. Whether it is the layout of the house in The Dark Room, the outhouse in The English Teacher or the difference between Lawley Extension and Kabeer Street, specific houses and locations not only become ‘the sites for both a Brahmin-based view of cleanliness…and for an exploration of an individual’s quest’ but are also an important part of the ‘cultural geography of the novel’ (p. 56).

There is a ‘falling-off’ in Narayan’s talents in his seventies and eighties, believes Thieme, but he does appreciate Talkative Man, one of the late novels of R.K. Narayan. The novel not only questions fictional authority and originary conceptions of self but also suggests that identities are ‘a product of narrativization’.

A discussion on R. K. Narayan would be incomplete without a discussion on language. The unassuming writer himself explained that he wrote in English for no other reason than that he felt comfortable in it. Critics, of course have had differing opinions on how well he used the colonizer’s language. Nandan Dutta believes that the best thing about Narayan’s writing is his language, which is flexible and adaptable. ‘He uses the language of Bible, Shakespeare and American Constitution to an amazing effect’, says Dutta. (see The life of R.K. Narayan) Naipaul expresses his admiration for the originality in Narayan’s language. ‘All languages have their own heritage…Narayan cleansed his English of all these associations, cleansed it of everything but irony’, says Naipaul. Shashi Tharoor takes a completely different stand and comments in his now infamous ‘obituary’ that Narayan’s prose was inadequate, flat, monotonous, clichéd and flippant. ‘At its worst Narayan’s prose was like the bullock-cart: a vehicle that can move only in one gear…’ he says. It is thus surprising that the issue of language does not elicit any significant response from Thieme. Also, one wishes he had included a discussion on Narayan’s short stories since they are set in Malgudi too. To limit the arguments only to Narayan’s novels seems unfair, especially for a book titled ‘R. K. Narayan’ (suggesting an overview of his entire oeuvre).

Nonetheless, these misses do not take away the book’s strengths. Thieme’s purpose is clear, his arguments convincing, and his analyses coherent. Above all Thieme does succeed in presenting Malgudi ‘as a trope for uncertainty, openness and ongoing secular struggle’ (p. 194). This book, especially after the umpteen critical works on Narayan, is fresh and extremely readable.

Padmaja Thakore

References –
Dutta, N. The Life of R. K. Narayan. California Literary Review (March 26 2007), online edition.
Hariharan, G. The Man Who Invented Malgudi. The Times of India (14 May 2001), online edition.
Mason, W. The Master of Malgudi. The New Yorker (18 Dec 2006), online edition.
Naipaul, V. S. The Master of Small Things. Time Magazine (28 May 2001), online edition.
Sundaram, P. S. R. K. Narayan as a Novelist. Delhi:B.R. Pub. 1988.
Tharoor, S. Comedies of Suffering. The Hindu (08 July 2001), online Edition.

This review first appeared in the jounral Confluence (UK) -http://www.confluence.org.uk/2009/06/07/theime-j-2007-r-k-narayan/

Kaminey – Kaminey indeed but not Kaminey Enough

It can be argued that the real test of talent of a good director lies not in his story but in its telling. In this sense, s/he would be like those classical bards who invented not the stories (and almost always borrowed from the existing mythologies) but the forms and styles to put them in. Indeed that’s how good and successful adaptations have earned a special place in cinema including Bhardwaj’s earlier adaptations of William Shakespeare plays.

Kaminey is not an adaptation in the way Maqbool and Omkara were, but the story or its elements are not entirely new. We have seen stories of Bollywood twin brothers – one good the other bad as we have seen gangster films, and, where all of the film is a set up for one big climactic action at the end… and yet, Bhardwaj’s films have a distinct auteur’s stamp that lends a newness to the narrative and a charm to the characters. He has developed a cinematic language that is ‘stylistically realist’ and one that produced amazing results in Omkara and works well enough if not perfectly for Kaminey.

Kaminey is a story of twin brothers Guddu and Charlie (one stammers, the other lisps; heart warming traits used to good effect), and how their fate gets entangled as try to fulfill their dreams. Guddu is the good guy who leads AIDS awareness campaigns and remembers the importance of a condom even in the heat of a personal moment. Charlie believes there are only two ways of making it big – short cut (or ‘fort cut’ as he says it) and chhota [shorter] short cut. So while Guddu is doing the right thing and marrying his pregnant girlfriend, Charlie is taking a chhota fort cut, resulting in a mix-up, involving a local neta, police and druglords, as everyone’s plans go haywire.

The narrative voice is Charlie’s and he keeps up the fun with his lisp and his black pearls of wisdom. Charlie and his small-time dreams (for goods worth 10 crores, he wants just 10 lakhs) keep the human angle alive in his side of the story, which is a dark world with quirky characters. The ‘Bengali bandhu’ that he works for are a welcome variation to the regular Mumbai gangs. It is pleasant to hear Bangla (and later Marathi) without distracting subtitles. Guddu and Sweety’s (Priyanka Chopra) love story keeps up with its directness and good dialogues.

Allthough Vishal usually starts his scenes mid-way into the acts – the pace often feels slow, party because the essential stories at the end of them all are fairly simple, lessening their overall impact. Also in a story about Kamineys [scoundrels], it is a let down that the lead protagonists are not kaminey enough – the sly Charlie is a let down when he proves to be an honorable chap in the end – a man who cared for his father and returns to look out for his brother (bringing us back to the old Bollywood ‘black & white’ perspective and one the director had apparently set out to rewrite). I think it would been more interesting if Charlie would have let the dumb Guddu die and try run away with the money and Sweetie (who too agrees to the proposal). Their Dad instead of stealing a watch should have sold the twins for a watch (and so on). The supporting cast shows its dark sides – for example, there is a hilarious auctioneering of the loot towards the end between the mafia and the police – only one is left wanting for more. If the film reminds you of Quentin Tarantino, it’s only fair, but there is a vital difference. If Tarantino proves that a good story can be told using the kitch and tacky 80s style (Jackie Brown, Death Proof), Kaminey stresses on a director’s individual style in retelling of a formula story but one that was not sufficiently tweaked. [If the climax reminds you of Guy Ritchie, it is because the set up resembles the climax of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.]

Vishal has a talent for bringing out good performances. Just when Shahid Kapur was beginning to get on the nerves with his ‘good boy with a smile pasted across his face’ acts, Kaminey brings out ‘Charlie & Guddu’ in him. He doesn’t quite pull off a Langda Tyagi, but plays Charlie surprisingly well. His Guddu act has a very convincing stammer and towers above the performances he has given so far. But the real surprise and treat of the film is Ms. Priyanka Chopra. This is perhaps the first time that she looks the character and not herself. She plays Sweetie with gusto and her dialogues in Marathi sound very authentic. Amole Gupte as Bhope Bhau (kudos for weaving in the Maratha hate-politics in the storyline) and Shiv Subramaniam as the senior cop are menacingly good.

Tassaduq Hussain joins the director after Omkara to provide a noteworthy camera-work, only here he has saved enormously on the lighting bill and I am not sure if the utter dark frames work really well for the narrative (one might add, Omkara’s was just right). Gulzar and Vishal continue to make for a perfect lyricist-composer duo. So much has been said about Gulzar’s inimitable style that any more would seem superfluous. And yet how can one not talk of a poet who brings back a near-lost vocabulary with ‘dil ka bazaar laga/ dhela, taka, pai baje’ or wonder at the imagination put into the AIDS awareness song – ‘patwar pehan jana, yeh aag ka dariya hai’.

Kaminey is a director’s film and if Vishal Bhardwaaj’s effort is measured in the manner of story-telling alone, he passes the test with respectable grades.

LUCK

Taking a chance on your own luck is passé, betting on other people’s luck is the next evolutionary level. Some people are unbreakable. While others keep dying around them they survive. Reminded me of a Manoj Shyamalan’s film where he narrowed his focus to the physical ‘indestructability’ of some people and gave it a supernatural tweak (others are being reminded of ‘13 Tzameti’, a film I haven’t seen). Soham Shah picks a more general idea of ‘luck’ and brings it to a very materialist plane. The assumption is that if luck can cheat death it can certainly make a lot of money, if not for those that lady luck favours, then for those who spot the lucky ones. The result is a series of death-defying games that could have been edge-of-the-seat entertainment.
Moussa (Sanjay Dutt) lives off his own luck and is a king of sattebazi. He wants to take betting to a new level where human beings are turned into lab rats with ‘lucky’ tags. One of his agents Tamaang (Danny Denzongpa) spots and collects these lucky people while Imran Khan plays a young man with a decent job who needs some quick money to save himself and his mother. He has to resort to theft to get a couple of lackhs but his midas touch opens lottery floodgates for others. Mithun Chakravarty as an army major is very brave but is considered ‘lucky’ to have defied death on numerous occasions on the battlefield. Similarly Chitrashi Rawat’s luck makes even a lame camel win the racei. But the most interesting character is one played by Ravi Kissan. A serial-killer, he’s been set scott-free (‘ba-izzat bari’) because the noose rope broke when he was being hanged (The film cites the law that one cannot be hanged twice!). And then there are several nonIndian participants whose backgrounds the film does not go into (why should we be interested!).

These lucky “victims” begin a series of games where some will be eliminated, literally by death, at each stage. Gamblers all over the world bet through the internet. There are a couple of spine-chilling games that shock and the action scenes are often not bad. But between the action there is a lot of ‘Dus-style’ poor-taste exhibition of the film’s budget – motorcades with flashy cars, men in dark suits and dark glasses marching in slo-mo, helicopters landing on rooftop cafes etc. These destroy whatever interest or anticipation the next game might have generated. And the last straw is the last action sequence which makes you squirm with its B-grade 70’s Bollywood style.
There are problems galore at the level of the script and themes. The very idea of luck is amorphous and undefined. If it just means cheating death, Imraan would not be on the initial list. If luck makes you win money, why are all the lucky people without it? And if it means you are generally lucky, at everything, then there are more questions than one can answer. In any case would you consider yourself lucky if the money you badly needed to save lives, came not through lottery tickets but through illegal means and by killing others? Another big problem is the treatment which lacks the grit that would keep you hooked and makes the film look like an expensive and rigged reality show.

Sanjay Dutt has played ‘bhai’ for so long, he’s gotten numb. He thinks heaving his shoulders from side to side is called performance. He is the weakest link performance-wise and could be the reason why the entire plan looks fake. Imran Khan seems ill-placed while Shruti Haasan looks good but needs to hone her diction. Chitrashi Rawat’s tomboyish act could have been a little restrained. If her lisp is not natural it was done well. So at the end of it the only people who give decent performances are Danny and Mithun and to some extent Ravi Kishan!

After a poor show like Kaal, Soham Shah has realized the importance of a story and a plot, the latter is nearly overdone. But he needs to better his art of scriptwriting. Why else would characters sound from 80s Kader Khan? Characters should speak credible lines instead of churning out bad one-liners with assumed punch lines. Camerawork and editing are good and Allan Amin’s action is on the whole good except the climax sequences. The background score is hellishly loud.

I doubt if Luck set out to be good cinema, but it certainly could have been a decent masala film. The film fails on quite a few counts but it’s mostly the script and treatment that does it in.
- Padmaja Thakore

Gulaal

Gulaal tarts with a rabble-rousing speech from Dukey Bana (Kay Kay Menon). Bana complains of treachery at the hands of the post-Independence Indian governments. The Rajput kings gave up their estates and royalties in support of a united India and in the process lost both power and wealth. And now the same political class that took away their powers is mismanaging the country. So to save the country (at least their part of it) it is imperative to form a separate Rajputana state. It is this regional variety of patriotism that is being witnessed by Dileep Singh (Raja Chaudhary), a naïve man who has come to Rajpur to study law.

Dileep Singh is the proverbial fence-sitter but gets dragged into the murky world of campus violence when some senior students beat, undress and lock him up with a woman lecturer, Anuja (Jesse Randhawa), facing similar predicament. Dileep’s house-mate Rananjay (Abhimanyu Singh, in a terrific performance) comes to his rescue. A cynical prince rebelling against the debauchery of his father by living an even more decadent life, Rananjay provides an ideal counter-point to the adolescent character of Dileep and the hollowness of macho-sounding Dukey Bana. He accepts to stand for the post of General Secretary (GS) in the college elections (whatever happened to the Presidents in a Union?), while Dileep hangs around him and gets introduced to the dark world of campus politics. Once Rananjay is bumped off before the end of first half, we get frequent narrative shifts – from college to Rajputana to household to “kotha” politics – that is tad disorientating and you start looking for the narrative points.

The marriage of campus politics with the fight for Rajputana results in an unconvincing drama. Dukey Bana calls for separate state but never leaves the dungeon where group of men in gulaal-covered faces gather listening to his speeches. That the erstwhile royals depend on siphoning off the local college’s annual festival funds to fight the Indian state seems an outlandish idea. Nonetheless, serving the director’s purpose of combining the college and Rajput politics is a brother-sister duo – illegitimate children of the local Maharaja (and father of Rananjay). The sister (Ayesha Mohan in a confident debut) runs for GS in college while the brother (Aditya Srivastava) is a contender for the post of Senapati (presently held by Dukey Bana) in the Rajputana struggle. Though convenient and contrived, the brother-sister coup through sex and violence is the most interesting part of the second half of the film.

The stories of college and Rajputana politics do not gel together well (did I say that before?). Also, the politics behind the Rajputana claim is questionable. Dukey Bana argues that ‘sometimes loving one’s country means going against its own government’. But Dukey’s is actually a separatist call where patriotism is limited to one’s community and not one’s country and the government-in-power is illegitimate and thus not one’s own in the first place. Another problem I faced was in identifying with Dileep Singh. The film’s inspiration is credited to the song from Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa, Ye duniya agar mil bhi jaaye to kya hai. Still I feel it was a slip-up to model Dileep Singh’s character after Guru Dutt’s. Dileep’s poker-faced naivette and the dogged stupidity about himself – as against intellectual detachment or cynicism – fails to get sympathy when he is cheated by his comrades and girlfriend. This character invites being a ‘natural victim’ of university ragging, masochistic politics and betrayals in love. One is not surprised when our protagonist is surprised by the worldly ways of the ‘adults’ around him. Ironically, in a classical la Devdas self-pitying moment (Kashyap here eschewing the modernity of Dev D.), the dying Dileep drags himself to Anuja’s doorsteps who truly loved him.

There are half-a-dozen other characters who justifiably attract your attention for their fine performance and/ or presence (Deepak Dobriyal, Jyoti Dogra, Mukesh Bhatt, Mahie Gill [she does look like Tabu, without her baggage], among others). There is often a mix of surreal (characters from Ramayan walking out of men’s hostel, a mute ardhanareshwar, a lone house in the middle of nowhere), and psychedelic imageries (courtesy: Rajiv Ravi’s camera and Wasiq Khan’s production design), with gritty & realist style (violent ragging and gun-dominated politics on the campus). The psychedelic, surrealist and the realist keep alternating for the length of the film. All of these elements render the film with a very interesting palette but also fill the story with lot of clutter, chaff and banter. This treatment is puzzled and complicated rather than complex and studied. And there is the Shakespearean ‘fool’ (Piyush Mishra) who keeps telling the audience the truth. As a one-act piece, Piyush Mishra is in excellent form singing away the story of disenchantment in post-independence India and also the wider world. But the film’s narrative seldom rises to the ideas he versifies.

It might seem Anurag Kashyap had too many things and ideas on his mind and for some reason felt compelled to put it all in one film.

Revolutionary Road

Revulutionary Road is the story of the Wheeler couple, Frank and April (Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet), living in a Connecticut suburb during the 1950’s. Sam Mendes’ film based on Richard Yates cult, eponymous book, however, is also a story that goes beyond the specifications of time and place to unravel the disappointment and disillusionment of an entire generation in post war America, where under the sheen of happy marriages, lied failed dreams of love and fulfillment.

The Wheelers have believed they are special people, and so have others who know them. They rise above the social circle they inhabit as an ‘ideal’ couple. But one look at an ordinary day in this couple’s life reveals the dreariness, frustration and the bitterness of misplaced expectations. Frank Wheeler spends his days toiling at the one job he had never wanted and April Wheeler pretends to be a working actress from brief appearance in ‘community plays’. This is when April Wheeler looks for clues in the past when they were happier. She remembers the idealism and confidence they had in not so distant past and a belief in the endless possibilities in life. It occurs to her that they abandoned those possibilities to settle for the safety and convenience of conventions. She convinces Frank to make a new start by moving to Paris. More than being a geographical location, Paris comes to symbolize the revolutionary and the idealistic.

As the couple announces its intention of relocating to Paris we see the interesting reactions from their friends – they vary from incredulous to envious. But one thing is clear, none of them will follow the Wheelers to “Paris”. The society fights its hopelessness by deifying the Wheelers, and avoid examining their own failures by looking up to the couple. However, a leap of this sort – a return to the idealism of youth – is not easy, and cracks in the Wheelers’ plan begin to show. Frank Wheeler loves the freedom the ‘move-to-Paris’ decision gives him but he has inhabited the present dreary world for too long. A raise in position and salary makes the present world immensely attractive to him. But his promotion will not erase his wife’s desolation. The interests of Frank and April Wheeler clash and the result is tragic, even baffling.

The director’s mouthpiece is a young Mathematician (Michael Shannon) who is ‘mad’ by society standards. Not only is he aware of the hopeless emptiness in his own life but he also appreciates the same awareness and the will to fight it in the Wheelers. He feels angry and frustrated at Frank’s chickening out and his (also probably the director’s) sympathy for April tilts the film in her favour leaving the common man’s struggle for ‘regular, safe’ life less sympathetic. But in the end it is not important as to who was right for both suffer equally.

The film’s tagline says ‘How do you break free without breaking apart?’ Every now and then people try taking the revolutionary road and the result is often disastrous. Failure is human predicament. People fail and are quickly erased from collective memories. The Wheelers become one such couple.

Revolutionary Road showcases Sam Mendes’ strength for dissecting complexities of family life (after American Beauty). Also noteworthy is that he opted for an intimate drama which was the call of the story than a mega-budget film that the stars, the author and he could have easily attracted. Kate Winslet proves that her nominations and wins for the numerous awards are well deserved. Leonardo di Caprio delivers a controlled performance and just about stands up to Winslet’s burning angst and raging histrionics.