REVIEW 792: FIGHTER

Release date:	January 25, 2024
Director:	Siddharth Anand
Cast:	Hrithik Roshan, Deepika Padukone, Anil Kapoor, Karan Singh Grover, Akshay Oberoi, Ashutosh Rana
Language:	Hindi

 

“PoK ka matlab hai Pakistan Occupied Kashmir. Tumne occupy kiya hai. Maalik hum hai (PoK stands for Pakistan Occupied Kashmir. You have occupied it. But we are the actual owners),” says Hrithik Roshan’s character in the midst of raging fisticuffs with a Pakistani terrorist in the new Hindi film Fighter. 

 

For the record, the dictionary defines maalik as: owner, master, lord, proprietor, husband. In the subtitles given in the trailer, the producers opt for “owner”. 

 

“We are the actual owners.” Never before has a Hindi film spelt out its proprietorial attitude towards Kashmir in such black-and-white terms.

 

Director Siddharth Anand’s Fighter – based on a story by Anand and Ramon Chhib, with a  screenplay by Chhib and dialogues by Hussain Dalal and Abbas Dalal – pretends to be a romance, the saga of an Indian Air Force (IAF) officer whose over-confidence cost him the life of someone dear to him as a result of which he denies himself the right to love and be loved again. Behind that emotive, humane camouflage though, Fighter is just another loud, jingoistic affair in which India and Pakistan battle over Kashmir while the voices of Kashmiris are entirely erased. 

 

That’s precisely what 2023’s Shah Rukh Khan starrer Pathaan (2023) did too, so what’s new with Fighter, you may ask? 

 

Not very much. For one, this abhorrent line on ownership in Fighter is delivered by an A-list star who has not overtly aligned himself with BJP-RSS off screen in the way so many of his Hindi film colleagues have. Pathaan played it safer on this front, to create the false impression of being a progressive film (read my review here) although it was just old wine in a bottle of deceptive dialogues, insidious and intentional ambiguity about the religious identity of the protagonist and the primary antagonist, cleverly disguised pandering to majoritarian sentiments and SRK’s charm. 

 

Second, Fighter is pegged on actual news developments: the suicide bombing in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pulwama district in 2019 that killed 40 members of the Central Reserve Police (CRPF), and the IAF’s retaliatory air strike on an alleged terrorist training camp in Balakot, Pakistan.

 

In tenor and spirit nevertheless, Fighter really does feel like Pathaan 2, while Pathaan itself felt like War 2. That Pathaanand War (2019) were also directed by Anand is no coincidence. Reminder: Roshan was the co-lead in War, which might have been nothing more than a noisy, slick action flick if it weren’t for its condescension towards the Muslim patriot played by Tiger Shroff.

 

In Fighter, Roshan is Shamsher Pathania a.k.a. Patty, an ace fighter pilot who is in the bad books of his boss (Anil Kapoor). The latter believes Patty is prone to prioritising personal glory over the interests of his team. Patty is part of a crack team of IAF pilots that includes Minal Rathore (Deepika Padukone) a.k.a. Mini. Obviously these two are drawn together like magnet to metal, but Patty’s past keeps him from openly expressing his feelings for her. 

 

In Chapter 1 we get hackneyed introductory scenes stressing Roshan’s sexiness in a white towel and in pilot’s uniform, and Padukone’s sexiness in uniform, followed by extensive passages of bonhomie between all the members of Patty and Mini’s team. There’s light-hearted teasing, songs, a couple gazing at each other across a space filled with people while music plays in the background, incremental revelations about the enigmatic hero’s painful back story that, as it turns out, lacks novelty, and other familiar elements that are often used in Indian films to superficially establish a sense of fraternity and a pivotal romance. In the background is the Pakistan government and a deadly terrorist – a snarling chap with a bloody red eye called Azhar Akhtar (Rishabh Sawhney) – who they recruit to target Kashmir.

 

Chapter 2 deals with Pulwama and Balakot. 

 

Despite the hyperbolic cartoonishness of Azhar Akhtar and the blatant cover-up that Fighter pulls off on behalf of the Indian government in Pulwama, despite the surfeit of clichés and decibels, the film until this point is carried on the shoulders of Roshan’s good looks, the sparks between him and Padukone, Satchith Paulose’s exquisite cinematography in stunning locales, the adrenaline high that comes from watching pilots in combat in skilfully executed action scenes and the sadness of knowing that those CRPF jawans were indeed murdered in real life. 

 

None of this is enough though to save Chapter 3 from its deafening volume, silliness, unoriginal storytelling, formulaic characterisation, inexorable length and the lies that begin in Chapter 2. 

 

First let’s deal with the cover-up. When the Pulwama terror strike occurred, corporate-owned news media largely avoided asking the obvious questions raised by the public on social media and some experts regarding the massive intelligence failure involved. Many have even ignored the statements by Satyapal Malik who was Jammu and Kashmir’s governor at the time of the Pulwama attack – Malik has said at multiple forums that the attack resulted from the “incompetence” of the Indian establishment, the Union Home Ministry in particular, and the CRPF, while also calling out the Prime Minister himself for his response. 

 

Obviously, Fighter does not have the guts to show any of this. Like every government-pleasing Hindi film since 2014, Fighter is disinterested in introspection, fixated on chest-thumping and backs the position that all acts of courage and all innovation in India have been initiated in the past 10 years. Mirroring the bombast of Uri: The Surgical Strike’s “Hindustan ab chup nahi baithega. Yeh naya Hindustan hai. Yeh ghar mein ghusega bhi, aur maarega bhi (India will no longer remain silent. This is a new India – it will not only enter your house, but it will kill you there),” in Fighter we get a politician, one assumes the PM, surveying the coffins of dead CRPF jawans and saying: “Picchle pachaas saalon mein kisi sarkar ne unki inn harkaton ka muh-thod jawaab nahin diya. Lekin ab bas. Unhe dikhana padega ke baap kaun hai (For the past 50 years, no government has given them a befitting reply. But now…enough. It’s time to show them who’s the boss).” 

 

Fighter kills whatever emotional resonance it had until the Balakot episode by following it up with endless screaming, ridiculously conceived confrontations between the IAF and Pakistani terrorists, and dialoguebaazi that peaks with the “maalik hum hai” line and Patty yelling a threat at the top of his voice that India will turn Pakistan into – wait for it, it’s every aggressive nationalist’s wet dream – “India Occupied Pakistan”. It’s not that Hindi filmdom is incapable of delivering credible battlefield sequences involving India and Pakistan. For a recent example within the commercial Hindi space, refer to Vishnu Varadhan’s Shershaah starring Siddharth Malhotra. 

 

In this segment, the sole Muslim on Patty and Mini’s team, Basheer Khan (Akshay Oberoi), has that inevitable conversation about Islam with a terrorist that has by now been made mandatory for loyal-to-the-vatan Muslims in propagandist Hindi films. 

 

And in the end, Fighter trivialises itself with a steaming hot song ‘n’ dance by the sea that has zero connect with the flavour of the rest of the narrative. Yes of course all those body-baring outfits on Roshan and Padukone are titillating, but the entire package is too imitative to be impactful and is anyway terribly out of place in a film in which it was preceded by bloodshed, a beloved character’s mutilated body and immeasurable heartbreak. In fact, the inclusion of this song, Ishq Jaisa Kuchh, indicates a lack of commitment on the part of the filmmaker to his chosen theme. 

 

Like the entire ensemble cast, Roshan’s acting in Fighter is as okay as it can be in such a film, barring a scene in which, while shouting something like “Main aa raha hoon” in a life-and-death situation, he adopts a trademark tone reminiscent of his character in Koi... Mil Gaya – a tone that few directors have managed to completely control in his dialogue delivery. 

 

Padukone does better but make no mistake about this: she plays an ordinarily written supporting character who ultimately amounts to little more than the leading man’s romantic sidekick and sensual drapery, in a film designed as a showcase for Roshan. 

 

Uri was dangerous because it peddled its agenda with a blend of originality, finesse and craft. War, Pathaan and Fighter are recycled versions of each other and of the entire multitude of war-mongering deshbhakt films of the present era. Fighter actually has some good things going for it to begin with, but gradually squanders those positives by resorting to lazy storytelling to fulfil its agenda. Yawn.

 

Rating (out of 5 stars): 2   

 

Running time:

167 minutes

 

Visuals courtesy: IMDB 

REVIEW 557: KAALAKAANDI

Release date:	January 12, 2018
Director:	Akshat Verma
Cast: Language:	Saif Ali Khan, Akshay Oberoi, Isha Talwar, Sobhita Dhulipala, Kunaal Roy Kapur, Shenaz Treasury, Vijay Raaz, Deepak Dobriyal, Amyra Dastur, Neil Bhoopalam Hindi

When the writer of Delhi Belly announces his intent to direct, obviously there is reason enough to sit up and take notice. That film – released seven long years back, produced by Aamir Khan and directed by Abhinay Deo – was an excellent black comedy that pushed the envelope in the genre more than most Bollywood filmmakers had for decades before that or have since. Its writing, direction and casting were in sync with each other. Kaalakaandi gets one element right: its cast. But though Saif Ali Khan is funny as hell here and several of his talented co-stars show spark, the writing does not give any of them enough substance to bite into and the film does not fully take off at any point.

Khan plays a man who has just discovered that he has stomach cancer and barely a few months to live. He is shocked at the diagnosis because he has lived what he considers a clean and healthy life. Read: no smoking, no drinking, no drugs, no fooling around. Since his family is celebrating a wedding when the doctor breaks the news to him, he decides to keep it to himself but also to live it up since he now has nothing to lose. His bizarre transformation confuses the groom (Akshay Oberoi) who, in any case, is coping with his own set of problems arising from pre-marital heebie-jeebies.

In the same city lives a young couple on the verge of parting ways since she (Sobhita Dhulipala) is leaving him (Kunaal Roy Kapur) behind while she heads off to the US for a PhD. With just hours to go for her flight they attend the birthday party of a close friend (played with aplomb by Shenaz Treasury).

What seems like light years away from their swish lifestyles, a notorious gangster’s sidekicks (Vijay Raaz and Deepak Dobriyal) are dealing with dilemmas of their own.

During the course of the film, the paths of these disparate characters cross in the most fleeting fashion, resulting in dramatic consequences for all of them.

Kaalakaandi (which, I have learnt from one of Khan’s pre-release interviews, means “gadbad” or “everything going wrong) is about karma taking over as we make other plans and the importance of occasionally surrendering to fate. The film is set in Mumbai and about two-thirds of its dialogues are in English, a choice that is well suited to the milieus it inhabits. Verma has an interesting enough concept in place here and has picked just the right bunch of artistes to get where he wants to go. The opening half hour offers plenty of Saif-Ali-Khan-induced laughter and zaniness to hold out the promise of more to come.

Sadly, the rest of the film does not live up to this potential, since it is neither madcap enough nor pacey enough nor raunchy enough nor witty enough nor shocking enough nor clever enough nor gutsy enough nor experimental enough to have the effect that it seems to be aiming for.

Verma’s inability to flesh out his basic idea for Kaalakaandi is particularly unfortunate because Khan is in his element here. In film after film, this actor has shown that he has the chops to pull off pretty much every genre, but his industry is not offering him projects to match. He was sweetly likeable in Chef last year and beautifully melded amorality with heart in Rangoon just months earlier. In Kaalakaandi, he lets his hair down wonderfully as he descends into nuttiness, but the script is too frail to give him the space to spread his wings.

That said, the writing of the thread about his character is the only one with the substance and life to keep this film going. The highlight of Kaalakaandi is his encounter with a transgender sex worker played by a luminous Nary Singh. The easy blend of light-heartedness and poignance in their interaction marks an important milestone for the portrayal of the trans community by Bollywood.

In the sensitivity Verma seemingly effortlessly combines with humour in that one episode, he proves that he has what it takes to be a director. If only he had spent more time on his script, it may have occurred to him that the strand involving Khan could have been a standalone venture.

The rest of Kaalakaandi is dead before it takes birth. Getting Oberoi to say “fuck” a few times, infusing Raaz and Dobriyal’s segment with ma-behen abuses, showing a naked woman covered in a sheet and throwing her lingerie at a horny lover or injecting a heavy dose of drugs into the plot doth not a black comedy make.

Each member of the cast has provided ample evidence of being a gifted performer in earlier works. Vijay Raaz was the heart and soul of Delhi Belly and Kunaal Roy Kapur was a hoot in the same film. We know from the Tanu Weds Manu films that Deepak Dobriyal is a killer comic. The good-looking Akshay Oberoi is just emerging from the brilliance of Gurgaon last year. Sobhita Dhulipala – who is a hottie – made a smashing debut in Anurag Kashyap’s Raman Raghav 2.0 in 2016. Yet in Kaalakaandi, when they are occasionally engaging, it feels more like a factor of their natural charisma than the writing of their respective characters. And then there is the usually exceptional Neil Bhoopalam who has zero impact in a pointless cameo here.

Besides, the timeline is inexplicable. The events in Kaalakaandi happen over one night, yet everything seems to take much longer than it possibly could in reality. The young couple, for instance, pack so much into the two hours before her flight that you have to wonder what clock they are operating on. This loose writing deprives the film of the compactness it should have had considering that its 111 minutes and 54 seconds is far less than the average Bollywood length.

It is hard to believe that a film directed by the writer of Delhi Belly is, for the most part, a drag. Despite Saif Ali Khan being in cracking form, Kaalakaandi lacks fizz and purpose.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	A
Running time:	111 minutes 54 seconds

This review was also published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/kaalakaandi-movie-review-saif-ali-khan-is-funny-as-hell-but-the-film-lacks-fizz-4299605.html

  

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaalakaandi

REVIEW 515: GURGAON

Release date:	August 4, 2017
Director:	Shanker Raman
Cast: Language:	Akshay Oberoi, Pankaj Tripathi, Ragini Khanna, Aamir Bashir, Shalini Vatsa, Ashish Verma, Arjun Singh Faujdar, Yogi Singha, Anna Ador, Srinivas Sunderrajan Hindi / Haryanvi

An air of foreboding hangs heavy over Shanker Raman’s Gurgaon, the story of a family bent under the weight of years of suppressed anger, bitterness, even guilt. The unease is almost tangible when young Preet lands in the city after an education abroad. I should not have come back, she tells her friend Sophie at one point.

Preet’s father Kehri Singh, who heads a real-estate behemoth, is thrilled at her return. All his paternal warmth is reserved for his daughter while he cold shoulders her elder male siblings, including his son Nikki Singh whose arrogance camouflages a yearning for his father’s approval.

You sense Nikki’s resentment towards his sister from their very first scene together. Something has gone awry here. The arrangement of figures in this carefully constructed family portrait is confusing. Deeply conservative Haryana has one of the worst child sex ratios in India, the result of rampant female foeticide and infanticide. Not that the rest of the world is innocent of patriarchy, but Haryana’s stats are particularly shameful. A daughter here is viewed as such a huge liability that preventing her birth is considered a routine option. In a society such as this, something is clearly askew in the Singh home which offers no other evidence of being progressive, yet it is Preet who studied abroad, not her brothers; it is she whose name the business bears, and not as a hollow token of fondness either; it is Preet who Kehri sees as a natural inheritor of his business; it is her degree that he is confident will take it to new heights. 

As layer upon layer of the story is peeled away, Raman reveals Kehri’s secret that has culminated in the tensions simmering in his household. We see then that the Singhs are in fact a metaphor for Gurgaon, a city resting on destroyed ecologies and clashing cultures, where dramatic changes have not been accompanied by gender and cultural sensitisation within the education system, where an appearance of liberalism masks deep-rooted conservatism.

Nothing exemplifies this better than Nikki’s quandary over Sophie. He clearly feels a genuine liking for this lively, friendly foreigner, but has no idea how to express such emotions. He knows how to show affection to his mother, to begrudge his sister her place in their father’s plans, to be violent with the woman he hires for sex, but tenderness… how is he to deal with that?

Could he discuss this with his boy band without denting the macho image he feels driven to project? Who then can he speak to? His distant father? His forever anxious mother? The sister he hates? In the absence of an outlet, he hits out at whoever comes his way, and he broods.

Much like urban Gurgaon, Kehri’s family did not naturally come into being, but was artificially assembled like a well-strategised business model. In this household, a daughter is allocated a non-traditional role because ‘equality’ is a convenience, for the moment at least, not a conviction. She has freedom not because it is her right, but because she has been identified as a ghar ki Lakshmi and not a panauti, those being the only two labels available to female offspring in Kehri’s worldview.

Gurgaon is a film of Dunkirk-like silences more than conversations. The war here is not one of naval destroyers, tanks and fighter jets, nor between countries. It is raging all the same, as sure as any that was ever officially declared: a civilisational clash, a battle between young and old, old inhabitants and new, patriarchy and feminism, mindless traditionalism and free thinking.

Manoj Yadav’s lyrics for the song running alongside the end credits evoke images from the Mahabharat, one of the subcontinent’s greatest epics and now a synonym for the greatest battles ever fought. Most outsiders do not know this, but Gurgaon is named after the Mahabharat’s Guru Dronacharya, “gur” being short for “guru” and “gaon” meaning “village”. Ergo, this is “the village of the guru”. The title, then, is as much a literal reference to the city as a comment on its many contemporary social and cultural conflicts though sans the voice of wisdom, the Lord Krishna that Draupadi seeks but cannot find in the closing musical number.

Cinematographer Shanker Raman – who was responsible for the meticulously crafted visuals of Kashmir in Harud (2012), which he also co-wrote – makes a first-rate debut as a director with Gurgaon. His narrative style and the uncluttered writing (by Raman with Sourabh Ratnu, Vipin Bhatti and Yogi Singha), are both geared towards making a point with the least words possible.

If you have visited this busy metropolis to the south of Delhi, you will know that while on the one hand it is teeming with people and vehicles, on the other, vast stretches of the place can be intimidatingly deserted. Vivek Shah manages to catch the multiple facets of Gurgaon’s split personality through his camera, though with an emphasis on the latter. Each character in the film is alone with themselves and looking out on to a world that seems far removed from where they stand. Nowhere does this work better than in capturing Nikki’s sense of isolation. It is not that the film is indulgent towards him – it is not – but it takes us to a place where we can see why such a creature might emerge from this cauldron of contradictions and confusion.

The atmospherics generated by Shah’s cinematography and the unsettling music by Benedict Taylor and Naren Chandavarkar, serve to build up a feeling of dread from the opening shot.

Crucial to the success of Raman’s storytelling is the casting. The good-looking Akshay Oberoi plays the seemingly glacial Nikki. The fake self-assurance he conveys here is a contrast to his character’s confident innocence in 2016’s Laal Rang, making him an actor to watch out for.

As Preet in Gurgaon, TV star Ragini Khanna is virtually unrecognisable minus the layers of Hindi-soap-opera-mandated makeup. It has been six years since her film debut in the indifferent comedy Teen Thay Bhai (TTB). Preet is a far cry from Khanna’s vivacious character on the teleserial Sasural Genda Phool, and gives her the space to display her versatility in a film that is more deserving of her talent than TTB was.

Aamir Bashir – who, by the way, directed Harud – delivers a stand-out performance in a small but notable part in Gurgaon. He plays my favourite character in the film.

While each member of the ensemble cast does a fine job, the most distinctive act in Gurgaon comes from Pankaj Tripathi playing Kehri in Don Corleone-like fashion, the godfather of a crumbling family and an expanding empire. The grating voice, protruding jaw and stoic demeanour he brings to this role, so different from the measured dancerliness of Rangeela in this year’s Anaarkali of Aarah, are ample reminders of this man’s chameleon-like skills. In fact, with a hint of prosthetics around the chin, he would be a perfect choice to play the lead in a Bollywood biopic of Marlon Brando, in the unlikely event of such a film being made.

But I digress… Haryana has inspired several Bollywood films in recent years, some celebratory (Sultan, Dangal), some reflecting depressing realities (Aurangzeb, NH10, Laal Rang, G Kutta Se). Gurgaon falls into the latter category. It looks beyond the glitzy malls and swanky condominiums of this emerging Maximum City, to serve as a cautionary tale about unthinking urbanisation and the unseen worlds within our world. Like the city that is its subject, cloaking its turmoil with its gloss, Gurgaon’s pace and tone too are deceptive. The film is a slow burn but make no mistake about it: the explosion is coming.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	107 minutes 31 seconds

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gurgaon_(film) and JAR Pictures