REVIEW 449: KAHAANI 2 – DURGA RANI SINGH

Release date:	December 2, 2016
Director:	Sujoy Ghosh
Cast: Language:	Vidya Balan, Arjun Rampal, Jugal Hansraj, Kharaj Mukherjee, Tota Roy Choudhury, Naisha Khanna, Tunisha Sharma, Manini Chadha Hindi

If you believe the end maketh the movie, then writer-director Sujoy Ghosh’s Kahaani 2: Durga Rani Singh falls strictly in the category of the not-extraordinary. The second instalment in this series starring Vidya Balan features nothing like the surprise that punched us in the collective gut in Kahaani’s climax back in 2012.

Before the end comes the beginning though, and there is much to recommend in the journey between those two points here – the atmospherics, the pall of disquiet blanketing the narrative, the unusual subject, locations rarely explored by Bollywood (Kalimpong and Chandan Nagar in West Bengal in addition to Kolkata), the cast, and most of all, Balan.

Kahaani 2 begins with a young single mother in Chandan Nagar hanging out with her bedridden daughter. We soon learn that when Vidya Sinha is at work, she has a nurse coming home to take care of Mini who is paralysed from the waist down.

Vidya wants to take her daughter to the US for treatment that she hopes will give the child back the use of her legs. She persists with this belief although her kindly doctor in Kolkata cautions her against being too optimistic about a cure. Then one day an abduction followed by another tragic turn of events ruptures their happy, middle-class existence.

Who is that voice on the phone threatening to separate Mini from her mother forever? Will this Vidya – like the redoubtable Vidya Bagchi of the first film – thrash aside all obstacles to attain her goal? Keep guessing.

What made Kahaani an absolute killer was that its entertaining, layered storytelling was followed by a disclosure through which we realised that nothing had been what it seemed through the film. Kahaani 2 features many disturbing and mystifying individual elements. It also delivers some shock treatment for viewers midway through the first half. Ultimately though you realise that most things in the film were more or less what you thought they were when they first rolled by and the big reveal is just so-so.

The ending may not deliver the goods, but Balan certainly does. The media has for years now discussed her willingness to take on the physical attributes of the various characters she plays. While that is no doubt a remarkable quality, to focus on that alone would be an injustice to this fine artist since physical quirks can be used as crutches by average actors too. Balan’s strength is her ability to drown out her own personality for a role.

And so, here in Kahaani 2, there is not a trace of the hard-as-nails heroine of Kahaani, the overtly sexual, bubbly Silk from The Dirty Picture (2011) or the brazenly manipulative Krishna from Ishqiya (2010) who had no qualms about purring out the words “chutiyam sulphate”, at a time when the industry’s heroines were usually identified by their coyness.

When Vidya/Durga in Kahaani 2 recoils at the first touch of a man she loves, the actress convinces us of her character’s diffidence and fears. As a distraught mother and a victim of social indifference, she does what we have come to expect of this formidable star: she erases Vidya Balan to become the person she is playing, Vidya Sinha.

The rest of the cast offers no equivalent of the lovely Parambrata Chatterjee and Nawazuddin Siddiqui from Kahaani, but it is still good to see an evolving (dishy as always) Arjun Rampal playing the policeman with a past, Inderjeet Singh, and Jugal Hansraj – the little boy from Masoom who grew up to a lacklustre acting career – surprisingly effective as a creep. The incredibly cute Naisha Khanna and the interesting youngster Tunisha Sharma – both playing Mini at different stages of her life – get limited space to showcase their talent, but are clearly worth watching out for.

Though Kahaani 2 has none of the memorable detailing of satellite characters that made Kahaani outstanding (where are you, Bob Biswas?) it is unobtrusively insightful in its own way. The long-term effects of sexual abuse, victim blaming, the politics in the police establishment and small-town life are all dealt with effectively. I enjoyed the sweetness of the brief romance between Vidya/Durga and her beau Arun (Tota Roy Choudhury, nice!), his kindness to her and his non-aggressive wooing. And there is a refreshing, believable normalcy in the relationship between Inderjeet and his wife played by the sprightly debutant Manini Chadha.

The big let-down in Kahaani is the writing of the climax, whether viewed in isolation or in comparison with its remarkable predecessor. For the record, these are the credits: Screenplay – Sujoy Ghosh, Dialogues – Ritesh Shah & Sujoy Ghosh, Story – Sujoy Ghosh & Suresh Nair.  Ghosh, who is so confident in his conceptualisation till that point, is clearly aiming at a similar sock-the-viewer-in-the-neck impact as before, but comes up instead with an unimaginative, more or less predictable whimper.

To be fair, his deft direction and Namrata Rao’s skillful editing ensure that there is not a moment of boredom right until then. The two have found a good match in DoP Tapan Basu, production designers Kaushik Das and Subrata Barik who together manage to make the film’s small and large spaces feel cloistered and intimidating, while lending unexpected warmth to Vidya and Mini’s tiny home in Chandan Nagar.

Clinton Cerejo’s music gently wafts around the film and then ends with a bang: the neatly orchestrated, energetic rendition of Rabindranath Tagore’s Anandaloke mangalaloke accompanying the end credits is so haunting that I stuck around for the very last word to disappear from the screen.

Vidya Balan is fantastic in Kahaani 2, but storywise, the film is like a pleasant meal spoilt by a mediocre dessert. If only…

Rating (out of five stars): **

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	129 minutes 55 seconds

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/kahaani-2-movie-review-vidya-balan-is-lovely-but-sujoy-ghosh-climax-is-a-let-down-3135648.html

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kahaani_2:_Durga_Rani_Singh

REVIEW 337: BELASESHE

Release date:	June 26, 2015
Director:	Nandita Roy, Shiboprosad Mukherjee
Cast: Language:	Soumitra Chatterjee, Swatilekha Sengupta, Shankar Chakraborty, Indrani Dutta, Aparajita Auddy, Kharaj Mukherjee, Rituparna Sengupta, Sujoy Prasad Chatterjee, Indrajit Chakraborty, Monami Ghosh, Anindya Chatterjee Bengali

SPOILERS AHEAD:

There is a warmth that envelops the heart of a certain kind of film buff when a veteran actor walks on to the screen. I confess I am that kind – emotional to the point of being schmaltzy. But even the pleasure of seeing the legendary Soumitra Chatterjee – reunited here with Swatilekha Sengupta, heroine of Satyajit Ray’s Ghare Baire – is insufficient compensation for Belaseshe’s painfully traditionalist view of marriage and almost laughable endorsement of socially dictated pre-designated gender roles within the institution.

Tagore’s The Home And The World on which Ghare Baire was based, gave us a husband who wanted his wife to have a life beyond the home. At one point, it seems that Biswanath Majumdar (Soumitra’s character in Belaseshe) shares that mindset. But Tagore and Ray were not faking liberalism; Belaseshe is. And so, in the end, Biswanath explains that he has come to realise a wife’s role in a marriage is inside the house and the husband’s role is outside.

What a disappointing, conventional conclusion from a film that starts out asking tough questions!

Soumitra here plays an old man who shocks his family by announcing that he wants a divorce from his wife of almost 50 years. Biswanath does not hate Arati (Swatilekha). He simply believes they have become a habit with each other in a loveless marriage that is not worth preserving. When she recounts the pleasant times they’ve had together, he tells her he thinks she loves domestic life rather than him. In a nation that deifies marriage and motherhood, how often do you see a mainstream film with the courage to articulate such thoughts?

Biswanath even alludes to his sexual needs and her disinterest. How often do you hear an old couple discuss such matters in an Indian film?

While hers is a relatively tepid character, she too raises a valid point when, in response to his complaint that she was not available for romance in their younger days, she asks him how she could have possibly spared the time when she was looking after his ailing dad.

These are all issues worth addressing. Is raising a family the sole purpose of marriage? Or should companionship be the primary goal? Is procreation the only purpose of sex? Is sex to be treated as dispensable in a marriage once you’ve had the number of children you want?

Biswanath’s decision to divorce Arati and the impact on their children could have led to a deep, much-needed exploration of the pluses and minuses of marriage along with these crucial questions. What we get after the initial promise though, are cliches, conformism, a cringe-worthy romanticisation of wifely slavishness and a transparent effort to trivialise modernity.

In a scene clearly intended to be highly romantic, Arati seeks to illustrate her love for Biswanath by revealing that she used to pick up the wet towels he would leave around after bathing and re-use them herself, to imbibe the smell of him; she would also eat his leftovers after each meal.

If you are moved by her revelation, forgive me for saying this… Ugh.

Before you present a counter argument, let me pre-empt it: I have no doubt relationships like Biswanath and Arati’s do exist. The issue is that the film pretends at the start to be questioning such marriages, then goes down the same old beaten track of glorifying them.

No effort is spared to please conservatives who are opposed to a dissection of marriage, who deny the intrinsically patriarchal nature of the institution, who believe every marriage is worth preserving at all costs, and who see procreation and child-rearing as the noblest of all causes, to be ranked way above friendship in a marriage, companionship, sexual pleasure and happiness.

Director duo Nandita Roy and Shiboprosad Mukherjee’s Belaseshe is not the liberal film it projects itself as being. Nowhere is this clearer than with the difference in its treatment of male and female infidelity. Biswanath and Arati’s son Barin (Shankar Chakraborty) and daughter Mili (Rituparna Sengupta) are both having extra-marital affairs, yet the film makes only brief references to Barin’s indiscretion and ultimate penitence, whereas it dwells at length on Mili’s unfaithfulness and later gives us elongated scenes of her remorse.

In the end, Biswanath does precisely what he claimed he was against at first. He said he was anti a marriage being nothing more than a habit you’re afraid to break; yet when he returns to Arati it is because he misses the presence of the person who would pick up his dirty clothes after him and always knew where his shoes were. Just as he wanted, she has become independent in his absence. He, however, is too dependent on her for his daily needs. Is that what makes a marriage worth holding on to? Why not hire an efficient maid instead of getting a wife? Biswanath seems to have forgotten by then that he had himself earlier made this point to the dutiful Arati.

There is also a clever attempt to deify tradition as symbolised by the old couple, while making light of modernity, personified by their youngest daughter Piu (Monami Ghosh) and her husband Palash (Anindya Chatterjee). The effort to lend gravitas to Biswanath and Arati while comedifying Piu and Palash is unmistakable. The youngsters are both TV producers. Their milieu is treated with the same disdainful attitude that makes the elderly in the real world routinely say, “Aajkal ke bachchon ka kya kehna?” (What is one to say of today’s generation?) Palash comes across as a buffoon. And from Piu’s tongue emerges such trite lines as this one: We are constantly social networking but there is no networking in this room. 

The cast is a mixed bag. Soumitra’s sensitive face is always a joy to watch and despite the faux liberalism of Belaseshe, it is hard not to be drawn to his Biswanath. Swatilekha has her moments but for the most part is deadpan. Of their children and children’s spouses, the most convincing performances come from Shankar as Barin, Indrani Dutta playing his wife, Rituparna as Mili and Indrajit Chakraborty making a brief appearance as her boyfriend. Aparajita Auddy, Kharaj Mukherjee, Sujoy Prasad Chatterjee and Anindya caricature their characters, which is a factor as much of the faulty writing as of their acting. Monami and the grandchildren fare better.

This is a theme that called for greater honesty of purpose and delicacy in approach. What we get instead is a please-all balancing act, verbosity and literalness. Despite the presence of Soumitra-da and the promising premise, Belaseshe is an unremarkable film.

Rating (out of five): **

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	141 minutes

Photograph courtesy: Eros International