161: CHAKRAVYUH

Release date:	October 24, 2012
Director:	Prakash Jha
Cast:   Language:	Abhay Deol, Arjun Rampal, Manoj Bajpayee, Anjali Patil, Esha Gupta, Om Puri Hindi

What we have here is the premise of Namak Haraam transported from the trade unions of the 1970s to the Maoist movement of today. Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s classic starred Amitabh Bachchan as a rich man who gets his friend Somu (Rajesh Khanna) to infiltrate a labour union. Once among the workers though, Somu has a change of heart when he witnesses their hardships and ideals first hand. Prakash Jha’s Chakravyuh gives us two friends too: an upright senior policeman, Adil Khan (Arjun Rampal), and Kabir (Abhay Deol) who offers to infiltrate a powerful group of armed Communists in Adil’s area of operation to help in the capture of their leader. Once among the rebels, Kabir is drawn into the movement when he witnesses police atrocities against poor tribals and their outlawed protectors. Will the friendship with Adil be ruined? Will the two men go their separate ways?

Until you find out for yourself, know this … The proceedings in Chakravyuh are unrelenting, the action is so fast-paced that there’s no time to think, the police-politician-industry nexus is handled with great maturity … this is gripping cinema. Yet, as I left the theatre I realised the film had not moved me with that heart-rending intensity that made Hrishida’s Namak Haraam so memorable. The primary problem is that Chakravyuh fails to firmly establish the depth of Adil and Kabir’s friendship. Since we’ve not invested in their bond and lingered over it, it’s not as emotionally wrenching as it ought to be when they start falling apart. The other weakness of the script is the Lal Salaam brigade: a bunch of one-dimensional, mostly flawless characters who needed to be better fleshed out. So Manoj Bajpayee plays Maoist kingpin Rajan, pretty newcomer Anjali Patil is a female member at the forefront of the group and Om Puri makes a brief appearance as an educated revolutionary who seems to be modelled on real-life Maoist Kobad Ghandy. We discover even less about the impoverished people they’re working to defend from the injustices of a wealthy industrialist and his political collaborators.

With the script faltering on this front, the lure of Chakravyuh’s Maoist movement lies not in its leaders’ motivations or the helplessness of the persecuted tribals (we don’t see much of either) but in the machinations of the police, politicians and big business. Herein lies the film’s strength. Writers Prakash Jha, Anjum Rajabali and Sagar Pandya are razor sharp in their treatment of the police-neta-industry alliance and while showing us the utter helplessness of a genuinely honest policeman caught between his weak-willed senior, corrupt political bosses, equally corrupt colleagues and rebels who have taken up arms against the state. Adil has crystal-clear principles: he sympathises with the tribals, he wants to win them over, but he will not tolerate anyone using violent means to fight for them; he does not support police atrocities, he resists an industrialist’s efforts to manipulate him, but he is determined to battle all these injustices within the ambit of the law. Jha’s direction is rock solid in the telling of this part of the story. The natural locations and cinematography add to the realistic feel of the film, and the editing is crisp and perfectly paced, giving us that rare Hindi film that does not feel a second too long. On the minus side, Chakravyuh could have done without the background score unnecessarily being raised several notches to create drama at places where there was high drama intrinsic to the situations being portrayed anyway. And that tuneless item song so abruptly thrust into the story should have been dispensed with altogether.

So here’s the balance sheet: The film has not stayed with me in quite the way I would have liked it to, but that’s a post-watching complaint. Because the truth is that while inside that hall, I found Chakravyuh both compelling and entertaining. After the pretentious Raajneeti and preachy Aarakshan, Jha is back in form here. Perhaps that’s why he extracts such credible performances from his cast, including Manoj Bajpayee and Anjali Patil who deserved better written characters, and Chetan Pandit as a convincingly slimy policeman. However, the film rests on the shoulders of Deol and Rampal who lend restraint and sincerity to their roles. Rampal is nicely earnest as the brooding, handsome, urbane Adil who loves his friend and believes in his job. Deol is appropriately low key even when emotions get the better of Kabir.

Like Adil, Chakravyuh has absolute clarity about the political stance it is taking and makes no awkward attempts to seem balanced just for the heck of it. Though the film’s heart clearly lies with the Maoists and exploited tribals, it takes another strong position with its choice of title: that the poor would not side with Maoists if it weren’t for state persecution, but Maoist violence has not helped them either, leading to an unending cycle of bloodshed to which a solution seems nowhere in sight. This is an important film that needed to be made now.

I also love the fact that one of the film’s heroes has such a patently Muslim name without a song and dance being made about it (Kabir could be ambiguous, not Adil Khan). Hindi films these days tend to feature Muslim characters usually when they’re making a larger point about either secularism or terrorism or a certain way of life or all of the above, as though you and I never bump into Muslims as regular folk in our daily lives. In Chakravyuh, Adil Khan just happens to be Adil Khan. For that, among other reasons, I’d like to shake Prakash Jha’s hand.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	U/A
Running time:	152 minutes

 

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

  

REVIEW 153: RAAZ 3 (3D)

Release date:	September 7, 2012
Director:	Vikram Bhatt
Cast:   Language:	Bipasha Basu, Emraan Hashmi, Esha Gupta, Manish Chaudhary, Mohan Kapur Hindi

 

There’s reasonable fun to be had watching Raaz 3 if you don’t think too much. Sure, there’s a lot about this film that bothers me – stereotypes, clichés, the works. But first I must confess that the early encounters with the spirit in the film were genuinely frightening, Bipasha Basu turns in a neat performance as a devotee of ‘black magic’, the 3D quality is world class* and director Vikram Bhatt does manage to maintain an eerie atmosphere throughout. Combine that with pretty sets and Bipasha’s stunning looks, and I suppose it can be safely stated that Raaz 3 delivers pretty much what its promos promise – nothing more, nothing less.

 

The storyline is thinner than Bips’ waistline so here it is in a sentence: leading film star Shanaya (Bipasha) ropes in an evil spirit to destroy her rival heroine Sanjana (Esha Gupta), with the assistance of her director boyfriend Aditya (Emraan Hashmi). Like all films about the netherworld, it’s a story that requires a suspension of disbelief from the audience. If you can set your rationalism aside for a couple of hours in a darkened theatre and/or if, like me, you grew up worrying that there was a ghost in every commode, then you may buy into the proceedings on screen. There’s a point in the film – in a cemetery – when Aditya says to Sanjana: “This is ridiculous, I think we should leave.” If I had not been spooked by then, I might have quoted that line to make a clever crack here. I won’t though, because the truth is that I was slightly on edge. The problem with Raaz 3, however, is that it fails to recognise that it has a good thing going, and so after a nicely scarey first half, it stretches itself far too much in the latter part of the second half, thus diluting the overall impact.

 

Esha – who barely moved a facial muscle in Jannat 2 – is wisely given the less demanding role of the two women in Raaz 3, and in that she acquits herself reasonably okay. Of course it defies believability that she could possibly eclipse an actress with the screen presence of Bipasha in filmdom, but never mind that. It comes as a relief that though blood flows and a spirit appears before us with his rotting, maggot-ridden flesh, Raaz 3 has no scenes that seem designed to induce vomit. Fortunately too, unlike most Bollywood films of the horror genre in recent years, the background score is not screechy.

 

I wish, however, that Vikram Bhatt had not resorted to so many clichés and stereotypes in his film. Since our film makers come from the society we live in, I guess it’s asking for too much to expect Bollywood to give us a career-minded, highly ambitious female character who is also level-headed, happy and not evil ... So I’ll fight that battle another day. But here’s one I won’t leave for the future … Shanaya is a bad girl, Sanjana is a good girl, Shanaya is shown smoking, Sanjana is not. Oh c’mon!! After the opening scene in a gorgeous red gown, evil Shanaya wears black almost throughout while sweet innocent Sanjana wears white and other light or bright colours. Oh c’mon, twice over!! In one encounter at a party that epitomises Shanaya’s destructive nature, Sanjana is completely unaware of Shanaya’s malevolent designs – perhaps precisely because of that, gentle Sanjana is in a soft, flowy white outfit while Shanaya is in a fitted, figure-hugging, rather more severe black gown. Don’t get me wrong … the women’s bodies and clothes in the film are b-e-a-u-t-i-f-u-l. I’m simply protesting against the triteness.

 

It’s also irritating how the script glosses over so much when just a little effort could have lent it some depth. Shanaya and Sanjana’s back stories, for instance, are given extremely superficial treatment. This laziness in the scripting and the so-so songs are what hold back Raaz 3 from being more than just a one-time watch. There’s also the fact that spook films have to be unrelenting right up to the end to be completely effective. In the second half, this one gave me too much time to recover from the earlier scares and ponder several questions: Why was that ghost so darned stupid that he didn’t realise how he was giving himself away? How come Aditya could see the shattered glass on the floor of that house but those guests couldn’t see the cockroaches that Sanjana saw? And most of all: Why the hell didn’t she just cut that dashed thread with scissors?!

 

Yes yes, I’m being a tease. Don’t ask for details or you’ll be complaining about spoilers. If you watch the film and come up with answers, let me know.

 

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

CBFC Rating (India):	A
Running time:	140 minutes

 

Footnote: (1) I had mentioned on Twitter that I watched Raaz 3 twice for this review. The second viewing was not because I “fell off to sleep the first time round”, as one of you cheekily surmised. No, I watched it another time because I was very late for the press preview and thought it only fair that I should see the film in its entirety before writing about it. Though I’ve called Raaz 3 a “one-time watch” in my review, I should point out that I did not mind it much the second time. What I mean though is that I would not have watched it again if duty had not demanded that I do so. (2) * In case you are one of those people who always wants to know if the 3D “makes a difference”, my answer is that I can no longer relate to that question. Why do we resist new technology? There was probably a time when audiences would ask “does the sound make a difference?” or “does colour make a difference?” My only objection is to films that are converted to 3D as an afterthought. Those are the ones that seem to me to look exactly the same in most scenes whether you have your glasses on or off. Otherwise, if the glasses are paper-thin (therefore convenient) and disposable (therefore hygienic) like the ones at Big Cinemas Odeon in Delhi where I first saw Raaz 3, I don’t understand why there should be an objection to seeing a film the way we see the world around us: with a third dimension.

 

Photograph courtesy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raaz_3D  

 

REVIEW 133: JANNAT 2

Release date:	May 4, 2012
Director:	Kunal Deshmukh
Cast:	Emraan Hashmi, Randeep Hooda, Esha Gupta, Manish Chaudhary, Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub, Arif Zakaria

A friend mentioned the other day that she’d just realised she has so far not seen an Emraan Hashmi film. Not surprisingly though, many of her favourite Hindi film songs from the past few years have featured this least acknowledged of Bollywood’s reigning stars.

It’s a given then, but it merits a mention … as in the case of every Emraan Hashmi-starrer, there’s plenty of hummable music to be had in Jannat 2, a film about the nation’s flourishing illegal arms trade. Emraan plays a small-time gun runner in Delhi who ends up becoming a police informer. Somewhere along the way, he falls in love with a woman and decides he wants to clean up his act. Let it be stated for the record that this film is not a sequel to Jannat which was released in 2008.

Jannat 2 starts off in quite an entertaining fashion but fizzles out through the second half. Some of this has to do with the fact that it’s too obvious in its effort to be clever, possibly aiming at the style of the 2010 gangster film Once Upon A Time In Mumbaai starring Emraan and Ajay Devgn that hit the jackpot at the box office with its 1970s-Bollywood-style dialoguebaazi. We get an early indicator of Jannat 2’s pretensions with the name of its hero: Sonu Dilli KKC (kutti kameeni cheez). Such subtlety!

Still, there’s interesting chemistry between Emraan and Randeep Hooda playing ACP Pratap Raghuvanshi who virtually blackmails the small-time crook into becoming a police informer. Their love-hate relationship could have carried this film through, if it weren’t for the under-written, under-acted asides in Jannat 2 that fail to draw us in.

So there’s Manish Chaudhary playing the big gun in the gun trade who remains nothing more than a trying-too-hard-to-be-menacing presence with really strange motivations. His is a small role that could be excused, but there’s no overlooking Dr Jhanvi who is running away from her past even as she runs a charitable clinic where Sonu first meets her. The lack of sparks between the two and the utter predictability of their relationship graph make the film’s romantic track decidedly dull. It’s also hard to empathise with this woman when the writer/director’s treatment of the character and actress Esha Gupta’s acting limitations reduce Jhanvi to nothing more than a showpiece. Yeah, so we know that she has flawless skin, a fabulous figure and (don’t hate me for saying this but) she looks like Angelina Jolie … So what?! Making matters worse is the placement of the love songs in the story and the completely unimaginative settings of these songs. The ending may have been heart-wrenching if Esha could act, but since she just about gets by in that department, the final portion comes across as overly stretched in a desperate attempt to wring tears out of the audience.

But Jannat 2 is not a hopeless case either. It features some action and chase scenes that made me sit up and take notice. It’s also nice to see a deserving actor like Randeep Hooda being given substantial roles in two mainstream films in quick succession (last year he had Sahib Biwi aur Gangster). Emraan too is convincing as the rascal with a heart. In fact, the two leading men are so good together that I found myself wishing Sonu Dilli had fallen in love with ACP Pratap instead of Dr Jhanvi! When these gentlemen are not sharing screen space, one of Jannat 2’s more moving moments comes from Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub in a small but impactful role. Ayyub had earlier played Jessica Lal’s killer in No One Killed Jessica and the hero’s friend in Mere Brother ki Dulhan.

I don’t see myself ever making the effort to watch this film a second time, but despite its many flaws, it’s only fair to say that Jannat 2 is a mildly entertaining even if unmemorable film.

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

CBFC Rating:                       A

Running Time:                      133 minutes

Language:                              Hindi

Photograph courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/Jannat2OfficialMovie