REVIEW 44: SHAGIRD

Release date:	May 13, 2011
Director:	Tigmanshu Dhulia
Cast:	Nana Patekar, Mohit Ahlawat, Rimi Sen, Zakir Hussain

If Shagird had been released about 15 years back, it might have had a stronger impact. This story of a corrupt policeman who gets caught up in the circle of violence and corruption that he cashes in on, has enough meat to sustain itself through its two-hours-plus running time. The problem is that in the past decade-and-a-half, we’ve seen so many gritty thrillers about the nexus between criminals, cops and politicians that it would take something earth-shatteringly different for a film to grab our attention and stay with it. Shagird doesn’t break too much new ground and is terribly unrealistic in parts. But it does give us Nana Patekar playing one of the quirkiest Hindi film policemen that I’ve seen in a while. His character is what makes this film worth watching.

Hanumant Singh (Patekar) is an openly corrupt officer in the Delhi Police’s Crime Branch. He thinks nothing of gunning down a room full of drug dealers and their buyers who walk in shortly afterwards, so that he can walk away with both the prized narcotics and the money that would have paid for it. When Mohit Kumar (Mohit Ahlawat) enters the force, he is shocked to witness this brazen loot taking place in the name of policing. Hanumant, incidentally, is a flunkie of senior neta Rajmani Singh (Zakir Hussain) who is on the verge of becoming the Union External Affairs Minister. Mohit happens to be in love with TV journalist Varsha Mathur (Rimi Sen) who is tracking Hanumant. The action heats up when Rajmani’s associate Bunty Bhaiyya (Anurag Kashyap) is imprisoned and three journalists are abducted by unknown elements demanding the release of a couple of notorious terrorists and Bunty in exchange for them. Who are these mysterious kidnappers? Is there anyone Rajmani will not sacrifice to achieve his goals? Will Hanumant stop at nothing to increase his bank balance? And is Mohit a worthy disciple to Hanumant? The answers to these questions are what Shagird is all about.

First let’s talk about Patekar. It has to be said that the man has been repeating himself unrelentingly for years now – every dialogue spoken in the same casual undertone, his real-life personality suiting the roles he’s been cast in much more than the actor moulding himself to any character. This marriage of actor and role is what made him ideal for a film like Taxi No. 9211. Then in a crazy, OTT film like Welcome, he explored new territory, discovered a funny bone and surprised us all. In Shagird, he sinks his teeth into a role after a long time, lends little touches to the character that make him delightful (Hanumant washes his hands with mineral water after peeing on the roadside) and seems to be having a jolly good time while he’s at it. The casualness with which Hanumant commits his crimes is now old hat for Hindi film goers (most recently, we had the incredible Mr Irrfan Khan taking crime to a whole new level of cool in Yeh Saali Zindagi). What’s amusing and entertaining about Hanumant though is the manner in which every misdeed is played out against the backdrop of his passion for food and his obsession with old Hindi film music. At one point, he has just bumped off a colleague who had been assigned to shoot him. By the time the dead man’s puppeteer phones a few minutes later, Hanumant is calmly stuffing himself with gol guppas not many metres away from where the body lies. In another scene, as he waits to swoop down on a bunch of goons, he notes with interest that they’re  watching a Nutan-Dev Anand classic on TV; when they switch channels to Emraan Hashmi mouthing Himesh Reshammiya’s Jhalak dikhla ja, Hanumant’s temper flares and he mows them down. Towards the end, that wry sense of humour does get stretched a bit, but not so much as to kill the experience of the preceding two hours for us.

Patekar gets a mixed bag of actors to work with in Shagird. Ram Gopal Varma’s discovery Mohit Ahlawat is still a tad too beefy and expressionless to be convincing. Zakir Hussain is as real as he usually is. Anurag Kashyap seems to be enjoying himself while testing his acting chops in the middle of a flourishing career as a writer-director – he lent a creepy air to the paedophile stepdad he played in Onir’s I Am just recently, and is effectively cocky and despairing by turns in Shagird. Rimi Sen is a natural actress but has done shockingly little research for this role. No Ms Sen, female political/daily news journalists in India do not usually wear strapped and halter-necked tops on their reporting assignments!

The beauty of director Tigmanshu Dhulia’s unheralded debut film Haasil (2003) was that in the middle of a wave of underworld flicks from Bollywood, he took a gangster story and transported it to Allahabad University to give us a unique and extremely realistic crime-on-campus caper. In the past 15 years or so, for dedicated film followers brought up on Ram Gopal Varma’s classics Satya and Company, Sudhir Mishra’s Iss Raat ki Subah Nahin, Ramu’s Sarkar and Sarkar Raj, and Once Upon A Time in Mumbaii, Shagird does not have that much that’s new to offer, in spite of Patekar’s eccentric crookish cop act. So let’s chalk out a balance sheet here. Assets: Patekar’s Hanumant Singh and the fun of catching snatches of Tere ghar ke saamne, Waqt ne kiya kya haseen sitam and other old film songs playing in the background throughout the film. Liabilities: the lack of novelty, some unconvincing twists in the end (why exactly did Mohit lie about his girlfriend?) and the stretch of imagination that requires us to believe, among so many other things, that a potential Exernal Affairs Minister would shoot a known crook in Central Delhi in the daytime in his own car and keep the body there while he drives to Parliament.

So I guess what I’m saying is that if you are in an undemanding, unquestioning mood, you could give Shagird a shot … for Hanumant Singh alone.

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

CBFC Rating:                       A without cuts

Running time:                        128 Minutes

Language:                              Hindi

Photograph courtesy: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/shagirdmovie

REVIEW 30: THANK YOU

Release date:	April 8, 2011
Director:	Anees Bazmee
Cast:	Akshay Kumar, Sonam Kapoor, Bobby Deol, Irrfan Khan, Rimi Sen, Suneil Shetty, Celina Jaitley

Raj, Yogi and Vikram are married men whose life’s mantra is infidelity. Raj deceives his gullible wife with promises of undying love. Vikram tramples upon his lady at every opportunity he gets. And Yogi has been tossed around by his spouse ever since she discovered him with a lover. The three men are buddies, so are the three women. When Raj’s wife Sanjana suspects him of fooling around, she hires a detective to pin him down. The sleuth Kishen (Akshay Kumar) complicates matters further by falling for the beatific and beautiful Sanjana.

Thank You is good for some laughs if you can forget that it’s offensive to women or that Bollywood has made several multi-star-cast comedies on the theme of adultery this past decade. Director Anees Bazmee’s No Entry was far funnier than his latest offering. It too featured three cheating husbands + three unhappy wives, one of them as credulous as Sanjana. Perhaps since critics are bound to point out the similarities between the two films, Bazmee has inserted a scene in Thank You in which a character is watching No Entry. Technically then, am I supposed to call this the director’s ode to his previous megahit or just a lack of fresh ideas? You decide the answer to that one. What I will tell you is that other Hindi films on the same subject are flooding my memory as I write: Shaadi No. 1, again with a triumvirate of married couples and Sanjay Dutt in a role similar to the one played by Akshay in Thank You; David Dhawan’s disturbingly bad Govinda-starrer Do Knot Disturb; Masti which too was about a trio of duos … feel free to add to the list ...

But as I said, despite the feeling of having been there and seen all that before, I did find parts of Thank You funny. The actors all acquit themselves reasonably well, Suneil Shetty is particularly hilarious, and Irrfan is so good that I’d love to see him in other, hopefully more original comedies. I say all this despite the fact that the film slows down in patches, is too long and has a dull soundtrack; the repeated references to the flute-playing Lord Krishna are too meaningless to even be called pretentious; Celina Jaitley disappears for a large part of the film in such an inexplicable fashion that it almost seems like the actress fell out with the film maker or didn’t give him sufficient dates; Mallika Sherawat’s much-hyped item number is completely impactless; there is no particular reason for the film to be set in Canada and not India; Akshay’s character’s sexually promiscuous ways are forgotten completely by the scriptwriter in the end; his interest in Sanjana too is entirely – and inexplicably – axed from the climax.

Lazy scripting apart, what is completely unfunny about Thank You is its attitude towards fornicating husbands, so similar to the other films I just listed in its league. Little has changed in Hindi cinema since the 1981 film Ek Hi Bhool in which Jeetendra played an adulterer who demands to be forgiven for his “ek hi bhool” (just one mistake) by his wife (Rekha). That film regressively painted the wronged woman as an unforgiving, stubborn creature who had the audacity to be offended by her pati parmeshwar’s sins … oops, just one sin. Thirty years later in Thank You, tokenism towards political correctness comes in the form of a long lecture about suffering wives that Kishen / Akshay delivers to the deceitful husbands. But just to be sure that the film doesn’t offend the sensibilities of its primary target audience, Kishen also describes the men’s penchant for bed-hopping as “ek chhoti si aadat”.

When I entered the hall to watch Thank You first day first show, I was taken aback to see a virtually all-male audience. As the film rolled on, I began to understand the gender imbalance in the crowd … The men in that theatre laughed their guts out every time the sadistic Vikram was mean to his wife, ordered her around and treated her like hired household help. They burst into peals of raucous thigh-slapping laughter whenever one of those celluloid husbands was unfaithful to his wife and successfully covered up his treachery. They then fell silent when Akshay lectured the womanising boys about the price of faithlessness. But the energy in the theatre returned when Akshay uttered those reassuring words “ek chhoti si aadat” and Vikram described his need to be with his wife, not in terms of his affection for her, but thus: “jabse yeh aurat meri zindagi mein aayee hai, meri kismet badal gayee hai.” Ah, that whole ghar ki Lakshmi phenomenon. My fellow viewers in the hall could understand that! The order of nature had been restored! All was well with the world! Thank you!

Now tell me Mr Bazmee, would you have the courage to make a comedy about man-ising wives in which female philanderers too are absolved this easily? I suspect not. Do prove me wrong.

Rating (out of five): **1/4

Post-script: My dear gentlemen readers, I DID NOT say the hall in which I watched Thank You was filled with gentle folk like you J

CBFC Rating (India):	U / A without cuts
Running time:	134 Minutes
Language:	Hindi

Photograph courtesy: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=154612521259601&set=a.154612517926268.36806.154356421285211&theater