REVIEW 781: CHOKED

Release date:	June 5, 2020
Director:	Anurag Kashyap
Cast:	Saiyami Kher, Roshan Mathew, Parthveer Shukla, Amruta Subhash, Rajshri Deshpande, Upendra Limaye
Language:	Hindi

Sarita Pillai nee Sahastrabuddhe’s life mirrors the humdrum lives of millions of middle-class Indian women. She wakes up every morning, cooks, prepares her kid for school, sends him off before heading to her own office in teeming Mumbai where she spends her day in mechanical, emotionless toil as a bank teller before returning home to cook, serve her kid and husband Sushant, admonish the latter for being a layabout, clean up and sleep. 

Forward to the next day. Wake up. Repeat. Sleep. And the next. And the next. Wake up. Repeat. Sleep. Wake up. Repeat. Sleep. 

Her listless existence and her evident disinterest in Sushant are punctuated occasionally by lively kitty parties with women in the neighbourhood who revel in gossip, including about members of their own group. 

We know from the start that there is and will be more to Sarita, heroine of director Anurag Kashyap’s Choked: Paisa Bolta Hai (Money Talks) that is streaming on Netflix from today. We know we can expect more than that surface mundaneness for two reasons: first, the film’s smartly executed prologue indicates some hanky-panky with money; and second, hints are dropped early on about an event in the past from where her marriage went downhill. 

Sushant for his part has more spark and appears to have more going for him than she does although he does nothing. He hangs around contributing zilch to the housework, casually plays his guitar at home and plays carrom with friends in the building. Sarita’s tetchiness towards him inexplicably does little to dampen his affection for her or dull the twinkle in his eyes, but it also does not enthuse him enough to lift a finger to share her burden around the house. 

Then one day, as the trailer has already revealed, Sarita unexpectedly comes across a stash of cash and for the first time in the film we see her face come alive. 

Choked is about what she does with that secret horde, and through that adventure it tells the story of a life stuck in a rut, a relationship at the edge of an abyss, greed and corruption in the era of demonetisation. 

At first Choked is intriguing. The manner in which Kashyap portrays Sarita’s boredom and sense of hopelessness in her role as wife and home manager is striking. Her act of latching a door and switching off a light night after night after night before going to bed is used to remarkable effect to underline the repetitiveness of her routine and the monotony that domesticity can bring. 

Sarita’s empty eyes and irritability when contrasted with Sushant’s easygoing nature and their son’s charm allude to a background that must have been far more interesting than her current busy yet godawfully drowsy routine. 

Besides the lead trio of Choked are a good fit. Sarita is played by Saiyami Kher who had the misfortune of making her Bollywood debut with Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s worst film till date, Mirzya (2016), but managed to reveal her innate charisma even in that dismal enterprise. The young actor has an impressive personality and speaking eyes. In the role of Sushant is the attractive stage and Mollywood artist Roshan Mathew whose brief filmography includes an aching portrayal of a man in love with a man in a conservative society in Geetu Mohandas’s otherwise middling Moothon. And Parthveer Shukla who plays their son is a little fireball of darlingness without the irritating precociousness that so many directors seem to demand of their child actors. 

Once the nuts and bolts of their relationship and the neighbourhood dynamics are established though, despite a series of twists and turns right till the end, the narrative is curiously lacking in energy. 

Sarita and Sushant’s back story, from which the title Choked is drawn, is not quite as fascinating as it is made out to be. His subsequent irresponsible behaviour and the progression of their equation are unconvincing. 

Kashyap and writer Nihit Bhave appear to be making a point about Narendra Modi’s decision in 2016 to demonetise select Indian currency notes – the point being that the corrupt and the powerful found their way around it, while ordinary citizens suffered. However, they seem to have internalised it so much, they say what they seem to want to say so hesitantly and in such a roundabout, meandering manner, that Choked almost comes across as praise for demonetisation, a measure that has had a  disastrous impact on the Indian economy. There is even a song and dance featuring the hero celebrating demonetisation that is placed prominently in the narrative. The collective effect of these elements sadly dilutes the impact of the cheeky song that plays with the rolling credits in the end. If Choked is intended as a sarcastic critique, it depends too heavily on the viewer being indulgent towards the director, being aware of his politics and off-screen stances and having studied the country’s reaction to the present prime minister.

And no ya, the play on “choked” does not work either. 

What does work is the constant flow of dialogues between languages in the way they naturally might in the Mumbai home of a couple in a mixed marriage. although Mathew swallows some of his lines as a result of which I often could not make out what Sushant was saying in his mother tongue. Of course a lot can be forgiven because he is cute. Ironically, his Hindi diction is excellent, and comes as a package with a delightful trace of a Malayalam accent. The precise way in which he says “contracts” and pronounces “L” or the way she pronounces “D” are fun to hear because their accents are not being caricatured. 

The usually reliable Amruta Subhash is inconsistent though – warm and hilarious in parts, but in one passage, surprisingly hammy.

There are a couple of standout scenes such as the one in which Sarita and Sushant fight in bed with their kid lying asleep between them and another involving the couple, a kitchen drain and top-notch sound design by Gautam Nair. The construction of both scenes is vintage Kashyap, as is the mischievous closing song.

What is not vintage Kashyap is the lack of clarity and sharpness in what he seems to be saying about demonetisation and achhe din. 

And exactly what is the point in showing us a lazy jerk of a husband who never does any work at home, is inconsiderate to his wife but is somehow presented as a sweetheart, is made to sound at one point as though he is willing to do anything for her but oh how unfair is she, and in the end gets to save the day? 

Kashyap’s last two breathtakingly good films were Mukkabaaz and Raman Raghav 2.0. Choked wants to say a lot, but is not even as hard-hitting or entertaining as his tweets.

Rating (out of 5 stars): 2

Running time:

114 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/choked-movie-review-anurag-kashyaps-demonetisation-saga-is-curiously-hesitant-and-dull-8450691.html

Poster courtesy: IMDB

REVIEW 425: ISLAND CITY

Release date:	September 2, 2016
Director:	Ruchika Oberoi
Cast: Language:	Vinay Pathak, Amruta Subhash, Tannishtha Chatterjee, Uttara Baokar, Chandan Roy Sanyal, Ashwin Mushran, Samir Kochhar, Voices of Rajat Kapoor and Manav Kaul Hindi with some English and Marathi

Island City is set in Mumbai but its premise would be relevant to any megapolis in the world. Come to think of it, the film may purportedly be about this big city or any big city, but with a tweak here and there it could fit just as well into a less imposing setting.

Ruchika Oberoi makes her directorial debut with a cinematic triptych about the robotic nature of too many lives in this world. The film covers an employee who mechanically follows a routine and his bosses’ instructions, a wife who makes a show of mourning the possible loss of a boorish husband, and a daughter who goes along with her parents’ choice of groom because she feels no other man would be interested in her and she has not even considered a life without one.

Though the urban backdrop may seem crucial to the narrative, it is not. Take away the swanky office and dictatorial organisation, and that employee could still be a worker in small-town India glad that he has a job, any job, rather than one that excites him. Take away the visual landmarks like the Mumbai trains, and those women resigned to fate could be from a small town too. And the themes could fit into pretty much any country. It is fascinating to see the manner in which those themes remain universal despite the cultural and locational specificities in this telling.

The title may suggest that this is a film about apathetic, impersonal cities. That is the more obvious subject matter, but the film is really about people who live life and live out relationships like automatons, people who are afraid to exit their comfort zones, including those for whom life in its entirety is a regret-filled compromise – unless fate intervenes.

Segment 1 titled “Fun Committee” is about corporate zombie Suyash Chaturvedi (Vinay Pathak) winning a day off from work, with a ‘fun’ schedule planned down to the last T by his office’s HR department. He is supposed to relax and enjoy himself, but if he does not comply with the detailed directives issued to him, he will be penalised by the management.

Next comes “The Ghost in the Machine” featuring a middle-class housewife called Sarita Joshi (Amruta Subhash) whose husband is in hospital hooked to life support systems. To ease the family’s tension, she purchases a TV, a distraction her despotic husband did not allow in the house. They get hooked on the tele-soap Purushottam when they receive some good news.

Meanwhile, in the city’s poorer quarters in “Contact”, Aarti Patel (Tannishtha Chatterjee) works at a printing press. She is a quiet, uncomplaining sort, but a sense of dissatisfaction with her dull existence is growing inside her when she receives an intimate letter one day.

Most viewers expect the individual strands in multi-strand films to intersect at some point. In the best films of this genre, the sub-sets can stand on their own even if the plot does not connect them. Many filmmakers feel compelled to link them, sometimes doing so to brilliant effect, sometimes awkwardly. Island City’s three tales are linked smoothly, thematically and by plot.

“Fun Committee” and “The Ghost in the Machine” are based on stories by Oberoi, “Contact” is by Siddharth Sharma. The screenplay is Oberoi’s. On the face of it, these are simple stories, yet they are filled with keen insights wrapped around existential questions. On the face of it these are oft-visited topics, but they are elevated by Oberoi’s incisive writing and her cast.

Boring ol’ Suyash is a role tailormade for Pathak who is adept at playing the common person, but that does not translate into a predictable performance. The actor lends enough nuances to his character to take him to places we are not expecting. I particularly enjoyed hearing him address a senior as “Sir”, giving the word a slight accent that made it sound comically deferential.

Chatterjee is aptly cast as Aarti in Story 3 and finds a perfect foil in the dynamic Chandan Roy Sanyal playing her egoistic fiancé Jignesh who seems comfortable with her primarily because he is convinced that she is too unattractive and unadventurous to ever draw the attention of or be drawn to another man. Sanyal is one of the finest character actors in contemporary Hindi cinema and it is a pleasure to see him in a substantial role that does justice to his charisma.

The lovely Marathi film actress Subhash, who sparkled recently in Anurag Kashyap’s Hindi film Raman Raghav 2.0, shares screen space here with the equally lovely veteran Uttara Baokar.

Acting, writing, satirical comedy and pathos – it all falls into place in their story, the most unapologetically impertinent of the lot. The juxtaposition of Sarita’s strained marriage against a TV show about an ideal husband, for instance, cheekily implies that such men can be found only in the imagination of soap scriptwriters. The relationship between the two women is especially intriguing because the filmmaker leaves us guessing about whether they are mother and daughter or mother-in-law and daughter-in-law. The old lady lives with Sarita and her husband, which, if you go by Indian custom, suggests that she is the ma-in-law. Sarita addresses her as Aai, the Marathi word for mother, though that could be in keeping with that other Indian convention, of treating your in-laws as parents. But their attachment is far removed from the antagonism stereotypically assumed to be a hallmark of all real-life saas-bahu rishtas, nor do they share an unbelievably syrupy equation of the kind often shown in silly serials such as the one they are currently watching. So are they maa-beti or saas-bahu? Either way, they come across as buddies and co-conspirators with great empathy and affection for each other. This is an enjoyable instance of female bonding not seen often enough in Indian cinema.

That said, Island City is a well-woven whole. Sarita’s saga is the most overtly entertaining of the three. The other two take some time to reveal their verve, then amply reward viewer patience with the shock value of “Fun Committee” and the unexpected (tragic) twists in “Contact”.

Oberoi does not alter her seemingly laidback though assured directorial manner in any segment, but the production design by Krishnendu Chowdhury and cinematography by Sylvester Fonseca are cleverly used to give each one a distinctive look. The steely shades of “Fun Committee” lend to it a slightly surreal, futuristic feel, to go with its deliberately exaggerated swipes at corporate India and its farcical tone. “The Ghost in the Machine” is warmly lit in Purushottam and in Sarita’s house, to be contrasted with the cold colours of the hospital where her husband now lies and the flashback to the time when he was well. “Contact” has grimy shades, much like the garbage spills Aarti passes on her way to her dreary work.

Island City was premiered last year at the world’s oldest known film fiesta, the Venice Film Festival, where it won an award for Best Debut Director. The honour is well deserved. Ruchika Oberoi’s understated style, on-point writing and sense of humour are significant new additions to the Indian cinemascape. Island City is a sorrowful yet amusing, acutely observant film.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	111 minutes

Poster, stills and trailer courtesy: Loudspeaker Media

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgkddfuOupA&feature=youtu.be