REVIEW 255: BHOOTHNATH RETURNS

Release date:	April 11, 2014
Director:	Nitesh Tiwari
Cast: Language:	Amitabh Bachchan, Parth Bhalerao, Boman Irani, Usha Jadhav, Sanjay Mishra, Brijendra Kala, Cameos: Anurag Kashyap, Shah Rukh Khan, Ranbir Kapoor Hindi

There’s a point in Bhoothnath Returns when Amitabh Bachchan’s character makes this very telling comment: Kabhi kabhi buraai khud buraai ko khatam kar daalta hai. The line is not a call to non-action by good folk, but a realisation that even as good fights evil, sometimes evil brings its own competition down. The line also marks one of the neatest twists in this well-meaning film that brings Bhootnath The Friendly Ghost back to Earth after we first met him in 2008’s Bhoothnath.

Bachchan plays the spirit who ends up standing for elections in Mumbai as his goal of helping a poor boy from Dharavi called Akhrot (Parth Bhalerao) turns into a goal to cleanse the Indian polity. The first half of the film has poignance, mischief and humour as Bhoothnath first sorts out Akhrot’s problems, then helps him become a professional ghostbuster, and finally becomes a politician himself. There is nothing in the Indian law that says a candidate must be alive to stand for elections, we are told. You can imagine the chuckles that entire sequence elicits.

Director Nitesh Tiwari ensures that the story trots along at a brisk pace for the most part, armed with a talented bunch of actors headlined by the lovely Big B and Parth. This wonderful child actor treads that fine line between precociousness and pizzazz delicately, and manages to keep his feet on the right side of the line while not once stepping out of character. It’s also worth noting that Bachchan always seems to put his child co-stars at ease as is evident not just here but earlier in Black and Bhoothnath too. Tiwari too must be complimented for his ability to spot gifted children – he’s the co-director of 2011’s Chillar Party. The children of Chillar were so amazing that the 10 of them jointly won the year’s National Award for Best Child Artiste (shared with Partho from Amole Gupte’s Stanley ka Dabba). It’s important to note that Bollywood’s ace casting director Mukesh Chhabra has worked on both films.

However, there are other not-so-fine elements from Chillar Party that Tiwari carries forward into this film: the absence of girls and women from the forefront of the action; and an item song in the end that arrives part way through the credits, placed in such a manner that most viewers are likely to miss it (having lingered to note down names of some crew members, I was at the door of the hall when it started, so I returned; most of the audience had left by then).

The timing of the film is apt. Rarely before has Bollywood made such a concerted effort to influence viewers to participate in the democratic process and to vote. The point is very effectively conveyed until Bhoothnath Returns turns into a speech in the final 45 minutes or so. At 2 hours and 35 minutes, the film is also just too long, feels stretched beyond a point and speaks in two tones.  Ram Sampath’s eloquent and moving song Sahib, for instance, is used in a documentary-style sequence featuring this slow-moving number played over a series of National Geographic-like stills of mostly poor Indians across communities.

It’s also never nice to see a director getting star-struck. Bhoothnath and Akhrot are the protagonists of this film, but that final item number during the credits shows us just brief glimpses of young Parth, and revolves instead around Bachchan with singer Yo Yo Honey Singh. Come Party With Bhoothnath is a catchy dance number, but is incongruous in a children’s film, especially with lyrics that go thus:

Don't waste your time, ab sun lo tum meri baat

Kahaan dhoondoge iss shehar mein club tum aadhi raat

Jab saari duniya so jaati hai

After party ho jaati hai

After party ke bhi after

Jo chale ye woh party hai

Come Party with The Bhoothnath, Relax man! (four times) …

Music... bajaate jaao

Daaru... pilaate jaao

Haathon... ko uthaate jaao

Aaj raat... sabko nachaate jaao

“Daaru pilaate jaao” in a kids’ film? In a video featuring those kids, albeit briefly? Strange!

Still, until it gets confused about what it wants to be – feature film or docu, children’s film or adult fare, light-hearted entertainer with a message or dead serious – Bhoothnath Returns is a lot of fun. It’s good to see Bachchan in a role so different from the standard patriarch he usually plays in films these days. As for Parth, he’s something special.

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

Footnote: After seeing Bhoothnath befriending a little boy in the first film, it would have been so refreshing to see him with a little girl in the sequel. This is not a criticism of Bhoothnath Returns in particular but of Bollywood in general. We know that this industry prefers to tell us stories of men, but it’s sad to see the male dominance extending to children’s films too.

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	155 minutes

Photograph courtesy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhoothnath_Returns

Lyrics courtesy: http://www.lyricsmint.com

REVIEW 66: BUBBLE GUM

Release date:	July 29, 2011
Director:	Sanjivan Lal
Cast:	Delzad Sanjay Hiwale, Sohail Lakhani, Tanvi Azmi, Sachin Khedekar, Apoorva Arora, Suraj Singh

What a darling film! Bubble Gum is about teenaged love and longing in 1980s Jamshedpur, about a brother coping with his elder sibling’s speech and hearing impairment, about well-meaning but blundering parents trying to get their sons to get along …  and it’s adorable! 

Vedant (Delzad Sanjay Hiwale) is a 14-year-old living in a middle class housing complex. He is in love with Jenny (Apoorva Arora), the pretty daughter of a local policeman. Jenny seems to reciprocate his feelings but the older boy Ratan works hard to drive a wedge between them with politicking that would make Machiavelli proud. This troubled phase of Vedant’s life is further disrupted by the arrival of his 16-year-old brother Vidur (Sohail Lakhani) who lives in a hostel, but is now home on a Holi break. The boys’ parents intend no harm but end up, as many parents do, neglecting Vedant while working hard to cater to Vidur’s special needs. Bubble Gum takes us through a couple of weeks in their lives during which Vedant’s resentment towards his brother gives way to teary-eyed pain when he returns to his hostel.

What a year it’s been for children’s films in Hindi. In spite of their flaws, almost all of them in 2011 have thrown up some incredible kiddie talent, whether it’s the heart-stoppingly good Taher Sutterwala and Chinmay Kambli in Sagar Ballary’s Kachha Limboo, the amazingly natural Partho from Amole Gupte’s Stanley ka Dabba, Chillar Party’s bachcha party and even ‘veteran’ Darsheel Safary who returned to us with the indifferent Disney offering Zokkomon. Happily for us, each of these lead players was also surrounded by a wonderful supporting cast of children. In Bubble Gum we get the remarkable Delzad Sanjay Hiwale and Sohail Lakhani who don’t seem to be acting at all, but look like someone put up cameras in their home and residential locality and said: “Okay, now pretend the camera is not there, just live out your lives.” A big round of applause please for casting director Honey Trehan, and for writer-director Sanjivan Lal who clearly has a magic touch with kids. Lakhani is deaf-mute in real life too, and the entire cast was put through a 15 day sign language workshop to help them with their performances and also to enable them to communicate with their co-star.

Mercifully, the grown-up characters in the film are as well-etched-out as the children. Vedant and Vidur’s parents (played with seemingly effortless ease by Tanvi Azmi and Sachin Khedekar) complement each other well. As you watch them, you can imagine that this couple will happily grow old together. The only jarring moment in Bubble Gum comes at a party when the children break into a really bad song that the film could have done well without. There are also certain technical aspects that should have been better handled. The lighting, for instance, seems ineffective in several places, which takes away some of the sheen from this otherwise utterly endearing film.

There’s something so gentle about Bubble Gum … no speeches, just a witness to reality. This is a world before cellphones and the Internet, when children connected on real playgrounds and not through SMS or virtual chatrooms, when too many essential items had to be ordered from the US, when even the most sincere adults would use the word “handicapped” with no malice whatsoever. With humour and sensitivity, Bubble Gum says so much about adolescence, disabilities, parenting and changing times without seeming to say much at all. This is a warm, compassionate, funny, true-to-life, poignant film.

CBFC Rating:                       U without cuts

Running time:                        115 Minutes

Language:                              Hindi

Photograph courtesy: http://www.bubblegumthefilm.com/

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

REVIEW 60: CHILLAR PARTY

Release date:	July 8, 2011
Director:	Nitesh Tiwari, Vikas Bahl
Cast:	Irrfan Khan, Sanath Menon, Rohan Grover, Naman Jain, Aarav Khanna, Vishesh Tiwari, Chinmai Chandranshuh, Vedant Desai, Shriya Sharma, Divij Handa

Just a week after a close-up of human excrement in Delhi Belly, here comes a lingering shot of doggy poo (or so you think) in Chillar Party. But fear not all you parents, the two films have little else in common beyond a powerful Khan each as producer.

So here’s what I truly love about Chillar Party … a bunch of utterly charming children, a director duo with that rare ability to extract natural performances from child actors, Amit Trivedi’s music plus a producer (Salman Khan) who is backing this unconventional film while at the peak of his career as a mainstream, muscle-baring star.

What I do not like about Chillar Party … A second half that defies logic in a film that’s clearly intended to be realistic, the exclusion of girls and women from most of the action and decision-making in a film that’s meant to be about inclusiveness and acceptance, plus a certain ambiguity in its feelings towards the bare human form.

And Ranbir Kapoor’s item song? Well before we get to that point, hear this: nothing I say in this critique should take away from the fact that those kids are talented and sweet and natural born actors. Directors Nitesh Tiwari and Vikas Bahl, please take a bow along with your casting director Mukesh Chhabra for discovering this motley crew to play your lead artistes in Chillar Party. They’re as gifted as that remarkable gang from director Amole Gupte’s Stanley ka Dabba, though my favourite children’s ensemble cast in a Hindi film still remains Sagar Ballary’s team in his completely unheralded film Kaccha Limboo.

Chillar Party takes us to Chandan Nagar Cooperative Housing Society in Mumbai where eight little boy buddies with cutesy nicknames like Encyclopedia and Jhangiya hang out together. They’re the Chillar Party. When the boy Fatka is employed to wash the cars in the colony, the Chillar Party decide to get rid of him because they’re afraid his dog Bheedu will soil their playground just like another dog that already lives there. But after their initial harsh behavior towards him, they become friends. So when a state minister targets Bheedu in his campaign to rid Mumbai of stray dogs, the kids put up a fight for their canine pal. 

The film is filled with endearing instances of humour that are as well written as they are well acted, except for a few scenes in which the children are made to try too hard to be adorable. The episode involving doggy do is fun. But my favourite scene is when the nerdy kid explains to his friends that NOC stands for No Objection Certificate, and the immediate response from one of his friends is a very mournful: “I’ve never won a certificate.”

But even more than the humour, the writers need to be lauded for not painting the children as saints. This is the one big issue I had with Stanley ka Dabba – the failure to recognise that children are not uniformly flawless creatures. It takes courage to acknowledge that children can sometimes be nasty. That’s what bullying in schools and peer pressure are all about. And in Chillar Party we see the mean streak in our otherwise loveable bunch when they play cruel pranks on Fatka to get him out of Chandan Nagar, not quite realising that working in their housing complex is a matter of life and death for this impoverished orphan.

This is the beautiful part of Chillar Party – the children’s journey from resentment to admiration for Fatka’s resilience, their penitence, the little boy asking his mother, “If someone has done nothing to harm me, but I make a concerted effort to harm him, does that mean I’m a bad human being?” Alas, this poignant portion is followed by an improbable, overly stretched Part 2 about a politician who risks his entire career over the Chillar Party and Bheedu.

And while the film is clearly well intentioned, I must say I’m concerned about the subliminal messages it is sending out about power equations in households. The children need to get signatures from the residents of Chandan Nagar to save Bheedu from eviction – barring one exception, they seem to approach only men for signatures. When a woman in a family is shown making the decision to sign or not to sign, her husband is portrayed as being hen-pecked.

I also find it hard to believe that boys in a co-ed school and ranging in age from 4-11 would have no female friends. And when the children of Mumbai join Chillar Party’s underwear campaign for Bheedu, there’s no explanation for why only boys participate. Director Nitesh Tiwari tells me: “Our conscience didn’t permit us to show topless girls in our film, however small they may be.” So they were uncomfortable with showing bare-bodied little girls on screen, but had no qualms about parading little boys in their chaddis before us? I find this conservatism confusing and unconvincing.

As for Ranbir Kapoor’s item number … it’s entertaining as a standalone video and I do appreciate the fact that he wiggles his cute tushy at the camera repeatedly. But it arrives inexplicably part way through the end credits, and might actually be missed by many members of the audience. If you do watch Chillar Party for those loveable kids, make sure you stay right till the end for Ranbir’s Tai tai phiss. And if you have an answer to an extremely pertinent question that one of the children asks about child labour, please do tell me what it is.

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

CBFC Rating:                       U without cuts

Running time:                        135 Minutes

Language:                              Hindi

Photograph courtesy: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/chillarparty