Hasee toh Phasee: Redefining Romance

Parineeti Chopra’s livewire Meeta doesn’t become the victim of what initially looks like a ‘taming of the shrew’ story, while Sidharth Malhorta’s charming Nikhil doesn’t make of her the demand to conform. Hasee toh Phasee is enchanting in the sense that it gives Bollywood romance that lovable twist which was indeed long overdue. Set against a big fat Indian wedding and a herd of annoying relatives that cannot be done away with, Hasee toh Phasee pleases by critiquing what it seems to exalt. It’s indeed one of the very first commercial Hindi films to foreground the hegemony of the family and the pressure it unnecessarily exerts on those who are different. I am absolutely delighted that Karan Johar, the devoted perpetrator of lachrymose family dramas in Bollywood, has broken out of that bubble world to debunk what he had been promoting so far. It’s indeed praiseworthy that Johar is trying to break out of his kind of cinema, as already attested by his endorsement of Lunch Box, last year. Two other names, Anurag Kashyap (who has also penned the dialogues) and Vikramaditya Motwane, who have joined hands with Vivek Agarwal and Johar to produce this film, might give you an idea that Hasee toh Phasee is no run of the mill Bollywood rom-com. Director Vinil Mathew’s choice of title, however, seems a tad misleading. Hasee toh Phasee sounds frivolous; but, the film has a profundity which the title doesn’t give the slightest inkling of. 

Nikhil’s appeal lies not in his looks (as was expected from the devastatingly debonair Sidharth Malhotra), but in his integrity of character. Malhotra subtly downplays his Greek God charm to get into the skin, heart and soul of the character which is truly modern, progressive, yet deeply rooted. No! Not in traditions. Nikhil’s strength as well as vulnerability comes from his mature take on relationships and his deep humaneness. And that makes him the most desirable Valentine this year! Meeta’s queerness, which strikes you at the very outset, is sustained throughout the film, though she does change into flashy ghaghra-cholis once or twice and dances to typical Punjabi wedding songs. Her difference from other Bollywood rom-com heroines is that her tomboyishness does not come in her way of wooing a man and make him fall in love with her. Meeta, in a way, marks a remarkable transition of the conception of the desirable woman Bollywood has so far projected: she is no Anjali of Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998), who learns to muster feminine grace and seductively dance with an unruly anchal flying in the breeze, to win the man of her dreams. The most important twist comes in the end. Watch out for the little epilogue at the airport. 

While in the entire ensemble cast manages to keep you at raptures all through, it is Parineeti who takes the cake with her comic timing. Sidharth’s suavity is in perfect rhythm with Mr. Goodness act he has to put up, and he performs with rare panache. Adah Sharma, the dolled-up heroine of the small screen, brings into her performance the right degree of peevishness in order to appear irritable. The music is a slight letdown, but that does not really matter since this film, unlike other romantic comedies, does not depend on good music to carry forward the plot. 

One of the best Valentine gifts that have ever come from the Bollywood stable, Hasee toh Phasee is truly a ‘come fall in love’ experience, that also marks Hindi cinema’s coming of age.

Dedh Ishqiya: Exploring unfamiliar terrains of a difficult ishq

Darkly humorous and unabashedly passionate, Abhishek Chaubey’s Dedh Ishqiya explores unfamiliar terrains of a difficult love where men are abandoned and women triumph, notwithstanding the extended drama of prevarication they resort to. The secret of this volatile tale of love, sex and dhoka is hidden in the title itself: Dedh Ishiqiya! The poetic cadence of the title is sustained throughout the film through shayari, kawali, thumri, and mujra, but the symbolic import of it is realized only in the end, when the audience is left agape at the retreating figures of the two women, victorious in their mission of love. The ‘dedh’ captures the liminal space between ‘singlehood’ and ‘coupledom’, challenging accepted notions of loneliness and romantic pairing, subverting conventional ideas of being in love. The supposedly ‘single’ Begum Para’s elaborate swayambhar is only a bait for the two rogues on the run (Naseeruddin Shah as Ifthekhar and Arshad Warsi as Babban); they swallow the bait and fall through the trapdoor into a subterranean chamber of secret desires, only to discover that their final predicament in this dangerous game is nothing but death. While the feisty Ifthekhar charts out the six stages of being in love - dilkashi, uns, mohobbat, akidat, ibadat, junoon – he doesn’t know that his object of desire (Begum Para) is not a fellow traveller in this odyssey. Maybe she is, but with a different companion. By the time he realizes that he is compelled to add the seventh stage, and that is maut! Dedh Ishqiya reignites the fire of passion in which men burn with desire, but are dismissed as unwanted. 

Begum Para’s Mehmuhdabad seems to be trapped in a time warp, although iPhones and LCD TVs have broken through the barriers of the purana haveli which harbours some dark secrets. Although reminiscent of Umraon Jaan and Pakeezah in look-and-feel, Dedh Ishqiya reverses victimhood narratives to reclaim women as wielding immense power in using men to their advantage. What strikes the men as devastating is the discovery that they are mere puppet-actors in a drama, the plot of which they thought was designed and controlled by them. The suspense is built up from the very outset, the climax of which is reached in a silhouetted passion play, when the men feel betrayed, fooled and defeated. In this volatile drama of passion, betrayal and evil scheming, ishq appears to be a complete anti-thesis of its poetic renditions, but is reinstated as inviolable in the end. Ismat Chugtai’s controversial story ‘Lihaaf’ (The Quilt) is appropriated by Darab Farooqi to create an intense tale of homoerotic desire which offsets received notions of love and sexuality decreed by the hetero-patriarchal system. The film ends with the women achieving ultimate freedom, completely rejecting the company of men. Humri Atariya Pe resonates with this sense of freedom, when Begum Para dances like a dream under a specifically female gaze. 

Naseeruddin Shah as Ifthekhar alias Khalujaan effortlessly shifts between a seasoned ‘picaro’ and a sensational poet, enacting every emotion almost flawlessly. Arshad Warsi balances frivolity and intensity with rare panache. Huma Khureshi brings to Muniya a perfect blend of confidence, evil and faithfulness. Madhuri Dixit actualizes Begum Para with the charm of an enchantress, at times very low-key and even dispassionate. She is not exactly the femme fatal of Ishqiya; rather she brings to her performance a sense of resignation, which occasionally, albeit rarely, recedes to emit sparks of vivacity. 

Films like Dedh Ishqiya are indeed rare, and thanks to Vishal Bharadwaj and Abhishek Chaubey for venturing into terrains not often visited on the Indian screen. The music is a slight letdown, given the lyrics are penned by Gulzar and scored by Bharadwaj; but, Jaagve Saari Raina choreographed by Birju Maharaj continues to linger in your head long after the film is over. 

Sunglass: Rituparno’s magic lenses and what wasn’t so magical after all

Shot in 2005, Sunglass (Taak Jhaank in Hindi) never saw a theatrical release during Rituparno Ghosh’s lifetime, and the grapevine has it that the filmmaker had a row with Planman Motion Pictures, which held up the film until the state government intervened and premiered it at the 19th Kolkata International Film Festival. Whenever I asked him about Sunglass, Rituparno was visibly annoyed, and asserted, ‘I am not bothered whether the film is released or not; I have outgrown that phase of my career long back…I do not make such films anymore…’ Yet, Sunglass is his most light-hearted film; his sense of humor, which informs many of his serious films, imbues almost every frame with a delightfulness which is indeed rare. Towards the end of his career, Rituparno was gradually shifting into darker themes and controversial subjects and the ‘merrymaking’ in Sunglass appeared escapist to him. Discourses on death, loneliness, betrayal, parallel sexualities, and the pains of inhabiting the periphery undercut his later films in such a way that happy endings had begun to appear much too Utopian to him...

Read more: 

http://www.cinemachronicles.in/rituparno-ghoshs-sunglass-review/

Mishawr Rawhoshyo: Mummified in Mediocrity

Mishawr Rawhoshyo! The exoticism and thrill embedded in the title ends in the title itself. Srijit Mukherjee’s latest is chic and smart, but lacks the edginess of a thriller. The disappointment grows steadily having set in at the very outset. The unforgivably miscast Prosenjit Chatterjee’s atrocious English and pretentions of intellectualism grate on the nerve from the very first scene which is, however, occasionally alleviated by Aryann (Santu), the only saving grace of the film. Prosenjit is the last person any Bengali can imagine in the garb of Kakababu, and he adds insult to injury to the character by performing it rather badly. In fact, the film should have been called ‘Chokher Bali’ or ‘Eyesore’, the title alluding to Prosenjit’s awful performance and even more agonizing screen presence. The biggest flaw is that Santu appears brighter and more intelligent than Kakababu, and the audience all along misses with a sigh a younger Soumitra Chatterjee or any other intelligent yesteryear actor who could have essayed the role with panache. Mukherjee could have cast some Bollywood actor, rather than let his film sink. Prosenjit cannot be cast in every other role; he might have a mass appeal (but am sure he was never popular with the educated metropolitan audience), and he does not have the polish or learning to perform such literary characters like Kakababu. It’s blasphemy to cast him! Just note how Prosenjit appears like a fish out of water in the JNU campus! You cannot but feel sorry for the poor chap. Sunil Gangopadhyay must be turning in his grave. 

If Prosenjit wasn’t causing enough anguish, Mukherjee brought in his own interpretation to the original story and linked it up with the revolution in Egypt. The idea was indeed novel, but the execution is terribly confused, perfunctory and shallow. No serious research seems to have gone into it, and the lack is glaringly visible in every single frame. In trying to contemporize the story, the filmmaker forgot to work on the mystery bit, and failed big time in packing the right kind of punch to let the thrill build-up. He ended up making an unpardonable mockery of the Egyptian Revolution. Despite Indraneil’s honest effort, the revolution which is in its rudimentary stage fails to appeal to the audience’s sympathy, for the filmmaker only skims the surface of it, not bothering to plunge deep.

The film actually tends to push you out of the theatre every time Sujan and Swastika Mukherjee appear on the screen in their pitiable middeclass-ness. No adjective can actually convey how agonizing they are; in fact, they have done more harm to the film than Prosenjit! And be prepared to be tortured by Santu's middleclass nyaka romance with a dolled-up nyaka girlfriend. Whatever it is, it is tortuous all along!

Mishawr Rawhoshyo, is totally rawhoshyo-less, and would remain in people’s memory for being the first Bengali film which had given plenty of screen time to the Sahara Desert. That would be its only claim to fame!  What Mukherjee has forgotten is that people have access to much better ‘detective’ films produced across the globe, thanks to the internet, and films like Mishawr Rawhoshyo can only cause embarrassment to the highly informed audience of the present day. Mediocrity being Tollywood’s forte, nothing could be expected from these directors; and Bengali Cinema would continue to revel in shoddiness, occasionally looking back nostalgically to a bygone of era of watchable films. 

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Photo courtesy: en.wikipedia.org

Source: https://www.google.co.in/search?q=mishor+rahasya&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=iF5jUrxohoysB_aSgcgL&sqi=2&ved=0CAcQ_AUoAQ&biw=1366&bih=664#facrc=_&imgdii=_&imgrc=U2PJWStONN-EqM%3A%3BpPHL8UytlQG3rM%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fupload.wikimedia.org%252Fwikipedia%252Fen%252Fthumb%252Fb%252Fb2%252FMishawr_Rahasya.jpg%252F220px-Mishawr_Rahasya.jpg%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fen.wikipedia.org%252Fwiki%252FMishawr_Rawhoshyo%3B220%3B274

Accessed on 19 October 2013.

The truth about Satyanweshi

The title of this review might appear arrogant for it seems to make a rather lofty claim of unveiling the truth about Rituparno Ghosh’s last film Satyanweshi. What truth needs to be told about this film given to truth-searching itself? The truth which a certain segment of the audience seems to have missed and the truth which might provide a counter-discourse to the mass-slandering the film has been an undeserving victim of. 

 
My first question: Ghosh had made practically unwatchable films, yet the media went out of its way to praise them. Example: Sob Choritro Kalponik. Example: Khela. Example: The Last Lear. Particularly the local media! Why?  Because, Rituparno Ghosh wielded such power that nobody seemed to have the guts to confront it? Now that he is no more, the slander that was long overdue is being unrestrainedly showered on a film which does not really deserve such harsh disparagement. I can vouch that had he been alive, Satyanweshi would have been, indubitably, espoused by the media as the best Byomkesh adaptation on screen! And such celebration, I would contend, would not have been conceited. Despite its many flaws, Satyanweshi is undeniably the best Byomkesh adaptation, although unfortunately, Ghosh did not have any reputed precedent to compete with: Satyajit Ray’s Chiriyakhana is pathetic, while the two Anjan Dutta films are better forgotten than remembered. 

What is remarkable about the film is that it commendably complicates Sharadindu’s Chora Bali which has a rather weak plot. In fact, Ghosh weaves together two totally unconnected plot strands of the original novel to unravel the complex domestic reality of a feudal family of Balwantpur, whereby a simple whodunit story acquires an intriguing dimension. A rather predictable murder-motive, which unfortunately, becomes evident only after a few pages in the original novel, is located within the larger discourse of patriarchal tyranny and its complicity with an economic base on which human relationships are founded or defined by. The death of the murderer in Satyanweshi is also the death of the tyrannical father, although his death does not assure agency to the daughter left behind. Both Alaka (Arpita Chatterjee) and Lila (Anandi Ghose), the first apparently powerful and the other, totally powerless, turn out to be unsuspecting victims of a system, rather than the brutal conspiracy of an individual. The women, Alaka and Lila, notwithstanding their opposing class positions, end up being (non)actors in a narrative designed and carried forwarded by a master-plotter. Harinath (Anirban Ghosh) is victimized as well, for having unwittingly entered the plot and impeding it, by revealing himself as a potential threat to the finely orchestrated conspiracy that was underway. Immersed in books and music and extraordinarily meticulous about his duties, Harinath offers a counterpoint to a more aggressive masculinity that must always control and eliminate any threat that impedes its mode of operation. 

Sharadindu’s simplistic Chora Bali, therefore, develops into a layered narrative of power dynamics that work within a class-gender nexus. The film demands painstaking attention from the viewer for the resolution is built-up through dialogue, not much through visuals (which is and has always been a significant drawback of Ghosh films); the activity of watching Satyanweshi is quite akin to reading a book or listening to a story, but that does not mar the experience of watching the film, for the entire film is more of an exercise of the mind for Byomkesh (Sujoy Ghosh), rather than action in the literal sense of the term. Please note how Ghosh very skillfully engineers a pun in the name of the site of action, that is Balwantpur, (on which Sharadindu does not even dwell) to connect it to the main plot. 

The film carries Ghosh’s auteuristic signature in its sets, costumes, music, mannerisms of characters, obsession with the film industry and deployment of intertexts. Like all other Rituparno Ghosh films, Satyanweshi remains a narrative-driven chamber drama (although North Bengal was the location for a major part of the film) and evokes the characteristic bourgeois nostalgia for feudal opulence (as is evident in period films). Through the deployment of intelligent intertexts (Bees Saal Baad, The Hound of the Baskerville, Chiriyakhana, etc.), Ghosh makes an attempt to place the film in the tradition of detective or mystery fiction, which again, has been a common practice with the filmmaker, who has often spoken back to the tradition of literature and cinema to which his own work is a new addition. What’s partially new is his experimentation with non-actors --- Sujoy Ghosh, Anindya Chattopadhyay, Sibaji Bandopadhyay, Anandi Ghose and Sanjay Nag! All of them are believable, although Sujoy’s stiffness comes across too glaringly in certain scenes. 

Now for the flaws: there are indeed far too many, few very silly ones, unexpected of a Rituparno Ghosh film. The film forgets to elaborate the conditions of the will left by the deceased king of Balwantpur on which the main plot is significantly based. It makes the characters speak in a language which sounds too contemporary; especially, the English words and phrases the characters use seem totally out of tune with the time in which the film is set; it’s ridiculous that Himanshu (Indraneil Sengupta) is taken to the dilapidated building blindfolded; wasn’t it dark enough for him to implement his extraordinary skill? Why does Kaligati (Sibaji Bandopadhyay) refuse that he has indeed removed two Ayurveda books from the library? Byomkesh and Ajit (Anindya Chattopadhyay) set a few questions independently and then compare them in order to solve the mystery of Harinath’s sudden disappearance. Surprisingly, the questions come typed on designer chits! When did they have the time to have the questions typed out and that too in a format that could only be possible with computers? There are far too many flaws which I refrain from cataloguing here. But, what I did not understand is that how is it possible that none, but one person in the entire estate is aware of the exact location of the quicksand, if it had always been there? The novel too provides no answer to this. 

Finally, I would like to raise this question: can we call Satyanweshi a Rituparno Ghosh film at all? It’s an incomplete work after all, completed by his team members. I have seen him shuffling scenes time and again till the last day before the film released! Had he been present on the editing table many flaws could have been eliminated. Had he supervised the dubbing neither Sujoy nor Indraneil would have spoken such accented Bangla. Had he seen the final cuts, he would have reshot entire scenes, for example the picnic sequence. Nothing looks more staged than that. But, Ghosh cannot be forgiven for such terribly constricted frames, even in outdoor scenes! Why is a huge palatial mansion reduced into a cramped corridor, a library, a temple and three rooms? Why isn’t the enormity of the palace at Balwantpur put to use in full to space-out the layered narrative? Why does Ghosh give the feel that it’s a television drama? Ghosh had indeed never learned to use the endless possibilities of the cinematic canvas! Perhaps he did not want to. Given that Satyanweshi is a Shree Ventakesh Films production, Ghosh wasn’t certainly working on a shoe-string budget to confine his camera within the walls of over-furnished rooms.  

Yet, despite its many flaws, the film is highly watchable. It would be unjust to dismiss the film as bad! No it isn’t! And, do not miss out the very subtle, almost invisible homoerotic strain that undercut the Byomkesh-Ajit relationship.

 
Image courtesy: SVF website.