Release date:
|
January 15, 2016
|
Director:
|
Jayant Gilatar
|
Cast:
Language:
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Shabana Azmi,
Juhi Chawla, Divya Dutta, Sameer Soni, Aarya Babbar, Girish Karnad, Richa
Chadha, Zarina Wahab, Jackie Shroff, Cameo: Rishi Kapoor.
Hindi
|
When a film’s
centrepiece is a nationally televised quiz contest, you would expect it to be
finicky about facts. Researchers and academics will hopefully verify the
answers provided in that in-film contest, but before it rolled around I had
already lost faith in Chalk N Duster
after a scene in which one character insists on speaking Hindi, saying, “Hindi hamari rashtrabhasha hai (Hindi is our
national language)”. Err… False! India does not have a “rashtrabhasha”.
How can you make a
film on education without doing your homework?
This faux pas is
not the only problem with Chalk N Duster (CND), which has its heart in the right
place but is pulled down by its mediocrity and its blinkered, uni-dimensional
vision.
CND is set in a private school where a bunch of sweet
people devote their lives to their students. The teachers are all uniformly
good – some almost saintly – human beings. No mention is made here of teachers
who are lazy, apathetic or deliberately teach badly in school so that children
are compelled to hire them as private tutors. No mention is made either of
monsters who dangle kids by their pigtails, bang little girls’ heads on walls
and victimise students they dislike.
It is not this
review’s contention that good teachers like the ones in this film do not exist.
They do. Sadly, they are not in a majority. In fact, the outstanding ones –
sincere, diligent, intelligent, kind, skilled, effective like Vidya Sawant of Chalk N Duster – are definitely in a
minority.
If this was a film
only about one particular teacher, a paean to its protagonist would have been
acceptable. But CND positions itself
as a thesis on the education system, and in its black-and-white worldview, all
teachers are flawless, no questions asked, no arguments brooked, full stop.
The story is of
Vidya (Shabana Azmi) and her young colleague Jyoti Thakur (Juhi Chawla) at
Kantaben High School, Mumbai. Enter: Cruella de Vil. Kamini Gupta (Divya
Dutta), the new principal, sets out to make Kantaben sought after among the
city’s rich and famous. Towards this end, rather than firing the present
employees, she harasses them in the hope that they will choose to quit. The
film is about how Jyoti rises in protest when a gross injustice is meted out to
Vidya.
Despite the
ham-handed writing, Shabana and Juhi lend some emotional resonance to Chalk N Duster with their innate acting
abilities and warm on-screen chemistry. Sadly, their endearing
younger-woman-older-woman friendship is overshadowed by the film’s
all-pervasive ineptitude.
So keen is CND on its no-teacher-can-be-faulted
line that it slams Kantaben’s administration when it pulls up a teacher for
being just four minutes late, but later hints at her being a habitual late-comer.
Is it wrong to demand punctuality from teachers? What does that even mean?
CND is particularly amusing in its stereotyping of
Kamini. The evil witch without any redeeming qualities is a single woman. She
says “main bhi akeli hoon” in a
discussion about a widowed teacher and her son, but with no specifics offered
and no child in sight, one is left to assume she is one of those things our
films still seem to consider so dreadful in women: a spinster or worse, a
divorcee, and a childless one at that. She is the only woman with short hair
among the main characters and in one close-up of her head, we see that she even
colours it red. I was almost expecting the director to round off the cliché by
showing her smoking, drinking and sleeping with her boss ’cos, you know, in the
world according to Bollywood that’s what ‘bad girls’ do.
Her singleton
status is sought to be emphasised by Vidya and Jyoti’s loving relationships
with their supportive spouses, played by the very likeable Girish Karnad and
Sameer Soni. How often does a Hindi film show a husband apologising to his wife
for a mistake? That too happens here.
Unfortunately for CND, these two couples are not its focal
point, India’s education system is, and in that discussion, it suffers from an
absolute lack of nuance. Jyoti is right when she speaks of the low salaries
teachers are paid in India, but other troublesome questions are left out. How,
for instance, does it impact the profession when women are encouraged to be
teachers not because of their own inclinations but because “yeh ladkiyon ke liye sabse acchha profession
hai (it’s the best profession for girls)” since teachers’ timings and
holidays coincide with their children’s timings and holidays, and they tend to
be back home before their husbands? Do most men who like teaching veer towards
universities because of the better pay, considering that they are expected to
be their family’s primary, if not sole, breadwinners? Does this not deprive
schools of many able men who might otherwise have opted to be schoolteachers?
Too much else is
wrong – silly, actually – with Chalk N
Duster. Such as that tacky, awkwardly choreographed song BODMAS. Jackie Shroff hamming the part
of a rival school owner is a poor caricature of himself. The bright spark in
the supporting cast is the immensely dignified Zarina Wahab as Kantaben’s
ousted principal Shastri. The casteist stereotyping intrinsic to the choice of
surnames for the two principals is inescapable though.
It is a mark of
Bollywood’s extreme gender bias that the likes of Shabana and Juhi must, more
often than not, compromise on quality if they wish to play heroines. These
remarkable women deserve better than this clumsy, even if well-meaning, film.
So does the teaching profession.
Rating
(out of five): **
CBFC Rating (India):
|
U
|
Running time:
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131 minutes
|
This review has also been published on
firstpost:
Photographs
and trailers courtesy: Sony
Pictures India
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