REVIEW 533: CHEF

Release date:	October 6, 2017
Director:	Raja Krishna Menon
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
Running time:	133 minutes 32 seconds

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/chef-movie-review-saifs-flimsy-but-occasionally-sweet-film-takes-the-chefing-out-of-favreaus-chef-4114951.html

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

REVIEW 360: BAJIRAO MASTANI

Release date:	December 18, 2015
Director:	Sanjay Leela Bhansali
Cast: Language:	Ranveer Singh, Deepika Padukone, Priyanka Chopra, Tanvi Azmi, Vaibbhav Tatwawdi, Milind Soman, Mahesh Manjrekar, Raza Murad Hindi-Marathi

Bajirao Mastani is almost everything the world has come to expect from a Sanjay Leela Bhansali film. Almost. It is a ravishing spectacle, the costumes are lush, the jewellery dazzling, the sets extravagant, the cinematography brilliant, the frames painterly, the lead cast more gorgeous than you would imagine human beings could be. For this alone, it is worth watching.

There is more to it than that though. The director’s latest film is told as a fable about the love between the 18th century Maratha warrior Peshwa Bajirao I and his second wife Mastani. The tone is trance-like and dreamy even when it is operatic and melodramatic, like a whisper passed down through generations and swirling about somewhere in the mists of a distant, mythical time.

This is an interesting narrative choice considering that the two lead characters are in fact historical figures and their romance is not an apocryphal story. It is a choice (made no doubt with the goal of not offending any community or angering historians) that permits the storyteller to be poetic, to fictionalise and dramatise to his heart’s content, even while staying as faithful to history texts as it is possible while chronicling the intimate lives of public figures.

Bajirao is a skilled soldier, a great leader and Peshwa (prime minister) to Chhatrapati Shahu of the Maratha Empire. Mastani is the valiant daughter of Bundelkhand’s Maharaja Chhatrasal with his Muslim queen Ruhaani Bai. Since Bajirao is already married when they first meet during the course of one of his battles, he returns home alone to his much-in-love wife Kashibai. But Mastani pursues Bajirao and they later marry.

The film is about the two simultaneous battles subsequently fought by one of the greatest warriors known to this country, the first one to expand the Chhatrapati’s empire and the other to gain acceptance for Mastani among his family. 

From the start it is evident that Bajirao Mastani is Bhansali’s ode to K. Asif’s Mughal-e-Azam, the folktale about the love between the Mughal crown prince Salim (later to become Emperor Jehangir) and the slave girl Anarkali. Yet, it is unlike that iconic 1960 film, or its precursor about the same legend, Nandlal Jaswantlal’s Anarkali (1953), or even the story of the prince’s father Akbar’s political-romantic alliance with his Rajput Hindu wife Jodha Bai recounted by Ashutosh Gowariker in Jodhaa Akbar (2008). The difference from these three memorable films lies in the fact that Bajirao Mastani doesn’t deify its pivotal romance by making it seem like its central male character is committed to just one woman or by brushing aside uncomfortable questions about male infidelity and the fleeting nature of this particular hero’s feelings.

Bhansali doesn’t evade this tricky territory, instead giving Kashibai a crucial scene in which she asks Mastani about the reliability of Bajirao’s heart that is set on one woman at one time, another at another time and who knows who next. Mastani clearly has no answer besides her own affection for him. She does not bat an eyelid when Bajirao impregnates Kashi without feeling conflicted about his emotions or actions. And she does not see his relationship with her as faithlessness towards Kashi who he describes as not just his wife but also his friend.

While the film makes it hard for us to be out-and-out angered by Bajirao’s hypocrisy, it certainly calls out the hypocrisy of his family and advisers who, as he points out, would have been willing to accept Mastani as his concubine but not his wife.

Equally special is the way the film negotiates Hindu-Muslim equations. Many of today’s Hindutvavaadis hold up the 17^th and 18^th century Marathas as flag-bearers of a Hindu Rashtra, as antagonists of Muslims and as a people who fought off “Muslim rule” in what they believe is “Hindu India”. Bhansali’s starting block with this film is in itself a position against their interpretation of history since he chooses to tell the story of a Maratha’s love for a Muslim. He takes it further with the Peshwa’s open declaration that his battle with the Mughals is restricted to his desire to extend the Chhatrapati’s territory and has nothing to do with their religion.

These then are the most fascinating aspects of the film: the unromanticised envisioning of Bajirao as a good man with shades of grey; the refusal to sidestep a first wife’s pain even if her husband is the film’s hero, and his relationship with his second wife is what folklore has placed on a pedestal; and the telling ambiguity about who is opposing Mastani out of affection for Kashi and who out of disdain for her being Muslim.

These elements are further augmented by the excellent principle cast – Ranveer Singh as Bajirao, Deepika Padukone as Mastani and Priyanka Chopra as Kashibai – supported by a bunch of talents, most especially Tanvi Azmi as Bajirao’s formidable mother.

Though Kashi gets less screen time than the titular characters, Priyanka makes the film as much her own as theirs, shining with grace, poise and restraint each time she comes on screen. She also slips comfortably into the role of a Maratha woman, tweaking her body language to fit the part and going well beyond the crutch of that sparkling nose ring and those lavish outfits.

The camera is occasionally distracted by Mastani’s luminous beauty, but Deepika still manages to lend depth to her character. She also reminds us of her penchant for action in one of the film’s best scenes, in which she single-handedly fends off a group of attacking swordsmen.

To stand out in the presence of these scintillating ladies takes some doing, but Ranveer achieves precisely that, reaching into himself for this character to deliver his best performance till date. In a break from the assembly-line uniformity of most male bodies in Hindi films these days (and his own over-muscled torso in the otherwise-lovely Ram-leela) he also gets his body right for the role. Hard though it is, with Bajirao Mastani he actually makes us forget that boy who stormed into our lives as the fabulous Bittoo who did “binness” on debut in Band Baaja Baaraat.

The use of language in the film too is neatly done. I’m not an expert on Marathi but the dialect that these characters speak blended with Hindi flows with natural ease. Thankfully, none of the actors is ‘doing an accent’. Instead, their speech is nicely nuanced in its intonations.

If Bajirao Mastani falls short of being what it might have been despite these positives, it is for two reasons: the songs (Bhansali’s compositions are a let-down); and the smattering of self-indulgent scenes that slow it down especially in the post-interval portion, with spectacle subordinating all else. Like the unwell Peshwa’s elongated, feverish hallucinations; or when Bajirao swishes and swings a chuttuvaal in each hand and barges solo into an enemy force. This whip-like sword with a flexible blade is used in Kalaripayattu, the martial art form from Kerala in which Ranveer trained for this role, and the actor looks amazingly at home with it. But the scene itself is no less silly – despite the more stylised presentation – than Sunny Deol single-handedly taking on the entire Pakistan Army with a hand pump in Gadar.

This is also what ails the relatively pretty-sounding song Pinga featuring both leading ladies. The women dance impeccably yet the focus is so much on the look that the feel is lost. That electricity Bhansali conjured up in the Dola re duet between Madhuri Dixit and Aishwarya Rai in Devdas (2002) is missing here, and Pinga ends up looking like a me-too and an also-ran.

In the rest of the songs, the choreography is heart-stopping, the dancers energetic or elegant as required, but the tunes are unremarkable. This is why Deepika’s dance to Deewani Mastani in the luxuriant Aina Mahal looks stunning yet does not match up to a number that it is evidently paying tribute to: Mughal-e-Azam’s Pyaar kiya to darna kya in which Anarkali challenged Akbar through words, music and dance in another unforgettable hall of mirrors.

Still, there is more to love than lament in Bajirao Mastani. Note the scene in which a mob of shadows seems to march towards the Peshwa before the camera raises its head from the floor and we realise that they come from a band of purposeful Brahmins. Note the many other scenes in which diyas, mirrors and silks shimmer like liquid gold. Note too Bajirao’s secularism, his reminder to us that all religions preach love yet love has no religion, his open defiance of the clergy, Mastani’s courage and passion, Kashibai’s dignity despite her limited choices, and that lovely moment of bonding between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law.

Despite its shortcomings then, this is a brave and beautiful film – beautiful to look at, beautiful in its position on religion, brave in its take on history, brave in its unwillingness to paint religious groups or its primary characters as black or white.

Bhansalified history, as it turns out, makes for good cinema.

Rating (out of five): ***

CBFC Rating (India): U  Running time: 158 minutes

This review has also been published on firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/bajirao-mastani-review-theres-more-to-love-than-lament-in-this-beautifully-brave-film-2552146.html#disqus_thread

Photograph courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/bajiraomastani/