REVIEW 609: VEERE DI WEDDING

Release date:	June 1, 2018
Director:	Shashanka Ghosh
Cast: Language:	Kareena Kapoor Khan, Sonam Kapoor Ahuja, Swara Bhasker, Shikha Talsania, Sumeet Vyas, Vivek Mushran, Ayessha Raza, Manoj Pahwa, Anjum Rajabali, Ekavali Khanna, Sukesh Arora, Vishwas Kinni Hindi

I confess I set out to watch Veere Di Wedding with some trepidation. Honestly, I am exhausted from the parade of so-called ‘women-centric’ Bollywood films in recent years by directors who do not understand or care a fig about women but smelt an opportunity as the rights of our half of the population moved from the inner folds of newspapers to Page 1 and television prime time after the December 2012 Delhi gangrape. When feminism is a fad and a formula for you, not a conviction, obviously you will churn out empty vessels such as Akira or stereotypes like Tanu in the Tanu Weds Manu flicks.

Veere Di Wedding is none of that. Director Shashanka Ghosh’s new film is about real, relatable women. They fight everyday battles, laugh and cry by turns, trip and fall as human beings often do and pick themselves up each time, all the while defying not just social strictures but also Bollywood’s boring cliché of what constitutes a ‘strong woman’ that even good films like NH10 and Mardaani did not entirely shake off. In the world according to Hindi cinema’s aspiring or fake feminists, if a woman is tough, she must compulsorily smoke heavily, drink, swear incessantly and if possible, be sexually promiscuous – teetotalers in particular apparently do not count.

Thankfully, Shashanka Ghosh, his writers Nidhi Mehra and Mehul Suri are not faking anything. Their Kalindi, Avni, Sakshi and Meera are not trying to impress us with what other shallow minds have perceived as mardaani (masculine), hip habits worth striving for, nor are they founts of what is conventionally considered feminine virtue. They simply are who they are.

These are women with agency, flaws, humanity and, above all, a sense of humour they often turn on themselves. Their vocabulary and behaviour are not borrowed from American serials that are often tapped by unimaginative, mindless writers who see the US as the Mecca of coolth and liberalism. They speak and act like educated, city-bred, wealthy or middle-class Indian women might and do.

The bride and buddy (veer) in the wedding of the title is Kalindi (Kareena Kapoor Khan) who has returned home to Delhi from Australia with her boyfriend for what turns out to be a garish, extravagant shaadi that his parents insist on organising, ignoring the couple’s wishes. Kalindi’s prospective saas-sasur – wealthy, unsophisticated, conservative, smothering their son with affection and attention – are a sharp contrast to her suave father (Anjum Rajabali) with whom she has barely had a relationship since he married after her mother’s death.

Of course her wedding is incomplete without her childhood friends, each grappling with their own problems. Avni (Sonam Kapoor Ahuja) is a divorce lawyer who sees marriage and babies as the next step for herself though she does not appreciate her mother being on her case about it. Sakshi (Swara Bhasker) is a mess, a creature of unhealthy propensities who is dawdling about her millionaire parents’ home, refusing to tell them why she left London, dumping the man she had picked and married in a rush.

Meera (Shikha Talsania) loves her husband and baby, hates her over-sized physique, seems incapable of staying away from food and drink, but steers clear of the father who objected to her choice of life partner.

By the end of the film’s running time, life has changed significantly for each of the four.

Romantic comedies, not just in India, tend to underline the indispensability and inevitability of marriage, or at the very least a romantic relationship, in every individual’s journey. Veere Di Wedding is about having a choice at every turn. Its achievement is that it arrives at this point without any dialoguebaazi or overt effort at messaging.

There is a tendency in the liberal public discourse to dismiss the concerns of women like Kalindi, Avni, Sakshi and Meera because of their apparent privilege. Ghosh and his writers refuse to underplay their wealth, instead occasionally emphasising it, as with that scene where they exit a building housing some of Delhi’s most expensive clothing stores and one of them grumbles about the forbidding cost of designerwear. Sure, they visit designer outlets but that does not make their problems any less pressing or their stories any less worth telling.

Veere Di Wedding is impactful especially because the lead quartet are enjoying themselves even while their film remains an unapologetic commentary on the lives of women in this setting. They are funny, these four. Funnier still is the picture in my head of the notoriously narrow-minded Censor Board viewing Indian female characters openly speaking of masturbation and sexual droughts, and – Hey Bhagwan, hamari sanskriti ko koi bachaao! – de-romanticising motherhood, in addition to discussing careers, marriage and kids.

Yes, this happens. In a mainstream Hindi film.

Without appearing to strain a muscle, Ghosh and his writing team end up smashing more barriers with laughter than a million weepy, vacuous Akiras could. It’s enough to make you want to forgive them for repeatedly getting Sakshi to equate courage with having “balls”, and to forgive the producers for the surfeit of product placements in a single film, one for a car too in-your-face to be ignored.

Kareena delivers a neatly restrained performance as Kalindi. Sonam is sweet and equally convincing with her character’s confusions as with her ultimate decisiveness. Swara is born to comedy and takes to this glossy set-up – vastly different from the two wonderful, low-budget films she has headlined so far, Nil Battey Sannata and Anaarkali of Aarah – like a fish to water. Shikha is pleasant and as impactful here as she was in Wake Up Sid back in 2009. Remind me again why we do not see her more often in films?

The supporting cast includes a bunch of reliable actors. Their performances cannot be faulted though the writing of some of their characters leaves much to be desired. The rigmarole of anger, fights and misunderstandings between Kalindi, her father and uncle are not as well articulated as the rest of the story. Ekavali Khanna as Kalindi’s Dad’s second wife Paromita and Edward Sonnenblick as Meera’s husband are the worst hit – he is gora, she has a weird laugh, there is nothing more to either of them. C’mon.

This is not about screen time, but about depth and detail in brevity. Just that one scene in which Avni and her mother (Neena Gupta) have a heart to heart conversation tells us all that we need to know about the older lady and their relationship. Kalindi’s fiancé Rishab too is treated with empathy, and actor Sumeet Vyas fashions him into a congenial fellow.

I have heard some chatter describing Veere Di Wedding as “India’s answer to Sex and the City”. For god’s sake, do not undervalue this film. The women of Sex and the City may have been entertaining, but at the end of the day, let’s face it, these were their primary preoccupations: the next lay, the next boyfriend, a husband. Kalindi, Avni, Sakshi and Meera are far more forward thinking. What they do have in common with Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda is their hilarious frankness about subjects so far untouched by Bollywood and an endearing bond that is far more believable than the clingy relationships shared all these decades by numerous gentlemen yaars and dosts in Hindi cinema.

Shashanka Ghosh has already worked with Sonam in Khoobsurat, which introduced Fawad Khan to Bollywood. In Veere Di Wedding he proves yet again his ability to tell sensible, engaging stories about women without being painfully self-conscious about his sensitivity or their gender, without elevating female characters to devi status, but presenting them to the world as they/we are, as human beings, good and bad, with the ability to laugh our heads off even as we deal with the multiple challenges this damned male-dominated world and our own failings throw at us.

As lyricist Anvita Dutt puts it in Veere veere, which is part of the film’s soundtrack:

Hum to aise 

Toote phoote se

Dham dhadaam se

Din dahaade 

Baithe baithe

Gir gaye muh ke bal yun 

Humne socha hume to bhai sab pata hai 

Mil rahi is galat faimi ki saza hai

(A rough précis: We are flawed. We have fallen flat on our faces as a result. We are suffering the consequences of having assumed that we know everything.)

Bless you Ghosh & Co for saying it like it is. Bless you ladies for signing up for this.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	A
Running time:	125 minutes

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

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/veere-di-wedding-movie-review-kareena-sonam-swara-shikha-play-relatable-non-conformists-in-a-fun-buddy-flick-4491491.html 

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

REVIEW 479: ANAARKALI OF AARAH

Release date:	March 24, 2017
Director:	Avinash Das
Cast: Language:	Swara Bhasker, Sanjai Mishra, Pankaj Tripathi, Ishteyaq Khan, Mayur More, Vijay Kumar, Nitin Arora, Vishwa Bhanu Hindi

“In future, whether a woman is your wife, a prostitute or one step above a prostitute, ask what she wants before you touch her.”

There is such deep satisfaction to be had from hearing a character on the big screen utter this sentence. That it comes from the heroine – not the hero – of the film in question, is cause to pop open a zillion champagne bottles. It is a moment of triumph, not just in this week’s Hindi film release, Anaarkali of Aarah, but in Bollywood history. 

In 1993, the lawyer Govind (Sunny Deol) roared out the well-remembered “tareekh pe tareekh” speech against the victimisation of a woman who was an eyewitness to a rape, in Rajkumar Santoshi’s Damini. In 2016, Amitabh Bachchan’s lawyer Deepak Sehgal snarled out the words “no means no” in a courtroom in Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury’s Pink. Both are significant films, no doubt, but 2017 is now witnessing a much-needed evolution beyond them. In Anaarkali of Aarah, a woman – not a man – storms into the lion’s den and skewers him with her wits and fury, as she reminds him about the meaning of consent. A woman, not a man – hold on to that.

Anaarkali, the firebrand who ticks off a male sexual predator in this fashion, is the protagonist of a film that works not just because of its sound gender politics though. It works because its feminism is embedded in a gloriously entertaining, skillfully told story with the best musical score and most intelligent choreography of the year so far. Even when it defies believability to snatch victory out of defeat for a beleaguered woman, Anaarkali of Aarah does so with such conviction, that it is impossible not to cheer despite knowing at some level that the real Anaarkalis of the world are hardly likely to get off as lightly.

Swara Bhasker plays the central character of the tale, a stage performer in Bihar’s Aarah town who is passionate about her song and dance. When a local bigwig molests her in public one day, not surprisingly the entire system closes ranks to protect him.

Anaarkali is not one to be taken lightly though. She is the sort of person some might consider foolhardy and others would call brave. She fights the man who preys on her along with his protectors and social opprobrium to have her say and live life on her own terms.

Writer-director Avinash Das makes his debut with a film that can only come from genuine belief. His writing is as assured as his direction. He obviously knows Bihar and small-town India, which accounts for the fact that Anaarkali of Aarah at no point exoticises its setting or its characters. Most important though, he appears to know women like Anaarkali well.

The tone of Anaarkali of Aarah’s narrative is unfaltering as is the look and sound of the film. Anaarkali sings erotic numbers often steeped in double entendre, as she would in the real world, yet the lyrics by Ramkumar Singh, Dr Sagar, Ravindra Randhawa and Das himself take dual meanings to a different level by supplementing their sexual content with the woman’s rebellion, resilience and lamentations. In Lehnga jhaanke she sings of the spellbinding effect her skirt has on men, in Mora piya matlab ka yaar she speaks of the deception by those very men, and in Sa ra ra ra she dares them to touch her without permission.

“Hamra ke confusiya ke gaya / Khidki se Patna dikha ke gaya / Hamra th chaukhat ke bhitri zulam hai / Saiyyaan ghoomakkad ko dharti bhi kam hai / Dekho suit boot zulmi taiyyaar / Mora piya matlab ka yaar,” she sings in this telling number written by Dr Sagar.

If Das is the captain of the ship, music director Rohit Sharma is his first officer. Not only are the earthy, folksy tunes and lyrics compelling, but the voices too have been chosen as if by a casting director. It is as if Swati Sharma, Indu Sonali, Pawni Pandey and Rekha Bhardwaj were all born to sing for Bhasker and Bhasker alone.

In fact, Anaarkali of Aarah is remarkable in the Hindi film musical universe in the sense that at no point does it seem like anyone but the actress herself is singing.

Swara Bhasker’s smoothly textured voice is one of her defining characteristics. With no obvious effort to sound gravelly or loud, she seems to have modified it to match her playback singers.

We already know Bhasker’s innate talent from Tanu Weds Manu (TWM), TWM Returns, Raanjhanaa and last year’s Nil Battey Sannata, but Anaarkali of Aarah is a big step up in her journey as an artist. She so completely inhabits this character, that there is no Ms Bhasker to be seen in the by turns raunchy, feisty, angry, scared, hurt and irrepressible Anaarkali.

Adding to her understanding of the character is the delightful work of the film’s costume designer Rupa Chourasia and choreographer Shabina Khan. Anaarkali’s dance moves in Sa ra ra ra and her complete immersion in that song gave me goosebumps.

Anaarkali of Aarah is a good lesson for those who seem confused by the ongoing debate on the portrayal of women in Hindi cinema. Anaarkali is objectified by the male characters in the film, but never by director of photography Arvind Kannabiran’s camera. Her character is demeaned by several men in her life, but never by Das, the man who has written the story of this film. She sings of the reality of women who are subjected to a sleazy male gaze, but Bhasker at no point submits to being degraded herself as a woman, as Kareena Kapoor Khan did when she danced to “Main toh tandoori murgi hoon yaar, gatka le saiyyaan alcohol se” in Dabangg 2.

Bhasker’s choices in this film, her performance and the manner in which Das has conceptualised and fleshed out Anaarkali all add up to a unique moment in Hindi cinema.

Anaarkali… features other interesting characters too. Rangeela, the man who runs the ‘music company’ of which the heroine is a member, is played with admirable control by Pankaj Tripathi. His gestures and body language in several places might conventionally be considered effeminate, yet Tripathi never reduces Rangeela to a camp caricature.

Sanjai Mishra as the film’s antagonist delivers a performance of great depth here. He makes university vice-chancellor Dharmender Chauhan a slimy fellow without resorting to easy gimmickry and over-the-top acting that usually defines the Hindi film villain even today. Watch out for that moment when the camera rests on his face in the climax.

If I have a grouse against Anaarkali of Aarah, it is that Rangeela is not better explored by the script. His relationship with Anaarkali is obviously complex, which is why she forgives him his aggression, unlike Dharmender Chauhan. Something is missing in the portrayal of that equation.

Another character who should have been better explored is Anaarkali’s young ally Anwar played by the loveable Mayur More. Anwar is cute, his unflinching support is endearing, and it is nice to see that this relationship does not take a predictable course (nothing in the film does). It would have been nicer still to discover more of Anwar through the script.

(Spoiler alert) There is a scene in the film in which a man walks seemingly menacingly towards a cowering Anaarkali in a closed room. He turns out to be a well-wisher, and that flash of intimidation appears to have been designed to throw us off. Brief though it is, it sticks out because it is the only point at which the script momentarily takes its theme lightly to manipulate the audience. (Spoiler alert ends)

The best written supporting character in Anaarkali of Aarah is another of the heroine’s allies, Hiraman played sweetly by Ishteyaq Khan with control that rivals Tripathi’s.

Among other things, Avinash Das appears to be having fun with names here – Anaarkali, Hiraman, Bulbul... Will this Anaarkali, for instance, be buried alive by patriarchy or banished to another kingdom, like her legendary forebear? My favourite of the lot is the corrupt cop Bulbul Pandey, as different from Salman Khan’s Chulbul Pandey in Dabangg as chalk is from cheese.

All this is the background from which emerges that one line from the heroine, translated at the start of this review: “Randi ho, randi se thhoda kam ho ya biwi ho, aainda marzi poochh kar haath lagaaiyega.” It may read like a conventional Hindi film dialogue of the sort that tends to attract cheers and wolf whistles from the masses, but be assured that it is discomfiting to status quoists. For proof, look no further than the Censor Board’s A rating for Anaarkali of Aarah.

When a ‘hero’ is violent with a heroine, as Badrinath was in Badrinath ki Dulhania earlier this month, and that heroine says in so many words that his behaviour is all her fault, the Board finds his violence worthy of a UA rating (meaning: fit for consumption by children if their parents consider it so). But when a woman on the margins of society fights back, she is deemed suitable only for adults. Pahlaj Nihalani and his ilk apparently do not want our “Bhartiya sanskriti” and impressionable children to be influenced by “uss type ki aurat” (that kind of woman).

Bless you Avinash Das for celebrating in a most entertaining fashion, every gutsy, rebellious, non-malleable, non-compliant uss type ki aurat through your Anaarkali. And bless you Swara Bhasker for bringing this wonderful woman to life on screen.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	A
Running time:	113 minutes 5 seconds

Poster courtesy: IMDB