REVIEW 747: MARJAAVAAN

Release date:	November 15, 2019
Director:	Milap Milan Zaveri
Cast: Language:	Sidharth Malhotra, Riteish Deshmukh, Nassar, Rakul Preet Singh, Tara Sutaria, Ravi Kishan, Shaad Randhawa, Suhasini Mulay Hindi

“Main maaroonga toh mar jayega tu, dobaara janam lene se darr jayega tu.” This line that the hero fires at the villain in Marjaavaan comes from an arsenal of rhyming bombast that he uses from the opening minutes of this exhausting film. Thankfully, there is an arsenal of adjectives in the English language to match his weaponry. Dated, loud, cliché-ridden, preachy, unimaginative, boring, flat – that is what Marjaavaan is.

Take the slotting of the characters for one. Each comes from a checklist that Bollywood in earlier decades felt compelled to cover exhaustively in most scripts. Virtuous hero, virtuous woman who exists solely for him to fall in love with her and thus give her the requisite qualification for the post of heroine, villain without a single redeeming quality, the other woman in the ‘golden-hearted tawaif’ mould whose unrequited love for the leading man survives every trauma thrown her way – you will find them all in Marjaavaan.

As if these Neanderthal formulae are not enough, there are more. The bad guy is a dwarf in a film that clearly sees a disability as nothing but a source of drama. The hero is a “lawaaris”. A glamorous woman pops up to do that thingie called an ‘item song’ with dance moves that include spreading her legs wide, thrusting her bottom out and wiggling it, and going down on all fours to lift her bottom again and wiggle it – gosh, there is no originality even in the objectification of women in Marjaavaan.

And while it is a relief to get a break from the Islamophobia that has been a regular feature of Hindi cinema in the last couple of years, there is no joy in returning, as Marjaavaan does, to an era when the co-existence of religious and linguistic communities was not treated as a fact of life but as a cause for sugary sentimentality and in-your-face messaging on secularism.

Oh, and while the nice guy speaks in verse, the bad guy reels off “what is the height of (optimism, etc)?” kind of jokes and the female protagonist speaks in riddles.

Considering all this, it is appropriate that Marjaavaan’s soundtrack is dominated by remixes.

Sidharth Malhotra plays Raghu, the handsome orphaned foster child of the gangster played by Nassar. The latter’s son Vishnu (Riteish Deshmukh) has always resented his father’s love for Raghu, that resentment made worse by his crushing complex about his congenital short stature. Their life-long enmity is heightened when Raghu falls in love with the mute Zoya (Tara Sutaria) who tries to reform the children of the neighbourhood by steering them towards music and away from an otherwise inevitable life of crime. Rakul Preet Singh stars as Aarzoo, the bar dancer who is devoted to Raghu.

Marjaavaan is written and directed by Milap Zaveri whose career has so far been built primarily on writing comedies, some of them largely harmless fun (such as the Varun Dhawan-starrer Main Tera Hero), many of them crude (case in point: Masti, Grand Masti). For this film, Zaveri ditches high-decibel sexist humour in favour of high-decibel sermonising. Perhaps in a bid to sound intelligent and relevant, at one point in Marjaavaan he has the hero yelling “mandir banega aur masjid bhi blah blah blah”, but in the absence of any political depth, that pointed allusion to the Babri Masjid imbroglio makes zero sense. In a more well-thought-out film it might have meant something that Zoya is a Kashmiri Muslim girl and she is assembling a troupe for a music festival in Kashmir. Here though it means nothing.

Marjaavaan is so hackneyed that even the usually restrained Malhotra is driven to intermittent over-acting during its two-hours-plus running time. Deshmukh hams his way through playing Vishnu. Ms Sutaria is bland.

Singh does better than her colleagues with the little acting she is required to do in her limited role. Her primary job here though is to look hot, but she is not allowed to do that well by the photography, wardrobe and other departments who, for some reason, collude to highlight her protruding rib cage through much of the film – this inexplicable treatment meted out to an otherwise lovely-looking woman will hopefully spark off a debate on the impossible thinness required of Hindi film heroines these days. As for the great Nassar, his performance in Marjaavaan is a textbook example of how even the finest of actors can be reduced to embarrassingly strained performances by bad writing and direction.

Maybe the line Raghu should have delivered is this: “Yeh film dekhega toh mar jayega tu, dobaara koi bhi film dekhne se darr jayega tu.”

Rating (out of five stars): *

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	137 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/marjaavaan-movie-review-sidharth-malhotra-whatcha-doin-with-this-loud-neanderthal-sermon-7656451.html

Photographs courtesy:

(1) https://www.facebook.com/marjaavaanthemovie/

(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marjaavaan

REVIEW 695: DE DE PYAAR DE

Release date:	May 17, 2019
Director:	Akiv Ali
Cast: Language:	Ajay Devgn, Tabu, Rakul Preet Singh, Jaaved Jaaferi, Alok Nath, Jimmy Sheirgill, Kumud Mishra Hindi

In the opening scene of De De Pyaar De (Give Me Love), a man throws a bachelor party for a friend. Enter: a stripper. Just as she is giving the groom a lap dance, enter: the bride. “Which man in the world will turn down a stripper at his own bachelor party?” says more than one character in defence of the fellow when the angry woman confronts him. He is projected as a hapless chap following his natural instincts, she as a humourless, unreasonable, screeching banshee.

The stripper gets drunk and ends up spending the night at the host’s house. When she wakes up she assumes something had happened between them and ribs the man gently about it. She is convinced of her hotness, sounds comfortable with the thought that he might have had sex with her when she was passed out and will not believe it when he says he did nothing. “Main behoshi ke bahaane ka mauka nahin deta,” the man explains. “Bahaana” in Hindi can be read as both “pretence” and “excuse”, so that translates to: “I do not give women the opportunity to cry rape using the pretence of having been unconscious as their excuse.”

Later in the same passage, she dispenses this wisdom about infidelity: you do not fall in love after one sexual encounter, so how can one sexual encounter cause you to fall out of love? In the context in which that sentence is uttered (that is, while discussing a woman not trusting the man she supposedly loves), here is a translation: a woman does not fall in love with a man simply because she had sex with him once, so how can she fall out of love with that man simply because he had sex with another woman just once?

The line is repeated later in the film by another character.

It’s that same old argument from the 1981 Jeetendra-Rekha-Shabana Azmi-starrer Ek Hi Bhool, in which a wife is taunted and demonised for not forgiving her husband’s single act of sexual infidelity because, after all, it was – as even the erring spouse has the audacity to tell her while demanding absolution – “ek hi bhool” (just one mistake).

Director-editor Akiv Ali’s De De Pyaar De has been marketed as an older-man-younger-woman romance, but make no mistake about this: what it truly is is a vehicle for claims of universal male victimhood, better disguised than its co-producer and co-writer Luv Ranjan’s three directorial ventures that have struck box-office gold in the past decade – Pyaar Ka Punchnama, Pyaar Ka Punchnama (PKP) 2 and Sonu Ke Titu Ki Sweety (SKTKS). Just to make it clear that De De Pyaar De is a tribute to Ranjan’s earlier works, it features a cameo by Sunny Singh from PKP 2 and SKTKS. The only thing missing is the song from the PKPs: Bandh gaya patta, dekho bann gaya kutta (The leash has been tied / Look, he’s become a dog). 

Unlike those three films, the stars of De De Pyaar De are big names, and perhaps because of that the misogyny is less crass and cleverly packaged instead as a call to modernity, couched in humour, wrapped in the combined warmth of Tabu, Ajay Devgn and their relatively lesser known but equally charismatic co-star Rakul Preet Singh. I kid you not, when a man cheats in this film it is described as an act of generosity towards a woman in need. His advocate is so eloquent while batting for him, that I almost wanted to give him a Nobel Peace Prize for Sexual Kindness.

The story as you already know from the promotions is centred around Ashish (Ajay Devgn) and Aisha (Rakul Preet Singh) who fall in love despite the quarter-century age gap between them. Ashish is a wealthy businessman living in London and estranged from his wife Manju (Tabu), who is a hotelier in Kullu and has brought up their two children. Aisha works through the corporate grind during the week and is a bartender on weekends.

The first half of De De Pyaar De is devoted to Ashish and Aisha overcoming their own mental blocks against their relationship. Post interval they travel to India to introduce her to his family. Confusion and misunderstandings follow, but inevitably there is reconciliation. How that reconciliation is reached or what it amounts to is what the trailer does not reveal.

Despite the troubling set-up with the bachelor party scene, what follows between Ashish and Aisha is sweet and I found myself wondering if the opening chapter was just an aside, possibly the director’s bow to his mentor’s persecution complex about men. Big mistake.

That said, it makes for such a pleasant change to see a male superstar of Devgn’s generation playing his real-life age instead of a 20/30-something screen character. He and Singh have genuine chemistry between them (although he should perhaps be officially banned from kissing women on screen since he seems to go cold in such scenes).

He of course is a talent familiar to Hindi film-goers. The very attractive Singh’s decade long filmography, however, is dominated by Tamil and Telugu cinema and she has done very little work in Bollywood so far. She is good, so the loss is yours, Bollywood.

When the action shifts to Kullu, it begins to feel a bit confusing that Ashish and Aisha’s age difference is an issue in the eyes of their family, when a viewing of Hindi cinema for the past four decades would have convinced a foreigner that a 15-20 year age difference is routine in Indian man-woman relationships. Male stars of Bollywood – from Amitabh Bachchan onwards in particular – have, after all, courted younger and younger heroines as they have grown older and their stature has risen.

De De Pyaar De’s sense of humour continues in the second half, but the misogyny too is now front and centre. It peaks in a horrid competitive scene between Aisha and Manju in which Aisha makes nasty ageist comments using a “puraani gaadi” (old car) as a metaphor for an ageing woman. It is worth noting that when she speaks of Ashish’s age early on, it is written as fond teasing, when she speaks of Manju’s age she is downright mean.

Tabu, of course, is luminous, and when she is around she overshadows everyone else including the gifted leads. It hurts though that she agreed to be part of this disturbing film in which her warmth makes an odd bedfellow with the animosity towards women underlying the entire screenplay and a weird twist in the end that is supposed to be cool but is too terribly contrived to be convincing.

She also gets to deliver the message that is obviously the primary purpose of De De Pyaar De’s existence: “We need to stop blaming him for everything.” In the scene in which Manju makes this statement, “him” is Ashish, but we were not born yesterday, so yeah we get it, “him” is all bechare men being blamed unfairly for all the wrongs in the world for which women should take equal blame, most especially when it is ek hi bhool. Haiye. Poor things.

On second thoughts, the flippant tone of that last paragraph does not sufficiently convey the sadness I felt as a woman watching a film on male victimhood with Alok Nath in the cast. Context cannot be ignored in the matter of casting, and in this case the specific link between the actor and the theme of De De Pyaar De makes it impossible to separate the art from the artist. This is the same Alok Nath who has multiple allegations of sexual harassment and violence against him, and whose first reaction to a rape charge by a TV stalwart last year was to casually say, “Neither am I denying this nor do I would (sic) agree with it” and “It is useless to react on the allegations as in today’s world only what a woman says will be considered.”

I am not delving into the timeline of De De Pyaar De’s casting and production, because Nath plays a small supporting character who could have been ousted if the producers (Ranjan’s Luv Films and T-Series – undoubtedly a moneyed lot) had the will to do so, whereas Hollywood icon Kevin Spacey was House of Cards’ leading man yet was dropped following multiple sexual abuse charges against him and Ridley Scott re-shot a film to replace Spacey for the same reason. Of course it is worth remembering, as the US magazine The Atlantic noted in October 2018, that most “men of #MeToo” in the American entertainment industry have been or are being gradually welcomed back after a brief exile. And in a film industry not far from Bollywood, Malayalam megastar Dileep – who was chargesheeted in a 2017 rape case – played a character in Kammara Sambhavam who got to mouth a line about false cases of sexual violence.

So yeah, Alok Nath is in a film about male victimhood, fronted by personages no less than Tabu and Ajay Devgn. In your face, women!

Rating (out of five stars): *

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	135 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/bollywood/de-de-pyaar-de-movie-review-tabu-ajay-devgn-champion-male-infidelity-hatred-for-women-a-weird-notion-of-modern-coolth-6648181.html

Poster courtesy:

https://www.facebook.com/DeDePyaarDe/