Release date:
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July 14, 2017
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Director:
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Onir
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Cast:
Language:
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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
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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):
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A
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Running time:
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108 minutes 27 seconds
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