REVIEW 440: 31ST OCTOBER

Release date:	October 21, 2016
Director:	Shivaji Lotan Patil
Cast: Language:	Soha Ali Khan, Vir Das, Deepraj Rana, Vineet Sharma, Lakhwinder Singh, Baby Anika, Baby Arohi, Sezal Sharma, Daya Shankar Pandey, Aksshat  Saluja Hindi and Punjabi

X happened. Then Y. And then Z. Director Shivaji Lotan Patil’s 31^st October is nothing more than a parade of facts about the anti-Sikh riots that followed the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards on October 31, 1984. It is a perfect example of a film on a sensitive issue completely bereft of imagination and subtlety.

31^st October stars Soha Ali Khan and Vir Das as Davinder Singh and Tejinder Kaur, a happy Sikh couple living with their three children in West Delhi. She is stern but loving, he a virtual saint. She feeds him and argues with him about his excessive goodness. He walks an extra mile for his Hindu neighbour. Everyone is nice to everyone and the world is all sweet and honey and sugar ‘n’ spice ‘n’ all things nice until Beant Singh and Satwant Singh shoot Indira at point-blank range.

The story opens on the morning of the PM’s murder and everything in the early scenes is an in-your-face set-up for what is to come. So, when we see Davinder run out of blood pressure meds, we know he will later be weak without medication in the middle of the pogrom. Since one of his little sons repeatedly asks him about the significance of a Sikh’s long hair and turban, we know at some point they will be driven to shear their heads to hide their identity from mobs.

As if the lack of nuance is not bad enough, 31^st October subjects us to mediocre production quality, third-rate dialogue writing and bad acting. An array of terrible extras are rolled out for the bit parts and even for significant satellite roles. Two irritating girls are cast as the lead couple’s sons. Sezal Shah is unbearable as a shy young Sikh woman gazing googly-eyed at a camera-wielding NRI. She cannot act for peanuts. Others are worse – so bad in fact, that peanuts look profound in comparison.

I’ve always enjoyed watching Vir Das on screen, but his facial expressions in 31^st October make me wonder whether what I have liked so far has been the suitability of his personality to comedy, the genre that has dominated his filmography so far. This film is not funny, it is not meant to be funny, and his expressions seem incongruous on the riot victim Davinder whose Hindu friends put their lives on the line to save him and his family. Soha Ali Khan does a fair job of his wife Tejinder who witnesses horrors that no human being could possibly recover from. Although her Punjabi accent slips on occasion, she makes their interactions tolerable.

The supporting cast contributes greatly to this film’s overall air of tackiness. The only two who rise above the mediocrity surrounding them are the always-reliable Deepraj Rana and Vineet Sharma, playing men who risk everything so that Davinder, Tejinder and their kids might live.

31^st October is based on the experiences of a Devender Pal Singh Sachdeva and Tejinder Sachdeva. The credits call it “a tribute by (producer) Harry Sachdeva”. In truth, this film does them an injustice. The Sikhs who were targeted after Indira’s death from her bullet wounds, deserve a better homage than this. What the producer and his director have put together instead is a disservice to a community that is still being denied justice by the authorities 32 years after humanity died on the streets of India’s Capital.

In the moments preceding the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in the US during World War II in Michael Bay’s 2001 Hollywood film Pearl Harbor, pretty little girls with golden curls are shown playing together in slow motion against a picturesque backdrop. This is the kind of offensive stupidity that distinguishes cliched films on violence from the ones with depth. If those children were not picture perfect, would their fate be less tragic or Japan’s actions less condemnable?

31^st October slathers bowlfuls of treacle on to the ordinary Sikhs who are attacked by rioters. Why? Would the butchery have been any less inexcusable if the victims had not been uniformly fantastic people, kind, gentle and dedicated to the service of others? In one scene, the suggestion that some Sikhs celebrated after Mrs Gandhi’s killing is brushed aside. Why? Does the filmmaker realise that by not acknowledging this element in the ugliness that pervaded Delhi following her assassination, he unwittingly implies that individuals who lit candles and distributed sweets that day could rightfully be seen as a justification for the slaying of innocent Sikhs?

Glossing over uncomfortable facts does more harm than good to survivors, even when you do so to please and appease them. Human beings do not have to be flawless or belong to a flawless community to deserve the right to live, to not to be robbed, to not be sexually violated, to not be forced to witness the brutalisation of their loved ones.

This kind of self-defeating storytelling plays into the hands of people like that chap in the hall where I watched this film who turned to another during the interval and said: “Ab agar ek qaum ko lagega ki voh kuchh bhi kar sakta hai, toh doosra qaum badla lega hi.” (Now if one community thinks they can do anything, then the other is bound to take revenge.)

There are many people like him in the world out there who are filled with hate. They are among the million reasons why the human species’ history of massacres needs to be chronicled repeatedly by cinema. Thousands of Sikhs were slaughtered, raped and driven out of their homes in the riots of October-November 1984. Their story needs to be told with delicacy and intelligence, not with the sloppiness and hollowness that are the hallmark of 31^st October.

Apart from the fact that actors styled to resemble Congress politicians H.K.L. Bhagat, Jagdish Tytler and Sajjan Kumar are shown engineering the riots, there is little worth noting in this film.

Rating (out of five stars): 1/2

CBFC Rating (India):	A
Running time:	102 minutes 18 seconds

A version of this review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/31st-october-review-a-hollow-sloppy-film-on-the-1984-anti-sikh-riots-3063868.html

Poster courtesy: Epigram Digital PR and Magical Dreams Productions

171: SPECIAL 26

Release date:	February 8, 2013
Director:	Neeraj Pandey
Cast: Language:	Akshay Kumar, Anupam Kher, Manoj Bajpayee, Jimmy Sheirgill, Rajesh Sharma, Kajal Aggarwal, Divya Dutta, Deepraj Rana Hindi

When the word “interval” flashed on screen halfway through Special 26, I remember being taken aback. Hadn’t the Censor certificate indicated a much longer film? How come the interval had arrived so fast? A glance at my watch indicated that approximately 1 hour 15 minutes of the film had already rolled by! Whaaaaaaaaat?!

When a nearly two-and-a-half-hour film feels like it’s short, you know it’s special. Special 26 is about a quartet of con men in 1987 who pose as CBI officials and conduct fake raids on black-money-laden politicians and businesspersons. The story is as basic as that. But with the treatment of the cons, the audacity of the players in this game and the cool-headedness that helps them get away with their crimes, writer-director Neeraj Pandey ends up giving us a thoroughly enjoyable suspense drama – based partly on real-life events – that also serves as a stinging indictment of our loophole-ridden criminal investigation system without tomtomming the message, all while examining the psychology of the corrupt. It is, as a certain lady from another film might have said: entertainment, entertainment, entertainment.

A neatly understated Akshay Kumar as the leader of the gang and Anupam Kher as his loyal cohort play off each other very well to deliver engaging performances. With OMG Oh My God and now this film, it’s clear that Akshay is trying to take his career in a whole new direction, which is a relief because this is an actor who has grown tremendously since we first saw him on screen and he really does owe it to himself to do more than gaudy comedies like Rowdy Rathore and Khiladi 786 that are indistinguishable from each other. In a role that unfairly gives him far less scope to display his acting skills, Rajesh Sharma as Joginder proves that great actors often rise above lack of screen time and dialogues. That one look of desperation he throws at Ajay when a particular raid seems to be flopping is a lovely reminder of the actor who played the corrupt-yet-good-hearted cop in No One Killed Jessica and that scintillating scene where he casually mentions to Sabrina Lal that he took a bribe to not beat up her sister’s killer in custody. The entire cast (Jimmy Sheirgill, Divya Dutta in a small role and Deepraj Rana) acquit themselves well. But the stellar performance in Special 26 comes from Manoj Bajpayee whose turn as the straight-talking CBI official Wasim Khan is his best in years (yes, I say that despite the accolades that have come his way for Gangs of Wasseypur 1). And when did this man become so thin? Did he lose weight for this role? Must say the extra lean look suits Mr Bajpayee!

It’s also nice that Akshay does not hog screen space in Special 26 although he’s the superstar of the bunch. But then the question arises: why does the film feel the need to assign a mandatory “love interest” to Ajay although he is not a stereotypical Bollywood hero? That romantic track unnecessarily slows down the film especially since every appearance by the girlfriend (played by Kaajal Aggarwal who looks too young for Akshay) is accompanied by a loud, tuneless, superfluous song. That brings me to the music by M.M. Kreem whose Tu miley dil khiley from Criminal still haunts me. In Special 26, his work is a huge disappointment.

The pointless love angle notwithstanding, the screenplay is taut and crisp for the most part, peppered with cheeky dialogues epitomised by the honest official who asks his boss straight to his face: will you give me a promotion or should I start taking bribes? For a change, the cops actually look and behave like real cops instead of actors-playing-cops-and-robbers. The art direction, costumes and styling are impeccably 1987, right down to the ancient Maruti 800s and a relatively empty Connaught Place in Delhi (empty! imagine that!) through which we witness one of the most exciting chases seen in a Hindi film in recent times. Though we are told next to nothing of the four crooks’ backgrounds and barely anything about Wasim Khan either, the brief shots of their home spaces – the elderly man with lots of children and the pregnant wife in Chandigarh, the doting middle-class dad who orders a woman to cover up her cleavage when in public, an overhead shot of an Old Delhi home – are deliciously telling. We didn’t really need to know anything more, which is why we could have done without the passing reference to Ajay’s motivations for forming his gang … half-baked, unconvincing, quite like the attempt to explain the title by one of the characters. And it’s rather inexplicable that despite the stashes of cash they’ve looted, the gang don’t seem to have much money. Still, the execution of the heists is so entertaining that these flaws somewhat fade into the background by the end of the film.

Neeraj Pandey’s earlier film A Wednesday was an equally well-produced, entertaining film though its populist political stance was disturbing: in its indirect call to the general public to take the law into their own hands, the film unabashedly and irresponsibly played to the gallery in an angry, terror-ridden India. Special 26 taps into the prevailing frustration with corruption and the “system” but stops short of glorifying the con men, simply telling it like it is.

Bollywood rarely does thrillers, and the few it takes up are rarely well done. That’s why Special 26 is such a very pleasant surprise.

 

Rating (out of five): ***1/4

CBFC Rating (India):	U/A
Running time:	143 minutes

Photograph courtesy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_26