REVIEW 578: HATE STORY 4

Release date:	March 9, 2018
Director:	Vishal Pandya
Cast: Language:	Urvashi Rautela, Vivan Bhatena, Karan Wahi, Ihana Dhillon, Gulshan Grover Hindi

“I am somebody who can get anybody but I want nobody other than your body,” a man in Hate Story 4 tells a woman he attacks on the street.

By the time this moment rolls by on screen, we are halfway through the film and I, for one, was numbed by its ludicrousness.

To be fair to dialogue writer Milap Milan Zaveri, he prepared us for this bunkum in the opening sequence when another villain urges the heroine not to panic, to give him time to sort out a mess they are in, and she replies: “Tumne jism nahin liya hota toh aaj waqt nahin maangna padta.”

Translated for the benefit of those who do not know Hindi, but should not be deprived of the pleasures of tacky wordplay, that reads: If you had not taken my body, today you would not need to ask for my time.

The line comes in the opening minutes of director Vishal Pandya’s Hate Story 4, the latest instalment of a thriller series marked by heavy dialoguebaazi, partially clad women, lustful men, long song sequences in which their bodies heave and thrust against each other in an unconvincing enactment of sex, all wrapped around a mystery that might not have been half bad if the writing team did not have such a low opinion of the viewer and had cared to flesh out their concept with more thought.

A quick glance at the Internet tells me Hate Story 1-3 have been moderate successes. Not that they deserved any better, but the fact that they notched up even average collections at the box office speaks volumes for the sexually repressed nation that we are. Do people actually think sex is what is going on on screen in any of these four films in which no one strips completely, they simply writhe about semi-clothed, with female breasts bulging out above bras that are still very much on and well-muscled male torsos are displayed while crucial areas remain covered? Are there actually human beings out there who are titillated by all that pretend sex, when instead they could easily access pornography?

Hate Story 4, like the first three, is neither artistic enough to be called erotica nor functional and overt enough to be call porn.

For what it is worth, the story is about Aryan (Vivan Bhatena) and Rajveer (Karan Wahi), the spoilt sons of a wealthy London-based Indian businessman. Aryan falls out with his girlfriend Rishma (Ihana Dhillon) and the boys fall out with each other over Tasha (Urvashi Rautela), a beautiful model who they launch through their enterprise.

During the course of the film, someone kills someone as a result of which someone else sets out to take revenge, no one can be trusted and everyone betrays everyone.

The three leads have great bodies. Rautela and Bhatena have shown flashes of potential in earlier works, but Wahi, I fear, has not one acting cell in his body. All three ham their way through this revenge saga set in London, in the company of fellow hamster Gulshan Grover playing Aryan and Rajveer’s Daddy. 

While characters who treat women like crap exist in this world, the director himself reveals his low opinion of the female half of the species with the way the camera captures women here, repeatedly closing in on boobs and butts, often before we have even seen their faces.

The first sight we get of a character called Monica is a close-up of her cleavage, then a switch to her derriere encased in tiny lingerie, and only then her face. Tasha’s introductory shot is of her bottom raised in the air as she crouches cat-like on a shiny stage, then the camera slides over her in various feline poses, focusing on fragments of her before it finally deigns to rest on her countenance.

Date rape is casually tossed around in the screenplay. Efforts at earnestness end up sounding laughable or unintentionally crude, such as during that romantic number Tum Mere Ho in which Aryan and Rishma feel each other up extensively on a bridge by a water body, and a woman singer’s voice goes: “Mere andar mujhse zyaada tum” (there is less of me and more of you inside me). Yikes!

Hate Story 4 is too low-brow to be offensive, but it tries its best to earn that tag when in the end it suddenly develops scruples and, having objectified women from start to finish, closes with statistics on crimes against women on screen, followed by this exhortation: “Fight the evil of eveteasing.” Nau sau choohein khaake etc etc…

The only thing more fake than this concern for women is the simulated sex in Hate Story 4. Spare us your bogus conscience, please.

Rating (out of five stars): 1/2

CBFC Rating (India):	A
Running time:	131 minutes

This review was also published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/hate-story-4-movie-review-a-fourth-instalment-of-pretend-sex-and-tacky-dialoguebaazi-4383561.html

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_Story_4

REVIEW 458: KAABIL

Release date:	January 25, 2017
Director:	Sanjay Gupta
Cast: Language:	Hrithik Roshan, Yami Gautam, Rohit Roy, Ronit Roy, Narendra Jha, Suresh Menon, Girish Kulkarni. Guest appearance: Urvashi Rautela Hindi

It is a fascinating idea: the perfect crime committed by a blind man whose other senses are so sharp that he can do things a seeing person could not. To expand that outline into a full-length feature though would require an investment of thought. Sanjay Gupta’s Kaabil lacks thought and much else.

The Internet tells me Kaabil’s budget was Rs 50 crore-plus. I am flummoxed by where that money went since the film’s production quality and special effects are so abysmal that I suspect there may be talented software engineers who have pulled off better student assignments. The sets look unintentionally stagey, Mumbai’s familiar external locations look plastic (as if the stars were super-imposed on existing footage), and scenes that are completely CGI-dependent – such as a fire caused by a blast in a godown – are poorly done.

(Spoilers ahead for those who have not seen the trailer)

All this mediocrity is wrapped around Rohan and Supriya Bhatnagar, he a dubbing artist, she an NGO employee. Both are blind. When Supriya is raped, the police look away because her rapists are well connected. Rohan decides to avenge her, knowing that investigators would find it hard to imagine a blind man being capable (kaabil) of meticulous planning and physically demanding execution. The bulk of the film is devoted to the manner in which Rohan gets back at the men who got after his wife.

(Spoiler alert ends)

First, for a film that is meant to be a thriller, I can think of only one OMG moment – and that one has nothing to do with Rohan’s schemes. It comes when a significant detail of the crime is revealed to Rohan by the rapist’s powerful politician brother. Rohan’s revenge is far less gasp-inducing than way better cinematic works we have already seen about persons with disabilities (PwDs) who possess phenomenal abilities.

(Another spoiler alert) The Mumbai Police should feel deeply insulted by a film in which a criminal does not bother to wear gloves but is not found out because cops do not lift fingerprints off the crime scenes. Nope, it does not occur to anyone to do so, not even that seemingly intelligent senior officer (Narendra Jha) to whom the chap had given advance intimation of his intent to commit those crimes.

Likewise, a woman commits suicide but the police do not do even a cursory check of her room, which would have led them to discover her suicide note. I know, I know, the Indian police are notoriously inefficient (Exhibit No. 1: the Arushi Talwar case), but these celluloid police are worse than anything we know of their real-life counterparts. (Spoiler alert ends)

The absurdly amateurish writing is far less objectionable than the film’s pretence that it cares about women. Kaabil is a perfect illustration of the male gaze. It is purportedly the story of a husband and a wife, the story of a woman who was raped and the man’s vendetta, but what it is in truth is a sympathy fest for the husband while the wife remains an ephemeral figure whose mindset and trauma the film barely explores.

Supriya is not a being unto herself. She exists in Kaabil solely so that the hero can fall in love with her and then display his machismo by punishing those who wronged her.

It is also terribly jarring to see an ‘item’ song in which the camera lasciviously examines a near-naked woman’s body in the middle of a film claiming to object to sexual violence against women. Such insensitivity can only come from a filmmaker feigning concern. For the record, my position on objectification is not as black and white as anti-feminists may lazily assume. For more on that, please read this article which is among the many I have written on the subject: The Naked Truth. Context matters.

Finesse in thriller writing and technical polish may not matter as much to some viewers as Hrithik Roshan does. Kaabil is a letdown on that front too. The thing about Roshan is that when he is good, he can be very very good, when he is bad, he can be Yaadein-level bad. The best that can be said about his performance as Rohan in Kaabil is that he has, in the past, been worse.

If you have not suffered Yaadein, FYI that is one of the films that marked the beginning of the end of Subhash Ghai. Roshan hammed his way through it. This beautiful-looking star needs a meticulous director to control him as an actor. His father Rakesh Roshan, Ashutosh Gowariker with Jodhaa Akbar and a couple of others have managed him well so far. He needs to seek out more like them. It is hard to understand how Roshan Senior, as the producer of Kaabil, tolerated this averageness.

It does not help Roshan Junior that Yami Gautam delivers a far more controlled performance as Supriya. There is a marked contrast between her work and his distractingly laboured effort at playing blind. Gautam needs to be commended for doing a fair job with her role despite the limited writing of her character.

The word “kaabil” is used with two meanings in this film: “worthy” and “capable”. The first is articulated in the title song “Main tere kaabil hoon, ya tere kaabil nahin” which here translates into, “Am I worthy of you or am I not?”

The film’s primary preoccupation is the other meaning though: Is he “capable” of ‘protecting’ his woman? Sanjay Gupta may argue that he is turning stereotypes of PwDs on their head with his portrayal of an extraordinarily able blind man, but his definition of kaabil when placed in the context of disability simply perpetuates patriarchal notions of manhood, masculinity and what it means to be an ‘asli mard’. Read: physically strong, physically flawless.

It is disappointing that this film should come from the producer who directed and co-wrote Koi… Mil Gaya, which starred Hrithik Roshan. C’mon Messrs Roshan, you are better than this.

The kindest review I could give Kaabil is to say it is not unbearable. What it is is commonplace, unremarkable, unthinking and shoddy.

  

Rating (out of five stars): *

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	139 minutes

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