REVIEW 241: JAI HO

Release date:	January 24, 2014
Director:	Sohail Khan
Cast: Language:	Salman Khan, Tabu, Naman Jain, Daisy Shah, Danny Denzongpa, Sana Khan, Nadira Babbar, Genelia Deshmukh, Mukul Dev, Mahesh Thakur, Ashmit Patel, Suniel Shetty, Pulkit Samrat Hindi

I’ve just come away from watching the most unexciting Salman Khan film since Veer in 2010. Jai Ho has none of the slick action of Wanted that helped Salman cross over from his traditional fan base to a larger audience. It has none of the action comedy of Dabangg that planted him firmly in the midst of this new-found following. In fact, it has little that’s new to offer within the Salman Khan genre of films (and yes, that is a separate genre).

Jai Ho is an official remake of the 2006 Telugu film Stalin which was inspired by the US film Pay It Forward. In the original, a child (played by Haley Joel Osment) starts a goodwill network kicked off by doing a favour to someone and asking the recipient of the favour to “pay it forward” to three others who are in turn asked to pay it forward to three more, until it becomes a national campaign. Since Indian film industries are adult-star-obsessed, the child of the Hollywood film becomes an adult played by a major male superstar in both Tollywood and Bollywood: Chiranjeevi in Telugu and Salman Khan in Hindi.

In Jai Ho, Salman plays ex-fauji Jai Dikshit, a one-man army who smashes to bits any man he catches doing wrong in his presence. His penchant for fisticuffs unwittingly earns him the enmity of the state Home Minister Dashrath Singh. Somewhere in between, when he rescues a kidnapped baby, he asks the child’s parents not to thank him but instead to do a favour to three people and further ask each of those three to help three others. That chain of favours gets lost somewhere along the way as director Sohail Khan gets diverted to what seems like the primary task of most of Salman’s directors these days: to show us how cute Salman is, how intimidating his fists are, how well-muscled his body is, how the sun rises from his eyes, how the earth revolves around that sun and how he is the centre of the film’s universe.

Sohail seems so complacent that he has neglected every other department in Jai Ho. The songs are lousy. The dances are lacklustre. Equally lacklustre is Daisy Shah, the light-eyed, light-skinned, slim-waisted actress chosen to play Jai’s girlfriend, possibly based on the MCP assumption that it doesn’t matter who the hell is the heroine so long as “Bhai” is in the film.

So unimaginative is Jai Ho that despite being a die-hard advocate of heroes going bare-chested in films, I found myself torn between yawning and being offended when Salman, as expected, finally does reveal that impeccable torso here. The man is in the middle of a truly gruesome fight. He’s been punched, shot and stabbed. He’s bleeding and in pain. Getting him to take off his top right at that point to pleasure his viewers felt truly distasteful. Was his battered, broken body meant to be titillating? In the past I have pointed out that the objectification of a willing woman is not objectionable if the goal is to provide visual pleasure without demeaning, degrading or dehumanising her. The same argument holds for our chest-flashing heroes. There have been other films in which Salman’s shirt has come off mid-fight, but they were handled better. In Dabangg, for instance, there was humour in that moment in which the wind ripped off Salman’s shirt. Today’s scene, especially considering that Jai Ho takes itself far more seriously than Dabangg, was disquieting.

Such mindlessness should not come as a surprise though in a film in which a female adult makes an inappropriate comment about a little boy’s shrivelled penis, and that child in turn nicknames her Pinky, after her pink panties, much to his Uncle’s amusement. The boy in question is Jai’s nephew (played by Naman Jain from Chillar Party) whose character is one of the loudest, crudest, most irritatingly precocious children I’ve seen in a Hindi film.

The irony is that Jai Ho’s most bearable performance comes from Tabu playing Jai’s sister Geeta. The two together give us the film’s nicest scenes. If she had been the lover, Jai Ho may have been worthwhile. But hey, it’s unthinkable in Bollywood that a 40-plus actress would play the girlfriend of a major male star even though that male star looks every bit the 48 years that he is, appears a bit tired (I noticed with a twinge of sadness) the way he did in 2012’s Ek Tha Tiger, seems no longer as light on his feet as he once was; and all this got emphasised by the fact – loudly expressed by a lady in the hall where I watched this film – that “woh heroine uski beti lagti hai”. The old order changeth, even though Bollywood and Bhai’s fans resisteth.

The film is as tired. The only novelty is that Salman here not only beats up people, he also roars in Sunny Deol style and – get this – he bites. Sunny roared in so many films that it got tiresome. Then in Yamla Pagla Deewana in 2011, he revved up the cliché by inviting us to laugh at it. Still, in his heyday he could pull off a tiger’s roar. Salman looks weird doing it, especially since he spends so much of the rest of the film talking gently about social change. Tigers are an endangered species for no fault of theirs. It’s boring films like THIS that deserve to go extinct.

Having said that, Jai Ho unexpectedly served an educational purpose for me. I’ve learnt today that “gando” is Gujarati for “crazy”. The resemblance in sound to a certain Hindi word becomes the reason for much mirth in one scene in which Pinky yells at Jai in her mother tongue. Let this not mislead you though. Jai Ho is only mildly crude in comparison with most Akshay Kumar films of recent years. What’s the Gujarati word for “dull”? Wish Pinky had told us that too.

Rating (out of five): *1/2

CBFC Rating (India):	U/A
Running time:	145 minutes

Poster courtesy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jai_Ho_(film)

Videos courtesy: Everymedia PR

Trailer launch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NS1diFUQBA

Dialogue promo 1:

http://erosnow.com/#!/movie/watch/1005293/jai-ho/6124576/salman-khan-is-disturbed?ap=1

Dialogue promo 2:
http://erosnow.com/#!/movie/watch/1005293/jai-ho/6124577/salman-khan-bullies-the-goons?ap=1
Dialogue promo 3:
http://erosnow.com/#!/movie/watch/1005293/jai-ho/6124736/salman-khan-stands-for-humanity?ap=1

REVIEW 60: CHILLAR PARTY

Release date:	July 8, 2011
Director:	Nitesh Tiwari, Vikas Bahl
Cast:	Irrfan Khan, Sanath Menon, Rohan Grover, Naman Jain, Aarav Khanna, Vishesh Tiwari, Chinmai Chandranshuh, Vedant Desai, Shriya Sharma, Divij Handa

Just a week after a close-up of human excrement in Delhi Belly, here comes a lingering shot of doggy poo (or so you think) in Chillar Party. But fear not all you parents, the two films have little else in common beyond a powerful Khan each as producer.

So here’s what I truly love about Chillar Party … a bunch of utterly charming children, a director duo with that rare ability to extract natural performances from child actors, Amit Trivedi’s music plus a producer (Salman Khan) who is backing this unconventional film while at the peak of his career as a mainstream, muscle-baring star.

What I do not like about Chillar Party … A second half that defies logic in a film that’s clearly intended to be realistic, the exclusion of girls and women from most of the action and decision-making in a film that’s meant to be about inclusiveness and acceptance, plus a certain ambiguity in its feelings towards the bare human form.

And Ranbir Kapoor’s item song? Well before we get to that point, hear this: nothing I say in this critique should take away from the fact that those kids are talented and sweet and natural born actors. Directors Nitesh Tiwari and Vikas Bahl, please take a bow along with your casting director Mukesh Chhabra for discovering this motley crew to play your lead artistes in Chillar Party. They’re as gifted as that remarkable gang from director Amole Gupte’s Stanley ka Dabba, though my favourite children’s ensemble cast in a Hindi film still remains Sagar Ballary’s team in his completely unheralded film Kaccha Limboo.

Chillar Party takes us to Chandan Nagar Cooperative Housing Society in Mumbai where eight little boy buddies with cutesy nicknames like Encyclopedia and Jhangiya hang out together. They’re the Chillar Party. When the boy Fatka is employed to wash the cars in the colony, the Chillar Party decide to get rid of him because they’re afraid his dog Bheedu will soil their playground just like another dog that already lives there. But after their initial harsh behavior towards him, they become friends. So when a state minister targets Bheedu in his campaign to rid Mumbai of stray dogs, the kids put up a fight for their canine pal. 

The film is filled with endearing instances of humour that are as well written as they are well acted, except for a few scenes in which the children are made to try too hard to be adorable. The episode involving doggy do is fun. But my favourite scene is when the nerdy kid explains to his friends that NOC stands for No Objection Certificate, and the immediate response from one of his friends is a very mournful: “I’ve never won a certificate.”

But even more than the humour, the writers need to be lauded for not painting the children as saints. This is the one big issue I had with Stanley ka Dabba – the failure to recognise that children are not uniformly flawless creatures. It takes courage to acknowledge that children can sometimes be nasty. That’s what bullying in schools and peer pressure are all about. And in Chillar Party we see the mean streak in our otherwise loveable bunch when they play cruel pranks on Fatka to get him out of Chandan Nagar, not quite realising that working in their housing complex is a matter of life and death for this impoverished orphan.

This is the beautiful part of Chillar Party – the children’s journey from resentment to admiration for Fatka’s resilience, their penitence, the little boy asking his mother, “If someone has done nothing to harm me, but I make a concerted effort to harm him, does that mean I’m a bad human being?” Alas, this poignant portion is followed by an improbable, overly stretched Part 2 about a politician who risks his entire career over the Chillar Party and Bheedu.

And while the film is clearly well intentioned, I must say I’m concerned about the subliminal messages it is sending out about power equations in households. The children need to get signatures from the residents of Chandan Nagar to save Bheedu from eviction – barring one exception, they seem to approach only men for signatures. When a woman in a family is shown making the decision to sign or not to sign, her husband is portrayed as being hen-pecked.

I also find it hard to believe that boys in a co-ed school and ranging in age from 4-11 would have no female friends. And when the children of Mumbai join Chillar Party’s underwear campaign for Bheedu, there’s no explanation for why only boys participate. Director Nitesh Tiwari tells me: “Our conscience didn’t permit us to show topless girls in our film, however small they may be.” So they were uncomfortable with showing bare-bodied little girls on screen, but had no qualms about parading little boys in their chaddis before us? I find this conservatism confusing and unconvincing.

As for Ranbir Kapoor’s item number … it’s entertaining as a standalone video and I do appreciate the fact that he wiggles his cute tushy at the camera repeatedly. But it arrives inexplicably part way through the end credits, and might actually be missed by many members of the audience. If you do watch Chillar Party for those loveable kids, make sure you stay right till the end for Ranbir’s Tai tai phiss. And if you have an answer to an extremely pertinent question that one of the children asks about child labour, please do tell me what it is.

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

CBFC Rating:                       U without cuts

Running time:                        135 Minutes

Language:                              Hindi

Photograph courtesy: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/chillarparty