REVIEW 747: MARJAAVAAN

Release date:	November 15, 2019
Director:	Milap Milan Zaveri
Cast: Language:	Sidharth Malhotra, Riteish Deshmukh, Nassar, Rakul Preet Singh, Tara Sutaria, Ravi Kishan, Shaad Randhawa, Suhasini Mulay Hindi

“Main maaroonga toh mar jayega tu, dobaara janam lene se darr jayega tu.” This line that the hero fires at the villain in Marjaavaan comes from an arsenal of rhyming bombast that he uses from the opening minutes of this exhausting film. Thankfully, there is an arsenal of adjectives in the English language to match his weaponry. Dated, loud, cliché-ridden, preachy, unimaginative, boring, flat – that is what Marjaavaan is.

Take the slotting of the characters for one. Each comes from a checklist that Bollywood in earlier decades felt compelled to cover exhaustively in most scripts. Virtuous hero, virtuous woman who exists solely for him to fall in love with her and thus give her the requisite qualification for the post of heroine, villain without a single redeeming quality, the other woman in the ‘golden-hearted tawaif’ mould whose unrequited love for the leading man survives every trauma thrown her way – you will find them all in Marjaavaan.

As if these Neanderthal formulae are not enough, there are more. The bad guy is a dwarf in a film that clearly sees a disability as nothing but a source of drama. The hero is a “lawaaris”. A glamorous woman pops up to do that thingie called an ‘item song’ with dance moves that include spreading her legs wide, thrusting her bottom out and wiggling it, and going down on all fours to lift her bottom again and wiggle it – gosh, there is no originality even in the objectification of women in Marjaavaan.

And while it is a relief to get a break from the Islamophobia that has been a regular feature of Hindi cinema in the last couple of years, there is no joy in returning, as Marjaavaan does, to an era when the co-existence of religious and linguistic communities was not treated as a fact of life but as a cause for sugary sentimentality and in-your-face messaging on secularism.

Oh, and while the nice guy speaks in verse, the bad guy reels off “what is the height of (optimism, etc)?” kind of jokes and the female protagonist speaks in riddles.

Considering all this, it is appropriate that Marjaavaan’s soundtrack is dominated by remixes.

Sidharth Malhotra plays Raghu, the handsome orphaned foster child of the gangster played by Nassar. The latter’s son Vishnu (Riteish Deshmukh) has always resented his father’s love for Raghu, that resentment made worse by his crushing complex about his congenital short stature. Their life-long enmity is heightened when Raghu falls in love with the mute Zoya (Tara Sutaria) who tries to reform the children of the neighbourhood by steering them towards music and away from an otherwise inevitable life of crime. Rakul Preet Singh stars as Aarzoo, the bar dancer who is devoted to Raghu.

Marjaavaan is written and directed by Milap Zaveri whose career has so far been built primarily on writing comedies, some of them largely harmless fun (such as the Varun Dhawan-starrer Main Tera Hero), many of them crude (case in point: Masti, Grand Masti). For this film, Zaveri ditches high-decibel sexist humour in favour of high-decibel sermonising. Perhaps in a bid to sound intelligent and relevant, at one point in Marjaavaan he has the hero yelling “mandir banega aur masjid bhi blah blah blah”, but in the absence of any political depth, that pointed allusion to the Babri Masjid imbroglio makes zero sense. In a more well-thought-out film it might have meant something that Zoya is a Kashmiri Muslim girl and she is assembling a troupe for a music festival in Kashmir. Here though it means nothing.

Marjaavaan is so hackneyed that even the usually restrained Malhotra is driven to intermittent over-acting during its two-hours-plus running time. Deshmukh hams his way through playing Vishnu. Ms Sutaria is bland.

Singh does better than her colleagues with the little acting she is required to do in her limited role. Her primary job here though is to look hot, but she is not allowed to do that well by the photography, wardrobe and other departments who, for some reason, collude to highlight her protruding rib cage through much of the film – this inexplicable treatment meted out to an otherwise lovely-looking woman will hopefully spark off a debate on the impossible thinness required of Hindi film heroines these days. As for the great Nassar, his performance in Marjaavaan is a textbook example of how even the finest of actors can be reduced to embarrassingly strained performances by bad writing and direction.

Maybe the line Raghu should have delivered is this: “Yeh film dekhega toh mar jayega tu, dobaara koi bhi film dekhne se darr jayega tu.”

Rating (out of five stars): *

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	137 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/marjaavaan-movie-review-sidharth-malhotra-whatcha-doin-with-this-loud-neanderthal-sermon-7656451.html

Photographs courtesy:

(1) https://www.facebook.com/marjaavaanthemovie/

(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marjaavaan

REVIEW 617: NEERALI

Release date:	July 13, 2018
Director:	Ajoy Varma
Cast: Language:	Mohanlal, Nadhiya Moidu, Parvatii Nair, Suraj Venjaramoodu, Nassar, Dileesh Pothan, Megha Mathew Malayalam

Survival tales are great material for cinema. A courier service employee marooned on an uninhabited island after a plane crash, a truck driver consigned to a coffin while alive, an adventurer trapped by a boulder in a deserted canyon – each of their stories has been turned into a compelling film, in a genre that has often paid solid box-office dividends worldwide. Following in the footsteps of the likes of Cast Away (US/2000), Buried (Spain/2010) and 127 Hours (UK-US/2010) comes Malayalam cinema’s Neerali.

Mohanlal here plays Sunny George, an incorrigible womaniser who is juggling a couple of affairs when his pregnant wife goes into labour in another city. To reach Molykkutty (Nadhiya Moidu) before the birth of their twins, he takes a lift from Veerappan (Suraj Venjaramoodu) who is headed in the same direction in a sturdy pick-up truck. Somewhere along the way Sunny wakes up bleeding as their vehicle sits precariously balanced at the edge of a mountainside with a sheer drop of hundreds, if not a few thousand, feet below them.

Director Ajoy Varma’s Neerali – also spelt Nieraali in the trailer – is filled to the brim with tension on behalf of its beleaguered protagonists. I could feel fingers of fear closing around my heart as I watched Sunny struggle to figure out a means of escape.

The film’s first half is marked by confident writing and execution. Neerali’s weak spot surfaces in the second half. The best survival films inspire admiration with the ingenuity their central characters display while getting themselves out of seemingly hopeless situations. Sunny has not a single brainwave that works. The excitement offered by the circumstances in which he finds himself would have been elevated by multiple levels with at least one stroke of genius or incredible feat of human endurance that gets him out of there, but it never comes. So, there is plenty of reason to be terrified along with Sunny throughout Neerali, but no particular reason to be awe-struck by him in the end.

This is particularly disappointing because Saju Thomas’ screenplay is imaginative in the way it builds up curiosity around the manner in which Sunny and Veerappan got stuck in this quagmire and creates suspense around their potential predators. It weaves in interesting insights into human behaviour and some asides on Kerala society, such as the reference to inter-faith romance and the voice of the sermonising Charismatic Christian preacher floating in from the distance. However, the insertion of Sunny’s father (Nassar) into the story seems forced, as does the philosophical significance of the title (which means “octopus”). The early mention of Sunny’s vertigo is later left unexplored. Above all, Neerali fails to come up with an inventive clincher, the sort of wow moment that would have made Sunny a worthwhile hero.

Neerali is also afflicted by the same ailment that has dogged most Mohanlal films for too long: the tendency to trivialise women. Women, we are told, are like salt shakers: sometimes you get no love at all out of them and sometimes too much comes pouring out. Like scores of other commercial Indian films, in this one too marital infidelity is portrayed as a charming – and normal – trait in a male character, excusable as long as he always returns to his socially sanctioned companion, his wife.

That one of the women Sunny fools around with (Parvatii Nair) is pointedly described as a Bombayite underlines another prejudice evident in some Malayalam films (and in Kerala society): that the urban woman who is an outsider is fair game.

This being a Mohanlal film, of course each of the actresses with whom he is shown to have a relationship looks eons younger. The women he has flings with are both played by artistes who are, characteristically, three decades his junior.

Usually in the superstar’s films, despite all these problematic areas, his acting shines through. Mohanlal the actor in Neerali though comes bearing a massive distraction. His face seems somewhat frozen and obviously altered, but it is hard for an inexpert eye to be sure whether the reason is excessive under-eye make-up or badly executed prosthetics or inexplicable lighting or some other “enhancing tool” (to borrow a phrase Bollywood’s Anushka Sharma used a few years back when she was lampooned for a glaring lip job). Whatever it is, it subtracts from a great thespian’s performance.

Mohanlal being Mohanlal, when his eyes do speak at Sunny’s lowest point, the world stands still in Neerali. For the most part though, his performance here is overshadowed by Venjaramoodu although the latter is given far less to do by the script.

While the maudlin song in the end needlessly stretches Neerali, the rest are placed such that they enhance rather than obstruct the narrative. A couple of shots inside the car while it is on the move appear to have been taken within a studio and look tacky, but for the most part, Santosh Thundiyil’s clever camerawork contributes to the ominous air of the film and in establishing the magnificent vastness of the landscape on which these two minuscule beings are stuck. This and some sure-footed direction are the reasons why Neerali, for all its flaws, is gripping through every second that it remains with Sunny and Veerappan in and around that ill-fated vehicle.

Rating (out of five stars): **1/4

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	2 hours 8 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/neerali-movie-review-mohanlals-latest-is-a-mix-of-thrilling-suspense-inventiveness-that-fizzles-out-and-casual-sexism-4741101.html

Visuals courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neerali