Everyone wants a happy ending

My Mumbai Mirror column:

Ludo tries hard to present the world as breezily anarchic, but it's hard to sustain while going on about good and evil

Anurag Basu likes to cultivate the idea of chaos, creating a tangle of threads so he can have the aesthetic pleasure of disentangling them. His latest film Ludo, which launched on a streaming platform earlier this year, takes that aesthetic conceit to its acme. A film with four different tracks needs a structuring motif, and Basu's choice is the popular board game with a board and counters organised into four primary colours. At first it seems that the only uniting factor among these disparate narratives is an unkillable don called Sattu Bhaiyya (Pankaj Tripathi), from whose gun -- and whose den -- all stories flow.

But while the four tracks appear to be treading their individual way to anarchy, Basu has clearly spent some time imbuing them with a fundamental premise. At the centre of each is a pair of individuals who seem like they ought to come together neatly: fill each other's blank spaces, so to speak. But they're also unlucky pairings, disunited by fate and selfhood. There's a bullied nurse and a bullied mall attendant; a neglected little girl and an ex-goonda separated from his own child; a besotted dhaba owner and his unrequited childhood love, reeling from her discovery of a cheating husband; and a pretty girl obsessed with hunting down the perfect husband, unlike the laidback guy she has fun sex with. There is also Sattu Bhaiya himself-- he who cannot be killed -- and the senior Malayali nurse Lata Kutty, to whom he takes an unexpected shine.

All of Basu's characters need rescuing -- but in each pair, there's one that we're told needs rescuing more. Abhishek Bachchan's Bittu, for example, is a sad man who wants his daughter back, and transfers some of his affections to the lost little girl he stumbles on one evening. The child (Inayat Verma) is named Mini, in Basu's clear tribute to the classic Kabuliwala narrative about another tall burly man who's actually a softie missing his faraway daughter. You'd think the child would be the more vulnerable one, but of course it's she who delivers the life lesson: if the object of your affections is happy elsewhere, you've just got to be happy for them. Bittu refuses to listen when his ex-wife delivers it as a stinging remark on confusing love and ego, but he absorbs it perfectly out of the mouth of a child.

Thankfully the little girl isn't implied to be exploiting Bittu – which does feel like the case with some of the film's other women characters. Aditya Roy Kapur's Akash seeks (and finds) casual sex on a matrimonial website. But it's his sexual partner Shruti (Sanya Malhotra) that we're told needs to be saved from her dream of finding a rich provider. Meanwhile Fatima Sana Sheikh's Pinky exploits Rajkummar Rao's unyielding affections all the way through school into adulthood, and even beyond – even her marriage to an ostensibly more suitable boy cannot prevent Alloo (Rajkummar) from being the only man she can turn to in a crisis.

Crisis, though, is what makes the film's boardgame-level philosophising work to the extent it does. “Jo bin matlab de saath, usi ka pakad le haath (When someone helps you without a motive, that's the one to hang on to),” Shruti quotes her grandmother as having proclaimed. The bullied twosome have no language in common – Pearl Maane's Sheeja can't speak much Hindi, Rohit Saraf's Rahul Awasthi certainly understands no Malayalam. As they find themselves launched on an adventure not quite of their making, the thrill of the ride is all they have in common. But when you see them at film's end, having exchanged their sad working lives for a hot pink car and fancy clothes, you wonder how long the spark can survive through such comfort. As Akash tells Shruti, in another of the tracks, having too little can make happiness hard – but having too much makes it impossible.

But for all Basu's attempts at Seventh-Seal-type commentary in the guise of Yamraj (the Hindu god of death), Ludo can't have only neat conclusions. As Yamraj says, “If the Kauravas were villains, what was Duryodhana doing in heaven at the end?” So Ludo leaves us with at least one un-deserved sad ending.

But the randomness he claims isn't really sustained – most characters get their just desserts, including Sattu Bhaiyya's deserved ludic one: paralysis followed by life with a loving caretaker, a vision of a lifelong future we've seen in previous Indian films, most visibly Hazaaron Khwaishen Aisi. Anarchy isn't as easy as they make it out to be.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 20 Dec 2020.

Film Review: The Unbearable Sweetness of Being Barfi

The central premise of Anurag Basu’s new film is that true love is that which is unplanned, unpremeditated—a pure impulse of the heart, unblemished by the dictates of the head.

At first, it seems that the exemplary practitioner of this is the film’s deaf-mute hero, Barfi (Ranbir Kapoor), and the one chosen to relay his message to us is the winsome young girl called Shruti (well-cast debutante Ileana D’Cruz) that he first gives his heart to. Barfi taught me, says a tastefully graying Shruti in one of the many too-easy voice-overs with which the film prepares to catapult us into epic romantic backstory, “ki life mein sabse bada risk hota hai kabhi koi risk na lena (The biggest risk in life is to never take any risks)”. If films must deliver how-you-should-live-your-life messages, then that’s a message I’d happily take on board.

But then it turns out that the model of true love in Barfi is actually the relationship between Barfi and the autistic Jhilmil (Priyanka Chopra). To the non-disabled, ‘normal’ Shruti, now the outsider in their wordless world, it is the only love that lives up to her childish vision of her grandparents, who lived together for ever and then died a day apart.

But childish is the operative word here. The relationship between Barfi and Jhilmil may well be unplanned, spontaneous and untainted by the instrumental pragmatism that underlies Shruti’s unhappy alliance to a suitable boy, which the film sets up as its other. But it is also untainted by the invariable crisscrossing of mutual expectations, or the occasional messiness of egos, or the essential frisson of desire. It is devoid, by its very nature, of any of the elements of real-life love as most people experience it. It is, like this film which places it on a pedestal, less pure love than pure fantasy.

The trajectory of Anurag Basu’s directorial career is an odd one, from the adultery and violence of Murder (2004) and Gangster (2006)—both fairly taut films, made under the Bhatts’ Vishesh Films banner, via the largely endearing (if undeniably derivative) ensemble film Life in a Metro (2007) to the overwrought romantic flourish of Kites (2010) – and now this attempt at epic tragicomic romance.

Barfi is as far as it is possible to come from gritty or sexy or dark or pungent. It inhabits a rose-tinted world filled with toy trains and picture-perfect houses, surrounded by magically wintry forests complete with fireflies that you can catch in shimmering soap bubbles. Right from the title onwards – named for the famously cute Murphy baby of radio fame, Ranbir says his name in such a way that people call him Barfi – the film clearly places itself in an alternate universe.

In this universe, being poor and mute and friendless in Calcutta means living in a place that manages to overlook the Howrah Bridge, and managing to make a living for two by pasting advertisements for Prestige pressure cookers on the city streets. From the picturesque ghats and green fields of rural Bengal to the sleepy, musty police station in a real place called Ghoom (sleep in Bangla), there’s no denying the care with which the film lays out its nostalgia-soaked milieu. It just feels suspiciously like a handkerchief placed there for us to weep into.

Because, despite all its avowed lightness of touch, personified in the adroitly Chaplinesque turn put in by its impressive leading man, this is a deeply manipulative film. The initial portions—in which we see young love bloom between Shruti and Barfi—do try to steer clear of mawkishness and sympathy, managing to make us believe in an initially reluctant Shruti becoming gradually smitten by Barfi’s wordless charm.

Ranbir’s effervescent performance, lifting sequence after sequence with his marvelous flair for physical comedy (like he did to some extent in Ajab Prem ki Gajab Kahani), has a lot to do with this. Everyone else is unmemorable, though Saurabh Shukla does reasonably well as a harried policeman whose waist “has gone down from 52 inches to 42 inches” in trying to keep up with Barfi, giving us several silent-movie-style chases that you cannot but smile at.

With the entry of Jhilmil, however, the film not only transforms into a circuitous, inexplicable whodunit that drags and drags, it also succumbs to everything it was apparently trying to avoid. Priyanka Chopra, officially deglamorised but never looking anything other than oh-so-adorable, makes a valiant effort to inhabit the rather impossible role she’s landed with, but there’s simply no getting away from the deliberately cutesy form that her relationship with Barfi takes.

From attempting to copy the elegant Shruti by wearing a sari, or trying to embody the imagined Bengali wife by fanning Barfi as he eats, there’s something terribly troubling about the film’s cloying resolution of Jhilmil’s autism. If only all differently-abled people could live in Barfi’s la-la-land.

Read the review on the Firstpost site here.