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 60: CHILLAR PARTY

Release date:	July 8, 2011
Director:	Nitesh Tiwari, Vikas Bahl
Cast:	Irrfan Khan, Sanath Menon, Rohan Grover, Naman Jain, Aarav Khanna, Vishesh Tiwari, Chinmai Chandranshuh, Vedant Desai, Shriya Sharma, Divij Handa

Just a week after a close-up of human excrement in Delhi Belly, here comes a lingering shot of doggy poo (or so you think) in Chillar Party. But fear not all you parents, the two films have little else in common beyond a powerful Khan each as producer.

So here’s what I truly love about Chillar Party … a bunch of utterly charming children, a director duo with that rare ability to extract natural performances from child actors, Amit Trivedi’s music plus a producer (Salman Khan) who is backing this unconventional film while at the peak of his career as a mainstream, muscle-baring star.

What I do not like about Chillar Party … A second half that defies logic in a film that’s clearly intended to be realistic, the exclusion of girls and women from most of the action and decision-making in a film that’s meant to be about inclusiveness and acceptance, plus a certain ambiguity in its feelings towards the bare human form.

And Ranbir Kapoor’s item song? Well before we get to that point, hear this: nothing I say in this critique should take away from the fact that those kids are talented and sweet and natural born actors. Directors Nitesh Tiwari and Vikas Bahl, please take a bow along with your casting director Mukesh Chhabra for discovering this motley crew to play your lead artistes in Chillar Party. They’re as gifted as that remarkable gang from director Amole Gupte’s Stanley ka Dabba, though my favourite children’s ensemble cast in a Hindi film still remains Sagar Ballary’s team in his completely unheralded film Kaccha Limboo.

Chillar Party takes us to Chandan Nagar Cooperative Housing Society in Mumbai where eight little boy buddies with cutesy nicknames like Encyclopedia and Jhangiya hang out together. They’re the Chillar Party. When the boy Fatka is employed to wash the cars in the colony, the Chillar Party decide to get rid of him because they’re afraid his dog Bheedu will soil their playground just like another dog that already lives there. But after their initial harsh behavior towards him, they become friends. So when a state minister targets Bheedu in his campaign to rid Mumbai of stray dogs, the kids put up a fight for their canine pal. 

The film is filled with endearing instances of humour that are as well written as they are well acted, except for a few scenes in which the children are made to try too hard to be adorable. The episode involving doggy do is fun. But my favourite scene is when the nerdy kid explains to his friends that NOC stands for No Objection Certificate, and the immediate response from one of his friends is a very mournful: “I’ve never won a certificate.”

But even more than the humour, the writers need to be lauded for not painting the children as saints. This is the one big issue I had with Stanley ka Dabba – the failure to recognise that children are not uniformly flawless creatures. It takes courage to acknowledge that children can sometimes be nasty. That’s what bullying in schools and peer pressure are all about. And in Chillar Party we see the mean streak in our otherwise loveable bunch when they play cruel pranks on Fatka to get him out of Chandan Nagar, not quite realising that working in their housing complex is a matter of life and death for this impoverished orphan.

This is the beautiful part of Chillar Party – the children’s journey from resentment to admiration for Fatka’s resilience, their penitence, the little boy asking his mother, “If someone has done nothing to harm me, but I make a concerted effort to harm him, does that mean I’m a bad human being?” Alas, this poignant portion is followed by an improbable, overly stretched Part 2 about a politician who risks his entire career over the Chillar Party and Bheedu.

And while the film is clearly well intentioned, I must say I’m concerned about the subliminal messages it is sending out about power equations in households. The children need to get signatures from the residents of Chandan Nagar to save Bheedu from eviction – barring one exception, they seem to approach only men for signatures. When a woman in a family is shown making the decision to sign or not to sign, her husband is portrayed as being hen-pecked.

I also find it hard to believe that boys in a co-ed school and ranging in age from 4-11 would have no female friends. And when the children of Mumbai join Chillar Party’s underwear campaign for Bheedu, there’s no explanation for why only boys participate. Director Nitesh Tiwari tells me: “Our conscience didn’t permit us to show topless girls in our film, however small they may be.” So they were uncomfortable with showing bare-bodied little girls on screen, but had no qualms about parading little boys in their chaddis before us? I find this conservatism confusing and unconvincing.

As for Ranbir Kapoor’s item number … it’s entertaining as a standalone video and I do appreciate the fact that he wiggles his cute tushy at the camera repeatedly. But it arrives inexplicably part way through the end credits, and might actually be missed by many members of the audience. If you do watch Chillar Party for those loveable kids, make sure you stay right till the end for Ranbir’s Tai tai phiss. And if you have an answer to an extremely pertinent question that one of the children asks about child labour, please do tell me what it is.

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

CBFC Rating:                       U without cuts

Running time:                        135 Minutes

Language:                              Hindi

Photograph courtesy: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/chillarparty    

  

REVIEW 41: STANLEY KA DABBA

Release date:	May 13, 2011
Director:	Amole Gupte
Cast:	Partho, Amole Gupte, Numaan Sheikh, Abhishek Reddy, Divya Dutta, Divya Jagdale, Rahul Singh

Stanley is as loveable as a child can be. He’s got a sense of humour, he’s bright without being precocious, he fibs without malice when he’s in trouble or when a concerned teacher asks why his face is covered with bruises, and he’d rather fill his empty stomach with litres of water from the cooler than admit to his classmates why he can’t afford to bring a tiffin box to school.

And yet, this student of Class IV in Holy Family High School, Mumbai, earns the wrath of his Hindi teacher. The old man thinks nothing of polishing off food from his colleagues and students at lunch time, but picks on Stanley for not bringing a dabba from home. When the irritated boys gang up and trick him out of a chance to swipe their khana but insist on sharing it with Stanley, this oily gent vents his frustration on Stan. Why would a grown man do this to a child?

Stanley ka Dabba asks precisely the question that should be asked in numerous schools across our country where there are just too many adults who forget to treat children like children. And what better way to ask that question than through a film starring child actors who seem to have forgotten the camera in their midst?

Well, they probably did forget. Because writer-director Amole Gupte did not tell the students of Mumbai’s Holy Family that he was making a film. When he started a year-and-a-half’s workshop with them, even he wasn’t sure what the result would be. So he told the kids: the camera you see is just meant as a reminder that you are part of an acting workshop. The dialogues were improvised, the light was natural, the shooting was done on an unobtrusive Canon EOS 7D still camera. And in the lead role of Stanley he cast a guileless, artless little fellow called Partho who seems like he was born into the part. The result: performances so natural that you’ll come away from the film wondering if it was a film at all. For that, more than anything else, Stanley ka Dabba is worth your time.

What bothers me about this film though is the somewhat simplistic, rose-tinted representation of children. In any regular school anywhere in the world, a child with a bruised face, mysterious family background and no tiffin to share with his classmates, would be the target of school bullies. I’m willing to swallow the fact that in this particular school, in this particular class, more children are favourably inclined towards this particular boy because he is talented and such a ray of sunshine. But we all know that gifted, popular kids attract envy in at least some measure. We also know that not every youngster is gentle with others who are less privileged. Yet neither Stanley’s murky home situation nor his remarkable talents attract any nasty classmates. Not one kid snubs him for not bringing food from home. And all the children are uniformly good. I’m afraid that doesn’t seem plausible, especially in a film that otherwise feels so realistic and real.

As I watched Stanley ka Dabba, it seemed to me that in a bid to show us the innocence and goodness in children, and their bonding when faced with an inconsiderate adult, Amole Gupte had completely wished away the real world where loving, thoughtful, sensitive kids co-exist with so many who are not; where bullies and peer pressure are as much a reality as child-like kindness. At the risk of being slaughtered by Taare Zameen Par acolytes, I must point out that this I-must-prove-my-point-at-any-cost approach is the one problem I had with TZP too. Gupte was the writer and creative director of that film, and was originally meant to direct it till Aamir Khan took over the job. In TZP, in order to convince us about the failure of adults to notice the struggles of that unhappy dyslexic boy, the film portrayed EVERY SINGLE ADULT ever encountered by Darsheel Safary’s Ishaan Awasthi as either cruel or competitive or at best, indifferent, UNTIL a major Bollywood superstar turned up as his salvation. Not as bothersome, yet worth mentioning here is the fact that towards the end of Stanley ka Dabba, the film seems to be deliberately stretching itself, almost as if trying to build up a thriller-like suspense over the truth about Stanley’s background. Completely unnecessary since the charm of the film until then is the easy, unforced storytelling style.

But still, my reservations about Stanley ka Dabba don’t take away from the fact that it’s a major  step forward in an otherwise dreary children’s film scenario in Bollywood. 2011 has been a relatively good year for children in Hindi films. Disney’s Zokkomon may have been too juvenile for its own good, but it was still a pleasant reminder that Darsheel Safary is a talent to reckon with. Before that, Bheja Fry director Sagar Ballary served us Kaccha Limboo that was filled with achingly natural performances. And now comes Stanley, a beautiful little boy who will, I suspect, touch your hearts like he did mine despite the incompleteness of his story.

Gupte’s revolutionary approach to making a film with children should make our exploitative, un-vigilant system sit up and take notice: he says he conducted his workshop every Saturday, in four-hour sessions in the morning with two recesses; that the children didn’t miss a single day of school for the film. Clearly, he’s also brilliant in the art of just letting children be. The adult actors are perfect for their parts: Gupte himself as the callous teacher, Divya Dutta as the compassionate one that Stanley has a crush on, Divya Jagdale as the unimaginative science Miss, Rahul Singh who looks distractingly handsome as the kind principal in the priestly black cassock ... As for the child actors: Numaan Sheikh and Abhishek Reddy, you are utterly lovely! All the kids who I am not naming in this review, yes every single one of you: you are lovely too!

And what do I say about Gupte’s son, 10-year-old Partho’s screen presence? Watch out Ranveer Singh! Eight years from now, this guy could well be your competition!

Rating (out of five): ***

CBFC Rating:                       U without cuts

Running time:                       92 Minutes

Language:                             Hindi and English