REVIEW 305: ZED PLUS

Release date:	November 28, 2014
Director:	Dr Chandraprakash Dwivedi
Cast: Language:	Adil Hussain, Mona Singh, Mukesh Tiwari, K.K. Raina, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Rahul Singh, Shivani Tanksale, Sanjay Mishra, Ekavali Khanna Hindi

If you’ve seen him on stage, you will know why I refer to him as His Hotness Adil Hussain. Sadly so far, the actor is best known to Bollywood audiences in films that have done little justice to his looks or immense acting talent. English Vinglish – in which he played Shashi Godbole’s selfish husband – is the best the Mumbai industry has offered him till date. In this week’s release Zed Plus – his first Hindi film as a leading man – Adil erases his striking personality to metamorphose into a diffident, flawed, sometimes naïve, sometimes clever tyre-puncturewallah who gets Z category security due to a misunderstanding that spirals into a national affair.

Aslam is the poor man in question, forever at loggerheads with his neighbour (Mukesh Tiwari) in the small town of Fatehpur, Rajasthan. One day he meets the Indian prime minister who is on a visit to the Peepal Wale Peer Ki Dargah in Fatehpur. My “padosi” is constantly giving me death threats, Aslam tells the PM. In the tension-ridden subcontinent, “padosi” means only one thing to this troubled neta. PM-saab issues orders that the fellow be given 24-hour security. This engaging political satire is about how that one move affects governments and a little man’s life.

Director Chandraprakash Dwivedi and Ramkumar Singh’s screenplay is for the most part both realistic and comedic. Adil is like a chameleon playing Aslam, changing his entire being for the role, without caricaturing the character. Mona Singh too delivers a laudable performance as his conflicted wife Hameeda who initially hates the disruption in their lives, then begins to revel in the unexpected importance. I particularly enjoyed the warm relationship she develops with her husband’s security team, especially a dapper Rahul Singh playing their chief, Rajesh Chaudhary.

Barring Kulbhushan Kharbanda as the PM and one jarring extra playing a cop awkwardly directing traffic in a fleeting scene, Zed Plus hits the bull’s-eye with every other casting choice. My pick of the supporting actors is Mukesh Tiwari who has given us one stand-out performance after another, from Bachcha Yadav in Prakash Jha’s Gangaajal (2003) to the Tamil-speaking Sikh policeman in Chennai Express (2013) and now this. To watch him dance like a maniac when his election campaign procession bumps into a rival group in Zed Plus is to see a man lose himself in a role.

Kharbanda’s laughably clueless PM is a product of faulty casting and writing. The usually reliable actor struggles with a character who cannot speak Hindi but whose English sounds ridiculous too. The PM’s inability to speak Hindi is not a minor plot point but the starting block for an entire chain of events. At first it comes across as a metaphor for a neta’s limited understanding of the “people’s language”. In one scene though, he wears a kasavu mundu and a lady presumably from his family is shown at his dining table in a kasavu sari. One can only assume then that we are expected to gather that he is a Malayali or some form of south Indian.

Is it Zed Plus’ contention then that for an Indian PM, aam aadmi ki bhasha must perforce be Hindi? Is Hindi here symbolic or to be taken literally? This mixed messaging is irritating. Besides, Kharbanda has such an overtly northern tongue that it’s hard to see him as a southerner.

In a small way, Dwivedi also reveals a desire to pander to a male audience. Aslam has a lover. When he gets Z security, he can no longer visit her without attracting attention. This becomes his primary motive for wanting to get rid of his guards. It is initially an amusing situation. However, when at one point he tells his wife “main tumhara gunehgaar hoon” and we are not shown the rest of the conversation, the audience is left to guess whether he was apologising to her for the affair or for having messed up their lives as a whole by allowing circumstances to overtake them.

The ambiguity reminded me of Ross’ fling with the copy girl in the US teleserial Friends while he and Rachel “were on a break”. It remained a major sore point between the couple throughout the show, but Ross was never once shown clearly apologising to Rachel for infidelity. The situation was left fuzzy enough for each of us to read into it what would least offend us. I guess whether it’s the US or India, Bright-Kauffman-and-Crane or Dwivedi, getting a man to say that word “sorry” to a woman with clearly articulated contrition is deemed avoidable.

We also never figure out what becomes of the other woman in Zed Plus. Make no mistake about this though, this is a sweet, fun film. The mincing of words in passing on the gender front is disappointing primarily because elsewhere Messrs Dwivedi and Singh make no bones about their attitude towards communal political parties (the Rajasthan government is run by the majoritarian, ahem, BKP), the manner in which supposedly secular netas use India’s biggest minority community, the meaning of that much-abused term “minority appeasement”, and the hypocrisy of a religionist who points out that consuming alcohol is not allowed in his religion but making it is not barred. This low-key political satire also bravely refers to the Babri Masjid demolition at a time when the prevailing mood in India is to pretend that some things never happened.

Dwivedi is best known for the mega-teleserial Chanakya and the National Award-winning film Pinjar. Despite some rough patches, Zed Plus is a worthy addition to that formidable CV.

Rating (out of five): ***

Aside: Misspelt words flashing on screen are inexcusable in any film. Didn’t anyone on Team Zed Plus notice “Chief Minister’s Residance”?

CBFC Rating (India):	U/A
Running time:	141 minutes

Poster and video courtesy: Epigram PR

Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmlrzLaptQs

164: KHILADI 786

Release date:	December 7, 2012
Director:	Ashish R. Mohan
Cast: Language:	Akshay Kumar, Asin, Himesh Reshammiya, Raj Babbar, Mukesh Tiwari, Mukesh Rishi, Mithun Chakraborty, Rahul Singh, Sanjay Mishra, Johnny Lever Hindi

A family of goondas waylays truck drivers on highways and loots them in collusion with the local police. Their son is in search of a bride but no family wants to give him their daughter. A gangster is in search of a husband for his sister, but the combined might of her explosive nature and bro’s explosive career keeps prospective grooms away. The girl is Indu Tendulkar; the ‘boy’ is Bahattar (yes, 72) Singh. You know of course without being told that he is played by Akshay Kumar and she by Asin, that their paths will cross at some point and that they will fall in love.

The name Bahattar forms the crux of one of the film’s many lame jokes. Equally lame is the ‘joke’ that the men in this family are all married to foreigners which means Bahattar’s mother is a white woman and his grandmother is black. This could have been funny except that the point is repeated ad nauseum plus both ladies can’t act. Cliches abound in this film, as frequently as dull songs. In the role of a marriage broker cum wedding planner, Himesh Reshammiya moves his facial muscles here more than he ever has before, but the fact that a non-actor like him gets to hog screen space in all his scenes while the supremely talented Sanjay Mishra is relegated to the role of his sidekick is completely unforgivable, even if Himesh happens to be one of the film’s producers. Johnny Lever appears in a brief role to contort his face a few times. Asin fans may derive consolation from the fact that her character is less insignificant here than she was in Bol Bachchan, but that’s not saying much for an actress who was an established star in southern India when she entered Hindi filmdom with a splash in 2008, before making a series of bad career choices. Still, it must be said that she looks pretty in Khiladi 786, has a natty wardrobe and shows off a refreshingly well-rounded body that’s neither overweight nor skinny in the manner of many of her industry colleagues. 

Nothing, however, illustrates the poor quality of the film’s writing better than the title itself. We’re never given a full explanation for why Bahattar Singh is also widely known as Khiladi 786 in the story (apart from a brief glimpse of one his palms on which the lines form those three numerals), but it doesn’t take much of an IQ to figure out that this is the team’s unsophisticated effort to remind us of Akshay’s run of luck with film titles featuring the word “Khiladi” while also using the numerical significance of 786 to appeal to a community that Bollywood wisdom tells us has primarily been Salman Khan’s catchment area so far. So tacky and in-your-face is the effort that at one point, when Bahattar Singh aka Khiladi 786 has just notched up a major gain in his life, as he walks away from the scene of his victory, he turns to look pointedly at a place of worship that just happens to be there. Finesse is clearly not the strong point of this team.

Equally gauche is the film’s repeated odes to its leading-man-cum-Bollywood-box-office-king-of-2012-so-far Akshay, precisely in the manner that all Salman Khan’s films pay homage to Salman these days. But even a charismatic star like Akshay needs to do more than strut, preen and pose around to be appealing.

It’s not that Khiladi 786 is without any redeeming factors. It actually is genuinely funny in places, my favourite moment being the manner in which Bahattar Singh pronounces the word “valet” to mean something completely different in Hindi. But such moments are few and far between. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mind mindless comedies. My issue is that this one is predictable and flat and just occasionally amusing. It actually made me long for Sajid Khan - yes, it is THAT bad.

If your tastes run in the direction of this genre, then here’s another comparison that may help you: with all its loudness and its repetitiveness in the second half, Son of Sardar is a far far far more entertaining film than Khiladi 786. Now have I made myself clear?

Rating (out of five): **

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	141 minutes

Photograph courtesy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khiladi_786

REVIEW 112: CHITKABREY – SHADES OF GREY

Release date:	August 26, 2011
Director:	Suneet Arora
Cast:	Ravi Kissen, Rahul Singh, Bobby Vats, Akshay Singh, Puja Gupta

Sex, lies and Ravi Kissen …. that, in short, is Chitkabrey – Shades of Grey. I watched this film with my eyes popping out, wondering how it got past our over-sensitive Censor Board. Perhaps the screening committee found the film so bad that they slept through most of it. There’s no other explanation for a film coming to our theatres giving us flashes of human body parts during sex scenes I never thought to see in a Hindi film!!! It’s soft porn, I tell ya!

But if you are a kinky sort who’s about to rush off to a DVD store or to some questionable website to find Chitkabrey, let me warn you: you’ve got to be pretty desperate to sit through this F-grade film with its bizarre storyline, worse acting, unprofessional lighting, poor quality camera work, cheap costumes, crude makeup and pathetic sets. How desperate could Bhojpuri star Ravi Kissen be to make it in Bollywood, that he actually signed up for this one?!

The story, if you can call it that, is about a man who hatches a far-fetched plot to get together a whole bunch of his college mates from across the world to an isolated house under a false pretext. Once they’ve gathered, some with their spouses, thinking it’s a college reunion of some sort, a faceless voice booms out at them that they’re captive in that building. Dan te nan! After much fuss and suspense, Ravi Kissen – with heavily kohl-lined eyes – appears before them to explain that this is an act of revenge for a humiliation they had all meted out to him back in college. Dan te nan! He then splits the couples and sends one of each off to collect some money (that I suppose is compensation for emotional trauma) while keeping the other as collateral in his eerie house. Dan te nan! Te na na na!

While all this is going on, excuses are found to play us some bad songs. Apparently Chitkabrey is meant to be an anti-ragging film, but the serious theme is buried under horrendously bad writing and execution. Among the film’s endless de-merits are the couple of white people it serves us in smaller roles whose acting skills make the rest of the actors seem like super performers. The worst of the main cast has to be Bollywood’s latest foreign import Sweetlana Manolyo whose screen presence by itself adds several points to the film’s sleaze-o-meter. But there are some familiar faces in this film who surely couldn’t be thinking that this is all they deserve?! On a good day, both Ravi Kissen and Rahul Singh for instance, are capable of turning out decent performances. Just this year, Singh featured as a rowdy villager in that sweet little road movie Chalo Dilli starring Vinay Pathak and Lara Dutta. He also played Poorna Jagannathan’s angry ex in Delhi Belly. Chitkabrey gives him a much larger role of course, but it’s also a blot on his CV! Was it worth it?

Come to think of it, this is actually an educational film that should be compulsory viewing for all students of cinema. Few films can teach you better about the worst that Bollywood can be!

Did I utter the word “educational” with reference to Chitkabrey?! Yeah okay, I was just kidding! Gotcha!

Rating (out of five): -60 stars

Language:        Hindi

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