REVIEW 783: BULBBUL

Release date:	June 24, 2020
Director:	Anvita Dutt
Cast:	Tripti Dimri, Avinash Tiwary, Paoli Dam, Parambrata Chattopadhyay, Rahul Bose, Ruchi Mahajan, Varun Paras Buddhadev, Vishwanath Chatterjee
Language:	Hindi

I really enjoy the way Anushka Sharma’s mind works. 

I am not referring to this film alone for which of course writer-director Anvita Dutt must first be cited. The mention of Sharma right at the start of this review comes because of a pattern emerging from the choices this talented actor has made in her avatar as a producer in the past half decade. Her debut production, NH10 in 2015, was a feminist crime thriller. Then followed two supernatural flicks, one a romance (Phillauri, 2017), the other a horror movie (Pari, 2018). Just as she is reaping accolades and fending off outraged conservatives for her socio-political crime series Paatal Lok on Amazon Prime, here comes her first feature film to be released directly on a streaming platform. 

Bulbbul combines what appear to be Sharma’s two primary interests – feminism and the paranormal – that earlier came together in the terrifying Pari. Her courageous, non-conformist filmography as a producer is at odds with her off-screen image in recent years of being a supporter of the current right-wing regime.

In Bulbbul, the viewer is transported to the Bengal Presidency in 1881, where child marriages were a norm, and women born or married into aristocratic families were expected – no differently from today – to stay silent about the injustices meted out to them by patriarchy, their caste privilege notwithstanding. 

A sense of foreboding descends on the screen from the very first frame on the wedding day of a little girl (Ruchi Mahajan), and in the palanquin on the way to her marital home, as a kind older boy tells her the story of a murderous, bloodthirsty chudail (female demon). 

Twenty years later, the girl is now a gorgeous but oddly detached young woman (Tripti Dimri) presiding over her mansion while her husband (Rahul Bose) and his twin brother are nowhere to be seen, her elder sister-in-law (Paoli Dam) has been relegated to insignificance and her attractive brother-in-law (Avinash Tiwary) returns after a long absence. 

Director Amar Kaushik had blended humour and the other-world in his Stree in 2018 to turn the tables on men who suppress women in the guise of concern. In a completely different genre, in Bulbbul the conceptualisation of the spirit cocks a snook at anti-feminist propaganda and stereotypes of the man-hating woman. At a very basic level, to me Bulbbul is what Devdas might have been if in a paranormal revisitation of that classic, Paro had turned round and landed a tight slap on the eponymous loser hero’s face.

Dutt is an accomplished lyricist, screenplay and dialogue writer for Hindi films. With Bulbbul she makes her debut as a director. Her writing for this film combines superstition, mythology and history, fantasy, folktale, feminism and fable, to deliver a story drenched in a deep sadness and the blood of women across centuries who have suffered and fought battles so that some of us may today enjoy freedoms that they could not, giving us the strength to fight newer battles against the cruelty that still survives.

The fabulous atmospherics in Bulbbul are a product of Amit Trivedi’s music in collaboration with DoP Siddharth Diwan’s low-lit colour-saturated frames and the production design by Meenal Agarwal in the leading lady’s resplendent house and neighbouring areas. 

Bulbbul does not often venture into bright daylight. Using a palette reminiscent of the lovely Tumbbad (2018), it bathes the screen in shades of red with flashes of gold – the red of the Hindu bride’s clothing and sindoor symbolising the red of a virgin’s blood flowing on her wedding night and onward into a river of silent suffering or rebellion or both. 

The chudail in Bulbbul fits the physical description of the furious female spook of Indian folklore – beautiful, with long hair and feet twisted backwards. Dutt however gives even that convention a neat – and heartbreaking – twist. This mystery woman is not summoned up here to startle the audience in the way traditional horror films do, but instead to set us thinking. (Note: please read this paragraph after watching the film) She is a personification of the rage of the marginalised, and a stark portrait of what the world might be if the oppressed – in this case, women – were to unleash their rage on the oppressor. She reminded me of a conversation I had aeons back with a senior friend who said she hoped I would not become one of “those angry feminists”, to which I remember replying, “But considering all that we are subjected to, should you not be asking why we women are so calm, and why we are not angrier?” (Cautionary note ends) 

For a film that is so thoughtful in its take on gender politics, it is surprising that  Bulbbul  uses a mentally challenged character as one of its metaphors for patriarchy in an India that remains largely ignorant about disabilities of the mind. I also wish the woman-as-goddess trope had not been thrown into the mix, especially since it is articulated by a man in the film. After all, pedestalisation has long been used by patriarchy to deceive women into thinking they are valued, when in fact they are being set up to be pulled down when the system pleases. The film might also have been better served if the character of Bulbbul’s brother-in-law Satya had more detail. 

Of the men in the storyline, the one given most heft by the writing is the doctor (Parambrata Chattopadhyay) who becomes the heroine’s friend. And of her many relationships, the one I found most complex was with her sister-in-law, Binodini – two women united in mutual despair yet playing games with each other for survival. 

Dutt has assembled a solid cast for Bulbbul. Tripti Dimri as the title character lives up to the promise she showed in Laila-Majnu. Her Bulbbul is in a state of constant internal turmoil camouflaged by an enigmatic demeanour, which the young actor conveys almost imperceptibly with the lightest of touches.   

Dimri’s co-star from Laila-Majnu, Avinash Tiwary gets a role here that is not flashy like the one he had in that film or the delightful but underrated Tu Hai Mera Sunday. He too is a picture of understatement. Ruchi Mahajan who plays the child Bulbbul is a dear. My pick of the supporting cast though is the unfailingly good Chattopadhyay. 

Since the film is set in Bengal, it requires a suspension of disbelief to accept characters who are all speaking Hindi. Dutt wisely does not ask her non-Bengali actors to do exaggerated Bengali accents to convince us of their characters’ ethnicity – the milieu is right, the look and styling are on point, thus making it possible for the viewer’s imagination to do the rest of the work. 

Among other joys that it offers then is the fact that Bulbbul is one of those rare contemporary Hindi films to travel beyond the Hindi belt and Punjab to a culture and place that Bollywood does not often visit these days. With its eerie air and mythical, mystical tone, Dutt’s film brings alive a spectre that is not scary in the way the average Hindi film bhoot or daayin is – what is scary are the circumstances that brought this creature to such a pass. 

Rating (out of 5 stars): 3

Gulabo Sitabo is streaming on Netflix.

Running time:

94 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/bulbbul-movie-review-anushka-sharmas-continuing-interest-in-the-paranormal-yields-compelling-results-8519781.html

Poster courtesy: IMDB

REVIEW 576: PARI

Release date:	March 2, 2018
Director:	Prosit Roy
Cast: Language:	Anushka Sharma, Parambrata Chattopadhyay, Rajat Kapoor, Preeti Sharma, Ritabhari Chakraborty Hindi

Two years in a row have brought unexpected gifts from Indian cinema for the national masochists club. Last year we heard of dybbuk and ruchim from Jewish folklore via the Mollywood production Ezra. 2017 also gave us the Tamil venture Aval (simultaneously made by the same director in Hindi as The House Next Door), which tapped into our anxieties about what lies outside our windows in the still of the night. Now, in the first quarter of 2018, has come the discovery of ifrit and peri from Middle Eastern mythology courtesy Bollywood.

I learnt about these beings – the former demonic, the latter more ambiguous, says the Goddess Google – as I sat cowering in my seat with my scarf covering my mouth and nose and inching towards my eyes throughout the press preview of the film Pari: Not A Fairytale last night.

Irrespective of what the rest of this review says, know this: Pari is scary as hell and heaven and every imaginable eerie space in between.

Director Prosit Roy’s supernatural thriller stars Anushka Sharma as a mysterious creature of preternatural origins and curious intentions. Her worldly name is Rukhsana, but she appears to be not of this world. Why did her mother (played by Preeti Sharma) keep her tied up in a hole in the woods and in a filthy condition no beast deserves?

The question is answered, though not entirely so, when Rukhsana latches on to a man called Arnab (Parambrata Chattopadhyay), an employee at a printing press in Kolkata. Their connection is that her mother dies in an accident involving his car.

Seeing the daughter’s pitiable condition, Arnab decides to do what every regular follower of the horror genre knows he should not: shelter her till he can make alternative arrangements.

Elsewhere in the region, a one-eyed man (Rajat Kapoor) searches for Rukhsana, and a medical professional (Ritabhari Chakraborty) wonders about the elusiveness of the fellow she loves.

Pari is not without its weaknesses. Among other things, some of the information about Rukhsana’s background remains fuzzy right till the end, and Kapoor’s character uses the words “pari” and “peri” interchangeably but with different pronunciations within the span of two sentences in one scene.

There is also a conversation between Arnab and his fiancée that flirts with a needless intellectualisation of the goings-on in the film. Fortunately, that exchange is so brief as to barely matter. It is unnecessary anyway, since by then Pari is well on its way to fulfilling its goal of frightening the living daylights out of the viewer.

This is not to say that Pari is unintelligent – no horror film is, if it is effective in being terrifying. Writer-director Prosit Roy and his co-writer Abhishek Banerjee are aware of the wave of Islamophobia sweeping across today’s India, prevailing prejudices against spinsters and the assumptions made about women who have undergone abortions. They use these to raise our expectations in one direction while Pari heads off in another.

(Spoiler alert) The same tactic is employed with the usual clichés that makers of fearfests tend to resort to. When you are expecting a manipulative screeching sound in the background, it does not come. When you are expecting an old man to repeat an action with a glass eye, he does not. That first scene featuring that artificial appendage and a cleansing routine sickened me because it felt gratuitous, but in the end, when the eye came back to haunt us, I realised that the director was having a spot of fun with us, knowing well that many Indian viewers tend to have low expectations while watching home-grown paranormal films because our film industries do not do the genre well.

In Pari’s bloodiest portion, while the colour red screams off the screen, as disturbing as the visible gore is the expectation of how much more we will see being spilled (but do not). (Spoiler alert ends)

The director’s job is made easier by one of the best casts assembled for a spook flick. Anushka Sharma is the perfect combination of innocent and enigmatic, frail and fearsome as Rukhsana. She delivers an image-defying performance that is designed to elicit pity and dread in equal measure, from the audience and from Arnab. The fact that the star has chosen to produce this shockathon (she is one of the few female actors in Bollywood to turn producer) speaks volumes about the risk-taking streak she has brought to her career so far.

Parambrata Chattopadhyay’s filmography is dominated by Bengali cinema. He made his Bollywood debut with an endearing performance in the Vidya Balan-starrer Kahaani (2012) and brings the same quality to his well-meaning but ultimately flawed Arnab.

These two central artistes have solid backing from veteran Rajat Kapoor, who is utterly chilling, and his shadowy gang, and from newcomers Preeti Sharma and Ritabhari Chakraborty.

Everything in Pari – from its art design to the background score and sound design (refreshingly non-grating considering the traditions of the genre in Bollywood), even the sketches accompanying the credits – works towards sustaining our sense of foreboding about what is to come in that next shot, around that next corner, behind that next door, beyond that next street, after that final name rolls off the screen.

Greater clarity in Rukhsana’s back story would have helped, but for now, I am too busy trying to recover from that petrifying passage in Pari when I finally shut my eyes for a moment because I could take it no more.

Anushka Sharma, you sadist…!

Rating (out of five stars): ***

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

This review was also published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/pari-movie-review-anushka-sharma-and-her-film-are-scary-as-hell-heaven-and-everything-in-between-4373241.html

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pari_(2018_Indian_film)

REVIEW 388: TRAFFIC

Release date:	May 6, 2016
Director:	Rajesh Pillai
Cast: Language:	Manoj Bajpayee, Jimmy Sheirgill, Divya Dutta, Kitu Gidwani, Prosenjit Chatterjee, Parambrata Chattopadhyay, Nikita Thukral, Vishal Singh, Amol Parashar Hindi

The road to cinematic achievement is lined with films that made it to the interval mark and then were ruined by their own contrivances. Traffic is a case study in what not to do with your story after the half-way post.

Based on a Malayalam screenplay by Bobby and Sanjay, which led to the well-received 2011 film of the same name, this remake is adapted for Hindi viewers by scriptwriter Suresh Nair with dialogues by Piyush Mishra and Prashant Pandey. The late Rajesh Pillai directed both films.

Traffic is inspired by a real-life incident from 2008 in Tamil Nadu that was reported in the news media. The story of the Hindi film version, as far as can be told without spoilers, is this: A 12-year-old girl called Riya, daughter of filmstar Dev Kapoor (Prosenjit Chatterjee) and his wife Maya (Divya Dutta), is struggling for her life in Pune. Meanwhile, newbie journalist and road accident victim Rehaan Ali (Vishal Singh) is on a ventilator in a Mumbai hospital. Doctors have virtually given up hope for him. His parents (played by Kitu Gidwani and Sachin Khedekar) agree to donate their son’s heart to save Riya. With time running out for her and all flights grounded due to poor visibility, the organ must be transported 160km by road in 150 minutes.

Anyone who knows the madness of Mumbai will understand what a near-impossible task that is. Constable Ramdas Godbole (Manoj Bajpayee) steps up to make the impossible possible with the support of his boss, Joint Commissioner of Police (Traffic) Gurbir Singh (Jimmy Sheirgill). As you would have figured from the trailer, Godbole and his companions are making good time when their vehicle disappears.

The rest of the film is spent figuring out what happened to them and whether they ultimately reach Pune before it is too late for Riya.    

This should have been a no-frills thriller woven around a story of basic decency and humanity. The human element is well handled in the first half leading the way to what should have been a suspenseful second half. Those early gains are frittered away though by the desperation to be a film with a message.

Traffic’s USP is the manner in which relationships and power equations between characters are established: the father who is brusque with his son even though he loves him, the young man whose feelings for a woman are unaffected by socially prescribed barriers, a mother who rises above her own grief to recognise the pain of another woman, the arrogance of a celebrity even in the face of personal tragedy, influential people who pull strings undeterred by the human life at stake and a police constable seeking redemption in the eyes of his daughter after a high-profile bribery scandal.

All these points are effectively driven home without being trumpeted from a rooftop. The moment loudness overtakes subtlety though, the impact of the film is sadly diluted.

An early sign of this tendency comes when a doctor lectures JCP Singh about doing his duty and taking a risk to save a life. Police personnel make for convenient scapegoats in any given situation because they are unpopular figures in public perception in India, but the truth is that Singh’s concerns are valid and yet bombastically brushed aside by the self-righteous doc. As it happens, no one asks him if he would have made that call for a non-VIP patient.

Still, the first half of the film offers sufficient compensation for that brief scene of populist overstatement. The second half, however, fails to sustain the tone.

You may have noticed, without this review rubbing it in, that the child needing a transplant in this story has a Hindu name and her potential donor’s name is Muslim. Audiences are not fools and can be left to draw whatever conclusion they choose without the point being underlined, then circled with a red pen and further highlighted with a bright yellow marker.

Having initially assumed that viewers are intelligent and sensitive to our social reality, Team Traffic later succumbs to an inexplicable urge to idiot-proof their film.

Firstly, the reason for the disappearance of Godbole’s vehicle comes across as being contrived to introduce a message about how everyone deserves a second chance in life. Next, the entire inter-community component overshadows everything else in the film’s second half with its in-your-face messaging, as golden-hearted Muslims clear hurdles in Godbole’s path while a song discusses Allah and maula, declaring that religion and God are both the problem and its solution.

Also thrown into the mix for good measure is a well-meaning Christian briefly gone astray and doing penance for his misdeeds. The only thing left was for them to put a turban on JCP Singh’s head and have him deliver a sermon on Wahe Guru. Thankfully, that does not happen, though the closing credits are accompanied by another musical reminder about communal amity.

It is clear that in this film’s mindscape – as it is with most mainstream Hindi cinema – minority community members are strategically placed in stories with the specific purpose of putting out some sort of lesson, not because they just happen to exist within the country’s population.

Between the overt secularism of Godbole’s experiences on the road and the repetition of the moral of the story in the final song, the film gets back on track with a brief scene involving Rehaan’s grieving parents and his girlfriend Aditi. That fleeting interaction is heartbreaking.

In fact, the two most moving scenes in Traffic feature low-key, low-volume phone calls: Maya Kapoor speaking to Mrs Ali, Dr Ali reaching out to Aditi. Divya Dutta, Kitu Gidwani and Nikita Thukral (as Aditi) are particularly wonderful through these moments, making the film their own despite the presence of the ever-dependable Manoj Bajpayee and Jimmy Sheirgill in much larger roles (both men are effective too).

If you have known the death of a loved one, you will understand how excruciatingly hard it is to let go. The only thing worse than the anticipation and fear of loss is loss itself. The feel of cold, lifeless flesh that will never be warm again is like a knife through the heart. Drama is intrinsic to these situations and to the larger, multi-cultural Indian reality, without the crutch of high-decibel songs or explicit moralising. If Team Traffic had understood that, this could have been a great film. As things stand, it is an uneven, unsatisfying ride.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	104 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/traffic-review-needless-messaging-spoils-this-manoj-bajpayee-starrer-2768456.html

Photograph courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_(2016_film)