Not the Usual Suspects

This week's Mumbai Mirror column: 

Thoughts on cops and the everyman, on the cop as everywoman: from 'Singham' to 'Drishyam' via 'Mardaani'

Tabu as IG Meera Deshmukh, with her posse of policemen, in Drishyam

Drishyam is by no means a great film. It's not even a particularly good film. Several performances and locales leave much to be desired. But having not been previously exposed to any of the previous versions - neither the 2013 Malayalam film of the same name, starring Mohanlal, nor the Japanese or Korean films that were more faithful renditions of the original inspiration, a Japanese novel called The Devotion of Suspect X - I found it watchable. It has a plot (which is already more than one can say for most big-budget Hindi releases), it has some suspense, and even posits something like an ethical dilemma. 

But this is not a review. Readers trying to decide if they should watch Drishyam are unlikely to find this piece helpful. What I want to think about is Drishyam's depiction of the police. The first interesting fact here is that the film casts Ajay Devgn - the very man who has made a career out of playing an outlandish supersize cop in Rohit Shetty films like Singham and Singham Returns - as the supposed everyman, a guy who finds himself in a tight spot, ranged against the police. Had Devgn been a little bit more in touch with his acting self (and I'm convinced he used to have one), he could have had some fun with this rolereversal, especially since even the location is the same as those films: a Marathi-fied Goa. It's a pity he's now so used to sleepwalking his way through the larger-than-life muscleman parts that he can no longer seem to convey either vulnerability or middle-class-ness with any degree of conviction. 

Second attention-grabbing tactic: Drishyam makes its tough cop a woman. The figure who must match Devgn's moves, play the cat to his mouse, is played by Tabu. It's not that Tabu hasn't played a cop before - I can think offhand of Fanaa (2006), where she had a small but effective role as an anti-terrorist bureau agent. But as IG Meera Deshmukh, she must marshal a different combination of attributes. There is an obvious comparison to be made here, between Meera Deshmukh and the last policewoman heroine we've seen on the Hindi film screen, Shivani Shivaji Roy, in last August's Mardaani. On the surface, they aren't similar at all. Rani Mukherjee's Shivani, as I had noted in these pages at the time, always appears in masculine garb: either in uniform or in loose collared shirts and trousers, with her hair tied back and her fists ready to hand out a punch or two. Tabu's Meera, in contrast, makes her 'entry' in near slow-motion, clad in an uber-flattering uniform that clings to her curves, and for much of the film's latter half, appears in fashionable churidar-kurtas and perfectly draped saris, her lovely auburn hair flowing loose even while she supervises the 'interrogation' of Devgn and his family by a violent junior. Meera, unlike Shivani, doesn't like to get her hands dirty. 

But there's one way in which both these characters mirror each other: their 'feminine' instincts are written into the roles in the most obvious fashion. If the childless Shivani Shivaji Roy, for all her mardaangi, is accused by male colleagues of taking things "too personally", and proves it by being pushed over the emotional edge by the abduction of an orphaned girl with whom she has a nurturing, quasi-filial relationship, Meera Deshmukh is more straightforwardly cast in the maternal mould. Her actions, which might be unforgiveable as a police officer, are meant to be condoned as those of a mother. And eventually, it is a failed mother that her character is judged. 

Outside this though, Tabu remains the unexamined Bollywood supercop: "Hum policewalon ko aadmi ke baat karne se pata chal jaata hai ki woh sach bol raha hai ya jhooth," she declares in one of the film's more dangerous ideological moments. And beyond the major characters, Drishyam offers a glimpse of a darker vision of the police. The film's small town of Pondolem, despite having flattened Goa's mix of communities into a Hindu milieu (complete with a Swamiji and a satsang in Panjim), comes across as rather idyllic. From the start, the only unpleasantness in town is created by the police. The bullish, corrupt Gaitonde (wonderfully played by Kamlesh Sawant) doesn't ever pay his bills at the eatery he frequents, and has illegally locked up a young man for defaulting on a loan payment to a company owned by Gaitonde's cousin. Most of Devgn's early exchanges with Gaitonde and his more amenable senior point out how unfortunate it is that the public fears policemen instead of trusting them. 

Charmy Harikrishnan's helpful comparison of the Hindi film with the Malayalam version points out that [spoiler alert] "Mohanlal protects his family precisely because he knows the boy is a police offer's son and the entire police force will come after them." This "grave mistrust between the ordinary man and the police" which, as Harikrishnan correctly points out, is "blurred" in the Hindi film. Thinking about this reminded me of another recent Malayalam film in which a policeman's family is the focus, albeit from the very different perspective of a policeman's son becoming witness to a murder. That film, Rajeev Ravi's superb, haunting Njan Steve Lopez (2014), suggests that Malayali filmmakers recognize the chilling fact that the police in this country often function as just another gang of thugs -- and are willing to engage with it with some complexity. Hindi filmmakers, still so abjectly tied to heroes and villains, could really learn a lesson or two.

Published in Mumbai Mirror

Film Review: Convict Bol Bachchan for the murder of Golmaal

The relationship between Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s original Golmaal and Rohit Shetty’s Bol Bachchan can be summed up in one of the ridiculous couplets that make up Bol Bachchan’s depressingly bad title song:
“Where one represents a magnanimous name,
While the other represents a horrendous game.”

If this makes absolutely no sense to you, I apologise. A couple of hours in the world of Bol Bachchan is enough to make the best of us start to blabber.

Rohit Shetty takes the marvellous mild-mannered comedy classic, squeezes every drop of joy and wit out of it, and hangs it out to dry. It is murder most foul.

It’s not clear why the film is called Bol Bachchan, except to capitalise shamelessly on the presence of the name, and on the somewhat grudging presence of its owner: the senior B appears in the aforementioned title song, cannibalising first one, then another of his own most famous dialogues, even as we wait with dread to see what will come next. One is almost grateful when he announces, at song’s end, that he’s not in the movie.


Replacing Utpal Dutt’s exaggeratedly fearsome Bhawani Shankar, he of the moustache and satya vachan, with Ajay Devgn’s whip-wielding, nose-flaring Prithviraj Raghuvanshi, whose speciality is mauling English words and phrases into unrecognizable nonsense: this is just the first sign of Shetty’s hubris. Next comes the substitution of Amol Palekar’s immortal Ramprasad and Lakshmanprasad by Abhishek Bachchan’s Abbas Ali and—wait for it—Abhishek Bachchan: such clever self-referentiality, wow! We must also suffer through the grotesque flirtatiousness of Archana Puran Singh in place of the superbly subtle Dina Pathak, and of the now-invariably-overdone Asrani in place of the quiet, twinkling David.

It’s no surprise, then, that the quiet middle class world of the old Golmaal, where the flashiest thing ever was the sight of Amol Palekar wearing sunglasses to a hockey match, has been swallowed up and spat out as this tourist universe of fake havelis with fake rangolis, black-and-gold uphostered sofa chairs serving as thrones in scorching open courtyards, and streets filled with earthen pots and bangle stalls—all the better to shatter in fight scenes. (It’s a superlative piece of irony that this film makes one of its heroines an “art director”.)

But Shetty doesn’t stop there. He takes a film whose very premise—the made-up judwa bhai—was an exquisitely fine dig at the proliferation of identical twins in mainstream commercial cinema, and creates a blissfully oblivious reworking of it that makes the hapless Asin Thottumkal both Ajay Devgn’s long-dead love and her “real-life” humshakal (yes, the ‘art director’).

The filmmakers’ ridiculously high estimation of themselves reaches its acme with what one can only assume is their deep belief in intertextuality. Not only does Bol Bachchan rework the plot of the old Golmaal, it also has the old film appearing as a movie on TV, inserts a local naatak mandli that’s rehearsing a play version of it—and even bungs in a sort of dream sequence where Ajay Devgan puts on glasses and ‘becomes’ Utpal Dutt to Abhishek’s Amol Palekar. And just in case you still haven’t managed to cotton on to the plot by the time all this is done, the finale has Ajay Devgn and his cronies perform a cringeworthy burlesque of everything that has taken place already.

The film also gives us a wonderful ringside view of the contemporary Hindu mind, to which it is apparently perfectly normal that no Muslim can admit to have broken a lock on a temple, even if it is to rescue a drowning child, and worse, no Hindu can have studied in a ‘Muslim’ institution, so that Jamia Millia Islamia must quickly be replaced by a fictional “Pandit Nehru College”.

None of these travesties, however, can compare with the dialogue, where Devgn takes pride of place with his straight-faced rendition of pure rubbish. When praised, he replies, “Thanks for the Complan boy,”; when lecturing the males of his village, he tells them to “eat lots of akhrot, tighten your langot and fight with bare hands”; and when calming someone down, he advises them to “Pest control” themselves.

But then Devgn has given up on himself as an actor a while ago—pity, because he’s not half bad when he tries. Abhishek Bachchan, on the other hand, did a rather good job with comic timing in Bluffmaster and Bunty aur Babli and even the much-reviled but very fun Jhoom Barabar Jhoom. Here, though, no amount of impressive bawdiness—one of his selves is supposed to be an effeminate Muslim dance teacher—can make up for the autopilot performance that gets him by for the rest of the film.

One can only pray that Rohit Shetty does not take it into his head to remake any more Hrishikesh Mukherjee films. As the sole hummable song in this film goes, “Kahin nikal na jaye humri body se praan re”.

Published in Firstpost.

Film Review: Tezz has the thrill, but where’s the dil?

“Aajkal izzat maangne se nahi milti, chheenni padti hai” (You don’t get respect by asking for it these days, you have to snatch it), says Akash Rana (Ajay Devgn) a few minutes into Priyadarshan’s new film. Before you can snap your fingers, Akash and his accomplices Adil (Zayed Khan) and Megha (Sameera Reddy) have planted a bomb on a train from London to Glasgow, and are demanding 10 million pounds to defuse it. Cut to the British railway control room, and cue series of mobile phone calls between sombre bomber Akash, train brain Sanjay Raina and top cop Arjun Khanna.

Tezz could have easily been an action-filled riff on A Wednesday: a lone man using a bomb threat to get media coverage and force the government to pay attention. And the film does spend an inordinate amount of time trying to convince us that Akash is the tragic victim of evil immigration laws. But how getting a lot of money out of the British government in exchange for 500 innocent lives is going to get him ‘respect’ is never explained.

In fact there’s much that is inexplicable about Tezz. In a Bollywood world where Indians abroad have never been shown as anything but well-off, well-settled NRIs with their dil in Hindustan, it’s interesting to finally have a Hindi film that allows for the fact that not all desi immigrants are legal, and that they want nothing more than to never have to return to India. Unfortunately, having hit upon a potentially interesting subject, Tezz is content to leave the treatment paper-thin.

Ditto for its characters. Who is Akash Rana? Where did he grow up? Why exactly does he think he can get away with not having legal status in the UK? Why, instead of being deported all by himself, doesn’t he simply take his simpering British wife (Kangna Ranaut, with scarcely anything to do) and child and go off to India – especially if he’s an engineer? The film has no answers. Zayed Khan and Sameera Reddy’s characters get even more slender backgrounds: just a couple of over-dramatic flashbacks which are supposed to explain why they’re risking their lives to aid Devgn’s train bomb ploy. Well, they don’t.

The guys they’re up against – the British establishment, represented of course by the desi cop Arjun Khanna (Anil Kapoor), desi railway controller Sanjay Raina (Boman Irani) and yet another desi cop (Mohanlal) – don’t have it much better in terms of characterisation. Anil Kapoor, playing a feted UK police officer, doesn’t look like he’s on the verge of retirement. But since we’re told he is, it seems a trifle unbelievable that he should have to fight “you guys are all terrorists” slurs from a random white colleague at this stage of a grand career. And make no mistake, it is grand – he’s the only cop I’ve ever heard of who gets to address an all-white British Parliament. Mohanlal is completely wasted, spending the whole film stuck on the bomb-threatened train where all he gets to do is deal with intermittent outbreaks of passenger panic. Oh, that and speak in a South Indian accent to a little girl speaking in a North Indian accent, who turns out to be the daughter of Establishment Desi No. 3: Boman Irani. Irani, being the talented actor he is, manages to imbue his (equally slender) character with a semblance of teary reality. But on the whole, this is a film where characters don’t really matter.

What matters are the chase scenes, the aerial shots of the train whizzing through the British countryside, the nailbiting stunts. And by Hindi movie standards, these are really rather good. I sat rooted to my seat watching Sameera Reddy rafting dangerously over rapids with a yellow waterproof suitcase and a bike over the heads of nonplussed British cops, all the while being followed by a combination of helicopters and police cars. Zayed Khan had my favourite chase scene, doing a lot of impressive somersaulting across a series of London subways and bridges. And Devgn gets to do a micro-mini-version of a Third Man-style splash through the sewers. All rather fun, and none of them look even faintly ridiculous while they’re doing it.

There’s a great scene in Tezz where Anil Kapoor and his team think they’ve got Ajay Devgn surrounded, until they break into the farm and find a solitary cellphone sitting on a chair in an empty room, routing Devgn’s voice through it. “Maan gaye isko yaar, bahut English picture dekhta hai saala,” laughs Anil.

Same goes for Priyadarshan, clearly. I just wish this Hindi picture had a little more kahani in it.

Film Review: Aakrosh

THE BURNING TRAIL



In Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning (1988), two FBI agents with diametrically opposed ways of functioning arrive in a small town in the American South to investigate the disappearance of three civil rights activists. In Priyadarshan’s Aakrosh, two members of a CBI team with diametrically opposed ways of functioning arrive in a small town in north India to investigate the disappearance of three college students. It doesn’t end there: the narrative, characters, even scenes are happily plucked from Parker’s film and planted in Priyan’s.

All of this might be palatable if one could count it as a decent adaptation of a classic. But while Mississippi Burning managed to be both a taut policier and a passionate race relations drama, Aakrosh doesn’t quite swing it on either count.

Which is sad, because the prolific Priyan’s return to ‘issue-based’ Hindi cinema — for the first time since Virasat (1997) — has enough going for it. S Tirru’s cinematography is often impressive, with some superb action set-pieces that are clearly the director’s pride and joy (including a nice Mirch Masala tribute). The underrated Akshaye Khanna as a watchful, bespectacled CBI agent (who plays hard, but by the rules) is a perfect foil to Ajay Devgn as the hot-headed officer sent to assist him, while Paresh Rawal plays nasty cop with a carefully calibrated mix of nonchalance and menace. And they all get some decent lines.

But as one issue bleeds into another — ‘honour’ killings, police impunity, Dalit oppression, a trishul-wielding Hindu sena whose only raison d’etre is that Mississippi Burning had a Ku Klux Klan — it becomes hard to feel anything. And the more violence the evil thugs wreak on their supremely hapless victims, the greater the disconnect.

There is also the small matter of Bipasha Basu, (hapless) wife of (evil) Rawal, who is just stunningly wrong, whether glumly dusting her tasteful furniture in discreet handloom sari and just-blow-dried hair, or mouthing lines utterly beyond her ken (“Jamuniya, tohre nain kahe bheegat hain?”).

The honour killings, never much more than a peg for some solid masala, are sadly sidelined. But hey, we do get to watch the effortlessly intense Mr Devgn squeeze under a moving train, propel himself along an electricity wire with his belt and steer a whole jungle car chase atop a moving Innova. I’m a fan.

From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 7, Issue 43, Dated October 30, 2010