REVIEW 428: OOZHAM – IT’S JUST A MATTER OF TIME

Release date:	September 8, 2016
Director:	Jeethu Joseph
Cast: Language:	Prithviraj Sukumaran, Divya Pillai, Neeraj Madhav, Jayaprakash Vittal, Pasupathy, Balachandra Menon, Kishore Sathya, Anson Paul, Tony Luke Malayalam

It is hard to believe that the man who made Drishyam and Papanasam made this film too.

Oozham – It’s Just A Matter of Time is directed by Jeethu Joseph who has been the toast of the national film circuit since the release of Drishyam starring Mohanlal in 2013. That film was so finely crafted, well-written, well-acted and entertaining that it was appreciated by both audiences and reviewers, including those who criticised Joseph for not acknowledging what they believed was his inspiration, the Japanese novel The Devotion of Suspect X. The Malayalam Drishyam was remade in four Indian languages, and Joseph himself helmed the Tamil remake Papanasam with Kamal Haasan, arguably an even better film than the first. How do you go from that to this? How do you go from Drishyam to Oozham in a span of just three years? How?

Everything about this one is embarrassingly shoddy, from the shallow script that would look bad on a junior school kid’s CV to the heavy-handed dialogues, the dreadful acting by some of the supporting cast and indifferent production quality. Prithviraj is no doubt sincere in his effort to lend believability to his role as an anguished son and brother out to avenge an injustice, but it is hard to forgive him for not having sensed a non-starter while reading the script.

Oozham’s screenplay saddles the actors with the most absurdly gauche lines ever written in English for a Malayalam film – lines so bad that they immediately reminded me of another Mollywood disaster from recent months, Uday Ananthan’s White starring Mammootty and Huma Qureshi. It is hard to believe that someone has actually matched Mammukka’s Prakash Roy telling the heroine of White on her birthday, “I never wanted to be the first person to wish you, neither the last. But I wanted to be a person to wish you.”

The conversations in Oozham are conducted in a mix of Malayalam, Tamil and bombastic, grammatically poor English. The corrupt industrialist Wilfred Marquez (Jayaprakash Vittal), for instance, glares at a hired hand and bellows, “How dare!” at him, because I suppose the pronoun “you” at the end of that sentence would have required too much of an effort. He does this twice, not once – yes, I counted.

Now excuse me while I fall off my chair laughing at the mere memory of these absurdities.

(Pause, while the writer picks herself off the floor.)

Okay, so where was I? Oh yes, Oozham. Surya Krishnamoorthy (Prithviraj Sukumaran) is home on a break from his job in the US to spend time with his family – his father Krishnamoorthy (Balachandra Menon) who is a health department official in Tamil Nadu, his mother Subbahlakshmy and sister Aiswarya. Soon after, tragedy strikes them and the family of Krishnamoorthy’s friend, the honest top cop SP Parthasarthy (Kishore Sathya).

Investigations by Surya, his friend/adoptive brother Ajmal Mohammed (Neeraj Madhav) and Parthasarthy’s sister Gayathri (Divya Pillai) lead them to the corrupt industrialist Wilfred Marquez. This sets them off on a trail of revenge which they execute with equal parts professionalism and idiocy. The trio’s foolishness matters not, since Wilfred, his sons Edward and Andrew, the explosives expert they hire for their security (Anand Chathuranga a.k.a. Captain played by Pasupathy), the entire staff of their Rs 5,000 crore company and the Police are all even more foolish.

Surya is adept at bomb making and heads the operation. Ajmal/Aju is a cyber specialist. And Gayathri is a specialist in squeezing herself into a short tight skirt and tight sleeveless top to attract the playboy Andrew. Because you cannot expect a girl to know about bombs and cyberspace, I guess?

As an American crime show junkie, this film made me want to scream in exasperation at the tackiness of the proceedings and Team Oozham’s lack of even a skeletal knowledge of criminal investigations and procedures. Forget that, this film lacks an understanding of simple questions relating to computers and the social media. These days I am watching Season 13 of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit (SVU) starring Mariska Hargitay – one of my all-time favourites – and I would like to apologise to the makers because I grumbled to a friend this week that the quality of the writing in SVU has declined since Season 1. I apologise because SVU exists on the same planet as Oozham and I was still finicky enough to fuss about it.

Now excuse me while I bow my head in contrition.

(Pause, while the writer observes a moment of silence.)

It is hard to believe that the man who made Drishyam and Papanasam could come up with this tripe. In one scene, a senior cop stares at a laptop trying to figure out how to get past the screen saver. I kid you not, he does not seem to know that clicking a key could make it disappear.

Okay, let us put that down to poor police training with new technology. After all, women victims of cyber crimes in the far more moneyed West have reported being asked pre-kindergarten-level questions by police personnel in their local precinct.

But can someone explain how a supposed tech wiz like Captain is not aware of the basics of a digital search? In one unintentionally comical scene, Captain sees the hero’s name written as “Surya Krishna Moorthy” in a file. He searches for “Soorya Krishnamoorthy” on Facebook, finds no one – of course, since a misspelt name on this social networking site will not throw up the person you are looking for – and immediately gives up.

Why, Jeethu Joseph, why?

Now excuse me while I go off to weep in solitude over this sorry moment in Malayalam cinema.

Rating (out of five stars): 1/2

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	140 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/oozham-review-whats-a-fine-actor-like-prithviraj-doing-in-this-shoddy-film-2999764.html

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oozham_(2016_film)

AGEIST BIASES AGAINST ACTRESSES / FILM FATALE: COLUMN PUBLISHED IN THE HINDU BUSINESSLINE

TOO OLD TO BE SEEN WITH?

Age remains a dirty word for women in commercial cinema worldwide, despite occasional flashes of liberalism

By Anna M.M. Vetticad

In an ideal world, being a Bond ‘girl’ would not be seen as a fillip to the filmography of an established, talented actress. This is not an ideal world though. Today’s reality is that mass-targeted cinema is still largely focused on male characters and while age is not a disadvantage for major male stars, even the fittest of fine actresses are sidelined much earlier in their lives than men.

In this scenario, the next James Bond film Spectre and Dil Dhadakne Do (DDD) merit a discussion. Hollywood sprung a surprise on us just months back with the announcement that Monica Bellucci will play Bond’s romantic interest in Spectre. At 50, Bellucci is the oldest actress to get that role, according to Western media reports, and she is even four years older than her co-star Daniel Craig, which would not be news-worthy information but for the fact that a premium is placed on female youth in glamour industries worldwide.

Here in India, it should not have made news that Bollywood star Anil Kapoor was playing a grey-haired, 50-plus father of grown-up children in DDD. But it did, because senior male actors in India tend to play characters much younger than their real age. While Kapoor deserves the kudos he is getting for evolving beyond that, it’s telling that nary a whimper has been raised about the casting of a much younger Shefali Shah as his wife.

Because Team DDD seems to be a progressive lot, it is more important than ever to ask: was no actress of Kapoor’s age found suitable for that role?

Allow me to get briefly literal and mathematical to illustrate my point. Shah is 42 and Kapoor is 58, according to various online sources. In the film, they are parents to a girl and boy played by 32-year-old Priyanka Chopra and 29-year-old Ranveer Singh. If Shah was really their mother off screen, she would have been 10 at her daughter’s birth and 13 when her son was born. Biologically you know that’s a stretch, legally of course this would mean kids born out of wedlock or in a child marriage. You could have dismissed these calculations as fussy and silly if it weren’t for the fact that the screenplay writer is clearly not oblivious to this matter and makes a subtle effort to justify the casting by pointedly assigning the following ages to the four principal characters: Dad 52, Mum 48, kids mid-20s.

When reports earlier emerged that 48-year-old Madhuri Dixit-Nene and 51-year-old Sridevi had turned down Shah’s role, the media was critical of them. The two “got queasy” and Shah “has taken up the challenge”, said a report in a leading national daily. A dear film critic friend is of the view that “Madhuri was being un-adventurous” with her decision. But no one has asked if any Bollywood director would have dared to offer the role of Priyanka and Ranveer’s father to John Abraham (who is the same age as Shah), Akshay Kumar (who is less than a year younger than Dixit-Nene) or the three Khans who all hit 50 this year.

Longevity for female stars is not a favour being granted to them, but every major film industry in the world is guilty on this front, though some are worse than others.

In India, not only are older actresses given limited roles by producers and writers, but older heroes want to romance heroines young enough to be their daughters. It’s as if actresses their age are not worth being seen or worth being seen with.

In his last three films, Tamil legend Rajinikanth has starred opposite Sonakshi Sinha, who is 36 years his junior, Anushka Shetty (31 years younger), Deepika Padukone (age gap: 35 years) and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan (age gap: 23 years).

In interviews I’ve done with them over the years, both Kamal Haasan and Salman Khan insisted they are merely giving in to audience demands by acting with younger heroines. But how can you claim viewers have made a choice, when you almost never give them that choice? And if the audience does indeed make a regressive choice, could you at least have the courage to claim helplessness rather than endorse their illiberal view?

Unlike several Hollywood heavyweights, Indian actresses have rarely been critical of this phenomenon, partly because not every woman is convinced of the need for gender justice, but mostly because it is risky for them to question the status quo in their respective male-dominated industries (which are, let’s admit it, even worse than Hollywood).

Not that gentleman feminists have it easy. It has been four years since Prithviraj Sukumaran, then 29, gave an interview to Asianet in which he bravely called on his senior colleagues in the Malayalam film industry, Mohanlal and Mammooty, to “start playing their age”. Fans of both stars, gender chauvinists and status-quo-ists are still skewering him for the comments.

Speaking up is always a lonely business at first. It is time more men and women slammed film industries worldwide for turning age into a dirty word for actresses but a badge of honour for men. No, it is not a big deal that a 50-year-old woman will romance Bond. And no, Madhuri was not being “un-adventurous” by rejecting DDD; she was simply doing what any sensible male star of her stature and age would do.

(Anna MM Vetticad is the author of The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic. Twitter: @annavetticad)

(This column by Anna MM Vetticad was first published in The Hindu Businessline newspaper on June 20, 2015)

Original link: 

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/watch/too-old-to-be-seen-with/article7329772.ece

Photograph courtesy: (1) Spectre – Sony Pictures Entertainment (2) Dil Dhadakne Do – https://www.facebook.com/DDDTheFilm

Note: This photograph was not sourced from The Hindu Businessline

THE FEMALE GAZE & BOLLYWOOD / ESSAY PUBLISHED IN HINDUSTAN TIMES’ BRUNCH SPECIAL

(This article by Anna MM Vetticad was first published in the Hindustan Times’ Brunch Bollywood Special Collectors’ Edition in the summer of 2013)

LOOK WHO’S WATCHING

BOLLYWOOD HAS FINALLY DISCOVERED THE FEMALE GAZE. ABOUT TIME TOO!

A feminist’s grateful nod to John Abraham, Hrithik Roshan, Salman, Shah Rukh and the rest of their shirtless colleagues for acknowledging the female eye.

By Anna MM Vetticad

It’s amazing how many sensible men are convinced that women don’t have hormones. Maybe this conviction arises from a fear of discovering that their mothers might sometimes be driven by unmentionable female body parts; and worse, that their mothers might, just might, have had sex to procreate.

But the reason lies largely in another possibility: that few of these men source their information about women from women. What follows are blanket assumptions: that women are not sexual beings and therefore, that men could never be objects of heterosexual female longing.

The truth is far from it, and for a change the Hindi film industry has made – and acknowledged – this discovery ahead of most of our society.

Never before was Bollywood’s bow to the female gaze more evident than in Vicky Donor in 2012. Making a guest appearance in the song Rum whiskey, actor-turned-producer John Abraham went beyond the by-now-common scenario of a leading male star going shirtless to reveal a fabulous body. There was John dancing when suddenly, for no apparent reason except that we were expecting him to oblige us, he stood still and two ladies stripped him topless. Other women hosed his bare torso, while he stretched out both arms as if to say: ladies, do as you please with me.

Bless him! Up to the 1980s, female sexuality rarely found overt expression in mainstream Hindi cinema beyond the “cabaret girl”. Unlike the usually asexual or apologetically sexual heroine of those times, the cabaret girl wore skimpy clothes, danced raunchy dances and even had sex. The flipside was that she was always a supporting actress playing the male villain’s sidekick or making a one-dance appearance; and while she provided eye candy to male viewers, there was no male equivalent catering to a female audience.

Though a sprinkling of heroes had taken off their shirts on screen in previous decades, Sanjay Dutt and Sunny Deol in the 1980s were among the earliest to be consistently body proud. It was their junior Salman Khan though who pioneered persistent shirtlessness.

If the initial goal was admiration from male viewers, these heroes got an unexpected bonus as many Indian women – conditioned to be reticent about their appreciation of male good looks – began to air their hormones in public.

The change was driven by economics. The number of women in the workforce had been rising; this meant more women making their own film-viewing decisions instead of depending on fathers, boyfriends and husbands; it also meant more women confident enough to openly cheer at great-looking, bare-bodied heroes.

And so by the turn of the century, when fitness-conscious leading ladies became the norm, leading men followed suit. Cabaret girls of the pre-1990s gave way to “item girls” and gradually, “item boys”. Though male viewers remain Bollywood’s priority, women are now less ignored.

So why has the male gaze historically ruled global cinema? Simple. In a male-dominated society, it is assumed that a human being is a man unless specified otherwise. In a film world led by male producers and directors (all heterosexual or closet homosexual), it is similarly
 assumed that the audience is male and heterosexual unless specified otherwise. Films therefore have not presented men as objects of heterosexual female desire, the assumption being that women are not keen on such visuals since the creators of these films are not.

Today’s Hindi film heroes seem to disagree. Cameras now embrace their every rippling muscle as lovingly as those lingering shots that were once devoted to the female body. The female gaze on heroes is even more pronounced in films by Bollywood’s handful of mainstream women directors. Remember, it took a Farah Khan to put the national spotlight on SRK’s abs in 2007’s Om Shanti Om.

Sadly, the bodylicious hero’s success with women has not yet led Bollywood’s production majors to realise that there’s a vast female audience out there yearning for well-made women-themed mass entertainers produced as lavishly as male-centric projects.

For today though, let’s just see our glass as half full. For today, let’s bask in the pleasure that our modern-day male Helens give us.

In fact, well-meaning activists unwittingly perpetuate a new double standard when they lobby the Central Board of Film Certification to clamp down on female-centric item numbers while ignoring the “item”-isation of heroes. Objectification – whether of men or women – should not be objectionable if the goal is to inoffensively please the gazer while celebrating the sexuality of the gazee. It’s only when the “object” is degraded and demeaned (as when Kareena Kapoor is equated with a “tandoori murgi” in Fevicol se), that it becomes our responsibility to disapprove.

The equitable objectification of both genders today is that rare ray of hope for women actors and audiences in an otherwise male-focused industry. This egalitarianism is epitomised by 2008’s Dostana which featured a bikini-clad Shilpa Shetty while John Abraham posed in golden trunks and later absent-mindedly scratched his bottom as he wandered around in briefs. In 2012, Rani Mukerji spent the entire film Aiyyaa fantasising about the delectable Prithviraj.

Women, you see, do have hormones after all. Just ask our boys in Bollywood.

(Anna MM Vetticad is the author of The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic. She is on Twitter as @annavetticad)

Photograph courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/BeingSalmanKhan

Note: This poster of Jai Ho was not published in the magazine. For the record, this article was written several months before the release of that film.