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Release
date:
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May 31, 2019
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Directors:
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Praveen
Fernandes, Hanish Kalia, Heena Dsouza, Sanjiv Kishinchandani, Avalokita,
Gaurav Mehra
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Cast:
Language:
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Neena Gupta,
Chunky Panday, Amit Sial, Lalit Behl, Pramod Pathak, Shahriyar Atai, Kamil Shaikh, Delnaaz Irani, Merenla Imsong,
Veera Fauzia Saxena, Anurita Jha, Saurabh Goyal, Mohit Chauhan, Preeti
Hansraj Sharma
Hindi
|
Shuruaat Ka Twist (The Twist at the Start)
is an
anthology of six
short films, its distinctive feature
being that the directors are all debutants who have been mentored by Bollywood
stalwarts. This of course makes it stand apart from other compilations by the
industry such as Bombay Talkies and Lust Stories, which have drawn attention
for getting top-ranking, blockbuster-making feature directors like Karan Johar
and Zoya Akhtar to dabble in this experimental space.
Shuruaat Ka Twist’s mentor list is a roll
call of some of Bollywood’s top shots though: Raj Kumar Gupta (No One Killed Jessica, Raid), Vikramaditya Motwane (Udaan, Lootera), Rajkumar Hirani (the Munnabhai
series, 3 Idiots) and Amit V.
Masurkar (Newton).
The anthology
begins with a very short short titled Tap
Tap by Praveen Fernandes starring Chunky Panday
as an out-of-work musician desperately in search of inspiration and finding it
in an unexpected place. Tap Tap is
faithful to the overall theme spelt out in the title, delivering an unexpected
twist in the end. This is clever, concise, sharp and consequently fun fare. It
also builds a solid case for producers to cast the underrated Panday in more
roles and to back Fernandes for a full-length film.
Next comes Khauff by Hanish Kalia, which stars Amit
Sial as a man seeking medical help for an inexplicable phobia: he stays awake
every night fearing that he will die. Pramod Pathak plays his therapist. This
mini movie falls in the psychological thriller genre, and at its mid-point is
just the sort of film about which those of us who consider ourselves “serious
film buffs” tend to get cocky and start prematurely crying, “predictable!” Be
patient, oh thou
cynic: it is not. Far from it.
Sial has been a
consistent performer in Bollywood but has not so far been rewarded with the
screen space he deserves. Here in Khauff he
does well as an enigmatic, apparently tormented soul. And Kalia’s direction
offers an apt lesson to his seniors who have, in the past decade, assumed that
the route to frightening an audience is a high-decibel background score,
grating sound effects and sudden camera movements. Khauff is genuinely scary and its sound design by Shajith Koyeri and Savitha Nambrath
is superlative. Like Tap Tap, it is
smart, small and entertaining.
From here on
though, Shuruaat Ka Twist becomes
uneven.
Adi Sonal by Heena Dsouza has a warm moment of female
bonding in the end, of the sort that we do not see often enough in mainstream
Hindi cinema, which prefers to dip into social stereotypes like the evil saas harassing her bahu and the evil bahu
torturing her old saas-sasur. That scene
brought to mind another rare Hindi film older-woman-younger-woman equation from
a few years back: a mother-in-law (Tanvi Azmi) offering a listening ear to a
daughter-in-law (Priyanka Chopra) whose heart has been broken by her unfaithful
husband. Read: Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Bajirao Mastani.
Neena Gupta in Adi Sonal is the matriarch of a joint
family in which the male head (Lalit Behl) does nothing all day but demand to
be served, and the pressure of work leads to some tension among the women who,
despite that, share an underlying unspoken understanding between them. Dsouza
is effective in capturing the drudgery of their existence, the patriarchal
nature of traditional marriages and joint families, and the terror that
domestic violence brings.
That said, Adi Sonal feels stretched, especially
coming as it does right after the clipped pace of Tap Tap and Khauff, and
the writing of the other two women characters is not as comprehensive as it is
with Gupta’s character and her suffering younger female relative. Its flaws notwithstanding, the uncommon empathy for
women made me curious to see what Dsouza might do next.
Bhaskar Calling by Sanjiv Kishinchandani
is a complete departure from the tone of the remaining five shorts. This one
does not have any pretensions to great intellectual depth, in fact it pointedly
– and thankfully – refuses to be a profound comment on the loneliness and
helplessness of the elderly.
Shahriyar
Atai is a hoot as an ageing Parsi gentleman home alone when he receives a visit
from a housing loan officer (Kamil Shaikh) while his daughter (Delnaaz Irani)
is away at work. To be honest, halfway through I kinda sorta figured what the
old chap was up to, but whatever! I had a good laugh watching Bhaskar Calling.
Guththi (The Knot) by Avalokita is the film that most
resembles in tone a work by the director’s mentor. Amit V. Masurkar’s calling
card today is Newton, but before he
made that film, there was a lovely, conversation-heavy, hilarious cum
ruminative but unfortunately under-noticed gem called Sulemani Keeda. At first the conversations between the two
flatmates played by Merenla Imsong and Veera Fauzia Saxena are nice because of
how real they feel. Guththi brings
home the extreme closeness that can develop between two very different
individuals in a sprawling metropolis, their lives far removed from a
conventional family situation. It is also a melancholic reminder of how much we
are compelled to give up when we make choices we are keen on.
Despite its
promising subjects, Guththi sags
after a while. Still, Avalokita is another talent worth exploring further.
Aside: Misspellings
in film credits are infuriating. The director’s name appears twice, first
immediately after Guththi and then in
the rolling credits right at the end of the anthology. So is it Avalokita or
Avlokita?
The closing film in
Shuruaat Ka Twist is the most
self-indulgent of the lot and irritatingly gimmicky. Gaurav Mehra’s
Guddu features Anurita Jha as a
youngster trying to escape a marriage her father is forcing her into. The
climax is a call for open-mindedness towards every kind of love in this world,
but by treating a sensitive issue as a mere tool to draw a gasp from the audience
rather than exploring it with any degree of understanding, Mehra ends up trivialising it.
Guddu is also the most technically iffy short in this
half dozen. The continuity issues in a scene in which the leads, Guddu and
Nishant (Saurabh Goyal), sit chatting in a vehicle should have been reason
enough to chop this one out of the set. The car door on the passenger side is,
in successive shots, shown open, closed, open and closed. It boggles the mind
that such inefficiency passed muster in a film with so many leading lights
attached to it.
Guddu’s ineptitude pulls down the entire anthology, coming
as it does right at the end. Tap Tap
and Khauff’s polish, the poignance of
Adi Sonal and the merriment in Bhaskar Calling merited a better
companion than this one. Still, as such film collections go, four out of six is
pretty impressive.
Rating (out
of five stars): **1/2
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CBFC Rating (India):
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A
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Running time:
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142 minutes
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This review has also been published on Firstpost:
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