REVIEW 782: GULABO SITABO

Release date:	June 12, 2020
Director:	Shoojit Sircar
Cast:	Farrukh Jafar, Amitabh Bachchan, Ayushmann Khurrana, Srishti Shrivastava, Ujali Raj, Ananya Dwivedi, Brijendra Kala, Vijay Raaz, Naushad (the puppeteer)
Language:	Hindi

In the Gulabo-Sitabo tradition of theatre in Uttar Pradesh, my arts encyclopedia tells me, these two ladies’ names are bestowed on glove puppets: Sitabo is a man’s exhausted and overworked spouse, Gulabo is his fresh-as-dew lover. 

In director Shoojit Sircar’s Gulabo Sitabo, written by Juhi Chaturvedi, the duo can be viewed either as a metaphor for Lucknow in which the story is set, or as an allusion to its warring leading men. 

Amitabh Bachchan plays Mirza here, a cantankerous, greedy septuagenarian landlord who is constantly at odds with the tenants residing in his haveli. Ayushmann Khurrana is Baankey, the wily leader of the pack who not only refuses to pay more than a pittance as rent but also ropes his fellow tenants into plotting against Mirza. Bickering is a fixture in their daily routine. 

The haveli is the inherited wealth of Mirza’s Begum (Farrukh Jafar), who also lives there. Baankey shares a room in it with his widowed mother and three younger sisters. 

In the past nine years, Sircar and Chaturvedi have collaborated on a bouquet of critically acclaimed, commercially successful projects that have played a pivotal role in redefining what mainstream means in Hindi cinema in the 2010s. Their subjects have been as off the beaten track as they can get – a sperm donor who keeps his ‘profession’ a secret from the woman he loves (Vicky Donor), the stormy equation between a difficult ageing man and his equally difficult, feisty daughter (Piku), a youngster mourning a former colleague with whom he did not have any significant relationship before an accident that sent her into a coma (October). Each of these films has been completely rooted in the respective cultures and communities in which they have been set. 

Gulabo Sitabo is arguably more overtly entrenched in local traditions than its predecessors in the Sircar-Chaturvedi filmography, yet is also, if you choose to read it that way, the most politically current of the lot. 

On the face of it, Gulabo Sitabo is about a bunch of people fighting over a mansion. The storytelling has a fable-like quality to it, its folksy feel underlined by Shantanu Moitra’s delightfully impish-and-ruminative-by-turns background score and Bachchan’s styling – for his role as Mirza, the actor has been given the look of a wizened old man who fits as perfectly into the ancient city of Lucknow in the 21st century as he might have in a tale of an unspecified yore. 

Mirza and Baankey’s battle is remarkable, because neither of them genuinely loves the haveli or understands its value and neither feels an iota of love for its original inhabitant among them, its rightful owner, Begum. Like India and Pakistan fighting over Kashmir, treating it as a coveted piece of land rather than a home to its present and former inhabitants, ultimately, neither the Gulabo nor the Sitabo of this tale has any actual affection for the individual, i.e. the haveli, they wrangle over – he/it is a practical compulsion for one and a useful object for the other, nothing more. And they fight and they fight until the person to whom it truly belongs serves them a life lesson they were not expecting. 

Irrespective of the interpretation, Gulabo Sitabo is one of the quirkiest, cheekiest, quaintest films to emerge from Bollywood this past decade.  

Among its many lovely impertinences is the fact that though it features two of Bollywood’s biggest male stars in its cast, it does not seem overly preoccupied with showing off their presence – they play characters in a story, like everyone else. 

That Gulabo Sitabo is not an unthinking follower of convention is exemplified by the way it gives Jafar pride of place over Bachchan and Khurrana in the opening credits, not as a patronising symbolic gesture, not even solely because her stature merits it, but because she is indeed the leading lady of the proceedings. 

Jafar, who is in her late 80s, is best-known to Bollywood watchers as Amma from Peepli Live. She is adorable as Gulabo Sitabo’s clever Begum, her eyes sparkling with a light and her speech brimming with an energy that defy her age.

Bachchan’s facial expressions are occasionally hard to detect behind all that prosthetic make-up, but his voice and body do more speaking than you can imagine. Mirza, a role that might have been lazily caricatured, is thankfully not. Over and above all this is the pleasure to be had from watching this legendary star merrily experimenting with such an unorthodox role just months away from his 78th birthday. 

Playing what is perhaps his least showy character till date, Khurrana imbues Baankey with an air of hesitation and helplessness and effectively erases his naturally strong presence. I loved the way he summons up awkwardness, guilt and trepidation on his face and in his demeanour in that shot in which Baankey peers through a hole he kicked into a crumbling wall in the haveli complex, thus kicking off another round of quarrelling with his elderly bete noir.

This is my favourite of his performances till date. 

In this constellation of talents, Srishti Shrivastava playing Baankey’s sister Guddo is my pick of the cast. She is a firebrand as an actor and, as it happens, gets to play an incredible firebrand in Gulabo Sitabo. 

In a small but crucial role, Brijendra Kala is a hoot. Watch his face in the scene in which Guddo confronts him – that look of reluctant admiration for a woman who has just insulted him. 

Gulabo Sitabo could not possibly have been what it is without Avik Mukhopadhayay’s sweeping cinematography, Mansi Dhruv Mehta’s production design that makes the haveli, Fatima Mahal, a character in its own right, and the eclectic music by Moitra, Anuj Garg and Abhishek Arora.

What Mukhopadhayay did for Delhi’s trees in October he does for Lucknow and Fatima Mahal in Gulabo Sitabo. The atmospherics he conjures up in the city gives us a Lucknow rarely seen before in Hindi cinema. And the way he captures the grandeur of the haveli without erasing the grime reminded me of the gorgeous Maithili film Gamak Ghar that was recently available on MUBI India and Anjali Menon’s Manjadikkuru (Malayalam) that, sadly, is not streaming anywhere right now. The lingering shots of the haveli towards the end are painterly compositions that ought to be freeze-framed for museum viewing. 

There is so much more in this unusual Hindi film to discuss and dissect in the coming days. Such as the thread of caregiving running through Sircar’s films from Piku to Pink (which he produced but did not direct), October and now this one; the non-stereotypical treatment of the elderly in Chaturvedi’s scripts, from Vicky Donor’s daadi (the only genuinely modern entity in Delhi along with the Metro, according to her grandson) to the irritating dad in Piku, the scoundrel Mirza and no-babe-in-the-woods Begum in Gulabo Sitabo; or even why the manner of use of the problematic, patriarchal term “ghar jamai” made me uncomfortable.

Gulabo Sitabo’s soundtrack is as thoughtful and amusing as the film. (I would strongly recommend the jukebox which is available on YouTube.) 

Quite appropriately, the beautiful Do Din Ka Yeh Mela Hai (with music by Garg, sung by Indian Ocean’s frontman Rahul Ram) runs with the closing credits, its lyrics by Dinesh Pant celebrating the blend of pooja and azaan in the innocent, naughty stories blowing in the wind. 

Gulabo Sitabo is not zippy in the way Vicky Donor and Piku were, nor over-emphatic with any point it makes. It is a slow burn – like October – despite its sense of humour, mischievous characters and the tongue firmly placed in its cheek. The film’s unobtrusive politics, including its quiet feminism, are blowing in the wind – there for us to hear if we wish as the unusual, entertaining narrative silently flows by. 

Rating (out of 5 stars): 3.5

Gulabo Sitabo is streaming on Amazon Prime Video India.

Running time:

125 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/gulabo-sitabo-movie-review-kooky-cheeky-quaint-and-utterly-delightful-8475961.html

Poster courtesy: IMDB

REVIEW 780: GHOOMKETU

Release date:	May 22, 2020
Director:	Pushpendra Nath Misra
Cast:	Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Ila Arun, Raghubir Yadav, Swanand Kirkire, Anurag Kashyap, Dipika Amin, Bijendra Kala, Rajendra Sethi, Ragini Khanna, Cameos: Chitrangda Singh, Sonakshi Sinha, Ranveer Singh, Amitabh Bachchan
Language:	Hindi

Though Nawazuddin Siddiqui has built his reputation largely on grim, sometimes even grisly roles, we know he has the genes for comedy. We know it from Lunchbox in which he was sweet and charming and comical in an otherwise pensive scenario. We know it from other, lesser films too in which we caught flashes of his funny bone. Ghoomketu – now streaming on Zee5 – is his attempt at an all-out comedic performance in an unconventional Bollywood project. 

Produced by the now-defunct Phantom Films and Sony Pictures, Ghoomketu has been languishing without a release for some years. It is easy to see why – why the concept found backing and why the completed film could not find takers. Ghoomketu’s writer-director Pushpendra Nath Misra (creator of the Netflix series Taj Mahal 1989) obviously had a good idea to begin with. He also then wrote a neat beginning and end. The bit that comes in between though, the bit that makes up the length of a film, flounders. 

Ghoomketu is named after its hero, a 31-year-old aspiring writer from small-town UP who wants a career in Bollywood. The film opens with him having run away from home, leaving behind his joint family. In Mumbai, a corrupt policeman is tasked with tracking down this runaway who is trying to convince a producer to buy his terrible scripts. 

From the word go, it is evident that Ghoomketu has little talent. Such a leading man is perfect material for hilarity or for perceptive commentary on the arts or whatever a filmmaker wishes to explore through him. Bad artists can make for great cinema – after reading this review, try watching Tim Burton’s 1994 film Ed Wood starring Johnny Depp as the eponymous real-life American director reputed for making horrendous films. 

In Misra’s case, having thought up an interesting character, he seems not to know what to do, which is ironic since the film displays as little imagination as its protagonist. 

The opening half hour or so of Ghoomketu is entertaining. I found myself giggling at the intentional silliness of the scenarios and characters. Too soon though, it became clear that the film is aiming for a certain whimsy that it does not have the depth to achieve. 

The use of graphics, animation, superstar cameos and the narrative device of getting the hero to talk directly to the camera end up feeling like window dressing in the absence of substance. After a while then, Ghoomketu becomes a long wait for a flight to take off.

Siddiqui tries hard and is initially effective. Beyond a point though, the script does not have enough meat for him. 

The supporting cast is a roll call of  actors who have in the past shown superb comic timing, and at places in Ghoomketu some of them do manage to elicit laughs.

Bijendra Kala and Rajendra Sethi are a hoot. Yadav is under-utilised and his Dadda is given little to do beyond scream at people. Kirkire gets to be mopey. Kashyap, making a rare acting appearance, shows some spark in his introductory scene but the writer has not bothered much with his character thereafter. Ragini Khanna who carried the Hindi TV serial Sasural Genda Phool on her shoulders and was impressive too in the Hindi film Gurgaon is wasted here. 

The actor who gets decent material to work on and remains a sweetheart throughout is Ila Arun as Ghoomketu’s adoring Bua – it helps that her interactions with him are the film’s best-written scenes. In the passage in which the senior lady explains to her nephew how she plans to act her way through a particular situation with his father, Arun steals the show from right under Siddiqui’s nose. We need to see more of her in Hindi cinema.

Ghoomketu boasts of several star cameos. Chitrangda Singh looks stunning in her few moments on screen. Sonakshi Sinha, Ranveer Singh and Amitabh Bachchan’s tiny roles seem to have been written with more care than the main characters. Sinha and Singh do a fair job. Bachchan seems to have had fun playing his part – that is actually nice to see. 

There is a tasteless fat joke running through Ghoomketu. I know, I know, some of you will point out that real people do make insensitive comments and a reality should not be censored on screen in a bow to political correctness. Look back though at how Sharat Katariya handled a similar theme in that Bollywood gem Dum Laga Ke Haisha. The issue is not what characters in Ghoomketu say or do, but that the film itself seems to be tickled by the thought of a plus-sized woman. In its attempt at profundity, it even appears to be using a slim woman as a metaphor for a man’s dreams coming true and for a Paulo Coelho-esque moment of treasure-finding involving an important character. Uff.

The twist in the climax is not bad at all, but it is inconsistent with what we have been told until then about Ghoomketu’s writing abilities. Lost in this film’s wafer-thin screenplay is the pleasant soundtrack by Sneha Khanwalkar and Jasleen Royal. More’s the pity.

Ghoomketu is being released directly online during India’s nationwide lockdown prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic. In these dreary times, it would have meant so much if its content had been a reason to celebrate. It’s sorta okay, but that is hardly enough from a film starring this stupendous cast.  

Rating (out of 5 stars): 1.5

Running time:

102 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/ghoomketu-movie-review-nawazuddin-siddiqui-is-kinda-funny-but-this-experiment-in-whimsy-doesnt-take-flight-8395151.html

Poster courtesy: Zee5

VIDEO REVIEWS: SYERAA NARASIMHA REDDY (TELUGU) & ASURAN (TAMIL)

(These are transcripts of Anna M.M. Vetticad’s video reviews aired on Rajya Sabha TV on October 13, 2019.)

Hello everyone, today I’m reviewing two films that are complete contrasts in terms of content and storytelling style. Both are big star vehicles though.

First, Syeraa Narasimha Reddy in which Telugu superstar Chiranjeevi plays Uyyalawada Narasimha Reddy who led an uprising against the British East India Company in the mid 1800s. This was before the 1857 revolt. To emphasise this point, his story is recounted here by Rani Laxmibai of Jhansi in a speech with which she hopes to inspire HER men to fight the British. 

In flashback form, Laxmibai takes us through the life of Syeraa Narasimha Reddy, one among several once-powerful rulers in the Telugu heartland who are being stripped of their power by the British. 

The common people are reeling under the back-breaking taxation policies of the British, when the hero sets out to unite his fellow rulers and the farmers against these foreigners.

Woven into the narrative is also his romance with the classical dancer Lakshmi, his relationship with his wife, song and dance routines shot on a gigantic scale, and endless action scenes. 

What is nice about Syeraa Narasimha Reddy is that it tells the story of an anti-British rebellion from southern India. The popular discourse in large parts of India tends to focus on the contributions and achievements of North Indians, not just in India’s freedom struggle but in all matters. In this context, Syeraa Narasimha Reddy is significant. But it squanders away that plus point with the WAY it tells its story.

As it turns out, the primary goal of this film is to underline Chiranjeevi’s star stature. More effort has been invested in creating a spectacle rather than in writing in-depth characters. Reddy is built up as a saintly He Man with superhuman strength and yogic powers. He is projected as SO INVINCIBLE, that his ultimate defeat seems unconvincing even though it is spelt out as a historical fact. 

To give the film scale, Chiranjeevi is surrounded by multiple major stars from Tamannaah to Nayanthara, Sudeep, Vijay Sethupathi, Amitabh Bachchan, Anushka Shetty and ... well, the list is long. Except for Tamannaah and Bachchan to some extent, the others are given short shrift by the screenplay.

This story has huge potential for social insights, but director Surender Reddy is too busy lionising Syeraa Narasimha Reddy and Chiranjeevi. Therefore the film offers us little understanding of the class and caste struggles involved. Realism and facts are not a priority in this revisionist historical drama.

As far as technical aspects go, the lavish production design and costumes are eye-catching, but the special effects are of confusing quality. Some night-time scenes are wonderfully impressive, but some scenes are surprisingly mediocre. The SFX in that long passage involving bulls, for instance, is embarrassingly tacky. 

The overall tone of the narrative is loud, rubbing every point, every message in our faces. 

For hard-core Chiranjeevi fans, perhaps there is some pay off here since their favourite star dominates the film in a role designed to overshadow all else on screen. That apart, Syeraa Narasimha Reddy is a generic, uninspiring film that lacks soul.

**** ****

Now on to writer-director Vetrimaaran’s Asuran.

From the moment he grabbed the spotlight with Aadukalam early this decade, Vetrimaaran has made his own road. With Asuran he offers a stellar redefinition of Big Cinema in the Indian context. 

There is a tendency in our country to assume that if a film revolves around caste or exploitation of any form, then it cannot take on the trappings that give mainstream Indian cinema its larger-than-life feel. With Asuran, Vetrimaaran walks a fine line to ensure that his hero is projected as a giant among men without trivialising the struggles of a marginalised community or making him appear so unconquerable that his defeats become hard to swallow. 

Dhanush plays Sivasamy whose impoverished family is engaged in a feud with a powerful land-owning family in the area. Initially, Sivasamy comes across as a pacifist. His sons are frustrated with his keenness to avoid violence. Later though, he introduces us to his defiant past and the havoc his defiance wreaked on those around him. 

Dhanush’s remarkable physical transformation is not the only indicator of the passage of time in Asuran. His is a richly detailed character that evolves too as the story runs along. Even when he metamorphoses into a roaring lion on screen, his brilliant acting, the direction and the writing ensure that he remains believable. 

Although Sivasamy is the central figure, the screenplay works hard to develop the characters of his wife Pachiammal, two sons, brother-in-law and antagonists. The excellent supporting cast does full justice to the writing. But none of the stars overshadows the film’s story or messaging. 

Malayalam superstar Manju Warrier in particular deserves to be singled out for her deeply felt, relatable performance as Pachiammal in a film that marks her Tamil debut. She is so good, that you have to wonder why even progressive filmmakers like Vetrimaaran tend to think in terms of male-centric stories. 

That said, Asuran uses a conventional genre – the male-centric action drama – to tell an unconventional story. 

It is violent, but it does not endorse violence. 

It uses episodes of loudness to take us to a point of stillness and calm. 

In short, Asuran is lovely.

**** ****

Link to the video of these reviews aired on Rajya Sabha TV:

https://youtu.be/pSOv1xEiXcw

Photographs courtesy:

(1)    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sye_Raa_Narasimha_Reddy

(2)    https://www.facebook.com/DhanushKRaja/