REVIEW 540: ITTEFAQ

Release date:	November 3, 2017
Director:	Abhay Chopra
Cast: Language:	Sidharth Malhotra, Sonakshi Sinha, Akshaye Khanna Hindi

                                                                                                                   

Ittefaq is not a remake. Its basic inspiration has of course come from the 1969 thriller of the same name directed by Yash Chopra, starring Rajesh Khanna, Nanda and Iftekhar (which in turn drew on already existing sources), but apart from a handful of building blocks, there is really no resemblance between these two films.

Here’s what this week’s release has in common with the original: a man accused of his wife's murder escapes and takes a hostage in a house where another murder takes place. The roles played by the lead trio nearly half a century back are here taken on by Sidharth Malhotra, Sonakshi Sinha and Akshaye Khanna.

Malhotra is Vikram Sethi, a bestselling UK-based author who is in Mumbai for the launch of his new book. When we first encounter him, he is driving his car down a busy road while a bunch of police vehicles give chase. He has an accident and disappears from the scene in a severely injured condition. Through a chain of circumstances, Vikram ends up accused of two murders, his alleged victims being his wife Catherine Sethi and a man called Shekhar Sinha, the husband of a woman called Maya Sinha (Sonakshi Sinha) in whose house he took refuge while hiding from the police. Dev Verma (Akshaye Khanna), who is in charge of the investigations, is given three days by his boss to solve the case, due to the political pressure from the UK government to let Vikram go since he is a UK citizen.

Director Abhay Chopra’s Ittefaq (written by Chopra with Shreyas Jain and Nikhil Mehrotra) has the audience and Dev grappling with one question throughout its 107 minutes and 48 seconds running time: should we believe Vikram or Maya’s version of events that took place in her house before and after Vikram’s arrival? I did not arrive at an answer till the end, and when the truth was finally revealed, it was not what I was expecting.

This is not to suggest that this Ittefaq is an oh-my-god-my-breath-just-stopped kind of whodunnit. One major irritant persists throughout and robs the film of finesse. (Possible spoiler ahead, please do not read the rest of this paragraph before watching the film) Although we are told that Vikram is well-connected and that the UK sarkar is pushing its Indian counterpart to tighten the screws on the Mumbai police, we see no evidence of this. Quite to the contrary, Vikram goes to the extent of speaking freely with Dev without once asking for a lawyer or being advised by friends to do so. Also, clearly merely in the interests of stretching the narrative across the pre-determined three days of its length (rather than that one night in the earlier Ittefaq), Dev takes two days to get Vikram and Maya’s respective stories out of them in instalments during interrogations, instead of extracting the complete story out of each at one go and then cross questioning them. This defies logic since he is otherwise shown to be a smart policeman who is often frustrated with his colleagues’ inefficiencies. Further, the cocky confession from the otherwise level-headed killer in the end, at a time when they could still have been booked for the crime, seems uncharacteristic of them and appears to have been timed to needlessly elevate the suspense in that climactic scene, considering that the person could well have waited for a day or two to disclose their secret without risk. (Spoiler alert ends)

 

Still, Ittefaq has enough going for it to make it an entertaining experience. Crucial to its effectiveness is the manner in which it sustains interest levels from start to finish with its crisp storytelling, Nitin Baid’s editing that walks a fine line between keeping the narrative fast-paced and unhurried (it is just right), and the excellent balance between silent stretches interspersed with background music.

Malhotra, Sinha and Khanna deliver credible performances. And Michal Sebastian Luka’s camerawork replete with close-ups of the three central characters, mostly in semi-lit spaces and golden glows, heightens the sense of mystery and lends an air of realism to the proceedings. The slip-ups by the police are believable since we are all well acquainted with the state of Indian crime scene investigations (look no further than the very public Aarushi Talwar murder case for evidence).

Ittefaq may not be perfect, but it is clever enough. Bollywood rarely does thrillers well. This one is not brilliant, but it is fun while it lasts.

Rating (out of five stars): **3/4

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	107 minutes 48 seconds

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/ittefaq-movie-review-sidharth-malhotra-sonakshi-sinha-akshaye-khanna-are-credible-in-an-effective-thriller-4191149.html

Poster courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/ittefaqofficial/

REVIEW 504: MOM

Release date:	July 7, 2017
Director:	Ravi Udyawar
Cast: Language:	Sridevi, Sajal Ali, Adnan Siddiqui, Akshaye Khanna, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Abhimanyu Singh, Vikas Verma, Adarsh Gourav Bhagvatula, Pitobash Tripathy Hindi

How could you get the politics of your film almost perfect in the first half, then descend into eternal Bollywood clichés about rape and maaaaaaa in the second? How could you go from low-key to high-pitched within the span of a single narrative? How could you assemble some of the most talented screen performers ever seen together in a film, then limit many of them with one-dimensional characterisation?

(SPOILERS AHEAD)

Debutant director Ravi Udyawar’s Mom revolves around a mother whose teenaged daughter is sexually assaulted in the most gruesome fashion imaginable.

Sridevi plays the central character, Devki Sabarwal. She is not your typical old-time-Bollywood Nirupa Roy kind of perennially weeping madre who was restricted to keeping house, longing for a bahu and shouting at God for being a patthar ki murti unmoved by her adoring son’s hardships. Devki is a senior school biology teacher, and is struggling to gain the affections of her husband’s first child Arya. Her mild demeanour camouflages a tough-as-nails personality though. That hidden Durga goes on a rampage – quiet at first – when Arya’s torn and ravaged body is found one day in a ditch, and the girl is let down by the judiciary.

You probably know this much already if you have been following the film’s publicity and have read its Wikipedia page. What you do not know yet is that the pre-interval portion of Mom goes beyond the expected, the initial treatment of the mother-daughter relationship is unconventional, and the long-drawn-out scene of gangrape is chilling yet sensitively done – what unfolds before our eyes is designed to horrify, yet we are not shown a single shot of what actually happens to Arya, which is a relief considering how Bollywood of an earlier era often used rape to titillate audiences rather than evoke empathy for the abused.

In the opening half of Mom, I found myself sobbing uncontrollably and moved to the point of speechlessness. I remember quickly pretending to check my phone during the interval for fear that a colleague at the press preview might strike up a conversation with me and realise I had lost my voice.

Understatement is the hallmark of Mom up to this point, and the gender politics is just so. But for a passing comment by Devki, which is atypical of this seemingly liberal woman, the writing does not stereotype women or sexual violence until then. (Credits: story by Ravi Udyawar, Girish Kohli and Kona Venkat, screenplay and dialogue by Girish Kohli.)

Perhaps that comment should have given us a hint of what was to come though. When Devki goes to a police station to report a missing daughter, cops brush aside her fear, with one going to the extent of saying that the girl has most likely taken off with her boyfriend since it is Valentine’s night. You may have come across many such girls but my daughter is not that type, Devki retorts. That type? Really? 

If those words had come from a character who had already been established as a conservative by the screenplay, it would have made sense, but since Devki is portrayed as an open-minded person, this sounded more like the writers unwittingly betraying their inner conservatism.

Still, that remark was overshadowed by the poignance of the film up to that moment.

Sadly, the post-interval portion of Mom leaves behind normal human beings with normal reactions to crimes against themselves and their loved ones, and gives way to cinematic clichés. Devki becomes an avenging angel in the mould of Dimple Kapadia in 1988’s Zakhmi Aurat, and Mom begins its downhill slide.

This is why last year’s Pink was so unusual – because for the most part, it showed us how ordinary people react to sexual violence in particular and injustices in general, despite the frustrations of inhabiting an unjust world.

Revenge sprees are less challenging to write though than nuanced normality. They also serve to satisfy the bloodlust of the audience, which is why commercial cinema has opted for them so often down the decades. If it was not a zakhmi aurat (wounded woman) it was a brother out to avenge the loss of his ghar ki izzat (family honour). In A Wednesday (2008), director Neeraj Pandey extended this populism to mob justice in terror cases, with a Common Man taking the law into his own hands to punish aatankvaadis who he feels are being needlessly given fair trials in the Indian system. In Mom the argument is articulated thus: “Galat aur bahut galat mein se chun-na ho toh aap kya chunenge?” (If you have to choose between what is wrong and what is very wrong, what would you choose?)

To be fair to Bollywood, it is not the only Indian film industry guilty of this charge. The Malayalam film industry a.k.a. Mollywood, for instance, has in recent years given us Puthiya Niyamam (2016) and 22 Female Kottayam (2012), which too were crowd-pleasing portrayals of rape.

Even for those who do not care about realism and reality, Mom is problematic for its lazy writing in the second half where loose ends are left hanging so openly that an intelligent person might spot them from a mile away. A criminal leaves behind a mega clue at a crime scene, but casually outwits a supposedly smart cop who gets his hands on it and who, at that point, is not sympathetic to her cause, which means he cannot be assumed to have deliberately let it go. Two people who show considerable deftness in committing three crimes, suddenly become really stupid with their fourth potential victim. And those same accomplices vow to hide their association from the world, yet subsequently provide elephant-sized evidence of it to the police.

So yes, Sridevi’s acting is wonderful; the actors playing her supportive husband Anand (Adnan Siddiqui) and Arya (Sajal Ali) have immensely likeable personalities; the use of A.R. Rahman’s music in the first half is effective; the always amazing Anay Goswami’s cinematography summons up stunning grandeur and intimacy by turns, depending on the requirement of the situation; and a particular mention must be made of the brilliant sound design by Nihar Ranjan Samal during the assault on Arya; but none of that can compensate for the post-interval increase in the film’s volume, the limited use of a talented actor like Akshaye Khanna (as the policeman Mathew Francis), the over-use of Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s histrionics for the character of the detective Dayashankar Kapoor a.k.a. DK, the re-stressing of gender stereotypes through a transgender character in the film, the loopholes and, above all, the cliched portrayal of the response to sexual assault. 

As if all this is not bad enough, Mom’s handling of the judicial process too lacks clarity and is misleading to viewers who do not know the nitty-gritty of India’s laws governing rape. I hope a lawyer will review this film in the coming days.

Ultimately then, despite its pretensions to non-conformism, Mom does nothing more than aim at easy applause. That goal is best illustrated by its predictable, horribly maudlin ending about maaaaaaaaaa.

Perhaps it was foolish to expect anything better from a film in which one character says, “Bhagwan har jagah nahin hota, DKji (God is not everywhere),” to which DKji a.k.a. Dayashankar Kapoor replies, “Isiliye toh usne maa banaayi hai (yes, that is why he made mothers).” If you want to be Manmohan Desai or Yash Chopra, why not go all out and not pretend?

The emotional pull of the first half and Sridevi’s acting excellence notwithstanding, Mom in many ways is as dangerous as the loud, raucous, not-even-pretending-to-be-progressive-about-women commercial Bollywood of the 1970s and ’80s.

Rating (out of five stars): **1/4

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	147 minutes 43 seconds

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/bollywood/mom-movie-review-goddess-sridevi-is-lost-to-bollywoods-eternal-cliches-on-sexual-assault-3785625.html

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mom_(film)