REVIEW 453: OK JAANU

Release date:	January 13, 2017
Director:	Shaad Ali
Cast: Language:	Shraddha Kapoor, Aditya Roy Kapur, Leela Samson, Naseeruddin Shah Hindi

“Tumhare liye zyaada aham kya hai? Tumhara career ya Adi?” (What is more important for you? Your career or Adi?)

Replace Adi with Aidan, Aman, Anthony, Ahmad, Rustom, Gurvinder, Armaan or any of lakhs of available male names, and what you have is a question women have been asked for decades.

What do you want more? Love or career? Marriage and children or that job? Because it has been decreed by those who know what is best for us better than we do, that wombs are incapacitated by ambition, and maternal instincts – a.k.a. every female human’s bounden duty – drown in professional success. As is often the case in life, so too in Ok Jaanu, the question is asked by a well-meaning person.

Director Shaad Ali’s Ok Jaanu is an official Hindi remake of Ali’s mentor Mani Ratnam’s 2015 Tamil film O Kadhal Kanmani (Oh My Love, The Apple of My Eye), otherwise known as OK Kanmani, starring Dulquer Salmaan and Nithya Menen. Ratnam has produced the Bollywood version in partnership with Karan Johar, and is credited with the story and screenplay here too.

Ali has had experience adapting Ratnam’s work for a north Indian setting and audience. He made his directorial debut in 2002 with Saathiya starring Rani Mukerji and Vivek Oberoi. That film was a reworking of Ratnam’s Tamil Alaipayuthey with Shalini and R. Madhavan. The retelling was lovely though not entirely as magical as its forebear. In Ok Jaanu, there is no reworking, just a scene-for-scene translation. And nothing is lost in the process except for the earlier leading man’s electric charisma and the leading lady’s zest.

Is that a good or bad thing? The answer depends on whether or not you loved OK Kanmani.

Ok Jaanu stars Shraddha Kapoor and Aditya Roy Kapur in the roles played in OK Kanmani by Salmaan and Menen. She is an architect who wants to study in France, he is a video game designer who wishes to work in the US. Tara and Adi meet by chance, are drawn to each other and decide to move in together for the few months they have in Mumbai before they go abroad.

(Spoiler alert)

“Is this love?” she asks him towards the start. She stops him from answering and he does not try further to respond at that point. Early on, they agree that marriage and babies are not for them. But as expected, six months and much sex later, they grow on each other and are confused.

The thing with films like OK Kanmani from Kollywood and Befikre from Bollywood is that they tell stories of young, urban, modern, liberal Indians not as they are but as seen through an older person’s aspirationally liberal gaze. OK Kanmani was steeped in wannabe coolth of the “please notice that I’m showing a couple having sex and living with each other before marriage” variety. Sadly, despite his relative youth, Ali has done nothing to improve Ratnam’s tone.

So yeah, Tara and Adi sleep together, live together and vow not to tie each other down, but when it comes to the crunch, the only difference between this film and almost every other such Hindi film romance featuring a commitment-phobic lead couple is that it acknowledges and underlines the point that a woman need not necessarily choose between career and marital commitment, if marriage is indeed what she wants; that two people can follow their professional dreams and still be together, that following each other to the ends of the earth could be a metaphor rather than a literal geographical journey.

And yeah, that’s a big small step, but how do Tara and Adi arrive at that change of mind? What inspires her, a young woman wounded by her parents’ divorce and custody battle, to soften up to the idea of marriage? Sure sure, she is in love, but she was in love soon after they met anyway, so what gives her this new confidence? What made Adi see life differently when just minutes earlier he described her as “Tara, my biggest mistake”?

Who knows? All we see are an actor and actress looking pretty, dressing prettily, doing fun stuff while songs play incessantly in the background, and doing the kind of things couples do in self-consciously ‘youth-oriented’ romances because they look cute on screen but would merit a mega showdown in real life (such as your boyfriend landing up inside – yes inside – your office, skulking about in the shadows and whisking you off for a day in the sun).

The director is so busy whipping up artificial energy in Tara and Adi’s relationship on screen, that he forgets one thing: conversations and quiet companionship.

When do these people talk seriously? When do they slow down from driving their jeep along a beach or making out on a high-rise parapet or breaking into a restaurant kitchen or taking food off a stranger’s table at a restaurant, to simply chat?

If it is Ali’s contention that they get to know each other in the spaces in their lives that we do not hear or see on screen, then the problem is this: as a viewer I wanted to know them too, but I came away with a superficial understanding of who they really are.

Ok Jaanu is interesting at first, but as it rolls along it reveals its hollowness, a failing that even the lead couple’s charms and the attractive production design cannot overcome.

Far more engaging than the central relationship is the bond between the elderly owners of the house they are living in, the Alzheimer’s-ridden former singer and her caring husband played ever so sweetly by Leela Samson (who was also in OK Kanmani) and Naseeruddin Shah.

A.R. Rahman’s music for this film is far from being his best. Sunn bhavara is a pleasant melody, but the title track loses some of its appeal in the journey from Kollywood to Bollywood. Even the remix of Humma humma – Rahman’s superhit from Ratnam’s 1995 Tamil blockbuster Bombay – becomes too muted in the effort to be different from the robust original.

Samson and Shah are likeable as the older couple. Kapoor and Kapur are not in the league of Salmaan and Menen, but they do share a nice chemistry that could be better exploited by better writing. That said, the snazzy graphics accompanying the credits cannot camouflage the fact that those credits give second billing to Ms Kapoor although she is the bigger star.  

Genuine liberalism and attention to detail are clearly not this film’s strengths. For one, not a single artist in a small supporting role leaves an impact. And that loud cellphone conversation across a church aisle would have got Tara and Adi thrown out of any real church in India. To know that though, perhaps you need to enter one as part of your research. Just as you need to acquaint yourself better with young people, enter their minds and understand their way of thinking, to portray them on screen with any degree of depth. Ok Jaanu is a surface skimmer.

Rating (out of five stars): **

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	137 minutes

A version of this review has been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/ok-jaanu-movie-review-shraddha-and-aditya-play-an-older-persons-idea-of-youth-3202446.html

Posters courtesy:

(1) OK Jaanu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ok_Jaanu

(2) O Kadhal Kanmani: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_Kadhal_Kanmani

PRIYANKA CHOPRA IN QUANTICO, COURT AT THE OSCARS / COLUMN PUBLISHED IN THE HINDU BUSINESSLINE

IT MATTERS, NASEERSAAB

“I don’t know why we hanker after this Oscar business,” says Naseeruddin Shah. Yes, let us not “hanker”, but let us not be dismissive of a global stage either

By Anna MM Vetticad

Two important — seemingly unrelated — events occurred on the Indian entertainment scene in the past month. First, the National Award-winning Marathi film Court was selected as India’s entry for the race to the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar next year. And Quantico — the American serial that marks Bollywood superstar Priyanka Chopra’s international TV debut — finally premiered in the US and then India, following a several-months-long publicity blitzkrieg in both countries.

One involves a cinematic work, the other a teleshow. One an annual occurrence, the other on an unprecedented scale.

What is the connection, you ask?

There is one. It is the question that surfaces each year around the time India, like most other countries, chooses its Oscar entry. And that question is: why do we care?

This year it came from one of India’s most respected actors. When asked about Court’s chances at the Oscars, Naseeruddin Shah reportedly said: “I don’t really care about the Oscars. Court is one of the finest films and in fact the best film to have released in recent times. I don’t know why we hanker after this Oscar business… I think it should be enough for makers of Court that the film has been liked and much appreciated in our own country and that is what matters.”

As Uriah Heep might have said, I would like to ’umbly disagree with Naseersaab.

Acceptance from your primary audience is obviously important, but unless an artiste chooses to limit herself, why should anything be “enough”? Wider reach matters. A global stage matters. It matters not just to individuals, but also to societies as a whole, not just because a larger audience means more money, but because it translates into several long-term benefits.

Film artistes are influential due to the reach of cinema. And so, every time an Indian film artiste speaks on a platform in another country, she has the opportunity to demystify India just that little bit abroad. Every time an Indian star performs in an overseas production that is worthy of her stature at home, she could endear India just that little bit more to people of other nations.

“Worthy” is crucial here. The idea is not to be a token brown-skinned prop in an inconsequential role or to play a part in pigeonholing an entire race. I remember Anil Kapoor telling me that between Slumdog Millionaire and the TV series 24, he turned down several scripts requiring him to play a stereotypical, caricaturish Indian. Last year, Chopra told me she absolutely would not accept a role abroad that would “cater to the stereotype of what Indians are like”.

Over the years, Team Slumdog, Anil on 24, Shashi Kapoor and Irrfan Khan in their multiple ventures abroad (not counting Khan’s embarrassingly marginal appearance in The Amazing Spider-man 2, Om Puri in East Is East and Nimrat Kaur in Homeland, among others — sometimes playing Indians, sometimes not — have served to unobtrusively remind some of the most powerful countries and moneyed audiences that Indians are not ETs. You know, like Apu from The Simpsons?

Complementing these artistes’ work on the global stage are those whose internationally acclaimed home-grown creations have taken Indian culture abroad, from Satyajit Ray, Adoor Gopalakrishnan and Mira Nair to youngsters like director Neeraj Ghaywan, whose Masaan won two awards at 2015’s Cannes Film Festival, and Chaitanya Tamhane, whose Court earned two trophies at Venice 2014. India needs more of them, familiarising foreigners with who we are in ways that a career diplomat would find hard to achieve.

The obvious pay-offs are enhanced bank balances and exposure for Indian artistes. Less obvious is another effect: the potential of a country’s cinema to make the culture of that country attractive to the world. US embassies and businesses — from clothing chains to pizza joints and fried chicken — owe much to Hollywood, which has been America’s most effective brand ambassador across the globe.

This is why it is important for India’s film industries not to have a frog-in-the-well attitude, but to work hard towards improving their international distribution and marketing. As long as it is done with dignity, there is no shame in promoting a beautiful film like Court at the Oscars. After all, a win at the world’s most-watched film awards function is every film-marketing professional’s dream.

Besides, you can’t put a price tag on soft diplomacy.

Could there be a more effective effort at de-exoticising India in American minds than Aishwarya Rai responding to this question from talk-show host David Letterman in 2005: “Do you live with your parents? … Is that common in India for older children to live with their parents?” Sweetly, yet with a knife-like thrust, Rai replied: “It’s fine to live with your parents, because it’s also common in India that we don’t have to take appointments with our parents to meet for dinner.”

Today, as sections of the Western media use India’s remarkable anti-rape movement to tar the entire country with one brush, there are few better illustrations of our social complexities than an Indian woman — Chopra — telling CNN.com in the run-up to Quantico: “My Dad always told me, ‘As a girl, you should not be someone who tries to fit into a glass slipper. You should shatter the glass ceiling,’ and that’s what I’m trying to do.”

So please, let us not “hanker” after global recognition, but in the global village that we inhabit, why “should” any space be considered “enough”?

(Anna MM Vetticad is the author of The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic. Twitter: @annavetticad)

(This column was first published in The Hindu Businessline newspaper on October 10, 2015)

Original link: 

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/watch/it-matters-naseersaab/article7742604.ece

Photo caption: (From top) Priyanka Chopra in Quantico; and a poster of Court

Photographs courtesy: 

(1) Quantico: https://www.facebook.com/QuanticoABC/ 

(2) Court: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Court_(film)

Note: These photographs were not sourced from The Hindu Businessline 

Previous instalment of Film Fatale: “Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics”

http://annavetticadgoes2themovies.blogspot.in/2015/09/govt-propaganda-against-ftii-students.html

REVIEW 261: MILLION DOLLAR ARM

Release date:	May 9, 2014
Director:	Craig Gillespie
Cast: Language:	Jon Hamm, Suraj Sharma, Madhur Mittal, Pitobash, Lake Bell, Aasif Mandvi, Bill Paxton, Alan Arkin, Darshan Jariwala, Tzi Ma English with some Hindi

Million Dollar Arm is such a quiet film that it would be easy to under-rate it. Anyone can guess how it will end for the protagonists, yet – unlike most sports films where we already know the central character won that World Cup or breasted that tape at the nth second – this one doesn’t build up an artificial frenzied suspense around the baseball field. What it does is introduce us to this wonderfully gray real-life American sports agent called J.B. Bernstein who plucks two poor boys out of India and takes them to the US to make them Major League Baseball players.

This is a biopic-of-sorts of JB (Jon Hamm) who has been struggling to survive since he started his own business. To save his career, he decides to find baseball’s next big sensation in India, to convert one of the cricket-crazy nation’s bowlers into a baseball pitcher. JB flies off to hold the Million Dollar Arm contest in India. With the help of the crotchety old sports scout Ray (Alan Arkin) and local baseball enthusiast Amit (Pitobash), he finally finds young Rinku Singh (Suraj Sharma) and Dinesh Patel (Madhur Mittal). From there the film takes us through the boys’ discovery of the US, JB’s opportunistic view of them as “investments”, and his gradual conversion from being a “Class A jerk” as his girlfriend calls him.

A story like this is fertile ground for condescension. This could have been a patronising white-man-saves-little-brown-people saga told in the kind of tone we’ve heard from too many Western journalists in the past year while covering India’s anti-rape protests, Moon Mission and other news developments. With masterful deftness though, director Craig Gillespie and writer Tom McCarthy pull back and hold a mirror to JB each time they’re entering tricky territory, giving us a surprisingly sensitive take on alien cultures, disparities and commonalities, underdogs, unwitting racism and white-man-who-is-saved-from-himself.

JB’s early impression of India is a quick composite of crowded roads, traffic jams, chaos and animals on city streets, but at the hands of DoP Gyula Pados nothing is over-emphasised to exoticise. Slumdog Millionaire’s critics may possibly have objections here too, but to be fair, it is but natural for a foreigner to be struck by these overwhelming aspects of India before they notice glitzy hotels, malls, factories and prosperity. It is to Gillespie’s credit that he presents to us these elements of the Indian reality without caricaturing the country.

We get a brief glimpse of Ray sneering at a goat’s kid on a two-wheeler riding beside his car in Mumbai, and an equally fleeting look at JB’s plush hotel in the city. There’s this and there’s that – fair enough then. A.R. Rahman’s music suffers one jarring moment when he includes some bars from Slumdog’s Ringa ringa in the background score, but for the most part it too is engaging and shorn of clichés.

Where the film falls short is in the depiction of the people at large, which could have been more well-rounded without turning Million Dollar Arm into a documentary on India. For instance, the scene depicting the boys’ wide-eyed wonderment when they enter an elevator for the first time is matter-of-fact without being patronising. Of course poor Indian village boys who’ve never been inside a modern building would be fascinated by lifts. In a world where too many Westerners think those are the only kind of Indians in existence though, it is a glaring flaw not to at least briefly introduce viewers to the other kind of Indians, the ‘people like us’ characters, the ones for whom a lift is not a discovery, the ones who are as exasperated by goats and cows on streets as a foreigner might be shocked, amused and bemused.

Million Dollar Arm scores though with its immaculate casting. Few men can play a slimeball in a suit with as many layers as Hamm, well-known in India for his role in TV’s Mad Men. The actor makes JB a character who is hard to hate even when he’s despicable, the sort of chap about whom you feel you know there’s a good guy lurking around somewhere inside him.

Suraj Sharma from Life of Pi is growing into a handsome young fellow, as is the potentially hunky Madhur Mittal who played the wayward elder brother in Slumdog. Both are spot on in their depiction of youthful confidence that occasionally hits a slump. They are so natural before the camera and so charming, that it becomes easy to imagine why JB’s neighbour Brenda would feel a certain tenderness towards them. Brenda is played by Lake Bell who is familiar to Indian viewers from Boston Legal. Her searingly astute observations about JB make for some of the film’s most well-written moments.

Pitobash as Amit is the one who could have ended up being Million Dollar Arm’s only cliched desi. Instead, this gifted actor holds back some of his innate rusticity and exuberance to give us a winning character. The screenplay wisely allows Amit, Rinku and Dinesh to have most of their conversations in Hindi. This gives the dialogues a natural tone, with the Indians speaking not in the stereotypically sing-song, accented English of The Simpsons’ Apu, but in the kind of English and Hindi that real Indians from their particular background would use.

The remaining roles are all played by talented actors who make their few minutes on screen count, including poor Aasif Mandvi who is saddled with the only badly written part. It seems as though someone forgot that business partners are actually supposed to do something in the business. Mandvi’s Ashu Vasudevan seems to contribute little to JB’s firm.

It needs to be pointed out that the film creates the impression that the Million Dollar Arm contest got a lot more coverage in the Indian national media than it did in reality. It should have also been clarified that baseball is many light years away from getting the “billion new viewers” that JB thought his contest would earn for the game in India. This country is still obsessed with cricket, and baseball is still largely a distant sport.

That being said, it goes without saying that the contest changed the lives of the real Rinku and Dinesh. This film though is the heart-warming story of how they changed the real JB’s life. No doubt JB was on an exploitative, self-serving mission, but the boys were too innocent to get that. No doubt the story is focused on JB and not the boys, which some may even see as its failing. However, by the end of its 122 minutes we get to know Rinku and Dinesh just that little bit more and are left with a cloud of warmth floating around the heart. This is a film that’s small in scale, with no pretensions whatsoever to grandeur. Million Dollar Arm is a pleasant and deliberately under-stated ‘melodrama’, as dramatic and real as real life usually is.

Rating (out of five): ***1/2

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time: MPAA Rating (US):	122 minutes PG (for mild language and some suggestive content)
Release date in the US:	May 16, 2014

Poster courtesy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Million_Dollar_Arm