REVIEW 478: PHILLAURI

Release date:	March 24, 2017
Director:	Anshai Lal
Cast: Language:	Anushka Sharma, Diljit Dosanjh, Suraj Sharma, Mehreen Pirzada Hindi with Punjabi

Early in Phillauri, an alcohol-swilling old woman with obviously dyed, jet black hair tells her grayhead of a son that he was the result of a single peg of booze. It is a funny remark, of course, yet one you might shrug off if you think of the number of Hindi films in recent years that have seen alcohol, cigarettes, swear words and sex talk from women as the sole harbingers of progressiveness, and the number of filmmakers who have used these props to mask their deeply entrenched patriarchal notions of womanhood while pretending to be forward-thinking.

Over an hour later though, a character in the film tells a woman that a man is worthy of her, not because of his social status, but because he treated her with genuine respect and honour. It is then you know for sure that Anshai Lal’s Phillauri is not merely faking it. The director along with writer Anvita Dutt have struck at the heart of what true equality means. And what a relief that is.

Phillauri belongs to the love-aaj-and-kal genre, with the story of Kanan and Anu in 2017 told parallel to the pre-Independence tale of Shashi and Roop. Kanan (Suraj Sharma) has just completed his studies in Canada and is now in Punjab to marry his childhood sweetheart Anu (debutant Mehreen Pirzada). Much against his wishes he fulfills the family elders’ wishes by marrying a tree to overcome his manglik dosh. Since the ghost of Shashi (Anushka Sharma) from a bygone era resides in that tree, Kanan ends up unknowingly becoming her groom.

The pretty spook is now stuck with him. His commitment phobia combined with the fact that only he can see Shashi ends up creating confusion in his relationship with Anu as D-day inches towards them.

Is Shashi real or is she a figment of Kanan’s weed-addled imagination? Who knows. What we do know is that while Shashi’s sepia-toned affair with the popular local singer Roop (Diljit Dosanjh) unfolds in Punjab’s Phillaur town, Kanan clears up his muddled head and figures out precisely what he wants from life. 

On the face of it, the apparition in Phillauri is a tool to take a comparative look at romance then and now. Yet, with its gentle allusions to India’s colonial history, social attitudes towards artists and women’s autonomy, the film becomes more than just that. It is, of course, a bemused swipe at regressive customs and those who follow them without conviction or understanding. It is a comment on how even now, gifted women are often fronted by men with half their talent because ambition is deemed a dirty word for women.

Most of all though, it is a reminder that the human lives lost in any tragedy are not mere statistics, but real people who died with goals yet unattained and dreams yet unfulfilled.

All this takes a while to sink in though because Lal takes too long to get to the point. Too many Hindi films are lost to the curse of the second half. Fortunately for Phillauri, its affliction is the exact opposite. The pre-interval portion is too stretched out and, after the initial engaging, humorous few minutes, becomes as pale as Shashi’s ghostly presence.

More time than required is spent with Kanan and Shashi together. Suraj has just one expression on his face throughout this segment and Anushka is a shadow of her usually charismatic self. Besides, their equation is far less interesting than Kanan-Anu and Shashi-Roop.

Of the two couples, the old-world pair has way more substance and novelty value than the two youngsters from the 21^st century. It is no wonder then that Phillauri truly comes into its own post interval when it devotes itself primarily to Shashi and Roop’s romance which is at once uplifting and heart-wrenching, thus rendering even the needlessly elongated climax forgivable. The resonance and relevance of their story in modern times is this film’s selling point.

The other USP of Phillauri is its music and the way it is used to recount a large part of Shashi and Roop’s love saga. Music director Shashwat Sachdev and lyricist Anvita Dutt deserve kudos in particular for the beautiful song Sahiba – a reference to the legend of Mirza and Sahibaan which serves as a red herring of sorts here – in Romy and Pawni Pandey’s lovely voices. Lal deserves a big salaam for how this number has been woven into the narrative to such soul-stirring effect. 

As with Imtiaz Ali’s Love Aaj Kal in 2009, the past has more appeal in this film too. One reason of course is the eternal poignance of what-might-have-beens and the challenge of that inevitable question: how might I have functioned or even survived in a regressive, claustrophobic era gone by? That alone does not explain Phillauri’s split personality though.

In terms of writing, directorial execution and acting, yesterday has zest and today does not in this inconsistent albeit sweet spook story.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	137 minutes 58 seconds

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/phillauri-movie-review-anushka-sharma-diljit-dosanjh-rev-up-this-inconsistent-sweet-spook-story-3350506.html

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillauri_(film)

REVIEW 261: MILLION DOLLAR ARM

Release date:	May 9, 2014
Director:	Craig Gillespie
Cast: Language:	Jon Hamm, Suraj Sharma, Madhur Mittal, Pitobash, Lake Bell, Aasif Mandvi, Bill Paxton, Alan Arkin, Darshan Jariwala, Tzi Ma English with some Hindi

Million Dollar Arm is such a quiet film that it would be easy to under-rate it. Anyone can guess how it will end for the protagonists, yet – unlike most sports films where we already know the central character won that World Cup or breasted that tape at the nth second – this one doesn’t build up an artificial frenzied suspense around the baseball field. What it does is introduce us to this wonderfully gray real-life American sports agent called J.B. Bernstein who plucks two poor boys out of India and takes them to the US to make them Major League Baseball players.

This is a biopic-of-sorts of JB (Jon Hamm) who has been struggling to survive since he started his own business. To save his career, he decides to find baseball’s next big sensation in India, to convert one of the cricket-crazy nation’s bowlers into a baseball pitcher. JB flies off to hold the Million Dollar Arm contest in India. With the help of the crotchety old sports scout Ray (Alan Arkin) and local baseball enthusiast Amit (Pitobash), he finally finds young Rinku Singh (Suraj Sharma) and Dinesh Patel (Madhur Mittal). From there the film takes us through the boys’ discovery of the US, JB’s opportunistic view of them as “investments”, and his gradual conversion from being a “Class A jerk” as his girlfriend calls him.

A story like this is fertile ground for condescension. This could have been a patronising white-man-saves-little-brown-people saga told in the kind of tone we’ve heard from too many Western journalists in the past year while covering India’s anti-rape protests, Moon Mission and other news developments. With masterful deftness though, director Craig Gillespie and writer Tom McCarthy pull back and hold a mirror to JB each time they’re entering tricky territory, giving us a surprisingly sensitive take on alien cultures, disparities and commonalities, underdogs, unwitting racism and white-man-who-is-saved-from-himself.

JB’s early impression of India is a quick composite of crowded roads, traffic jams, chaos and animals on city streets, but at the hands of DoP Gyula Pados nothing is over-emphasised to exoticise. Slumdog Millionaire’s critics may possibly have objections here too, but to be fair, it is but natural for a foreigner to be struck by these overwhelming aspects of India before they notice glitzy hotels, malls, factories and prosperity. It is to Gillespie’s credit that he presents to us these elements of the Indian reality without caricaturing the country.

We get a brief glimpse of Ray sneering at a goat’s kid on a two-wheeler riding beside his car in Mumbai, and an equally fleeting look at JB’s plush hotel in the city. There’s this and there’s that – fair enough then. A.R. Rahman’s music suffers one jarring moment when he includes some bars from Slumdog’s Ringa ringa in the background score, but for the most part it too is engaging and shorn of clichés.

Where the film falls short is in the depiction of the people at large, which could have been more well-rounded without turning Million Dollar Arm into a documentary on India. For instance, the scene depicting the boys’ wide-eyed wonderment when they enter an elevator for the first time is matter-of-fact without being patronising. Of course poor Indian village boys who’ve never been inside a modern building would be fascinated by lifts. In a world where too many Westerners think those are the only kind of Indians in existence though, it is a glaring flaw not to at least briefly introduce viewers to the other kind of Indians, the ‘people like us’ characters, the ones for whom a lift is not a discovery, the ones who are as exasperated by goats and cows on streets as a foreigner might be shocked, amused and bemused.

Million Dollar Arm scores though with its immaculate casting. Few men can play a slimeball in a suit with as many layers as Hamm, well-known in India for his role in TV’s Mad Men. The actor makes JB a character who is hard to hate even when he’s despicable, the sort of chap about whom you feel you know there’s a good guy lurking around somewhere inside him.

Suraj Sharma from Life of Pi is growing into a handsome young fellow, as is the potentially hunky Madhur Mittal who played the wayward elder brother in Slumdog. Both are spot on in their depiction of youthful confidence that occasionally hits a slump. They are so natural before the camera and so charming, that it becomes easy to imagine why JB’s neighbour Brenda would feel a certain tenderness towards them. Brenda is played by Lake Bell who is familiar to Indian viewers from Boston Legal. Her searingly astute observations about JB make for some of the film’s most well-written moments.

Pitobash as Amit is the one who could have ended up being Million Dollar Arm’s only cliched desi. Instead, this gifted actor holds back some of his innate rusticity and exuberance to give us a winning character. The screenplay wisely allows Amit, Rinku and Dinesh to have most of their conversations in Hindi. This gives the dialogues a natural tone, with the Indians speaking not in the stereotypically sing-song, accented English of The Simpsons’ Apu, but in the kind of English and Hindi that real Indians from their particular background would use.

The remaining roles are all played by talented actors who make their few minutes on screen count, including poor Aasif Mandvi who is saddled with the only badly written part. It seems as though someone forgot that business partners are actually supposed to do something in the business. Mandvi’s Ashu Vasudevan seems to contribute little to JB’s firm.

It needs to be pointed out that the film creates the impression that the Million Dollar Arm contest got a lot more coverage in the Indian national media than it did in reality. It should have also been clarified that baseball is many light years away from getting the “billion new viewers” that JB thought his contest would earn for the game in India. This country is still obsessed with cricket, and baseball is still largely a distant sport.

That being said, it goes without saying that the contest changed the lives of the real Rinku and Dinesh. This film though is the heart-warming story of how they changed the real JB’s life. No doubt JB was on an exploitative, self-serving mission, but the boys were too innocent to get that. No doubt the story is focused on JB and not the boys, which some may even see as its failing. However, by the end of its 122 minutes we get to know Rinku and Dinesh just that little bit more and are left with a cloud of warmth floating around the heart. This is a film that’s small in scale, with no pretensions whatsoever to grandeur. Million Dollar Arm is a pleasant and deliberately under-stated ‘melodrama’, as dramatic and real as real life usually is.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time: MPAA Rating (US):	122 minutes PG (for mild language and some suggestive content)
Release date in the US:	May 16, 2014

Poster courtesy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Million_Dollar_Arm