REVIEW 696: PM NARENDRA MODI

Release date:	May 24, 2019
Director:	Omung Kumar B
Cast: Language:	Vivek Oberoi (credited here as Vivek Anand Oberoi), Manoj Joshi, Zarina Wahab, Suresh Oberoi, Prashant Narayanan, Darshan Kumar, Boman Irani, Anjan Shrivastav, Akshat R. Saluja, Yatin Karyekar, Rajendra Gupta Hindi

This week’s new Bollywood release, director Omung Kumar B’s PM Narendra Modi (PMNM), is not a biography. It is an unwittingly farcical, comical hagiography of Narendra Modi and the BJP, and even that is a euphemistic description. To put it simply, this is a highly fictionalised account of the present Indian prime minister’s life.

Omung Kumar’s recall value so far has come from the vastly superior Priyanka Chopra-starrer Mary Kom (2014) and the embarrassingly bad Aishwarya Rai Bachchan-starrer Sarbjit (2016). PM Narendra Modi (PMNM) falls into the so-bad-it-could-be-fun category, except that it is not fun at all – it is, instead, an insult to viewer intelligence and viewer knowledge.

“Modi ek insaan nahin, ek soch hai (Modi is not a person, Modi is a way of thinking / a concept),” says the protagonist himself at one point. Aur Modi ke baare mein soch badalne ke liye, to change the thinking about Modi, the screenplay – co-written by Anirudh Chawla and the leading man, Vivek Anand Oberoi – runs facts through a carefully chosen sieve and presents a new, rewritten history so far removed from recorded reality, that it bears little resemblance to the actual Modi. In that sense, PMNM reminded me of a scene in last year’s Malayalam feature Kammara Sambhavam in which the hero watches a PR film about his life and does not recognise himself on screen.

Things that did not happen in Modi’s life are in this film shown to have happened: he is shown being arrested during the Emergency, the then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee is shown praising him to the press during the 2002 riots, in the run-up to the 2014 election Modi is shown volunteering to do a live interview with a hostile TV journalist before an audience and acing it. In the face of such liberties with facts involving major historical events, all PMNM’s other follies and flaws – the word “grateful” being spelt as “greatful” in the opening acknowledgements, the lazy caricature of former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Modi’s corrupt government colleague in Gujarat, the false suggestion that Modi never married, other monumental exaggerations and misrepresentations in the screenplay, Hitesh Modak’s overbearing background score and the overall tackiness of the narrative – pale into insignificance.

It is worth mentioning here that the aforementioned hostile journalist is a stooge of a corrupt industrialist called Aditya Reddy played by Prashant Narayanan. Three enemies are very clearly marked out by PMNM: Pakistan, the news media and, through the medium of the Reddy character, the dark-skinned self-serving south Indian.

On Vivek Oberoi’s shoulders falls the task of playing this larger-than-life version of Modi, determined to vanquish all three. Most of Oberoi’s co-stars are comparatively irrelevant because their roles are dwarfed by his, but despite being dealt the same hand, their performances are a mixed bag. Manoj Joshi looks oddly wimpish as Amit Shah (the BJP chief’s full name is muted out in the film for some reason), but Boman Irani brings some dignity to the role of Ratan Tata as does Zarina Wahab playing Modi’s mother. In an ocean of mediocrity, Anjan Shrivastav does a reasonably good take on Atal Bihari Vajpayee without resorting to gimmicky mimicry. 

As for Oberoi, well, in the actor who hams his way through this role, there is no trace of the young debutant who showed such spark under Ram Gopal Varma’s guidance in 2002’s Company. It is sad to watch an artist lose his touch. For those of us who saw something in him in Company, the only consolation is that his turn as Modi is less cringe-worthy than his performance as a horny young chap in Masti (2004), Grand Masti (2013) and Great Grand Masti (2016).

If you think about it, despite the apparent contrast between them, the Masti trilogy and PMNM both offer conventionally accepted definitions of masculinity. The Mastis used slapstick comedy as a vehicle to present us with men driven by their nether regions and their hormones as men naturally would be, or so we are given to understand. In PM Narendra Modi, the hero espouses an earnest, asexual, aggressive machoism, initially speaking of wanting to renounce the world and follow the path taken by Lord Buddha, and in the climactic moments ascribing his decisiveness – as the real life Narendra Modi has done – to a 56-inch chest. You see, his political journey is not a consequence of personal ambition, it is the answer to the public’s prayerful longing for “ek sachcha mard (a real man)” to lead them, to quote the words of a character early in the film.

Rating (out of five stars): 0

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

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/bollywood/pm-narendra-modi-movie-review-vivek-oberoi-hams-his-way-through-an-unwittingly-farcical-comical-hagiography-6693971.html

Poster courtesy:

https://www.facebook.com/ModiTheFilm2019/

REVIEW 538: JIA AUR JIA

Release date:	October 27, 2017
Director:	Howard Rosemeyer
Cast: Language:	Richa Chadda, Kalki Koechlin, Arslan Goni, Sudhanshu Pandey, Zarina Wahab   Hindi

                                                                                                                   

Zindagi koi aaloo pyaaz nahin jiski keemat hoti hai. Zindagi jis kisi ki bhi ho, priceless hai. (Life is not like onions and potatoes that a price can be placed on it. Every life is priceless.) You can almost imagine the creator of these lines patting himself on the back after having come up with them. The speaker is Kalki Koechlin’s character in Jia Aur Jia. The second half of the film is filled with such dialogues, trying hard to impress listeners with their wisdom. They fill up the empty space in a 92 minute saga that could have added up to something if writers Mudassar Aziz (credited for story and dialogues) and Farahjaan Shiekh (screenplay) had known how to flesh out their concept: two young women with sad secrets on a road trip through Sweden. After a mildly promising start though, they struggle the rest of the way. The result is a flimsy girl bonding flick that is so vacant, it may as well have not been made.

Koechlin plays Jia Garewal, owner of a small bakery in Panchgani. Ms Garewal is on a tight budget and hooks up online with a banker called Jia Raghupati Venkatram (Richa Chadda) to split the cost of a Europe sojourn. It is clear from the word go that Ms Venkatram is nursing a tragic past. Be that as it may, she is at first exasperated and then gradually charmed by the crazy creature in her company who lives life with such abandon while she herself is so stiff-necked.  

It does not take a genius to guess that we will at some point discover that Garewal has a secret too. Jia Aur Jia is about two strangers meeting, and how one of them changes the other’s life forever.

Choreographer Howard Rosemeyer makes his directorial debut with Jia Aur Jia, featuring a lead pair with impressive credentials and an amateurish screenplay. Garewal is the film’s idea of cool and chirpy, which means she talks a lot, steals food from a café (this is not a spoiler, the scene is even in the trailer) drinks a lot, blows smoke into her roomie’s face and wakes her up in the middle of the night by chomping loudly on chips. Of course she is constantly smiling, laughing and dancing on camera.

In short, she is the standard Bollywood idea of cute, a cliché of youthful energy that we have seen in film after film over the years, the kind of person who would rightfully be considered irritating in real life, but who we are expected to fall in love with when we meet her on screen. Trite though the woman is, the screenplay leaves us guessing about her long enough and Koechlin’s natural charisma gives her just about enough likeability to keep the film floating through its first half.

Venkatram is completely boring, her past far less interesting than Team Jia Aur Jia seems to think it is, and Chadda – who was so striking in Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur films and in a brief role in last year’s Sarbjit – is unable to lend her character an iota of charm. Making matters worse is the contrived male character called Vasu Krishna Bergman (played by Arslan Goni) who is forced into the narrative.

Despite Koechlin’s verve, a kinda sorta curiosity the director manages to conjure up in the first half about what may possibly come as the story moves along, and some pretty visuals of the Swedish countryside, the film fails to lift off at all.

Jia Aur Jia’s saving grace is that it resurrects Jiya o jiya, the title song of the Asha Parekh-Dev Anand classic Jab Pyar Kisise Hota Hai, for its background score. The music makes the opening scenes memorable, but when the entire remix of the song is sung along with the closing credits, the effect is completely ruined: Nisschal Zaveri’s Jiya o jiya reprise – performed by Jyotica Tangri and Rashid Ali – is flat in comparison with the original. Jia Aur Jia is flat, full stop.

Rating (out of five stars): 1/2

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	92 minutes 39 seconds

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/jia-aur-jia-movie-review-kalki-koechlins-verve-is-wasted-in-a-flimsy-girl-bonding-flick-4179077.html

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

REVIEW 364: CHALK N DUSTER

Release date:	January 15, 2016
Director:	Jayant Gilatar
Cast: Language:	Shabana Azmi, Juhi Chawla, Divya Dutta, Sameer Soni, Aarya Babbar, Girish Karnad, Richa Chadha, Zarina Wahab, Jackie Shroff, Cameo: Rishi Kapoor. Hindi

When a film’s centrepiece is a nationally televised quiz contest, you would expect it to be finicky about facts. Researchers and academics will hopefully verify the answers provided in that in-film contest, but before it rolled around I had already lost faith in Chalk N Duster after a scene in which one character insists on speaking Hindi, saying, “Hindi hamari rashtrabhasha hai (Hindi is our national language)”. Err… False! India does not have a “rashtrabhasha”. 

How can you make a film on education without doing your homework?

This faux pas is not the only problem with Chalk N Duster (CND), which has its heart in the right place but is pulled down by its mediocrity and its blinkered, uni-dimensional vision.

CND is set in a private school where a bunch of sweet people devote their lives to their students. The teachers are all uniformly good – some almost saintly – human beings. No mention is made here of teachers who are lazy, apathetic or deliberately teach badly in school so that children are compelled to hire them as private tutors. No mention is made either of monsters who dangle kids by their pigtails, bang little girls’ heads on walls and victimise students they dislike.

It is not this review’s contention that good teachers like the ones in this film do not exist. They do. Sadly, they are not in a majority. In fact, the outstanding ones – sincere, diligent, intelligent, kind, skilled, effective like Vidya Sawant of Chalk N Duster – are definitely in a minority.

If this was a film only about one particular teacher, a paean to its protagonist would have been acceptable. But CND positions itself as a thesis on the education system, and in its black-and-white worldview, all teachers are flawless, no questions asked, no arguments brooked, full stop.

The story is of Vidya (Shabana Azmi) and her young colleague Jyoti Thakur (Juhi Chawla) at Kantaben High School, Mumbai. Enter: Cruella de Vil. Kamini Gupta (Divya Dutta), the new principal, sets out to make Kantaben sought after among the city’s rich and famous. Towards this end, rather than firing the present employees, she harasses them in the hope that they will choose to quit. The film is about how Jyoti rises in protest when a gross injustice is meted out to Vidya.

Despite the ham-handed writing, Shabana and Juhi lend some emotional resonance to Chalk N Duster with their innate acting abilities and warm on-screen chemistry. Sadly, their endearing younger-woman-older-woman friendship is overshadowed by the film’s all-pervasive ineptitude.

So keen is CND on its no-teacher-can-be-faulted line that it slams Kantaben’s administration when it pulls up a teacher for being just four minutes late, but later hints at her being a habitual late-comer. Is it wrong to demand punctuality from teachers? What does that even mean?

CND is particularly amusing in its stereotyping of Kamini. The evil witch without any redeeming qualities is a single woman. She says “main bhi akeli hoon” in a discussion about a widowed teacher and her son, but with no specifics offered and no child in sight, one is left to assume she is one of those things our films still seem to consider so dreadful in women: a spinster or worse, a divorcee, and a childless one at that. She is the only woman with short hair among the main characters and in one close-up of her head, we see that she even colours it red. I was almost expecting the director to round off the cliché by showing her smoking, drinking and sleeping with her boss ’cos, you know, in the world according to Bollywood that’s what ‘bad girls’ do.

Her singleton status is sought to be emphasised by Vidya and Jyoti’s loving relationships with their supportive spouses, played by the very likeable Girish Karnad and Sameer Soni. How often does a Hindi film show a husband apologising to his wife for a mistake? That too happens here.

Unfortunately for CND, these two couples are not its focal point, India’s education system is, and in that discussion, it suffers from an absolute lack of nuance. Jyoti is right when she speaks of the low salaries teachers are paid in India, but other troublesome questions are left out. How, for instance, does it impact the profession when women are encouraged to be teachers not because of their own inclinations but because “yeh ladkiyon ke liye sabse acchha profession hai (it’s the best profession for girls)” since teachers’ timings and holidays coincide with their children’s timings and holidays, and they tend to be back home before their husbands? Do most men who like teaching veer towards universities because of the better pay, considering that they are expected to be their family’s primary, if not sole, breadwinners? Does this not deprive schools of many able men who might otherwise have opted to be schoolteachers?

Too much else is wrong – silly, actually – with Chalk N Duster. Such as that tacky, awkwardly choreographed song BODMAS. Jackie Shroff hamming the part of a rival school owner is a poor caricature of himself. The bright spark in the supporting cast is the immensely dignified Zarina Wahab as Kantaben’s ousted principal Shastri. The casteist stereotyping intrinsic to the choice of surnames for the two principals is inescapable though.

It is a mark of Bollywood’s extreme gender bias that the likes of Shabana and Juhi must, more often than not, compromise on quality if they wish to play heroines. These remarkable women deserve better than this clumsy, even if well-meaning, film. So does the teaching profession.

Rating (out of five): **

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

This review has also been published on firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/chalk-n-duster-review-the-endearing-juhi-shabana-relationship-is-overshadowed-by-the-films-flaws-2585898.html

Photographs and trailers courtesy: Sony Pictures India

Trailer 1: https://youtu.be/FtcubOnXgZk

Trailer 2: https://youtu.be/p9TGagd542Y