Journalism Blues

My Mirror column:

Noor’s fluffy portrait of a thoughtless journalist made this columnist think about other films that have dealt with the media’s murkiness.

Sonakshi Sinha's portrait of a journalist in Noor (2017)

Last week, I wrote in these pages about the 1986 film New Delhi Times, in which Shashi Kapoor’s ethical Delhi news editor finds himself pushed to the edge by political pressure and physical threats. Rakesh Sharma’s under-watched film traced the beginnings of a threatening climate for honest journalism. So it felt strangely serendipitous this week to be watching a film which might be said to bring Hindi cinema’s portrait of the crisis in journalism up to date.

Noor Roy Chowdhury, the titular protagonist of this week’s release, Noor, works as a journalist at something called The Buzz. We’re told she wants to be the next Barkha Dutt, but director Sunhil Sippy’s targeted vibe for her is more desi Bridget Jones. Noor trips clumsily on her way into her office, cribs constantly over her maid not getting the geyser fixed, obsesses loudly over her weight (which – this being Bollywood – seems totally under control), and makes louder faux pas as she waits for the hot boyfriend and big story of her dreams.


Our heroine’s blissful obliviousness about most things – journalistic and otherwise – is put to the test when a real scandal falls into her lap, pretty much alongside the much-desired hot boyfriend. Goggle-eyed with excitement at the thought of catching a big fish, Noor pushes hastily forward with the story – only to have to repent at leisure.

It’s interesting that something very similar happens to Shashi Kapoor’s character Vikas Pande in New Delhi Times – although unlike Sonakshi Sinha’s Noor, Vikas is both seasoned and conscientious, and his failing is not thoughtlessness but an inability to see that he is being used – until it is too late. Although thirty years apart, and hugely different in intent and tone, both films focus on journalists so caught up in what they thought was the big picture that they sacrifice the individuals at the centre of their story.

In the same period as New Delhi Times, Jagmohan Mundhra’s Kamla – based on a script by the legendary playwright Vijay Tendulkar – also tells an acerbic tale about a journalist intoxicated on his own power. In Mundhra’s film, Marc Zuber plays a star reporter called Jaisingh Jadhav who decides to ‘buy’ a young woman from a tribal area in Madhya Pradesh and bring her back to Delhi. His reason, he says, is “Desh ka aam aadmi jo bhayaanak nashe mein jee raha hai, usse jhatka deke jagaana hai.” Which is all very well. But right from letting Kamla believe that he’s ‘bought’ her, to cruelly forcing her to wear her ragged saree to a press conference that ends up as a sexist free-for-all, Jadhav’s insensitivity to the bewildered, childlike Kamla belies all his high-minded statements. If it is the tragic state of humanity he is out to expose, one begins to feel, he should perhaps have started with himself.

Kamla’s depiction of Delhi’s journalistic world is bleak. The film’s Press Club scenes have journalists either sitting around playing cards, or talking trash. Once a female journalist is seen retouching her lipstick before her supposed meeting with a minister – who is ‘Suresh Darling’ to her. Later, in the drunken, orgy-esque ‘press conference’ (which contains no sex but the pervasive suggestion of it being on people’s minds), far from offering the poor tribal woman a buffer against a horde of camera-wielding men, the same woman emerges as the flag-bearer of the press’s urban middle class hypocrisy, making crude remarks about Kamla’s adivasi way of wearing her sari as her ease with ‘displaying her body’. 

Meanwhile, Jadhav’s penchant for sensational exposes is juxtaposed with the old-school journalism of his wife’s uncle Kakasahab (AK Hangal), who makes a caustic remark that rings truer now that it probably did then: “Haan bhai, nowadays a man is as successful as the number of phone calls he receives”. Later he makes the point that journalism cannot only be about showing us ‘how’ and ‘what’ is happening – it must also try to say ‘why’.

Cinematic censure against journalism, of course, reached its peak in Madhur Bhandarkar’s 2005 hit drama Page 3, in which Konkona Sen Sharma’s Madhavi tries her best to move from covering high society to exposing its grimmest underbelly – which turns out to be child prostitution: it was a Madhur Bhandarkar film, after all. Naturally, her big story is nipped in the bud. Over a decade later, Sonakshi Sinha in Noor is struggling to make a similar leap, and after a difficult interlude that is actually much more difficult for her informant than herself, she triumphs – with the aid of social media.

Page 3, Kamla and New Delhi Times may feel dated, but in their clear-eyed pessimism, they seem much more in tune with the journalistic present than Noor is.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 23 Apr 2017.

How to be a small-town superman

Today's Mumbai Mirror column: 

It's an unapologetically entertaining battle between good men and bad men. But if one looks closely, underlying Tevar's masaledar heroics is a fairly meaty take on masculinity.

   

In recent years, the Hindi action movie has grown bigger, brasher, more and more full of special effects, and less and less fun to watch. When Akshay Kumar or Ajay Devgn or Salman Khan are doing the pummelling, the only people likely to experience any surprise at their being flattened into chappatis are the baddies themselves. Because we’re dealing with Supermen, and everyone knows it.

Pintu Shukla, in contrast, may get ‘Main hoon Superman, Salman ka fan’ as his ‘introduction song’, but he's no local legend. Or not yet. The hero of Amit Ravindernath Sharma's directorial debut is Agra's budding kabaddi champ, a local lafanga with a gender-sensitive heart.

Of course, Pintu, being Arjun Kapoor, is anything but pint-sized, and his opening one-man victory for the Kanpur kabaddi team has already showcased large reserves of strength and endurance. But something about Kapoor's energy makes Tevar's action scenes more enjoyable than any I've seen in a while. He captures the youthful swagger of the small town hero, in the sense of “bada hero banta hai”.

There's little by way of plot or character that could be considered new in Tevar. The small town boy's half-bored defiance of his middle class parents is something we've seen, for example, in Bunty Aur Babli (the father is even played by the same actor, Raj Babbar); the villainous politician casting a covetous eye upon a local middle class girl, too, has a long cinematic lineage — most memorably Haasil; the recreation of the UP-Bihar milieu of generalised thuggery, where corrupt cops and political goondas combine to throttle the faintest voice of resistance, has been a dominant current for more than a decade, including films like Shool and much of Prakash Jha's oeuvre. Stylistically, too, Tevar is an out-and-out masala film. It feels at least 20 minutes too long because it really doesn't skimp on the set-pieces: fights, songs, full-on dialoguebaazi.

I haven’t seen Okkadu, the 2003 Telugu hit from which Tevar is adapted, but director Amit Sharma (an advertising man best known for the Google reunion tearjerker) clearly has a sound grasp of his chosen North Indian milieu. He and Shantanu Srivastava, who shares Tevar's writing credits with Okkadu's writer-director Gunashekhara, have successfully transposed the script from its original Hyderabadi setting to a Mathura-Agra world that feels vibrant and alive, even while painted in broad, colourful, filmi strokes.

The song choreographies and fight scenes offer a satisfying tour through the grubby gullies and open terraces of the UP small town, with well-timed local colour provided by steaming istris, hot halwais’ ladles and even a tashtri full of gulaal. The opening kabaddi match between Mathura and Agra is also wonderfully imagined and nicely paced: the semi-comic display of local sporting talent spliced together with more lethal forms of political gamesmanship.

The dialogue has enough local flavour to make even predictable scenes juicy: “Jalwe toh nachaniyon ke hote hain,” drawls Manoj Bajpayee's menacing Gajendar Singh as he eliminates a rival; an anxious teammate waiting for our hero to arrive for the match, erupts: “'Aa jayega, aa jayega': kya Karan Arjun hai jo aa jayega?”

But what helped sustain my interest was the film's framing theme: masculinity. Spoken or unspoken, violent or couched in humour, there is no getting away from the film's central underlying question: what does it take to be a man in a society as lawless and violent as this one?

The answer the film offers is no different from a million Westerns and thousands of Hindi movies with even more invincible heroes: it takes brute force. This is a world in which the sharp-tongued truth-seeking journalist, for all the power of the media at his back, is easily silenced by violent intimidation; the state is run by thugs, and the police, even those members of it not in their pay, are emasculated by the deep rot in the system.

So what's left? Well, good louts versus bad louts. The street is, in Tevar, the domain of men. And I say this not to criticise the film, but to note the degree of attention it gives to what is after all, a plain and simple fact about North India, but one that doesn't get any play in most films set in the region. Here, there's an effectively menacing scene involving a phone booth and a pichkari filled with Holi colour; there's a lascivious driver at a traffic light. What is unusual about Tevar is that it makes a point to underline the non-stop harassment and lasciviousness that women face, without necessarily turning all of it into life-threatening violence.

The film's division between good masculinity and bad is built almost wholly on the edifice of respect for women. Pintu's heroicness is established early on by his playful rescuing of a cycling young woman from the leering attentions of a local ruffian—and all through the film's main rescue (that of Sonakshi Sinha's Radhika), he never once makes unsolicited advances. If you're female, though, you can be spirited and sardonic all you want, but in the end you're dependent on good brute force to rescue you from the bad. And when it does, you fall gratefully in love with it.

In a world where the cinematic POV offered to us is so often that of the man who takes the woman's reciprocation as his right (think Raanjhana, Ek Deewana Tha, and a million others), Tevar's model for masculinity is a huge advance. And for all their rambunctious filminess, the streets of Tevar's universe aren't quite a figment of the imagination. Hopefully some day, we'll have one in which men don't have to beat up other men, and women can be something more than grateful. 

Film Review: Rowdy Rathore -- a mess of maal, masala and moustache

“[Pitaji] kaha karte thhe ki manushya ko apne aadarshon aur moochhon ka uchit aadar karna chahiye,” (Father used to say that a man must respect his principles and his moustaches), went Amol Palekar’s brilliant faux-soulful paean to the moustache in the original Golmaal. “Moustache is the mirror of human soul and mind, moochh toh mann ka darpan hai.”

In a cleverer, kinder universe, Rowdy Rathore might have been a 21^st century comic tribute to the power of the moochh. After all, like the old Golmaal, it features a double role where the hero’s two avatars are distinguishable only by a moustache (though both Akshays have a moustache here: one turned up, the other down), and much crucial dialogue that turns on moochhes.

Unfortunately, though, Prabhudeva’s Hindi remake of 2006’s Telugu hit Vikramarkudu has neither the wit nor the charm needed to craft a real send-up. In fact, it’s not at all clear whether we’re meant to be able to laugh at the ridiculous, over-the-top masculinity of SSP Rathore’s oft-repeated desire to die with a smile on his face, twirling his moustaches. I have the terrible feeling that this stuff is deadly earnest. Our hero takes his moochh even more seriously than Utpal Dutt did.

The plot is fairly convoluted. SSP Vikram Rathore – the man who wants his moustache cut off if he dies in a fight – is a fiery police inspector with a track record for incorruptibility and bravado. His arrival in the village of Devgarh puts him into immediate confrontation with a family of South Indians-playing-Bihari villains, headed by the gross tongue-rolling Nasser. Rathore temporarily breaks the reign of terror under which the villagers have been labouring for years. He is nearly killed in retaliation, but while the villains think he’s dead, he secretly recuperates and moves undercover to Mumbai.

Meanwhile, Rathore’s cherubic little daughter, pining for her lost father, stumbles upon his lookalike, a child-hating conman called Shiva. After the kind of heart-tugging that would convert even King-Kong, Shiva finally discovers his paternal side. But the fetching Bihari girl he’s just wooed – Sonakshi Sinha – isn’t too happy to discover that her new boyfriend comes with a pint-sized attachment who keeps plaintively calling him Papa. Cue grand misunderstanding, convenient disappearance of heroine, and shift to pure action.

The rest of Rowdy Rathore is a remarkably trashy hotchpotch of a million things you’ve seen before. Singham-style action sprinkled with ridiculous macho dialogue, tick. Don-style replacement of deadly serious hero by comic double, tick. Brain pe pressure that gets worse when the sun is hot (think back to Amitabh Bachchan’s brain tumour in Majboor) and magically disappears when rained on, tick. Imaginary village that some have been calling Sholay-style but that really feels like Agneepath – tick. The echo of Agneepath feels particularly strong: Devgarh is set around a rocky outcrop; the terrified villagers scrape and bow before an evil 80s-style villain; crowds of villagers assemble to be passive witnesses to the violent death of their sole possible saviour – the stringing up of SSP Rathore is highly evocative of the tableaux of Deenanath Chauhan’s death.

But the 2012 Agneepath, while every inch a mass entertainer, actually made the effort to create an identifiable character for its heroine – Priyanka Chopra’s excitable Kali had both a believable backstory and aspirations for the future: a beauty parlour in Dongri, marriage to her childhood love Vijay. Rowdy Rathore, on the other hand, is the sort of film where the “masala” label is an excuse to justify a hero who calls his girlfriend “mera maal” and where the heroine’s declared “special talent” is her gleaming gori waistline, with the camera zooming in grossly on the love handles our thieving hero can’t keep his hands off. Deprived of even the couple of “feisty” lines that made her Dabanng debut so bizarrely feted, Sonakshi’s character reaches its depressing nadir when she actually puts into words her vision of this ‘romance’: “Shaadi ke baad har hafte shopping le jaoge ki nahi?” If this is what the ‘common man’ thinks women want, they probably get the hellish marriages they deserve.

Rowdy Rathore does get one woman – the repeatedly raped wife of a policeman (Yashpal Sharma) – to finally turn avenging Draupadi. But her angry pummelling of Nasser is probably the only moment in the whole film when the spotlight is not monopolised by Akshay Kumar. From stealing cellphones out of people’s hands mid-conversation to wiping out whole armies of goondas, Krishna-like, with a Sudarshana chakra-esque weapon, there’s no doubt that Akshay is what makes this film somewhat watchable. He may look indubitably older – particularly in some of the gross tummy-displaying choreography that Prabhudeva thinks is seductive or something – but he still jumps off buildings with aplomb, and remains winsome enough to make you smile. But in an industry that swears by him, can’t Akshay Kumar get himself a star vehicle that’s not a half-baked rehash of a zillion other films? Is it too much to ask for plot twists that you can’t see coming a mile away, villains who might actually scare us, and perhaps an actual female lead rather than a waist-in-attendance? One lives in hope.

Published on Firstpost