POLL 8: DEEPIKA VS DEEPIKA VS NIMRAT VS SONAKSHI VS PARINEETI… – YOUR VOTE FOR BOLLYWOOD’S BEST ACTRESS 2013

Dear Readers,

It isn’t often that this happens, but Bollywood in 2013 threw up a bunch of roles for female leads that were as important as the male leads in the film. This is unusual for this shamelessly male-dominated industry that continues to give precedence to the male gaze, male stars, male characters in films and stories told from the male point of view. Deepika Padukone led the ladies’ gang with not one, but three films offering her roles as crucial as her male co-stars’ characters: Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani, Chennai Express and Goliyon ki Raasleela Ram-leela.

It’s a measure of how difficult the situation remains for women, that despite this year of progress, two out of these three films were based on stories being told from the hero’s point of view. Only Ram-leela brought to us a world seen as much through Leela’s eyes as through Ram’s. It’s good not to forget either that in this same year, Deepika also starred in a non-descript role in Race 2, the sort that her industry would describe as the “traditional Bollywood heroine role” where the woman’s job is to be the “glamour element” in the film, the hero’s “love interest” and a pretty prop against the backdrop of which the man’s life plays out.

More to the point is the fact that each of the films from which I picked 11 Best Actress nominees had equally important if not more important male protagonists, but if you go back to the poll for Best Actor, you will find the following pattern among the 15 nominees:

7 out of 15 Best Actor nominees came from films which had an equally crucial role for a woman (in terms of screen time and the character’s importance): Lootera, Club 60, The Lunchbox, Raanjhanaa, Prague, Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani and Ram-Leela.

2 out of 15 had what Bollywood might insist on calling a heroine but what in truth can at best be described as a supporting role to the hero: Krrish 3 and Jolly LLB.

6 out of 15 had no female lead at all: Shahid, Bhaag Milkha Bhaag, Special 26, Aurangzeb, Kai Po Che and Nautanki Saala.

Despite this, 2013 was still a better than usual year for women in Bollywood.     

So the question I asked in this poll was:

FROM THE FOLLOWING PERFORMANCES, WHO WOULD YOU PICK AS BOLLYWOOD’S BEST ACTRESS OF 2013?

Here’s how you voted:

The winner, the one picked by a majority of you as the year’s Best Actress: 38.5% of you chose Deepika Padukone for her role in Ram-leela

The runner-up with 28.8% of the votes is Deepika Padukone in Chennai Express, which should underline the point I made when I announced the poll, that while giving away acting awards we should always pick performances and not roles or actors and actresses.

The third spot with 9.6% of the votes went to newcomer Nimrat Kaur in the highly critically acclaimed film The Lunchbox

9.1% of you voted for Deepika Padukone (again!) for her performance in Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani. Clearly, 2013 was Deepika’s year all the way. And going by the box-office and reviewer response to Ram-leela, Chennai Express and YJHD, hopefully she will avoid forgettable roles in films like Race 2 in the future, however much they may seem guaranteed to make big bucks at the turnstiles.

6.7% of you picked Sonakshi Sinha’s performance in Lootera

3% of you voted for Parineeti Chopra in Shuddh Desi Romance

1.4% each went to Sonam Kapoor in Raanjhanaa and Vidya Balan in Ghanchakkar

Elena Kazan in Prague, Mahie Gill in Saheb Biwi Aur Gangster Returns and Sarika in Club 60 each got 0.5% of the vote

MY TAKE:

Since I’ll be filing a separate blog on my choice of Best Actress 2013, I won’t tell you here who I voted for. Do look out for that blog post in the coming weeks.

Until then, do vote in the next poll which is already up. Question: From the following performances (listed in alphabetical order), who would you pick as Bollywood’s Best Supporting Actress of 2013?

Warm regards,

Anna

Photographs courtesy: (a) The Wikipedia pages of Lootera, The Lunchbox and Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani (b) annavetticadgoes2themovies for Raanjhanaa, Ghanchakkar, Chennai Express, Club 60, Ram-leela, Prague, Shuddh Desi Romance and Prague

REVIEW 226: PRAGUE

Release date:	September 27, 2013
Director:	Ashish R. Shukla
Cast: Language:	Chandan Roy Sanyal, Elena Kazan, Mayank Kumar, Arfi Lamba, Sonia Bindra Hindi, English, a bit of Czech and Russian

I watched Prague for the second time this week to refresh my memory of the film for this review; the first time was at the Cinefan film festival in Delhi in 2012. That I could enjoy it again despite knowing the climax is a mark of how cleverly director Ashish R. Shukla has stitched together this psychological thriller about a mentally troubled young man.

Through a narrative travelling between Europe in the present and India in flashback, we see what brought this 'normal'-looking chap to this pass. Chandan is/was an architecture student, too shy to approach the girl he liked. Shubhangi is/was that girl. Arfi is/was his friend. Gulshan is/was his often crude, obnoxious yet well-meaning classmate. Chandan and Gulshan bag a trip to Prague to do their thesis. Once there, they meet a pretty local girl, the dancer Elena.  

Guilt+jealousy is a combustible combination. I won’t reveal the cause of Chandan’s guilt here. What I can tell you is that his insecurities seem to stem from an underlying conviction that he’s not good enough – for Shubhangi or Elena. When did he metamorphose from the cocksure fellow cruelly indifferent to Arfi’s cries to an under-confident youngster? Has his over-active imagination been triggered by the green-eyed monster, or by his psychological frailty brought on by guilt, or perhaps even by substance abuse? What came first? We must find out.

The fulcrum of Prague is theatre and film actor Chandan Roy Sanyal whose calling card with Bollywood audiences so far has been the supporting role of Mikhail in Vishal Bhardwaj’s Kaminey in 2009. Between then and now, he has made several appearances in Hindi, English and Bengali films, some that have effectively tapped his tremendous talent (F.A.L.T.U., D-Day) and others that have terribly shortchanged him (Hema Malini’s Tell Me O Kkhuda). It’s a joy then to see him play the lead in Prague, delivering a performance that’s only possible when a man invests his entire body, mind and soul in a complex, demanding role. India has woken up to the remarkable Nawazuddin Siddiqui in the past couple of years. Hopefully soon, the spotlight will fall on an equally deserving talent going by the name Chandan Roy Sanyal.

His co-stars have all been well-chosen. Elena Kazan was seen earlier this month playing Randeep Hooda’s alcoholic girlfriend in John Day. In Prague she’s a woman desperate to help Chandan although his inordinate curiosity about her past loves leads her to tell him with disgust that he’s “a typical Indian man”. The German-Russian actress’ proficiency with Indian languages is charming, her on-screen journey from carefree soul to heart-broken lover seems effortless. Arfi Lamba as Arfi and Mayank Kumar as Gulshan are equally natural performers.

The other star of this film is its music featuring old and original compositions in Hindi, English, Bengali and Czech, some in their entirety, some in snatches. The standout elements are the haunting Czech number Kap kap kap which the subtitles tell me translates into “Drip drip drip”; and that scene in which Gulshan starts singing Meri bheegi bheegi si palkon pe rah gaye from the 1970s Hindi film Anamika at which point Chandan cuts in with the original Bengali song from which it took its tune, Mone pore Ruby Ray. Lovely! The soundtrack, Elena’s stage performance, the streets of Prague, its history and landmarks, the snappy editing and Udaysingh Mohite’s disturbingly intimate camerawork come together to build up the ever-on-the-edge, ever suspicious, never-completely-happy mood of Prague and its protagonist.

The film’s screenplay (credited to Sumit Saxena, Ashish R. Shukla, Akshendra Mishra, Vijay Verma and producer Rohit Khaitan) is complex but never convoluted. The one sore point for me is the writing of the character Shubhangi, which has touches of that cliched women-get-into-relationships-to-take-advantage-of-gullible-men trope that some gentlemen propagate. This is not a thought emerging from Chandan’s imagination but hinted at by the tone of a couple of scenes. In retrospect that puts a whole new colour on the use of the song from Anamika in which you might recall that the lyrics at one point went thus: “Aag se naata, naari se rishta / Kahe mann samajh na paaya.” Perhaps this was unintentional, but it’s an issue worth raising. As it happens, some of Shubhangi’s English dialogues sound slightly stilted, which is surprising considering that all the other lines in the film flow naturally.

I’m not sure I agree with the choice of title for the film, but the choice of foreign location is apt. Unlike Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara’s tourist-brochure-like tribute to Spain, Prague is not used in this film merely for its beauty. Chandan doesn’t go abroad simply to illustrate how hard it had become for him to escape his demons. There’s that point too, no doubt, but Prague in particular becomes a metaphor for the game of self-deception his mind is playing with itself, as Elena explains to him that locals took advantage of the Nazi-run concentration camps in Europe for Jews, using them as a cover to run similar camps to finish off gypsies during World War II, later blaming this travesty on the Nazis. For art, architecture and history buffs, there are moments like this scattered throughout Prague. In fact, one of the film’s nicest scenes has Elena and Chandan before the city’s statue of The Cloak of Conscience, trying to decipher it.

Prague is a thoroughly engaging, highly engrossing film. It demands every ounce of the viewer’s attention, but in the end it’s an intriguing, rewarding experience.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	U/A
Running time:	1 hours 49 minutes

Photograph courtesy: Team Prague

REVIEW 222: JOHN DAY

Release date:	September 13, 2013
Director:	Ahishor Solomon
Cast: Language:	Naseeruddin Shah, Randeep Hooda, Shernaz Patel, Vipin Sharma, Elena Kazan, Sharat Saxena Hindi

John Day is a mirage. There’s no better way to describe a thriller in which, as a viewer you keep waiting to reach that oasis in the distance that will make the trek through the burning desert worth it, but it just doesn’t come.

In the first half hour of the film when a girl dies while on vacation with her boyfriend, and we are later introduced to her grieving parents John and Maria Day, there’s a promise being held out of great revelations to come. “Have faith in God,” says John to his wife. “Have faith in God and then he treats you like shit?” she shoots back. Shortly afterwards, Maria is attacked in her home and there’s a hold-up in the bank where John is a manager. Aha, the plot thickens! But then the film takes too long to reveal its hand, and worse, that hand turns out to be a damp squib.

The length of time John Day takes to arrive at its climactic twists and turns might have been acceptable if that climax was intriguing. After all, the beauty of Manoj Night Shyamalan’s Sixth Sense was that a lumbering ride ended in one of the most fascinating film endings in history. Unfortunately, the promised oasis in John Day turns out to be a little shrub. In the end then, it matters little that Naseeruddin Shah and Shernaz Patel are sweet together as Mr and Mrs Day; or that this is that rare Hindi film featuring an elderly man as its hero; or that this is that rare Hindi film in which an old man is shown kissing his wife, however briefly; or that the production designer, background score composer and cinematographer join hands to build up an atmosphere of foreboding from the word go; or that some of the locations are scenic. Up to the 1980s, Hindi cinema was dominated by stereotyped Christian characters – gangsters, gangsters’ molls, bartenders, bootleggers, cabaret dancers, quasi-foreigners who could barely speak Hindi, drunken men, dress-wearing women who slept around unlike the virginal heroines and so on. From the 1990s onwards, Christians virtually disappeared from Hindi films. John Day is that rare post-1990s Hindi film with a Christian as a leading man and – surprise, surprise! – no Bollywood-esque stereotypes. Like the other positives though, this too fades into insignificance after a while as the film peters out with each passing scene.

Randeep Hooda delivers a generic performance as Gautam, the brooding, corrupt cop with a miserable past; we know he’s capable of far better than this. The interesting discovery in John Day is Elena Kazan playing his alcoholic girlfriend Tabassum Habibi. Unlike most other recent international imports into Bollywood (media reports tell me she’s of German-Russian ancestry), this girl can act.

What exactly is John Day about? Well, that’s the thing: it tries to be about a lot of things but ends up being about not much. Unlike producer Anjum Rizvi’s earlier film A Wednesday, this one does not have pace or contextual relevance to make it gripping (A Wednesday was also an anarchist’s dream that tapped into a prevailing national bloodlust, but that’s a different discussion). Here in John Day, there’s a father out to get revenge for the death of his daughter, a mother who blames herself for the tragedy, a gangster devoted to his religion and crime, an underworld-media nexus, a boy tormented by memories of sexual abuse, a man afraid of commitment, a woman desperately in love, a murky international corporation and a beautiful, vast stretch of land called Casablanca Estates in which I’d lost interest by the time its secret was finally unveiled.

Director Ahishor Solomon is clearly well-intentioned and not without talent, but he fails to bring it all together into a compelling, convincing whole. In the end, what remains is a feeling that he was trying to make a grand, profound film … the key word being “trying”. The overriding memory though, is of a “cigarette smoking is injurious to health” warning that inexplicably remains on screen throughout the film from the very first frame, even when there’s not a ciggie in sight; and two scenes of violence more gruesome than anything you’ve ever seen in a mainstream Hindi film.

Rating (out of five): *1/2

CBFC Rating (India):	A
Running time:	2 hours 17 minutes

Photograph courtesy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Day_(film)