REVIEW 786: SAM BAHADUR

 

Release date:	December 1, 2023
Director:	Meghna Gulzar
Cast:	Vicky Kaushal, Fatima Sana Shaikh, Sanya Malhotra, Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub, Neeraj Kabi, Govind Namdev
Language:	Hindi with some English

How do you make a film on a national icon whose image of coolth in his lifetime was built not solely on extreme courage and brilliant war-time strategising, nor even just his sense of humour and forthrightness, but also on widely disseminated accounts of his sexist condescension towards a prominent woman politician? The task is especially challenging when the man in question is Field Marshal Sam Hormusji Framji Jamshedji Manekshaw, a beloved Army Chief credited with India’s win in the 1971 war against Pakistan that led to the formation of Bangladesh.

 

A story that Manekshaw addressed the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi as “sweetie” (She: Are you ready to go to war? He: I am always ready, sweetie) has assumed legendary proportions over time, with some fans repeating it as proof of his hipness and daring, while others have sought to deny it, and still others dismiss criticism of him by taking the position that women these days make much ado about nothing. Either way, the anecdote is an intrinsic part of the Manekshaw legend, and a truthful film about him cannot sweep it under a carpet. Would it be wisest for such a film to normalise sexism, or else to examine the subject through a critical, analytical lens even at the risk of irking Manekshaw’s adoring admirers?The dilemma is apparent in Meghna Gulzar’s Sam Bahadur that the director has co-written with Bhavani Iyer and Shantanu Srivastava, and is just one of the weak spots in an oddly pallid, superficial biopic. 

 

(Note: Manekshaw’s daughter has been quoted in the press this week praising the film after seeing two previews. This should put to rest the speculation about whether the “sweetie” saga is true.) 

 

Like most human beings, Sam Manekshaw was not easily definable. That patronising line to Gandhi is just a fraction of the abundant lore surrounding him, supplemented in Sam Bahadur by another not-so-well-known conversation: Manekshaw in the film tells Mrs G during an official, one-on-one meeting that she can always rest her worried head on his shoulders. Ugh! 

 

Since the film has not laid any ground for that exchange by suggesting a close friendship between them, his words are nothing less than an instance of over-familiarity and superciliousness that women at workplaces, including women leaders, are acquainted with. This is the same Manekshaw though who is known to have, and shown to have, unequivocally ordered his troops not to harm Bangladeshi women after India’s victory against Pakistan in 1971. To say he was complex, therefore, is an understatement, but Sam Bahadur’s script merely flits over various aspects of his personality and struggles to weave them into a comprehensible, relatable, engaging whole. 

 

The writers appear not to have come to terms with the troubling eternal reality that contradictory qualities often co-exist within the same person. Instead, in an ostensible bid to justify the unpalatable, they let on that “sweetie” was Manekshaw’s mode of address not just for India’s first woman PM, but for others too, both male and female. Err, talking down to another person does not become okay just because women are not the only ones at the receiving end. This was perhaps an opportunity to scrutinise society’s willingness to indulge distasteful conduct by men in power. Sadly, Sam Bahadur lacks the subtlety to handle this delicate point while simultaneously acknowledging Manekshaw’s incredible achievements.

 

The film is painfully conscious that its central figure was a giant among men. It declares that he was great, and expects us to believe it because it says so, but fails to distil the essence of who he was and why. In fact, Sam Bahadur is so acutely aware of his stature in Indian history, that initially it underlines a marginal brainwave as though it was an act of unprecedented genius. Later, when Manekshaw is accused of being anti-national, the charge is shown quickly collapsing under the weight of his grandiose pronouncements – this is another opportunity lost, if you consider the parallels with contemporary India, but for that resonance to be conveyed, a film would have to rise above the broad brush strokes that Sam Bahadur favours over nuance and detail.

 

The script jumps from one milestone in Manekshaw’s personal and professional journey to the next to the next to the next – from his marriage to his triumphs at various postings in the Army before and after Independence, internecine politics, his appointment as chief, 1971, his elevation to the position of India’s first field marshal, and finally, retirement – without getting to the beating heart of the celebrated soldier. It thus comes across as a listing of historical events rather than an in-depth exploration of the person behind the larger-than-life persona. 

 

If the goal was to offer a primer to students brushing up on their GK before a quiz, Sam Bahadur has served its purpose. As a biopic though, it is shallow.

 

The portrayal of Manekshaw’s relationship with his wife exemplifies the follies of the script in its entirety. They meet at a party, he is smitten at first sight, he says clever-sounding things, they gaze at each other through a long, moony song as they dance, we gather that they fall in love as that number plays at the party since that’s the purpose served by such musical interludes in Hindi films that feature a ‘heroine’ as a glamorous aside…cut to her in the bedroom of their home gazing at their sleeping child. That is literally how abrupt it is. That the director of the exemplary Raazi and Talvar would deliver a film this poorly structured and this lightweight is surprising.

 

Mrs Manekshaw, Silloo, gets a defining trait: an inexplicable animosity towards Indira Gandhi even before meeting her. The film implies that Silloo was insecure about Gandhi for no given reason, obviously playing into the stereotype that women don’t like attractive women. Eye roll! The antagonism results in some of Sam Bahadur’s silliest, unfunniest-albeit-meant-to-be-funny moments. It is disappointing that Mses Gulzar and Iyer, who co-wrote Raazi, opted to trivialise women in this film, first by giving an Army wife zero substance beyond her jealousy towards another woman, then compounding that diversion with a flash of what could be either innuendo or a genuine misunderstanding in at least one telephone conversation – presumably designed for comical effect – between Gandhi and Manekshaw. Worse, when he is shown patronising her, she has no reaction. Neither shock, nor confusion about how to react, neither anger, nor amusement. 

 

Are the writers implying that Gandhi was attracted to Manekshaw because he was a hottie? Can’t say for sure, but they’re certainly implying something. It is as if they could not fathom a normal working relationship between a good-looking, high-profile woman and man. 

 

No amount of contrived humour, no surface energy, no acting swag or rambunctious patriotic song – all of which we get here – can compensate for this passionless narrative.  

 

Not unexpectedly then, Vicky Kaushal’s performance as Manekshaw is as slight as the script. In Shoojit Sircar’s Sardar Udham (2021), Kaushal seemed to grasp the freedom fighter Udham Singh’s emotions and motivations. Here, he effectively captures Manekshaw’s posture, gait, intonation and the twinkle in his eye, but never gets past his skin. The fact that Manekshaw had a big personality is no excuse. For a recent example of an actor steering an audience beyond a real-life character’s overwhelming exteriority and flamboyance, Kaushal and the writers of Sam Bahadur would have done well to reference Ranveer Singh’s brilliant, non-caricaturish, immersive turn as the flashy former Indian cricketer Kapil Dev in Kabir Khan’s well-written 83.

 

The talented Sanya Malhotra (Dangal, Pagglait, Kathal) is wasted in Sam Bahadur, cast as an insipid Silloo. So is Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub, who is unrecognisable after a while as Pakistan’s President Yahya Khan. Fatima Sana Shaikh delivers a stolid, dull Gandhi.  

 

The film is too much in awe of Manekshaw and too determined to lionise him to do justice to the other stalwarts on screen. Gandhi here, for instance, is nothing like the charismatic woman we saw in the public realm in reality, whose steely will earned her the nickname “Iron Lady of India”. 

 

Still, Sam Bahadur is not without qualities to recommend. The scenes of military action, for one, are captivating. In a decade when patriotism and even the national anthem have been weaponised by the Right, and Hindi cinema is bowing to prevailing winds by turning accounts of Indian heroes and their achievements into vehicles for chest-thumping desh prem, hatred of Pakistan and the stereotyping of India’s own religious minorities, this film is different. Sam Bahadur representspatriotism, not chauvinism. Shankar Ehsaan Loy’s song Badhte Chalo that runs through the 1971 war in the film is stirring, not jingoistic. This is not Akshay Kumar style aggressive nationalism, nor is it akin to the more polished propaganda of Uri: The Surgical Strike that Kaushal himself starred in. This is Meghna Gulzar style love for the country. This is cinema, not a war cry.  

 

Even when Sam Bahadur presents a broken Jawaharlal Nehru with Sardar Patel during the 1962 India-China debacle, it stops short of the right-wing ecosystem’s favourite trope that Nehru was a weakling and Patel the strong-willed one in the Cabinet. Their scenes are as broadly written as everything else in the film, nevertheless they are a marked contrast to the comically cowardly Nehru and gigantic Patel in Ketan Mehta’s Sardar (1994) and in the current dominant discourse. 

 

Ultimately though, anything that Sam Bahadur gets right is overshadowed by its sketchy scripting and bombast sans soul in the protagonist’s speech, demeanour and actions. The film tells us Manekshaw tended to downplay his troubles with the signature line “I’m okay”. Okay is not good. Okay is not great. Okay is just okay. Like the film. Sam Bahadur is okay, I guess. Just okay. 

 

Rating (out of 5 stars): 2

 

Running time:

150 minutes

 

Poster courtesy: IMDB 

REVIEW 634: GALI GULEIYAN

Release date:	September 7, 2018
Director:	Dipesh Jain
Cast: Language:	Manoj Bajpayee, Om Singh, Shahana Goswami, Arbaaz Khan, Neeraj Kabi, Ranvir Shorey Hindi

An air of such immense grief and pain blankets Gali Guleiyan, that it is almost a separate entity in the film. It swaddles Khuddoos in his dingy home as he scans a crowd of television monitors on which he watches his neighbours via surveillance cameras surreptitiously planted around the locality. It dogs the little boy Idu/Idris whose story it parallelly tells. And it wanders the labyrinthine lanes of Old Delhi where it is set.

Director Dipesh Jain’s film Gali Guleiyan a.k.a. In The Shadows features Manoj Bajpayee as Khuddoos, a crumbling man in a decaying vest who spends his days and nights spying on people in the vicinity. He is so obsessed with this task, that he skips meals, barely sleeps and would probably starve to death in solitude if it weren’t for Ganeshi (Ranvir Shorey) who, unlike him, has a head on his shoulders and a life. Ganeshi keeps checking in on his messed-up friend, bringing food and jobs for his survival.

Khuddoos’ life trundles along in this state of miserable inertia until he hears the sounds of what seems like a child being abused in a house with which he shares a wall. A desperate urgency takes over his entire existence as he tries to figure out who the kid is in the rabbit warren that is their locality, as if his remaining shreds of sanity depend on whether he can save the boy.

In that same Old Delhi, Idu (Om Singh) and his best bud Ginny (Arbaaz Khan) skip around merrily exploring the area, peeking into the homes of unsuspecting residents and watching films in a video store, their innocent happiness in each other’s company a marked contrast to Idu’s challenging family situation. Home for him is a loving mother (Shahana Goswami) who tries her best to protect him from the wrath of his autocratic, combustible father (Neeraj Kabi).

Little or nought seems to change in congested Old Delhi, and Jain (who makes his feature debut with Gali Guleiyan), his cinematographer Kai Miedendorp and production designer Sujata Sharma Virk make careful and clever use of this time warp to underline the unending cycle of exploitation and violence that repeats itself in crowded residential localities like the one Idu inhabits, where the screams of women and children either go unheard, or when heard, simply ignored by those who could do something about it. Neither Khudoos nor Jain is willing to forgive such apathy, with the latter announcing his demand for accountability with this quote from the American writer William S. Burroughs that precedes the opening credits: “There are no innocent bystanders...what are they doing there in the first place?”

Not that action comes easy. If and when the Khuddooses of the world do set out to find that wailing child on the other side of the wall, nothing better emphasises the enormousness of the challenge before them than Miedendorp’s striking shots of that cluttered neighbourhood with which Jain closes the film.

Another star of this enterprise is editor Chris Witt, whose unerring back and forth between Khuddoos and Idu ensures the smoothness of this film’s narrative.

Jain (who is also Gali Guleiyan’s writer) is a master of detail and of understatement. He leaves it to viewers to notice or not, for instance, that the children saunter across a bustling main road at the edge of which Khuddoos hesitates with trepidation. Or that most of this film’s primary characters are practitioners of Islam, a fact that we are made aware of without any particular emphasis on their Muslimness, unlike Hindi films of the pre-2000 era in which a Muslim presence necessarily meant nawabi ada, shayari and/or golden hearts. In this aspect, Gali Guleiyan is part of the evolution of Hindi cinema in the matter of representation in the past decade during which Muslims (unlike members of India’s other minority communities) have been increasingly featured in films as regular people – good, bad and ugly – instead of specifically to emphasise any aspect of their religious/cultural/political identity or to unwittingly other them through (I guess well-intentioned) deification.

Gali Guleiyan is swathed in the shadows referenced in its title, giving it an air of mystery and simmering unrest. It would be a disservice to this film – and a very literal interpretation of it – to view it as a conventional thriller though. What Khuddoos discovers towards the end is allowed to gradually dawn on the viewer for a while before the closing scenes, so that the real mystery becomes not whether he will ever find and save the suffering child in the adjacent flat, but whether he will ever save himself from the confines of his shattered mind.

Manoj Bajpayee as Khuddoos brings an almost fiendish intensity to his role, which is made all the more challenging by the seemingly unvarying nature of the man’s moods and demeanour. Through that surface sameness though, he manages to let on that he is forever on the verge of boiling over, a suspicion that is confirmed in that single scene in which he metamorphoses into a snarling beast in a local eatery.

Shahana Goswami has, since her debut over a decade back, been sadly under-utilised by the more commercially inclined arms of Bollywood, as Bajpayee was for almost a decade and a half after Satya (1998) and Shool (1999). That Bajpayee is now enjoying a wonderful second innings as the protagonist in an interesting mix of conventional and offbeat projects should make us optimistic for young Ms Goswami whose phenomenal talent indie filmmakers ought to reward with more lead parts and who blinkered mainstream filmmakers will hopefully tap for larger roles some day soon. She lends tenderness and warmth to her role as Idu’s mother, switching with seeming effortlessness between her affection for her children and her quiet tension around her husband.

Gali Guleiyan brings us one of the best ensemble casts of the year from Hindi filmdom, though Om Singh deserves to be singled out for his performance as Idu, capturing with equal assurance the child’s playfulness and his animosity towards his father.

The words “inspired by a true story” appear on screen at the start of Gali Guleiyan. We all know that what happens to the people in this story happens routinely in real life, yet to have it spelt out clearly, to be reminded so emphatically that Khuddoos and Idu are not fiction, adds to its poignance. It has been several days since I watched this film, and even now an acute sadness grips me each time I think about it. The beauty of Gali Guleiyan lies in the fact that I never ever want that feeling to go away.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	117 minutes

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gali_Guleiyan

REVIEW 582: HICHKI

Release date:	March 23, 2018
Director:	Siddharth P. Malhotra
Cast: Language:	Rani Mukerji, Harsh Mayar, Neeraj Kabi, Rohit Suresh Saraf, Sparsh Khanchandani, Poorti Jai Agarwal, Benjamin Yangal, Jannat Zubair Rahmani, Jayesh Kardak, Riya Shukla, Vikrant Soni, Kalaivanan Kannan, Shiv Subrahmanyam, Supriya Pilgaonkar, Sachin Pilgaonkar, Vikram Gokhale, Hussain Dalal, Asif Basra Hindi

Back in 2005, when he released the excellent Iqbal, I remember writer-director Nagesh Kukunoor saying: a few minutes into the film, you will forget that my hero is deaf-mute. Truth be told, it was a while after watching Iqbal that it struck me the leading man was also Muslim sans all the indulgent clichés and compulsory cultural markers associated with Hindi film Muslims until then.

Kukunoor’s conviction and approach to that character come to mind each time I watch a film on a differently abled person or minority community member, and I find myself asking: does it pass the Kukunoor/Iqbal Test?

Hichki does. 

Director Siddharth P. Malhotra’s new Hindi film is about a teacher who is tasked with bringing an unruly, disinterested class of financially backward students in line. Apart from the children’s background, Naina Mathur (Rani Mukerji) faces two additional challenges: their elite Mumbai school, St Notker’s, seems resigned to their fate; and Naina has Tourette Syndrome, a disorder characterised by vocal and motor tics, in her case a tendency to make certain loud involuntary sounds and swing her head to the side while touching her hand to her chin, most especially when she is agitated. Her battle then is not just to help the girls and boys of Class 9F overcome their own pessimism and the prejudice they face from some of the richer students and one particular teacher, but also to guide them past the prejudice they direct at her.

Hichki (Hiccup) is based on the book Front of the Class by Brad Cohen and Lisa Wysocky which was made into the 2008 American film of the same name. Frankly, although it will very likely prompt scores of Google searches in the coming days, Hichki is not about Tourette’s – Malhotra’s film is designed to have us looking past Naina’s condition, seeing her as a woman who happens to have Tourette’s and is determined not to allow her students to succumb to their worst fears or insecurities, to recognise their own failings and biases even as they battle the biases others hold against them. Tourette’s is just one of multiple factors steering this screenplay – written by Anckur Chaudhry, Malhotra himself, Ambar Hadap and Ganesh Pandit – that, interestingly for patriarchal Bollywood, has taken a male-centric literary work and adapted it with a woman as the protagonist.

The result is a largely engaging film that, despite the hiccups in its writing journey, manages to hit the mark.

It is, in some senses, a predictable path. We know from the moment Naina Mathur enters that classroom, how the story will turn out: that the kids will resist her, they will next be won over by her sincerity, and they will finally become her allies. Occasionally it feels rather thin too as a consequence, sometimes manipulative and often also very simplistic. This is, after all, a formula that has been repeatedly visited in films since E.R. Braithwaite took up a teacher’s job in his book To Sir, With Love and Sidney Poitier followed suit on screen more than half a century back. The addition of classism within the school and Tourette’s to the situation does, however, alter the dynamics.

In the end then, Hichki offers enough surprises and enough moments of unmanipulative emotional intensity to be a rewarding experience.

One of the film’s biggest strengths is Mukerji, who has been seen in only three features – Aiyyaa, Talaash and Mardaani – since the box-office success of No One Killed Jessica in 2011. She lifts Hichki every time she is on the scene, bringing empathy and charm to Naina’s character without at any moment soliciting the audience’s pity. Even when the screenplay is passing through its most slender passages, Mukerji elevates it with her presence.

She is surrounded by a bouquet of charismatic supporting actors, not all of whom get the benefit of in-depth characterisation. Most of the students in Naina’s class, for instance, are painted with broad brush strokes and a single defining attribute that do not do justice to the evidently capable actors playing them. Among the ones getting short shrift is Riya Shukla who delivered an electrifying performance in 2016’s Swara Bhasker-starrer Nil Battey Sannata.

The youngster with the benefit of the best-written part is Harsh Mayar playing Aatish, the last rebel standing in 9F. Look closely: that casually good-looking guy is the same fellow who played the little livewire Chhotu in Nila Madhab Panda’s I Am Kalam (2011) for which he won a National Award for Best Child Artist. Age has done nice things to Mayar, looks-wise and acting-wise. There are some rough edges that need smoothening out, such as when he is given a somewhat schmaltzy speech to deliver, but overall he has the ability to hold his own in Mukerji’s company and acting chops worth watching out for.

To learn how not to be pulled down by a spot of speechifying in a screenplay, he just needs to take notes from his co-star, theatre veteran Neeraj Kabi, playing the doggedly classist Mr Wadia, Naina’s bete noir in the St Notker’s staffroom. Even when the man sneeringly describes 9F as “municipality garbage”, Kabi ensures that his character comes across as credible rather than hyperbolic.

People can be mean. People who face nastiness from others can in turn be nasty to those less fortunate than they are. Hichki may not have the heft of Iqbal but it is a valuable reminder, through the vehicle of the Naina-Aatish equation, that intolerance is not justified simply because the person at the receiving end is flawed. It is also, of course, about not giving up on a human being if you spot redeeming qualities beyond their jagged exterior.

The film itself is not without its faults, but its uplifting theme and Mukerji’s understated performance serve as compensation. Besides, it drew tears from me more than once, each time when I was least expecting it. Sweetness and good intentions make for a pleasant combination in Hichki.  

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

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	118 minutes 29 seconds

A version of this review was published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/hichki-movie-review-rani-mukerjis-to-maam-with-love-hits-the-mark-hiccups-and-all-4402515.html

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hichki