REVIEW 390: AZHAR

Release date:	May 13, 2016
Director:	Tony D’Souza
Cast: Language:	Emraan Hashmi, Prachi Desai, Nargis Fakhri, Lara Dutta, Kunaal Roy Kapur, Rajesh Sharma, Manjot Singh, Gautam Gulati, Kulbhushan Kharbanda Hindi

For an industry that has avoided biopics through most of its existence – fearing lawsuits, thin-skinned fans, a national penchant for idolatry, violent reactions to political hot potatoes and also, perhaps, its own limited investment in research – Bollywood has certainly taken to the genre with a vengeance in recent years. After the money-spinners Bhaag Milkha Bhaag (2013) and Mary Kom (2014), comes Azhar just months before the celluloid biography of M.S. Dhoni.

Tony D’Souza’s film takes on the story of arguably the most controversial sportsperson of 20^th century India, a figure first revered and later reviled, former Indian cricket captain and batsman Mohammad Azharuddin. An opening disclaimer tells us that this is “not meant to be a biopic” of Azharuddin but a “fictionalized dramatic representation of incident(s)…for entertainment purposes only” (for full text of disclaimer, see footnote).

The claim is amusing – as is the use of incomplete names throughout, probably on the advice of the producers’ lawyers – since the film is about a Hyderabad-born Indian batsman jiske “naam mein hi Mohammad hai” but who is popularly addressed as Azhar, who came from humble beginnings, made his international cricket debut in the 1980s, hit a century in each of his first three Tests, was married young to a woman called Naureen, captained India, hit headlines not just for his on-field achievements but also for his affair and subsequent marriage to an actress called Sangeeta and was banned for life by the country’s top cricket body on charges of match fixing, with the ban being set aside by a court nearly a decade later.

Not a biopic? Okay.

The shy boy who fumbled his way through interviews, who still swallows more words than he lets out of his mouth, yet managed to charm a high-profile, glamorous star from 1980-90s Bollywood (Salman Khan’s ex-girlfriend Sangeeta Bijlani, no less), is without doubt fascinating even to a non-cricket fan. That he had a scintillating career before he was disgraced makes him a troubled icon even now for cricket maniacs. Azharuddin had once famously said he was victimised by the cricketing establishment because he is a minority community member, which makes him highly relevant in the current socially and politically volatile atmosphere (note: he later apologised for the remark).

The film fails in its treatment of all three aspects of Azhar’s life.

While his initially hesitant and then comfortably boring relationship with his first wife is well established, it skims over his liaison with his second wife. In fact, Sangeeta remains a distant creature throughout, a woman he seems to have fallen for primarily out of sympathy when he realises that glamour dolls have feelings.

More disappointingly, Azhar does not even touch upon the potential communal angle, an element that was handled with such delicacy and beauty in Shimit Amin’s Chak De! India (2007) starring Shah Rukh Khan.

The film truly does itself in though by inexplicably serving up very little cricket. Even the worst screenplay might have been lifted by some suspenseful on-screen matches, but Azhar remains a sports film sans the sport.

What we get instead is a half-baked, half-hearted attempt to declare Azharuddin innocent of match-fixing charges. Even if the job of discussing the nitty-gritty of the case is left to cricket experts, this question is bound to strike even a layperson: if indeed the BCCI (not mentioned by name) had framed Azhar back then, what were its motivations?

By not even bothering to address that point, the film lets down the man whose reputation it appears to be trying to redeem in the public eye.

Azhar’s tepid pace and cursory writing are not its only follies. Nargis Fakhri bobbed her head through her debut Bollywood film Rockstar in 2011. Five years later, her performance as Sangeeta relies entirely on her hotness to tide over her awkward dialogue delivery and inability to handle serious emotions.

A further let-down comes in the ordinary execution of her big moment in the film: the resurrection of the hit song Oye Oye (Gajar ne kiya hai ishara) from the 1989 blockbuster Tridev which starred Bijlani. The success of that number is the only memorable element in the former actress’ indifferent filmography, yet the choreography and remix are so lukewarm that you have to wonder why the filmmaker even bothered with it.

Though Fakhri is a poor choice, there are others in the cast who are not.

It is easy to take Emraan Hashmi lightly considering that through most of his career he has played pretty much the same character – the romantic rascal – with varying storylines. He revealed his acting chops though in Dibakar Banerjee’s Shanghai (2012). Here, he does not manage Azhar’s bumbling speech but nails the walk and, more important, gives the cricketer a certain vulnerability that is hard to resist even when all else around him in the film collapses.

Prachi Desai too has played more or less the same character through her short career: a simple, innocent, pretty young thing. There’s more to her character and her performance in this film though. Her Naureen is controlled, her heartbreak believable.

In a small role as Azhar’s Naanujaan, Kulbhushan Kharbanda is a loveable presence as always. Rajesh Sharma delivers a chameleon-like performance as the slimy bookie M.K. Sharma. Manjot Singh too makes a mark in a brief role as a turbanned batsman-turned-commentator modelled on Navjot Singh Sidhu. Without making a laboured over-the-top effort, he does a good Sidhu impression.

Lara Dutta and Kunaal Roy Kapur get to play lawyers in some of the most boring, poorly written court scenes seen in a Hindi film in a while. Despite flashes of effective humour in Kapur’s equation with the presiding judge, it is impossible to get past the dreariness of the overall treatment, the lack of content in most of their arguments, the fakeness of the set and Dutta’s excessive makeup. After the depth of the Arshad Warsi-starring legal drama Jolly LLB (2013) such courtroom mediocrity is hard to bear.

A scene in the latter half of Azhar indicates the promise of Azharuddin’s story. Now hated by the fans who once adored him, Azhar is forced by his lawyer to inaugurate a gym to keep up the appearance that life is going on as usual. The owner of the gym though turns out to be an obnoxious fellow who thinks he owns Azhar since he has paid for his time.

This moment harks back to one of the nicest scenes in the recent SRK-starrer Fan in which we saw the boorishness of an industrialist towards a major movie star. Away from the spotlight, the rich and the famous often deal with heartburn, heartbreak and humiliation to get to where they are and stay there. Mohammad Azharuddin’s rise and subsequent fall from grace were as public as it can get. What the film should have given us, but does not, is a detailed, insightful view of what went on behind the scenes and why.

Azhar is a superficial look at the life of one of the most enigmatic and intriguing sporting stars this country has ever seen. It is an opportunity lost. 

Rating (out of five): **

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	131 minutes

  

A version of this review has been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/azhar-review-this-emraan-hashmi-starrer-is-an-opportunity-lost-2779976.html#disqus_thread

Footnote: The following is the full text of the disclaimer carried at the start of the film:

Disclaimer:

This Film is inspired from various stories/incident(s) based on life and times of Mr.Mohammed Azharuddin and is not meant to be a biopic. It is neither a documentary nor a biography of any character depicted in the Film.

The story, timelines, events and the characters depicted in this Film have been fictionalized and no scenes are meant to be construed to represent a true or accurate recreation of the actual incident(s) that may have transpired.

This Film attempts to present a fictionalized dramatic representation of incident(s) pertaining to the life and times of Mr. Mohammed Azharuddin mostly published and available in public domain, for entertainment purposes only.  Any event shown in the Film should not impute any innocence or guilt on the part of any of the persons/characters represented in the Film.

This Film does not intend to hurt the sentiments and/or malign the image, reputation of any person, body and/or corporate in any manner. Any resemblance or similarity to any entity(ies), incident(s), and/or person(s), whether living or dead, is purely coincidental and unintentional.

Photograph courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azhar_(film)

  

REVIEW 335: HAMARI ADHURI KAHANI

Release date:	June 12, 2015
Director:	Mohit Suri
Cast: Language:	Vidya Balan, Emraan Hashmi, Rajkummar Rao, Suhasini Mulay, Amala Akkineni, Prabal Panjabi, Namit Das, Madhurima Tuli, Sara Khan Hindi

This film should not be called Hamari Adhuri Kahani (HAK). A far more appropriate title would be Hamari Aadhi-Adhuri Khokli Film Ki Kahani.

To be fair, Mahesh Bhatt’s story for HAK is not without merit. In particular, the motivations of one character – the terror accused Hari Prasad (played by Rajkummar Rao) – are fascinating, because the extent to which humans will go to get revenge is always worth exploring. It is also worth exploring, as HAK fleetingly does, the motivations of women when they cover their bodies in numerous announcements of their marital status (the mangalsutra/thaali maala, red bangles, sindoor,  wedding ring, the works), take on their husband’s surnames and carry babies through nine months of energy-sapping pregnancy only to round it off with painful labour before blithely handing the child over to be named after the father and socially be deemed his heir, not hers.

Neither of these is an element to be ignored. Sadly, an outdated storytelling style, a surfeit of cliches, an alarming degree of literalness in its metaphors (especially the references to Radha-Krishna and Sita), some conflicted and laboured ‘feminism’ and terrible dialogue writing end up ruining the potential of this Vidya Balan-Emraan Hashmi-starrer.

Bhatt Senior’s basic plotline is interesting, but he fleshes it out poorly. Given the story’s lack of heft, director Mohit Suri’s deliberately languid pace becomes tedious early on. Worse, writer Shagufta Rafique gives HAK some of the most laughably bombastic dialogues to emerge from mainstream, high-end Bollywood in a while. She is clearly aiming for an approach that was popular in 1970s-80s Hindi cinema. Here’s the thing, Shagufta-ji… First, human beings in the real world have never spoken that way, but we were willing to indulge in a collective national suspension of disbelief for a while because it was fun to do so. The fantasy that was enjoyable back then is not so much any more though ’cos we’ve outgrown that era. If you do wish to revisit it, you need the combined panache of writer Rajat Aroraa and director Milan Luthria who pulled it off in Once Upon A Time In Mumbaai (2010) and The Dirty Picture (2011). Mohit and Shagufta, you have delivered some entertaining films together in the past – 2011’s Murder 2, for instance, was neat. But the dialogue-baazi of HAK and its half-hearted direction kill the film.

Why does a hard-as-nails, apathetic police officer unexpectedly decide to help Vasudha Prasad (Vidya) escape her husband so that she can be with Aarav? Kyunki yeh kaaynaath bhi sachche pyaar karne waalon ki madad karne ko taiyyaar ho jaata hai (because all of Creation steps up to aid the cause of true love), the gentleman in uniform explains.

Why is billionaire Aarav Ruparel (Emraan) so in love with Vasudha? Because bahut saare patey thhey mere, par ghar tumne dilaaya (I had many addresses, but you got me a home), he says.

Woven around such lines is the sketchy tale of Vasudha, abandoned by her husband a year after marriage yet clinging – literally – for dear life to her mangalsutra. Why? Because our values are racing through our veins (i.e. nass-nass mein), she says. Sad and pretty Vasudha arranges flowers for a living in a luxury hotel where Aarav arrives as a guest one day. After two meetings, much gazing and some borderline stalking, as floral scents float through the air from Mumbai to Dubai, he develops behad ishq and mohabbat (boundless love) for her.

Aarav is a business wizkid with his own dukhi bachpan ki kahaani. He also has a weird reason (Oedipal, though unintentionally so, I suspect) for being drawn to Vasudha: she reminds him of his mother. Combine his back story with her miserable present and a contrived climax involving Bastar, and the result is HAK.

Vidya and Emraan have a flair for bombast-by-design as you can see from their track record (he was in Once Upon A Time…, they co-starred in Dirty Picture). Here though they are completely wasted, with little to do but pose around between those hackneyed conversations and speeches.

The film has evident pretensions to epic emotions, but extreme close-ups of the leads’ faces, her tears and her curls cannot compensate for a weak story. In fact, Vishnu Rao’s long shots of some attractive locations (an overhead view of Mumbai, a garden in Dubai, the sands of the desert city) get tedious beyond a point in this soulless film. Rao shows little imagination in capturing Bastar, though even his regular shots of a spectacular locale are better than the glaringly fake computer imagery used to conjure up a field of flowers in crucial scenes in rural Chhattisgarh.

Suhasini Mulay though gets the worst of the cinematography: when her face is caught in tight close-ups, she looks like a woman possessed by a spirit rather than an elderly relative offering kindly advice to Vasudha. It’s nice to see Amala after so many years in a Hindi film (as Aarav’s mother), but the stand-out member of the supporting cast is Prabal Panjabi (playing Aarav’s employee Apurva) whose inexplicable screen presence gives us one of HAK’s most unwittingly comical scenes: in which he declares his friendship and (platonic?) love for Aarav.

As for the film’s seeming ‘liberalism’, the unspirited Vasudha dramatically transforms into a modern-day Durga in a late scene with her husband to articulate some very valid thoughts about a woman’s identity being inextricably linked to her husband’s, but the point is entirely lost in the speechifying, the trite imagery of Durga’s idols passing behind her just then (Vasudha is very conveniently in Kolkata at the time) and the film’s completely contradictory stance until then.

No doubt women like Vasudha do exist – there is nothing wrong in portraying this reality. The problem lies in the fact that the film itself seems to endorse the stupidity of such women, going by the symbolism of a naari as a man’s slave appearing repeatedly through the narrative till then: Vasudha cleans her husband’s feet when he turns up at her house after five years, a filthy, bedraggled creep demanding her affection and loyalty; later she falls at Aarav’s feet on discovering that he intends to save that same abusive husband.

Then of course there is the not-so-minor point that early on in the film when Vasudha dashes off to save Aarav from a fire in a hotel, he yells at the hotel’s security staff with this spectacularly sexist line: ek aurat ko mujhe bachaana pada! A mere aurat! Imagine that!

Spectacularly sexist and spectacularly boring – that’s a lethal combination. It hurts to see Vidya in such a film.

Rating (out of five): *

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	131 minutes