REVIEW 782: GULABO SITABO

Release date:	June 12, 2020
Director:	Shoojit Sircar
Cast:	Farrukh Jafar, Amitabh Bachchan, Ayushmann Khurrana, Srishti Shrivastava, Ujali Raj, Ananya Dwivedi, Brijendra Kala, Vijay Raaz, Naushad (the puppeteer)
Language:	Hindi

In the Gulabo-Sitabo tradition of theatre in Uttar Pradesh, my arts encyclopedia tells me, these two ladies’ names are bestowed on glove puppets: Sitabo is a man’s exhausted and overworked spouse, Gulabo is his fresh-as-dew lover. 

In director Shoojit Sircar’s Gulabo Sitabo, written by Juhi Chaturvedi, the duo can be viewed either as a metaphor for Lucknow in which the story is set, or as an allusion to its warring leading men. 

Amitabh Bachchan plays Mirza here, a cantankerous, greedy septuagenarian landlord who is constantly at odds with the tenants residing in his haveli. Ayushmann Khurrana is Baankey, the wily leader of the pack who not only refuses to pay more than a pittance as rent but also ropes his fellow tenants into plotting against Mirza. Bickering is a fixture in their daily routine. 

The haveli is the inherited wealth of Mirza’s Begum (Farrukh Jafar), who also lives there. Baankey shares a room in it with his widowed mother and three younger sisters. 

In the past nine years, Sircar and Chaturvedi have collaborated on a bouquet of critically acclaimed, commercially successful projects that have played a pivotal role in redefining what mainstream means in Hindi cinema in the 2010s. Their subjects have been as off the beaten track as they can get – a sperm donor who keeps his ‘profession’ a secret from the woman he loves (Vicky Donor), the stormy equation between a difficult ageing man and his equally difficult, feisty daughter (Piku), a youngster mourning a former colleague with whom he did not have any significant relationship before an accident that sent her into a coma (October). Each of these films has been completely rooted in the respective cultures and communities in which they have been set. 

Gulabo Sitabo is arguably more overtly entrenched in local traditions than its predecessors in the Sircar-Chaturvedi filmography, yet is also, if you choose to read it that way, the most politically current of the lot. 

On the face of it, Gulabo Sitabo is about a bunch of people fighting over a mansion. The storytelling has a fable-like quality to it, its folksy feel underlined by Shantanu Moitra’s delightfully impish-and-ruminative-by-turns background score and Bachchan’s styling – for his role as Mirza, the actor has been given the look of a wizened old man who fits as perfectly into the ancient city of Lucknow in the 21st century as he might have in a tale of an unspecified yore. 

Mirza and Baankey’s battle is remarkable, because neither of them genuinely loves the haveli or understands its value and neither feels an iota of love for its original inhabitant among them, its rightful owner, Begum. Like India and Pakistan fighting over Kashmir, treating it as a coveted piece of land rather than a home to its present and former inhabitants, ultimately, neither the Gulabo nor the Sitabo of this tale has any actual affection for the individual, i.e. the haveli, they wrangle over – he/it is a practical compulsion for one and a useful object for the other, nothing more. And they fight and they fight until the person to whom it truly belongs serves them a life lesson they were not expecting. 

Irrespective of the interpretation, Gulabo Sitabo is one of the quirkiest, cheekiest, quaintest films to emerge from Bollywood this past decade.  

Among its many lovely impertinences is the fact that though it features two of Bollywood’s biggest male stars in its cast, it does not seem overly preoccupied with showing off their presence – they play characters in a story, like everyone else. 

That Gulabo Sitabo is not an unthinking follower of convention is exemplified by the way it gives Jafar pride of place over Bachchan and Khurrana in the opening credits, not as a patronising symbolic gesture, not even solely because her stature merits it, but because she is indeed the leading lady of the proceedings. 

Jafar, who is in her late 80s, is best-known to Bollywood watchers as Amma from Peepli Live. She is adorable as Gulabo Sitabo’s clever Begum, her eyes sparkling with a light and her speech brimming with an energy that defy her age.

Bachchan’s facial expressions are occasionally hard to detect behind all that prosthetic make-up, but his voice and body do more speaking than you can imagine. Mirza, a role that might have been lazily caricatured, is thankfully not. Over and above all this is the pleasure to be had from watching this legendary star merrily experimenting with such an unorthodox role just months away from his 78th birthday. 

Playing what is perhaps his least showy character till date, Khurrana imbues Baankey with an air of hesitation and helplessness and effectively erases his naturally strong presence. I loved the way he summons up awkwardness, guilt and trepidation on his face and in his demeanour in that shot in which Baankey peers through a hole he kicked into a crumbling wall in the haveli complex, thus kicking off another round of quarrelling with his elderly bete noir.

This is my favourite of his performances till date. 

In this constellation of talents, Srishti Shrivastava playing Baankey’s sister Guddo is my pick of the cast. She is a firebrand as an actor and, as it happens, gets to play an incredible firebrand in Gulabo Sitabo. 

In a small but crucial role, Brijendra Kala is a hoot. Watch his face in the scene in which Guddo confronts him – that look of reluctant admiration for a woman who has just insulted him. 

Gulabo Sitabo could not possibly have been what it is without Avik Mukhopadhayay’s sweeping cinematography, Mansi Dhruv Mehta’s production design that makes the haveli, Fatima Mahal, a character in its own right, and the eclectic music by Moitra, Anuj Garg and Abhishek Arora.

What Mukhopadhayay did for Delhi’s trees in October he does for Lucknow and Fatima Mahal in Gulabo Sitabo. The atmospherics he conjures up in the city gives us a Lucknow rarely seen before in Hindi cinema. And the way he captures the grandeur of the haveli without erasing the grime reminded me of the gorgeous Maithili film Gamak Ghar that was recently available on MUBI India and Anjali Menon’s Manjadikkuru (Malayalam) that, sadly, is not streaming anywhere right now. The lingering shots of the haveli towards the end are painterly compositions that ought to be freeze-framed for museum viewing. 

There is so much more in this unusual Hindi film to discuss and dissect in the coming days. Such as the thread of caregiving running through Sircar’s films from Piku to Pink (which he produced but did not direct), October and now this one; the non-stereotypical treatment of the elderly in Chaturvedi’s scripts, from Vicky Donor’s daadi (the only genuinely modern entity in Delhi along with the Metro, according to her grandson) to the irritating dad in Piku, the scoundrel Mirza and no-babe-in-the-woods Begum in Gulabo Sitabo; or even why the manner of use of the problematic, patriarchal term “ghar jamai” made me uncomfortable.

Gulabo Sitabo’s soundtrack is as thoughtful and amusing as the film. (I would strongly recommend the jukebox which is available on YouTube.) 

Quite appropriately, the beautiful Do Din Ka Yeh Mela Hai (with music by Garg, sung by Indian Ocean’s frontman Rahul Ram) runs with the closing credits, its lyrics by Dinesh Pant celebrating the blend of pooja and azaan in the innocent, naughty stories blowing in the wind. 

Gulabo Sitabo is not zippy in the way Vicky Donor and Piku were, nor over-emphatic with any point it makes. It is a slow burn – like October – despite its sense of humour, mischievous characters and the tongue firmly placed in its cheek. The film’s unobtrusive politics, including its quiet feminism, are blowing in the wind – there for us to hear if we wish as the unusual, entertaining narrative silently flows by. 

Rating (out of 5 stars): 3.5

Gulabo Sitabo is streaming on Amazon Prime Video India.

Running time:

125 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/gulabo-sitabo-movie-review-kooky-cheeky-quaint-and-utterly-delightful-8475961.html

Poster courtesy: IMDB

REVIEW 589: OCTOBER

Release date:	April 13, 2018
Director:	Shoojit Sircar
Cast: Language:	Varun Dhawan, Banita Sandhu, Gitanjali Rao, Ashish Ghosh, Isha Chaturvedi, Sahil Vadoliya, Prateek Kapoor, Nimmi Raphael, Shekhar Murugan, Iteeva Pandey, Karamveer Kanwar, Rachica Oswal   Hindi

In tone, apparent intent and the nerves it touches, this week’s Bollywood release October brings to mind Althaf Salim’s 2017 Mollywood film Njandukalude Nattil Oridavela (An Interval In The Land of Crabs), a low-key entertainer about a family grappling with cancer in their midst. It requires immense finesse to treat such a subject with humour, yet not be insensitive or gross. In another setting and with another theme, October manages to do just that.

When the mother’s diagnosis was revealed in Njandukalude, I remember thinking: “What kind of jerk makes a comedy about cancer?” The answer came by the end of the film: the sort who understands the inexpressible, inexplicable aura that envelops us when tragedy strikes and life seems to come to a standstill yet goes on, with all the accompanying smiles, tensions and tears; the sort who understands that it is possible to affectionately laugh at people’s quirks without mocking them or their circumstances.

Like Salim, writer Juhi Chaturvedi and director Shoojit Sircar are “that kind of jerk”.

Their October draws us into the world of a young hotel management trainee in Delhi called Danish Walia a.k.a. Dan (Varun Dhawan), a somewhat silly, impetuous, immature, angsty, antsy, exasperating, good-hearted know-it-all that you cannot help but love. He is, when we are introduced to him, a 20-something man-child skating on thin ice with his employers for all too frequently exploding at irritants that in professional circumstances require icy “the customer (or the boss) is always right” detachment.

Dan does not do detachment well. And so, when his colleague Shiuli Iyer (Banita Sandhu) slips into a coma after a freak accident, he finds himself far more disturbed by the calamity than even her best friend. Shiuli was/is a nice girl, but hardly his closest buddy. Dan cannot get his mind off her though when he discovers that her last words before she was injured were, “Where is Dan?”

October is a mellow drama shorn of conventionally filmic twists and turns. It is tough to explain because it needs to be felt. Through its running time of less than two hours, it shares with us the bonds Dan develops with Shiuli’s mother and siblings who are strangers to him until this personal ordeal brings them together, the support offered by those around him, the effect Shiuli’s condition has on his work and more.

It is a film that appears to say little while saying so much. It is about the prospect of bereavement bringing out facets of us that we did not know existed. About the loss of someone whose relationship with you has not – or not yet – been socially defined. Dan is asked more than once whether he is Shiuli’s boyfriend. If not father, brother, boyfriend or husband, then what? Must he be one of these to mourn her?

How can he explain that she was his what-might-have-been, the quiet classmate who was possibly interested in him while he was too dense to notice? In some ways his struggle to put a finger on his feelings and his inability to articulate them brings to mind Devi in Neeraj Ghaywan’s Masaan (Hindi, 2015) grieving the death of the boy with whom she had a brief amorous tryst in a seedy hotel room, a chap to whom she was no one in society’s eyes but who felt like someone to her.

As were Vicky Donor (2012) and Piku (2015) – both Juhi Chaturvedi-Shoojit Sircar collaborations – October too is a sharply observant film about small joys, small conversations and empathy. As much as it is about its overriding theme, it is also about that hospital employee who chats intimately with a patient’s friend late one night because he hangs around so much that it feels like they know each other well; the mother who can confide in this boy she only just met, more than those who have known her all her life; the uncle who does not realise that his well-intended pragmatism about Shiuli could hurt those closest to her.

It is about friends whose frustration with you rivals their fondness. It is about how different people cope differently when life throws curve balls at them, and realising that Ishani who asks Dan, “Kuchh zyaada hi affected nahin ho raha hai tu?” (Are you not getting too affected by Shiuli’s accident?) may love Shiuli no less than Dan who replies, on seeing his gang go about their lives as if it is business as usual: “Tum log itne unaffected kaise ho?” (How come you are so unaffected?)

The success of October’s writing and acting lies in the fact that each of these people is so utterly real, and the story so utterly relatable.

The best cinema reminds us of our own life experiences even when our scripts do not literally match. I confess that the night after watching October, I tossed and turned in bed for hours before waking up in tears, remembering difficult questions about a beloved relative that once confronted me in what now seems a lifetime ago. Of course I am not Dan and this is not the same thing, yet October causing those emotions to well up inside me is an indicator of its resonance with realities other than its own.

Like Chaturvedi and Sircar’s previous team-ups, this one too marks a new turning point in Bollywood, where the lines between offbeat and mainstream are continuously blurring. As much as we celebrate such an experimental film coming from a financially successful director, it is worth celebrating the fact that an actor as hard-core commercial as Varun Dhawan has chosen to star in it. In a filmography dominated by the likes of Student of the Year (2012) and Judwaa 2 (2017), it is interesting to see Dhawan stirring the mix at this early stage of his career with riskier ventures like Badlapur (2015) and this one.

Sircar is good for Dhawan. The director mines his leading man’s innocent charm well for this role, and Dhawan himself makes every effort to efface his starry swagger and trademark cutesiness to play Dan. There are fleeting moments when the latter does peek through in his dialogue delivery, but for the most part the actor hits the nail on the head with his performance.

Casting director Jogi deserves a trophy for finding October’s outstanding supporting actors. Banita Sandhu deserves another for rising to the challenge of playing a character who, for the most part, has nothing to do but be motionless. In the few minutes we get with Shiuli before she is bed-ridden, Sandhu ensures that we like her enough to stay invested in her till the end, and later brings alive even that frail creature lying helpless in bed.

October is that rare example of a film in which every single actor is remarkable, every single character memorably written and acted. While each one has stayed with me, a special mention must go to the fabulous Gitanjali Rao who plays Shiuli’s mother Vidya Iyer, an IIT professor and single mother.

As you watch Dan repeatedly messing up on the job, it is hard to believe that a five-star hotel would retain this troublesome fellow as long as Radisson Dwarka holds on to him, but Chaturvedi’s writing and the acting by the lovely Prateek Kapoor make Dan’s immediate boss Asthana so believable, that even that improbability comes across as probable.

October is not a film in a hurry, its pace entirely mirroring the painstaking healing process that Shiuli goes through. Seasons change, Avik Mukhopadhayay’s camera closes in on tired faces and moves back to capture pretty pictures of a city that is a lot more than the “concrete jungle” stereotype now attached to urban spaces.

Sircar gives us time to take in the enchanting detailing he offers: the bougainvillea tree laden thick with pink blossoms in a splendid full frame, the mother whose demeanour in the classroom does not betray the trauma she is dealing with back home, a Delhi that is far more multicultural than most Bollywood films set here seem to realise. The Malayali nurse (Nimmi Raphael), the Bengali neurologist (Ashish Ghosh), the Tamilian professor explaining why her daughter has a Bangla name – their presence makes October far more representative of the real Delhi than Punjabi-obsessed Bollywood usually acknowledges.

Sircar’s latest film is a sweet-sad-funny saga of love, loss and coping. It has been many hours since I watched it and I am still lost in its poetic realism.

Rating (out of five stars): ****

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	116 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/bollywood/october-movie-review-varun-dhawans-innocent-charm-sits-well-with-this-sweet-sad-funny-film-4429839.html

Poster courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/OctoberFilm2018/

REVIEW 430: PINK

Release date:	September 16, 2016
Director:	Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury
Cast: Language:	Kirti Kulhari, Taapsee Pannu, Andrea Tariang, Amitabh Bachchan, Angad Bedi, Vijay Varma, Raashul Tandon, Tushar Pandey, Dhritiman Chatterjee, Piyush Mishra, Mamata Shankar, Mamta Malik Hindi, English

Every sleazy hand that ever groped you, every insulting conjecture ever made, every lascivious remark ever thrown at you, every lewd gesture, every leering eye, they may all come to mind as you watch director Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury’s Pink. This is a film about male privilege, prejudice, sexual violence, and the many systems that support them.

The starting block of Pink is a rock show on the outskirts of Delhi where Minal Arora (played by Taapsee Pannu), Falak Ali (Kirti Kulhari) and Andrea Tariang (a character who shares her name with the actress playing her) meet Rajvir Singh (Angad Bedi), Dumpy a.k.a. Raunak Anand (Raashul Tandon) and Vishwajyoti Ghosh a.k.a. Vishwa (Tushar Pandey). Falak already knows Vishwa. They get chatting. The women accept an invitation to drinks and dinner at a nearby resort. Things go awry when Rajvir mistakes their sociability for sexual availability and forces himself on Minal. She resists, he gets aggressive, in a state of panic she smashes a bottle on his head. 

This opening incident is revealed through a smart narrative device between the opening and end credits that tests our own biases as viewers in the he-said-she-said game that ensues.

The film is about Rajvir’s quest for revenge with the help of his friend Ankit Malhotra (Vijay Varma), the girls’ quest for justice, and society’s interpretation of the meaning of consent.

At a time when sections of upper-class Delhi and Mumbai seem disturbed by the action taken in the Tehelka and Mahmood Farooqui rape cases, and coming from an industry that continues to make light of heroes molesting heroines in the guise of courtship, Pink is a huge milestone simply by virtue of its choice of theme. Mainstream Hindi cinema persists in perpetuating the notion that it is okay for a man to read a woman’s “no” as “maybe”. Just weeks back, director Ali Abbas Zafar (Mere Brother Ki Dulhan, Gunday, Sultan) told me in an interview: “There are two ways of stalking. One way is ugly, one way is politically correct.” For such an industry to make a film taking an undiluted position that a “no” from a woman means “no” is in itself a reason to celebrate.

What goes against Pink though is an occasional self-consciousness, an overt awareness that it has been created to send out a message on women’s rights – an awareness that begins with its cliched title (pink for girls, blue for boys, you know) and ultimately leads to some overly dramatised courtroom episodes that cross the border into almost ridiculous, self-defeating territory.

It is the film’s good fortune that those scenes arrive very late in the day. Until then and after they are through, there is plenty in this film that makes it worthy of our time and discussions, from the many significant nuanced arguments it takes up in the matter of violence against women to the top-of-the-line performances of the three talented female leads and the four men playing their antagonists. Chowdhury’s heart is in the right place and that in itself is worth toasting.

Pink smoothly packs multiple debates into a single compact film: how society judges single women, the pre-conceived notions about women not staying with their parents, the assumption that if women receive male visitors at home then they must be promiscuous, the social definition of “provocation”, the stereotyping of women from certain communities, the manner in which patriarchy paints men as helpless victims of their hormones, the gentle reminder that patriarchy could not survive without the collusion of at least some women and the reminder too that feminists may well be men (a kindly landlord who refuses to buy into gossip about his female tenants, the watchful neighbour, the sympathetic lawyer, the considerate judge).

Pink also delivers a slap on the face of status quo-ists who are alarmed at the tiny gains made by India’s women’s rights movement in recent years. The whispers are no longer whispers, as panic-stricken men anxious about a potential loss of millennia-old privilege paint pictures of hordes of women filing false cases of violence and discrimination against helpless men in a world rapidly switching to female dominance. Pink has something to say about all this and more.

Half the battle is won for the film because Chowdhury’s clarity of thought is complemented by his smashing cast. Pannu is relatively new to Bollywood but an established star of Kollywood and Tollywood. Kulhari has done a few Bollywood films, but none so far have been box-office successes. Both women have already proved that they are extremely natural performers. They live up to that track record in Pink (though Pannu needs to work on her enunciation of “coward” which was jarring in the film considering that the rest of her diction was well-suited to a presumably public-school-educated Punjabi girl from Delhi).

Andrea Tariang is a welcome addition to the Mumbai cinemascape. Firstly, it is a joy to see a Hindi film that actually features a character from Meghalaya – Bollywood tends to pretend that the North-east of India does not exist. It is such a relief to see the character being played by an actor from Meghalaya, unlike Mary Kom that avoided risking a newcomer from Manipur, instead having a Manipuri Mary Kom played by a part-Punjabi-part-Bihari-part-Malayali Priyanka Chopra since she is an established star. Most important: Tariang is good.

The lead trio’s perfect chemistry is the bedrock of this film, as is their demeanour. They come across as real-life friends and real-life middle-class working women living in south Delhi.

This would not have been possible without the credible characterisation and effortlessly flowing Hindi-English dialogues by writer Ritesh Shah. His screenplay also does full justice to the four villains of the piece and all four actors are excellent. Varma and Bedi merit a special mention for the conviction with which they convey seething arrogance and male entitlement. Those clenched jaws, their sneering speech, the way one of them snarls “aisi ladkiyon ke saath aisa hi hota hai” (this is exactly what happens to such girls) capture their furious resentment towards women who dared to say no and now dare to ask questions. These are not creepy-looking fellows. That would have been the lazy casting choice to make. They are, in fact, exceedingly attractive. It is not their looks but their words and deeds that make them both scary and slimy.

Every tiny satellite role in Pink has been carefully cast, though my pick of the supporting players are Mamta Malik as investigating officer Sarla Premchand and veteran Dhritiman Chatterjee as the judge – they are both superb. Megastar Amitabh Bachchan plays Deepak Sehgal, a “manic depressive” retiree who re-dons his lawyer’s robes to fight for the women – his is the only awkwardly written role in the film and it shows in his slightly affected performance.

This is where Pink falters. It is not set up as a song-dance-and-dishoom-dishoom saga in the Damini mould, so you do not go to court expecting “dhai kilo ka haath” kind of dialoguebaazi. Pink does not head off completely in that direction through Sehgal, but it is certainly not as true-to-life in its judicial proceedings as you might expect from the treatment up to that point.

(Spoiler alert) In a film that gets so much else right, it is especially infuriating to watch that ridiculous scene in which Sehgal badgers one of his own clients to reveal intimate details of her sexual past in a crowded courtroom. Women’s rights movements worldwide have fought – are fighting – long and hard to end such intrusive, suggestive interrogations of women victims by defence lawyers. To have such behaviour from a woman’s own lawyer be projected as a clever legal move is bizarre. 

Just as bizarre is the scene involving a woman victim claiming that she accepted money for sex, though she did nothing of the sort. Why did she make this false ‘admission’? Because she wanted to drive home a complex point that a woman is well within her rights to withdraw her consent once it is given. Even if you accept that a beleaguered, frustrated woman might speak impulsively when harassed in a witness box, it is unthinking of the film to suggest that she was being brave and intelligent not brainless. Really? That is an intelligent move in a system already stacked against women? Gimme a break. (Spoiler alert ends)

This is why in some ways I missed Rituparno Ghosh while watching Pink. No contemporary Indian film I have seen has as effectively and believably captured the torture a woman victim of violence is subjected to in court in the way Ghosh’s Dahan did. These instances of melodrama in Pink’s courtroom scenes are absolutely unnecessary since there is so much drama intrinsic to the situations anyway.

For the most part though, Pink maintains a realistic tone. Chowdhury seems to have a clear vision of what he wants to say and how. The air of tension he builds around the three women is almost palpable. It is tension that rights-conscious women can identify with as we live out our lives so constantly on edge that we ourselves may not notice our own instinctive actions and gestures of self-preservation – the fact that many of us avoid making eye contact with male strangers in public places especially in a culture of gender segregation where men tend to misconstrue affability, the manner in which our arms reflexively go up to cover our torsos in crowded spaces, the way we plan our safety while planning our schedules.

It is hard, therefore, not to be moved by the trauma and humiliation of Minal, Falak and Andrea who have to justify their life choices, their clothing choices and their tiniest moves before the world because one of them defended herself against an influential man who tried to rape her. Its flaws and that title notwithstanding, Pink is a powerful film.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	136 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/pink-review-amitabh-bachchan-teams-up-with-a-smashing-young-ensemble-in-this-powerful-film-3006604.html

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_(2016_film)