Release
date:
|
July 20, 2018
|
Director:
|
Shashank Khaitan
|
Cast:
Language:
|
Janhvi, Ishaan,
Ashutosh Rana, Kharaj Mukherjee, Shridhar Watsar, Ankit Bisht, Ishika Gajneja
Hindi with some
Bengali
|
Sairat – Nagraj Popatrao Manjule’s critically acclaimed Marathi blockbuster of which Dhadak
is an official remake – was a film about love across caste divides, chilling
and entertaining in equal measure. What made it unique on India’s cinematic
landscape was that though it placed the gravity of casteism firmly at the
centre of its narrative, it was an unapologetically commercial film with a
determination to be viewed as mainstream and massy, complete with glossy
packaging, striking visuals and Ajay-Atul’s fantastic, cheerful songs. It was as
unequivocal about its caste concerns and its focus on a romance between a poor low-caste
boy and a wealthy upper-caste girl in rural Maharashtra.
Dhadak (Heartbeat) seems to have completely missed the
point of its source material.
The star-crossed
lovers in writer-director Shashank Khaitan’s Hindi version of Sairat are Parthavi Singh and Madhukar
Bagla. When they first meet they are immature college kids in Udaipur but are soon
catapulted into maturity by the hard knocks of life. Her father is a powerful
and unscrupulous Rajasthan politician and hotelier, her mother a silent
sidekick in the marriage. His parents run a small restaurant in the same city.
She is a spoilt brat. He is an obedient son who assists his Mum and Dad at
work.
The two have
already caught each other’s eye when the film opens. Madhukar’s father becomes
aware that something is going on between them, and warns his son against persisting
down that path because “voh oonchi jaati
ke log hai” (they are upper caste). His fears are well founded as Parthavi
and Madhukar learn when her family finds out about their relationship.
Within the
constraints of the commercial space where nuance is often viewed as a minus
point, Sairat managed to abound with
detail about the girl’s family, the boy’s friendships, their differing
circumstances and most of all, caste. Dhadak
is bereft of detail from start to finish in almost every aspect of its game.
Why, for one,
bother to make a film about an inter-caste romance if you are afraid to discuss
caste? It is almost bizarre but true that when Dhadak’s finale is past, you realise that this shameful Indian
reality was the elephant in the room Khaitan did not address, as though by
doing so his candyfloss and popcorn would acquire a bitter taste. That is as
weird as revisiting Anand and not
mentioning death, or deleting trade unions from a Namak Haraam remake.
Dhadak’s trepidation – or is it apathy? – is in keeping
with the attitude of post-1980s Bollywood, in which filmmakers have virtually ignored
the existence of India’s lower castes. Their blinkered vision has led to three
decades of films in which the world has revolved around Brahmins, Kshatriyas
and the occasional Vaishya, while oppressed castes have been erased from the picture. In the matter of representation in scripts,
Bollywood has a lot to learn from its counterparts in Marathi, Tamil, Malayalam
and Telugu cinema.
The aversion to a scrutiny
of caste takes on ridiculous proportions though when a Marathi film that was
entirely about a caste-ridden social landscape fraught with danger is remade in
Hindi but the remake not only does not specify the boy’s jaati, it references the subject just in passing, and has
absolutely nothing to say about the intricacies of human equations in these
tricky settings.
To further sanitise itself,
perhaps because the poor are deemed too dirty and
too much of an inconvenience when you know only how to create fluff, the
poverty-stricken background of Sairat’s
hero is scrubbed out of the frame and replaced by lower middle class parents
for Madhukar in Dhadak. (Possible spoiler alert) Likewise, when
Archi and Parshya escape their village in Sairat,
they begin a new life in a filthy slum in Hyderabad, but in Dhadak instead their struggles are transported
to a scruffy but not-a-slum block of matchbox-sized apartments in Kolkata. (Spoiler alert ends)
Perhaps it is too
much to expect sensitivity and inclusion from a director whose last film – Badrinath Ki Dulhania starring Alia
Bhatt and Varun Dhawan – romanticised, sympathised with and justified a leading
man’s violence towards the heroine, going so far as to have her exonerate him
and blame herself for his actions.
Badrinath was disturbing. Dhadak, on the other hand, is just plain hollow. Even as a
conventional rich-girl-poor-boy romance, it fails miserably, because of the superficially written bond
between the lead pair. The first half is devoted to their aankhon hi aankhon mein ishaara ho gaya style love affair filled
with stolen glances and perilous rendezvous, but barely a conversation. There
is no depth in their characterisation that might help us understand their
willingness to risk life and limb for each other later on.
One of the problematic aspects of
Sairat was the writing of the girl as
a clichéd heroine who initially plays fast and loose with the hero to test his
commitment to her, a couple of times knowingly putting him – and herself for
that matter – in great jeopardy. In fact, the big turning point in the plot,
the moment her family discovers that they are together, is a result of this
behaviour. Not surprisingly, Khaitan gets the woman-as-a-tease part of Sairat down pat.
That, however, is all that he manages to capture from
Archi and Parshya’s blossoming affection. In the original, time and thought are
invested in acquainting us with Archi’s intrinsically fiery nature, and the way
she is indulged by her otherwise imperious Dad. It is because we know how much
he dotes on her that his subsequent viciousness has the impact it does. It is
because we know what a firebrand she is that her subsequent decisions become
believable. In Dhadak, these elements
too are sketchily written, as are the pair’s struggles in their new life away
from their parents.
What works in Dhadak are Madhukar’s early scenes with
his friends (played sweetly by Shridhar Watsar and Ankit Bisht) which inject humour
and verve into the proceedings. The snapshots of life in Kolkata in the second
half too are interestingly done, and in fact far more insightful than the time
spent in Udaipur. And this being a Dharma Productions undertaking, it is filled
with resplendent visuals, of course. Vishnu Rao’s cinematography beautifully
captures Udaipur in all its delicious glory by day and by night. Rao’s
camerawork has already got me planning my next trip to the city, since my last
time there was far more rewarding than the trip to the theatre for this vacuous
film.
Ajay-Atul’s music was fabulous in
Sairat, and is unarguably the best
thing about Dhadak too. But the lack
of a deserving screenplay to wrap itself around robs it of some of its charm,
and I say that even of the heartstoppingly good Yad lagla which has been reworked as Pehli baar with Hindi lyrics by Amitabh Bhattacharya and still in
the voice of the wonderful Ajay Gogavale.
This brings us to Dhadak’s much-hyped newcomers Janhvi and
Ishaan, she the debutant daughter of pan-India screen legend Sridevi and
producer Boney Kapoor, he the half brother of actor Shahid Kapoor and son of
Neelima Azeem. Charisma can come through even when it is burdened by faulty
writing. Sadly, Janhvi lacks personality and delivers a colourless performance
as Parthavi. Ishaan is kinda cute, but he too does not yet possess the screen
presence to make a mark in this lacklustre scenario.
In a poorly scripted joke
directed at Kangna Ranaut last year, Dhadak’s
producer Karan Johar, actors Saif Ali Khan and Varun Dhawan had stood on a
stage and chanted the words “nepotism rocks”. No man, Karan, it does not,
especially when it means giving big-banner, high-profile breaks to youngsters
who would not have got a toe in the door in mainstream Bollywood if it were not for their connections.
Rating
(out of five stars): *1/2
CBFC Rating (India):
|
U
|
Running time:
|
137 minutes 54 seconds
|
This review has also been published on Firstpost:
Poster
courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/DhadakMovie/
No comments:
Post a Comment