REVIEW 395: WAITING

Release date:	May 27, 2016
Director:	Anu Menon
Cast: Language:	Kalki Koechlin, Naseeruddin Shah, Rajat Kapoor, Arjun Mathur, Suhasini Maniratnam Hindi

Considering the grim subject and setting – the intensive care unit of a luxe hospital in Kochi – Waiting is a surprisingly pleasant and positive film.  

Anu Menon’s second directorial venture has the same lightness of touch and natural storytelling style she brought to her debut in 2012’s London, Paris, New York starring Aditi Rao Hydari and Ali Zafar. Yet this film is as different from her first as night is from day and Tara is from Shiv.  

Tara and Shiv are Tara Deshpande-Kapoor (Kalki Koechlin) and Professor Shiv Natraj (Naseeruddin Shah) in this Hindi-English-occasionally-Malayalam (subtitled) film Waiting. They ought, henceforth, to be an accepted metaphor for strangers who really “get” each other.  

She is a feisty, often foul-mouthed, occasionally unthinking though always well-meaning, impatient, impetuous, flashy, attractive, young, recently married woman. Her husband Rajat has just been in a near-fatal accident that sends him into a coma.  

Shiv’s wife of 40 years, Pankaja, has been in a coma for eight months. He is a spirited yet sobre, prim and propah, meticulous, kind, staid old man and theirs has been a happy marriage.

Tara is well off. Shiv has taken on back-breaking debt to pay Pankaja’s medical bills.  

The two meet in the waiting room of the Kochi hospital where their respective spouses lie in an Intensive Care Unit. As they bond over their grief, fears and difficult decisions, they form an unlikely friendship that transcends age and backgrounds.  

He does not know what Twitter is; the discovery that he has been married for four decades elicits an incredulous “oh fuck” from her. Here is what they do have in common though: they both adore their spouses.  

It is the simplest of premises drawn from a challenging phase in Menon’s own life. Under her direction aided by a strong script she has co-written with James Ruzicka, it turns into a warm, telling commentary on love, family, generation gaps, inner strength and basic human goodness.  

The film is not only about two grieving individuals though. Central to the plot is the fact that Tara is more alone than she might otherwise have been in this tragic scenario, because she has been plucked out of her home city Mumbai and planted in a new milieu where she has no friends and does not understand the language. Kochi is busy and buzzing in comparison with other Kerala towns and cities, yet not as much as India’s biggest metropolises; it is large enough to offer the kind of high-end hospital where Rajat is being treated, but not as crowded or frenetic as Chennai and Bengaluru in a way that might be familiar and comforting to a lonely Mumbaikar.

The hustle and bustle of daily life can sometimes be used to drown out the voices in our heads. In relatively languorous Kochi, Tara does not have that option.  

In such a place, away from her family and social circle, it is but natural that she would turn for comfort to a local who is also somewhat of an outsider: Pankaja is a Malayali, Shiv is not. Being a retiree gives him enough time to be devoted to his comatose wife while also offering a shoulder to cry on to Tara who initially strikes him as an inexplicable drama queen.  

If you go looking for dramatic twists, you will not find them here. Waiting is not that kind of film. It does, however, throw a bunch of questions at us. When we pray for a bed-ridden loved one’s longevity, are we doing it for them or for ourselves? Is it selfish to long for their survival irrespective of the quality of life they may have? If you pull the plug on someone you love, are you giving up on them?

Waiting does not spoonfeed us responses to these questions as universal truths. It leaves us to find our own answers while its protagonists find theirs.

Shah and Koechlin complement the film’s non-preachy and realistic tone. There is a natural rhythm to their acting and the chemistry between them is unmistakable.

Tara is the kind of woman who thinks nothing of making her husband’s evidently conservative colleague squirm by asking him if Rajat was sleeping with a business associate. Koechlin’s achievement is that she makes her character appealing despite her brashness.

Shah is charismatic as ever. Although his pupils appear strangely dilated in some close-ups, those shots do not happen so often as to be distracting. The actor does not resort to over-statement at any point although there are plenty of scenes where he could have. Even when Shiv gets frantic about Pankaja, care is taken not to reduce him to a caricature of an eccentric old man. His is a seemingly effortless and moving performance.

The film features several well-written supporting roles. National Award-winning Tamil-Telugu-Malayalam actress Suhasini Maniratnam and Arjun Mathur are so likeable in cameos as Pankaja and Rajat that you can well imagine a spouse pining away for months and years for them.

Actor Krishnasankar as the junior doctor Ravi and Rajeev Ravindranathan playing Girish from Rajat’s Kochi office are interesting choices. It is nice to see the film’s Malayali characters being played without the usual Bollywood ‘Madrasi’ stereotyping.

Rajat Kapoor walks a fine line as the neurosurgeon Dr Nirupam Malhotra, making him a man who is hard to dislike although he is painfully practical in a way that some people might consider heartless, even egotistical. I did not entirely understand why he had to be a Punjabi though – this is not to suggest that there are no Punjabi doctors in Kochi, but that the lack of locals except in supporting, subordinate positions is curious. Except for this and a somewhat contrived, needless revelation Shiv makes to Pankaja at one point, the rest of the film flows as smoothly as the backwaters that briefly appear on screen.

Waiting is about some of the toughest decisions life can throw at us and about an unusual, heartwarming friendship. It is both sad and amusing, believable, well acted and very well told.

Rating (out of five): ***

CBFC Rating (India):	A
Running time:	99 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/waiting-review-naseeruddin-shah-and-kalki-koechlin-shine-in-a-lovely-film-2801552.html

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_(2015_film)

REVIEW 322: COFFEE BLOOM

Release date:	March 6, 2015
Director:	Manu Warrier
Cast: Language:	Arjun Mathur, Sugandha Garg, Mohan Kapur Hindi and English

Coffee Bloom is a small, charming even if inconsistent film about a young man letting his life slip away in bitterness over an incident in his youth. Director Manu Warrier tells his tale armed with three talented actors and one of the most gorgeous settings in India: the coffee plantations of Coorg in Karnataka.

The story revolves around Dev Anand Cariappa (Arjun Mathur) who spends his time listening to clichéd recorded sermons about the meaning of life, as he wallows in the lingering misery of an old romance gone terribly wrong. Dev claims to be a sanyasi, but has to deal with the surfacing of his worldly desires when a tragedy takes him back to his old family estate – which now has a new owner – in Coorg. There he meets his former girlfriend Anika (Sugandha Garg) and her husband. As he works at his job on a local estate, he must confront his feelings for her and his own desperate need for closure over the incident that tore them apart.

The circumstances surrounding their broken relationship are told in instalments through a series of flashbacks. The incremental revelations form an interesting element in Coffee Bloom. Equally attractive are the three central performers – Mathur, Garg and Mohan Kapur playing Srinivas Panicker, the boss of the plantation on which Dev takes up temporary work.

The ever-reliable Mathur – earlier seen in Luck By Chance, I Am, My Name Is Khan and several author-backed roles in high-profile ads – is convincing as always as a flaky, immature fellow borrowing pretentious phrases for everyday conversations from those sermons he listens to; an emotionally ravaged young man masking his silent screams for revenge with a veneer of renunciation. He comes across as a person who probably pictured himself playing the part of a tortured soul/tragedy king and then did such a good job of it that he became the man he was playing, a man who just cannot let go of the past.

Garg is a familiar face as the excellent actress who played Imran Khan/Jai Singh Rathore’s close friend in Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na. Not only is she talented, she’s also exceedingly good-looking. It’s a mystery why we don’t see her more often in mainstream Hindi films. Kapur turns in an interesting performance as the ebullient, slightly dense, but well-meaning Srinivas who does not know the ‘c’ of coffee or the ‘oo’ of oogaana (cultivation), as Dev puts it angrily, but sees running a coffee estate as his dream. He is a bit flighty but so good-natured and good-hearted that it’s hard to be put off by him.

In the midst of their believable characterisations and acting comes Ishwari Bose-Bhattacharya’s turn as Shonda, who is… well, I could not entirely make out what she does, but she is the live-in partner of someone we never meet and a woman who Dev befriends. This inexplicable, voluptuous woman speaks an awkwardly written blend of Bengali-accented Hindi and English, which is incongruous considering that the director is clearly asking for a suspension of disbelief from us by: (a) not asking Mathur to ‘do an accent’ (you know what I mean) and (b) by showing a Coorgi boy and his mother naturally conversing with each other in Hindi. Since we have been convinced to accept both the above, trying to introduce authenticity to Shonda’s language and style of speaking makes the film uneven. Why could she not have spoken plain Hindi?

That apart, the narrative turns slightly disjointed during an incident involving a gun towards the end of the film. Still, Mathur and Garg manage to pull Coffee Bloom over that bump with their natural ease before the camera.

A desire for revenge consumes us much more than it harms our intended targets – that’s what the film seems to be gently telling us; and that even if you never discover what caused a cataclysmic event in your life, the best thing you could do for yourself is to move on.

For the most part then, this is an engaging film. What is disappointing though is that Director of Photography Yogesh P. Jani fails to fully exploit the naturally rich location at his disposal. This is not to say that his pictures aren’t pretty. They are. Very pretty indeed. But then even if you and I were to take random shots of sundry spots in Coorg, we might come away with exquisite visuals – that’s how lovely the place is. Point is, with a professional behind the camera, I can’t remember any outdoor shot in Coffee Bloom so unique in its composition that it surprised me, which is odd considering that the Internet tells me Jani is the same man who delivered to us the photographic detailing of Saheb Biwi Aur Gangster Returns (2013). With Coffee Bloom, was he constrained by a limited budget or was he personally less invested in this project? It’s impossible to guess the reason. It is a measure of the absolute splendour of this region that it looks stunning in the film despite the limited imagination employed in the cinematography.

Be that as it may, I found Coffee Bloom a well-acted and unexpectedly satisfying film. Be warned: it is paced in a fashion that might be considered too slow and too languid by some. To me though it felt relaxed, reflective, unusual and offbeat.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	U/A
Running time:	95 minutes

Photograph courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/CoffeeBloomMovie?ref=ts&fref=ts