REVIEW 108: STAND BY

Release date:	August 26, 2011
Director:	Sanjay Surkar
Cast:	Siddharth Kher, Adinath Kothare, Sachin Khedekar, Dalip Tahil

I wish Bollywood would make more sports films. Actor-producer Aamir Khan’s Lagaan and Chak De with Shah Rukh Khan were superhits, so too (in the low-budget arena) was Nagesh Kukunoor’s small wonder Iqbal. So clearly there’s an audience out there interested in the blood-sweat-tears-toil-and-politics-ridden lives of Indian sportspersons.

Stand By is not a slick and glossy production like these iconic works, but it’s still a captivating, moving film about the games people play in Indian sport. Rahul and Shekhar are good friends who play football for Maharashtra. Rahul is the son of a middle class bank employee (Sachin Khedekar) while Shekhar is the thoroughly spoilt kid of millionaire businessman J.P. Verma (Dalip Tahil). When Rahul is selected for the main squad at the national level and Shekhar is picked as a stand by, Big Daddy steps in to get his boy the slot he covets so much. After all, Shekhar has been brought up on the dictum that there’s nothing money can’t buy, and if he’s sulking then dad has to act.

Multiple National-Award-winning Marathi director Sanjay Surkar has a natural storytelling style. He handles his main cast well, and the casting director has picked actors who are well suited to the roles of Rahul and Shekhar. Siddharth Kher who plays Shekhar was earlier seen in the Amitabh Bachchan-starrer Teen Patti. Here in a better film, he gets more scope to display his talent and comes off well as the brattish, selfish footballer. But the highlight of this film is Adinath Kothare who plays Rahul. Kothare has both acting talent and boy-next-door good looks, and will hopefully be cast in bigger films too in future. Tahil is just right as the arrogant rich man who would demand compliance from national selectors and others in power, in return for his munificence. And Sachin Khedekar is appropriately diffident and dogged by turns in the fight for his son’s future.

Surkar tells this interesting story with an insider’s eye for detail. At some level, all of us are aware of the lobbying, big money and intrigue that mars the work of sports bodies in India. But it’s still chilling to see a plan as Machiavellian as the one in which J.P. Verma threatens to take his company’s account away from the bank that Rahul’s father works for if they don’t offer their hapless employee a posting in another location, a move that would jeopardise Rahul’s footballing prospects.

In the midst of all this realism though, the director repeatedly inserts a very theatrical song-and-dance sequence that serves as an unnecessary disruption, as does an item number that should not have been there. Even the song Lad Bapu feels like it’s trying too hard to be that one hard-hitting number that could be the sports anthem emerging from the film. Stand By also seems to suffer from a limited budget that has led to a lack of finesse in the production, including in the casting of some of the satellite characters. Most of all, I’m confused by the message the film is trying to send out in the end. Sports films tend to be uplifting works filled with positivity, about men and women who dreamt the impossible dream and conquered mountains to achieve their goals. If Stand By wanted to go in the opposite direction, be more realistic and acquaint us with the hopelessness of the situation in India’s sporting structure, then it should have gone all the way. But on the one hand we have a situation where player after player rejects J.P. Verma’s offer of a bribe to play dirty games on the team, and on the other hand, Rahul’s own actions in the end (I won’t reveal exactly what) seem to suggest that the only way to survive is to match filth with filth, muck with muck. Was this what the director intended? I’m not sure.

But in spite of these reservations, I’d say Stand By exhudes a certain sincerity that I found utterly charming. It’s not a polished production but it’s got its heart in the right place. And it’s got Adinath Kothare. The film was poorly promoted and disappeared from theatres even before it was released – if you chance upon it on DVD, I’d recommend it to you.

Rating (out of five): **3/4

CBFC Rating:                        U without cuts

Running time:                        124 Minutes

Language:                              Hindi

Video courtesy: Youtube

REVIEW 66: BUBBLE GUM

Release date:	July 29, 2011
Director:	Sanjivan Lal
Cast:	Delzad Sanjay Hiwale, Sohail Lakhani, Tanvi Azmi, Sachin Khedekar, Apoorva Arora, Suraj Singh

What a darling film! Bubble Gum is about teenaged love and longing in 1980s Jamshedpur, about a brother coping with his elder sibling’s speech and hearing impairment, about well-meaning but blundering parents trying to get their sons to get along …  and it’s adorable! 

Vedant (Delzad Sanjay Hiwale) is a 14-year-old living in a middle class housing complex. He is in love with Jenny (Apoorva Arora), the pretty daughter of a local policeman. Jenny seems to reciprocate his feelings but the older boy Ratan works hard to drive a wedge between them with politicking that would make Machiavelli proud. This troubled phase of Vedant’s life is further disrupted by the arrival of his 16-year-old brother Vidur (Sohail Lakhani) who lives in a hostel, but is now home on a Holi break. The boys’ parents intend no harm but end up, as many parents do, neglecting Vedant while working hard to cater to Vidur’s special needs. Bubble Gum takes us through a couple of weeks in their lives during which Vedant’s resentment towards his brother gives way to teary-eyed pain when he returns to his hostel.

What a year it’s been for children’s films in Hindi. In spite of their flaws, almost all of them in 2011 have thrown up some incredible kiddie talent, whether it’s the heart-stoppingly good Taher Sutterwala and Chinmay Kambli in Sagar Ballary’s Kachha Limboo, the amazingly natural Partho from Amole Gupte’s Stanley ka Dabba, Chillar Party’s bachcha party and even ‘veteran’ Darsheel Safary who returned to us with the indifferent Disney offering Zokkomon. Happily for us, each of these lead players was also surrounded by a wonderful supporting cast of children. In Bubble Gum we get the remarkable Delzad Sanjay Hiwale and Sohail Lakhani who don’t seem to be acting at all, but look like someone put up cameras in their home and residential locality and said: “Okay, now pretend the camera is not there, just live out your lives.” A big round of applause please for casting director Honey Trehan, and for writer-director Sanjivan Lal who clearly has a magic touch with kids. Lakhani is deaf-mute in real life too, and the entire cast was put through a 15 day sign language workshop to help them with their performances and also to enable them to communicate with their co-star.

Mercifully, the grown-up characters in the film are as well-etched-out as the children. Vedant and Vidur’s parents (played with seemingly effortless ease by Tanvi Azmi and Sachin Khedekar) complement each other well. As you watch them, you can imagine that this couple will happily grow old together. The only jarring moment in Bubble Gum comes at a party when the children break into a really bad song that the film could have done well without. There are also certain technical aspects that should have been better handled. The lighting, for instance, seems ineffective in several places, which takes away some of the sheen from this otherwise utterly endearing film.

There’s something so gentle about Bubble Gum … no speeches, just a witness to reality. This is a world before cellphones and the Internet, when children connected on real playgrounds and not through SMS or virtual chatrooms, when too many essential items had to be ordered from the US, when even the most sincere adults would use the word “handicapped” with no malice whatsoever. With humour and sensitivity, Bubble Gum says so much about adolescence, disabilities, parenting and changing times without seeming to say much at all. This is a warm, compassionate, funny, true-to-life, poignant film.

CBFC Rating:                       U without cuts

Running time:                        115 Minutes

Language:                              Hindi

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

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

REVIEW 64: SINGHAM

Release date:	July 22, 2011
Director:	Rohit Shetty
Cast:	Ajay Devgn, Prakash Raj, Kajal Aggarwal, Sonali Kulkarni, Sachin Khedekar

Early on in Singham, there is a point at which Bajirao Singham’s fists send a villain flying. As the hapless man’s body rotates in mid-air, Singham takes a leap, lunges towards that body spinning in slow motion, and steps over him on his way to the next bad guy. It’s at this point that you must decide whether you are in the mood for a no-holds-barred fantasy action thriller or you wish to leave the hall. Singham is not everyone’s cup of tea – there’s too much in it that defies logic, gravity and many other laws of physics. But if you enjoy at least the occasional hero whose superpowers are not derived from the wizarding world or the bite of a spider but simply from the fact that he’s the leading man in an Indian film, do stay on – you’re in for a zany ride.

Singham is the story of an honest policeman in a small village bordering Goa and Maharashtra. Bajirao Singham is loved by his people for the justice he metes out, relying more on the heart and human ties than legal procedures. This is a film about what happens when he crosses swords with the powerful criminal-politician Jaykanth Shikre.

Singham is a remake of the 2010 Tamil superhit of the same name. The Hindi version does not have the incredibly handsome Surya in the lead, but what it does have is the incredibly intense Ajay Devgn whose searing eyes have always been an interesting contrast to his unexpectedly shy smile. In this film, he comes to us more muscular than ever before – those arms are a tad too bulked up for my tastes, but boy oh boy, do I envy him his abs! Devgn is pitch perfect as the straight-talking, kind-hearted Singham who single-handedly beats up entire gangs of goons, yet is shy in love. Providing a fabulous villainous foil to Singham’s goodness is National Award-winning Tamil/Telugu/Malayalam actor Prakash Raj as Jaykanth Shikre, reprising his role from the original Tamil film. Prakash Raj ups the ante here, his arrogance and ruthlessness several notches higher than in his Tamil avatar. Of the supporting cast, I particularly enjoyed the actors playing Singham’s colleagues. Kaajal Aggarwal playing Singham’s girlfriend may not be the most charismatic star you will find, but she’s pretty and bubbly and sadly, the role demands nothing much of her beyond being the woman behind her man.

So Singham is a clever mix of action balanced out by emotion, romance and even a comic track. Bajirao Singham is Amitabh Bachchan of the 1970s but with muscles. He is Salman Khan of the past couple of years but with more acting muscle. He is Sunny Deol of Gadar but with less shouting. If Salman’s recent films have marked the return of the Angry Young Man to Bollywood, with Singham that short-tempered vigilante digs his heels in further. But unlike Wanted and Dabangg which were undisguised tributes to Salman, this film comes across as a gentle ode to the baap of them all, Bachchan. At one point, Singham is even mocked at his police station by a villain who dips his voice in an attempted baritone: “Ab yeh mat kehna ki jab tak kaha na jaaye chup chaap khade raho, yeh police station hai tumhare baap ka ghar nahin.”

The film is filled with such 1970s style dialoguebaazi. My favourites are Shikre’s “sab kuchh karne ka, lekin Jaykanth Shikre ka ego hurt nahin karne ka” and the one I know I’ll be quoting for years to come, Singham’s “Meri zaroorte kam hai, isliye mere zameer mein dum hai.” It’s a line that made me want to chuck up my notions of dignity and whistle during the press preview.

Despite the improbabilities inherent in this genre, make no mistake about this: Singham is masala with meaning. For me its lesson lies in the hero’s punchline: if your material needs are less, you’re less likely to feel the need to supplement your income through dishonest means, don’t you think? This is also an extremely intelligently crafted commercial entertainer designed to appeal to disparate audiences. When the hero seamlessly peppers his Hindi dialogues with Marathi, when he identifies himself as “Maratha Bajirao Singham” with a roar, I can just imagine the ferocity of the cheers in a movie hall in Maharashtra. As if Prakash Raj’s presence and the curiosity around the Hindi remake of a well-loved Tamil film is not enough to attract south Indian cinema buffs, there’s also an entire sequence with Tulu dialogues and a joke comparing a gigantic cut-out at election time to a “south superstar”. Singham also plays shamelessly to the gallery in an India disgusted and disillusioned with corruption. Which is why, I guess, despite my reservations about what seems like a justification of police atrocities in the film, I still couldn’t help but enjoy the leading man’s animal-like powers over his beastly bête noir.

The action choreography is brilliant, a sort of mid-path between Amitabh Bachchan and Rajinikanth. The title track and the background score are a thumping tribute to the film’s larger than life appeal, though the romantic numbers didn’t work for me and it felt odd to see Devgn lip syncing to vastly different playback voices in two songs. It also feels odd to hear the hero’s girlfriend addressing him by his surname – I guess that’s the extent of the film’s keenness to convey Bajirao’s leonine qualities to us.

For a change Singham is a legitimate, above-board remake. But considering that a huge percentage of the film is a carbon copy of the original Tamil (with direct translations of dialogues and exact duplications of fight scenes) I wish the credits had been shared with the original writers and action designer.

In creating a highly melodramatic vehicle for Surya, Tamil director Hari had shorn his film of the poignance that was so appealing in Kaakha Kaakha, an earlier highly memorable high-action cop saga featuring the actor and directed by Gautham Menon. Rohit Shetty’s version raises the drama several levels higher. On the downside then, Singham is formulaic and unrealistic. But its plus point is that it injects the formula with pulsating energy, making it a supremely entertaining watch. Congratulations Rohit Shetty! Prakash Raj has acted in a few Hindi films already, but I suspect that years from now we will look back at July 22, 2011, as the day when he well and truly arrived in Bollywood. Ajay Devgn has for years now been a major star but I suspect too that we will look back at this as the week when he finally became a Khan.

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

CBFC Rating:                       U/A

Running time:                        161 Minutes

Language:                              Hindi, Marathi and even some Tulu

Photograph courtesy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singham_(2011_film)