CAMPAIGN TO COMMUNALISE DISCUSSIONS ON HINDI CINEMA / FILM FATALE: COLUMN PUBLISHED IN THE HINDU BUSINESSLINE

THERE ARE NO “HINDU ACTORS” & “MUSLIM ACTORS”, PLEASE!

The past three years have witnessed a blatant effort by communal forces to infiltrate viewer and reviewer responses to Hindi films

By Anna MM Vetticad

“Is not this same white missionary beach that gave 4 stars to raees, a movie on an anti-national Moslem terr0rist? Any Hindu actor’s movie, this hater tries to pull it down!” (sic)

This comment was one of many that appeared below my review of the Hindi film Jolly LLB 2, starring Akshay Kumar, published on Firstpost this month. If it weren’t so venomous, it would be funny. A friend with a vivid imagination says “missionary beach” conjures up visions of hanky panky in the sand — an experience I cannot claim to have had. Just as I did not give Raees a four-star review, I rated it 2.5 stars. Whatever. The truth, as you know, is irrelevant to propagandists. They prefer what Donald Trump’s aide Kellyanne Conway describes as “alternative facts”.


So what’s new? After all, falsehoods and personal attacks against critics in the virtual world are as old as the day websites first opened their comments sections to the public. The preceding paragraphs signal a relatively recent trend in online animosity though, evidenced by the pigeon-holing of Kumar.

 “Hindu actor” — what does that even mean? A man may simultaneously be Hindu and an actor, but to place the two words side by side is as reductive and demeaning to his craft as tags like “woman journalist”, “gay filmmaker”, “Dalit writer” and “black singer” when used outside discussions on discrimination.

If you have been around long enough, this labelling may remind you of Hrithik Roshan’s smashing debut in 2000, which led to some distasteful right-wing cheer at the arrival of a “Hindu superstar”. The dominance of the three Khans in the Hindi film industry had been a sore point with the Hindu Right for a while, but the political atmosphere was different back then, and the attempt to celebrate an actor’s religious identity remained on the margins of our collective existence.

That began to change with the BJP and Narendra Modi’s general election victory in 2014. The subsequent flow of the ruling party’s Internet battalions into the film criticism space turned into a flood in 2015, when Aamir Khan and Shah Rukh Khan both publicly condemned religious intolerance. Since then, these trolls have unrelentingly exhorted viewers to boycott — and critics to slam — films starring “Muslim actors” Aamir and Shah Rukh, and to back “Hindu actors” Ajay Devgn, Hrithik Roshan and Kumar.

How can we know that these are BJP supporters, you ask? Because their vocabulary and behaviour patterns have consistently mirrored BJP trolls, and mimicked the party and government’s reaction to these stars. For instance, online workers goaded “nationalists” to boycott Snapdeal, since Aamir was its brand ambassador, and Dilwale, since it starred Shah Rukh, even as the sarkar engineered the termination of Aamir’s association with the Incredible India campaign and bullied Snapdeal into leaving him.

Meanwhile, these trolls have largely spared the other Khan, Salman. BJP insiders admit that this is one of Salman’s many rewards for his proximity to the PM and silence on the government’s shenanigans.

The repulsive communal profiling of Hindi film stars peaked this January
 when the SRK-starrer Raees
 clashed in theatres with Kaabil featuring Roshan. Online troops demanded that “nationalists” should skip Raees and make Kaabil a hit, while BJP national general secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya batted for Kaabil with
 this obtuse tweet he claimed
 was about demonetisation: “The #Raees who are not for the coun
try are of no use. We should all 
stand with a #Kaabil (worthy) patriot.”

As I write this column, I call up fellow critics to ask what they make of this ugly scenario. Raja Sen, whose reviews began appearing on Rediff in 2004, tells me, “The Hindu-Muslim divide among fan responses existed earlier too, but it was only one of many polarities including regionalism which one encountered as a journalist online. Now though, religion dominates responses to reviews. It is often clear that these people are not even paying attention to what you have written and that they are not necessarily film fans or mobs hired by some star’s PR, but may well be members of Chairman Modi’s orange army.”

Suparna Sharma, film critic for The Asian Age, offers this analysis: “Today’s online trolls attacking critics based entirely on the religion of certain stars are simply an extension of the ongoing campaign to communalise everything — the food we eat, the clothes we wear, how we vote, whether we stand for the national anthem or not... Unfortunately for them, and fortunately for us, box-office is secular. So while politicians and their Sanghi trolls can hound out, say, Pakistani actors from a film, they can’t really keep people out of theatres. I’d like to believe that critics, but more than them, audiences who queue up to buy tickets with their hard-earned money and commit two-three hours to a film, are above this sort of bunkum.”

Still, it is important to vocally condemn this well-strategised endeavour to infiltrate our reactions to cinema, because we cannot risk having well-meaning viewers and reviewers go the way of many political journalists, and subconsciously self-censor their public statements to avoid abuse. We live in a world where even shamshaan ghats (cremation grounds) and kabristaans (cemeteries) are being politicised. In this world, more than ever, it is important too to remind bigots that for a true cinephile, there are no “Hindu actors” and “Muslim actors”; there are only actors, characters, stories and films.

(This article was published in The Hindu Businessline’s BLink on February 25, 2017.)

Link to column published in The Hindu Businessline:

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/watch/there-are-no-hindu-actors-and-muslim-actors-please/article9557459.ece

Previous instalment of Film Fatale: Ignoring the jana in Jana Gana Mana

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/watch/ignoring-the-jana-in-jana-gana-mana/article9503111.ece

Photographs courtesy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raees_(film)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dangal_(film)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jolly_LLB_2

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

REVIEW 463: JOLLY LLB 2 (a.k.a. THE STATE VS JOLLY LLB 2)

Release date:	February 10, 2017
Director:	Subhash Kapoor
Cast: Language:	Akshay Kumar, Annu Kapoor, Saurabh Shukla, Kumud Mishra, Sayani Gupta, Manav Kaul, Rajiv Gupta, Inaamulhaq, Sunil Kumar Palwal, Ram Gopal Bajaj, V.M. Badola, Vinod Nagpal, Huma Qureshi Hindi

Director Subhash Kapoor’s Jolly LLB was one of the best Hindi films of 2013. It was that rare Bollywood venture that journeyed into an Indian courtroom with realistic storytelling rather than manufactured high-decibel dialoguebaazi, drawing humour and melodrama from true-to-life situations, through the medium of some of the industry’s finest actors led by the inimitable Arshad Warsi.

It goes without saying then that Kapoor has put his neck on the line with Jolly LLB 2, resurrecting a successful title and upping the stakes by casting a superstar as his protagonist. Three questions are crying out to be answered here: Is Part 2 as good as Part 1? Is Akshay Kumar as good as Warsi? Even when seen in isolation without the context of its predecessor, is this a good film? Patience, dear readers, patience!

Kapoor – who is credited with the story, screenplay, dialogues and direction of Jolly LLB 2 – sets the film in Lucknow where Jagdishwar Mishra a.k.a. Jolly (Akshay Kumar) works as an assistant to the veteran lawyer Rizvi (Ram Gopal Bajaj). A tragic incident prompts Jolly to set aside his casual dishonesty and metamorphose into a formidable legal activist. 

The case that has this transformative effect on him involves a pregnant widow seeking justice for her murdered husband, police corruption, judicial indifference, Kashmir politics and more. Individually, these are explosive ingredients. And significant portions of the film are credible as a result. It fails to come together in its entirety though because of the inconsistent writing. 

Keep in mind that the hero of the first Jolly LLB was initially ignorant, often unprepared, lazy and consequently amusing, but he was not a fool. The Jolly of this new tale is well-intentioned, but the weakness of his arguments, the glaring lacunae in the evidence he presents in court throughout (even after he has seemingly matured as a lawyer) and the loopholes in the demands made by the opposing counsel seem invisible not just to him but to the writer too.

Are polygraph tests admissible in a court of law? If a lawyer facilitates a prisoner’s escape, would it not strike him that presenting the escapee as a witness in a case could be problematic? These are just a couple of the questionable situations the film presents. There are more, which are dealt with in such a way that it is hard to figure out whether what guides Jolly’s actions and what prevents him from effectively citing the law in court is inexperience, ignorance or stupidity.

Making matters worse is Jolly LLB 2’s seeming indecision about the tone it wishes to strike: realistic or revved up. The many little touches that made Jolly LLB so enchanting, especially the detailing in the courtroom procedures and production design, are also not so evident here. It does not help that the first film’s one blaring shortcoming is carried forward into this one: songs are needlessly injected into the proceedings, the worst of them being a tuneless Holi number – Manj Musik’s Go pagal – that completely disrupts the mood of the narrative.

The gender equations in Jolly LLB 2 are worth a discussion. Without raising a clamour about it, the film gives us a hero whose wife (Huma Qureshi) has not taken his surname – she is Pushpa Pandey, not Pushpa Mishra. Without appearing overly self-conscious or comedifying the situation to soften the blow for viewers who may be disconcerted, it also shows him cooking for her and their child. And when her husband is assaulted, she – in a reminder of Rani from Queen – gives the attacker a fight to remember. (A bow here to action director Parvez Shaikh for the execution of that brief scene.)

Coming from a deeply patriarchal industry serving a largely patriarchal audience, these flashes amount to a noteworthy statement from Kapoor.

That statement would have meant a lot more though, if the film as a whole did not sideline women so completely. Pushpa Pandey herself is a marginal player in the central drama. The only female character of any importance to the plot is Hina Siddiqui (Sayani Gupta, wow!), whose personal calamity changes Jolly. A witness’ mother makes an impactless appearance. I wonder if it has struck the team of Jolly LLB 2 that everyone else with a name in their script – lawyers, relatives of lawyers, judges, witnesses – is a man.

Akshay Kumar deserves some praise here for not allowing his starry swagger to rear its head except in the song ‘n’ dance routines. His Jolly is not quite as charismatic as Warsi’s lawyer was in the first film, but he is interesting enough. This performance is not quite as good as what he achieved in last year’s Airlift, but it is engaging enough. Kapoor too must be commended for not allowing the storyline to be overwhelmed by such a major star’s presence.

The supporting cast is a parade of theatre stalwarts and seasoned character artistes from films. What a pleasure for stage enthusiasts to see Bajaj (a former head of the National School of Drama), V.M. Badola and Vinod Nagpal in the same big-screen production. What a pleasure too to see an actor from Jammu & Kashmir playing a cop from the J&K force, rather than an outsider to the state attempting an accent: Sunil Kumar Palwal has a striking presence and will hopefully be seen in more Hindi films in the coming years. (While on the subject of accents, watch Inaamulhaq playing a Kashmiri pronounce “card” differently within a span of a few seconds.)

My pick of the cast, as with Jolly LLB, is Saurabh Shukla playing the eccentric judge, Sunder Lal Tripathi, whose veneer of idiocy camouflages his don’t-mess-with-me attitude. That said, Shukla is not as memorable here as he was playing the same character in the previous film. The difference between him in 2013 and 2017 is a reminder that actors do not function in a vacuum in films: great performances are born of great acting extracted by great screenplays and great direction.

Jolly LLB 2, as it turns out, is a mixed bag. The references to the Kashmir conflict and Hindu-Muslim tensions are impressive because the film raises these crucial issues without being in your face about them. It also bravely takes a swipe at self-righteous deshbhakts in the ongoing nationalist-versus-anti-national debate. The basic elements in the story are teeming with potential. When it’s good, Jolly LLB 2 is alternately amusing and moving. Sadly, the patchy treatment leaves it sagging too often.

So yes, it pulls off humour and emotional resonance in several places, but those passages are also a reminder of what might have been if more time and thought had been invested in the writing of this film as a whole. Jolly LLB 2 has its moments, poignant, political and profound, but it ain’t no Jolly LLB.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	138 minutes 31 seconds

This article was also published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/bollywood/jolly-llb-2-review-akshay-kumar-subhash-kapoor-pull-off-emotional-resonance-in-a-patchy-film-3276406.html

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jolly_LLB_2