REVIEW 440: 31ST OCTOBER

Release date:	October 21, 2016
Director:	Shivaji Lotan Patil
Cast: Language:	Soha Ali Khan, Vir Das, Deepraj Rana, Vineet Sharma, Lakhwinder Singh, Baby Anika, Baby Arohi, Sezal Sharma, Daya Shankar Pandey, Aksshat  Saluja Hindi and Punjabi

X happened. Then Y. And then Z. Director Shivaji Lotan Patil’s 31^st October is nothing more than a parade of facts about the anti-Sikh riots that followed the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards on October 31, 1984. It is a perfect example of a film on a sensitive issue completely bereft of imagination and subtlety.

31^st October stars Soha Ali Khan and Vir Das as Davinder Singh and Tejinder Kaur, a happy Sikh couple living with their three children in West Delhi. She is stern but loving, he a virtual saint. She feeds him and argues with him about his excessive goodness. He walks an extra mile for his Hindu neighbour. Everyone is nice to everyone and the world is all sweet and honey and sugar ‘n’ spice ‘n’ all things nice until Beant Singh and Satwant Singh shoot Indira at point-blank range.

The story opens on the morning of the PM’s murder and everything in the early scenes is an in-your-face set-up for what is to come. So, when we see Davinder run out of blood pressure meds, we know he will later be weak without medication in the middle of the pogrom. Since one of his little sons repeatedly asks him about the significance of a Sikh’s long hair and turban, we know at some point they will be driven to shear their heads to hide their identity from mobs.

As if the lack of nuance is not bad enough, 31^st October subjects us to mediocre production quality, third-rate dialogue writing and bad acting. An array of terrible extras are rolled out for the bit parts and even for significant satellite roles. Two irritating girls are cast as the lead couple’s sons. Sezal Shah is unbearable as a shy young Sikh woman gazing googly-eyed at a camera-wielding NRI. She cannot act for peanuts. Others are worse – so bad in fact, that peanuts look profound in comparison.

I’ve always enjoyed watching Vir Das on screen, but his facial expressions in 31^st October make me wonder whether what I have liked so far has been the suitability of his personality to comedy, the genre that has dominated his filmography so far. This film is not funny, it is not meant to be funny, and his expressions seem incongruous on the riot victim Davinder whose Hindu friends put their lives on the line to save him and his family. Soha Ali Khan does a fair job of his wife Tejinder who witnesses horrors that no human being could possibly recover from. Although her Punjabi accent slips on occasion, she makes their interactions tolerable.

The supporting cast contributes greatly to this film’s overall air of tackiness. The only two who rise above the mediocrity surrounding them are the always-reliable Deepraj Rana and Vineet Sharma, playing men who risk everything so that Davinder, Tejinder and their kids might live.

31^st October is based on the experiences of a Devender Pal Singh Sachdeva and Tejinder Sachdeva. The credits call it “a tribute by (producer) Harry Sachdeva”. In truth, this film does them an injustice. The Sikhs who were targeted after Indira’s death from her bullet wounds, deserve a better homage than this. What the producer and his director have put together instead is a disservice to a community that is still being denied justice by the authorities 32 years after humanity died on the streets of India’s Capital.

In the moments preceding the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in the US during World War II in Michael Bay’s 2001 Hollywood film Pearl Harbor, pretty little girls with golden curls are shown playing together in slow motion against a picturesque backdrop. This is the kind of offensive stupidity that distinguishes cliched films on violence from the ones with depth. If those children were not picture perfect, would their fate be less tragic or Japan’s actions less condemnable?

31^st October slathers bowlfuls of treacle on to the ordinary Sikhs who are attacked by rioters. Why? Would the butchery have been any less inexcusable if the victims had not been uniformly fantastic people, kind, gentle and dedicated to the service of others? In one scene, the suggestion that some Sikhs celebrated after Mrs Gandhi’s killing is brushed aside. Why? Does the filmmaker realise that by not acknowledging this element in the ugliness that pervaded Delhi following her assassination, he unwittingly implies that individuals who lit candles and distributed sweets that day could rightfully be seen as a justification for the slaying of innocent Sikhs?

Glossing over uncomfortable facts does more harm than good to survivors, even when you do so to please and appease them. Human beings do not have to be flawless or belong to a flawless community to deserve the right to live, to not to be robbed, to not be sexually violated, to not be forced to witness the brutalisation of their loved ones.

This kind of self-defeating storytelling plays into the hands of people like that chap in the hall where I watched this film who turned to another during the interval and said: “Ab agar ek qaum ko lagega ki voh kuchh bhi kar sakta hai, toh doosra qaum badla lega hi.” (Now if one community thinks they can do anything, then the other is bound to take revenge.)

There are many people like him in the world out there who are filled with hate. They are among the million reasons why the human species’ history of massacres needs to be chronicled repeatedly by cinema. Thousands of Sikhs were slaughtered, raped and driven out of their homes in the riots of October-November 1984. Their story needs to be told with delicacy and intelligence, not with the sloppiness and hollowness that are the hallmark of 31^st October.

Apart from the fact that actors styled to resemble Congress politicians H.K.L. Bhagat, Jagdish Tytler and Sajjan Kumar are shown engineering the riots, there is little worth noting in this film.

Rating (out of five stars): 1/2

CBFC Rating (India):	A
Running time:	102 minutes 18 seconds

A version of this review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/31st-october-review-a-hollow-sloppy-film-on-the-1984-anti-sikh-riots-3063868.html

Poster courtesy: Epigram Digital PR and Magical Dreams Productions

REVIEW 369: GHAYAL ONCE AGAIN

Release date:	February 5, 2016
Director:	Sunny Deol
Cast: Language:	Sunny Deol, Narendra Jha, Tisca Chopra, Shivam Patil, Aanchal Munjal, Diana Khan, Rishabh Arora, Om Puri, Soha Ali Khan, Manoj Joshi, Nadira Babbar, Abhilash Kumar, Harsh Chhaya, Sachin Khedekar Hindi

Ghayal Once Again marks the return of Sunny Deol as one of the best-remembered characters he has ever played on screen. Ajay Mehra from 1990’s Ghayal, directed by Rajkumar Santoshi, preceded the signature “dhai kilo ka haath” Sunny held up in court as a lawyer in Santoshi’s Damini (1993). These two films gave the actor the two National Awards of his career and were a source of much viewing pleasure, even to some among us with increasing reservations about flaring nostrils, red eyes and yelling in the midst of flying fists.

The sequel to Ghayal – directed by Sunny himself – seems to be the star’s effort to do a balancing act between an emerging audience with changing tastes and his own traditional following. It works for a considerable part of the film; but after a while it is neither here nor there and it all goes downhill.

The hero himself enters the frame 15 minutes into the proceedings, in a scene that is surprisingly low key in comparison with the many grand entries Sunny has made on screen in the past. When it is hinging itself on action alone, Ghayal 2 is effective, even when you cannot but be aware of the improbability of it all.

Sure there is silliness along the way, plenty of over-the-top action too, but it is nothing that we have not willingly swallowed in the past from Hollywood action adventures such as the MI, Die Hard, Indiana Jones and Bond series, all of which demand a suspension of disbelief from viewers. Admittedly too, there are spots of tackiness elsewhere, especially when the writers are trying too hard to be youthful and cool (such as a completely superfluous song and dance sequence involving the four kids at the centre of this story, or another where they hang out with the grandfather of one of them). Yet, not counting the needlessly extended ending where schmaltz is injected into what should have been some good old-fashioned, absurdly unapologetic dishum-dishum, Ghayal Once Again’s stunt sequences are fun.

In Ghayal, Ajay went on a rampage to execute a treacherous villain (Amrish Puri) for preying on his businessman brother (Raj Babbar). After the events of that film, he spent 14 years in jail and on his return, has been running a corruption-hunting media platform called Satyakam with the support of good-hearted souls he met in prison and a wide underground network of concerned citizens. The pivotal plot point of Ghayal 2 emerges when four students unknowingly shoot a video of a crime being committed by a powerful individual and decide to hand it over to Ajay.

The opening quarter hour of the film, which includes black-and-white flashbacks to the previous one, are deceptively calm. The chases that follow are nail-bitingly suspenseful, even though it makes no sense that not a single soul stops to help the children or Ajay, despite the latter’s evident popularity among the public. Besides, when blood-thirsty goons go on a rampage in a Mumbai mall, how on earth, in this day and age does it come about that not a single eye-witness manages to clandestinely shoot their violence and upload it somewhere?

No doubt police, politicians and a pliant or scared media have in real life colluded to cover up crimes committed by influential individuals. Those though did not happen before the eyes of thousands of witnesses. The initial murder in the film occurs in a private space and is hidden in a believable fashion. That part of the screenplay is convincing. But the effort to abduct the children and to punish Ajay for helping them, are both done so publicly that the silence of the onlookers is ridiculous.

Really? Not one person steps forward? Not even a few seconds of the bloodletting surfaces on Youtube or any other online space? Not even one media house, not even a marginal off-mainstream platform or unknown blogger, has the courage to report these very openly conducted goings-on on the roads, malls and trains of Mumbai? Really?

It is a measure of the effectiveness of the film’s well-paced action choreography that these chase scenes manage to keep even a cynic on edge despite this.

The script’s bigger failing though is that it skims over too many characters without giving them enough flesh. The murderer had particular potential because of his lack of redeeming factors, but we get to know little about him beyond the fact that he is a spoilt brat. Of the quartet who set out to expose him, you may remember Aanchal Munjal as the young artiste who played Kajol and Arjun Rampal’s child in We Are Family (2010). She and Shivam Patil – Anushka and Rohan here – are worth watching out for.

The execution of Ajay’s relationships in Ghayal 2 are too reliant on fan affection for Sunny and nostalgia for the first Ghayal. Sunny’s acting too remains dated, with every emotion over-stated and over-done.

There is, however, another note-worthy dynamic at play here. It is interesting to see an omnipotent industrialist (Narendra Jha, nice) and his wife (Tisca Chopra) torn between their conscience and their natural parental instincts when they recognise the potential for evil in their offspring; a wealthy father’s arrogance tempered by paternal fears; a mother who is shocked at the wrongdoings being committed in her presence yet does not stop them; another (Nadira Babbar) who points out to her son that it is the job of a parent to cover up a child’s mistakes, not his crimes.

This and the film’s well-executed chases are dragged down by its stupid improbabilities, its lack of focus, too many loose ends and oh yes, those bad white extras. When one of them tells Sunny in the end to drop his gun and follows that up with a laboured, “Now we are going to beat you up with our bare hands,” I laughed out loud. It reminded me of cars reversing with twangy, recorded voices warning bystanders, “Attention please, this car is backing up.” What is it with Bollywood producers that they will hire a helicopter for a grand finale but will not spend on above-average Caucasian actors for incidental roles or invest in good writing?

The name of Ajay’s newspaper in this film is no doubt a bow to Dharmendra’s 1969 film Satyakam in which Deol Senior played an idealist struggling against a corrupt world. That classic deserved a better-thought-out tribute than this one.

Rating (out of five stars): **

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	126 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/ghayal-once-again-review-sunny-deol-and-the-sequel-are-disappointing-and-dated-in-equal-measure-2614220.html

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghayal_Once_Again