Heroes of the Unlikely KInd

My Mirror column: 

Jolly LLB 2 is not a great film by any means, but its jollities pack a rare political punch.

Subhash Kapoor’s latest film returns us to a character he first presented on screen in March 2013: the ambitious small-town lawyer whose failure to work the system suddenly ends up pitting him against it. In Jolly LLB 1, Arshad Warsi was Jagdish Tyagi, the guy from Meerut whose ham-handed attempt to get himself some publicity sets him up against Boman Irani’s scheming Rajpal, the sort of high-maintenance Delhi lawyer whose arrival causes a flutter of anticipation to run down the corridors of the court. In Jolly LLB 2, Tyagi (and Warsi) has been unceremoniously replaced by Jagdishwar Mishra, Akshay Kumar playing a Kanpur ka Kanyakubja Brahmin who finds himself doing battle with a slimy Lucknow legal mind called Pramod Mathur (Annu Kapoor).

Warsi’s 2013 Jolly was no saint — in fact, that was crucial to Kapoor’s imagining of an identifiable everyman: someone who didn’t have the luxury of purity, but picked his battles. But Akshay Kumar’s version is less bumbling and way more swag. The new film’s insistence on his being street-smart seems to be centred around the need to preserve something of Kumar’s heroic persona: he is the Kanpuria who can bluff his way into a sweeter deal, the lawyer who doesn’t have any trouble breaking the law, who doesn’t even think twice about lying outright to a needy woman when he thinks his need is greater. Which is fine until we are asked to simultaneously believe in him being a novice in the courtroom: not just when it comes to legal argument, but even in lawyerly etiquette.

Kapoor has never really been bothered by legal niceties like getting the law right. In the 2013 film as well as now, he merrily treats the reopening of a criminal case as a Public Interest Litigation. What he gets right in both films, though, is the depressing state of the Indian judicial system, as encapsulated in the dimly lit courtroom, presided over by the underwhelming and often overwhelmed Saurabh Shukla. The piles of files, the diminutive judge who thinks nothing of hiding under the table, the chaotic haatha-paaii that is constantly threatening to break out under the very nose of Justice — none of this could be further from the old-school Hindi movie adaalat of Awaara or even Damini.

We have had bleaker, more realistic takes on the present-day courtroom in Hansal Mehta’s Shahid and Chaitanya Tamhane’s Court. But Kapoor is going for a different register. For one, he seems interested in holding up the irascible and eccentric Justice Tripathi (Saurabh Shukla recycling his act from the 2013 film) as a sort of metaphor for the judiciary: he is down but not yet out. His rotund frame and preoccupied manner may make him a figure of fun, but when it comes to the crunch, he manages to imbue the proceedings with authority.

But again the tone is uneven. The filmmaker claims a self-conscious departure from the grand histrionics of old by having Justice Tripathi dismissing Jolly’s high drama in his courtroom with a perfunctory “Sunny Deol kyun ban rahe ho?” And yet the film — and Justice Tripathi — seem quite willing to entertain high drama when it comes to the actual case at hand: an investigation into a police ‘encounter’ that wasn’t one.

This sort of choppiness in terms of both characterisation and tone does not prevent Jolly LLB 2 from being a politically courageous film whose broadstrokes humour might just succeed in getting across its message to a large audience. The encounter in the film is unpacked as the custodial murder of an innocent man for the unfortunate mistake of sharing his first name with a terrorist. He is deliberately mis-identified by a corrupt policeman so that the real accused can make good his escape, having paid a tidy sum to the policeman in question.

As in his first film, Kapoor deals here categorically with an all-too-common narrative that crops up in the media only after it is too late, and even then is often addressed with too little conviction: how the rot in the police system prevents justice from being done in the courtroom.

And here Jolly LLB 2 goes even further. It pits the “deshdrohi” terrorist against the policeman who has taken a “matribhoomi ki shapath”, thus reproducing the discourse of ‘anti-national’ versus ‘nationalist’ that the BJP has successfully made the discourse of the country’s drawing rooms and chai shops. But it then uses two powerfully understandable devices — Kashmir and police corruption — to show us how hollow this supposed binary is. The film’s message is so simple as to be obvious: the Muslim is not a terrorist until proven to be so; and the policeman is not a nationalist until proven to be so. But Kapoor must absolutely be applauded for delivering it.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 26 Feb 2017.

Film Review: Phata Poster Nikla Hero

From my review of Phata Poster Nikla Hero:

"The Rajkumar Santoshi genre of comedy is hard to translate. It’s some insane combination of silly slapstick and filmi spoof, via which we’re also meant to experience a return to a world of pure good and evil – a world which has only ever existed in Manmohan Desai movies. Pretty much every situation and character in Phata Poster Nikla Hero is a deliberate comic reworking of a ’70s’ Hindi movie cliché – the labouring single mother who raises her son to be an honest man, the loving son who can’t see tears in his mother’s eyes, the gang of villains who trick the hero into doing bad things on their behalf, and the evil supervillain who wants to destroy the world. But it is a gentle, goofy reworking that remains, in spirit, thoroughly inside the emotional universe of Hindi movie melodrama."

Read more here.

Film Review: A streak of cynical realism undercuts all of Jolly LLB's jollities

Jolly LLB opens with a hit-and-run accident involving a drunk rich kid in a Land Cruiser and several poor men sleeping on a Delhi pavement. The pavement-dwellers die, a case is filed against the rich kid, but his family hires the sharpest, most hotshot lawyer in town – and gets the boy acquitted. The case is closed. Until a struggling young advocate, newly arrived from a small town, decides to file a PIL to have the case re-opened.

Sounds like a dully predictable tale of good-versus-evil? Certainly there’s no doubt that Jolly LLB is a film with its heart in the right place. But director Subhash Kapoor manages to leaven his conscience-laden tale with a healthy dose of laughter. And crucially, he gives us a protagonist more complicated and believable than, for instance, the unswayable paragon of Ferrari ki Sawaari, a charming but somewhat fairy-tale-ish film that was also about honesty.

Jagdish Tyagi, aka Jolly (Arshad Warsi) is a decent-enough guy, but his small-town simplicity is not something he’s proud of. He’s made the move from Meerut to Delhi because he has ambitions. He wants to be somebody. In fact, he wants to be somebody like Tejinder Rajpal (Boman Irani) — the kind of lawyer whose arrival in court causes a stir. When Jolly decides to file the PIL asking for reinvestigation in the Rahul Deewan case, it isn’t only the public interest that’s on his mind: he knows it’s a quick route to media attention and potential fame. It just so happens that this pits him against his hero Rajpal – and Rajpal’s heroism starts swiftly and surely to unravel.

The rest of the film is about how a novice like Jolly meets the multiple challenges thrown his way by a riled Rajpal: challenges not just of the head, but also of the heart. What makes Jolly LLB more than a standard-issue David vs Goliath story is that it understands the difficulties of retaining a moral compass in a world which seems to reward cleverness, not honesty. For the small-time lawyer whose ‘desk’ is a rickety table outside the District Court (with his typewriter chained to it for fear even that be stolen), the stakes are low and the temptations great. Is it surprising that such a man should measure even his own defeats by degrees of nuksaan and faayda?

Kapoor’s last film, Phans Gaye Re Obama (2010), a quirky tale of a recession-hit gang of dacoits, was spread needlessly thin across a convoluted plot and too many characters. Jolly LLB – barring some utterly out-of-synch songs and an uninteresting romance track involving Amrita Rao – sticks assuredly with its main plotline: the unconnected rookie lawyer, a minnow trying to fight the biggest fish in the pond—and having to figure out if he’s going to take the bait.

Warsi and Irani, the consummate performers they are, keep us more than engaged in the twists and turns of the battle. But the character who really brings the courtroom to life is Saurabh Shukla’s eccentric Justice Tripathi—not averse to asking for the odd favour, but sharply aware of where the buck stops, a man who can be a stickler for the rules but can also bend them when it seems absolutely necessary.

When Kapoor does move our gaze away from the central courtroom drama, it is to cast a gently satirical eye on the absurd ironies of the surrounding reality. There is the great scene where a havaldar known as Guruji (Sanjay Mishra) sits down to auction posts at different police stations, with the "upar se order” being only that the bidding start at 20 lakhs and the post go to a “clean image wala afsar”. There is the police bodyguard who arrives, on court orders, to ensure Jolly’s security—a doddering old man who can barely bear the weight of his rifle. There is the unremarked, completely realistic moment when it is made clear that even to fight the good fight, you must pay a couple of bribes—but chalo, you can do it at a discount rate.

There is pleasure in watching the underdog win, and the film does not deny us that. But when Boman Irani’s raging Rajpal shakes his fist and declares he’ll be back, there is something about this film that makes him more believable than we’d like. There’s a streak of cynical realism that undercuts all of Jolly LLB's jollities.

Published on Firstpost.

Dazed And Confused: Raat Gayi Baat Gayi Review

SOMEWHERE DURING THE interminable party that forms the core of Saurabh Shukla’s new film, a gangly man with wild hair (real-life theatreperson Makarand Deshpande) is chatting up a giggly housewife. He’s just announced his deep interest in palmistry when her uncouth lout of a husband plonks himself between them and demands that his palm be read. “I can tell you three things,” says the faux-palmist. “One, you haven’t got what you deserve.” “True,” says the loutish man. “Two, it’ll stay like this for some time.” “And then?” asks the loutish man. “Then? You’ll get used to it.”

That tripartite proclamation sums up the experience of watching Raat Gayi Baat Gayi. Unlike recent Hindi films that have tried to unravel the mating game in contemporary India (Rajat Kapoor’s own Mixed Doubles, a tautly-scripted, charming riff on wife-swapping, or Anil Senior’s over-the-top but endearingly frank Dil Kabaddi, which had the unfair advantage of a Woody Allen script, being a scene-by-scene adaptation of Husbands and Wives), Raat Gayi never quite loosens up.

Despite the abundant acting talent from the Rajat Kapoor - Saurabh Shukla stable, the characters are stiff, never seeming comfortable enough in their skins to come close to the required unbuttoning. Kapoor is competent as the middle-aged ad filmmaker who fancies himself a bit of a charmer and isn’t above drunken flirtation, but is petrified when he realises he may have endangered his 14-year-old marriage. Vinay Pathak as the doofus whose cheesy pick-up lines get him nowhere wears a ridiculous peaked cap and is super-annoying. Anuradha Menon and Navneet Nishan aren’t allowed to extend themselves beyond weepy and deliberately obtuse wifeliness, while Neha Dhupia comes across more as petulant than as mysterious femme fatale.

This film can’t decide if it wants to be a thoughtful take on marriage or play the extramarital dalliance for laughs: so a scene where Dhupia’s full-time and part-time lovers are stuck in a cupboard is interrupted by one’s wife calling to ask him to buy olive oil on the way home, which he tenderly does. From Shukla, who’s scripted gems like Satya (1998) and Mithya (2008), this is a disappointment.

From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 7, Issue 02, Dated January 16, 2010