… AND THE GAMES THE THACKERAYS PLAY

Sparing Hindi Medium, Raees and Dear Zindagi, attacking Ae Dil Hai Mushkil for featuring a Pakistani star – how Mumbai’s first family of cultural policing cherrypicks their controversies

By Anna MM Vetticad

(A shorter version of this article was published in The Hindu Businessline’s BLink on June 17, 2017.)

It is Bollywood’s sleeper hit of the year, having quietly completed five weeks in theatres and grossed Rs 68 crore-plus at domestic turnstiles so far, in the midst of the high-decibel hype generated by the marketing teams of more high-profile films. Hindi Medium starring Irrfan Khan and Pakistani artiste Saba Qamar appears to have found its popular appeal with a combination of comedy, charismatic leads and, above all, a theme that has resonated with the masses.

Wait…

What was that again, you ask?

She’s Pakistani, yet the Mumbai-based nationalist crowd has not been up in arms, as they were last winter over Karan Johar’s Ae Dil Hai Mushkil starring her compatriot Fawad Khan?

What happened to all that rhetoric about “honouring our soldiers dying at the border” by boycotting talent from the other side, following the Uri terror strike?

These are questions the film industry and mediapersons discussed in whispers around the time Hindi Medium arrived on the big screen, but avoided raising in public for fear of giving ideas to violence-prone social and political organisations or bruising their egos to the point of driving them to action despite their disinterest. Such groups tend to strike films in the immediate pre-release period, because that is when producers are most vulnerable and most prone to succumb to unreasonable demands. That is also when a controversy is prone to attract headlines, which is any violent protesting group’s primary goal. Now that Hindi Medium is nearing the end of its theatrical run, having been swept out of most theatres by Hurricane Salman’s Tubelight, it is safe for us to have this prickly discussion.

Between October 2016 and May 2017, at least four Hindi films starring Pakistanis have come to Indian theatres, but extremists have obstructed only one: Ae Dil Hai Mushkil released on October 28, 2016. Raj Thackeray and his party Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS), with the tacit support of the present establishment at the Centre and the state, harangued Johar to such an extent over Fawad, that the panicked producer-director issued an abject apology and went so far as to rewrite, re-edit and re-dub his film at the last minute to change a crucial aspect of his storyline: that Ae Dil was originally an India-Pakistan love story, albeit set in London, in which Anushka Sharma, Fawad Khan, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Shah Rukh Khan and Fawad’s fellow countryman Imran Abbas were all playing Pakistani Muslim characters.

(For details of the alterations made to the film, please read my column titled “How KJo reworked Ae Dil Hai Mushkil”, published on November 12, 2016).

Johar also did nothing to quell rumours that he had donated Rs 5 crore to the Army Welfare Fund, as “penance” stipulated by Raj for the transgression of casting Fawad in Ae Dil. Contrary to news reports claiming that the Army rejected this payment, sources in the film industry and defence establishment tell me that Johar made no such payment in the first place, therefore there was no question of rejection by the Army. However, Johar’s silence on the false stories being circulated in the media helped Raj to further strut his fake bravado.

Just weeks after Ae Dil, Gauri Shinde’s Dear Zindagi starring Alia Bhatt and Shah Rukh came out on November 26, 2016. Dear Zindagi starred the Pakistani actor-singer Ali Zafar in a crucial supporting role, yet did not elicit a whimper of protest from Raj Thackeray and his goons or his estranged cousin Uddhav Thackeray and the Shiv Sena, who together form Mumbai’s first family of cultural policing.

India-Pakistan relations had not miraculously normalised in the four weeks between the two, so to understand the difference in extremist responses to Ae Dil and Dear Zindagi, it is important to travel back in time to October 2, 2009. It was the morning of the release of Johar’s production Wake Up Sid starring Ranbir Kapoor and Konkona Sen Sharma. On discovering that characters in the film were referring to “Mumbai” as “Bombay”, MNS threatened to block it. Hearing reports of vandalism on Day 1 at theatres screening Wake Up Sid in the state, Johar rushed to Raj’s home to seek forgiveness, thus gifting him and the relatively new MNS an important political victory in a fracas clearly cleverly created by the party to gain some mileage just days before the Maharashtra Assembly elections.

Since Johar had keeled over so quickly, he was marked out as an easy target for any state leader wishing to stress his regionalist or nationalist credentials. And so, shortly afterwards, Cousin Uddhav decided to use him to score a point in a game of one-upmanship with Cousin Raj. The SRK-starrer My Name Is Khan (MNIK), directed by Johar and co-produced by him with Shah Rukh’s Red Chillies Entertainment, was scheduled for an early 2010 release. Uddhav decreed that Shiv Sena would not allow MNIK in theatres unless Shah Rukh expressed regret for remarks made a short while earlier about the need to include Pakistani players in the IPL.

Shah Rukh, not Johar – big mistake.

Bullies usually avoid attacking unknown quantities, opting instead for tried-and-tested victims. Where Johar may possibly have complied to save his film, Shah Rukh refused. MNIK was released despite hitches, it went on to become one of the year’s biggest hits, and Cousin Uddhav ended up with egg on his face. Scorecard: Raj – 1, Uddhav – 0.

Now fast forward to 2016, and you may see why Raj was confident that grandstanding over Johar’s film would pay off whereas targeting Dear Zindagi (a Shah Rukh-starrer and a co-production between Johar, Shinde and the star’s home banner) could be risky. What if he or Uddhav had demanded contrition for the casting of Dear Zindagi and been asked to take a hike? What if… There is nothing a bully fears more than losing face.

Besides, both Thackerays understand news cycles and would have known that sustaining the ruckus for another four weeks after Ae Dil’s release would have been near impossible. However sensational a headline may be, the media tends to move on, and organisations like the two Senas are nothing without the spotlight on their aggressions.

This is not to say that Shah Rukh is unbendable. The political atmosphere in 2017 is poles apart  from 2009-10 when Maharashtra’s Congress chief minister Ashok Chavan had expressed disappointment over the Wake Up Sid imbroglio. “Johar should have approached the police or the government instead of going to any individual or party for sorting out his grievances,” Chavan had been quoted in the press as saying back then. The left-of-centre Congress was in power at the Centre and in the state, and though the party has not always been consistent in its opposition to fundamentalism, Shah Rukh may have taken a stand on MNIK with a reasonable expectation that both governments had his back. As it happens, his instincts were right. It turned out that Chavan was not spewing empty words earlier about Wake Up Sid and did indeed provide My Name Is Khan with security and moral support.

India in 2017 is a different country, the far right-wing BJP is in power at the Centre, and a BJP-Shiv Sena combine rules Maharashtra. Not surprisingly then, in the run-up to this January’s release of his home production Raees in which he played the titular lead, Shah Rukh held a pre-emptive meeting with Raj. The actor’s team projected it as a courtesy call unrelated to Raees, no doubt to assuage the disappointment of Shah Rukh’s constituency of liberals. MNS, on the other hand, tomtommed their claim that the star had met Raj to assure him that Pakistani actress Mahira Khan – Raees’ heroine – would not be coming to India to promote the film.

However saddened a liberal may feel by Shah Rukh’s decision to legitimise Raj as an extra-Constitutional authority with punitive powers, it must be acknowledged that the star managed his dignity far better than Johar did in the wake of the Wake Up Sid and Ae Dil episodes. Besides, the sound and fury that MNS typically generates over such issues was missing in the case of Raees, making it clear that Raj felt the need to tread on eggshells around SRK.

News of their rendezvous and the MNS chief’s reduced chest-thumping reminded me of a scene from the film Fan last year in which Shah Rukh’s character Aryan Khanna is warned by his manager about a particular obsessive fan. She says: “Ek baar sorry bol do na. Sanki hai voh.” (Just say sorry once. He’s whimsical / unpredictable / a madcap.) Aryan shoots back: “Acchha, aur main kya hoon?” (I see, and what am I?) Raj Thackeray knows that when a star has proved himself to be “sanki” in these matters, a hoodlum would do well to handle him with care.

That then is a deconstruction of the games the Thackerays play: they are so transparent, that they would be laughable if they were not dangerous, and they are entirely reliant on a potent mix of a gullible public, pliable public figures, overt or covert support from the establishment of the time and – sadly – journalists who do not ask the right questions.

This brings us to the silence of both Senas on Hindi Medium. It is not as inexplicable as you might think.

A spokesperson for the production company T-Series confirms that during the Ae Dil episode they had informed Raj that they finished shooting Hindi Medium long before the Uri attacks and promised not to use Qamar for the promotions. The ego massage he got from that communication notwithstanding, Raj would in any case have known that raising the same issue within just eight months would yield diminishing returns in the media – remember he left a gap of eight years between Wake Up Sid and Ae Dil. Besides, Saba Qamar is not as familiar a face in India as Fawad. To target her film when she and her nationality are not widely known among audiences would not have been as politically rewarding as targeting Ae Dil had been.

Likewise, controversy over a small Irrfan-starrer would probably get less media space than a massy KJo production or a Shah Rukh-starrer. Even back in 2009-10, Raj’s clash with Johar over Wake Up Sid was a whisper in comparison with Uddhav’s run-in with SRK over My Name Is Khan, a factor not just of the alacrity with which Johar succumbed in the first case while Shah Rukh did not in the second, but also of MNIK’s scale, the magnitude of SRK’s stardom and the blockbuster track record of the SRK-Kajol-Johar hero-heroine-director combination.

In any case, Hindi Medium’s marketing campaign was cleverly designed by T-Series to emphasise its theme rather than its cast. That theme – language and class snobbery – is a pet cause of the Sangh Parivar at large and the present Central government whose spokespersons routinely demean opponents proficient in English by labelling them the “Lutyens elite”. The ruling BJP is therefore unlikely to have backed an assault on Hindi Medium, since it could have ended up being a self-goal.

Like the late Bal Thackeray before them, Raj and Uddhav cherrypick their controversies with great thought. Keeping all the above factors in mind, sparing Hindi Medium would have been a no-brainer for them.

Link to the version of this column published in The Hindu Businessline:

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/watch/the-games-thackerays-play/article9727826.ece

Previous instalment of Film Fatale: “A Lament for Banglawood”

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/watch/a-lament-for-banglawood/article9653826.ece

  

Photographs courtesy:

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

https://www.facebook.com/RaeesTheFilm/

https://www.facebook.com/DearZindagi/

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

REVIEW 457: RAEES

Release date:	January 25, 2017
Director:	Rahul Dholakia
Cast: Language:	Shah Rukh Khan, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Mahira Khan, Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub, Atul Kulkarni, Narendra Jha, Sheeba Chaddha, Guest appearance: Sunny Leone Hindi

“Pabandi hi baghawat ki shuruat hai (Restriction is the starting block of rebellion),” says the  voiceover at the start of this film, while commenting on prohibition in Gujarat. It is a simple line, yet so effective within this story and in the larger current national context as India reels under bans, prudishness, increasing censorship of the arts, eating habits and life choices, and prohibition in states where governments are well aware of flourishing gray markets.

This is the kind of writing – straightforward and effective – with which writer-director Rahul Dholakia kicks off Raees. Borne on the shoulders of this screenplay, the first half of the film is taut, pacey, action packed and utterly gripping. As the story takes us through little Raees’ early interest in the illicit alcohol trade, shows us how deeply entrenched the business is in the bylanes of his hometown such that children from ordinary homes become natural collaborators of criminals, and recounts the manner in which the adult Raees establishes himself as an ‘entrepreneur’ with political connections and a social conscience, I found myself unable to take my eyes off the screen for a single second.

The only exasperating aspect of Raees up to that point is that it seems like the heroine is being treated as a good-looking side-show. (As it turns out, she becomes important later, though her husband’s attitude towards her is disquietingly misogynistic, his actions repeatedly verging on violence. The film’s tolerance of his behaviour towards her and rose-tinted view of his other crimes becomes disturbing as it rolls along.)

That said, the narrative in the opening half is purposeful, single-minded in its desire to entertain us yet be realistic to the extent that it is possible within the confines of conventional Bollywood storytelling, and unapologetic about those goals.

So, Ram Sampath’s songs are catchy, relevant to the storyline and well woven into the narrative. The stunts are deliciously amusing in their improbability and heart-stoppingly thrilling. And like every traditional Indian hero, like Bruce Willis, Harrison Ford and Tom Cruise a few continents away, Shah Rukh Khan too emerges miraculously more or less unscathed from every battering. It does not matter, because Raees’ pre-interval storyline remains packed, and it does not pretend to be anything but what it is: a commercially driven entertainer.

The proceedings in that half are unrelenting, leaving us with little time to ponder over why the hero casually took to crime although there is nothing to suggest that he had no choice or was a congenital psychopath; and skimming over his questionable interpretation of his mother’s conviction, “Koi dhanda chhota nahin hota aur dhande se bada koi dharam nahin hota.”

Then comes the second half and Raees loses its way. It is hard to understand why so many writers and directors conceive and execute their films in this fashion. Post-interval, Raees’ story boasts of limited depth, and tries to camouflage this failing with a swagger. The beginning of the end comes with the song Zaalima mindlessly thrown into the narrative immediately after the interval, and it goes downhill from there.

The sad part is that Khan as the titular character is very convincing. SRK has looked graceful and dignified in his films starting with Fan, in which he has made no obvious effort to camouflage his age. It helps that he rocks that beard. I do wish someone would remind him though that he looks so much nicer romancing a heroine closer to him in years.

It has been a pleasure in the past year or so to see Khan allowing the actor in him to subsume the star. In this film, he strikes an uncommon balance between being stylish, stylised and yet restrained.

Raees’ supporting cast is a roll call of some of Bollywood’s finest character actors: Nawazuddin Siddique (yes that is how his surname is spelt in the credits, not as Siddiqui) plays Raees’ bête noir, the dogged policeman Jaideep Ambalal Majmudar, Mohammad Zeeshan Ayyub is in the role of the hero’s loyal lieutenant Sadiq, Atul Kulkarni plays Raees’ first boss Jairaj, and Narendra Jha his later business associate Moosa. Kulkarni gets the first shot at one of the films most wolf-whistle-worthy lines (which is later quoted by Raees): “Baniye ki dimaag aur Miyabhai ki daring, dono hai iske paas.” Mahirah (spelling taken from the credits again) Khan – a star in Pakistan, a debutant here – is naturally easy before the camera playing Raees’ girlfriend and later his wife.

Good actors need good writing and editing on which to peg their craft though, and the post-interval Raees seems not to know where to go in these departments.

One of the positive aspects of Raees, as with last year’s Salman Khan-starrer Sultan and several films in recent years featuring central Muslim characters is that their religious identity does not define them. This is a much-needed departure from the treatment of minority community members in Hindi films until a decade back. Dholakia is not needlessly conscious of his hero being Muslim, as a result of which we get to see him as a person who happens to be Muslim, male, Gujarati and many other things – in short, a human being.  

If only that nuanced approach had been carried into every other element of Raees’ post-interval storyline. Instead what we get is a matter-of-fact account of how A happened in the hero’s life, then B, then C, then D, all the way to Z, with no detailing, no surprises, too much music, too many close-ups, shots that linger longer than they should, all in what seems like an effort to impress. This is unexpected considering that Dholakia is the man who gave us the deeply moving Parzania (2007) based on the true story of a child who went missing in the 2002 Gujarat riots.

Raees is rumoured to be based on the true story of the gangster Abdul Latif who operated in Gujarat in the 1980s and ’90s. From information available on the Internet, there is a fascinating tale in there of his association with Dawood Ibrahim and of the police-politician-underworld nexus that allowed him to rise. This film scrapes the surface but fails to take forward what lies beneath. Likewise, the potentially intriguing life-long face-off in Raees between the hero and Majmudar is well begun and could have been the fulcrum of the film, but Majmudar becomes only an intermittent presence after a point. The hypocrisy of governments that introduce prohibition, the politics of riots, the virtues of vicious men all could have been beautifully studied in this film but are not.

The first half of Raees is supremely interesting and filled with promise. Besides, Shah Rukh Khan is a joy to watch in this new, exploratory innings of his career. The second half lets him down though. Style trumping substance is rarely a good thing for a film.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	142 minutes

A version of this review has been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/raees-movie-review-shah-rukh-khan-aces-his-role-even-when-the-film-loses-its-way-3219968.html

Posters courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/RaeesTheFilm/