REVIEW 352: SHAANDAAR

Release date:	October 22, 2015
Director:	Vikas Bahl
Cast: Language:	Alia Bhatt, Shahid Kapoor, Pankaj Kapur, Sushma Seth, Sanah Kapoor, Sanjay Kapoor, Vikas Verma Hindi

The road to cinematic boredom is paved with grand intentions.

There are  moments in Shaandaar when you can almost imagine what writer-director Vikas Bahl was hoping to achieve during the conceptualisation of this project. Like those scenes in which Jagjinder Joginder (Shahid Kapoor) and Alia Arora (Alia Bhatt) read each other’s dreams. Or when Shahid, Alia, Pankaj Kapur, Vikas Verma and debutant Sanah Kapoor join forces for an argument via the song Senti wali mental – the sets are delicious, the choreography is imaginative, the music is fun and the lyrics sparkle with each character’s convictions.

This then is what the film could have been: an unusual blend of Wes Anderson’s whimsy, Baz Luhrmann’s over-the-top, luxurious fantasia and Manmohan Desai’s emotion, zest and verve.

Sadly, Shaandaar works only in bits and pieces. It has its heart in the right place as is evident from the messages it tries to convey – about stereotypical definitions of beauty, adoption (some well-intentioned misfiring there), children making their own life choices, the superficiality of the happiness money can buy, and the pursuit of both happiness and wealth. It is also sporadically funny. The rest seems lost somewhere in the recesses of Vikas and his co-writers Anvita Dutt and Chaitally Parmar’s minds, like an inside joke floating around perhaps among those clouds that inhabit Alia’s and Jagjinder’s dreams in the story.

It breaks the heart to say this since Vikas directed last year’s best Bollywood film, Queen, which he co-wrote with Anvita, Chaitally, Parveez Shaikh and actress Kangna Ranaut herself. Queen was brilliant. Shaandaar, on the other hand, struggles from the word go.

The story is set in a castle in the English countryside where two wealthy Indian families gather for a destination wedding. The Punjabi Aroras’ overweight daughter Isha (Sanah) is set to marry the Sindhi body-flaunting gym enthusiast Robin Fandwani (Vikas). She is a nice girl who loves her dad (Pankaj), her adopted sister Alia and good food. He is an egotistical, protein-shake-swilling twit who loves himself. Their union is being pushed primarily by the Arora family’s matriarch, Isha’s grandmother (Sushma Seth), to save her clan from bankruptcy. In the run-up to D-day, Alia gets romantically involved with Jagjinder who is their wedding planner.

Going by standard practice in mainstream Bollywood, you might assume that the film revolves mainly around Alia and Shahid’s characters. It does not. There are many sub-stories within this story, and that’s the first step at which Shaandaar falters. Ensemble scripts require a great deal of directorial and writing skill to keep us equally involved with all the characters even as the spotlight continuously shifts from one to the other. Shaandaar cannot  pull that off. Each time it focuses on Alia and Jagjinder, Isha recedes into the background; each time it moves to Isha and Robin, the other two seem to fade away; and so on. The result is an erratic, bumpy narrative.

The occasional, genuinely comedic portions are pulled down by laboured efforts to be cool and humourous elsewhere. The Sindhis in the film for instance – gold-swathed, money-obsessed loud mouths – are caricatures, yet not unabashedly over-done enough to be funny. Karan Johar’s cameo is contrived (KJo leering at a male star is a tired joke that really really needs to be retired). And what were those panties doing on Alia’s plate? No one tells us so it’s fair to assume that that lingerie’s only purpose was to contribute an intriguing element to the film’s trailer.

In such a scenario, it’s hard to analyse the acting. The cast is talented, but there are no stand-out performances. Since Shahid delivered a career best in Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider just last year, this is proof – if any was needed – that no actor is better than the written material at hand. At a couple of places, it even seems as though Alia – usually a sparkler – loses interest in the film.

Still, let it be placed on the record that Sushma Seth looks regal, and Vikas Verma and Sanah are promising. I enjoyed Vikas’ dancing in Senti wali mental and his willingness to make a fool of himself on screen because that was a requirement of the role. Sanah – Shahid’s half sister – has a warm, likeable personality and she holds her own in the presence of established stars.

Let it also be placed on the record that everything and everyone in Shaandaar looks pretty.

That’s it. Team Shaandaar is clearly aiming at a certain quirkiness that it fails to achieve for the most part. In fact, the animated sequences grow tiresome once it becomes clear that the film has more style than substance. The basic plot and other-worldly look suggest a nod to old European fairytales, but Shaandaar doesn’t go all out in that direction either. And the strand about the plus-sized Isha’s self-esteem, well meaning though it is, is put in the shade by Sharat Katariya’s consistently heart-warming film Dum Laga Ke Haisha that was released early this year.

There was a smoothness to Queen that indicated great teamwork. Shaandaar, on the other hand, feels like patchwork. Take that scene in which a gay man comes out of the closet before his relatives. It leads to a sweetly amusing response from the family that is promptly followed by a moment of stereotyping in which he aims a gun at someone with the limpest wrist ever seen in Bollywood. It’s as though two separate mindsets were operating within that idea.

Well, never mind. I loved Queen so much that I plan to pretend to myself that Shaandaar never happened. Until your next film then, Vikas…

Rating (out of five): *1/2

CBFC Rating (India):	U/A
Running time:	144 minutes

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

REVIEW 289: FINDING FANNY

Release date:	September 12, 2014
Director:	Homi Adajania
Cast: Language:	Deepika Padukone, Naseeruddin Shah, Dimple Kapadia, Pankaj Kapur, Arjun Kapoor, Anjali Patil, Anand Tiwari, Cameo: Ranveer Singh English (A Hindi version has also been released.)

After a sparkling debut with Being Cyrus, director Homi Adajania unexpectedly betrayed a penchant for stereotyping with his disappointing take on the Christian woman and neurotic spinsterhood in his second film Cocktail. It was with trepidation then that I entered the hall to watch his latest film, Finding Fanny. Would it continue Bollywood’s notorious typecasting of Goan Christians as a semi-foreign bunch of male drunkards and female cabaret dancers speaking the “hum God se pray karta hai” kind of Hinglish?

As it turns out, whatever else it may or may not be faulted for, Finding Fanny cannot be accused of a reductive portrayal of Goans. For the moment, let’s forget the fact that Hindi cinema as a whole is yet to acknowledge the existence of Goan Hindus or of sari-wearing Goan Christian women. Before that stage of evolution can be reached, here comes Finding Fanny, a film that thankfully does not follow the Bollywood tradition of caricaturing this community.

Sadly, that’s not enough. Finding Fanny is quirky in parts, funny some of the time, and has a wonderful cast. But by the end of it all, the film feels too lightweight and too flimsy to matter.

Welcome though to sleepy Pocolim in Goa. On the surface, this fictional village appears to epitomise the fabled susegad, the contentment that lies at the heart of the state’s culture. We discover along the way though, that there are unfulfilled dreams and desires and long-held secrets simmering below the surface.

We are introduced to the film’s five leading characters in the voice of young Angie (Deepika Padukone), a beautiful widow of six years who shares a warm equation with her gorgeous and curiously husbandless mother-in-law Rosie (Dimple Kapadia), the local queen bee. Angie’s best friend is the elderly postmaster, choirboy and child-man Ferdie (Naseeruddin Shah). Their lives take off in a whole new direction when a letter Ferdie sent to the love of his life – Stefanie Fernandes a.k.a. Fanny – is returned to him after 46 years. Angie urges him to find Fanny, and reveal his unrevealed feelings to her. For their mission, she is compelled to rope in ma-in-law, the artist Don Pedro (Pankaj Kapur) and her childhood friend Savio (Arjun Kapoor); because Savio is the only one among them who can drive, Pedro owns a car, and the unwitting Rosie’s company on the road trip is essential as bait to coax him into lending them that vehicle.

Clearly the film is aiming at whimsy, a quality so smoothly achieved in Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel that was recently in Indian theatres. Finding Fanny doesn’t have enough substance to achieve its goal though. It is not entirely consistent in its characterisation either. That outburst by Rosie against Savio, for instance – did it not imply animosity towards Angie, who she clearly loves? Is it fathomable that sweet, protective Angie would pimp Rosie to the discomfortingly lustful Pedro? And why are we expected to be amused by that lecherous chap?

Pankaj as Pedro over-acts to the point of making you wonder why he is routinely described by critics as “one of Bollywood’s most under-rated actors”. When he is good, he can be lovely – as he was in last year’s Matru ki Bijlee ka Mandola and in Bhavna Talwar’s brilliant 2007 film Dharm – but when he is not, he can be painfully repetitive and/or OTT, which is how he is here. The forever-stunning Dimple too has a couple of overdone moments in the film, but it’s hard to hold that against her when she’s clearly enjoying the role. Besides, overall she shows more depth in Finding Fanny than she has got a chance to display through most of her career so far. She immerses herself in her character, as does Naseer whose loveable babe-in-the-woods turn here has more conviction than we see from him in most commercial films these days.

Notwithstanding how Finding Fanny has turned out, it’s a sign of our interesting times that hard-core commercial stars Deepika and Arjun signed up for this evidently experimental venture. Arjun has been growing with each film and proves, especially in that scene in which he ticks off Rosie, that he has what it takes to lose himself in a role. Deepika looks angelic, is attractively but simply turned out, and is completely natural before the camera. She does laidback very well, although Angie’s internal conflicts are not conveyed quite as effectively either by her acting or the writing. Still, the actress reminds us why she is widely considered one of mainstream Bollywood’s best talents in a late-night scene in a field, during a conversation with Savio that is far more casual than you would expect considering the circumstances – so casual, in fact, that it’s a hoot. It’s the best-written scene in the film and both stars shine in it.

The delightful music of Finding Fanny is a perfect fit. Composed by Mathias Duplessy, it is woven seamlessly into the narrative to complement the mood of the film and cinematographer Anil Mehta’s picture-postcard images of the pretty Goan countryside.

“Fanny” is used by Indian English speakers as slang for the bottom. In some places though, it mean a woman’s genitals. Adajania’s overt reason for using the word in the title is the search for Ferdie’s lady love. However, he seems to be having a chuckle with this naming game, playing simultaneously on Angie’s and possibly Freddie’s virginity, Rosie’s expansive buttocks and Pedro’s paintings of grotesquely voluptuous women reminiscent of the legendary Goan painter Francis Newton Souza’s canvases and to a lesser extent, Goan cartoonist Mario Miranda’s buxom ladies. Errr… So who exactly is “finding fanny” in this story? Now if only the film was as substantial as Rosie’s derriere or had as much depth as the connotations of its name...

Rating (out of five stars): **

CBFC Rating (India):	U/A
Running time:	105 minutes

Photograph courtesy: Effective Communication

REVIEW 76: MAUSAM

Release date:	September 23, 2011
Director:	Pankaj Kapur
Cast:	Shahid Kapoor, Sonam Kapoor

I can’t believe that Pankaj Kapur has done what he’s done to Mausam! About one hour into the film I found myself thinking, Great job Mr K – you’ve got a winner on your hands. And then the film went on and on and on … and on and on and on … coming up with twists and turns that seemed deliberately and painstakingly contrived (no other word for it!) to keep the lead pair apart! Oh Mr Kapur, how could you have willfully spoilt what could have been a gem of a film?!

The basic story is this: Harry is a carefree youngster in Mallukot in Punjab. The year is 1992, the state is remembering to forget the ghosts of its recent terror-torn past, and Harry is surrounded by family, friends, happiness and laughter. Enter the beautiful Aayat who’s been sent to a relative’s home here by her father to escape from terror-stricken Kashmir. When Harry says to his friends one sunny afternoon in Mallukot, “Bluestar mara nahin, Ayodhya paida ho gaya,” you know this will not be a simple love story. Harry is smitten by Aayat but before she can reveal her feelings to him, she leaves Mallukot without a word. The years pass, they meet, they part again, and the cosmos seems to be plotting against them. Mausam takes us through a decade in India’s communal calendar – the demolition of the Babri Masjid, the Mumbai bomb blasts, Kargil, the Gujarat riots – and global events that keep two young lovers apart.

I can imagine what debutant director Pankaj Kapur was striving for in this film – an epic tale of star-crossed lovers torn apart by historical events, at the scale of Dr Zhivago. Perhaps as a tribute to David Lean’s classic, there’s even a scene in Mausam in which Harry on a moving train spots Aayat outside while she fails to see him. But Yuri Zhivago and Lara were separated by credible circumstances and events that flowed naturally and believably. Many of the developments that keep Harry and Aayat away from each other, however, seem to arise from their own foolishness or the scriptwriter’s lack of imagination. The first part of the film in Mallukot is well-written and well-directed, but years later when the couple are re-united and Aayat explains to Harry the reason for her disappearance, all I could think was: “And you couldn’t have just walked over to his house and told him that back then?!!!” Too many coincidences, too much happenstance … calls don’t get connected, people aren’t at home just when the protagonists phone them, people don’t try again if they get an answering machine the first time … I could have forgetten all those in the tenderness of Harry and Aayat’s final coming together IF the director had not then proceeded to stretch the story even further with a baby and a white horse that is meant to be symbolic but really looks quite silly! And nothing, yes nothing, screams out a director or producer’s lack of confidence in their product more than a song-and-dance at the end that’s in complete contrast to the mood of the entire film.

But let me dwell on the loveliness of the first hour of Mausam for a while. The languorous, old-world romance between Harry and Aayat is so appealingly different from the frenzied pace of love we’re more used to seeing in Hindi films since the 1970s. The couple are rarely shown touching, but when he sees her on an upstairs balcony in her home, he caresses her shadow that falls on the wall below. In the first real ‘conversation’ they have, they write notes to each other while seated in the same room, because they don’t want to awaken his sister who is lying fast asleep between them. There’s energy, humour, poignancy and pathos in that tightly executed first half, and actors Shahid Kapoor and Sonam Kapoor carry it through with conviction.

Shahid is completely, utterly loveable as the chirpy, youthful Harry with not a care in the world. But he doesn’t quite manage to pull off the more intense, older Squadron Leader Harinder Singh in later years, despite some very subtle make-up changes that add a few barely noticeable lines to his forehead to signify the passage of time. Sonam as Aayat is given barely any meat to sink her teeth into, but within those limitations she sustains her part throughout, playing a diffident yet mischievous girl in the first half and the tragic woman in Part 2.

A word about Shahid’s moustache in his Air Force officer avatar – doesn’t work! If the team was looking for a way to make that likeable boyish face appear older, they should have opted for the stubble and then beard he adopts right towards the end.

At a political level, the film starts off on solid ground but ends on a whimper. By making Aayat a Muslim, Mausam bravely makes the point that terror has affected the lives of everyone in Kashmir irrespective of religion. But unlike director Onir’s beautiful 2011 film I Am that takes a tough position on the misfortunes of Kashmiri Pandits and Muslims, unlike that lovely Dharm in which Pankaj Kapur played a Hindu priest who adopts a child without realising that it was born of Muslim parents, Mausam plays it safe. Considering that there are many right wing elements in our society who believe Godhra was a justification for the Gujarat riots, Mausam’s decision to skip Godhra entirely and jump straight to the Gujarat riots feels like a cop-out, providing fodder to fundamentalist Hindus who accuse secular, moderate Hindus of being apologists for the Muslim community. Forget that tricky question, Mausam even pussyfoots around the communal divide between our lead couple – we are told that her father worries because Harry is a Punjabi and Aayat is a Kashmiri, not because of their religious differences. Oh c’mon, after the Saif Ali Khan-Kareena Kapoor-starrer Kurbaan in 2009 in which a man frankly raises concerns about his prospective son-in-law’s religion, such gingerly behavior from Mausam appears odd.

So on the assets side of its balance sheet, Mausam has an attractive lead pair with good on-screen chemistry, a strong supporting cast, two good songs (Rabba main toh mar gaya oye and Saj dhaj ke), lovely locations (from rural India to Scotland and Switzerland), and striking cinematography. Its liabilities are a screenplay that weakens as the film moves along, self-indulgent direction and its unnecessary length – no, we didn’t need to see that Mozart concert or Aayat taking ballet lessons or all those extreme close-ups! What a lost opportunity Mausam is! 

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

CBFC Rating:                        U without cuts

Running time:                        170 Minutes

Language:                              Hindi

Photograph courtesy: http://mausam-thefilm.com/