REVIEW 534: SOLO

Release date:	October 6, 2017
Director:	Bejoy Nambiar
Cast: Language:	Dulquer Salmaan, Sai Dhansika, Arthi Venkatesh, Anson Paul, Renji Panicker, Sruthi Hariharan, Manoj K. Jayan, Prakash Belawadi, Neha Sharma, Nassar, Suhasini Maniratnam, Dino Morea, Deepti Sati Malayalam

(Note: This is a review of the Malayalam version of Solo. The film has been simultaneously made in Tamil.)

Dulquer Salmaan is as hot as I imagine the planet Mercury must be. Now imagine someone bringing Mercury down to earth, cloning it to generate four blazing balls of fire and packing them into a single film. That is what writer-director Bejoy Nambiar has done in his new release Solo, an anthology of short stories written jointly by Nambiar and Dhanya Suresh, with DQ – as he is popularly known – playing the protagonist in each.

Too hot to handle? Jokes (meaning, that hormonally charged first paragraph) aside, actually not. Nambiar handles the central artiste in his cast as any director should treat a gifted performer: with respect but not reverence. Too many filmmakers ruin potentially good projects by behaving like fanboys rather than helmsmen. In Nambiar’s hands though, Solo is not star-struck, not designed simply to show off a young superstar’s beauty and talent, not painfully conscious of his presence or overwhelmed by it. Salmaan does not overshadow all else here. He is what he is and ought to be: an actor playing a part… well, four parts.

First, he is Shekhar, a musician with a speech impairment and an interfering family, in love with a dancer who is blind. Next, he is Dr Trilok Menon who rescues an accident victim on a lonely road. Then comes Shiva, a violent gangster who is protective towards his little brother and roughs up the mother of his child. And Lieutenant Rudra Ramachandran of the finale is determined to marry the woman he loves despite opposition from her family, including her brigadier father who could destroy his career as revenge.

Each short is presented as a representation of one of the elements – Water, Wind, Fire, Earth; each character as a representation of that element as manifest in Lord Shiva, and bearing one of the beloved deity’s many names.

As standalone shorts, they work well. Each segment is well-rounded for the most part. There is a surprise in each one, but no twist feels contrived. When the realisation settles in, by the third short a viewer is waiting for an unexpected turn of events, but the expectation is not a distraction and does not eclipse everything else that is going on, nor is any revelation predictable.

DQ is excellent throughout, pulling off sensitivity, innocence, cruelty and heartbreak without the effort being apparent. Each of his characters is styled distinctively (Shekhar, for instance, has long hair), but they are distinguishable from each other even without that because of the actor’s subtly changing body language.

The supporting players are just as good, and include stars in their own right. Veterans Suhasini Maniratnam and Nassar who play Rudra’s parents live up to their reputations. Of the young lot, Sai Dhansika stands out for her performance as Shekhar’s lover Radhika and because she too is a Mercury-level knockout. Anson Paul delivers a neatly nuanced performance as Justin, a man wracked with guilt at a choice he once made against the dictates of his conscience, as does Sruthi Hariharan who displays her substantial range in travelling from nagger to victim to sexual being to conflicted woman hopelessly in love within the span of the few minutes available to her.

The only artiste constrained by this film’s grandeur is Arthi Venkatesh playing an accident victim called Ayesha in Trilok and Justin’s short. The camerawork in this portion is painfully overt in its effort to present her as a cute darling sort, as if that was necessary to convince us that her death would be a huge loss to those who loved her. There is also something slightly discomfiting about the focus on her body, her bare skin and her curves, before and after a tragedy befalls her. If the portrayal of Ayesha is one of the film’s lacunae, the fault lies not with Venkatesh but with the cinematography and direction in the few seconds that she is on screen.

This is the only place where Solo becomes self-conscious right in the middle of a narrative. Sadly, it detracts from the natural flow of this section.

The other moments of self-consciousness come in the unconvincing effort to connect Lord Shiva and the elements to Shekhar, Trilok, Shiva and Rudra, and to weave the figure four into the fabric of their lives.

The religio-mythological referencing in Solo is strained and ineffective. It is also, if you think about it, unnecessary. Even without the great Destroyer of the Hindu Holy Trinity, there are common threads running through Solo’s segments: aloneness (which is perhaps why the film is titled thus), loss and betrayal – the physical loss of a loved one, the emotional loss that comes with betrayal by a loved one. These are thoughtful stories in which the audience must grapple with the questions thrown our way without answers being obviously spoonfed to us.

What, for instance, is the definition of human goodness? If a man hesitated over a monumentally heartless action and repented for it all his life, is he evil? Who is the better person: the gun-toting, trigger-happy hooligan camouflaging the great pain he endured in his childhood, or the seemingly polished fellow with a genuine grievance, calmly and systematically executing a plan of revenge? A character describes another as “a good man…not good enough”. Where does human frailty end and “good enough” begin?

These questions, ironically, were “good enough” to make Solo a wholesome film without the intellectual pretentions that rob it of some of its warmth.

While I do not have any favourite in this quartet, I do have a least favourite one, which I cannot reveal because it would involve a spoiler. When you see Solo you will figure out which part I am referring to here. When a man cheats on his wife, and his son asks, “Could you not find any other woman (to have an affair with)?” the Dad has the audacity to say, “I could ask you the same thing.” Actually, he would not be justified in doing so (when you know the particulars, you might agree), and while I can certainly believe that there could be such traitorous fathers out there who might ask their sons such questions, it is hard to buy this particular son’s silence in response to his father’s impertinence, considering the overall writing of his character.

Also defying credulity elsewhere is Rudra’s army boss (Dino Morea) actively prodding him to indulge in silly, typical-Indian-commercial-film-climax-type behaviour.

Solo has a smattering of dialogues in Hindi and Tamil. While for the most part, it is okay not to subtitle them since it can be argued that we are hearing them from the standpoint of characters who don’t understand these languages, this reasoning does not apply to Shiva’s story where some of the Tamil lines are pivotal to the understanding of the main antagonist’s motivations. It would have made sense to embed Malayalam subs here for the benefit of Solo’s primary audience unless it is being assumed that every Malayali knows Tamil.

Like all Nambiar’s films so far, this one too is a visual treat featuring well-used music. Striking illustrations introduce each section. The cinematography is luscious, never more so than in the way it captures those heavily wooded country roads in Trilok’s saga. The greenery in those scenes is so delicious that you could make a meal of it. Each segment too gets a well-defined look without being too literal in the representation of jalam, vaayu, agni and bhoomi.

In each of Nambiar’s features so far, his penchant for stylised storytelling has been his strength and his Achilles heel. I still get goosebumps remembering the splendid overlaying of the song Khoya khoya chand over two parallel tracks of extreme chaos in Shaitan (2011). Nambiar always has an interesting point to make, but too often in his works, style has subtracted from soul. Solo has style and soul. The reason why the film pulls through as a whole despite the needless contrivance used to link its individual parts is because the Shiva reference precedes each one, after which the stories themselves are immersive enough and the cast engaging enough for the artifice to be forgotten till it rolls around once again before the next one. This amounts to liking the film not for what the maker meant it to be, but in spite of his intentions. So be it. Solo is not a great film, but it is “good enough”.

Rating (out of five stars): **3/4

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	154 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/solo-movie-review-four-dulquer-salmaans-and-some-thoughtful-storytelling-overshadow-a-needless-contrivance-4118875.html

Poster courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/solothemovie2017/

REVIEW 512: MUBARAKAN

Release date:	July 28, 2017
Director:	Anees Bazmee
Cast: Language:	Anil Kapoor, Arjun Kapoor, Ratna Pathak Shah, Pavan Malhotra, Ileana D’Cruz, Neha Sharma, Athiya Shetty, Rahul Dev, Karan Kundra, Sanjay Kapoor Hindi

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been longing for a silly, fun yet not lazily offensive or gross Hindi comedy for a while. Too many Bollywood writers and directors have for too long now resorted to certain IQ-averse formulae to tickle the audience’s funny bone.

One, rhyming dialogue. What on earth is that about?

Two, jokes directed at the marginalised and disadvantaged. It takes a particularly slothful and insensitive kind of creative bankruptcy to laugh at victims of rape and domestic violence, persons with disabilities (PwDs), LGBT persons and others who you assume do not dominate your audience and/or control most purse strings at turnstiles. Himmat aur dimaag hai toh find ways to mock rapists, wife beaters, homophobes and sarkari afsars who are apathetic to PwDs.

Three, crudeness. You know, wisecracks about butt cracks, balls, boobs, potty and gas emissions from the posterior.

Yawn.

At his worst, director Anees Bazmee has been guilty of many of the above crimes. For proof, suffer No Problem, Thank You and Ready. At his best though, Bazmee has done what David Dhawan and the much-maligned Rohit Shetty at their best have done: provide us with comic relief from our daily struggles, without making us feel foolish or tapping into our basest instincts.

Hedunnit with the screwball comedy Welcome in 2007 and Singh Is Kiing in 2008. His new film Mubarakan is not exactly a match, but it resides on the same plane as those two: slapstick, crazy, over-the-top, even loud, yet not cheap, lewd or loud-for-the-sake-of-being-loud.

The starting point of this comedy of errors is Kartar Singh (Anil Kapoor), whose brother and bhabi die in a car accident one night, leaving behind twin infant sons. Twins have long been a favourite with writers of farce, William Shakespeare being the most exalted of them. Kartar is overwhelmed by the job of bringing up the kids, so he hands Karan over to his London-based big sister Jeeto (Ratna Pathak Shah) and Charan to his Baldev pra (Pavan Malhotra) in Punjab.

The babies grow up to be the strapping Arjun Kapoor, both bearded, though Charan is turbanned (did I mention they are Sikhs?) while Karan is not. That difference helps the confounded viewer only partly, since the confusion in Mubarakan arises not just from the boys’ identical looks, but also from the fact that Karan loves Sweety Gill (Ileana D’Cruz), Charan loves Nafisa Qureshi (Neha Sharma) and neither has the courage to disclose their relationship to their respective adoptive parents, as a result of which each Mummyji and Papaji in the reckoning fixes up their betaji with another woman, causing Kartar to think up ridiculous solutions to the mess, that make things worse – of course – leading to a fight between Charan’s Buaji and Karan’s Chachaji.

(Pause, while the critic catches her breath)

Angry words pile up on angry words and misunderstandings pile up on misunderstandings until, as in real life, the original cause of the tension matters less than the egos involved.

Also in the fray is Binkle (Athiya Shetty), daughter of a rich man called Sandhu (Rahul Dev).

Binkle Sandhu. Teehee. Yes, like Binkle from Enid Blyton’s tales of two naughty rabbits named Binkle and Flip. Punjabis and Malayalis have certainly cornered the world’s weirdest names.

There’s more than Binkle’s name to evoke laughter here though. The first half of Mubarakan is unrelentingly hilarious. Bazmee does not sustain that momentum post interval – because he stretches it needlessly to 156 minutes – but Anil Kapoor as Kartar is such an uninhibited riot that it is tempting to forgive the film its elongation. The second half does not have enough of Kapoor, but what we do get of him is worth the price of five tickets.

His nephew Arjun effectively conveys the difference between the cocky Karan and his more diffident brother Charan, though the uncle and his young female co-stars manage to steal some of his thunder. To be fair to Arjun, the ladies play more interesting characters.

It is nice to see the beautiful Ileana D’Cruz evolving as a comedian with Mubarakan. Equally enjoyable is Neha Sharma as the fiery though less charming Nafisa who, by the way, is in a profession rarely assigned to Hindi film women – she’s a lawyer. The only dull performance comes from Athiya Shetty as Binkle, although to be fair – again – Binkle herself is a dullard.

Most Bollywood comedies in the past two decades have offered better-written parts to male actors and given primacy to their characters, while women have inhabited the sidelines. Mubarakan is different in the sense that among the younger lot, it offers more exciting roles to the women than the men, and also because it is an ensemble film in the true sense of the term.

Kapoor Sr, Ratna Pathak Shah and Pavan Malhotra have the benefit of the additional charisma that age lends to already charismatic artistes. When Kartar, Jeeto and Baldev are on screen in Mubarakan, it is impossible to look at anyone else.

The gifted Malhotra has not yet got his due – in terms of roles and recognition – from mainstream Bollywood, so it is a joy to see him rocking a substantial part in an out-and-out masala flick like Mubarakan. Also a pleasure is the sight of Shah in prominent roles in film after film in the last couple of years. Her uproariously maudlin and over-sensitive Jeeto follows the sharply contrasting Leela in Lipstick Under My Burkha, released just days before Mubarakan.

Is there stereotyping in this film? Of course there is, but although Mubarakan plays up a particular comical view of Sikhs and Punjabis, the fact is it laughs affectionately with a community, not patronisingly or contemptuously at them. More important, despite occupying that space, it does away with many of Bollywood’s more nauseating Punjabi/Sikh clichés. No one, for instance, says “balle balle” with each breath or indulges in identity-centric buffoonery. This choice is worth far more than the mandatory tribute to Sikh bravery you find as compensation in most such Bollywood comedies (and here too in a song), designed to appease the Sikh clergy that has proved to be disappointingly touchy and nosy in the past decade.

One episode in the film does briefly seem headed in the direction of “baarah baj gaye” territory – yup, that tired joke targeting Sardarjis – but thankfully it does not go there. It takes skill to write entertaining, relaxing rubbish without being regressive, and except for fleeting taunts directed a couple of times at wives and at Kartar’s singleton status, the rest is surprisingly okay. 

In Kartar’s beleaguered gora sidekick Jolly (played by American actor Alexx O’Neill), the film even cocks a snook at that old Hollywood staple: the white leading man’s wacky black flunkey.

(Spoiler alert) The most intriguing aspect of Mubarakan is the inclusion of Nafisa Qureshi. When Hindu-Muslim tensions are at an all-time high in India, when the heightened ‘love jihad’ campaign has vitiated inter-community romances, the insertion of a Hindu-Muslim love angle in slapstick fare is curious, especially because of its unsatisfactory resolution in the film. To me it seems like Bazmee & Co chickened out, fearing going the whole hog in these disturbing times, though I guess there could also be another interpretation. Without revealing details, let’s just say that the conclusion could, alternatively, perhaps be seen as a clever act of subversion that makes the point: you can put it off all you want, or pretend it is not happening, but it will and it is. I leave you to your own interpretation. Irrespective of its intended meaning, Nafisa’s final scene is awkwardly handled, hurriedly done and the worst part of this film. (Spoiler alert ends)

Be that as it may, and despite the considerable dip in pace in the second half, Bazmee has delivered to a great extent with Mubarakan. The film does not strain the viewer’s intellect too much yet does not demand that we – to quote a reviewer cliché – “leave our brains at home”.

At one point, Kartar has a chuckle at the expense of 60-year-old Anil Kapoor’s much-vaunted eternal youth, when he tells a group of youngsters: “Arrey main kehta hoon, goli maaron un buddhon ko. Baat aapas mein hi rakhte hain, yooouthh mein”? (I say, to hell with the oldies. Let’s keep this secret to ourselves, the youth.) The star is clearly allowing the film to laugh at him, just as Mubarakan is clearly mocking itself and its entire genre. This is intelligent silliness.

Rating (out of five stars): **3/4

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	156 minutes

Poster courtesy: IMDB