Filmi Geek

The Dirty Picture (2011)

Let me get this out of the way: it is not easy for me to be objective and intellectual about this movie. The "frankly lesbian perspective" that earned me a mention in a recent Outlook India article also has me fairly smitten with Vidya Balan, and whatever else The Dirty Picture gets right or wrong, it offers a whole heck of a lot for anyone in that stricken condition. 

Reshma (Vidya Balan) flees from the stifling prospect of life as a village wife to the big city of Madras, carrying nothing but a tin of sugar and her dream of becoming a film star.  She wins her first job through her willingness to dance a raunchy number that no other dancer will take on.  Her steamy performance earns her the notice of Selva Ganesh (Rajesh Sharma), a producer who anglicizes her name to "Silk" and casts her in an item opposite her hero, an aging A-list star named Suryakant (Naseeruddin Shah).  Silk wins Suryakant's support more by her willingness to sleep with him than anything she does on screen.  But the public is captivated by Silk's sizzling sensuality, and soon she ascendant as a huge star in her own right.  Not everyone is equally impressed, though. A director with artistic aspirations, Abraham (Emraan Hashmi), is disgusted by Silk and everything she represents about the industry's taste for banal and cheap entertainment.  Naila (Anju Mahendru), an older writer who makes her living tearing stars apart in the gossip rags, aims her pen squarely at Silk.  Even Suryakant himself becomes threatened by Silk's volatility and success.  And Suryakant's younger brother, Ramakant (Tusshar Kapoor), is torn between his own fascination with Silk, and his desire to break into screenwriting, which drives his dangerously sycophantic loyalty to his brother. 

I watched this movie in continuous dialogue with myself.  Feminist, analytical, serious Carla pondered the difficult question whether a movie could offer commentary on the exploitation of female sexuality without being exploitative itself.  Lesbian horn-dog Carla was just having too much fun - and was too busy wiping drool off her chin - to give much thought to anything.

Feminist, analytical, serious Carla (FASC):  The Dirty Picture has a very fine line to walk.  Everyone knows that the cardinal rule of moviemaking is "show it, don't tell it."  If The Dirty Picture wants us to understand that Silk is lascivious and uninhibited, that she takes her performances beyond the bounds of good taste, the movie has no choice but to show Silk doing just that.  And so, there is a justification for letting the camera linger on Vidya Balan's cleavage, or caress her throat as she throws her head back in simulated climax -

Lesbian horn-dog Carla (LHDC):  You're talking about that scene in the red negligée, with the rose, right?  That was flat hot.  I mean, the bow-chick-a-wow-wow music is beyond cheesy - but what can I say?  Everything Vidya does, just plain works on me. 

FASC (casting the side-eye at her alter ego):  As I was saying, it is arguably the right way to make this movie - rather than just telling the viewer that Silk is screen-meltingly sensual, do everything you can to make the viewer feel just what  audiences of Silk's movies would have felt.

LHDC: Well, in that case I think it was very effective.  Although, I might have to watch it three or four more times, just to be completely sure.  Here, let me cue up that negligée scene again ...

FASC: ... right.  The trouble is that once the movie goes down that road, it is inevitably using the appeal of that sexuality to sell itself.  And so the movie's criticism of that kind of exploitation runs the risk of ringing hollow at points.  Leaving that internal contradiction aside, though, The Dirty Picture does a largely adequate job of pointing up the hypocrisy of an industry that worships male stars far beyond their worth, but chews up and spits out girls like Silk.

LHDC:  If I got hold of a girl like Silk, I might well devour her, but I wouldn't chew her up or spit her out...

FASC: Ha, ha, funny.  At any rate, the movie's efforts as highlighting the industry's double standards are well-rendered, if a bit literal and ham-fisted.  (It should be noted that while the movie is nominally about the Madras movie industry, the implicit commentary applies just as well to Bombay.)  For example, there is a Suryakant shooting in which he plays a college student while a woman half his age plays his mother - a woman, we are told, who had played his heroine the previous year.  The audience gets to nod knowingly at this "it's funny because it's true" jab at the movie industry - but that's all there is.  We all know this industry practice well, and The Dirty Picture's commentary on it doesn't really add any new insight.  Suryakant is a bit of a buffoon, but he is treated as a God, sucked up to by nearly everyone from his brother on up to the apparently powerful producer Selva Ganesh - but it isn't clear why he wields such power.  It might just be that money talks, and Suryakant wields power as long as he puts butts in seats - but even so, the script muddies that message, strongly suggesting that over-the-hill Suryakant can't fill theaters without Silk's skinshow.

The movie's reflection of the symbiotic relationship between stars and the reporters who get famous by dragging stars through the mud is rendered with a little more subtlety.  Naila understands this relationship completely, and holds Silk in much higher regard than Silk, barreling through her own arc at runaway speed, understands.  Indeed, Naila is the movie's closest thing to a feminist voice; she views Silk's courage with admiration, and watches her decline with sadness and a true understanding of its inevitability.

LHDC:  You haven't mentioned that song yet ... 

FASC:  Everyone has already seen the song.

LHDC:  But it's awesome!   It's fun, it makes me want to run off and watch old Southern movies.  And it makes me want to be Naseeruddin Shah.  Oh wow ... Vidya is completely yummy in it ...

 

FASC (with an exasperated sigh):  Yes, yes, it's a very good song.  It captures Silk's rise to stardom in a fun montage of costumes and sets, interspersed with delightfully styled fictional movie posters and scenes of her affair with Suryakant as it heats up.  It's also a nice little microcosm of the dilmma that The Dirty Picture faces of illustrating the expoitation of Silk without simultaneously exploiting Vidya Balan. 

And the best way for The Dirty Picture to redeem itself for being a little exploitative would be to give us a clear, compelling picture of Silk's inner life.  But this is where it falls The Dirty Picture falls a little short.  At times it isn't clear what drives Silk and her peculiar mix of strength and desperation.  This is through no fault of Vidya Balan, who does everything she can to add dimensionality to this weakest aspect of the script, and gives a flawless performance.

LHDC: Flawless is the right word for Vidya.  How about that bathtub scene?  And that smile, wow.  And how about the smoldering looks she gives in that lovely "Ishq sufiana" song?

FASC (rolling eyes):  Not now!  As I was saying, Vidya clearly has a coherent mental model of her character, and does as well as an actor can do at conveying that model to the audience, given that the script paints her inconsistently and a little mysteriously.  For example, for much of the movie, Silk is willfully oblivious to insults hurled at her by the press, until a comparison to the mythological Draupadi - a jab at her for apparently having affairs with both of the brothers Suryakant and Ramakant - causes an abrupt about-face, an explosion of rage in which she burns years worth of magazines and clippings.  Has Silk been secretly sensitive to the invective all along, or has something about the Draupadi taunt in particular gotten to her in a way that the rest of the trash-talking did not?  The script doesn't make this clear - but I think Vidya has a theory of Silk that she wants to make the audience understand. 

LHDC:  It is a theory that includes much chest-heaving and lip-licking, and clearly requires a great deal of careful study.

FASC (clearing throat loudly):  And Vidya does a marvelous job with Silk's slide, in the second half of the film, into exhaustion and despair.  The script is a little heavy-handed, but Vidya shows impressive range as she navigates Silk's almost bipolar swings from panicky impulsiveness (stopping traffic by dancing on the hood of a car to disrupt Naila's star-studded party) to lonely melancholy (drinking herself into a stupor alone in her enormous bungalow).  Some of Vidya's finest scenes are Silk's least glamorous - such as late in the movie, as Silk sits on the floor of her living room with Abraham, bloated and without makeup, browsing through the photographic remnants of the best days of her career.

Another heavy-handed scene that is elevated by Vidya's performance is the staging of the song "Honeymoon ki raat,"(*) in which Silk faces down a young, naive rival (Arya Banerjee) for her position as the sexiest star of Madras movies.  Silk trips the younger girl and strikes a triumphant pose.  But rather than cheering for her, the onlookers are somewhere between horrified, amused, and embarrassed for her.  The expression on Silk's face as awareness dawns is a marvelously complex mixture of fear, desperation, rage.

So, whatever The Dirty Picture's warts - and it does have some - Vidya Balan deserves all the praise she received for her rendering of Silk.  The strength of her performance brings Silk to life with depth and (as much as she can) coherence.  Vidya Balan, more than anything else, makes The Dirty Picture worth watching. 

LHDC:  Now that, I can agree with.  Let's go watch it again. 

FASC (facepalm).

(*) I have to note that my recent experience watching Broadway shows has made me more sensitive to the laziness of most Hindi song productions that don't bother to give different voices to lines picturized on different actors.  Surely by the time "Honeymoon ki raat" was recorded, the dance-off picturization had already been decided.  Was it really not possible to budget a second singer for Arya Banerjee's lines?  The song would have been much stronger that way.  You can apply a charitable interpretation - using the same voice highlights the fungibility of item girls, etc. - but that feels like a stretch.  It's lazy, plain and simple, and in such an otherwise carefully-crafted production, there isn't really much excuse for it. 

Chhoti si baat (1975)

छोटी सी बात

Don't ever let anyone tell you, as one of my guides in India claimed, that all Hindi movies are the same.  We know better.  They are not all bombast and melodrama, improbable dance numbers and dishum-dishum.  Not that there's anything wrong with that!  But there has long been a place in Hindi cinema for sweet stories adorably and delicately told.  Taking pride of place alongside charming gems like Chashme buddoor and Katha is Basu Chatterjee's lovable, scrumptious, and hilarious Chhoti si baat ("a little thing"), truly one of the cutest, most delightful Hindi movies I have ever had the pleasure to see.

Arun (Amol Palekar) is a mild, bashful accountant with an all-consuming crush on Prabha (Vidya Sinha), a woman who works in a nearby office building and takes the same bus as Arun to work.   Arun can't bring himself to speak to Prabha, but his adoring gaze on the bus - and his habit of following her all the way home - tips his feelings to Prabha.  She indulges him, and even seems rather to like him - but she can't resist teasing him a little, too.  Soon, though, a rival arrives on a shiny yellow scooter and forces Arun's  hand - the breezy, confident Nagesh (Asrani), a lawyer in Prabha's office who takes an obvious shine to her and leaves Arun in the dust.  Desperate, Arun turns to a famous fixer, retired Colonel Julius Nagendranath Wilfred Singh (Ashok Kumar), who dishes out advice to everyone from lovelorn office workers to superstars like Amitabh Bachchan.  The Colonel takes a fatherly interest in Arun's case, and gives him a month-long crash course in suavity and confidence.  But it remains to be seen whether following the Colonel's sometimes questionable guidance will do the job to help Arun turn the tables on Nagesh, and win him Prabha.

If I weren't already firmly on the Amol Palekar train after Golmaal, Chhoti si baat would certainly have done the trick.   The guy is flat adorable.  From his first appearance minutes into the movie, with his sweet anxious demeanor and nervous smile, I was grinning like a dope and didn't stop until long after it was over.  He renders Arun's docile sweetness just perfectly, and is a complete delight to watch - and to root for - as he stumbles through his courtship of Prabha.  Palekar brings a charming physicality to this role, adjusting his posture and mannerisms almost continuously as his confidence grows and wanes and grows again.  And Arun's Walter-Mittyish fantasies add to his charm and make him thoroughly relatable to a daydreamer like me.  In one fantastic sequence Arun, in a cinema hall, watches a song featuring Dharmendra and Hema Malini.  He squirms jealously in his seat as Hema morphs into Prabha in Dharmendra's arms - and then relaxes into a contented smile as the image of Arun takes Dharmendra's place.

 

Vidya Sinha brings her share of adorable to the show, too - Prabha sports a magnificent smile (not to mention a vast collection of fabulous sarees), and it's not difficult to see how Arun could be utterly besotted by her.  Especially charming are the scenes where she recounts Arun's fumbling attempts at stalking and courtship to her coworker (Nandita Thakur), who cracks slightly racy jokes as the clearly smitten Prabha blushes.  Indeed, most wonderfully portrayed is that Prabha actually likes Arun, right from the very beginning, and is fairly unwavering in that - Nagesh's smooth talk and slick scooter may seem a threat to Arun, but the audience is in on the secret that as far as Prabha is concerned, it's Arun all the way.

The best treat of all, though, is Ashok Kumar, who is simply hilarious as the avuncular Colonel Julius Nagendranath Wilfred Singh (I never tire of that name, and neither does the movie).  I chronicled my ever-growing appreciation for Ashok Kumar when I recently wrote about Ek saal - it's hard to imagine a more different role from that of the Colonel, but here he is just a riot.  He spews an endless stream of advice that is somewhere between platitudes and complete nonsense, and then chides Arun for answering "yes" when the Colonel asks "samjhe?"  "Khak samjhe!" the Colonel spits, "main khud nahin samjha maine kya kaha!" ("Like hell you understand! I myself don't even understand what I said.")  And as humorously and broadly-drawn as he is, the tenderness with which the Colonel realizes, toward the end of the film, that he might have steered Arun wrong is genuinely touching.

Chhoti si baat offers some visual treats too, including a fun hillside trek through Khandala.  And, of course,  there are marvelous street scenes of Bombay that made me long for more time there, after my very abbreviated visit a few months ago.  These are crowned by this wonderful sparkly poster for an Amitabh and Saira Banu film that adorns the bus stop where Arun and Prabha meet:

Among Chhoti si baat's pleasures are a number of cameos, including a hilarious appearance by Rajendranath as a fake sadhu who pulls out a lemon out of his rear with a ridiculous "look what I did!" grin, bilks Arun out of a tidy sum, and steals his pen to boot.  I first saw Rajendranath in his riotously cute role in Tere ghar ke samne, and I laughed like a loon through his entire scene here.

What can I do besides gush?  Chhoti si baat is a thoroughly delightful film, one I'll watch over and over again, and one that is available in reasonable quality with subtitles on YouTube.  What are you waiting for? 

 

Ek saal (1957)

एक साल

Ashok Kumar and Madhubala make a very compelling screen couple - he dashing and serious, she ingenuous and fragile.  Amrita at IndieQuill adores this pair so much that she once wrote an entire post celebrating them.  There, she especially highlighted Ek saal ("one year"), and after thoroughly enjoying the jodi in Howrah Bridge, I came to this movie with high expectations.  And Ashok and Madhubala do not disappoint - but the movie's frustratingly paternalistic premise, plus a particularly grating comic side plot, interfere to make it something less than a favorite.

Usha (Madhubala) is a vibrant, lovely girl who delights in life - you would never know she has an inoperable brain tumor with a prognosis of just one year to live.  Usha herself does not even know - when her father receives the news from her doctor (Mehmood), he decides to keep her in the dark.  Suresh (Ashok Kumar) arrives, ostensibly to manage her father's land holdings, but really with some kind of con in mind, hoping to fleece the wealthy man for as much as he can take for himself and his business partner, a bitter woman named Rajni (Kuldip Kaur).  Usha quickly falls in love with the dashing Suresh, but he does not return her feelings - indeed, he scorns the very idea of love.  Even knowing this, her father - desperate to keep Usha happy and smiling in the final months of her life - offers Suresh an astonishing amount of money to pretend he loves her.  It is an offer that Suresh, who is always looking for an angle, cannot refuse.  But soon Usha melts even his hardened heart, and Suresh has to wonder if the con might become the truth.  The jealous Rajni wonders too, and sends a hapless private investigator, Pinto (Johnny Walker), to throw a monkey wrench into Suresh and Usha's  romance.

Although there is a lot to love about Ek saal, I find it hard to get past the patronizing way that the men in Usha's life control her access to information.  I can sometimes forgive a certain kind of sexism in older movies - one rather often has to, to enjoy them at all.  But the idea that a woman is too delicate a creature to deserve forthright information from her own doctor about her own prognosis is just too offensive for me to se aside, even for the sweetest of movies.  If Usha is naive, an ingenue, it's largely because Suresh and her father insist on keeping her that way.  One supposes that her innocence both pleases them, and keeps her docile and manipulable.  Who knows what kind of woman Usha could be if she were actually given control over her own destiny? The movie doesn't contemplate that, and that is very frustrating.  Usha's father's grief is poignant - he shudders with sadness every time the clock strikes, marking the passage of her time on earth - but it is also premature.  I have to think that if she knew she were dying, Usha would not tolerate her father's simpering, and would instead urge him to enjoy their time together to the fullest.

Meanwhile Rajni offers an interesting contrast to Usha's helplessness.  Rajni is an angry, malevolent force - she is in love with Suresh herself, but he rejects her as anything other than an associate in his shady business dealings.  Rajni's response to this rejection seems to say that if she can't have Suresh, she'll make sure he and everyone he cares about suffers just as much as she does.  She is a fascinating character - a heavyset woman, with her mouth set in a cruel scowl, she is both loathsome and thoroughly fabulous in her own way.

Though Suresh tries to keep her physically distant (trapped in Lucknow while he cavorts with Usha from Bombay to Mussoorie), Rajni takes matters into her own hands, first engaging Pinto and finally confronting Usha herself to sabotage her happiness.  What is remarkable here is that it is Rajni who finally reveals Usha's prognosis to the clueless girl.  Rajni tells Usha bluntly that men are not to be trusted, and while her motives are nefarious, there's a weird backward truth to what she's saying - the men strive to control Usha by concealing her illness, and only a woman, Rajni, gives Usha anything resembling a truthful account of what is happening to her.  She many not mean to do so, but ultimately Rajni empowers Usha. 

Suresh is powerless too, in an entirely different way.  He is at least nominally in charge of his own destiny, but as he falls in love with Usha he becomes more and more helpless, treading ground he's never covered before in his heartless, mercenary life. A hard heart softened by love may be a time worn cliche, but it is a thing of beauty when well-executed, and Ashok Kumar does a masterful job with this trajectory.  When I watched Howrah Bridge - another movie in which Ashok Kumar pretends to love Madhubala only to fall for her for real - I complained that Ashok's about face was abrupt and not sufficiently conveyed.  Here, though, his turnabout forms most of the meat of the movie.  In one standout scene, Suresh grapples with his conscience, which appears to him in the form of a photograph of himself (never mind why he keeps such a photograph on his nightstand!) that comes to life and scolds him for his reprehensible decpetion.

So, there is a lot going on in this movie, and I admit that I appreciated it more on a second viewing, when I could skim through Johnny Walker's numerous, lengthy scenes - he irritates me a lot more here than he usually does - and focus on these interesting nuances in the story and characterizations.  And, of course, on the pretty - there is lots and lots of pretty to enjoy.  Madhubala is utterly radiant - even if her imposed fecklessness grates at times, she does play a marvelous ingenue, and she's simply lovely. 

 

That is just the prettiest of the many pretty songs in Ek saal.  Early in the film, some dancers perform for Usha on her birthday - wishing her "tu jiye hazaaron saal" - and her childlike delight at their performance is just scrumptious.   Toss in a couple of entertaining cameos - Usha's doctors include an uncharacteristically nerdy and straight Mehmood, as well as Madan Puri - and there is plenty to make Ek saal worth watching.  If nothing else, it will please Amrita to know that I am thoroughly sold on her favorite jodi.  A copy of Mahal arrived in the mail today...

Tezaab (1988)

तेज़ाब

The excellent Asim Burney won the drawing to choose Filmi Geek's 200th review, and his choice was Tezaab ("acid"), the 1988 film that made a star out of Madhuri Dixit. The movie was a huge hit, and folks roughly my age who grew up with Hindi movies no doubt remember it with loving nostalgia. 

Shyamlal (Anupam Kher) is a gambling alcoholic, who finances his carefree lifestyle by exploiting the singing and dancing talents of his daughter Mohini (Madhuri Dixit).  But his debts catch up with him when the underworld boss Lotiya (Kiran Kumar) kidnaps Mohini.  Mohini's friend Jyoti (Suparna Anand) witnesses the kidnapping and sends for her brother Mahesh (Anil Kapoor), who had been Mohini's college classmate and beau, to come rescue her.  There is just one problem:  Mahesh is now a gangster known as Munna, wanted by the police and banned from the city.  Police Inspector Gagan Singh (Suresh Oberoi), who remembers Mahesh from his pre-crime days as a promising young naval cadet, captures him, and after listening to the story of how he became a banished criminal, strikes a deal with him - Inspector Singh will look the other way for 24 hours, to give Munna  a chance to save Mohini.  In return, Munna must return to his upstanding, law-abiding ways.

So much for summary - the top comment on the YouTube page for Tezaab does a much better job at hitting the highlights:

Epic Dance 0:06:33 Epic Scene 0:30:27 Best "You are under arrest" ever 0:24:37 Best "Hi" ever 0:57:50 Epic Jump 1:14:00 Epic Pose 1:14:12 Epic Laught 1:28:11 Epic Fight 1:45:14 with Epic Win Face 1:45:37 another Epic Dance 1:47:27 THE EPIC SCENE 2:08:50 The Epic Pursuit 2:11:53 Epic Hammer Fight 2:34:30 The Epic Last Fight 2:37:41

What can I add to that?  Tezaab is EPIC.  And I think the best way to appreciate this movie is to put yourself in the mind of someone to whom it really would be epic - say, an Indian male who was a young adolescent at the time of this movie's release.  Tezaab is in no way a movie for me.  But there is enough in it for me to understand something of why it was a hit in its time, and why a certain generation - especially that generation's boys - remember it so fondly.   Everything about this movie is BIG - big fights, big car chases, big explosions, overwrought drama even by filmi standards, all supported, of course, by a background score full of bombastic fanfares and strategically-timed thunderclaps.  It's not hard for me to imagine that a boy of certain age would, at the time, have found Anil Kapoor's Munna the coolest thing EVER, what with his self-sacrificing bravery and the stupendous super-filmi dialogue that rolls effortlessly from beneath his trademark mustache. 

When I started up the movie, I was greeted with this:

 

This may as well say "Carla, you will hate this movie."  I am a complete wimp when it comes to movie violence; no matter how fake or stylized it is, I really have no tolerance for it.  When I saw Ram Lakhan, I was pleasantly surprised at how rich and interesting it turned out to be.  Tezaab, though, is the movie I feared I would get when I sat down with Ram Lakhan - weakly plotted, needlessly violent, and overwhelmingly male.  The story is, on the whole, weak and barely coherent - the flashbacks-within-flashbacks narrative structure doesn't make it any easier to follow - and largely an extended excuse for motorcycle chases, explosions, and fistfights.

And there is more "violent" than "love" in this violent love story.  Indeed, Tezaab's is one of the lamest, most weakly motivated love stories I've ever seen.  Mahesh first meets Mohini when both are fresh-faced college students.  He seduces her on a bet, to prove to his idiot friends that he knows the secret to winning a girl.  This trope - the idea that all women are identical, and are guaranteed to respond like automata to an expert execution of the right formula - is offensive enough that I can't give it a pass in any movie, of any era.  And the nominal love story only gets stupider from there.  Mohini discovers Mahesh's ruse and responds with justifiable anger.  For some reason this makes him decide he really does love her after all, enough not to just threaten suicide but actually attempt it.  Naturally this melts away Mohini's anger, and after his wounds heal they frolic together for a song or two.  Later, though, after his exile from Bombay, Mahesh decides that he's no good for Mohini, and abuses her horribly in order to make her hate him.  This isn't so much love story as it is incoherent nonsense.

On the plus side, though, it's incoherent nonsense involving Madhuri Dixit, who is blessed with a perfectly radiant smile and the sheer talent to elevate even the most unbearable garbage to near watchability, at least while she is on the screen. 

I could look at that all day!  Madhuri does a lot with what she's given in Tezaab.  Mohini has a few nearly fierce moments as she tries to stand up to her drunken, abusive father.  And she has some truly funny moments as well, especially when Mahesh feigns interest in another girl (part of his magic formula, which of course works flawlessly), and Mohini works out her jealousy in a hilarious sequence of frustrated facial expressions.

You can't talk about Madhuri in Tezaab without mentioning her famous number "Ek do teen".  This song may have launched a star career, but in the eyes of this firangi Madhuri-lover with the benefit of a quarter-century of hindsight on it, I really have to say that the song is more famous than good.  While I can imagine its impact in its day - even on this insipid song with ridiculous choreography, Madhuri is clearly something special - if I want to watch Madhuri today, I have dozens of much, much better songs to choose from. 

Also in Tezaab's assets column are a few notable performances from supporting actors.  Bolstering the film's underlying message (to the extent it has one) of redemption and moral rectitude are the story arcs of Inspector Singh and Mahesh's loyal friend Baban (Chunky Pandey).  Both shine through the bombast and bluster and even offer something approaching subtlety.  As Singh,  Suresh Oberoi projects a delicate charm and maturity akin to Jackie Shroff's character in Ram Lakhan - his seriousness and upstanding morality is wrought too broadly and stiffly to be believed, but he is perfect as an archetype and a foil for Munna's bitterness.  And even his straight-arrow  flawlessness has its limits; when they are finally reached at the film's end, it is a satisfying closure for his arc.  As for Baban, he is a wonderful surprise, and the most three-dimensional and complex character in the film.  He shows tenderness, loyalty, fearlessness, rage, wits, roguishness, and charm.  Chunky Pandey does a great job with this interesting character (and even gets a sweet song  nearly to himself, "So gaya yeh jahan").  I would watch a whole movie about him - even without Madhuri.

At any rate, while I can't say I really enjoyed watching Tezaab, I didn't really expect to either.  (In fairness to it, I liked it much better on second viewing, when I could better follow the nested flashbacks, better appreciate what little subtlety there is, and skip the most unbearable parts.)  But I do get a lot from watching movies that were huge commercial hits - if nothing else, they offer a small, imperfect window onto the time and culture that created them and on the people who cherish them.  And that window is a big part of the fascination of Hindi movies, for me. 

Band baaja baaraat (2010)

बैंड बाजा बारात

It isn't often that a new film makes me wonder how it will be remembered in 30 years.  Even most good movies are looked back on with affectionate nostalgia; only a few attain the status of classics, elevated in memory to a cultural touchstone, something more than a nice way to spend a few hours. Before you decide that I have lost my mind: I am not quite ready to say that Band baaja baaraat ("band, fanfare, wedding procession") is such a movie, though it is delightful and extremely well-wrought.  Yet, just like the business created by its protagonists, Band baaja baaraat is a synergy, more than the sum of its parts -  enough so to make me wonder whether more might be going on here than just the best-made love story of the past few years.

Shruti Kakkad (Anushka Sharma) is a young woman with a plan.  Fresh from college, she has a vision of building the biggest wedding planning business in the country, and is not afraid to work for it.  Her classmate, Bittoo Sharma (Ranveer Singh), talks Shruti into a business partnership, if only to buy some time before his father drags him away from the excitement of Delhi, and back to the family farm.  Shruti and Bittoo take to the work like demons, putting in long hours together and working their way up from small celebrations in dingy chawls to the grand prize of wedding planning - giant, multi-day, estate home affairs.  Their style is unique, colorful, and fun, and their business - Shaadi Mubarak - has arrived.  But the growing attraction between Shruti and Bittoo sours the laddoo; Shruti's rules of business don't leave any room for passion, and Bittoo sees himself too much the gadabout to let love tie him down.  Shaadi Mubarak bends and breaks under the strain, and each of the partners tries, unsuccessfully, to carry on the business alone.  It is going to take near-divine intervention to get Shaadi Mubarak - not to mention Bittoo and Shruti - back on the right track.

Band baaja baaraat is, most importantly, a ton of fun, well-paced and colorful - and cleverly constructed with built-in excuses for multiple wedding songs without turning the movie into Hum aapke hain koun.  It is a cute, shiny entertainer - accessible, charming, and funny, and blessed with lots of terrific music.  Shaadi Mubarak's signature style is described in the movie with the words "chatak" and "dhinchyak" - both rendered in the subtitles as "kitsch" - which lend the whole film a wonderful shimmering color and energy that is exactly what makes this kind of Bollywood movie so immersive and fun.   

But for all of that delicious sparkle, Band baaja baaraat is also a lot richer and more character-driven than most love stories.  It isn't just two hours of stalling to see how the principals find their way to each other; there is a strong character arc for each of them, a process of maturation that is very satisfying to watch.  The movie gives them a few lucky breaks - the one that brings Shaadi Mubarak back together after the rift, in particular, is a little too far on the deus ex machina side of things - but it also never shies away from showing just how much hard work Shruti and Bittoo pour into their business. 

As a modern, independent young heroine, Shruti is even better than Jab We Met's Geet, strong-willed without being reactionary, visionary without being flighty.  She is far from flawless - she has eye rolling down to an art form, and it is clear from the beginning that she will need to develop some flexibility and a sense of humor before movie's end.  But develop she does - her speech to Bittoo in the movie's climax nearly made me stand up and cheer - how refreshing to see a young woman in a movie, after suffering a heartbreak, dust herself off and prepare to get on with her life!  And at the resolution, she accepts him without compromising her strength, noting that "uske tang tod dungi, partership nahin" ("I'll break his legs, but I won't break the partnership").   

The movie's excellent handling of the sexual facet of Bittoo and Shruti's relationship is refreshing, poignant, and thoroughly relatable.  It is not sex itself that throws a wrench in Bittoo and Shruti's works; it is their failure to honestly acknowledge and communicate their feelings about it and about each other.  Band baaja baaraat does not have even the scent of a morality tale, in which young people's ambitions are driven off the rails by sex.  No one's life is ruined by sex - in particular, Shruti's life is not ruined.  The message here is only that one should be as mature and forthright about matters of the heart as one is about matters of business - but in neither sphere is it necessarily a bad thing for a woman to be aggressive about getting what she wants.  

With all that richness in Shruti's character arc, Band baaja baaraat would have been a good movie even if Bittoo were merely a cipher or a foil for her development, but he too gets a satisfying character progression.  He starts the movie as a bit of a feckless loser with more strut than substance, and a capacity for lying under pressure that, one feels, will cause him more trouble than it gets him out of.  But Shruti's steadying influence puts his natural (if rough) charm and fast-talking ability to its best possible use, and there is much delight in watching Bittoo coming to understand how he needs her.  

As such a character-driven movie, Band baaja baaraat asks much more of Ranveer Singh and Anushka Sharma - a newcomer and a near-newcomer - than most light romances demand of their young stars, and part of what makes it so good is that the two of them are more than up to the task.  And that is where I start to think about where Band Baaja baaraat will end up after a few more decades of filmi history.  There is something about its electric young jodi that reminds me of the thrill with which folks remember star-launching romances like Bobby or Qayamat se qayamat tak.  As a work of filmmaking craft, Band baaja baaraat is far better than either of those.  But even as the decorations get taken down and the bleat of horns fades into the distance, the question lingers: are Anushka Sharma and Ranveer Singh a nascent powerhouse jodi? 

And  beyond just the power of the pairing, Band baaja baarat offers a bold, empowering, reflection of the industrious, young population of urban India - it's like Rocket Singh with sex and without the questionable business practices. (It's no small matter that Shruti is explicit in her conviction that Shaadi Mubarak distinguish itself from the prevailing wedding-planning practice of cheating customers.  Band baaja baaraat strives to show an alternative path to success besides beating the establishment at its own game.)  The segment of middle-class society portrayed so positively in Band baaja baaraat is, in no small part, the folks  who get to decide which of today's movies are tomorrow's classics.  So, does this movie capture a watershed moment in the development of the Republic?  That is a grand and heavy load for a light, comedic romance to carry.  If any movie can shoulder that load, though, Band baaja baaraat is it.

 

The Broadway-Bollywood Exchange, or Bhoot Meets Phantom

I have a friend who loves Broadway musicals as much as I love Hindi movies. 

One day over lunch, not too long ago, we were comparing notes about our respective passions.  It occurred to me that the two forms have a great deal in common.   Both have musical production numbers, of course, but also melodrama, archetypes and allegory, big emotions, and - so compelling to both my friend and myself - chest-heaving heroines succumbing to passion against their better judgment.

An idea took shape as we talked, a sort of  "I'll show you mine if you show me yours" exchange - we planned a day where we would get together and watch both a Broadway show and a Hindi movie.

I asked around the internet filmi communities for recommendations for a film to show her - surely there were legions of people who were fans of both forms and would be full of ideas about what films had Broadway-crossover appeal. But there wasn't much response.  The few suggestions I got were not markedly different from suggestions commonly made for introducing any newcomer to Hindi films. And only one person I found was herself a Broadway fan.

That lone Broadway fan made an interesting remark.  "You would think there would be all kinds of crossover appeal," she said, but in fact there doesn't seem to be.  Her own attempts to introduce her theater friends to Hindi movies were received well enough, but did not take root and create new Bollywood fans.

And so, when the day came for me and my friend and our Broadway-Bollywood exchange, I went in with the spirit of an anthropologist exploring the differences between two cultures.   I wanted to know why the commonalities weren't strong enough to create a common fandom.   What would I find lacking in Broadway?  What would put her off about Bollywood?  I tried to keep an open mind and also to put no pressure on my friend - I promised myself I wouldn't be defensive if she didn't like what she saw. 

My friend chose a recording of a Royal Albert Hall staging of Phantom of the Opera, starring her crush-du-jour, Sierra Boggess.  (Going to a live performance would have been ideal, but also expensive - this production of Phantom was a reasonable second choice.) 

I am not going to judge the appeal (or lack thereof) of modern Broadway productions based upon this one show.  Phantom of the Opera is a show with many warts - its score is bombastic and dated, its book somewhat lacking in substance.  Its heroine, Christine, is a simpering thing, and she doesn't get much to do beyond look fetching and sing at the command of various men, often against her will.   In that, though, she is not that much different from many filmi heroines!  Though, it would have been nice to see some defiance in her reluctant performance of the Phantom's composition, like Basanti's command performance for Gabbar Singh.  What she does show is not exactly defiance:

 

*cough* 

In another notable parallel to the traditions of Hindi movies, certain songs serve as a thinly-veiled substitute for sex scenes; the climax of "Music of the Night" is quite clearly just that, as the Phantom repeatedly cries "Sing!" while Christine squeals out ever higher, louder, and more ecstatic notes.  "Well, that wasn't the least bit orgasmic, not at all," I commented to my friend.  ETA: My friend informs me that I have my songs mixed up.  What I have described here is the climax of the show's title song. "It's the lead-in to 'Music of the Night'," she tells me, "which is post-coital." 

For what it's worth, while Phantom will never be my favorite show, it offers plenty to impress.   The staging is large and spectacular, with a few grand production numbers and even a little bit of dancing.  The most fun choreography comes not in a dance production, but in bustling scenes where characters glide around the stage in a delightful kind of orchestrated chaos.  And the pure talent and ability of the performers is nothing short of stunning - it's unbelievable that they execute near-flawless live performances show after show, day after day.

After the curtain came down on Phantom of the Opera, it was Bollywood's turn.  I had deliberated for weeks to choose a movie for this event; it's always hard to pick one movie to do all the heavy lifting, to be the sole representative of a vast, diverse century of Hindi cinema.  I settled on Paheli, a movie that I love for its style and color - especially since my trip to Rajasthan - and its delightful songs.  I love it also for Rani Mukherjee, who perhaps isn't to me quite what Sierra Boggess is to my friend, but is thoroughly delicious nonetheless.  (I wanted to showcase my own crush-du-jour, Vidya Balan, but I didn't have a suitable newcomer's movie on hand.)  I also love that Rani's character in Paheli makes a bold assertion of her sexuality, choosing with fully informed consent to get it on with the bhoot instead of enduring five celibate years of her husband's absence.  She is a much more willful and substantial heroine, and much less an ingenue, than Christine.

The first thing my friend noticed (after I apologized profusely during Eros's interminable, unskippable promos) was that unlike Broadway, the actors don't do their own singing.  (My friend has a good ear; Paheli's opening song, "Minnat kare",  is sung by Shreya Ghoshal only, but lines are picturized on several different women.)  I think this was a bit of a disappointment to my friend; when I probed her afterward, she said that a good part of the appeal of Broadway to her is the spectrum of talent of the performers, and the pure awesomeness of the live performance I mentioned above.  I have heard others make this complaint about Hindi films, and I admit it somewhat puzzles me; I have no problem with the division of labor, letting the actors act and the singers sing.  But, it's a problem inherent to comparisons across media - while Broadway and Bollywood do have some elements in common, there are some inherent differences between movies and live shows - different constraints and different advantages to each - and if a person prefers one over the other, de gustibus non disputandum.

 

At any rate, while my friend didn't offer much commentary during the screening of Paheli - and I didn't press her for any while she was watching - she was rapt throughout, which was good enough for me.  (She especially enjoyed the peanut gallery of puppets with their running commentary on the proceedings.)    The verdict is the best I could have hoped for - she wants to do it again.  Next time, I think I'll show her Lagaan.   She is a serious fan of football (the American kind), and so I think she'll get a kick out of the cricket and appreciate the sports-movie arc of the film.  Also, being accustomed to the broad strokes and playing-to-the-cheap-seats acting style of Broadway shows, she is less likely than the average westerner to be put off by some of the more unsubtle characterizations in that movie, such as Captain Russell's mustache-twirling villainry.   ("I'm not afraid of cheese," she said to me at one point, "I like cheese."  She is most definitely Bollywood-ready.)  Or maybe I'll go classic, and risk Chalti ka naam gaadi - that has the advantage of a tasty helping of Madhubala, along with Kishore Kumar singing his own songs.

Whatever we choose, the anthropological study will continue, and we'll see whether, at least in our two cases, a Broadway fan can become a Bollywood lover and vice versa.  It's a bit of an unfair arrangement, for now, as DVDs of live stagings are not easy to come by, so she can't show me her favorites as easily as I can show her mine.  I would love to see a live show with her - maybe next summer, when a production of Wicked comes to our city, we will make that happen.  In the meantime, we'll make do with what she has on hand.  And, I'll keep you posted.

 

Kaala patthar (1979)

काला पत्थर

I have not yet seen every Salim-Javed movie, but I have seen a lot of them, more than enough to know just how good the duo is at telling riveting stories with a flawless balance of all the requisite masala elements.  Kaala patthar ("black rock") is no exception, with superb drama, heart-melting romance, and moving arcs of redemption.  This is one movie - yet another - that I wonder why I waited so long to watch, and immediately watched twice more. 

The Dhanraj coal mine is a dangerous place, beset by accidents that all too frequently cost workers their lives.  But it is also a profitable place, and its owner, Dhanraj Puri (Prem Chopra), minces no words in explaining that he values the coal more than the people who dig it out for him at such risk.  His earnest new engineer, Ravi Malhotra (Shashi Kapoor), discovers that one of the active mine tunnels is dangerously close to flooding, but Dhanraj callously dismisses his concerns and insists that the men keep digging.  Ravi enlists the help of a brassy young reporter, Anita (Parveen Babi), who writes an exposé on the terrible conditions in the mine.  He also earns the trust of Vijay (Amitabh Bachchan), a troubled mine worker whose fearless drive to heroism makes him both friends and enemies - including Mangal (Shatrughan Sinha), an escaped convict who struts arrogantly into the mining town.  Meanwhile, Vijay finds solace for his restless, guilt-wracked psyche in the company of the mine's idealistic doctor, Sudha Sen (Rakhee).  And Channo (Neetu Singh), a local girl who sells good-luck trinkets, must decide between turning Mangal into the police, or falling in love with him.

There is much going on in this multi-starrer to which that facile plot summary cannot do justice.  Salim-Javed's evocative dialogues add a deftly poetic touch that make the moving scenes even more so.  One of the best is naive Sudha Sen's introduction to the reality of the mine hospital, presented to her by the outgoing doctor (Sanjeev Kumar in a wonderful cameo).  "Is hospital mein mariz nahin," he laments, "laashein aati hain - voh laashein jo abhi puri tarah mari nahin hain."  ("There are no patients in this hospital, just corpses - corpses that are not yet fully dead.")  Sanjeev Kumar is one of my favorite actors at any rate, and his pained resignation in this small scene is just magnificently rendered.  In another standout scene - too lengthy for me to reproduce the dialogue here - Vijay and Sudha discuss the nature of dreams, and why the lost souls of the mining town so willingly pony up their hard-earned rupees for Channo's baubles.  These touching scenes provide a perfect counterpoint to balance Kaala patthar's generous offerings of improbable, classic-style dishum-dishum. 

Yash Chopra's visuals, too, are often arresting and symbolically loaded.  Even the obvious visual cues, like the contrast between the grime of the coal miners on the one hand and Dhanraj's crisp suits and shiny cars on the other, are skillfully rendered and add texture to the story.  Vijay, of course, appears in his first scene smeared with even more sweat and coal dust than his peers, suggesting at the very start that he throws himself into his work with a vigor and aggression that boils up from the depths of his character.  The scenes of the mine's operations are also rich and compelling.  The film opens with wide shots of the mine's ground-level works, enormous machines shuttling and processing mountains of coal while endless lines of grimy, exhausted men file into and out of the mine's mouth.  These operations shots, reminding me of the fascinating steel-mill sequences that open Shyam Benegal's Kalyug, set the scene with a powerful evocation of the grit and heat of coal-mine labor.  Another beautiful wide shot later in the film - one of the few that shows women working the mines too - sharply contrasts the women's colorful rural dress against the slate-grey of the ground they toil on and the deep black of the coal they carry on their heads. 

 

(Click the image for a full-size look.)  Even the background score - not something I am usually particularly clued into as a movie-viewer - adds both depth and levity as needed.  In one excellent sequence early in the movie, a resonant long note in the score melts seamlessly into the call of the mine's emergency klaxon, a sound heard altogether too often by the beleaguered miners.  (In that scene, the miners bolt energetically to the scene of the accident; later, they seem to drag themselves sullenly, with a resigned, "what is it this time" affect.)

Kaala patthar's three romantic threads span the full spectrum of masala pyaar.  Anita and Ravi's courtship is jaunty and light; their banter provides the closest thing Kaala patthar offers to a comic side plot.  (Like Salim-Javed's outstanding Deewaar, Kaala patthar has too much substantial story to tell to waste very much time on tension-breaking digressions.)   Channo and Mangal's romance is somewhat shallowly motivated, the standard-issue filmi trope in which Channo's affections bloom after Mangal saves her from a pack of would-be rapists.  But the facility of that is more than made up for by Vijay and Sudha's arc, which unfolds delicately and cerebrally.   Sudha responds subtly and nonverbally to hints that Vijay is not what he appears to be - an outburst in perfectly cultured English, for example, that signals his educated, upper-class background.  And it is genuinely moving as Vijay begins to make himself vulnerable to her, finally telling the story that haunts his disturbed sleep and allowing her to see "mere dil mein kamra ... jis mein main khud bhi nahin jaata"  ("the place in my heart where I my myself don't even go").

I have already run out of space without mentioning so much else that makes Kaala patthar rich enough to reward multiple viewings -  a super supporting cast, some terrific songs, Ravi's shiny moral certitude, Channo's slight tinge  of melancholy even when she is providing naach-gaana and cheerfulness to everyone in the mining town.   Instead of gushing further, I think I'll go watch it again, and recommend that you do the same. 

 

 

Iqbal (2005)

इक़्बाल

I have said this before, but I have a soft spot for sports movies.  Even if the drama is a little manufactured, the conclusion foreordained, a well-made sports movie can still generate the right frisson, the little thrill of shared victory that sports allows the folks in the stands to share with the athletes on the field.  And so, I had high expectations for Nagesh Kukunoor's Iqbal, a sports movie with the additional benefits of a village setting and appealing, talented cast.   With that hat trick going for it, I thought Iqbal would surely be an instant favorite.  For reasons I still can't pin down even as I write, though, this movie misses the mark.

Iqbal (Shreyas Talpade) is a deaf-mute young man, a farmer's son with big dreams.  He inherited a passion for cricket from his mother (Prateeksha Lonkar), and spends long afternoons in the countryside setting up wickets and bowling them down with impressive precision.  With the help of his hearing little sister Khadija (Shweta Prasad), Iqbal earns a tryout at a nearby swanky cricket academy led by a famous teacher known just as Guruji (Girish Karnad).  He is soon ejected from the academy to appease a jealous and egotistical boy whose rich father's wallet holds more influence with the academy than Iqbal's talent - the naive Iqbal first unpleasant lesson about what really drives the machinery of competitive-class cricket, but not his last.  Almost at the end of hope, Iqbal discovers that the village drunk, Mohit (Naseeruddin Shah), was a star bowler in his youth, and he prevails on the reluctant man to coach him.  Mohit's training - and his personal influence - earn Iqbal an opportunity with the Andhra Pradesh state team.  But Iqbal has more than deafness and lack of formal training to overcome.  His father (Yatin Karyekar) is dead set against cricket, and wants Iqbal working the farm by his side.  And Guruji, too, has machinations of his own in the works. 

I am puzzled as to why this movie does not fire on all cylinders for me. It is not the performances, which are all fine and fairly natural.  As the mute Iqbal, Shreyas Talpade is as sweet and likable as he ever is.  Iqbal has no dialogue, and so Talpade must rely on other forms of expression to convey his character's central dilemma, the conflict between his dreamy nature on the one hand, and his love for his father and sense of responsibility to his family on the other.  Talpade is more than up to this challenge.  Naseeruddin Shah, in contrast, is not challenged at all as the wisecracking drunken has-been Mohit, who dries up in a hurry when Iqbal needs him to.   But even if it is not his most nuanced performance ever, Shah is appealing enough.  The best performances are from Prateeksha Lonkar and Yatin Karyekar as Iqbal's parents; Karyekar is especially compelling, offering a combination of tenderness and sternness that is believable and sympathetic.

Iqbal also offers a pleasing window onto village life, the kind that I usually enjoy.   Iqbal's father is a hardworking farmer, always at risk of losing his property.  But he wants better for his children, and the way he runs his family suggests a dream of upward mobility that is very engaging.  Iqbal's sister Khadija is studious and book-hungry, and she seems thoroughly encouraged in these pursuits.   As for Iqbal, when he is not practicing his bowling technique, he tends the family's buffaloes, whom he has named for national-team bowlers (including his favorite, Kapil Dev, who makes a cameo appearance late in the movie).  The scenes in which Iqbal leads the buffaloes to pasture and sets up his practice pitch provide Kukunoor many opportunities for picturesque landscape shots full of billowing meadows and rakish palm trees.

Despite its strengths, though, Iqbal remains a fairly by-the-book sports movie - dream, obstacle, glimmer of hope, training montage, setback, more training montage, more hope, more setback, improbable last-minute turnaround victory.  All of this is fine if it is well-executed, but the sports aspect of Iqbal is, unfortunately, one of its weaker aspects.  The movie does not provide a great sense of cricket as a team sport, partly due to Iqbal's isolated, outsider status, but also because in the story's arc, the rest of his team simply doesn't matter.  The result is that the sports arc of Iqbal packs less punch than that of Dil bole hadippa, Chak de India, or Lagaan - each of those, in its own way, offers a larger context for the big game than a single character's apotheosis.

And then there is the question of why Iqbal is deaf and mute.  In fretting to understand what this element adds to the movie, I have come up with several theories, some narrative and others symbolic.  Perhaps it is meant to augment Iqbal's isolation, providing a coccoon for his focused pursuit of his dream.  Or, maybe it's presented as a quotidian aspect of village life - such disabilities are perhaps more common in communities where quality medical care for childhood diseases is wanting.  In this reading, Iqbal's deafness is just another aspect of who he is, shown in the same way is shown to be Muslim - not to make a point, just to add color to the movie's tapestry.  Perhaps his deafness is a device to increase the odds against him - but if so, the movie drops this thread very abrubtly when Iqbal joins the Andhra team, as there is not even lip service paid to any communication problems with his coach or teammates there.  None of these readings is very satisfying - they read like post-hoc attempts to justify a story element that ultimately feels tacked-on, a cheap ploy for sympathy that is brushed aside when it is no longer expedient. 

This spotty handling of Iqbal's deafness perhaps gets to the heart of why Iqbal is merely a nice movie and not a superb one.   The movie suffers from a bit of tone confusion - the filmi facets of Iqbal's deafness clash against the delicate, arty portrayal of his family life, and the gears don't quite mesh.   It's a sweet movie, a nice try, and has a lot that makes it worth watching.  But I can't help feeling that it's just not as good as it could have been.  It has a good solid innings, but it doesn't quite hit a century.

 

Ra.One (2011)

I admit that a tiny screen on an airplane is no way to watch a movie that, if it is respected for anything, is respected for special effects.  But flashy stunts and explosions, unbacked by compelling story or characters, cannot save an otherwise terrible movie.  And Ra.One is nothing if not a terrible movie. 

Shekhar (Shah Rukh Khan) is an earnest, nerdy video-game designer.   Desperate to please his son Prateek (Armaan Verma), an 11-year-old with an overdeveloped sense of cool, Shekhar designs a game in which the villain is more powerful than the hero.  Prateek is duly impressed, both with the game's awesome villain, Ra.One, and the nifty full-body virtual reality suit he has to don to play the game.  Soon, though, Ra.One comes to life, breaking out of the game and killing both Shekhar and his colleague Akashi (Tom Wu) - and hell-bent on Prateek.  The only way to save the boy and his mother, Soniya (Kareena Kapoor), is to bring the game's hero, G.One (also Shah Rukh Khan) to life to take on Ra.One in his most powerful form (Arjun Rampal).

If that summary sounds thin, it's because the story is thinner than onion skin, unburdened by any nuance or substance.  There is more plot device than coherent explanation involved in bringing the game's characters to life.  That would be forgivable if the characters had any character, but for the most part, they do not.  Unlike most better superhero movies, there is no backstory to drive either the hero G.One or the villain Ra.One.  They are "good" and "bad", respectively, only because the movie declares them to be so.  There is an attempt at a message in the half-baked, confusing plot device called a HART - I can't remember what the acronym stands for - that both Ra.One and G.One rely upon for their life force, or something.  This yields some watery symbolic nonsense about whether someone without a heart can truly be destroyed, but this is more incoherent technobabble than trenchant allegory.

The movie's failure to provide any depth, any driver for conflict other than the arbitrary designation of goodness and evil, is particularly frustrating in the case of its villain, Ra.One.  While he may be techincally a case of artificial intelligence gone wrong, Ra.One in fact has no intelligence at all, no emergent properties of any interest.  He wants to kill Prateek only because he is programmed to.  This is hardly an avatar of the Raavan of legend, whose intellect was so great that he mastered the Vedas in a single day.  The movie does makes a feeble nod at connecting Ra.One to the mythical demon he is named for; in one scene, Ra.One encounters a Dussehra festival, learns about his namesake, and questions whether a villain who needs to be vanquished year after year is really vanquished at all.  This one weak attempt at allegory hardly even rises to the level of lip service, and it's far from satisfying; it feels tacked-on and phoned-in, and if anything, it throws into relief how much more the movie could have done with the idea beyong choosing evocative names for its video-game automata.

As for the dual heroes, Shekhar and G.One, they don't offer much more either in the way of substance or entertainment value.  Shekhar is presented in broad strokes that, I suppose, are supposed to invoke humorous southern-Indian sterotypes; the irony of doing so alongside a running joke in which the Sino-Indian Akashi repeatedly protests that "not all Chinese are Jackie Chan!"  seems lost on the filmmakers.  At any rate, Shekhar is not so much a yokel as he is just an idiot.  G.One is equally dopey; his cartoonish attempts at being a real live boy (à la Pinnocchio, or Data) are perhaps meant to be sweet, but the rendering is just cloying and stupid.  If Ra.One has a redeeming feature, it is the occasionally charming moments of tenderness between Shekhar and Soniya; it is always refreshing when a movie offers a relatively mature married couple.  Yet these, like the hints of mythological substance, are too few and far between; Kareena Kapoor is especially underutilized here. 

Even the songs, so often the redemption of an otherwise forgettable film, fall frustratingly short in Ra.One.  "Criminal" and "Chammak challo" are too similar in sound and picturization - "Chammak challo" is marginally the better of the two, but the movie certainly does not need both.  The most charitable interpretation of this directorial choice is that the two songs are a kind of bookending, an attempt transform or develop the robotic G.One toward Shekhar-ness.  But there is nothing textual to justify such a generous interpretation of the two songs, which are more likely just there to pack twice the Shah Rukh Khan, twice the scantily-clad gori dancers, twice the big production numbers, twice the Akon songs into the movie.  (Incidentally, I can't even hear Akon's voice without immediately thinking of his  hilarious Lonely Island number "I Just Had Sex" - not an association one expects to have when watching a Hindi film!)  The soundtrack does include one superb song, "Bhare naina," definitely a keeper - but when the lights come up and the inanity of Ra.One finally and mercifully ends, I can't shake the feeling that even on an airplane there are much more satisfying ways to kill a couple of hours. 

A departure from format: In the Name of Research

Ever since I launched Filmi Geek more than 5 years ago, I have stuck pretty firmly to my format:  movie reviews, 600-1000 words in length.  For the most part, I haven't been tempted to write posts with compilations or lists.

But for the celebration of women in Hindi cinema going on this month, hosted by the Totally Filmi blog, I've decided to do something a little different.  I've seen so many posts over the years by so many bloggers paying tribute to the hottest stars, the chocolate heroes who light up their dreams, the swoon-worthy stars who make their hearts go pitter-pat.  And I decided I wanted in on this action, and a chance to offer a lesbian perspective what is sexy about Hindi movies.

After all, there's only so much serious feminist thinking a girl can do.  And I've done plenty of that, here on Filmi Geek and elsewhere too.  But once in a while, even an earnest geek like me just wants to kick back and enjoy some of the eye candy that Hindi movies have to offer. 

In the name of Research (*cough*), I performed extensive field studies, scouring YouTube for the best chest-heaving, midriff-baring goodness  I could find.   And so without further ado, here is a sampling of the filmi women who turn me into a slack-jawed heap of "guh".

---

Sharmila Tagore

I was recently talking to Beth about her reaction to Saif Ali Khan in Agent Vinod, and while I agreed that he's not bad for a fellow, I had to say that his mother is really more my speed.  This song is Exhibit A - the dimples, the midriff, and oh those hips ... Sharmila is the one star for whom I have reserved the title "Crushasaurus", and she is just good enough to eat. 

 

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Madhubala

Two words:  lickable collarbones.   But in this song from Mughal-e-azam it is the coquettish facial expressions that get to me, especially when she bites her lip - GUH.  Oh, and those hips - have I mentioned that I have a weakness for a nicely curved pair of hips?  Still scraping my jaw off the floor years later...

 

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Madhuri Dixit

Aww hells to the yeah.  Madhuri is so delicious that she gets more than one video in this post.  First, and most obvious, a song that has three stars: Madhuri and choli ke peeche jo hain... I have a good friend who is a 50-ish lesbian, born and raised in the most genteel city in the American south.  She prides herself on her poise, level head, and gift for understatement.  When I showed her this song, she was quiet for a long time ... and finally allowed, "Cute gal." 

 

But Madhuri is more than just T & A in semi-traditional dress; she is sizzling hot in a modern milieu as well.  I love her look and her moves in this bit of Prabhu Deva genius.

 

I could go on, and on, and on ... but I'll content myself with one more.  This song, from an otherwise thoroughly forgettable movie that I never even got all the way through, does very, very bad things to me.  If I wasn't queer before I saw it, I would be after.  And again, with the hips!  

 

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Aruna Irani

In my review of Caravan, I praised Aruna's midriff as a magnificent character in its own right.  This song summarizes why - yum.

 

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Nadira

Rawwrr! 

And she's from my tribe, too. 

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Rani Mukherjee

I think Rani is adorable, a particular type of adorable that is very, very sexy.  I had a hard time choosing a song that encapulates what is sexy about her, though.  In this song from Yuva, she shows a very smoldering, sensual side - and for that, for its mature sexuality, it's as good a choice as any. 

 

Edit:  I can't believe I forgot to mention this next song.  WHAT WAS I THINKING.  Dil bole hadippa is dripping with delightful subtext that plays right into my obsession with butch style.  So, despite the rodent-faced Rakhi Sawant, this song of Rani's definitely makes me sit up and take notice - that's quite an impressive rod you've got there, Rani.

 

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Zeenat Aman

An obvious choice, but hey - she's got it, and it works on me.   I thought about highlighting one of Raj Kapoor's skinfest songs from Satyam shivam sundaram - some of them are lovely, even steeped as they are in the male gaze.  But I settled for this one instead, from the full-on wackadoodle masala joyride that is The Great Gambler.  I  understand just how Amitabh Bachchan and Prem Chopra feel during this one.   

 

Because, you know, hips.  And midriff.  And hips.

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Vidya Balan

Like everyone else in the known universe, I am high on Vidya Balan these days.   However, unlike everyone else, I am behind the 8-ball and haven't yet seen The Dirty Picture (I'm saving it for a special moment).  So I'm not going to offer up a song for Vidya.  Instead, I'll just present this picture, which perfectly captures much of what it is about Vidya that lights up my girl-parts.  This is the kind of woman who reminds me why I like women. GUH.

mmmm... hm?  what was that?  oh, right - writing a blog post, I remember now.

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Shabana Azmi

You didn't think I'd get all the way through this post without mentioning her, did you?  She doesn't quite fit with the others here, because what turns me on most about her is what is between her ears, not what's beneath her blouse.   Which is not to say that she isn't stunning in her own right!   In this song from the amazing movie Godmother, she is fierce and gorgeous as a group of women dance for her drunken pleasure.

 

And for pure heart-melting beauty, I don't know of a better song than this bittersweet ghazal from Arth:

 

But now I've drifted far away from the spirit of this post.  So let me close with something that puts the mind (well, my mind, at least) back in the proper frame of reference ...