REVIEW 400: DHANAK

Release date:	June 17, 2016
Director:	Nagesh Kukunoor
Cast: Language:	Hetal Gada, Krrish Chhabria, Vipin Sharma, Gulfam Khan, Rajiv Lakshman, Vijay Maurya, Vibha Chhiber, Suresh Menon Hindi

There is a scene in Dhanak, in which two boys are seated on a swing with Pari, the elder sister of one of the li’l fellows. She watches them with affection and mildly chides them for over-eating as they stuff their faces with jalebis. The mini gents feed each other, but it seems not to even occur to either of them to offer her a nibble.

Later, Pari sits with her brother Chotu and a child-like man. Again, the man feeds Chotu while not even asking her if she is hungry, and again, she seems not to mind at all.

It is unclear whether writer-director Nagesh Kukunoor intends us to read Dhanak this way, but his latest film is as much an unspoken comment on the male-centricity of our collective human existence, as it is an endearing road movie about two siblings journeying across a desert to meet Shah Rukh Khan.

Dhanak is the story of Pari and Chotu who live with a childless uncle and his heartless wife in a village in Rajasthan. The kids lost their parents a few years earlier, and Chotu lost his eyesight when he was four. Now eight, he is the focal point of 10-year-old Pari’s life. She selflessly showers him with love, deliberately fails in school exams – despite being a very bright student – so that they can end up as classmates, and has promised him that his vision will be restored before he turns nine on October 2 of the year in which we meet them. As it happens, Pari is a fan of Shah Rukh while Chotu is obsessed with Salman Khan

When Pari sees SRK on a poster for eye donations and later learns that the star is shooting near Jaisalmer, she runs away from home with Chotu to get her favourite Khan’s help to help Chotu.

During the risky excursion from their tiny hamlet and across the blazing Thar, they meet a motley bunch of characters who serve as a reminder of the evil that exists in this world while also underlining a fact we too often forget: that the good out there far exceeds the bad.

Kukunoor keeps his tone real and the proceedings believable through most of the film. For the most part, Dhanak is consequently both charming and insightful. Even when he stumbles occasionally, the children remain consistently loveable. And stumble he does, such as in the chance encounter with a somewhat clichéd white man (Chet Dixon), the abrupt shift in gears to a mystical realm with a soothsayer (Bharati Achrekar) and the stereotyping of the children’s hard-working aunt (Gulfam Khan) as a mild version of the evil stepmother from old fairytales while their lazy layabout of an uncle (Vipin Sharma) is viewed through a lens of indulgent tenderness. 

Through all this though, the characterisation of Pari and Chotu, and the incredible child actors playing the two, remain pitch perfect. Their conversations flow naturally, their chemistry is palpable and at no point does Kukunoor try to manipulate us with precocious cutesiness as so many directors do when they are working with such young artistes.

The children are surrounded by an array of interesting supporting actors, most especially Vipin Sharma playing their uncle and the attractive Rishi Deshpande as an elderly truck driver. These are strong performers to be up against, but Hetal Gada as Pari and Krrish Chhabria as Chotu are more than up to the challenge. They were just 10 and eight years old respectively when the film was being shot, yet they do not take a single misstep. Producer Elahe Hiptoola reveals that 500 kids were auditioned in Mumbai, Jodhpur, Jaipur, Bangalore and Hyderabad to find this pair.

There is more to them than their innate, innocent charm. They were born to be before the camera. It would interesting to see what Chhabria grows up to be, since he currently has the advantage of a baby-like appearance, is of slighter stature than the girl and in the film, has the benefit of playing a bratty, chatty youngster of the kind adults are usually drawn to. She – taller, with a face maturer than her age – is a confirmed quantity though: sweet-voiced Hetal Gada is, without question, a formidable talent.

Hats off for the casting win, Team Dhanak!

Chirantan Das’ camerawork among those scorching desert sands is eye-catching. Tapas Relia’s songs are uniformly catchy and include a revisitation of the lovely old Dama dam mast qalandar in the stunning voice of Devu Khan Manganiyar.

This brings us to a concern with an element in the film’s sound quality though. The transition from conversations (and one actor’s own singing voice) to the playback song recordings is not smooth at all. This audio bumpiness is glaring even to my technically inexpert ears and occurs more than once in the film.

It was also a mistake to let Krrish Chhabria himself sing the opening line of Tujhe dekha toh yeh jaana sanam at one point while he has professional playback artistes singing for him through the rest of the film. The contrast between his regular Joe voice and the extraordinary singers who have sung playback for him is needlessly rubbed in our faces considering that Chotu’s singing ability is one of his striking qualities.

This is particularly disappointing because elsewhere it is evident that the director does care about detail: in the personal Shah Rukh story each satellite character has up their sleeve, in the lipstick mark that should not be on that coffee mug with a starring role…

Overriding any and all reservations are the two children at the heart of this film, their seeming incorruptibility and artlessness, the touching bond they share, Kukunoor’s way with children, his trademark sense of humour, and Dhanak’s faith in faith. Chotu asks Pari one day: Why do you credit X with this kindness being done to us, when Y is responsible for it? She replies: Leave me to believe what I believe, and you believe what you wish. That, ultimately, is what Dhanak is about: allowing the mind to wander where it will, seeing a rainbow (dhanak) in the night, putting your trust in who or what you will – God, miracles or even Shah Rukh Khan.

Clearly, stories of siblings and sensitivity towards physical disabilities are Kukunoor’s great strengths. 2005’s Iqbal featured a warm relationship between a deaf-mute cricketer and his supportive younger sister. That film stands head and shoulders and a whole human being above his other works. Dhanak, warts and all, is a reminder of the best that this director can be.

It is hard to say which is the star of this film: the writing of the child characters or the manner in which the director has just let them be or the child actors who play them or the fact that Chotu is not made an object of pity by the film? There’s a whole constellation twinkling at us off screen from this warmly appealing, life-affirming film.

Rating (out of five): ***

PS: So does Shah Rukh Khan make an appearance in the film? My lips are sealed.

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	117 minutes

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhanak

REVIEW 62: CYCLE KICK

Release date:	June 17, 2011
Director:	Shashi Sudigala
Cast:	K.P. Nishan Nanaiah, Sunny Hinduja, Girija Oak, Ishita Sharma, Dwij Yadav, Tom Alter

It’s tough to say what I have to say about Cycle Kick because there’s something so warm and likeable about the film’s young lead cast, especially the quietly attractive Malayalam film actor K.P. Nishan Nanaiah playing Ramu, an odd-jobs-man trying desperately to make a living to educate his little brother, and all the while dreaming of playing football. There’s also the lovely Girija Oak (who we saw just recently in Shor In The City), playing a smaller role as the bada saab’s sister who Ramu falls for. Besides, it’s nice to see a moneyed producer like Subhash Ghai – best known for his big-budget masala films as a director – supporting small ventures by rank newcomers, some from his own film institute, and ensuring that they get released. But having seen Whistling Woods International graduate Sunny Bhambhani’s Love Express and now Shashi Sudigala’s Cycle Kick, it’s time to point out that those good intentions are not an excuse for either bad quality or “inspired” film making.

Cycle Kick is clearly a take-off on Vittorio De Sica’s classic Bicycle Thieves, but despite the magnificent source of inspiration, it’s a sadly tepid product. The story of an impoverished father and son in 1940s Italy is here transposed on to Ramu and Deva, brothers living in a small coastal town in contemporary India. They don’t have parents, so Ramu as the much older sibling works to support them. He makes a living pasting film posters around town. Deva prays that his brother gets a bicycle some day so that he can get around faster, do more work in less time, and fulfill all their dreams. Then one day, Ramu finds a misshapen bicycle lying abandoned on a beach. He lovingly repairs it and life starts looking up.

That frail machine on two wheels becomes a metaphor for all their hopes and dreams. But then the cycle is stolen... Many scenes later, following tensions between the boys from the lowly government college where Ramu works and an upper class neighbouring institution, there is a climactic football match that is so dull, it feels like an anti-climax. Since director Shashi Sudigala seems open to drawing from already-released sources, I wish he’d just watched Lagaan, Iqbal, Chak De India or a couple of Hollywood classics with sports as their centre to at least rev up that final game.

To be fair to this film, it’s not a scene-for-scene or situation-for-situation lift of Bicycle Thieves (no, that distinction must go to big-shot film makers like Pooja Bhatt who virtually Xeroxed Dirty Dancing for Holiday, Priyadarshan who carbon copied Mississippi Burning for Aakrosh, and other senior names). But Cycle Kick is such a lukewarm film, so completely lacking in energy or direction, that it can’t even be considered a fitting tribute to Bicycle Thieves. Apart from the potential of the lead cast and the pretty locations, I can think of nothing that works in its favour. 

Rating (out of five): 1/2

CBFC Rating:                       U

Running time:                        85 Minutes

Language:                              Hindi

Photograph courtesy: http://www.muktaarts.com/filmography/cyclekick.asp   

  

REVIEW 31: TEEN THAY BHAI

Release date:	April 15, 2011
Director:	Mrighdeep Singh Lamba
Cast:	Om Puri, Deepak Dobriyal, Shreyas Talpade, Ragini Khanna

Teen Thay Bhai could have been that fun – even if mindless – children’s movie that India so rarely makes. Just look at it … a story with immense potential being told through three actors as fine as Om Puri, Deepak Dobriyal and Shreyas Talpade. But though debutant director Mrighdeep Singh Lamba’s film is enjoyable in parts, it doesn’t live up to the promise that its credits offer. Produced by Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, Teen Thay Bhai is the story of three estranged brothers – Chixie, Happy and Fancy – who reluctantly come together in a mountainside cottage owned by their late grandfather, due to compulsions imposed on them by his will. Chixie is an ill-tempered husband and father. Happy is an unhappy dentist who has never forgiven his little brother a childhood indiscretion that cost him the love of his life. And Fancy is an aspiring actor whose conversations are peppered with references to Hollywood films.

Put them together in an isolated house on the snow-covered slopes of Himachal Pradesh and you can just imagine the possibilities for some explosively funny situations. And it does work in bits and pieces. But those bits and pieces are separated by too many patches in which the director tries to compensate for the indifferent dialogue writing with some loud acting. So, each time you feel “now the film’s gonna lift off” …  “oh okay, maybe now” … the pilot fails to shift the right levers and it’s back to the head of the runway again. At places the jokes are so predictable that twice, in the hall where I watched the film, a lady yelled out her guess of what would happen next … and she was right! And one more thing: I’m not sure I wanted to live to see the day when Om Puri farts on screen, but that’s what he does in Teen Thay Bhai.

Puri has for a few years now looked completely uninvolved in many of his films, almost like a bystander watching his co-stars in motion. The good thing about TTB is that for a change he throws himself into the proceedings. The bad thing is that he serves us a stereotypically loud Punjabi son-of-the-soil with only sporadic humorous appeal. Deepak Dobriyal delivers the smoothest performance of the trio, and teams up with TV’s Ragini Khanna to give us a sweet little romantic track on the side. Khanna – who soap buffs will recognise as Suhana from the hit show Sasural Genda Phool – is as feisty and pretty in TTB as she is in SGP, though her role in the film is not substantial enough to match her television star stature. But the disappointment in the cast is Shreyas Talpade (yes, wonderfully warm and real Shreyas Talpade of Iqbal and Welcome to Sajjanpur) who hams his way through the role of a bad actor in TTB, when we all know he’s so capable of being so much better.

Maybe Talpade as Fancy with the leather jackets and pants just gave up on this film when he realised that instead of snow, the production team was showering little balls of white confetti on his back. Or maybe I saw that wrong, and it was actually snow. But it sure as hell looked fake to me.

And Teen Thay Bhai sure as hell looked to me like a film that was made for bachchas till it went all violent and gory. Yes, despite the inconsistent feel of the film, the children in the theatre where I watched it seemed highly amused by Chixie, Happy and Fancy’s juvenile behaviour, and I could imagine some of the madcap kids in my family getting kicks out of hearing Fancy say: “Aapko ghalat family hui hai. Hum to benchelors hai.” But then the director and writing team decided to throw in scenes of police torture; an extended situation involving drug trafficking; and a joke that has Fancy facing a woman on a mobike, staring at her boobs and asking, “Silicons?” Therein lies the biggest problem with Teen Thay Bhai: it’s not consistent enough for a serious film buff who doesn’t mind the occasional OTT comedy, it’s not clever enough for adults, it’s not suitable for kids. So tell me then, who do I recommend it to?

Rating (out of five): **

CBFC Rating (India):	U/A without cuts
Running time:	125 Minutes
Language:	Hindi

Photograph courtesy: http://www.facebook.com/?ref=home#!/TeenThayBhai