REVIEW 508: SHAB

Release date:	July 14, 2017
Director:	Onir
Cast: Language:	Ashish Bisht, Raveena Tandon, Arpita Chatterjee, Areesz Ganddi, Simon Frenay, Raj Suri, Anika Dhawan, Gaurav Nanda, Andrew Hoffland, Shray Rai Tiwari, Cameos: Sanjay Suri, fashion designers Varun Bahl and Wendell Rodricks Hindi with English

One of the great highs of being a cinephile comes from watching a new release by a director whose body of work you love, and discovering that they have done it again. There is, I have come to realise, a sub-conscious tension I experience as I enter a hall before any film, more so before a film by someone with a solid track record, and if the film turns out to be good, a sense of relief that washes over me as I leave – relief that those couple of hours of life were not wasted, and in the case of an artist I respect, relief that they have proved to be consistent.

My heart broke a little when I saw Shab this week. It has been helmed by Onir, who made the politically brave, mind-shatteringly beautiful My Brother Nikhil in 2005 and I Am in 2011, with the latter deservedly going on to win the year’s National Award for Best Hindi Film. Shab is his first directorial feature in six years, but the intervening period has, unfortunately, not been well spent.

The title comes from a Hindustani word for “night”. The story is about what goes on under cover of a metaphorical darkness in Delhi’s social circles, where young entrants on the glamour scene are used and abused by unscrupulous veterans, where a creative person you see at work in a posh colony could be supplementing their income by dabbling in the world’s oldest profession, and where bored rich married couples find excitement in infidelity.

In one of Shab’s earliest scenes, an aspiring model from a small town walks to the head of a catwalk in the briefest of shiny briefs, wiggles his butt and crotch about for the viewing consumption of a panel of judges seated below the stage, and introduces himself in broken English that causes them to snigger. He is achingly young and eager, but they appear not to see that. What they see instead is a target for their snobbery and their lust. 

It is a moment brimming with pathos and potential, not over- or under-done, but just right. Newcomer Ashish Bisht playing the boy-child on the ramp – Mohan from Dhanaulti – seems to have been well chosen for the role. As he stands there before that elite set, the picture of innocence and enthusiasm mixed with a dash of stupidity, anxious to impress and evidently impervious to their contempt, it is hard not to feel uneasy on his behalf and sorry for him. It is possible that Bisht is acting here, but to all appearances he is just being.

That fleeting passage perfectly illustrates the difference between the objectification of a person with the reins in their hands (such as a male superstar choosing to dance shirtless to Dard e disco, and other top heroes in India’s big film industries) versus a person with less power (heroines from the same film industries, including the seniors among them) versus those with no power at all (female debutants and even men like Mohan). No one touches Mohan during that trial, yet there is exploitation written all over it.

When the wealthy socialite Sonal Modi (Raveena Tandon) decides that Mohan is a worthy toy boy, we learn that he is not quite as innocent as he looks. She later re-christens him Azfar to fit him better into snooty circles, anoints him her fitness trainer, and starts carting him around wherever she goes. Azfar develops a swagger and a seductive air with women, and strains at the leash on which his mentor keeps him.

If Shab had been able to carry forward the nuanced air of discomfort in that opening talent hunt, it could have been special. Because of that promise, when at first we are introduced to a string of individuals and we watch their paths intersect, it seems like something might come of it. Unfortunately, Shab disintegrates within its first half hour. And so, we are hauled across the criss-crossing lives of character after character, from Mohan/Azfar, Sonal and her designer buddy Rohan Sud (Raj Suri), to restaurateur Neil (Areesz Ganddi) and his close friend Raina (Arpita Chatterjee), Raina’s sister Anu (Anika Dhawan) and her neighbour Benoit LeBlanc (Simon Frenay), Neil’s lovers, Raina’s clients, and… you know what, it does not matter, because the comatose narrative – divided pointlessly into the four seasons – left me so indifferent after a while, that I could not even remember their names.

The problem lies not with the multiplicity of characters or even the acting for the most part, but with the shallow writing, jagged editing (initially intriguing but distractingly choppy as time goes by) and inert direction. Shab somehow feels like a film Onir made in the middle of a million distractions. The editing has been credited to the usually reliable Irene Dhar Malik and Onir, the screenplay and dialogues to Merle Kröger and Onir, the Hindi dialogues to Adhiraj Singh and the dramaturgy to Kröger, while Urmi Juvekar has been acknowledged for the story idea – let them decide culpability amongst themselves in this case.

Whatever conclusion they may arrive at, the fact remains that even though some of the actors in Shab are worth caring for, not a single character is.

Bisht is sweet up to a point, but is lost to surface treatment by the writers. Tandon has screen presence and gorgeousness, but after an interesting introduction, is given little to do beyond be haughty, hot and horny.

Chatterjee is a veteran of the Bengali industry. She was strong in her Bollywood debut Chauranga (2016), which was co-produced but not directed by Onir. In Shab she is inexplicably stiff as cardboard, which weighs heavily on the already insubstantial writing of Raina. Ganddi and Frenay look like they might add up to something more with a better script, but they are so under-written that it is impossible to judge them by this film. Suri, thankfully, does not go stark raving camp like designers in the formulaic Madhur Bhandarkar mould, but his motivations in his final scene are one of this film’s many mysteries that I do not give a damn enough to crack.

Restraint cannot mean zero vitality, yet that is what you get in Shab. Worse, the film does not have anything new to say. We already know that wealth does not guarantee marital happiness, that freshers in the modelling and acting professions get taken advantage of sexually, that big cities can be challenging to small-town folk. We know of the casting couch, high-society call girls and closeted homosexuality. They exist, but what more can you tell us about them beyond what has already been told? What emotion can you stir up that has not already been felt?

If the answer to either question is “I don’t know”, here is another question: is the film worth making? Shab, sadly, was not.

Rating (out of five stars): *

CBFC Rating (India):	A
Running time:	108 minutes 27 seconds

Poster courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/ShabTheFilm/

REVIEW 57: BBUDDAH… HOGA TERRA BAAP

Release date:	July 1, 2011
Director:	Puri Jagannadh
Cast:	Amitabh Bachchan and others (the others being Sonu Sood, Prakash Raj, Hema Malini, Raveena Tandon, Sonal Chauhan, Charmme, Makrand Deshpande)

So let’s be very clear about this: Bbuddah… Hoga Terra Baap is an ode to Amitabh Bachchan. In purely artistic terms, there are plenty of holes I could pick in this film. But what’s endearing about it is that it’s not pretending to be anything but an out-and-out paean to The Bachchan’s Angry Young Man days, right from the name of the film’s official website http://www.bigbisback.com/ to the first scene in which AB enters the frame till the last shot which is followed by a note on screen by director Puri Jagannadh describing BHTBaap as his tribute to the megastar.

The story is simple: Karan is a dashing young ACP in the Mumbai police force who earns the wrath of the gangster Kabir when he takes a public oath to rid the city of crime and criminals. Kabir wants Karan dead. Enter Viju, an elderly sharpshooter who had once left Mumbai to run a bar in Paris. Viju is a flashy sort who hates being called a bbuddah which, he points out, is quite natural: do bachchas like being called bachchas, he asks? Indeed. What follows is a two hour fun ride involving action, humour, song ‘n’ dance, repeated references to Bachchan’s earlier films and some all-round masti.

Tribute #1: Viju, a cool curtailment I assume of Vijay, Bachchan’s name in several blockbusters. Tribute #2: Like Bachchan’s own personal life, this film is a recognition of the infinite possibilities that life offers you as an older person, which is something we in India tend not to see. Since we’re dousing ourselves in Bachchanalia here, of course there’s a Ma in the film: Karan’s mother played by the ever-beautiful Hema Malini. I tell you, AB and Hema can get sparks flying even today in a manner that would be the envy of many of their younger colleagues.

Unlike Ready – another ode-to-a-superstar type of film that’s also in theatres right now – BHTBaap is almost never tacky with its Bachchan referencing, nor does it at any point get irritatingly repetitive. The credit for that goes to some clever writing by Jagannadh and his team whose citations of earlier AB films are not always literal. The film also cheekily turns typical 1970s-style dialoguebaazi on its head on occasion. Karan tells Viju on the phone: Saamne aa, tumhe itni goli maaroonga ki tum yaad rakhoge, or something to that effect. To which Viju replies: “Toh phir saamne kyun aaoonga, stupid?” Touche. The other reason why this film works is that though Bachchan’s Viju is the focal point of the story, other important characters too (namely the good cop and the bad guy) are given their due.

Some of it doesn’t even make sense but it works all the same because of the self-deprecating tone. And when the film laughs at itself, it’s hard not to laugh along. So when Bachchan and a bevy of gori mems suddenly and inexplicably start dancing to Go Meera Go – a medley of songs from some of the actor’s biggest hits – a character asks the question: yeh Meera kaun hai? He doesn’t know. I don’t know either. But did we enjoy ourselves? That’s the entire point.

Of the cast, Bachchan seems to be having a rollicking time. Sonu Sood as Karan is his usual reliable self (why doesn’t Bollywood give this guy bigger roles?) and god bless Jagannadh for that one scene in which the actor gets to display his finely sculpted torso! Hema Malini is elegance personified. Sonal Chauhan as Karan’s pretty girlfriend acquits herself well in the little time she has. Makrand Deshpande playing the lead villain’s flunkey is brilliant in a small role. But my pick of the cast is Prakash Raj who is hilarious and menacing by turns as Kabir. The final confrontation between Viju and Kabir is so well acted and well directed that I was beside myself with both tension and laughter.

What I didn’t like … Well, there’s an extremely annoying sub-plot involving Raveena Tandon who seems to have been in love with Viju from her younger days. The deliberately over-the-top performance just doesn’t work. And since the actress doesn’t look a day above her 36 years, it’s weird to see her presented to us as the mother of a 20-plus-year-old daughter: someone sure as hell broke the law if she was married when that kid was born! It’s weirder still to hear Viju explain that there’s a 20 year age difference between them. Give us a break! The Bachchan’s a fit and fine hottie at almost 70, but what kind of mathematics is that?! It’s appropriate that Banda yeh bindass hai from the decade-old film Aks plays in one of their scenes together. That was the film which broke the dam of my tolerance for seeing Amitabh Bachchan acting with much-much-much-younger heroines when he played the husband of the amazingly smooth-skinned, then-20-something Nandita Das.

Back to BHTBaap … Charmme as Raveena’s daughter plays the role in too fussy a fashion. And at several places, the scenes don’t flow smoothly from one to the next.  But honestly, all the film’s flaws are redeemed by its unpretentious celebration of a remarkable career. Bachchan is enviably agile for a near-septuagenarian. And his voice works well for the songs he sings in this film, my favourite of the three being Haal-e-dil.

Would Bbuddah… Hoga Terra Baap rank anywhere on a list of my 10 favourite Bachchan films? I’m afraid not. Because Sholay, Deewar and their ilk are way too slick to be compared to BHTBaap. But it’s certainly one of the better Bachchan films of the past half decade, a period that has done little justice to the man’s track record. And did I have fun watching it? I sure did!

Rating (out of five): ***

CBFC Rating:                       U/A without cuts

Running time:                        122 Minutes

Language:                              Hindi

Photograph courtesy: http://www.bigbisback.com/