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 475: MANTRA

Release date:	March 17, 2017
Director:	Nicholas Kharkongor
Cast: Language:	Rajat Kapoor, Kalki Koechlin, Lushin Dubey, Shiv Pandit, Rohan Joshi, Danish Hussain, Yuri Suri, Adil Hussain English with some Hindi

In an early scene from Mantra, a little girl at a shop counter asks for King Chips. All around her there lie only packets of the upstart brand Kipper, which the shopkeeper is hardselling. She is undeterred. King Chips is what she wants and King Chips is all she will have. The dukaandaar finally gives in, fetching a packet from a corner at the back of his establishment where he had stashed it away from the gaze of customers, not having bargained for this one insistent child.

Her loyalty is rare in a market where money buys visibility and where consumer choices could be driven as much by a lack of alternatives as by natural inclinations, Indian cinema itself being a case in point. What, for instance, might the girl have done, if she had been told that Kipper was the only brand in stock? Would she have had the time to scour the market? Would she have given up eating chips altogether?

Questions, questions… They come up at every juncture of director Nicholas Kharkongor’s crowd-funded film set in New Delhi in 2004, when the protagonist Kapil Kapoor’s home-grown business is on the verge of bankruptcy as his King Chips struggles against the greater resources of Kipper’s multinational owners.

Rajat Kapoor plays Kapil a.k.a. KK, whose losing battle with Kipper has destroyed his peace of mind. His wife Meenakshi (Lushin Dubey) is wilting under the weight of their loveless marriage. Meanwhile, KK is trying to be an attentive father to their children who he once neglected. Their 28-year-old son Viraj (Shiv Pandit) does not want anything to do with his Dad’s company, opting instead to start a restaurant chain, from the name of which the film derives its title. Daughter Pia (Kalki Koechlin) is a chef in Mantra Delhi. At 25, she wants a life of greater independence from her father who she resents. The family of five is rounded off by their much younger sibling Vir (Rohan Joshi) who, at 16, has discovered love and sex on the Internet.

The Kapoors’ public facade of normalcy hides great professional and personal turmoil.

KK is the point at which the old and new collide, in a world where “mantra” could indicate a cool hangout to a hip youngster or our vulnerable Bhartiya sanskriti to an aggressive nationalist. Manmohan Singh and P.V. Narasimha Rao’s liberalisation policies from the 1990s have altered India forever. Atal Bihari Vajyapee’s PM-ship is coming to an end, but Hindutvavaadi forces are still on the rise. In this cauldron of change, family is sometimes a source of solace, but very often not.

Mantra has several ingredients that work in its favour. Kharkongor’s script is often observant, and touches upon multiple issues without seeming self-conscious about its social conscience. The background score is pleasant, soothing and almost thoughtful. And though this is not a dominant factor, I enjoyed the artwork on the walls of the Kapoor home.

If the film does not come together as a whole, it is for clearly identifiable reasons: first, the cast is a mixed bag; second, the English dialogues do not sit well on several of them; third, the equation between the five Kapoors is not fully established, as a result of which I found myself rooting for some of them as individuals but not for the family as a whole (unlike, say, the equally unhappy Mehras who we met in Zoya Akhtar’s Dil Dhadakne Do in 2015).

Curiously enough, Mantra’s most memorable passages involve a brief encounter between a Kapoor and an absolute stranger: KK’s comfort level with a bemused truck driver, Pia trying to knock logic into the heads of misogynistic policemen, the humour in KK’s drunken night-time revelry with an unnamed drug user, and – above all – a poignant conversation between Pia and a restaurant delivery man who responds to her call for help in a life-threatening situation.

These episodes give us glimpses of Kharkongor’s potential in an otherwise inconsistent film.

Koechlin and Pandit are the pick of the primary cast. Dubey is awkward throughout. And Rajat Kapoor’s likeable screen presence cannot camouflage his discomfort with his English lines though he seems fine while occasionally speaking Hindi in the film.  

He is still better off than Maya Rao and a couple of the other supporting artistes, who sound like they are spouting English dialogues written for Western characters in a Western play that has not been adapted to the Indian English idiom. We see too many such productions on the Delhi stage.  

The blame for this unevenness rests mostly with the writing, though the actors must take some responsibility too, if you consider that Koechlin and Pandit slip in and out of English and Hindi without sounding mannered at all while speaking English, as some of their seniors in the film do.

Which brings me to an important question: why on earth do we not see more of Shiv Pandit as a hero in films? Or Adil Hussain? Pandit manages to draw something out of his role despite the limited exploration of his character in the script. And Hussain rules with an appearance that lasts barely a couple of minutes.

That scene in which Pia breaks down while confiding in his character, a migrant from Jharkhand, is the stand-out moment in Mantra. Give us more where that came from, Mr Kharkongor.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	A
Running time:	96 minutes 03 seconds

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/mantra-movie-review-adil-hussain-and-encounters-with-strangers-stand-out-in-an-uneven-film-3340020.html

Poster courtesy: imdb.com  

REVIEW 395: WAITING

Release date:	May 27, 2016
Director:	Anu Menon
Cast: Language:	Kalki Koechlin, Naseeruddin Shah, Rajat Kapoor, Arjun Mathur, Suhasini Maniratnam Hindi

Considering the grim subject and setting – the intensive care unit of a luxe hospital in Kochi – Waiting is a surprisingly pleasant and positive film.  

Anu Menon’s second directorial venture has the same lightness of touch and natural storytelling style she brought to her debut in 2012’s London, Paris, New York starring Aditi Rao Hydari and Ali Zafar. Yet this film is as different from her first as night is from day and Tara is from Shiv.  

Tara and Shiv are Tara Deshpande-Kapoor (Kalki Koechlin) and Professor Shiv Natraj (Naseeruddin Shah) in this Hindi-English-occasionally-Malayalam (subtitled) film Waiting. They ought, henceforth, to be an accepted metaphor for strangers who really “get” each other.  

She is a feisty, often foul-mouthed, occasionally unthinking though always well-meaning, impatient, impetuous, flashy, attractive, young, recently married woman. Her husband Rajat has just been in a near-fatal accident that sends him into a coma.  

Shiv’s wife of 40 years, Pankaja, has been in a coma for eight months. He is a spirited yet sobre, prim and propah, meticulous, kind, staid old man and theirs has been a happy marriage.

Tara is well off. Shiv has taken on back-breaking debt to pay Pankaja’s medical bills.  

The two meet in the waiting room of the Kochi hospital where their respective spouses lie in an Intensive Care Unit. As they bond over their grief, fears and difficult decisions, they form an unlikely friendship that transcends age and backgrounds.  

He does not know what Twitter is; the discovery that he has been married for four decades elicits an incredulous “oh fuck” from her. Here is what they do have in common though: they both adore their spouses.  

It is the simplest of premises drawn from a challenging phase in Menon’s own life. Under her direction aided by a strong script she has co-written with James Ruzicka, it turns into a warm, telling commentary on love, family, generation gaps, inner strength and basic human goodness.  

The film is not only about two grieving individuals though. Central to the plot is the fact that Tara is more alone than she might otherwise have been in this tragic scenario, because she has been plucked out of her home city Mumbai and planted in a new milieu where she has no friends and does not understand the language. Kochi is busy and buzzing in comparison with other Kerala towns and cities, yet not as much as India’s biggest metropolises; it is large enough to offer the kind of high-end hospital where Rajat is being treated, but not as crowded or frenetic as Chennai and Bengaluru in a way that might be familiar and comforting to a lonely Mumbaikar.

The hustle and bustle of daily life can sometimes be used to drown out the voices in our heads. In relatively languorous Kochi, Tara does not have that option.  

In such a place, away from her family and social circle, it is but natural that she would turn for comfort to a local who is also somewhat of an outsider: Pankaja is a Malayali, Shiv is not. Being a retiree gives him enough time to be devoted to his comatose wife while also offering a shoulder to cry on to Tara who initially strikes him as an inexplicable drama queen.  

If you go looking for dramatic twists, you will not find them here. Waiting is not that kind of film. It does, however, throw a bunch of questions at us. When we pray for a bed-ridden loved one’s longevity, are we doing it for them or for ourselves? Is it selfish to long for their survival irrespective of the quality of life they may have? If you pull the plug on someone you love, are you giving up on them?

Waiting does not spoonfeed us responses to these questions as universal truths. It leaves us to find our own answers while its protagonists find theirs.

Shah and Koechlin complement the film’s non-preachy and realistic tone. There is a natural rhythm to their acting and the chemistry between them is unmistakable.

Tara is the kind of woman who thinks nothing of making her husband’s evidently conservative colleague squirm by asking him if Rajat was sleeping with a business associate. Koechlin’s achievement is that she makes her character appealing despite her brashness.

Shah is charismatic as ever. Although his pupils appear strangely dilated in some close-ups, those shots do not happen so often as to be distracting. The actor does not resort to over-statement at any point although there are plenty of scenes where he could have. Even when Shiv gets frantic about Pankaja, care is taken not to reduce him to a caricature of an eccentric old man. His is a seemingly effortless and moving performance.

The film features several well-written supporting roles. National Award-winning Tamil-Telugu-Malayalam actress Suhasini Maniratnam and Arjun Mathur are so likeable in cameos as Pankaja and Rajat that you can well imagine a spouse pining away for months and years for them.

Actor Krishnasankar as the junior doctor Ravi and Rajeev Ravindranathan playing Girish from Rajat’s Kochi office are interesting choices. It is nice to see the film’s Malayali characters being played without the usual Bollywood ‘Madrasi’ stereotyping.

Rajat Kapoor walks a fine line as the neurosurgeon Dr Nirupam Malhotra, making him a man who is hard to dislike although he is painfully practical in a way that some people might consider heartless, even egotistical. I did not entirely understand why he had to be a Punjabi though – this is not to suggest that there are no Punjabi doctors in Kochi, but that the lack of locals except in supporting, subordinate positions is curious. Except for this and a somewhat contrived, needless revelation Shiv makes to Pankaja at one point, the rest of the film flows as smoothly as the backwaters that briefly appear on screen.

Waiting is about some of the toughest decisions life can throw at us and about an unusual, heartwarming friendship. It is both sad and amusing, believable, well acted and very well told.

Rating (out of five): ***

CBFC Rating (India):	A
Running time:	99 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/waiting-review-naseeruddin-shah-and-kalki-koechlin-shine-in-a-lovely-film-2801552.html

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_(2015_film)