Again and again and again

My Mirror column:

A plot-heavy romance uses time travel to look at love in the long term — which means the here and now.

Nitya Mehra's Baar Baar Dekho is the second Hindi film by a woman director to hit theatres in consecutive weeks - and it shows. Last week saw the release of Ruchika Oberoi's Island City, whose darkly comic provocations came lined with deep insight into how it feels to be human these days. This week's film is much more consciously 'mainstream' -- a love story between two good looking people with the predictably Punjabi Khatri names that Bollywood clings to with such tenacity. But the relationship between Diya Kapoor (Katrina Kaif) and Jai Varma (Sidharth Malhotra) is seen through a woman's eyes, and that makes it different from most relationships we've seen on the Hindi film screen.

There's a cool time-travel plot, which helps keeps things light. The future as a way to add visual interest -- Bahai-temple-shaped electric cremations and hologram-style projections of phone calls -- can sometimes seem lame, but it isn't too distracting. On a more emotional plane, Jai's recurring befuddlement at having been catapulted into some time he doesn't recognize makes sure that laughs are always around the corner. But make no mistake, this is a film with urgent, important things to say about love - not the sweep-you-off-your-feet, first-flush adoration that Hindi films have helped turn into our collective imagination, but the show-up-and-stay-around variety that seems to be as hard to find in life as it is on screen.

The characterisation isn't particularly subtle. So the cerebral man who wants to live his life 'logically' is represented by an actual mathematician-—frantically crunching numbers with his head even when it's his heart that's in danger. The absent-minded professor is so absent-minded that he actually 'forgets' large chunks of the life he's lived. Another man, another problem: the fellow who constantly inflates his class status goes from needing to deny to his best friend that he's travelling Economy Class to having to deny to his wife that he's actually flipping burgers for a living. Meanwhile the rich businessman father-in-law's large-hearted offers of 'support' are an obvious way of showing down his son-in-law's more limited income.

But what Mehra's film maps with warmth and insight is a relationship dynamic most middle class Indian women are likely to recognize all too easily -- and let's face it, subtlety might not work too well if the idea is to get the men in the audience to see it too.

So it's probably strategic that Baar Baar Dekho hits us on the head with its portrait of the checked-out husband. The sweet-faced, mostly even-tempered Jai seems like the perfect catch -- except that he seems to spend most of his life behaving like he's trying to escape.

He's the man who's always so preoccupied with the 'big things' that every other part of the couple's life together becomes relegated to 'small stuff'-- which somehow makes it the woman's sole responsibility. I mean the man who wafts along, letting his partner take charge of all decisions about their everyday domestic arrangements and social life, because he really couldn't be bothered -- until he suddenly, angrily, is. You know, the man who all his work colleagues would agree is a nice guy, and hardworking too -- except he never seems to see that relationships at home need niceness and hard work, too.

Among the other things the film does with comic finesse is to highlight how wrong men get it when they try to define what being a good partner is. Even at the very last calamitous moment, when faced with the question 'What can I do to fix my marriage?' the always overwhelmed Jai can only come up with a negative injunction to himself: 'Don't have an affair'. Which isn't exactly wrong, Mehra's film seems to say -- but it's very far from being enough. Because being a good husband, as every woman who has ever beaten her head against her partner's incomprehension knows, can't just mean not being a 'bad' one. It isn't just about not beating up your wife, not cheating on her, or not endangering your children's lives. A healthy, happy, loving relationship needs positive words and actions—and not words and actions that are wrenched from you after seventeen reminders, but voluntary things that you do because you want to be in the relationship.

Being there for someone can't just be a theoretical thing in the back of your head, which you're sure you'll do when the time comes. Being there in a relationship means being there every day. Not just because that keeps it alive and well, but because once you stop doing it every day, you'll find you don't even notice when the time does come.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 11 Sep 2016.

All that glitters isn't gold

My Mumbai Mirror column today:

Fitoor reduces Great Expectations to a glossy bauble dangling from a thin thread of Kashmir.

Portrait of the artist as a muscled man: Aditya Roy Kapur in Fitoor 

Among the Dickens novels thrust upon Indian schoolchildren, Great Expectations was perhaps the one I liked least. The book's dramatic opening, with a petrified young Pip helping out the on-the-run convict Magwitch, was certainly memorable, as was Miss Havisham and the eerie atmosphere of decay that surrounded her. But I never understood Pip's fascination for Estella: the rich, spoilt, pretty girl who doled out her company as a favour, and the poor boy who remained enraptured, long after he had ceased to be a boy. Her being rich wasn't the problem for me; it was that she seemed such a creature of surface: all fancy clothes and frippery, with not a glimmer of intelligence or feeling to back up her childish hauteur. Why, I always wondered, would someone find that interesting? And if they did, why should I find that someone interesting? 

Still, when I heard of an Indian adaptation of Great Expectations, I imagined it was precisely the Pip-Estella relationship - if you can call so one-sided a thing a relationship - that would be its focus. After all, the poor little boy obsessed with the rich little girl has been a staple of Hindi film romance - think Awara, or Muqaddar ka Sikandar. 

And so it was. Abhishek Kapoor's Fitoor, set in a Kashmir of fifteen years ago, places his characters at the requisite unbridgeable social distance, and leads us squarely into the childhood romance we recognise. The dreamy-eyed Noor, called to the big house as apprentice to a carpenter—his fond Junaid Jeeju—becomes immediately besotted with the apple-cheeked young Firdaus. Encountering the young boy staring goggle-eyed at her, Firdaus's first words to him are a pert injunction. "Aankhein neeche," she commands, even as she holds his gaze and stares right back. A moment later, it is she who lowers her eyes -- not out of bashfulness, but to look condescendingly at the hole in Noor's tatty shoes. 

It is a sharp scene, accurately presaging the inequalities to come. In fact, Fitoor's childhood sections, nicely inhabited by a thin little Mohammad Abrar and a plump little Tunisha Sharma, are the film's most convincing. Abrar, in particular, does both jaunty and crestfallen well, making you believe in his helpless infatuation with this snotty princess, desirable precisely because she represents a world he can barely imagine. 

But before you know it, the children have grown up, and lost any personality they might have once had. The most imperious thing about Firdaus is now Katrina Kaif's flaming red hair, while Aditya Roy Kapur's muscle-laden Noor practices art as a bare-bodied sport. It is left to Anay Goswamy's cinematography to produce such enchantment as he can: grand interiors that are gloomy even when lit with chandeliers, gorgeous snow-bedecked exteriors that produce a timeless, aestheticised, frozen Kashmir—so what if part of it is Poland. 

In stark opposition to the political punch of Haider, which was the last film Bollywood set in that part of the world, Fitoor reduces an explosive, complicated political milieu to a meaningless gimmick. A single death in a single bomb blast stands in for everything that's happened in Kashmir in 15 years. None of the characters are affected by their strife-torn locale, except for a mindless marshalling of the rightwing slogan "Doodh mangoge toh kheer denge, Kashmir mangoge toh cheer denge". Though perhaps it isn't mindless: Firdaus' marital alliance with a Pakistani man suggests a muddled Kashmir allegory. 

The palace that serves as home to Tabu -- Miss Havisham as a hookah-smoking, highly strung Hazrat Begum—is all carpets and ghazals, an updated Muslim social universe that could have been set anywhere, so long as Tabu spoke her Urdu. Katrina Kaif is a blunt instrument at the best of times, but it seems particularly unfair to set her up next to an actress whose every word is a quivering arrow. Despite a confusing bunch of flashbacks (involving the ethereal Aditi Rao Hydari dubbed in Tabu's voice), Tabu makes Hazrat the film's sole motor. Moving between petulant, melancholy and sinister, even the waning Hazrat radiates more aura than the shimmering Firdaus. 

The great themes of Great Expectations - class hierarchy and social advancement - are ostensibly present in Fitoor, too. If Pip neglects old friends to become a gentleman for Estella, Noor is quick to reject his roots for the glittering world of Delhi's art parties. For Pip, the discovery that his secret benefactor was not Miss Havisham but the convict Magwitch destroyed his delusions of grandeur. Noor, making the same discovery, shows only anger—no remorse. 

Where Dickens made us scrutinise "the happiness of money" in the cold light of day, Kapoor and his co-screenwriter Supratik Sen seem unable to rid their eyes of the dazzle. Our hero goes from Srinagar artisan to global sensation in a matter of months, and never bats an eyelid at a world where a single painting sells for Rs 3 crore while a talented woodworker is kept waiting for two thousand. 

On a scholarship called 'Art for Freedom' (which is both residency and gallery contract), he causes a sensation with his anodyne depictions of a wounded Kashmir. But asked his views on aazaadi, all he can say is, "Itni aazaadi kaafi nahi? Zinda hoon, saans le raha hoon..." and tell us he craves a return to "the way things were". It isn't just Fitoor's camerawork that's all smoke and mirrors. But like Noor, perhaps surface gloss is all we deserve.

Film Review: Ek Tha Romance

My review of Ek Tha Tiger, on Firstpost:

First, the good things: Ek Tha Tiger is the least annoying Salman Khan movie in ages. Coming after the ceaseless assaults on the senses that were Bodyguard and Ready, Salman’s performance in Ek Tha Tiger feels almost subtle. There are no bordering-on-obscene dance moves, no grotesque family members, and – believe it or not – only a single scene where he takes his shirt off.

Salman plays a RAW agent, which in the Ek Tha Tiger universe means that fans can have the pleasure of watching him perform stunts in various exciting locations, from Afghanistan to Dublin to Havana. Some of these action sequences are rather fun. The film opens, for instance, with a slow-mo Salman ridding the earth of a traitorous colleague, followed by a rather enjoyable chase through cobbled Afghan streets – director Kabir Khan, who made several documentaries in Afghanistan before making his feature debut with Kabul Express, knows how to exploit this locale.

After much catapulting from rooftops and tobogganing backwards down a flight of stone steps with a gun in each hand, Salman does a noton ki baarish with the late colleague’s ill-gotten gains, creating a nicely choreographed quasi-riot through which he can then escape.

We get the bare bones of Tiger’s home life, but it’s nicely done. The introductory scene placing him in his Delhi neighbourhood is most enjoyable: women of all ages failing to tear their eyes away from the mysterious bachelor who reappears after long absences to stand at his front door in his banian and take milk from the doodhwala. The scene with his boss Shenoy (Girish Karnad) is also a fine one, even if it hinges on some predictable farz-versus-mohabbat lines. Karnad at least has not gone the sleepwalking way of Naseeruddin Shah (Maximum) and manages to bring a bit of spark to his scenes.

The real surprise of this film is that Salman actually has a romance track that isn’t played as broad comedy or tacky trophy-wife acquisition. It may be slightly silly (witness bad jokes about Zee and Doordarshan), but it has moments of real tenderness that one would have thought Salman had forgotten how to deliver. If this return to romance has something to do with the fact that the object of his affection is played by real-life ex Katrina Kaif – well, more power to her.

Katrina is an asset to the film – as British Asian student Zoya, she not only achieves the gigantic feat of making Salman Khan appear ‘in love’, she manages to look absolutely glorious without looking synthetic. She is also about a hundred times better at action than the last desi heroine I watched try her hand at a spy thriller – Kareena Kapoor in Agent Vinod.

That brings me to the inevitable comparison between the two films, and here Ek Tha Tiger comes off rather badly. As a spy thriller, Agent Vinod was infinitely cleverer. Sriram Raghavan, too, used an implausible spy story to take us on an unapologetically colourful ride around the world – but every exotic set piece had a place in the plot. If Raghavan took us to St. Petersburg, there was an actual Russian villain and the heroine performing a dance number to distract him; if the Moroccan sequence began with Prem Chopra killing off his pet camel, there was a reason why we saw him do it; and conversely, if the director felt like giving us an old-style double mujra, we found ourselves at a glittering Karachi wedding.

In contrast, Ek Tha Tiger, though not badly shot, saunters through its locations like a contented tourist, rarely making any effort to create plotlines or characters specific to place. Even when it does – like casting Roshan Seth as a crabby old Indian scientist who lives and works in Dublin – the script gives him almost nothing to do. Ranveer Shorey, as Tiger’s colleague Gopi, is yet another instance of a marvelous actor given fairly little to chew on.

If Ek Tha Tiger is meant to be a spy thriller, it’s a disappointingly soft-boiled one. There is precisely one twist – one involving Katrina Kaif that you can see coming from a mile away – after which the film becomes an increasingly soppy, ever more unbelievable romantic saga, occasionally punctuated by fights in foreign locales.

Perhaps this should not surprise us, for this is an Aditya Chopra story, and romance must rule. And perhaps — as the box office failure of Agent Vinod and the record-breaking success of Ek Tha Tiger forces us to conclude – even when making spy thrillers, we just prefer soppy Indo-Pak romances to cleverly plotted scripts with a twinkle in their eye.