REVIEW 475: MANTRA

Release date:	March 17, 2017
Director:	Nicholas Kharkongor
Cast: Language:	Rajat Kapoor, Kalki Koechlin, Lushin Dubey, Shiv Pandit, Rohan Joshi, Danish Hussain, Yuri Suri, Adil Hussain English with some Hindi

In an early scene from Mantra, a little girl at a shop counter asks for King Chips. All around her there lie only packets of the upstart brand Kipper, which the shopkeeper is hardselling. She is undeterred. King Chips is what she wants and King Chips is all she will have. The dukaandaar finally gives in, fetching a packet from a corner at the back of his establishment where he had stashed it away from the gaze of customers, not having bargained for this one insistent child.

Her loyalty is rare in a market where money buys visibility and where consumer choices could be driven as much by a lack of alternatives as by natural inclinations, Indian cinema itself being a case in point. What, for instance, might the girl have done, if she had been told that Kipper was the only brand in stock? Would she have had the time to scour the market? Would she have given up eating chips altogether?

Questions, questions… They come up at every juncture of director Nicholas Kharkongor’s crowd-funded film set in New Delhi in 2004, when the protagonist Kapil Kapoor’s home-grown business is on the verge of bankruptcy as his King Chips struggles against the greater resources of Kipper’s multinational owners.

Rajat Kapoor plays Kapil a.k.a. KK, whose losing battle with Kipper has destroyed his peace of mind. His wife Meenakshi (Lushin Dubey) is wilting under the weight of their loveless marriage. Meanwhile, KK is trying to be an attentive father to their children who he once neglected. Their 28-year-old son Viraj (Shiv Pandit) does not want anything to do with his Dad’s company, opting instead to start a restaurant chain, from the name of which the film derives its title. Daughter Pia (Kalki Koechlin) is a chef in Mantra Delhi. At 25, she wants a life of greater independence from her father who she resents. The family of five is rounded off by their much younger sibling Vir (Rohan Joshi) who, at 16, has discovered love and sex on the Internet.

The Kapoors’ public facade of normalcy hides great professional and personal turmoil.

KK is the point at which the old and new collide, in a world where “mantra” could indicate a cool hangout to a hip youngster or our vulnerable Bhartiya sanskriti to an aggressive nationalist. Manmohan Singh and P.V. Narasimha Rao’s liberalisation policies from the 1990s have altered India forever. Atal Bihari Vajyapee’s PM-ship is coming to an end, but Hindutvavaadi forces are still on the rise. In this cauldron of change, family is sometimes a source of solace, but very often not.

Mantra has several ingredients that work in its favour. Kharkongor’s script is often observant, and touches upon multiple issues without seeming self-conscious about its social conscience. The background score is pleasant, soothing and almost thoughtful. And though this is not a dominant factor, I enjoyed the artwork on the walls of the Kapoor home.

If the film does not come together as a whole, it is for clearly identifiable reasons: first, the cast is a mixed bag; second, the English dialogues do not sit well on several of them; third, the equation between the five Kapoors is not fully established, as a result of which I found myself rooting for some of them as individuals but not for the family as a whole (unlike, say, the equally unhappy Mehras who we met in Zoya Akhtar’s Dil Dhadakne Do in 2015).

Curiously enough, Mantra’s most memorable passages involve a brief encounter between a Kapoor and an absolute stranger: KK’s comfort level with a bemused truck driver, Pia trying to knock logic into the heads of misogynistic policemen, the humour in KK’s drunken night-time revelry with an unnamed drug user, and – above all – a poignant conversation between Pia and a restaurant delivery man who responds to her call for help in a life-threatening situation.

These episodes give us glimpses of Kharkongor’s potential in an otherwise inconsistent film.

Koechlin and Pandit are the pick of the primary cast. Dubey is awkward throughout. And Rajat Kapoor’s likeable screen presence cannot camouflage his discomfort with his English lines though he seems fine while occasionally speaking Hindi in the film.  

He is still better off than Maya Rao and a couple of the other supporting artistes, who sound like they are spouting English dialogues written for Western characters in a Western play that has not been adapted to the Indian English idiom. We see too many such productions on the Delhi stage.  

The blame for this unevenness rests mostly with the writing, though the actors must take some responsibility too, if you consider that Koechlin and Pandit slip in and out of English and Hindi without sounding mannered at all while speaking English, as some of their seniors in the film do.

Which brings me to an important question: why on earth do we not see more of Shiv Pandit as a hero in films? Or Adil Hussain? Pandit manages to draw something out of his role despite the limited exploration of his character in the script. And Hussain rules with an appearance that lasts barely a couple of minutes.

That scene in which Pia breaks down while confiding in his character, a migrant from Jharkhand, is the stand-out moment in Mantra. Give us more where that came from, Mr Kharkongor.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	A
Running time:	96 minutes 03 seconds

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/mantra-movie-review-adil-hussain-and-encounters-with-strangers-stand-out-in-an-uneven-film-3340020.html

Poster courtesy: imdb.com  

REVIEW 228: BOSS

Release date:	October 16, 2013
Director:	Anthony D’souza
Cast: Language:	Akshay Kumar, Shiv Pandit, Aditi Rao Hydari, Mithun Chakraborty, Ronit Roy, Parikshit Sahni, Danny Denzongpa. Guest stars: Sonakshi Sinha, Shakti Kapoor, Prabhu Deva, Yo Yo Honey Singh Hindi

Cleverly-crafted mindlessness can be so much fun. Boss is mindless all right, but cleverly crafted it is not. Over and above everything else, it is designed as a vehicle for its megastar hero, his trademark swagger, his looks, his agility… you get the picture. Plot matters little in such films, but for the record, this is it: a teenager called Surya is disowned by his father (Mithun Chakraborty) for acts of violence that were not his fault. Surya is taken in by the kind-hearted gangster Big Boss (Danny Denzongpa) and 15 years later we meet him as the old man’s comrade-in-arms, known to the world as Boss (Akshay Kumar). His bête noir is the corrupt ACP Ayushman Thakur (Ronit Roy) whose sister Ankita (Aditi Rao Hydari) falls for Boss’ brother Shiv (Shiv Pandit) though Ayushman wants her to marry a minister’s loser son.

Never mind Akshay’s distractingly over-gelled hair or the fact that this nicely-fit 46-year-old actor is trying to pass off as a man in his early 30s in this film; we’ve got bigger problems here. Many Bollywood buffs have lamented The Curse Of The Second Half that has afflicted so many Hindi films in recent years. In Boss, the situation is reversed. It’s first half is littered with PJs-trying-desperately-to-sound-smart and action-trying-desperately-to-look-cool, and all the film’s genuinely comical and suspenseful scenes come in the second half. There’s one particularly hilarious scene involving Shiv reading text off Boss’ various body parts. And while the rest of the film’s songs are strangely noisy and tuneless (yes including the much-hyped title track featuring Akshay mounted on an all-gold Mercedes!), two remixes save the day. The Tamil superhit Appadi pode has been rewritten as the tad-noisy-yet-fun Hum na chhode; and Har kisi ko nahin milta yahan pyaar zindagi mein filmed memorably on Sridevi and Feroz Khan in 1986’s Jaanbaaz, is first filmed here on Shiv-Ankita and runs a second time with Boss and Sonakshi (Sonakshi Sinha) right at the end – it’s equally enjoyable both times.

What Sonakshi is doing in this film is a big question. Although Bollywood is shockingly male dominated, none of today’s other reigning male superstars relegates women to the insignificance accorded to most heroines of Akshay and Salman Khan’s films. In The World According To Akshay-Salman, women are meant to be pretty and/or protected, romanced and danced with, but nothing more. Boss takes its male interpretation of the world to a different level altogether by dispensing with a heroine completely, reducing what Bollywood traditionally calls the “female love interest” to nothing but an “item girl”. Sonakshi initially appears in the film at a party where she dances to Party all night while singer Yo Yo Honey Singh leers at her and a crowd of bra-top-clad gori women. Then she disappears to resurface in the finale song. Having proved in Lootera that you are capable of so much more, why would you reduce yourself to being a glamorous nobody in a film, Ms Sinha?

To be fair, this treatment is meted out not just to women, but to everyone else in the film except Mithun Chakraborty, Danny Denzongpa and Ronit Roy. A fantastic character actor like Mukesh Tiwari gets a few seconds on screen. Comedian Sanjay Mishra gets a few minutes of nothingness. Aditi Rao Hydari, who sparkled in Yeh Saali Zindagi and London Paris New York, is relegated to the role of a sweet face and a hot bod (underline that!) in a bikini. Poor Shiv Pandit from Shaitan, handsome and talented though he is, is often treated like an extra in Boss even though he plays a key role. Nowhere is the centrality of Akshay and the marginality of the rest of the cast emphasised more than in Hum na chhode in which Shiv is present in the scene but the spotlight rests throughout on Akshay’s Boss dancing wildly surrounded by an army of women. Then suddenly as the song ends, Shiv is once again awkwardly plonked next to Boss to dance energetically for a few seconds.

Early in the film, Ayushman tells a man: “Maut se kyun bhaag raha hai re? Maut ko log yu hi badnaam karte hai. Takleef toh zindagi deti hai.” A filmi type like me could live off such lines but writers Farhad-Sajid struggle to sustain the tone. They even start repeating themselves after a few scenes. Boss has pretensions to intellectual depth with the action shifting from Delhi to Kurukshetra and Boss being likened to Arjun, but again Farhad-Sajid can’t pull it off.

At his best, Akshay Kumar has an arresting screen presence and a flair for the action-comedy mix. We get glimpses of that man in the second half of this film, but it’s hard to fully enjoy a star when he becomes overly conscious of his charisma and his indulgent fans. He is not the only one. Too many recent solo-hero action-comedy flicks have suffered from this problem. They’ve even begun to resemble each other. Where does Rowdy Rathore end and Khiladi 786 begin? Where does Dabangg end and Ready begin? In a stark reminder of Dabangg, Boss even features a climactic fight in which Ayushman rips off his baniyaan, to which gesture Boss responds by tearing open his kurta. I’m not sure what profound meaning those moves have, though I suppose I shouldn’t grumble since both actors have wonderfully toned bodies without being over-muscled. Okay then, that complaint is withdrawn, Milord! The rest still stand.  

Rating (out of five): **

CBFC Rating (India):	U/A (despite some extremely violent scenes)
Running time:	2 hours 24 minutes

Photograph courtesy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boss_(2013_Hindi_film)

REVIEW 51: SHAITAN

Release date:	June 10, 2011
Director:	Bejoy Nambiar
Cast:	Kalki Koechlin, Neil Bhoopalam, Kirti Kulhari, Shiv Pandit, Gulshan Devaiya, Rajeev Khandelwal, Raj Kumar Yadav, Rajit Kapoor, Pavan Malhotra

Shaitan is what Paanch might have been if it had lacked soul but possessed more sheen. It must rank as one of the heartbreaks of contemporary Hindi cinema that Paanch, Anurag Kashyap’s debut film as director – a raw, sock-you-in-the-face, punch-you-in-the-stomach type of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll saga – was never released as a combined result of Censor intolerance and the producer’s problems. Nearly a decade after he made that film, Kashyap is now himself an influential Bollywood producer presenting to us debutant director Bejoy Nambiar’s Shaitan.

To begin with, this story is enjoyable and quite intriguing. Shaitan stars Kalki Koechlin from Dev D as a troubled NRI kid who’s just landed in Mumbai because her father is working on a government project. It’s evident from the start that Amrita Jayshankar a.k.a. Amy is mentally not all there. She writes her mother’s name on every piece of paper she can get and imagines that Mom has been confined to a mental institution though she’s dead. Her father and stepmother seem to love her, but she’s not willing to give them a chance. Enter: rebellion and ‘friends’. Amy meets Dash, KC, Zubin and Tanya, and the five decadent youngsters while away their days in a haze of booze, sex, cigarettes, drugs and a speeding Hummer. Wildness is second nature and remains that way even when a joyride leads to tragic consequences, and their lives spiral out of control.

They’re a charismatic bunch, these five actors. Neil Bhoopalam (Zubin) who we’ve earlier seen in No One Killed Jessica and model-turned-actress Kirti Kulhari (Tanya) deserve particular mention for their natural ease before the camera, and Shiv Pandit (Dash) for his easy good looks. Besides, our introduction to the depravity of these fast-talking, highly intelligent youngsters comes through well-edited sequences (take a bow, Sreekar Prasad) filled with sharp-witted, cheeky dialogues that are highly entertaining. When they first meet, Zubin tells Amy to choose him as her boyfriend. “F*** the tiger, save the Parsi,” he says. But the joy of these positives rapidly gets diluted as style takes over substance especially in the second half of the film. I remember the precise point at which the over-stylisation of Shaitan began to irk me. It’s when a clever story is being told in flashback – the word “flashback” flashes on screen, then it’s rewound, then the words “flashback mein flashback” appear, then ... well, the thing about being clever is that you must not allow the effort to show. And sadly for Shaitan, it feels like it’s trying too hard.

To be fair to Bejoy Nambiar, he’s got his basics in place – the production is slick, some of the writing is commendable, the accident that proves to be a turning point in the film is superbly executed, and he’s remarkably sure-footed while interlinking two long, parallel sequences of mayhem unfolding beautifully over that lovely classic song Khoya khoya chand (I really loved this part very very much). And so I’m keen to see how Nambiar will evolve with a second film. But in Shaitan, gloss overshadows heart beyond a point, which makes it tough to empathise with the characters or invest in their pain. I found myself enjoying the violence unfolding on screen, but not really caring too much about the fate of that crazy five. In fact, I was far more involved with a satellite character: Rajeev Khandelwal’s irrationally violent cop who is deeply in love with his estranged wife and is investigating a high-profile case while struggling with his own failing marriage.

The film’s catchy background score gets jarringly and unnecessarily loud in several places, and the characterisation of many of the central players isn’t very consistent either. Okay, I get that the lead five are spoilt, bratty and irresponsible, but there’s nothing that tells us in the beginning that they are fools. So what explains the loophole-riddled plan they come up with to get out of a tight spot? The plan doesn’t go awry solely due to circumstances beyond their control. No, it goes awry because it’s downright stupid. Amy is the daughter of a well-connected man, but when her bizarre behaviour makes it to television news, she and her friends seem surprised beyond belief. Why? Why does her stepmother suddenly break down saying she can’t live without Amy, although it’s obvious that the two barely have a relationship? And why do Amy’s parents – who otherwise come across as decent, caring folk – not take her to a psychiatrist when it’s staring all of us in the face that she’s been completely unhinged for years?

Kalki Koechlin has an uncommon and arresting face that worked perfectly for her out-of-control Chanda in Dev D. She deadpans her way through Shaitan. It would be a pity if her third film also features her as a wacko character given to a spot of debauchery, and relies more on her interesting facial features than her acting skills. On the other hand there’s my pick of this cast, Rajeev Khandelwal, whose exceedingly likeable personality and under-stated performance reminded me of why he was such a superhit as Sujal on the TV soap Kahiin To Hoga. I wonder why Bollywood is not giving him a better deal.

Shaitan is about five youngsters who are done in by the devilish streak within. It’s also a fine example of a promising film that’s done in by its own seeming determination to be glib. I’m waiting for your second film, Mr Nambiar.

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

CBFC Rating:                       A with one cut

Running time:                        128 Minutes

Language:                              Hindi with some English

Photograph courtesy: http://www.facebook.com/CultofShaitan