Release
date:
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October 6, 2017
|
Director:
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Raja Krishna
Menon
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Cast:
Language: |
Saif Ali Khan, Padmapriya Janakiraman, Svar Kamble, Chandan Roy Sanyal,
Dinesh P. Nair, Milind Soman, Sobhita Dhulipala, Ram Gopal Bajaj, Pawan
Chopra
Hindi
|
It is hard to entirely dislike
any film starring Saif Ali Khan. He has such a likeable personality and such
natural ease before the camera, that he ends up adding charm to any project he
is a part of, however flimsy or dismal it might be. Chef is not dismal, but it is flimsy.
Airlift director Raja Krishna Menon’s new
film is an official remake of the Hollywood film Chef directed by and starring Jon Favreau, in which a once shining star
on the American culinary scene has a meltdown when a critic skewers his
restaurant. The video clip of his moment of weakness turns viral and ends up
almost ruining him professionally. Instead of allowing that trough in his
career to translate into a complete full stop, he uses the opportunity to find a
new road and simultaneously bond with the son he had with his ex-wife.
In the Hindi Chef, Khan plays top chef Roshan Kalra who is plateauing and loses
his job at a plush restaurant in New York when he hits a dissatisfied patron.
At first feeling sorry for himself and angry at what he perceives as an
injustice, he soon realises that he had indeed allowed his work to
qualitatively decline. The customer, it dawns on him, was, in fact, right.
On the urging of his good friend
and former colleague Vinnie (the lovely Sobhita Dhulipala from Anurag Kashyap’s
Raman Raghav 2.0 last year), he uses
the hiatus to visit his son in Kochi, where the boy lives with his mother Radha
Menon, a successful classical dancer who was once married to Roshan. Without
going into the details of how it happens, it can be told that like in the
original, the father and child end up on a road trip in a food truck Roshan has
decided to run.
What Chef has going for it is that Saif is as seemingly effortless as
always before the camera. So is Janakiraman who, as it happens, is a hottie. Seriously,
she is exquisite. Janakiraman is a pan-India actress with a filmography
dominated by Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu. She is not a known face in Bollywood
though, which is truly Bollywood’s loss.
Both lead actors share good chemistry
with debutant Svar Kamble who plays Roshan and Radha’s kid Armaan. And in a
small role, Milind Soman reminds us that there are few creatures in this world
sexier than a well-built man in a well-draped mundu.
The thing about Kerala is that it
is so spectacular, that wherever you aim your camera you will automatically see
beauty, and director of photography Priya Seth takes full advantage of the
picturesque landscape at her disposal to lay out an array of stunning visuals
for our consumption. That becomes particularly important because after a while,
Chef transitions into a road film,
taking us along from Kerala to Goa and finally Delhi. What Seth does not serve
us though are food visuals, a fact that turns out to be this film’s death knell
since it is – wait for it – a food movie.
So yeah, Chef is a slick production, with everything and everyone looking
good from start to finish (I particularly enjoyed Anuradha Shetty’s designs of
the interiors of Roshan, Radha and Soman’s character Biju’s homes – each one
markedly, and interestingly, different) but when viewed as a whole, it is an
extremely frustrating experience. The joy of watching any road movie is to see
the changing geography and cultures of the places the protagonists pass through.
We get a decent serving of the former and a teeny bit of the latter here. What is
truly unforgivable though is Chef’s
lack of fervour for food.
It is hard to believe that Menon
is not well-acquainted with the genre. If he was not, all he needed to do for
inspiration and education was to look within Kerala, where most of Chef is set, and from where, just this
year, Angamaly Diaries dished out a
plethora of thoroughly exhilarating food scenes on screen, set in the roadside
eateries and kitchens of a small southern Indian town. Alternatively, he could
have sought out reference material from the film industry in which he operates.
Although Bollywood does not frequent food films, just recently in 2013 director
Ritesh Batra brought home to us the enticing sights and sounds of cooking in The Lunchbox – oil bubbling in a pan,
the whoosh when fresh onions meet the surface of that oil, the crackle of
mustard, human hands affectionately putting it all together. Forget these two films
– all he needed to do was watch the original Chef for guidance.
Favreau’s film was not
earth-shatteringly brilliant, but it had clarity about what it wanted to do and
no hesitation in doing it. It told a heartwarming story, and was almost
meditative in the way it captured the lead character’s intense romance with
cooking. To see him slice, chop and dice vegetables, select meats and veggies, fry,
bake, boil and roast, and then plate up as a painter would work a canvas or a
dancer would work a stage was enough to get any normal viewer’s mouth watering
and heart racing. That, after all, is the primary mission of any such film.
Throughout the Hindi Chef, I wanted to shake my fist at the
screen and scream at it in anger when large passages went by with no reference
to food at all, interspersed with scenes where people were shown cooking,
serving and eating in long and medium shots, with little to no focus on what lay
on their plates, the processes that got it there or their pleasure while
tasting the end product. It took almost 45 minutes for Chef to give us an entire scene devoted to the hero conceptualising
and cooking a complete dish, with the camera closing in on his ingredients, his
methods and his invention. I am not even a particularly obsessive foodie, but
the moment that scene was over, I immediately felt the urge to rush back home
to my kitchen and try out that thing Roshan christens a rotzza.
That is the effect that any good food
film should have on its audience.
When Armaan tries chhole bhature
for the first time and the camera gingerly watched him at arm’s length, I almost
yelled, “Oh, for God’s sake, zoom in on that bloody bhatura, will you?” Somewhere
there is a mention of idiyappam a.k.a. string hoppers, a steamed rice-noodle preparation
with a coconut filling that is a popular part of Malayali cuisine but little
known in the north – again, no close up. Was this the DoP’s failure, or did she
take those shots and did the editor remove them, or was it the director’s call
not to feature such shots at all? Whatever be the reason, Menon’s film takes
the chefing out of Chef, which is pretty
much like taking the music out of a musical. What’s the point then? Huh?
Raghu Dixit has come up with some
agreeable background music for Chef,
but his songs are surprisingly bland, with the exception of an up-tempo number
called Shugal laga le that revs up
the mood as soon as it is played. Dixit himself makes an appearance to sing it,
and his introduction is one of the film’s most awkwardly constructed scenes.
The other comes in the interactions between Roshan and Biju. Both appear to be
the most hurriedly written, poorly developed parts of the screenplay.
There
is some sweetness to be experienced in the interactions between Roshan and
Armaan and separately between Roshan and Radha, some insights that emerge from
the account of Roshan’s early struggles and poignancy in his experiences in
Amritsar, but it is just not enough. Besides, the lethargic pace of the
narrative underlines the flimsiness of the screenplay by Ritesh Shah, Suresh
Nair and Menon. Ankur Tewari’s lyrics for Shugal
laga le, “Ghoomey awaara se / Mere kadam jahaan / Bantaa gaya bas rastaa / Rahi miley jahaan bhi / Pagley manmauji jo / Badhta gaya bas kaarvaan” (Wherever I
wandered, wherever my path took me, I made my own road / Wherever I encountered
fellow travellers, crazy whimsical beings, the caravan got longer), capture the
essence of what this film wanted to be and might have been if it had explored
Roshan’s relationships – with the owner of Galli, with food, with Radha, with
Armaan and with himself – in greater depth.
On the plus side, the blending of
Hindi, Malayalam and English in Ritesh Shah’s dialogues is neatly done, though the
writing team’s lack of research is shocking in a scene where a character
informs Roshan that he knows Hindi, which he describes as “the national
language”. Err, India does not have a “national language”, Team Chef. Have you not read the Constitution
or the history of the country’s language movement? It is bad enough that Hindi
propagandists work hard to spread this lie, but such ignorance from a screenwriting
crew is grossly inexcusable.
This is not to say that Chef has nothing to offer. It is
pleasant in parts, pretty almost throughout, and the cast is appealing. In the
absence of heft and a commitment to its genre though, it remains an ineffectual
film. A close scrutiny of the credits reveals that there was actually a food
stylist – Sandhya Kumar – on the rolls. What the heck? Why bring her on and
then waste her work? It also turns out that the chefs at Galli Kitchen, Roshan’s
New York eatery, were all drawn from JW Marriott, including some leading names
from the world of gastronomy. Umm, why bother with such detailing in the
casting if you ain’t gonna show them cook? Oh lord, I want to bang my head on
my table in exasperation as I write this.
Saif Ali Khan, who I believe is
one of Hindi cinema’s most underrated actors, needs to choose better.
It does not speak well of Menon’s
latest screen offering, that I felt the need to compensate for the deep
dissatisfaction I felt after watching it by coming home and watching an entire
episode of Masterchef Australia. To
see Gary rustle up a simple plate of roast chicken with pea custard and fondant
potatoes was a yummilicous and sensual experience. That’s what Chef should
have been but is not.
Rating
(out of five stars): *1/2
CBFC Rating (India):
|
UA
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Running time:
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133 minutes 32 seconds
|
This
review has also been published on Firstpost:
Poster courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/ChefFilmIndia/
