REVIEW 700: SHURUAAT KA TWIST

Release date:	May 31, 2019
Directors:	Praveen Fernandes, Hanish Kalia, Heena Dsouza, Sanjiv Kishinchandani, Avalokita, Gaurav Mehra
Cast: Language:	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

CBFC Rating (India):	A
Running time:	142 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/shuruaat-ka-twist-movie-review-neena-gupta-and-chunky-panday-join-a-likeable-cast-in-an-uneven-anthology-6735791.html

Poster courtesy:

https://www.facebook.com/ShuruaatKaTwist/

REVIEW 579: RAID

Release date:	March 16, 2018
Director:	Raj Kumar Gupta
Cast: Language:	Ajay Devgn, Saurabh Shukla, Amit Sial, Ileana D’Cruz, Sheeba Chadha, Sulagna Panigrahi, Saanand Verma, Devas Dixit, Ravi Khanwilkar Hindi

An honest income-tax official conducts a carefully planned raid on one of the most powerful people in Uttar Pradesh. The lead star is Ajay Devgn. The director is the man who brought us Aamir and No One Killed Jessica. The year is 1981, back when sewing jewellery into mattresses and stashing cash under floor tiles was the order of the day among tax evaders.

Raj Kumar Gupta’s Raid works, for the most part, like a procedural drama. Devgn’s Amay Patnaik arrives at his new posting after being transferred from station to station as punishment for his integrity. Ritesh Shah’s writing largely mirrors this no-nonsense character, going about its business quietly and purposefully, and in the bargain throwing light on one of the least hailed of government departments.

Amay’s sincerity is established within minutes of his arrival on the scene. It is clear too right from the start that the enemy is not confined to the homes of wealthy families with unaccounted incomes. The enemy within is as lethal a combatant as any outside.

Apart from his associates, we also meet Amay’s wife Malini (Ileana D’Cruz) who unflinchingly supports him despite her exhaustion at the repeated packing and moving that have become constants in their life.

On the face of it, it could be said that Devgn has played precisely this part – a ramrod straight man within a broken system, doing his duty against all odds – a zillion times in his 27 year long career, yet there is a difference. In most of his previous such films, there was a superhero element to his role. In Singham, for instance, his Bajirao Singham virtually climbed pillars and walked on air to single-handedly bash up packs of goons. Here, in a production that strikes a far more realistic tone than the formulaic commercial Hindi cinema that dominates his filmography, Amay requires police protection to conduct his work freely, and is often afraid although he does not allow his fear to hamper his assignments.

Credible realism and Gupta’s unembellished directorial style are what make Raid such a gripping experience.

The film occasionally falters in this area – twice, to be precise, when the romantic songs Saanu Ek Pal and Nit Khair are needlessly jammed into the otherwise unrelentingly pacey proceedings. This trite device has been plucked out of the 1980s in which the tale is set, from the days when musical interludes were the primary means of portraying man-woman love in Bollywood and it was assumed that the audience wants such breaks within every powerful narrative. If anything, these numbers serve as irritating distractions in Raid, though thankfully they are brief enough to not be completely ruinous.

Once Amay’s team enters the house that is the fulcrum of the film’s action, Raid almost feels like a suspense thriller. Who is the informer who has given him such accurate information about a family with such clout? Will Amay manage to finish the task at hand or will he be disillusioned by how far the corrupt Tauji’s political allies will go to save him? And where on earth has Tauji hidden his ill-gotten riches?

As riveting as these questions is the realisation dawning on the viewer as the film rolls along, that income-tax officials operate in a very dangerous field. Potential transfers are nothing in comparison with the risk of actual physical harm that their targets could inflict upon them.

The manner in which Gupta leads up to this point is smooth and believable. It helps that he has picked a no-fuss cast who match his intent scene for scene, as does editor Bodhaditya Banerjee.

Devgn does brooding intensity better than most of his colleagues, and injects just the right amount of vulnerability into Amay to make him relatable. While some of the lines given to Amay (and wisely to Amay alone) hark back to the dialoguebaazi of an earlier era in Hindi cinema, the actor delivers them sans bombast to ensure that they are fun and do not sound dated.

Ileana as his wife gets limited screen time, but for what it is worth, she plays it well, achieving a nice note of indulgent bemusement in response to her husband’s often exasperating uprightness.

Saurabh Shukla as Tauji is the lynchpin of the striking supporting cast, with the screenplay giving him enough space to imbue the characterisation with interesting shades of gray. Sheeba Chadha as one of the bahus of his household and Amit Sial as Amay’s colleague are among the multiple satellite players who lend crucial detailing to their characters’ questionable morality.

Thankfully, none of the bad folk here are caricatures and one of the most enjoyable parts of Raid is Tauji’s relationship with his brusque, wizened old mother.

At 128 minutes and 3 seconds, Raid is just the right length for its pithy screenplay by Shah whose earlier credits include Citylights (2014) and Pink (2016). The opening text on screen informs us that it is “based on true stories”, and in the end we are told of the perils faced by income-tax officials in real life.

Media coverage and our own apathy have reduced these sarkari afsars to nothing but their nuisance value and the way they are misused by vengeful governments. Raid throws light on another crucial aspect of their story that we all ought to know, minus stereotypical Bollywood-style glorification of honest individuals. Barring those incongruous songs, the gendered language of the closing text on screen (which assumes that all income-tax officials are male, contrary to what we see even in Amay’s office) and a passing line about homosexuality that could perhaps have been better written, Raid is on point, insightful and engaging.

This is not the kind of fare you might expect to set your pulses racing, but that is precisely what it achieves in its closing scenes. Raid is not regular Bollywood. What it is though is thoroughly entertaining.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	128 minutes

This review was also published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/bollywood/raid-movie-review-ajay-devgns-brooding-intensity-raj-kumar-guptas-gripping-direction-add-up-to-a-winner-4392773.html

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raid_(2018_film)