REVIEW 715: JUDGEMENTALL HAI KYA

Release date:	July 26, 2019
Director:	Prakash Kovelmudi
Cast: Language:	Kangana Ranaut, Rajkummar Rao, Amyra Dastur, Amrita Puri, Hussain Dalal, Satish Kaushik, Brijendra Kala, Jimmy Sheirgill Hindi

What if roles were reversed and instead of Raavan pursuing Sita in the Ramayan, she were to sense his intentions in advance and go after him? The question is at the core of director Prakash Kovelmudi’s Judgementall Hai Kya which places a story of domestic abuse, the effect of violence on a child’s psyche and mental illness against the backdrop of one of India’s favourite epics. 

It is an intriguing concept, and for that, here is a hat tip to Kanika Dhillon who is credited with the story, screenplay and dialogues. Comedy is a dominant element in her writing of this film, but it never crosses the Lakshman Rekha to mock those with mental health issues – Kangana Ranaut’s Bobby Batliwala Grewal is designed to evoke laughter, but never pity or contempt. Hat tip, again. Dhillon’s words are comfortably ensconced beside Kovelmudi’s trippy storytelling, and delightfully unfettered performances by Ranaut and Rajkummar Rao that make the first half at least a compelling watch.

Artistry and good intentions abound here, and when the final scenes roll around, it becomes clear that the goal of the film is to question prevailing notions of what constitutes “normal” and “abnormal”. Unfortunately, the writer’s concern is not backed by solid research, and despite everything it has going for it, Judgementall Hai Kya ends up adding to rather than reducing prevailing confusions, misconceptions and stereotypes about mental health in India. This also causes the writing to get murky and somewhat muddled in a second half that calls upon the viewer to join the dots by tossing around medical terms like “acute psychosis” and “dissociative identity disorder”.

When she was a little girl, Bobby witnessed her father repeatedly bashing up her mother. The trauma of a childhood tragedy has left deep scars that follow her into her adulthood. She is a woman with many voices in her head.

Twenty years after we met the child Bobby, the grown-up Bobby (Ranaut) is living alone, works as a dubbing artist in films, and is kinda sorta dating a guy called Varun (Hussain Dalal) when she meets Keshav (Rajkummar Rao) and Reema (Amyra Dastur). She is drawn to Keshav but simultaneously suspicious of his attitude towards his wife, and from there begins Sita’s pursuit of Raavan.

The performances all round are phenomenal, well matched to the film’s intentionally hyperbolic tone. Kovelmudi also succeeds in sustaining the air of intrigue he builds around Bobby and Keshav. It does not quite add up in the second half though, which is when matters get slightly simplistic and the screenplay does not quite tie up all its loose ends.

I spent an hour and a half after last night’s preview interviewing a clinical psychologist because Judgementall Hai Kya traps us in a web spun out of our own ignorance about “acute psychosis” and “dissociative identity disorder” (DID). First, I learnt that “acute psychosis” is used incorrectly here. Second, DID is chucked in as a red herring – who exactly has it is left to us to conclude. There are two possibilities. At the point at which DID is first mentioned, the film is clearly trying to steer us in the direction of one particular character, but it turns out that that person does not display any symptoms of DID as I now understand it from an expert. How on earth is a layperson in the audience to know that though? Are we expected to interview medical professionals after watching the film, or to have prior, in-depth knowledge of such matters? If not, then should we conclude that mental health is a mere gimmick for this team? Later, the film steers us towards another character, but in retrospect I realise that it would not have made an inch of a difference to the plot whether that person had DID or not, whether that person was mentally unwell or not – everything that happened in the story could have happened either way. A criminal does not have to be given the excuse of a mental disorder to explain away their crimes – sometimes people do evil because evil is what they are.

In fact, the constant association of crime with the mentally ill in mass entertainment, not just in India but in other countries too, contributes to the stigma and ignorance surrounding mental illness. The world is full of regular folk like you and me grappling with mental health concerns, but such people are rarely portrayed in cinema and on TV. As it happens, Indian entertainers are among the worst offendors in this arena. Judgementall Hai Kya seems to mean well, but its limited understanding of mental health does not help matters.

It is challenging to say what needs to be said here without giving away spoilers, which is why those last two paragraphs will perhaps be understood only by those who have watched Judgementall Hai Kya. If you have already seen the film, think about these issues. Ask yourself too if the post-interval portion would have been possible at all if it weren’t for those two purportedly conscientious policemen involved in a murder investigation in the first half being uncharacteristically casual towards a massive clue that placed the spotlight on one of the protagonists and would have led them to the truth if they had cared enough to probe further. If you have not yet seen the film, then know that Judgementall Hai Kya is based on an interesting concept, it is often funny and fascinating, but in the ultimate analysis, it does not make the grade.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	121 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/judgementall-hai-kya-movie-review-kangana-rajkummars-unfettered-performances-suffer-a-confusing-plot-and-poor-research-on-mental-health-7059841.html

Visuals courtesy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judgementall_Hai_Kya

REVIEW 628: HAPPY PHIRR BHAG JAYEGI

Release date:	August 24, 2018
Director:	Mudassar Aziz
Cast: Language:	Sonakshi Sinha, Jassie Gill, Jimmy Sheirgill, Piyush Mishra, Aparshakti Khurana, Jason Tham, Cameos: Diana Penty and Ali Fazal Punjabi, Hindi, Urdu and a spot of Mandarin

Happy Bhag Jayegi was the sleeper hit of 2016, a comedy revolving around an Amritsari bride who runs away from her wedding to marry the man she loves, but lands up in the home of a stranger – a Pakistani politician – by mistake. Diana Penty was luminous as the eponymous leading lady of that film, which, despite its insubstantial plot and flagging second half, managed to be funny all the same. She reprises her role in a cameo in Happy Phirr Bhag Jayegi even as it diverts its gaze to another Punjabi girl called Harpreet a.k.a. Happy, this one played by Sonakshi Sinha.

Writer-director Mudassar Aziz appears to have taken the feedback on his previous venture to heart. Happy Part 2 not only remains largely amusing if you can excuse a few waning patches here and there, the writing of its characters and the plot also have more substance than Part 1. Of course it is a parade of non-stop nonsense, but how does it hurt to get a fit of the giggles in a film that yet does not insult your intelligence and heads off in directions that Bollywood rarely bothers with, especially in comedy?

For a start, it is nice to once again meet a heroine not helplessly hanging around waiting for a man, any man, to bachao (save) her when she is trapped in trying circumstances. This Happy is a combustible woman and like that Happy takes matters into her own hands when the going gets tough.

There’s more where she came from. How often do we get to see a Hindi film featuring a turbanned Sikh as a major character without the screenplay being packed with Bhangra and cries of “balle balle”, without the guy in question being loud and boisterous, and sans sermons about Sikh valour or traditions of service to others? Representation should not be about pedestalising minority communities, but about acknowledging their existence in big and small ways without feeling compelled to create a shindig around an individual’s religious or ethnic identity.

So yeah, we have Khushwant Singh Gill (played by the very likeable Jassie Gill) who is recruited to Happy’s team in a foreign country, without so much as a balle balle or a lecture about Sikhism. Then there is the Lahori cop Usman Afridi (Piyush Mishra) and the Amritsari thug-politician Daman Singh Bagga (Jimmy Sheirgill), carryovers from Happy Bhag Jayegi, still sparring over Urdu and Pakistan in a still engaging and still inoffensive fashion. Yeah, a Pakistani character who is not belittled or demonised in this era of crude, in-your-face nationalism that India is passing through and Bollywood is pandering to. Imagine that.

The trickiest part of Happy Phirr Bhag Jayegi is that it is set in China, which would have been an excuse to make lazy racist jokes in most Bollywood films, but not here. Aziz walks a fine line – a clever line – by allowing his characters to be racist as they would be in real life, while using their prejudice to throw a spotlight on the “all Chinese look alike” attitude of the average insular Indian who resorts to the dismissive umbrella labels “Cheeni” and “chinky” for people of the entire geographical region extending from our own north-eastern states all the way to Japan. Happy Phirr Bhag Jayegi’s humour incorporates consequences that the primary characters suffer for their insularity and ignorance. This is done mainly through the medium of the gangster Chang played by Jason Tham.

None of this is spelt out in black and white, nor is the normalisation of a gay romance in a brief passage that eschews Dostana-style jokes completely. In a film where you least expect it, we are thus reminded without anyone overtly saying so, that homosexuals, cross dressers, Pakistanis, the Chinese, Punjabis and women – groups that are usually stereotyped in Hindi cinema – are all just regular people.

Happy Phirr Bhag Jayegi could still have done with more work on its writing and direction – the songs (barring the remix of the appropriately chosen classic, Mera naam Chin Chin Chu) are ordinary and feel superfluous, there are places in the narrative where the energy dips (which is inexcusable in a comedy), the manner in which a fellow called Fa in Shanghai is introduced seems to suggest that he will be a significant player among Happy’s allies but then he inexplicably disappears for most of the film, and the sidelining of Diana Penty’s Happy feels like such an opportunity lost considering the spark this underrated, under-utilised actor showed in the first Happy.

Truth be told, I was really looking forward to more scenes with Sinha and Penty together, because though Sinha is the bigger star, Penty has the charisma to match. Where she does get screen space in Happy Phirr Bhag Jayegi, Penty gives us evidence of her innate verve, which adds to the disappointment on this front.

Sinha’s filmography so far has been dominated by crass big-banner ventures often trivialising sexual harassment and starring major male stars, in which she played the hero’s lover who could have been played by any other marginal female star. She has underlined her ability to be more than just a vapid sidelight and in fact to carry a story on her shoulders in films such as Lootera, Noor and Ittefaq. Happy Phirr Bhag Jayegi gives her the chance to tap her comic timing and she does so with gusto, leading the charge in an ensemble cast of gifted actors. Piyush Mishra is as hilarious as he was last time. Sheirgill gets more opportunities here to mine his flair for comedy and is good too. And Gill is, without question, hero material.

Happy Phirr Bhag Jayegi is not without flaws, but they are overshadowed by the absence of references to farts, poop and animal backsides, homophobia, misogyny and other ugly biases that have repeatedly reared their heads in the kind of comedies Sinha herself has been a part of over the years. Pleasant and engaging is an option in this genre – thank you, Mr Aziz, for knowing that.

Note: This is not a Hindi film. The dialogues are a mix of Punjabi, Hindi, Urdu and a spot of Mandarin (I think), with Punjabi dominating the conversations but not so much that a non-Hindi speaker would be lost.

Rating (out of five stars): **1/4

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	137 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/bollywood/happy-phirr-bhag-jayegi-movie-review-sonakshi-sinha-leads-charge-with-gusto-in-a-pleasantly-silly-comedy-5034911.html

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

REVIEW 620: SAHEB BIWI AUR GANGSTER 3

Release date:	July 27, 2018
Director:	Tigmanshu Dhulia
Cast: Language:	Mahie Gill, Sanjay Dutt, Jimmy Sheirgill, Chitrangda Singh, Deepak Tijori, Kabir Bedi, Deepraj Rana, Soha Ali Khan, Zakir Hussain, Nafisa Ali Hindi

“Jab naam ke alaava kucch bacha na ho toh naam ko bacha bacha ke chalna chahiye (When you have nothing left but your name, you would do well to fiercely protect that name),” says a nautch girl to an arrogant aristocrat in Saheb Biwi Aur Gangster (SB&G) 3. The effect is lost in translation, but in Hindi this is the kind of zinger written and delivered without sounding self-conscious and bombastic that made Saheb Biwi Aur Gangster (2011) and its sequel, SB&G Returns (2013), such fun to watch. Five years after Jimmy Sheirgill, Mahie Gill and Irrfan Khan crackled and popped on screen in Tigmanshu Dhulia’s second film of the series, comes the third.

Sheirgill and Gill remain the saheb (master) and biwi (wife) of the title. The gangster played by Khan is gone, of course, and in his place arrives Sanjay Dutt, a once charismatic superstar with a sensitive face who has, in the past decade, allowed himself to become a listless, lumbering giant barely able to move a limb or a facial muscle.

It is evident from the opening scene that Dhulia intends to make this Dutt – the star, not the character he plays – the centrepiece of his enterprise. And so we are treated to several minutes of the man, yet unnamed, playing Russian Roulette with a parade of hapless fellow humans in a London nightclub called House of Lords. His invincibility is underlined by the Baba Theme track which goes – I exaggerate not – “Dekho dekho dekho dekho dekho dekho dekho dekho dekho dekho dekho aaya / He’s the Baba, he’s the Baba, he’s the Baba / le aaya tera baap.”

As every Bollywood buff knows, these lyrics allude to Dutt’s infantile real-life nickname, which serves to stress his public image of an overgrown, golden-hearted baby who is too innocent to know what he is doing when he messes up. There is not an atom of fierceness in the teddy-bear-like sobriquet, so using it in this film makes no sense since he plays a royal with a reputation for ruthlessness and violence here.

This is the first hint of Dhulia’s seeming disinterest in this project, which appears to have been slapped together to give everyone on the team something to do. In SB&G3, we are back with Aditya Pratap Singh (Sheirgill), member of a former princely family trying to retain some significance by having a political career in a post-Independence India that no longer recognises royalty and titles although the families themselves hold on to “His Highness”, “Yuvraaj”, “Kunwar” and other dregs of an era long gone. Aditya has been away in prison, while his first wife Madhvi (Gill) honed her own skills as a politician and his second wife Ranjana (Soha Ali Khan) honed her passion for alcohol.

Uday Pratap Singh (Dutt) is the son of another royal family of Rajasthan, whose ties with his father (Kabir Bedi) and brother (Deepak Tijori) are strained. Uday is in love with the beautiful dancer Suhani (Chitrangda Singh).

As with the earlier two films, here too someone is lusting after someone he ought not to be eyeing, several players in the story are bitter, and some are planning revenge on those they resent or hate. Given that two-thirds of the principal cast is the same, you would think that this is a safe formula, but nothing is foolproof in the absence of solid writing. 

Except for a couple of clever dialogues like the one quoted in the first paragraph, and Madhvi, the rest of the lines and characters are barely developed and lack spark. Madhvi’s actions in her first few scenes are laugh-out-loud hilarious and cheeky, which is exactly what we have come to expect of this volatile creature who is unapologetic about her sexual appetite and her anger towards Aditya.  Sheirgill is sincere as always, but suffers because Aditya’s graph lacks fizz. Still, the structuring of their first scene together on a terrace is a reminder of how effective SB&G and SB&G Returns were because Dhulia was evidently committed to both.

Here, the writer-director makes the mistake of forgetting that the volcanic nature of the first two SB&G films came from the gangster entering the Aditya-Madhvi relationship. Irrfan Khan and Randeep Hooda (who was in Part 1) are among Bollywood’s finest actors. Dutt is an able actor who gave up trying a long time ago. In the absence of an explosive third angle in this triangle, the story moves along mechanically with a handful of somewhat interesting turns but no major plot point worthy of a gasp.

Too many characters hang loosely around, including Aditya’s loyal lieutenant Kanhaiya (still played by Deepraj Rana), Kanhaiya’s impactless daughter and that lukewarm girl Aditya has lukewarm sex with out of the blue, as though someone suddenly remembered, “Yaar, there was lots of great sex (uncommonly explicit by Bollywood standards) in the first film. Yahaan bhi kucch karna chahiye, nahin?”

The editing, which was such a strong point of the first two films, is lackadaisical here. The music is run-of-the-mill unless you insist on counting the brief use of the gorgeous classic Lag ja gale. And the sound design and editing in a fight scene involving Uday in his father’s palace is slapdash enough to draw the attention of even an inexpert ear.

To be fair to the film, it does manage to summon up an eerie atmosphere of foreboding through its background score by Dharma Vish, along with DoP Amlendu Chaudhary’s low-lit frames and Dhananjoy Mondal’s production design in the corridors and gloomy rooms of Aditya and Madhvi’s palace. And Gill does still manage to make Madhvi a character deserving of a viewer’s emotional involvement. The film could have been so much more than the passably entertaining fare that it is if Dhulia and his co-writer Sanjay Chouhan had spent more time polishing up her story and fleshing out the multiple characters around her, including Uday, rather than leaning on Dutt’s stardom for support.

Sanjay Dutt is not Salman Khan whose films may often lack depth and sensitivity, but who absolutely has to be credited for being completely invested in his fandom and in maintaining himself. Sanju Baba has rested on his laurels and his natural charisma for too long to be trying his hand at this stage at those self-referential lines and inside jokes that seem to resonate so well with Salman fans (even if they are now boring to critics and non-fan audiences). Here he tries a Salman on the viewer when his character says: “Zindagi ka mazaa humne bahut kam liya hai. Ab waapas lauta hoon. Zindagi bhar ka mazaa loonga (I have not lived life to the fullest so far. Now I am back. I intend to enjoy a lifetime of happiness).” Coming as they do on the heels of the indulgent biopic lovingly crafted for him by his good friend, director Rajkumar Hirani, that has been a box-office blockbuster, these lines brim with Dutt’s desire to make a comeback in the public eye. He has a right to that ambition, but why was a filmmaker capable of such lovely works as Haasil, Paan Singh Tomar and Raag Desh, unable to see that the actor lacks the fire to hold up a weak script?

The first two Saheb Biwi Aur Gangster films were gratifying action-and-vengeance-packed rides. This one is just okay.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	A
Running time:	2 hours 20 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/saheb-biwi-aur-gangster-3-movie-review-sanjay-dutt-is-stiff-but-mahie-gill-lends-spark-to-a-fading-franchise-4833651.html

Poster courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/SBG3Film/