REVIEW 740: MADE IN CHINA

Release date:	October 25, 2019
Director:	Mikhil Musale
Cast: Language:	Rajkummar Rao, Boman Irani, Mouni Roy, Sumeet Vyas, Amyra Dastur, Gajraj Rao, Manoj Joshi, Abhishek Banerjee, Paresh Rawal Hindi

For a country that is virtually a baby producing machine, we are oddly hesitant to talk about sex outside our bedrooms, and there too, very often not. 

It took Hindi filmdom several decades to evolve beyond showing flowers and birds nudging each other in parks as a stand-in for human couples. But in the past 10-plus years, there has been a gradual attitudinal shift as Bollywood has finally acknowledged that girls and boys take off their undergarments while, err, doing the deed (Pyaar Ke Side Effects, 2006), that some couples need sperm donors to help them conceive (Vicky Donor, 2012), that erectile dysfunction is a thing (Shubh Mangal Saavdhan, 2017), women menstruate (Padman, 2018), women masturbate (Veere Di Wedding, 2018), sexual dysfunction and venereal disease are a thing too (Khandaani Shafakhana, 2019). Who knew Bollywood had it in them?

The latest in the tiny trickle of Hindi films with a plot pivoted on sex and sexuality is the Rajkummar Rao-starrer Made In China, based on the book of the same name by Parinda Joshi. Rao here plays a Gujarati youngster forever on the lookout for a new business idea. Raghuveer Mehta’s entrepreneurial efforts keep flopping, but he remains undeterred. Then one day in China, he receives a proposal to market an aphrodisiac in India. The catch is that its main ingredient is illegal. 

Revise that: Raghu’s primary challenge in this matter turns out not to be that he has to sell in the grey market, but that his product occupies a grey market in the Indian mindspace where taboo subjects are stashed away. This calls for ingenuity on his part and leads to some comical and occasionally bizarre situations. 

Before the film gets to Raghu’s business experiments though, there is a death. That, in fact, is how Made In China begins: there is a death in Gujarat and the prime suspects are Raghu and his business partner, the sexologist Dr Vardhi played by Boman Irani. 

From the start, it is evident that director Mikhil Musale is aiming at being a thriller with a message and a certain whimsy. He gets his look and feel right with the aid of some atmospheric production design, cinematographer Anuj Rakesh Dhawan’s moody, low-lit frames, boisterous songs and a particularly memorable, ominous zithery background sound that brings to mind buzzing insects. 

There are places at which the narrative gets funny too. Very very funny. A scene in which Dr Vardhi gives a sex talk to a conference of adults who were expecting something else is an absolute hoot without once resorting to icky or immature double entendre. But considering that Rao and Irani are in fine fettle here, Made In China surprisingly feels at all times like a film that is about to lift off but never quite takes flight. 

A large part of this is due to the tonal and logical inconsistency in the narrative. There is, for instance, no explanation for Raghu’s cheery attitude during his interrogation by the investigating authorities, an off-kilter element that particularly impacts Made In China because it is a running thread throughout the film. 

There is no explanation either for why Raghu hides his latest business from his wife with whom we are led to believe he has a close and non-traditional relationship. As evidence of this, they have been shown swilling alcohol together, sharing a cigarette (both points are very high on Bollywood’s list of Things Liberal Women Do) and discussing her orgasms. She also supports him unflinchingly in the face of his family’s contempt for his many failures. Yet somehow he is too ashamed to tell her that he is producing and peddling an aphrodisiac, and her reaction when she learns the truth ends up justifying his fears. If this is meant to be a comment on the superficiality of contemporary liberalism, it is not convincing. 

Made In China also drags in long stretches. When Rao and Irani are not together on screen, the storytelling lacks spark, which is disappointing considering that the supporting cast is full of actors with proven talent. Even an overly-made-up, forever-dressed-to-the-nines Mouni Roy as Raghu’s wife Rukmani brings a certain panache to her performance, but how convincing can an actor be when her lavish wardrobe and perfect face distract so completely from her claims of financial struggles? 

At one point, Raghu gathers this wisdom from a character played by Paresh Rawal who ends up being his business guru: “The customer is a ch*****,” says the man. The epithet is muted but since it is heard as often as prepositions and conjunctions on the streets of north India, it is understood that viewers know the word he repeatedly mouths and Raghu dutifully echoes – that’s part of the joke, of course. It is tempting to play on their vocabulary and accuse Musale of making a ch***** of his audience, but that would be off the mark because there is an interesting concept somewhere in this film that has been lost in execution. 

Made In China fails to hit the bull’s eye because it sorely needed an evening out of pace and tone, depth of characterisation and detailing in the plotline. The best thing about it are Rao and Irani who are a pleasure to watch even in this middling affair.

Rating (out of five stars): **

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	130 minutes

A version of this review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/made-in-china-movie-review-rajkummar-rao-conjures-up-a-certain-whimsy-but-in-a-half-done-film-7553431.html

Photograph courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_In_China_(2019_film)

REVIEW 696: PM NARENDRA MODI

Release date:	May 24, 2019
Director:	Omung Kumar B
Cast: Language:	Vivek Oberoi (credited here as Vivek Anand Oberoi), Manoj Joshi, Zarina Wahab, Suresh Oberoi, Prashant Narayanan, Darshan Kumar, Boman Irani, Anjan Shrivastav, Akshat R. Saluja, Yatin Karyekar, Rajendra Gupta Hindi

This week’s new Bollywood release, director Omung Kumar B’s PM Narendra Modi (PMNM), is not a biography. It is an unwittingly farcical, comical hagiography of Narendra Modi and the BJP, and even that is a euphemistic description. To put it simply, this is a highly fictionalised account of the present Indian prime minister’s life.

Omung Kumar’s recall value so far has come from the vastly superior Priyanka Chopra-starrer Mary Kom (2014) and the embarrassingly bad Aishwarya Rai Bachchan-starrer Sarbjit (2016). PM Narendra Modi (PMNM) falls into the so-bad-it-could-be-fun category, except that it is not fun at all – it is, instead, an insult to viewer intelligence and viewer knowledge.

“Modi ek insaan nahin, ek soch hai (Modi is not a person, Modi is a way of thinking / a concept),” says the protagonist himself at one point. Aur Modi ke baare mein soch badalne ke liye, to change the thinking about Modi, the screenplay – co-written by Anirudh Chawla and the leading man, Vivek Anand Oberoi – runs facts through a carefully chosen sieve and presents a new, rewritten history so far removed from recorded reality, that it bears little resemblance to the actual Modi. In that sense, PMNM reminded me of a scene in last year’s Malayalam feature Kammara Sambhavam in which the hero watches a PR film about his life and does not recognise himself on screen.

Things that did not happen in Modi’s life are in this film shown to have happened: he is shown being arrested during the Emergency, the then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee is shown praising him to the press during the 2002 riots, in the run-up to the 2014 election Modi is shown volunteering to do a live interview with a hostile TV journalist before an audience and acing it. In the face of such liberties with facts involving major historical events, all PMNM’s other follies and flaws – the word “grateful” being spelt as “greatful” in the opening acknowledgements, the lazy caricature of former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Modi’s corrupt government colleague in Gujarat, the false suggestion that Modi never married, other monumental exaggerations and misrepresentations in the screenplay, Hitesh Modak’s overbearing background score and the overall tackiness of the narrative – pale into insignificance.

It is worth mentioning here that the aforementioned hostile journalist is a stooge of a corrupt industrialist called Aditya Reddy played by Prashant Narayanan. Three enemies are very clearly marked out by PMNM: Pakistan, the news media and, through the medium of the Reddy character, the dark-skinned self-serving south Indian.

On Vivek Oberoi’s shoulders falls the task of playing this larger-than-life version of Modi, determined to vanquish all three. Most of Oberoi’s co-stars are comparatively irrelevant because their roles are dwarfed by his, but despite being dealt the same hand, their performances are a mixed bag. Manoj Joshi looks oddly wimpish as Amit Shah (the BJP chief’s full name is muted out in the film for some reason), but Boman Irani brings some dignity to the role of Ratan Tata as does Zarina Wahab playing Modi’s mother. In an ocean of mediocrity, Anjan Shrivastav does a reasonably good take on Atal Bihari Vajpayee without resorting to gimmicky mimicry. 

As for Oberoi, well, in the actor who hams his way through this role, there is no trace of the young debutant who showed such spark under Ram Gopal Varma’s guidance in 2002’s Company. It is sad to watch an artist lose his touch. For those of us who saw something in him in Company, the only consolation is that his turn as Modi is less cringe-worthy than his performance as a horny young chap in Masti (2004), Grand Masti (2013) and Great Grand Masti (2016).

If you think about it, despite the apparent contrast between them, the Masti trilogy and PMNM both offer conventionally accepted definitions of masculinity. The Mastis used slapstick comedy as a vehicle to present us with men driven by their nether regions and their hormones as men naturally would be, or so we are given to understand. In PM Narendra Modi, the hero espouses an earnest, asexual, aggressive machoism, initially speaking of wanting to renounce the world and follow the path taken by Lord Buddha, and in the climactic moments ascribing his decisiveness – as the real life Narendra Modi has done – to a 56-inch chest. You see, his political journey is not a consequence of personal ambition, it is the answer to the public’s prayerful longing for “ek sachcha mard (a real man)” to lead them, to quote the words of a character early in the film.

Rating (out of five stars): 0

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	131 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/bollywood/pm-narendra-modi-movie-review-vivek-oberoi-hams-his-way-through-an-unwittingly-farcical-comical-hagiography-6693971.html

Poster courtesy:

https://www.facebook.com/ModiTheFilm2019/

REVIEW 659: ODIYAN

Release date:	December 14, 2018
Director:	V.A. Shrikumar Menon
Cast: Language:	Mohanlal, Manju Warrier, Prakash Raj, Sana Althaf, Innocent, Siddique, Manoj Joshi, Nandhu, Naraina, Kailash, Santhosh Keezhattoor Malayalam

Is he a congenital shape shifter or a master of disguise with the agility of a fleet-footed beast? Does he fight only in self-defence or is he a criminal messiah of evil? The answers take a while in coming in the new Mohanlal-Manju Warrier-starrer Odiyan, the tale of the last man from a tribe of the pre-electricity era in rural Kerala, said to transform into various animals and attack humans under the cover of night-time darkness.

When the film begins, an elderly Odiyan Manikyan (Mohanlal) returns to his village of Thenkkurussi after 15 years. Through a series of flashbacks that dominate the narrative, we learn of the reason for his departure under a cloud of suspicion following the deaths of two locals. We learn too of the triangular relationship between the poor hero, the mistress of the house he serves (Prabha played by Warrier) and the lustful Ravunni (Prakash Raj). Prabha has a sister (Sana Althaf) who is blind.

A considerable part of the first hour is spent in building up Manikyan’s animalistic avatar in viewers’ minds, and the initial sighting of him in this form is reasonably exciting as a result. He/it is not exactly a magnificent creature, but curiosity around precisely what he/it is and what he/it becomes, especially after we realise that Manikyan does not know the entire truth himself, is enough to sustain the film until that final well-executed clash with multiple opponents.

Audiences across the globe, including India, have bought into the tale of a nerdy kid bitten by a radioactive spider and metamorphosing into a webslinging superhero. We have embraced an interplanetary immigrant from Krypton with superhuman strength, the ability to fly and a penchant for wearing his underwear over a skin-tight jumpsuit. We have turned a bespectacled “boy who lived” and an evil wizard who split his soul to attain immortality into international literary and cinematic bestsellers. What Odiyan lacks is depth and detailing in contrast with these contemporary Western myths transposed on screen and with richly allegorical ancient religious mythology worldwide, including India’s own.

At its heart, Odiyan is perhaps intended as a metaphor for the beast within who could be unleashed for good or evil, depending on the human being it inhabits. Through the medium of the antagonist’s actions, it very obviously also is a comment on how myth and superstition can be exploited by ill-intentioned people. Via Manikyan, it is certainly a reminder of the power and reserves of strength that marginalised communities possess but rarely tap and are usually not even aware of. Harikrishnan’s screenplay does not have the imagination required to further flesh out these angles which have the potential for immense emotional heft when set, as Odiyan is, against the backdrop of a romance across class divides. Besides, the manner in which black (specifically, Ravunni’s complexion) is consistently interpreted as being symbolic of evil, is quite reprehensible. Contempt for dark skin is no doubt a real-world prejudice that could and should be portrayed in films – I am not objecting here to the prejudices of Odiyan’s characters, but to the director’s and writer’s own problematic gaze on Ravunni.

It could be argued of course that all this is a needless intellectualisation of a film that is meant to be just a fun fantasy flick. Well, Odiyan comes across as wanting to be something beyond that. Besides, contrary to expectations raised by its basic concept, there is more story than stunts in the narrative, and that story needed to offer more than it does.

What sustains Odiyan through its nearly three hours running time is the folksy air it manages to build up from the start, the special effects during the few (too few) action scenes, Mohanlal’s physical transformation to play the younger Manikyan – his styling, makeup and visible weight loss – and the pleasure, as always, of seeing Manju Warrier in a substantial role.

Lalettan himself occasionally, though not often enough, wades past the outward trappings of Odiyan Manikyan, past the stylised slow motion shots and close-ups designed for diehard, wolf-whistling fans, and looks inward for this performance, thus reminding us of the fine actor he is still capable of being. Prakash Raj has an imposing presence but overacts throughout.

Warrier, on the other hand, is uniformly good as the lonesome, long-suffering Prabha who has always known that her fate was written the moment she was born into a particular social class and often summons up the spirit to defy that written word.

Although Warrier is 18 years Mohanlal’s junior, and the age difference is a glaring reminder of how commercial Indian cinema continues to believe that women of his age are not worthy of being romanced on screen, it comes as a relief that Prabha is not a passing aside in the storyline like the ‘heroines’ of his films usually are these days (cases in point: Velipadinte Pusthakam and Oppam).

Their on-screen chemistry may not be electric, but there is a comfortable equation there that is mined well in a song sequence featuring both their characters in the open countryside at night. Here in this picturesque, atmospheric scene, the lines between dreams and reality, what is and what might be, blur, such that it simultaneously conveys the joyfulness of a couple being all that they want to be to each other and the melancholic awareness of the hurdles in their path.

This passage, and that excellently choreographed fight to the finish between Manikyan and his enemies exemplify Odiyan’s potential – a potential it has not lived up to. As things stand, it is neither extraordinary nor memorable, but it is engaging enough while it lasts.

Rating (out of five stars): **

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	167 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/odiyan-movie-review-mohanlals-transformed-physique-manju-warrier-are-usps-of-a-reasonably-watchable-mytho-fantasy-5730951.html

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