REVIEW 726: CHHICHHORE

Release date:	September 6, 2019
Director:	Nitesh Tiwari
Cast: Language:	Sushant Singh Rajput, Shraddha Kapoor, Varun Sharma, Tahir Raj Bhasin, Naveen Polishetty, Tushar Pandey, Saharsh Kumar Shukla, Prateik Babbar  Hindi

A present-day tragedy sends Annirudh Pathak (Sushant Singh Rajput) off in search of his best buddies from his youth. They were all students at India’s most prestigious engineering college about two decades back when they joined forces to get rid of the loser tag slapped on their hostel by the rest of the institution.

Anni gathers his gang – now older and many of them balding – around his son to recount their shenanigans from back then and convince the boy that winning is not everything, that the fight counts. At first Anni’s ex-wife Maya (Shraddha Kapoor), who was also their collegemate, is cynical about this strategy to lift the child’s spirits. She changes her mind though as the group gets deeper and deeper into their story and their young listener begins to get involved with these characters, some of who once went by the names Sexa, Acid, Mummy and Bevda.

Writer-director Nitesh Tiwari had his heart in the right place when he conceptualised this project. Chhichhore (The Childish Lot) is about an India that teaches youngsters to slog, compete and celebrate victory but almost never counsels them on how to handle defeat. It is a lesson that this country and its blinkered education system, pushy parents and mindless teachers sorely require. It is a lesson that sensible parents and forward-thinking teachers have long tried to propagate. The vehicle for this messaging needed to be less shaky though.

From the word go, Chhichhore’s 3 Idiots hangover is evident. That 2009 blockbuster by Raju Hirani was not without flaws – its take on education was simplistic and one-dimensional, it cast men in their late 30s and mid 40s as teenagers, and it trivialised rape in that horrid “balatkaar” speech. For the most part though, its humour was not insensitive, and one thing is for sure: 3 Idiots had its own voice. Chhichhore is a film in search of a voice that ends up looking, feeling and sounding all mixed up.

Too much about this film is uneven and confusing. For a start, how come the boys have aged when we meet them in the present day but Maya has not? The only change in her is that her attire and styling are less sassy and flouncy. From Western dresses and short hair the older Maya has switched to staid cotton saris, salwar suits and a boring bun. But her skin, hair, posture and gait remain unchanged. It is as if Team Chhichhore felt that unlike men, ageing women are not worthy of screen space.

Even Maya’s wardrobe and style in college are inexplicable. She has the appearance of a girl from a much earlier era than her male collegemates, perhaps the 1960s.

Not that the men fare much better in their senior avatar. With the years added to their lives, their hairlines recede but several of them continue to have skin as supple as a baby’s bottom.

These might have been excusable glitches if Chhichhore had got its tone right, but unfortunately the narrative never quite settles into doing its own thing. Both thematically and tonally, the film is trying to be what it is not throughout, borrowing heavily from 3 Idiots in terms of mood and even plot points. And the back and forth switches between the present and the past are just not effective.

What works in Chhichhore are the sports contests which do have an air of suspense about them, a considerable part of the banter between the friends in their younger days, and the energetic songs Control and Fikar Not (music: Pritam, lyrics: Amitabh Bhattacharya).

Nitesh Tiwari clearly has a talent for setting up battles in the sporting arena – he proved that in his last film, Dangal, and proves it again here. The many matches in Chhichhore, the boys’ hilarious immaturity and sharp tongues are often thoroughly entertaining. And while Maya remains a shadow in the background of the narrative that is anyway largely bereft of women, it is nice to see a Hindi film set in an environment where gender segregation is the norm but the hero’s wooing of the heroine is not noxious and stalkerish.

None of this is, however, enough to sustain Chhichhore. There are too many draggy patches in between, the acting is inconsistent, and the somewhat superficial messaging adds nothing to the “what matters is that you tried” line we have heard before.

The writing of Chhichhore (by Tiwari himself with Nikhil Mehrotra and Piyush Gupta) is so lacking in depth, and the direction so passionless, that it is hard to believe it is brought to us by the same person who made Dangal. Despite its sporadic bursts of humour, Chhichhore comes across as a half-hearted enterprise.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	146 minutes

A version of this review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/bollywood/chhichhore-movie-review-sushant-singh-rajput-ages-shraddha-kapoor-does-not-in-a-hotch-potch-with-a-3-idiots-hangover-7295001.html

Posters courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/foxstarhindi/

REVIEW 637: MITRON

Release date:	September 14, 2018
Director:	Nitin Kakkar
Cast: Language:	Jackky Bhagnani, Kritika Kamra, Neeraj Sood, Pratik Gandhi, Shivam Parekh, Mohan Kapoor, Prateik Babbar  Hindi and Gujarati

The first thing I did after watching Mitron was to check the credits for Jacky Bhagnani’s producer father’s name. I could not find it, which makes me wonder what the hell and Hades director Nitin Kakkar – the man who gave us that sparkling gem called Filmistaan – was thinking when he chose to cast Bhagnani Junior as his hero here. Each time a youngster this personality-less enters filmdom, you hope and pray he quietly retires on reading the message the audience is sending him, so that no critic is forced to spell it out in black and white and all the hurtful colours of the rainbow.

It feels harsh to say these things without mincing words and I don’t want to intentionally cause pain, but when an actor’s zero charisma ruins what feels like a screenplay with promise, perhaps all of us need to lash out at an industry that makes talented outsiders struggle for a single tiny role while giving chances again and again to star kids even after viewers have repeatedly rejected them, an industry so blinded by its privilege that when someone calls them out on their nepotism, they mock and marginalise her as revenge.

I do not know what Kakkar’s compulsions were, or whether he genuinely believes that Bhagnani’s sweet, paavam-boy look suits this role. What I do know is that I loved, loved, loved Filmistaan, which made me laugh till I cried, died and was resurrected, and that the combination of Kakkar with Sharib Hashmi in Mitron made me sit up and take notice (Hashmi played one of the leads in Filmistaan, and is the writer who has adapted the story of the Telugu film Pelli Choopulu for this one). As it turns out, Mitron’s screenplay has quite a bit going for it, and the casting of the leading man is the spoke in the wheel.

Jai (Bhagnani) is a lazy, indisciplined Gujarati youngster without a purpose. He lolls about, yet to find a mission in life and getting on his father’s nerves as sons have got on fathers’ nerves for centuries. He enjoys culinary experiments and would ideally like to be a chef, but goes down conventional paths under pressure from his tradition-bound, exasperated parent. This includes agreeing to an arranged marriage, which leads to an accidental “ladki dekhna” meeting with Avni (Kritika Kamra), whose son-obsessed father has failed to notice what a bright, enterprising daughter he has.

Jai and Avni bond over their frustrations with their respective parents, though her purposefulness is a stark contrast to his fatalistic, lackadaisical attitude. Meanwhile, he finds a potential bride. She, on the other hand, refuses to give up her professional ambitions even as the quest for her groom continues.

The point about autocratic, judgemental parents imposing professional dreams on their hapless children was explored with profound insights and emotional depth in Imtiaz Ali’s lovely, underrated Tamasha in 2015. It seems like an incongruous comparison considering that that film had the remarkably charismatic Ranbir Kapoor playing the male protagonist. Still, it is worth mentioning because Tamasha displayed an acute understanding of Kapoor’s character’s situation, but completely forgot its heroine (played by Deepika Padukone, no less) halfway through the film. On the other hand, Sharib Hashmi’s screenplay is thoroughly committed to its interesting female lead played by an interesting female actor.

It is not often that Hindi cinema bothers with women’s career dreams. TV’s Kritika Kamra makes her big screen debut as the entrepreneurial Avni, a woman performer with spunk playing a character with spunk. Unfortunately for Kamra, she is done in by Bhagnani who is too insipid to make Jai’s  lack of drive worth watching, and ends up pulling down the entire film and robbing it of all zest. If Bollywood has any common sense, it will take note of her arrival and give her another opportunity to display her acting chops in this new medium.

Mitron is strewn with hints of what it might have been if it had been better cast. Hindi cinema tends to be very culturally insular, its worldview largely being restricted to the people and preoccupations of the Hindi belt and Mumbai where it happens to be based. It is therefore interesting to see that Mitron is set in India’s Gujarati community, which it portrays complete with their pluses and quirks, yet remains devoid of caricatures or stereotypes.

Another passing insight into Hashmi’s worldview, which is clearly more expansive than his industry colleagues’ vision, comes from a brief reference Jai makes to Mani Ratnam’s Mouna Ragam. Indian cinemas other than Hindi are replete with references to films across Indian languages including Hindi and it is not unusual for them to mix languages in the dialogue writing. Hindi films on the other hand tend to be very parochial, only occasionally turning their gaze outward for a few laughs or exotica. Mitron, in that sense, is different even if not massively so.

Mitron’s attitude to women too is uncommon in the Hindi film industry but not in the manner of films such as Akira made by directors who are clearly clueless about feminism but have of late discovered its commercial potential. The episode with Jai’s nasty, opportunistic girlfriend, for instance, does not have that venomous tone of misogyny now so familiar from films like Pyaar Ka Punchnama 1 and 2 and Sonu Ke Titu Ki Sweety – unlike in those horrid, hateful films, here she is one girl, not a comment on womankind at large.

Sure, Mitron’s ending is a bow to social norms, but it can be excused if you recall a conversation in which Jai tells Avni’s father that parents need to stop pushing kids to hurry through life, and should instead leave them to make their choices at their own pace. This, in essence, is the point of the film.

All this fades into insignificance though in the face of the overall lack of energy in Mitron that comes from a vacuum opposite the sparks emanating from Kamra’s Avni, as a result of which the simplicity of the story and the storytelling style end up coming across as predictability instead. Frankly, I found myself wondering what this film might have been if Jai had been played by Vicky Kaushal who has been dealt a poor hand by Anurag Kashyap’s Manmarziyaan – also in theatres this week – and yet has managed to eke something out of nothing in that film.

I derived some satisfaction from assuming that Hashmi shares my frustrations, after watching a scene in which a call centre boss in Mitron yells at Jai and calls him a “sifaarshi tuttoo”. An inside joke? Perhaps. Ouch, did you say? Well, if you winced while reading that, know that writing it was no cakewalk – hearing the truth no doubt hurts, sometimes speaking the truth hurts too.

Rating (out of five stars): *

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	119 minutes

A version of this review has been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/mitron-movie-review-jackky-bhagnani-spoils-the-day-kritika-kamra-deserves-another-shot-at-filmdom-5194281.html

Posters courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitron

REVIEW 125: EKK DEEWANA THA

Release date:	February 17, 2012
Director:	Gautham Vasudev Menon
Cast:	Prateik Babbar, Amy Jackson, Manu Rishi

Truth be told, I’m so tense about my book deadline that I was planning to skip reviewing Ekk Deewana Tha. But writer-director Gautham Vasudev Menon has created such a silly myth about Malayali Christians in this film, and in the past 24 hours I’ve read so many conversations on Twitter by authorities of half-baked knowledge, that I couldn’t resist.

Stereotyping apart, Ekk Deewana Tha is an excellent case study for the worst way to remake a lovely film. Quite literally, it is a carbon copy of Menon’s own hit 2010 Tamil film Vinnaithaandi Varuvaayaa (VTV / Will You Cross The Skies With Me). But you cannot Xerox a story, transport it to a completely different setting, and make no adjustments for the new milieu!

VTV was the story of the love between a Tamil Hindu boy and a Malayali Christian girl in Chennai, his unwavering feelings, her confusion and indecisiveness especially in the face of her family’s opposition, and an impetuous decision she takes in a fit of anger/irritation that changes their lives. It was a very poignant, very mellow film about two very real people whose longing for each other gave me an ache in my own heart. When Karthik is burning with desire for Jessie, you see it in the way his fingers surreptitiously brush against her feet as they sit chatting on a train. When he tells her their chemistry is undeniable, you see him seated across a table from her, locked in an argument, while in his mind’s eye he’s with her on her chair locked in a passionate embrace. Jessie was not a girl I entirely liked or respected, but of course such muddled-up, dithering women do exist. VTV was excellently acted by Silambarasan and Trisha Krishnan, impeccably written and directed by Gautham Menon, complemented by a top-class technical team, featured one of A.R. Rahman’s best ever soundtracks … and I loved every bit of it!

The Hindi remake Ekk Deewana Tha, on the other hand, works in places, but is filled with so many incongruities and strikes so many discordant notes that it is hard to get entirely drawn into the story.

The problems begin with the casting. British actress Amy Jackson plays Ekk Deewana Tha’s heroine Jessie, a Malayali Christian girl based in Mumbai. Is it just me or are there others out there who agree that Jackson does not look Indian? Dark hair doth not a desi beauty make! Her features are a tad too European to be convincing. While that may be debatable, what’s not debatable is that the poor girl has been bestowed with the worst make-up you’ve ever seen on a Bollywood heroine! Through parts of the film her face looks orange, elsewhere she has a light chin with dark cheeks and forehead, in one close-up it seems as though no effort was made to mask the dark circles around her eyes, and she looks oily faced almost throughout! It’s as if the entire technical team (make-up, lighting, camera) conspired against her in the film!

Prateik Babbar in Ekk Deewana Tha is Sachin, a Marathi Hindu unemployed engineer who wants to work in films. Playing a man who falls irrationally in love with Jessie, Babbar makes up somewhat for his shockingly bad performances in last year’s Aarakshan and My Friend Pinto. There’s a spark somewhere in there no doubt, so let’s not write him off just yet.

Those who’ve seen VTV may agree that Rahman’s lovely music is not used one-tenth as effectively here as it was in the original film. But the biggest issue with Ekk Deewana Tha is the writing. Menon is credited with the story and screenplay, while Manu Rishi has written the dialogues. Both of them seem strangely disconnected from the setting of their film, and that disconnect is exemplified by their portrayal of Jessie’s people. In VTV, the heroine’s Chennai-based family with their roots in Alappuzha seemed true-to-life … Malayali Christians tend to be conservative, and it’s quite believable that her family would frown upon love marriages and consider filmmaking a useless profession. Why just Malayali Christians? A large percentage of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs share these views too. But in the Hindi Ekk Deewana Tha, Messrs Menon and Rishi have a rather weird way of showcasing Jessie’s family’s orthodoxy. When she meets Sachin for the first time, Jessie explains that she was born and brought up in Mumbai. Since she’s 23, I guess I can safely assume that her entire family was based in Mumbai for at least 23 years? Yet an earlier conversation reveals that Jessie’s father does not know who Amitabh Bachchan is! And when Sachin asks Jessie about Malayalam megastar Mohanlal, she has not heard of him either! Her explanation: among us, watching films is considered “a sin”! She does not say “in my family”, she says “among us”. The implication being that Malayali Christians consider film-viewing a sinful pastime! Huh? That’s not true! Besides, how stupid and insular is this family that has lived in Mumbai for over two decades (in Juhu which is Bachchan’s neighbourhood) but is clueless about the Big B?!! And how lousy is this girl’s general knowledge that, despite being a Malayali, she is not aware of Mohanlal’s existence?!! Perhaps Gautham Menon would also like us to believe that Malayali Christians (even software firm employees like Jessie) don’t read newspapers, don’t watch TV, don’t notice hoardings, don’t talk to neighbours and colleagues, and in fact live in isolated settlements of the sort conceived by Manoj Night Shyamalan in The Village!

Sadly, because Menon is a south Indian himself and because he reportedly claims that Ekk Deewana Tha is his own story, there are Hindi film viewers out there who will assume that the picture he’s painted is correct. Sadder still, because south Indians (a.k.a. “Madrasis”) and Christians are still considered exotica by many people in the northern part of our country, this silliness too will be filed away in folklore. Though as @jojitjoseph wrote to me on Twitter, tongue firmly planted in cheek: “At least I am glad (that because of Ekk Deewana Tha) Bollywood now knows that there are Christians in Kerala. They believed that Christians are indigenous people only found in Goa.”

On the plus side, in Ekk Deewana Tha, Kerala as seen through cinematographer M.S. Prabhu’s lens is beautiful. And with all its flaws, the film does throw up scenes that tug at the heart strings, and others that are funny. I particularly enjoyed the one in which Sachin, seated in church during a wedding, guesses the bride’s next move based on the church weddings he’s seen in films. Some people may consider Jessie’s garrulous uncle in Alappuzha a stereotype, but I didn’t mind the bald little man’s enthusiasm for Hindi and “lenj” (lunch). Occasional caricatures can be amusing. Let’s focus our energies instead on ignorance, insidious stereotypes and disjointed film making.

Rating (out of five): **

CBFC Rating:                       U/A

Language:                              Hindi

Photograph courtesy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ek_Deewana_Tha