REVIEW 242: ONE BY TWO

Release date:	January 31, 2014
Director:	Devika Bhagat
Cast: Language:	Abhay Deol, Preeti Desai, Tahir Bhasin, Rati Agnihotri, Jayant Kriplani, Lilette Dubey, Anish Trivedi, Yudishtir Urs, Darshan Jariwala Hindi

I’ve no doubt there are many great existential profundities that writer-director Devika Bhagat believes she’s addressing with this film. As the teenagers I know would say: it’s deep. Very deep, indeed. So deep that I drowned in a sea of boredom and just managed to escape.

One By Two tells us the parallel stories of the love-lorn techie Amit (Abhay Deol) and aspiring dancer-choreographer Samara (Preeti Desai), both living in the city of Mumbai. That they will meet at some point in the film is an inevitability intrinsic to this format. Keeping us hooked until they get there is Bhagat & Co’s job. Sadly, they – and by that I mean the entire team, not just Bhagat – fail miserably in the attempt.

The worst of this film’s many failings is the long-winded screenplay with its inert storytelling style and tons of loopholes, Why, for instance, would a seemingly self-respecting woman assume that her long-estranged ex-lover’s dinner invitation to their daughter was in fact a joint invitation for her too? Why would that daughter lead her mother to believe so? Why would the woman set herself up for an insult, by getting ready for that dinner? Why would the daughter, who loves her mother dearly, seem completely unmoved when the father ticks off the lady for being presumptuous? And these are questions emerging from just one scene where careless writing and poor acting converge. Come to think of it, I have plenty of existential queries with which I could fill this page. Leading the pack is this: Why did Viacom 18 and Abhay Deol invest in a script that is as lifeless as the nondescript title bestowed on it?

This is not to say that Bhagat does not have a track record that would inspire hope in potential producers. She is, among other films, the writer/co-writer of Manorama Six Feet Under, Bachna Ae Haseeno, Aisha and Ladies vs Ricky Bahl. Whatever you may have thought about those films, you have to admit they came armed with enthusiasm and energy. One By Two completely lacks spark. And while much of that could be blamed on the director, the lead cast must share a large part of the blame.

Let’s talk about Abhay Deol, for instance. Sunny and Bobby’s cousin, who was so charming on debut in Imtiaz Ali’s Socha Na Tha, needs to step back and re-assess his work, his choice of roles in the last nine years and how much of himself he invests in the characters he plays. He has a likeable screen presence and a natural ease before the camera, but it’s time he upped his game. In One By Two he plays Amit with an unvarying tone from start to finish and fails to explode on screen even when the screenplay clearly requires him to do so, in that one scene in which the chap deliberately sets out to embarrass his family by appearing before a room full of guests dressed in his underwear and guitar, to sing I’m just pakaoed. Playback singer Siddharth Mahadevan brings on the fireworks with that song, but his zest is unsuited to Deol whose facial expression barely changes to match the words and tune emerging from his character’s lips. Highlighting the actor’s uninspired performance here is the repeated presence in the same frame of cute, talented and impactful young Tahir Bhasin playing Amit’s loyal friend.

And what were they thinking casting model-turned-actress and Deol's real-life girlfriend Preeti Desai as the female lead in this film? She’s an extremely good-looking former beauty queen and a graceful dancer, but on the acting front the best thing that can be said about her is that she has improved vastly since she stood out like a sore thumb in a small role in the midst of an otherwise-brilliant cast in Krishna DK and Raj Nidimoru’s wonderful Shor In The City in 2011. Comparing her to herself, she’s better here, which is saying little. 

As for Shankar Ehsaan Loy’s music over which Deol fought a battle with T-Series that’s been well chronicled by the news media, well, it’s the high point of the film but certainly nowhere close to the high points of their career. The production design is eye-catching, as is Samara’s wardrobe. The dances are attractive, but there’s not a single move that took my breath away as you might expect in a film which features a heroine who is a professional dancer. Since there’s little else worth discussing in One By Two, I’d like to make a special mention of a commode-shaped ice bucket that has a starring role in a drinking session on the terrace with Amit and his friends.

In the end, One By Two is like the farts that Amit dispenses after over-eating his mother’s paneer dish: it’s just so much gas and thin air, but dissipates into the surrounding atmosphere as the memory of this film already has.

Rating (out of five): 1/2 (half star out of 5)

CBFC Rating (India):	U/A
Running time:	139 minutes

Poster courtesy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_By_Two_(2013_film)

REVIEW 37: SHOR IN THE CITY

Release date:	April 29, 2011
Director:	Raj Nidimoru and Krishna DK
Cast:	Sendhil Ramamurthy, Pitobash Tripathi, Nikhil Dwivedi, Tusshar Kapoor, Radhika Apte, Preeti Desai

First let me get this out of the way:

Sendhil Ramamurthy!

Sendhil Ramamurthy!

Sendhil Ramamurthy!

Okay, so I’m having a little fun out here, but you do get my point! Ramamurthy – Indian origin star of the American serial Heroes – is a hottie. It’s clear that he’s also a very discerning man since he’s chosen to make his Hindi film debut in a project as unusual and unexpectedly entertaining as Shor in the City.

Ever since Ram Gopal Varma broke new ground with that amazing gangster flick Satya in 1998 and followed that up with the equally compelling Company, Bollywood has been hooked on Mumbai’s underbelly. Shor in the City visits familiar ground but does so in a delightfully unfamiliar fashion.

The film tells three partially intersecting stories. Tilak, Ramesh and Mandook are friends who are up to no good. Mandook is a loose cannon without a conscience. Ramesh has a head on his shoulders in spite of his vagabond ways. And Tilak, the most reluctantly dishonest of them all, is in the pirated books business. Far removed from their murky world is Abhay, an NRI who has returned to India to run a small enterprise and comes up against a wall of corporate inefficiency, institutional corruption and underworld interference. Somewhere in between is Sawan Murthy a.k.a. Savvy, a cricketer struggling to raise money to bribe a selector, while his girlfriend is paraded before prospective grooms by her family.  

What sets Shor apart from the numerous other films on life in Mumbai is the inoffensive and seamless blend of pathos and humour in the storytelling style. So many of the clichés we’ve come to expect in such films are missing here. There are abuses galore, but conversations are not peppered with those by-now-not-at-all-shocking-and-in-fact-quite-irritating words “moothna” and “hagna”; nor once are we shown an image of a man wetting his pants in fear. What we get instead is a twist at every turn, so that just when you’re expecting to shed a tear, the film makes you smile, and just when you are expecting to laugh, you’re shocked out of your wits instead.

Directors Raj Nidimoru and Krishna DK (who earlier made 99) have also wisely steered clear of most actors we’ve almost come to expect in films about the dodgy side of Mumbai. I have just one word for their cast: wow! Okay, grant me two words please: double wow! Pitobash Tripathi is brilliant as Mandook who thinks nothing of soothing his wounded ego and having a spot of fun by pulling a gun on a man going about his business on a toilet commode. Nikhil Dwivedi (earlier seen in My Name is Anthony Gonsalves and Raavan) is smooth and easy as the far more level-headed Ramesh who is startled out of his wits at the discovery that his friend Tilak is reading a book! The film’s producer Ektaa Kapoor’s brother Tusshar Kapoor as Tilak is not as top-notch as these two, but he’s still the best he’s ever been, in a nicely understated way. The trio have the benefit of the most attractive of the three stories in Shor, but Sundeep Kishan as Savvy shines even without that advantage: he is both good-looking and an absolute natural in front of the camera as are Girija Oak playing his girlfriend Sejal, Hottie Ramamurthy and Radhika Apte who is the semi-literate Tilak’s college-educated wife (Apte, incidentally, also stars in this week’s other film release, Onir’s I Am).

The weak link in the chain is former Miss Great Britain Preeti Desai who is cast as the girlfriend of Abhay (Ramamurthy). Her awkward dialogue delivery kind of blunts the effect of Abhay’s frustrations which every Indian would relate to. ‘Serious’ cinema buffs may argue that there was no need for that brief scene in which Ramamurthy makes a bare-chested appearance wearing nothing but a white towel around his waist. But milord, may I point out that it takes nothing away from the film!

Okay, so I’m getting carried away with myself again. But seriously, pretty much all the elements in Shor in the City are just right: The script is tight. The camera team keeps it real and simple. A couple of the songs are catchy. The background score is used to excellent effect. The sound effects editing is near perfect. And everything comes together to give us a film that’s a tragi-comic look at life in Mumbai. Part of the tragedy is how we as viewers laugh when we watch scenes that should in fact hurt us, perhaps because we are resigned to the corruption that pervades our lives. Like the expat who finally comes to terms with the reality of Mumbai and confidently tells his auto driver to enter a one-way street because he knows his cash will silence that vigilant traffic constable. Like the frustrated businessman who pulls a gun on a goon, and says to him: “If you can get away with it, I can too.”

But it’s the little touches that make Shor in the City such a wholesome experience: Savvy’s pronunciation of the word “Hyderabad” in precisely the way that a Mumbai-based south Indian might say it; the cricket selector’s Mumbaiyya intonation when he says “mind-blowing”; Tilak telling his wife, “Ek saal baad ek badi gaadi khareed lenge – Nano”; the way she nods her head just so, when she meets her husband’s employee; the manner in which a common man caught in a bank robbery asks pathetically, “Woh hazaar rupye jo har maheene SIP mein daalta tha, woh gaya?” Shor in the City is so real, that it feels more like fact than fiction.

Rating (out of five): ****

CBFC Rating:                      U/A without cuts, several swear words have been beeped out

Running time:                        111 minutes

Language:                              Hindi with English

 

Photograph courtesy: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/shorinthecity