REVIEW 465: RUNNING SHAADI

Release date:	February 17, 2017
Director:	Amit Roy
Cast: Language:	Amit Sadh, Taapsee Pannu, Arsh Bajwa, Brijendra Kala  Hindi and Punjabi

Ironic perhaps, but laughter is a great tool to highlight human misery. For proof of this, as we count down to Oscars 2017, look no further than Roberto Benigni’s Best Picture-nominated, Best Foreign Language Film-winning La Vita E Bella (Life Is Beautiful) from Oscars 1999, a tragi-comedy about a Jewish Italian man and his little son in a Nazi concentration camp. La Vita E Bella was effective because it fully understood the heartbreak behind its humour and it did not at any point trivialise the pain of its characters. It takes a genius to walk that line.

Not that there is any comparison between the two, but I thought of Life Is Beautiful several times as I watched writer-director Amit Roy’s Hindi-Punjabi film Running Shaadi, the story of a young man who starts a matrimonial website/facilitating agency for couples whose families are opposed to their relationships. When it is not meandering, Running Shaadi is funny in places. Before we weigh its cinematic merits and demerits though, the film deserves to be lambasted unequivocally for seeming to be blissfully unaware of the catastrophic consequences that often accompany inter-community romances in India.

Roy cannot be accused of trivialising the issue. He simply seems not to understand it. It is hard to say which is more inexcusable.

For a moment though, let us discuss Running Shaadi in a vacuum, completely removed from this particular socio-political context in which it has been made. Amit Sadh plays the film’s Bharose, a Bihari working in a clothing store in Punjab. The owner of the establishment relies heavily on him for his business and often for his personal affairs too.

The old man’s daughter – Nimmi played by Taapsee Pannu – considers Bharose a good friend, though not the lover he clearly wants to be. At some point in the story, Bharose decides to start runningshaadi.com. Religious differences, caste boundaries, class divides – whatever be the objection your parents have to your union, Bharose and his partner Cyberjeet (Arsh Bajwa) will get you married and try, if possible, to even win over Dad, Mum and the extended parivaar.

Like these parents, the filmmaker too is not bereft of prejudice. One of the film’s jokes is that Cyberjeet considers a thickly bespectacled, ordinary-looking Bengali youth not good enough for his pretty Punjabi girlfriend. She snaps at Cyber for his doubts, telling him that her Shonkhu (Sandip Ghosh) is the most intelligent man she knows. Predictably, the actress cast in this part has a markedly light complexion while Ghosh is dark-skinned. Whaddyaknow! The stereotype of fair-is-beautiful-and-dark-is-ugly meeting the stereotype of the cerebral Bengali and the good-looking Punjabi in a film that is supposedly opposed to bias? C’mon Amit Roy! Seriously?

Once Bharose’s business takes off, you guess of course that he too will need its services some day. He does. The rest of the film is devoted to the hero solving his own problem, surmounting far greater hurdles than any of his clients faced.

Sadly for Running Shaadi, it features some commendable components. For one, it unobtrusively turns an important corner for the portrayal of women’s reproductive rights in Indian cinema by showing a major character opting for an abortion because she is not ready to have a baby. Yes, that dreaded A-word, a place that last year’s Sultan feared to tread.

This passing passage early in the film is handled with such subtlety that it raises expectations for what is to come. Also on point is the non-caricaturish portrayal of small-town conservatism (to be contrasted with big cities where more people use a veneer of liberalism to camouflage their narrow-mindedness).

The initial proceedings are sweetly believable. Too soon though, Running Shaadi begins to wander. Monotony sets in as Bharose and Cyberjeet run through dozens of couples with nary a variation in their personal story and nary a detail that might have made these characters worth investing in. Familial opposition is overcome or even quelled with such ease that you wonder if the filmmaker has ever read of murders sanctioned by khap panchayats, the gruesome crimes that have come to be known as ‘honour killings’, the ‘love jihad’ campaign of recent years, and other socially and politically sanctioned brutalities.

Until this point, Running Shaadi presents itself as social satire. Then suddenly, the film snaps its fingers and becomes an action adventure/thriller without easing us into the change of mood – a mood that it fails to sustain anyway. At this point, the story has shifted to Patna in Bihar and even briefly visits Dalhousie in Himachal Pradesh. The couple at the centre of the post-interval proceedings do face a murderous family, but a sense of urgency is missing in the narrative. The casual treatment is exacerbated by the fact that the narrative has drifted around too long to get here. By now it is too late for the film.

This is a pity, because the characters big and small in Bihar are far more interesting than the ones in Punjab. The highlight of this portion is Brijendra Kala playing Bharose’s uncle, a struggling filmmaker. Kala infuses his Ujjala Mamaji with a warmth and substance that are absent in the rest of the story’s primary players. To be fair, he is also written better than the others in the screenplay by Navjot Gulati and Roy himself.

The film’s cinematography and production design are not distinctive, which is surprising since Roy was a noted cinematographer with Sarkar and Sarkar Raj among other films to his credit before he turned director with this one. A special mention must go though to Manoj Yadav, Shellee, Keegan Pinto, Tanveer Ghazi and Anas Ali Khan for the earthy colloquialisms and attractively informal tone of their engaging lyrics.

Amit Sadh has been excellent in all his films so far, and most of all in Kai Po Che (2013). Taapsee Pannu was utterly brilliant in last year’s Pink. Both need a better written, better edited, better directed drama to house their talents.

While on the subject of editing… The film’s name was changed late in the day from RunningShaadi.com to Running Shaadi following a legal dispute. I do wish the producers (among them Shoojit Sircar, who produced Pink) had further delayed the release to rework it instead of blurring people’s lips and muting the “dotcom” repeatedly. Postponement may have been expensive, but the repeated disruptions are even more so. They are irritating.

Plugging that problem would not have saved the film though from its loose writing, unforgivably limited social insights, feeble direction and screenplay. Running Shaadi is a whimper.

Rating (out of five stars): *

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	115 minutes

This article was also published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/running-shaadi-movie-review-taapsee-pannu-and-amit-sadh-are-running-to-nowhere-3288002.html

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

REVIEW 32: DUM MAARO DUM

Release date:	April 22, 2011
Director:	Rohan Sippy
Cast:	Abhishek Bachchan, Rana Daggubati, Bipasha Basu, Aditya Pancholi, Prateik Babbar

Yeh Michael Barbosa kaun hai? 

It’s a question that occupies the mind and life of ACP Vishnu Kamath who has been hand-picked by the Union Home Minister to clean up drug-ravaged Goa. The state has been enslaved by dealers. But the kingpin is an ephemeral creature who no one seems to have ever met. Is he young or old, Indian or foreign, is he in fact a she? But the real question is, does Dum Maaro Dum have what it takes to keep us glued to our seats till we get the answer to that first question?

The story of DMD is told through three parallel tracks: Lorry (Prateik Babbar) aspires to study in the US with his girlfriend but doesn’t have the money to make it there without a scholarship; Kamath (Abhishek Bachchan) is a man battling the ghosts of his past along with the spectre of Michael Barbosa; musician/DJ Joki (Rana Daggubati) is desperate to redeem himself for his earlier failure to stand up for his girlfriend Zoe (Bipasha Basu). Tying them all together is the evil drug lord Lorsa Biscuta (Aditya Pancholi).

The film establishes each character firmly and succinctly. The actors are good; the background score by Midival Punditz is evocative of the sadness underlying the loveliness all around; and Amit Roy’s camera thankfully goes beyond the clichéd images of Goa’s beaches and churches, beyond even those traditional Portuguese homes and the roadways flanked by fields, and travels all the way up to atmospheric graveyards and the lonely patches of green in the countryside where anything could happen when no one’s watching. Till the interval comes around, director Rohan Sippy takes us along on the ride with his hands very firmly on the wheel. But his grip slackens post-interval, so does the pace, and the run-up to the climax followed by an overly elongated epilogue left me with a vague sense of dissatisfaction.

Directors of crime thrillers are all manipulating us; the trick is to keep us unaware of those manipulations so that they don’t get irritating. In DMD a couple of annoying red herrings are thrown our way while we try to figure out who Michael Barbosa is. There’s a voice threatening Lorry in whispers. It was just not disembodied enough and if I could spot the actor behind that voice, so could anyone. Then there’s the pointed look that sultry item girl Deepika Padukone throws at ACP Kamath before she disappears into a crowd. What was that about, huh Missy?

Making matters worse is Pritam’s insipid music. And I’m not just talking about one of the best-remembered songs in Hindi film history that he’s reworked into a pale shadow of itself. To be fair to Jaideep Sahni, his cheeky lyrics “Oonche se ooncha banda, potty pe baithe nanga …,” may actually have been fine IF they weren’t being imposed on a dull remix of RD’s classic.

But there’s also much to like in DMD. The characters are all well-rounded, especially ACP Kamath and Zoe. Kamath’s transformation from bribe-taker to upright policeman comes through a painful journey so well described by Lorsa Biscuta at one point. There’s one particularly deftly handled scene in which Kamath’s dead wife seems to speak to him. It’s touching, yet not maudlin. Abhishek pitches in a neat performance as the broodingly intense drug-buster, though a lot of the impact is diluted by repeated visitations by that same dead spouse which become tacky and silly after a point. There’s a scene in which Lorry angrily asks Kamath, “What would you know about family?!” We know by then that Kamath does know. But I guess because it’s assumed that we are dense, the sound of the car crash that killed his wife plays out in the background at that point.

While those irritants should be attributed to the director along with the pointless references to Amitabh Bachchan’s iconic films, Abhishek must share the blame for an entire interrogation scene he does which is woven around dad’s Khaike paan Banaraswala. Why was it necessary? Why why why?!

The character that worked best for me in this film is Zoe who, in a sense, personifies a physically beautiful yet internally scarred Goa. It’s not a large role, but it’s one that goes beyond the sexy body and endless legs that Bipasha has come to signify in the public eye. The actress shines as Zoe who makes the journey from youthful zest to bitterness and ultimate despair.

The rest of the characters too are well played. They fit well into the Goan milieu without caricaturing Goans in the stereotypical “Hum God se church mein jaake prayer karenga” Bollywood manner. But there is a strange and inexplicable disconnect between Rana Daggubati’s personality in the film and his voice/dialogue delivery. Rana is the grandson of legendary producer D. Rama Naidu and hero of the Telugu hit Leader. The handsome star makes his Hindi film debut playing Joki in DMD. At first I assumed that someone else had dubbed for him. Then I read news reports that he has dubbed for himself. Perhaps then he was too pre-occupied with camouflaging his borderline Telugu accent (which, by the way, I find quite alluring Mr Daggubati). Either way, something’s not quite right here. If anyone felt that Rana didn’t sound Goan enough for DMD, surely an explanation for the uncommon style of speaking could have been gently worked into the script! I mean c’mon, this is a Bollywood where a Katrina Kaif has made a career for herself while playing an NRI or a phoren-returned heroine in film after film just to justify that twang! More’s the pity considering that Rana is a tall, strapping hottie and he certainly looks this part!

So Dum Maaro Dum is a stark tale of what lies beneath a picture postcard setting. It’s violent without being self-indulgently gruesome. I liked the film very much as it unspooled in the first hour. But the inconsistent treatment has ensured that it ends up as a nice film in which the second half doesn’t live up to the promise of the first.

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

CBFC Rating:                       A (The producer’s rep explains that while the Censor Board didn’t ask for cuts, the I&B Ministry asked for the deletion of the dialogue: “Yahan sharaab sasti, ladkiyan usse bhi sasti aur zindagi toh muft mein hi bik jaati hai.” It has been removed.)

Running time:                        135 Minutes

Language:                              Hindi

Photograph courtesy: http://www.facebook.com/DumMaaroDum