REVIEW 726: CHHICHHORE

Release date:	September 6, 2019
Director:	Nitesh Tiwari
Cast: Language:	Sushant Singh Rajput, Shraddha Kapoor, Varun Sharma, Tahir Raj Bhasin, Naveen Polishetty, Tushar Pandey, Saharsh Kumar Shukla, Prateik Babbar  Hindi

A present-day tragedy sends Annirudh Pathak (Sushant Singh Rajput) off in search of his best buddies from his youth. They were all students at India’s most prestigious engineering college about two decades back when they joined forces to get rid of the loser tag slapped on their hostel by the rest of the institution.

Anni gathers his gang – now older and many of them balding – around his son to recount their shenanigans from back then and convince the boy that winning is not everything, that the fight counts. At first Anni’s ex-wife Maya (Shraddha Kapoor), who was also their collegemate, is cynical about this strategy to lift the child’s spirits. She changes her mind though as the group gets deeper and deeper into their story and their young listener begins to get involved with these characters, some of who once went by the names Sexa, Acid, Mummy and Bevda.

Writer-director Nitesh Tiwari had his heart in the right place when he conceptualised this project. Chhichhore (The Childish Lot) is about an India that teaches youngsters to slog, compete and celebrate victory but almost never counsels them on how to handle defeat. It is a lesson that this country and its blinkered education system, pushy parents and mindless teachers sorely require. It is a lesson that sensible parents and forward-thinking teachers have long tried to propagate. The vehicle for this messaging needed to be less shaky though.

From the word go, Chhichhore’s 3 Idiots hangover is evident. That 2009 blockbuster by Raju Hirani was not without flaws – its take on education was simplistic and one-dimensional, it cast men in their late 30s and mid 40s as teenagers, and it trivialised rape in that horrid “balatkaar” speech. For the most part though, its humour was not insensitive, and one thing is for sure: 3 Idiots had its own voice. Chhichhore is a film in search of a voice that ends up looking, feeling and sounding all mixed up.

Too much about this film is uneven and confusing. For a start, how come the boys have aged when we meet them in the present day but Maya has not? The only change in her is that her attire and styling are less sassy and flouncy. From Western dresses and short hair the older Maya has switched to staid cotton saris, salwar suits and a boring bun. But her skin, hair, posture and gait remain unchanged. It is as if Team Chhichhore felt that unlike men, ageing women are not worthy of screen space.

Even Maya’s wardrobe and style in college are inexplicable. She has the appearance of a girl from a much earlier era than her male collegemates, perhaps the 1960s.

Not that the men fare much better in their senior avatar. With the years added to their lives, their hairlines recede but several of them continue to have skin as supple as a baby’s bottom.

These might have been excusable glitches if Chhichhore had got its tone right, but unfortunately the narrative never quite settles into doing its own thing. Both thematically and tonally, the film is trying to be what it is not throughout, borrowing heavily from 3 Idiots in terms of mood and even plot points. And the back and forth switches between the present and the past are just not effective.

What works in Chhichhore are the sports contests which do have an air of suspense about them, a considerable part of the banter between the friends in their younger days, and the energetic songs Control and Fikar Not (music: Pritam, lyrics: Amitabh Bhattacharya).

Nitesh Tiwari clearly has a talent for setting up battles in the sporting arena – he proved that in his last film, Dangal, and proves it again here. The many matches in Chhichhore, the boys’ hilarious immaturity and sharp tongues are often thoroughly entertaining. And while Maya remains a shadow in the background of the narrative that is anyway largely bereft of women, it is nice to see a Hindi film set in an environment where gender segregation is the norm but the hero’s wooing of the heroine is not noxious and stalkerish.

None of this is, however, enough to sustain Chhichhore. There are too many draggy patches in between, the acting is inconsistent, and the somewhat superficial messaging adds nothing to the “what matters is that you tried” line we have heard before.

The writing of Chhichhore (by Tiwari himself with Nikhil Mehrotra and Piyush Gupta) is so lacking in depth, and the direction so passionless, that it is hard to believe it is brought to us by the same person who made Dangal. Despite its sporadic bursts of humour, Chhichhore comes across as a half-hearted enterprise.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	146 minutes

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

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/bollywood/chhichhore-movie-review-sushant-singh-rajput-ages-shraddha-kapoor-does-not-in-a-hotch-potch-with-a-3-idiots-hangover-7295001.html

Posters courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/foxstarhindi/

REVIEW 638: MANTO

Release date:	September 21, 2018
Director:	Nandita Das
Cast: Language:	Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Rasika Dugal, Tahir Raj Bhasin, Divya Dutta, Ranvir Shorey, Vijay Verma, Tillotama Shome, Neeraj Kabi, Chandan Roy Sanyal, Inaamulhaq, Ila Arun, Rajshri Deshpande, Javed Akhtar, Rishi Kapoor Hindi/Urdu

In a memorable passage mid way through Nandita Das’ film, writer Saadat Hasan Manto is addressing a gathering of bibliophiles in Lahore when a member of the audience tells him that his works are so dark they could drive anyone to depression. Manto rebukes the man, not because he was critical but because he sought to speak on behalf of readers other than himself.

The scene could well have been aimed at present-day censors and morality warriors who presume to speak for entire populations while curbing the creative freedoms of artists. It is also possibly a cautionary note for film critics who make it their business to predict whether a film will strike a chord with audiences, and be a hit or not. Manto’s admonition put me in an introspective mood, reminding me not to try to answer in this review the question that preyed on my mind through the film’s 116-plus minutes running time, “Will it work for those who do not know Manto’s works well?” and instead to focus on the only question a critic should answer in this space: “Did it work for me?”

Das’ Manto – her second film as director after the critically acclaimed Firaaq – weaves several of the legendary writer’s short stories into the story of his own life, providing a running commentary on the heartbreaking socio-economic realities of Partition. When the film opens, Manto is thriving in pre-Independence Mumbai’s vibrant literary and film worlds, spiritedly clashing with tone-deaf producers and with the morality police (he was tried in court for obscenity six times, thrice in British India, thrice in Pakistan), debating censorship with his fellow writers including Ismat Chughtai, being a loving husband to his wife Safia and fond father to their daughter.

Manto is a happy man at the time, basking in the company of his friends, family and the characters he creates, in the perennial presence of his beloved whiskey and cigarettes. In private conversations, when he puts pen to paper and on his sojourns in courtrooms, he minces no words, simultaneously endearing himself to vast sections of the masses while shocking others.

At first, Manto is optimistic about Independent India, but Hindu-Muslim tensions take their toll on his psyche, and he finally tears himself away from Mumbai and moves to Pakistan. The downward spiral begins from there. This, after all, is “not the dawn we dreamed of”.

Das’ finely detailed screenplay provides a fertile playing ground for Nawazuddin Siddiqui who has, in recent years, been largely tapped by directors for his ability to play wackadoodles and kinky criminals or for the mischievous glint he summons up in his eyes like no other while taking on the roles of slightly eccentric regular folk. He has been good in all of them and brilliant in many, most especially Anurag Kashyap’s under-publicised Raman Raghav 2.0 and Ritesh Batra’s The Lunchbox. In Manto though, there is not a trace of anything he has done so far. His physical transformation for the part is in itself quite astonishing. This is a ruminative, considered performance, in complete empathy with the person whose shoes he steps into for it, and without question his best till date.

(Possible spoiler ahead) Some of the conversations in Manto are like a punch in the gut, and could easily be transposed to a more conventional Bollywood film where they could well be histrionically interpreted as bombast – to striking effect. Imagine, for instance, a young Bachchan in a biopic directed by Manmohan Desai in that scene in which a friend tries to dissuade Manto from leaving for Pakistan. Manto was born Muslim but is clearly not a devotee, and so the man points out, “You are hardly Muslim,” to which comes the reply, “I am Muslim enough that I could be killed for it.” Drum rolls, please. This paragraph is not an effort to diss Bachchan and Desai – I thoroughly enjoy both – but to point out that Das and Siddiqui’s work here comes armed with absolute clarity about the film’s tone and the space it inhabits in the cinematic realm. Dialogues are not delivered in Manto, lines are spoken as naturally as life is lived. (Spoiler alert ends)

Siddiqui as the fulcrum of the cast gets excellent backing from Rasika Dugal playing Manto’s loving but exasperated wife, and Tahir Raj Bhasin as his close friend, the real-life Bollywood actor Shyam. Just as important is the attention to detail in the casting and writing of the minutest roles, as a result of which multiple characters remain significant and unforgettable despite the few seconds to few minutes they get on screen.

Das’ naturalistic storytelling style is complemented well by Rita Ghosh’s sepia-toned production design (particularly notable in the shift from prosperous pre-Partition Bollywood to decrepit, post-1947 Lahore) and Kartik Vijay’s atmospheric, moody camerawork that remains intimately involved with the characters in the story, never choosing instead to pan out and emphasise the ambitious nature of this period project.

The seamless switches from fact to Manto’s fiction in the narrative are born of smart writing and some great editing by veteran A. Sreekar Prasad, the transitions fashioned in such a way that it often feels like we are observing scenes play out while standing beside Manto.

The only bumps on this otherwise smooth ride come when Das gets too obtuse in filming a couple of Manto’s shorts. Thanda Ghosht (Cold Meat) is perfect and as soul-shattering in this film as it is when I first read it, as are most of the others that find a place in this script, but I found the telling of Khol Do (Open It), for one, too dense and – god how I hate to use this word for a film that otherwise means so much! – somewhat pretentious, coming across as if it was trying to walk a tightrope between wanting to be clear to those who have not read the story and wanting not to be too explanatory to those who have. The pressure causes it to fall right off that rope.

Through all this, what leaves a lasting impression is the realisation that when it comes to communal divisions and censorious, interfering social, political and religious overlords, little seems to have changed between colonised India, Manto’s Pakistan and the India of today. (The words “Manto lives on” flashing on screen in the end are incongruous. They were not needed, the point was already made...very well.) Manto was unrelentingly vocal in his objections to injustice, prejudice and stupidity. Das, for her part, has remained consistently outspoken about her concerns – reflected over the years in Firaaq, her public pronouncements on various platforms, and now this film – without allowing herself to become a sermoniser in her directorial ventures.

The messaging in this film is for us to imbibe if we wish, as she chronicles a remarkable, dramatic true story in an engagingly unmelodramatic style. In doing so, Das makes her Manto a stirring, sensitive portrait of a tortured genius from an era seemingly long past yet tragically mirroring our troubled present.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	116 minutes 35 seconds

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/manto-movie-review-nawazuddin-siddiqui-is-the-best-he-has-ever-been-in-nandita-das-stirring-portrait-of-a-genius-5231401.html

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manto_(2018_film)