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Release
date:
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May 24, 2019
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Director:
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Omung Kumar B
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Cast:
Language:
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Vivek Oberoi
(credited here as Vivek Anand Oberoi), Manoj Joshi, Zarina Wahab, Suresh
Oberoi, Prashant Narayanan, Darshan Kumar, Boman Irani, Anjan Shrivastav,
Akshat R. Saluja, Yatin Karyekar, Rajendra Gupta
Hindi
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This week’s new
Bollywood release, director Omung Kumar B’s PM Narendra Modi
(PMNM), is not a biography. It is an unwittingly farcical, comical
hagiography of Narendra Modi and the BJP, and even that is a euphemistic
description. To put it simply, this is a highly fictionalised account of the
present Indian prime minister’s life.
Omung Kumar’s
recall value so far has come from the vastly superior Priyanka
Chopra-starrer Mary Kom (2014) and the embarrassingly
bad Aishwarya Rai Bachchan-starrer Sarbjit (2016). PM
Narendra Modi (PMNM) falls into the so-bad-it-could-be-fun
category, except that it is not fun at all – it is, instead, an insult to
viewer intelligence and viewer knowledge.
“Modi ek insaan
nahin, ek soch hai (Modi is not a person, Modi is a way of thinking /
a concept),” says the protagonist himself at one point. Aur Modi ke
baare mein soch badalne ke liye, to change the thinking about Modi, the
screenplay – co-written by Anirudh Chawla and the leading man, Vivek Anand
Oberoi – runs facts through a carefully chosen sieve and presents a new,
rewritten history so far removed from recorded reality, that it bears little
resemblance to the actual Modi. In that sense, PMNM reminded
me of a scene in last year’s Malayalam feature Kammara Sambhavam in
which the hero watches a PR film about his life and does not recognise himself
on screen.
Things that did not
happen in Modi’s life are in this film shown to have happened: he is shown being arrested during the Emergency, the then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee is shown praising him to the press during the 2002 riots, in the
run-up to the 2014 election Modi is shown volunteering to do a live interview
with a hostile TV journalist before an audience and acing it. In the face of
such liberties with facts involving major
historical events, all PMNM’s other follies and flaws
– the word “grateful” being spelt as “greatful” in the opening
acknowledgements, the lazy caricature of former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh
and Modi’s corrupt government colleague in Gujarat, the false suggestion that
Modi never married, other monumental exaggerations and misrepresentations in
the screenplay, Hitesh Modak’s overbearing background score and the overall
tackiness of the narrative – pale into insignificance.
It is worth
mentioning here that the aforementioned hostile journalist is a stooge of a
corrupt industrialist called Aditya Reddy played by Prashant Narayanan. Three
enemies are very clearly marked out by PMNM: Pakistan, the news
media and, through the medium of the Reddy character, the dark-skinned
self-serving south Indian.
On Vivek Oberoi’s
shoulders falls the task of playing this larger-than-life version of Modi,
determined to vanquish all three. Most of Oberoi’s co-stars are comparatively
irrelevant because their roles are dwarfed by his, but despite being dealt the
same hand, their performances are a mixed bag. Manoj Joshi looks oddly wimpish
as Amit Shah (the BJP chief’s full name is muted out in the film for some
reason), but Boman Irani brings some dignity to the role of Ratan Tata as does
Zarina Wahab playing Modi’s mother. In an ocean of mediocrity, Anjan Shrivastav
does a reasonably good take on Atal Bihari Vajpayee without resorting to gimmicky
mimicry.
As for Oberoi,
well, in the actor who hams his way through this role, there is no trace of the
young debutant who showed such spark under Ram Gopal Varma’s guidance in
2002’s Company. It is sad to watch an artist lose his touch. For
those of us who saw something in him in Company, the only consolation is
that his turn as Modi is less cringe-worthy than his performance as a horny
young chap in Masti (2004), Grand Masti (2013)
and Great Grand Masti (2016).
If you think about
it, despite the apparent contrast between them, the Masti trilogy
and PMNM both offer conventionally accepted definitions of
masculinity. The Mastis used slapstick comedy as a vehicle to
present us with men driven by their nether regions and their hormones as men
naturally would be, or so we are given to understand. In PM Narendra
Modi, the hero espouses an earnest, asexual, aggressive machoism, initially
speaking of wanting to renounce the world and follow the path taken by Lord
Buddha, and in the climactic
moments ascribing his decisiveness – as the real
life Narendra Modi has done – to a 56-inch chest. You see, his political
journey is not a consequence of personal ambition, it is the answer to the
public’s prayerful longing for “ek sachcha mard (a real man)” to
lead them, to quote the words of a character early in the film.
Rating (out
of five stars): 0
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CBFC Rating (India):
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U
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Running time:
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131 minutes
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This review has also been published on Firstpost:
Poster
courtesy:
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