REVIEW 403: SHORGUL

Release date:	July 1, 2016
Director:	Jitendra Tiwari and P. Singh
Cast: Language:	Jimmy Sheirgill, Ashutosh Rana, Sanjay Suri, Narendra Jha, Anirudh Dave, Suha Gezen, Hiten Tejwani, Eijaz Khan, Deepraj Rana Hindi

First, let us get this out of the way: Muzaffarnagar is not mentioned anywhere in Shorgul. The allusions are unmistakable though, which explains media reports that BJP MLA Sangeet Som has been raising a ruckus about this little-known film.

Som is a prime accused in the Muzaffarnagar riots of 2013. Actor Jimmy Sheirgill in Shorgul plays a fictional Ranjeet Om, an MLA from a right-wing Hindu party who engineers communal riots in the town of Malihabad – in a state ruled by a Chief Minister Mithilesh Yadav (Sanjay Suri) – to further his goal of becoming a Member of Parliament in the next election.

Som clearly does not know when to shut up though, because the fact is, Shorgul makes allusions to other contemporary political leaders and situations that could very well place the story elsewhere too. Such as the film’s slim Muslim leader Alam Khan (played by Narendra Jha) who delivers an inflammatory speech about the likely consequences of India’s Muslims rising up against the country’s Hindus, which sounds almost like a replica of the real-life speech allegedly delivered by All India Majlis-e-Ittehad-ul Muslimeen MLA Akbaruddin Owaisi in Adilabad in 2012 for which he was arrested in 2013.

All right then, that point has been addressed. Onward to the review. If you have been brought up in a secular, liberal environment, it is easy to dismiss some of the situations and conversations in this film as a figment of the writers’ minds. That scene, for instance, in which a Muslim student asks a fellow Muslim collegemate to hang out with her own people instead of Hindu friends. Improbable? Actually, not. If you have kept your eyes and ears open and looked beyond your own immediate family, you would know that such words have been – and are – routinely spoken in homes and public places across India, earlier in whispers and now increasingly openly.

The point is, the film’s story is believable. A Muslim girl called Zainab and a Hindu boy called Raghu grow up as friends. He falls in love with her but she is unaware of his feelings. When her fiancé Saleem discovers the truth, it leads to tension between all parties involved and ultimately, an unplanned act of violence that is used by Ranjeet Om to incite riots in the town.

Caught in the crossfire along with the youngsters is Raghu’s father, Chaudhary (Ashutosh Rana), a respected local leader who is constantly at loggerheads with Om.

Plausible plotline, as you can see. The execution is a different matter altogether.

Shorgul’s screenplay by Jitendra Tiwari is effective in not taking sides with either community involved. Unfortunately, it takes its title very seriously and ultimately loses itself in its own din.

The film – co-directed by Tiwari with P. Singh – is noisy, lacks finesse and depth, and the political machinations are diluted to irritating effect by too many loud songs and problematic production quality.

At the centre of it all is an actress so uncharismatic playing Zainab, that it is hard to understand why two men – not one, but two – are so smitten by her as to be willing to give up their lives for her. Newcomer Suha Gezen lacks a screen presence. Making things worse is the director duo’s evident fixation with what they consider her immense beauty. As a result, she is given a lingering introductory shot and the camera gazes lovingly at her throughout.

It does not help Gezen’s case that Zainab’s suitors are played by TV stars Anirudh Dave and Hiten Tejwani who are both easy on the eye and better actors. Dave does twice resort to screaming to convey a burst of temper but there is reason to forgive him that folly in the scene in which Raghu acknowledges his feelings for his lady friend. Tejwani, who is his senior, lends a quiet likeability to Saleem.

There is also some pleasure to be derived from the performances of Messrs Sheirgill, Rana and Jha. All three manage to avoid sounding bombastic for a considerable part of the film, despite the decibel levels that surround them (not counting a verbal explosion by Rana in his final scene).

There is a not-entirely-uninteresting twist in the tale. The real mystery though is why, through Sanjay Suri’s cameo, the filmmakers have tried to place a halo around the head of real-life UP Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav.

Be that as it may, Shorgul is a perfect example of the Central Board of Film Certification’s persistent inconsistency. Despite its communal language and intense violence, the film has got away with a UA rating and, according to co-director P. Singh, a directive to remove just three words – gau, Ganga and Godhra. This seems like an act of extreme indulgence from a Board that just last month fought hard to prevent the release of Udta Punjab and had to be forced by the judiciary to let that film come to theatres with an A certificate.

It is not this review’s case that Shorgul should be banned – of course it should not be. Question is, by what yardstick does its content not merit an A (restricted to adults) rating? And why the double standards?

The lasting memory from Shorgul though is of its overall air of tackiness. The song and dance routine accompanying the opening credits should have been a sign of things to come: it features a poorly shot Hrishitaa Bhatt stuck with some of the most awkward choreography seen in a film in recent memory. Closing the brackets on the mediocrity is a ridiculous video of a wailing, weeping Zainab/Gezen filmed underwater and running alongside the closing credits, possibly to convey some deep philosophical point. It is unwittingly funny.

Between the two ends, we get an array of junior artistes with limited talent, a scar on Eijaz Khan’s neck that proves the prosthetic make-up department lacked funds and oh yes, a couple of songs with lyrics by Congress politician Kapil Sibal that are unmemorable enough to merit this cliché: his writing is nothing to write home about.

The Muzaffarnagar riots are a blot on contemporary history and the wounds from that blaze are yet to heal. It is almost criminal to use references to this human tragedy to draw audiences into a deafening, unimaginative, ordinary film.

Rating (out of five): *

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	132 minutes 47 seconds

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/shorgul-review-loud-tacky-film-on-the-not-muzaffarnagar-riots-2866476.html

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

PERSONS WITH DISABILITIES & OTHER MARGINALISED SECTIONS IN FILMS / FILM FATALE: COLUMN PUBLISHED IN THE HINDU BUSINESSLINE

FROM IQBAL TO MARGARITA: NO ‘THEM’, ONLY ‘US’

Physically challenged, mentally challenged, Muslim, Christian, Sikh, gay, woman… it is possible for a character to be all or any of these, yet be a source of regular stories, not just hagiographies or tearjerkers

By Anna MM Vetticad

After a few minutes, the wheelchair will disappear.

Writer-director Shonali Bose has repeated variations of this line a zillion times while promoting her Hindi-English film Margarita With A Straw, the story of a sexually adventurous college student with cerebral palsy, now running in Indian theatres.

It reminded me of a similar sentence uttered by another filmmaker precisely a decade ago. Nagesh Kukunoor’s Iqbal is a small jewel of a film revolving around a deaf-mute boy who becomes a national-level cricketer. A few minutes into Iqbal, you will forget the hero is physically challenged, Kukunoor said in interview after interview in the run-up to the release of his film in 2005.

Is it possible, you ask, to stop noticing that large metal chair bearing a human body? Is it necessary to not notice that the man addressing you is doing so in sign language?

The point both Kukunoor and Bose make is this: Disabilities can be a source of anguish, but they need not define us, and we could acknowledge a distressing aspect of a person’s reality without harping on it. A film could well be about a person with physical or mental challenges, without being about those challenges alone. And if, as a filmmaker, you cannot even consider the likelihood of such a film not being a hagiography or a tearjerker, you might want to ask yourself whether you are constrained by your vision of such a person as ‘the other’ and not ‘one of us’.

A personal example may help illustrate my concerns. My mother has been wheelchair bound for many years. Yes, it is painful to see her decline, but believe me, our conversations are rarely about that. As her family, we are constantly vigilant, but if I were to tell Mum’s story, her physical condition would be only one element in it. For the most part I would tell you about her generation-defying liberalism, her fortitude, the bright smile she still manages to summon up in spite of a cruel disease and the sense of humour that remains undefeated by those wheels.

When I watched Margarita the other day, that wheelchair did disappear after a while. What I remember the most is how the heroine Laila’s smile travelled all the way from her lips to those eyes brimming over with sunshine. And what I remember most about Iqbal today is his sense of mischief, and that classic scene in which his sister and he infuriate a bully by using sign language to discuss the fellow in his presence.

When I see Hollywood actor Michael J Fox on public platforms, I do see his physical struggles because of Parkinson’s disease, but the overwhelming feeling is one of admiration for his strength nearly a quarter century after he was diagnosed. His recurring role as the ruthless lawyer Louis Canning in the multiple-award-winning TV serial The Good Wife is not that of a saint with a physical affliction — he plays a manipulative character who uses his tardive dyskinesia (a rare condition which causes erratic body movements) to gain the sympathy of judges and jurors.

These are regular folk with regular pluses and minuses.

It is only fair to clarify that the ‘them and us’ school of cinema is not confined to India, nor to characters with physical and mental challenges. How often have you seen an Indian film featuring an LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) person who is not a source of jokes or whose sexual orientation is not the fulcrum of the story? For many decades, mainstream Hindi cinema in particular would feature Muslim characters only with a specific purpose: either to showcase Muslim culture or as near-flawless creatures whose presence made a point about secularism.

During an interview I recorded with Madhuri Dixit in 2003, I remember her complaining that Bollywood tends to see “women-centric films” as compulsorily being about “issues”. Why must such a film be a rona-dhona story (a weepie), she asked. Why not a light-hearted comedy? No doubt her industry has changed in these 12 years, but her question remains relevant. A large part of the reason could be that, like most film industries in the rest of India, a male-dominated Bollywood too tends to see stories of women through a male gaze, with men being the norm and women the exceptional ‘them’.

It is in this context that Margarita has wrought a miracle beyond the obvious one we have already discussed. Laila is three things that would usually be treated as issues by an Indian filmmaker: she has cerebral palsy, she is bisexual, she is a woman. Hell yes, while watching the film I almost forgot that she’s a woman! And a sexually assertive one at that. Possibly because the director did not turn either element into an ‘issue’?

As for the gorgeous Iqbal, not till many months after watching it did it strike me that the hero was a Muslim. How lovely that Kukunoor did not define him in terms of his religion or his speech-and-hearing impairments. How lovely that Iqbal was presented to us as a human being who just happened to be both deaf-mute and Muslim.

Physically challenged, mentally challenged, Muslim, Christian, Sikh, gay, woman — it is possible for a character to be any or many of the above, yet be seen as a regular person rather than a showpiece in an old curiosity shop.

(Anna MM Vetticad is the author of The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic. Twitter: @annavetticad)

(This column by Anna MM Vetticad was first published in The Hindu Businessline newspaper on April 25, 2015)

Original link: http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/features/blink/watch/no-them-only-us/article7137392.ece

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

Note: This photograph was not published in The Hindu Businessline

REVIEW 257: DEKH TAMASHA DEKH

Release date:	April 18, 2014
Director:	Feroz Abbas Khan
Cast: Language:	Apoorva Arora, Satish Kaushik, Tanvi Azmi, Vinay Jain, Satish Alekar, Sharad Ponkshe, Alok Rajwade, Jayant Wadkar, Ganesh Yadav, Dhiresh Joshi Hindi

In a seaside town somewhere on the deceptively tranquil Indian coast, the giant cut-out of a neta falls on a poor man, crushing him to death. Under normal circumstances Hamid Tangewala would have got a funeral and been promptly forgotten by all but his closest family. As it happens, however, this is no ordinary poor man. He was once Kishan, an impoverished Hindu who fell in love with a Muslim woman called Fatima (Tanvi Azmi), converted to Islam and married her a long long time ago. In a nation perennially searching for political hot potatoes, a local Hindu leader (Sharad Ponkshe) shifts his attention from an offensive book to demand that “Kishan’s body” be handed over to “them”. What follows is a battle involving police, courts and media, in a film that underlines the utter ridiculousness of riots and religious bigotry, like few Hindi films have done in the past.

Director Feroz Abbas Khan’s Dekh Tamasha Dekh (DTD) is an unusual cocktail of humour and poignance, unusual because of the grimness of the subject and because he has chosen satire as an instrument to convey the bizarre lengths to which violence-prone communalists will go to score a point. Khan – a veteran of theatre, but relatively new to the film world – had earlier helmed Gandhi My Father, a film on the Mahatma’s strained relations with his son Harilal. The assured directorial hand he displayed on debut comes to his aid here again, ensuring that despite the bloodshed in the background, we are not offended when DTD induces tears and laughter in equal measure.

How can a film about riots be funny, you may well ask? Well it can be, just like a film set in a concentration camp could be a comedy? Khan displays the same directorial sleight of hand that made Roberto Benigni’s La vita é bella (Life Is Beautiful) such a hard-hitting commentary on Hitler’s Holocaust. Dekh Tamasha Dekh takes a swipe at hollow religious leaders on both sides who don’t give a damn about the people, but are happy to use them to further a dubious cause. It subtly slams the media through the character of a traitorous, chameleon-like journalist. As a hapless judge is asked to decide whether a body is Hindu or Muslim, whether that body must be cremated or buried, it gives us one of the most preposterous, most hilarious courtroom scenes ever seen in a Hindi film.

“Did you care about Kishan all those years ago when he was struggling for a living and desperately needed help?” the Hindu leader is asked. He has no credible answer and doesn’t care to search for one either. That the majority community’s bigots are hateful not just towards the minorities but also towards its own moderates is evidenced by the harassment of the gentlemanly, scholarly Professor Shastri (Satish Alekar) early in the film. Elsewhere, a moderate Muslim leader is summarily brushed aside by the more rabid elements of his biraadari, once the situation heats up. We are never shown exactly who started the riots, who lit that first fire, the point being that it doesn’t and shouldn’t matter.

Somewhere in between is an inter-community love story destroyed by the bloodshed. Most of all though, the film renders a resounding slap in the face of self-appointed guardians of “Indian culture” who assume that this country comprises one homogeneous mass of people, ignoring the vast differences in rituals and social practices across India, within states, and even within the same caste or religious community.

Some scenes are deliberately stage-like, in particular the ones involving the late Hamid’s daughter Shabbo and her boyfriend Prashant, further underlining the absurdity of the goings-on around them. This boy, who refuses to believe in a world of “them” and “us”, seems to live forever in a trance-like state, inhabiting a parallel universe far removed from his fellow citizens’ ludicrous antics that lead to tragic results.

The camera never rests for too long on any one character. Make no mistake about this though: this is a solid cast drawing on Shafaat Khan’s disturbingly incisive writing and the director’s clarity of vision. The performances are all uniformly fitting in a film with no heroes or heroines, only real people. It’s particularly heartening to see little Apoorva Arora from that 2011 gem Bubble Gum, all grown-up and playing Shabbo.

DTD is particularly resonant because of its timing, coming as it does in the middle of one of India’s most significant and polarising elections so far. It compels us to ask ourselves how political leaders can claim that a riot was not their fault if it lasted for more than a few hours under their watch. It holds up a mirror to every section of society that causes or permits communal violence to happen, either due to apathy or by actively sparking a flame. The silent secularist, the opportunist and the bigot are all to blame. The old man who takes off his hearing aid to find his peace, the editor who headlines a rumour to increase his newspaper’s circulation and save his job, the policeman who stays equidistant for a while for fear of being accused of bias, the sword-wielding rioter…in one way or the other, each one is to blame. Take one of these elements away from the mix, and the madness can end.

I laughed and cried through Dekh Tamasha Dekh because I was embarrassed and ashamed of the fact that every bit of stupidity and cruelty and insensitivity portrayed in it is true of today’s India. This is a film that should be compulsory viewing in social science classes across the country.

Rating (out of five stars): ****

CBFC Rating (India):	A
Running time:	109 minutes

Poster and trailer courtesy: Everymedia PR

Trailer 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPlgyRzE3Ug

Trailer 2 (“Is every Indian a Hindu?”:

 http://erosnow.com/#!/movie/watch/1005515/dekh-tamasha-dekh

Trailer 3:

http://erosnow.com/#!/movie/watch/1005515/dekh-tamasha-dekh/6129188/see-your-fat-neta-being-abused?ap=1

Trailer 4:

http://erosnow.com/#!/movie/watch/1005515/dekh-tamasha-dekh/6129190/newspaper-prints-rumour-as-news?ap=1