REVIEW 254: JAL

Release date:	April 4, 2014
Director:	Girish Malik
Cast: Language:	Purab Kohli (credited here as Purab H Kohli), Kirti Kulhari, Tannishtha Chatterjee, Saidah Jules, Yashpal Sharma, Mukul Dev Hindi

There is much that holds out promise in Jal, debutant director Girish Malik’s fable-like film about the terrifying fallout of water scarcity in a remote rural desert location: the Rann of Kutch (where the story is set) is stunning and DoP Sunita Radia painstakingly exploits its disturbing beauty; the costumes are as eye-catching and dramatic as you would expect in this part of the country; leading man Purab Kohli is as sincere as they get; Kirti Kulhari is as striking here as she was in Shaitan (2011); the rest of the Indian cast are all respected talents; Sonu Nigam and Bickram Ghosh as music directors give us a haunting background score and the goosebump-inducing Jal de in Shubha Mudgal’s voice; and oh those pink flamingoes, what a sight they are to behold! Besides, water politics and the consequent violence are more real than we privileged folk would like to believe. This is a story that needs to be told.

Purab plays a “water diviner” in the Rann called Bakka, a man who can tell where the precious liquid is to be found below that parched, cracked earth. The villagers have for long depended on him, but some have begun to doubt his skills. Bakka is the object of affection of a local girl (Tannishtha Chatterjee). A Russian bird enthusiast (Saidah Jules) lands up in their midst with a team of scientists to save the flamingoes from death by poor quality water. Her arrival stirs up the community since there is money to be earned from the rich Westerners plus all the men want to leer at the gori mem’s legs. Thrown into the mix is an enmity with a neighbouring village where water is not as scarce and where Bakka finds his one true love (Kirti Kulhari).

There’s potential for an epic here, and Malik manages to lend an intriguing mystical air to the initial proceedings in Jal. Everything about this film screams out its aspirations to grandeur and a massive scale, and it’s got a basic framework in place to fulfill its ambitions. After a point though, those ambitions dwarf everything else and Jal ends up feeling insubstantial, visually breathtaking but soulless.

Having started out raising a crucial issue, Malik and his co-writer Rakesh Mishra also proceed to arrive at a rather silly, unthinking conclusion that we often hear from uninformed members of the public: that environmentalists care more about animals and plants than human beings. Feature films aren’t lecterns from which sermons need to be delivered, but if a film positions itself as a green crusader, then it had damned well be more responsible with the point it makes. Mr Malik, there’s no either/or in environmental matters: even from a selfish point of view, humans need to save animals and plants from extinction to save themselves. Why did the foreigners in Jal refuse to provide succour to the thirsty villagers? Why didn’t the Indian authorities care? Neither question is explored with any depth.

This is a story that needed to be told. But it needed to be told better.

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

Footnote: Since the location, cinematography and costumes are Jal’s big pluses, I thought I’d give you a shorter than usual review, and post a photo album here instead. Hope you enjoy it.

CBFC Rating (India):	U/A
Running time:	136 minutes

Photographs courtesy: Effective Communication

REVIEW 234: R…RAJKUMAR

Release date:	December 6, 2013
Director:	Prabhu Deva
Cast: Language:	Shahid Kapoor, Sonu Sood, Sonakshi Sinha, Mukul Dev, Ashish Vidyarthi, Asrani, Srihari Hindi

Somewhere in a secret location between Mumbai and Chennai, there’s a factory that has mastered the assembly-line technique. The formula for the factory’s product is this: physically invincible hero (usually played by Akshay Kumar) + vulnerable heroine (almost always played by Sonakshi Sinha) + evil villain + lots of scenes in which the heroine is stalked by the hero or roughed up by the villain or both + loud songs + massive crowds of extras led by hero dancing to those songs + guest appearance by the rubber-spined Prabhu Deva in one of the songs + loud loud colours + litres of blood + shouting + humour interspersed with violence + one punch line that the hero repeats at regular intervals = a film!

Now here are instructions for the factory workers this week: (1) Replace Akshay Kumar with Shahid Kapoor. (2) In place of one villain have two. (3) Give Shahid’s character the grandiose line, “Silent ho jaa varna main violent ho jaaoonga.” (4) Check off the rest of the items in the formula – Sonakshi, yawn, check… blood, yawn, check… Prabhu Deva (also the film’s director), yawn, check… Ladies and gentlemen, here’s presenting RAMBO RAJKUMAR!!!!!

Oh ya, that’s the old title of R…Rajkumar. The name change was reportedly forced on the makers by copyright issues. Wish they’d been legally compelled to come up with at least one original thought for this project. For whatever it’s worth, this is the story: Romeo Rajkumar (Kapoor) works for the cocaine lord Shivraj (Sonu Sood) in Dhartipur village. He is assigned to kill Shivraj’s rival Parmar (Ashish Vidyarthi) but is distracted by the discovery that Chanda, the girl he ‘loves’, is the fellow’s niece. Chanda doesn’t care for Rajkumar but it’s nothing that some good old Hindi-film-style stalking and roughing up can’t fix. The damsel’s heart having been thus won, another impediment surfaces when Shivraj also falls for her. What follows is lots of scheming, screaming and bloodletting until the happily ever after.

I watched R…Rajkumar in a benumbed state of boredom because, try though I did, I couldn’t find a single element in it that we haven’t already seen in the gaudy-garish genre in recent years. The film is so cliched that I don’t even have the energy here to dwell at length on the many feminist concerns it raises with the treatment of its heroine. It would be callous not to raise one point though: there is nothing more disturbing in this film than the passing scene of a corrupt police officer raping a woman who’s probably in custody at his police station. We don’t actually see him in the act. The camera in the adjoining room is aimed somewhere in the direction of the bars of an open cell. On the floor we see a woman’s out-stretched arm and we hear her cries. A phone rings, someone calls out to the policeman who emerges from the cell in a dishevelled state while the woman continues to wail. In another film this could have been a poignant moment. In R…Rajkumar – a film which doesn’t display an iota of tenderness on any front, in which the hero’s irritating and distasteful idea of wooing is to pucker up his lips at every sight of the reluctant girl, which treats women as showpieces, in which bosomy female humans appear out of nowhere to grind their hips and bulging breasts to a song, in which the rape scene is just casually thrown in as if designed to titillate the target audience, in which no context of sensitivity is offered before or after that scene – it’s above and beyond offensive.

Any positives, did you ask? Well, Kapoor looks cute and dances well as usual, he fights smoothly, is funny in places and throws himself into the role with gusto, but what can actorly zeal do in the face of such a trite screenplay? It’s tragic to see Vishal Bhardwaj’s Guddu/Charlie from Kaminey reducing himself to a Romeo Rajkumar. R…Rajkumar has nothing new to offer even a fine actor like Sood whose Chhedi Singh in Dabangg was hilarious. No, it’s not good enough that his bare torso is a sight to behold or that, as he helpfully informs us, his upper arm has a wider circumference than Romeo Rajkumar’s thigh. Sonakshi Sinha looks sweeter here than ever before, possibly because she thankfully doesn’t repeatedly flash her profile at us in this film as she has done in that trademark, painfully self-conscious fashion in all her films so far. She clearly has comic abilities worth tapping, but persists in wasting herself on formulaic films in which women characters are particularly poorly written and the heroine is a prize to be won by the hero or villain. In the midst of the dialoguebaazi by all the characters, she too has a scene in which she gets to yell “khamosh!!!” in a bow to her famous daddy, but it ends up being a decidedly unfunny moment in a film filled with un-funny-ness, repetitiveness, bombast and noise.

In the first half hour it does seem like R…Rajkumar might actually offer that blend of humour and action that made Dabangg an enjoyable experience. It fizzles out though as the film becomes gradually indistinguishable from Rowdy Rathore, Khiladi 786, Boss and others that have emerged from the factory. What exactly is the difference? I’ve already forgotten!

Rating (out of five): *

CBFC Rating (India):	U/A
Running time:	2 hours 27 minutes

Photograph courtesy: Everymedia PR