REVIEW 508: SHAB

Release date:	July 14, 2017
Director:	Onir
Cast: Language:	Ashish Bisht, Raveena Tandon, Arpita Chatterjee, Areesz Ganddi, Simon Frenay, Raj Suri, Anika Dhawan, Gaurav Nanda, Andrew Hoffland, Shray Rai Tiwari, Cameos: Sanjay Suri, fashion designers Varun Bahl and Wendell Rodricks Hindi with English

One of the great highs of being a cinephile comes from watching a new release by a director whose body of work you love, and discovering that they have done it again. There is, I have come to realise, a sub-conscious tension I experience as I enter a hall before any film, more so before a film by someone with a solid track record, and if the film turns out to be good, a sense of relief that washes over me as I leave – relief that those couple of hours of life were not wasted, and in the case of an artist I respect, relief that they have proved to be consistent.

My heart broke a little when I saw Shab this week. It has been helmed by Onir, who made the politically brave, mind-shatteringly beautiful My Brother Nikhil in 2005 and I Am in 2011, with the latter deservedly going on to win the year’s National Award for Best Hindi Film. Shab is his first directorial feature in six years, but the intervening period has, unfortunately, not been well spent.

The title comes from a Hindustani word for “night”. The story is about what goes on under cover of a metaphorical darkness in Delhi’s social circles, where young entrants on the glamour scene are used and abused by unscrupulous veterans, where a creative person you see at work in a posh colony could be supplementing their income by dabbling in the world’s oldest profession, and where bored rich married couples find excitement in infidelity.

In one of Shab’s earliest scenes, an aspiring model from a small town walks to the head of a catwalk in the briefest of shiny briefs, wiggles his butt and crotch about for the viewing consumption of a panel of judges seated below the stage, and introduces himself in broken English that causes them to snigger. He is achingly young and eager, but they appear not to see that. What they see instead is a target for their snobbery and their lust. 

It is a moment brimming with pathos and potential, not over- or under-done, but just right. Newcomer Ashish Bisht playing the boy-child on the ramp – Mohan from Dhanaulti – seems to have been well chosen for the role. As he stands there before that elite set, the picture of innocence and enthusiasm mixed with a dash of stupidity, anxious to impress and evidently impervious to their contempt, it is hard not to feel uneasy on his behalf and sorry for him. It is possible that Bisht is acting here, but to all appearances he is just being.

That fleeting passage perfectly illustrates the difference between the objectification of a person with the reins in their hands (such as a male superstar choosing to dance shirtless to Dard e disco, and other top heroes in India’s big film industries) versus a person with less power (heroines from the same film industries, including the seniors among them) versus those with no power at all (female debutants and even men like Mohan). No one touches Mohan during that trial, yet there is exploitation written all over it.

When the wealthy socialite Sonal Modi (Raveena Tandon) decides that Mohan is a worthy toy boy, we learn that he is not quite as innocent as he looks. She later re-christens him Azfar to fit him better into snooty circles, anoints him her fitness trainer, and starts carting him around wherever she goes. Azfar develops a swagger and a seductive air with women, and strains at the leash on which his mentor keeps him.

If Shab had been able to carry forward the nuanced air of discomfort in that opening talent hunt, it could have been special. Because of that promise, when at first we are introduced to a string of individuals and we watch their paths intersect, it seems like something might come of it. Unfortunately, Shab disintegrates within its first half hour. And so, we are hauled across the criss-crossing lives of character after character, from Mohan/Azfar, Sonal and her designer buddy Rohan Sud (Raj Suri), to restaurateur Neil (Areesz Ganddi) and his close friend Raina (Arpita Chatterjee), Raina’s sister Anu (Anika Dhawan) and her neighbour Benoit LeBlanc (Simon Frenay), Neil’s lovers, Raina’s clients, and… you know what, it does not matter, because the comatose narrative – divided pointlessly into the four seasons – left me so indifferent after a while, that I could not even remember their names.

The problem lies not with the multiplicity of characters or even the acting for the most part, but with the shallow writing, jagged editing (initially intriguing but distractingly choppy as time goes by) and inert direction. Shab somehow feels like a film Onir made in the middle of a million distractions. The editing has been credited to the usually reliable Irene Dhar Malik and Onir, the screenplay and dialogues to Merle Kröger and Onir, the Hindi dialogues to Adhiraj Singh and the dramaturgy to Kröger, while Urmi Juvekar has been acknowledged for the story idea – let them decide culpability amongst themselves in this case.

Whatever conclusion they may arrive at, the fact remains that even though some of the actors in Shab are worth caring for, not a single character is.

Bisht is sweet up to a point, but is lost to surface treatment by the writers. Tandon has screen presence and gorgeousness, but after an interesting introduction, is given little to do beyond be haughty, hot and horny.

Chatterjee is a veteran of the Bengali industry. She was strong in her Bollywood debut Chauranga (2016), which was co-produced but not directed by Onir. In Shab she is inexplicably stiff as cardboard, which weighs heavily on the already insubstantial writing of Raina. Ganddi and Frenay look like they might add up to something more with a better script, but they are so under-written that it is impossible to judge them by this film. Suri, thankfully, does not go stark raving camp like designers in the formulaic Madhur Bhandarkar mould, but his motivations in his final scene are one of this film’s many mysteries that I do not give a damn enough to crack.

Restraint cannot mean zero vitality, yet that is what you get in Shab. Worse, the film does not have anything new to say. We already know that wealth does not guarantee marital happiness, that freshers in the modelling and acting professions get taken advantage of sexually, that big cities can be challenging to small-town folk. We know of the casting couch, high-society call girls and closeted homosexuality. They exist, but what more can you tell us about them beyond what has already been told? What emotion can you stir up that has not already been felt?

If the answer to either question is “I don’t know”, here is another question: is the film worth making? Shab, sadly, was not.

Rating (out of five stars): *

CBFC Rating (India):	A
Running time:	108 minutes 27 seconds

Poster courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/ShabTheFilm/

REVIEW 322: COFFEE BLOOM

Release date:	March 6, 2015
Director:	Manu Warrier
Cast: Language:	Arjun Mathur, Sugandha Garg, Mohan Kapur Hindi and English

Coffee Bloom is a small, charming even if inconsistent film about a young man letting his life slip away in bitterness over an incident in his youth. Director Manu Warrier tells his tale armed with three talented actors and one of the most gorgeous settings in India: the coffee plantations of Coorg in Karnataka.

The story revolves around Dev Anand Cariappa (Arjun Mathur) who spends his time listening to clichéd recorded sermons about the meaning of life, as he wallows in the lingering misery of an old romance gone terribly wrong. Dev claims to be a sanyasi, but has to deal with the surfacing of his worldly desires when a tragedy takes him back to his old family estate – which now has a new owner – in Coorg. There he meets his former girlfriend Anika (Sugandha Garg) and her husband. As he works at his job on a local estate, he must confront his feelings for her and his own desperate need for closure over the incident that tore them apart.

The circumstances surrounding their broken relationship are told in instalments through a series of flashbacks. The incremental revelations form an interesting element in Coffee Bloom. Equally attractive are the three central performers – Mathur, Garg and Mohan Kapur playing Srinivas Panicker, the boss of the plantation on which Dev takes up temporary work.

The ever-reliable Mathur – earlier seen in Luck By Chance, I Am, My Name Is Khan and several author-backed roles in high-profile ads – is convincing as always as a flaky, immature fellow borrowing pretentious phrases for everyday conversations from those sermons he listens to; an emotionally ravaged young man masking his silent screams for revenge with a veneer of renunciation. He comes across as a person who probably pictured himself playing the part of a tortured soul/tragedy king and then did such a good job of it that he became the man he was playing, a man who just cannot let go of the past.

Garg is a familiar face as the excellent actress who played Imran Khan/Jai Singh Rathore’s close friend in Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na. Not only is she talented, she’s also exceedingly good-looking. It’s a mystery why we don’t see her more often in mainstream Hindi films. Kapur turns in an interesting performance as the ebullient, slightly dense, but well-meaning Srinivas who does not know the ‘c’ of coffee or the ‘oo’ of oogaana (cultivation), as Dev puts it angrily, but sees running a coffee estate as his dream. He is a bit flighty but so good-natured and good-hearted that it’s hard to be put off by him.

In the midst of their believable characterisations and acting comes Ishwari Bose-Bhattacharya’s turn as Shonda, who is… well, I could not entirely make out what she does, but she is the live-in partner of someone we never meet and a woman who Dev befriends. This inexplicable, voluptuous woman speaks an awkwardly written blend of Bengali-accented Hindi and English, which is incongruous considering that the director is clearly asking for a suspension of disbelief from us by: (a) not asking Mathur to ‘do an accent’ (you know what I mean) and (b) by showing a Coorgi boy and his mother naturally conversing with each other in Hindi. Since we have been convinced to accept both the above, trying to introduce authenticity to Shonda’s language and style of speaking makes the film uneven. Why could she not have spoken plain Hindi?

That apart, the narrative turns slightly disjointed during an incident involving a gun towards the end of the film. Still, Mathur and Garg manage to pull Coffee Bloom over that bump with their natural ease before the camera.

A desire for revenge consumes us much more than it harms our intended targets – that’s what the film seems to be gently telling us; and that even if you never discover what caused a cataclysmic event in your life, the best thing you could do for yourself is to move on.

For the most part then, this is an engaging film. What is disappointing though is that Director of Photography Yogesh P. Jani fails to fully exploit the naturally rich location at his disposal. This is not to say that his pictures aren’t pretty. They are. Very pretty indeed. But then even if you and I were to take random shots of sundry spots in Coorg, we might come away with exquisite visuals – that’s how lovely the place is. Point is, with a professional behind the camera, I can’t remember any outdoor shot in Coffee Bloom so unique in its composition that it surprised me, which is odd considering that the Internet tells me Jani is the same man who delivered to us the photographic detailing of Saheb Biwi Aur Gangster Returns (2013). With Coffee Bloom, was he constrained by a limited budget or was he personally less invested in this project? It’s impossible to guess the reason. It is a measure of the absolute splendour of this region that it looks stunning in the film despite the limited imagination employed in the cinematography.

Be that as it may, I found Coffee Bloom a well-acted and unexpectedly satisfying film. Be warned: it is paced in a fashion that might be considered too slow and too languid by some. To me though it felt relaxed, reflective, unusual and offbeat.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	U/A
Running time:	95 minutes

Photograph courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/CoffeeBloomMovie?ref=ts&fref=ts