REVIEW 41: STANLEY KA DABBA

Release date:	May 13, 2011
Director:	Amole Gupte
Cast:	Partho, Amole Gupte, Numaan Sheikh, Abhishek Reddy, Divya Dutta, Divya Jagdale, Rahul Singh

Stanley is as loveable as a child can be. He’s got a sense of humour, he’s bright without being precocious, he fibs without malice when he’s in trouble or when a concerned teacher asks why his face is covered with bruises, and he’d rather fill his empty stomach with litres of water from the cooler than admit to his classmates why he can’t afford to bring a tiffin box to school.

And yet, this student of Class IV in Holy Family High School, Mumbai, earns the wrath of his Hindi teacher. The old man thinks nothing of polishing off food from his colleagues and students at lunch time, but picks on Stanley for not bringing a dabba from home. When the irritated boys gang up and trick him out of a chance to swipe their khana but insist on sharing it with Stanley, this oily gent vents his frustration on Stan. Why would a grown man do this to a child?

Stanley ka Dabba asks precisely the question that should be asked in numerous schools across our country where there are just too many adults who forget to treat children like children. And what better way to ask that question than through a film starring child actors who seem to have forgotten the camera in their midst?

Well, they probably did forget. Because writer-director Amole Gupte did not tell the students of Mumbai’s Holy Family that he was making a film. When he started a year-and-a-half’s workshop with them, even he wasn’t sure what the result would be. So he told the kids: the camera you see is just meant as a reminder that you are part of an acting workshop. The dialogues were improvised, the light was natural, the shooting was done on an unobtrusive Canon EOS 7D still camera. And in the lead role of Stanley he cast a guileless, artless little fellow called Partho who seems like he was born into the part. The result: performances so natural that you’ll come away from the film wondering if it was a film at all. For that, more than anything else, Stanley ka Dabba is worth your time.

What bothers me about this film though is the somewhat simplistic, rose-tinted representation of children. In any regular school anywhere in the world, a child with a bruised face, mysterious family background and no tiffin to share with his classmates, would be the target of school bullies. I’m willing to swallow the fact that in this particular school, in this particular class, more children are favourably inclined towards this particular boy because he is talented and such a ray of sunshine. But we all know that gifted, popular kids attract envy in at least some measure. We also know that not every youngster is gentle with others who are less privileged. Yet neither Stanley’s murky home situation nor his remarkable talents attract any nasty classmates. Not one kid snubs him for not bringing food from home. And all the children are uniformly good. I’m afraid that doesn’t seem plausible, especially in a film that otherwise feels so realistic and real.

As I watched Stanley ka Dabba, it seemed to me that in a bid to show us the innocence and goodness in children, and their bonding when faced with an inconsiderate adult, Amole Gupte had completely wished away the real world where loving, thoughtful, sensitive kids co-exist with so many who are not; where bullies and peer pressure are as much a reality as child-like kindness. At the risk of being slaughtered by Taare Zameen Par acolytes, I must point out that this I-must-prove-my-point-at-any-cost approach is the one problem I had with TZP too. Gupte was the writer and creative director of that film, and was originally meant to direct it till Aamir Khan took over the job. In TZP, in order to convince us about the failure of adults to notice the struggles of that unhappy dyslexic boy, the film portrayed EVERY SINGLE ADULT ever encountered by Darsheel Safary’s Ishaan Awasthi as either cruel or competitive or at best, indifferent, UNTIL a major Bollywood superstar turned up as his salvation. Not as bothersome, yet worth mentioning here is the fact that towards the end of Stanley ka Dabba, the film seems to be deliberately stretching itself, almost as if trying to build up a thriller-like suspense over the truth about Stanley’s background. Completely unnecessary since the charm of the film until then is the easy, unforced storytelling style.

But still, my reservations about Stanley ka Dabba don’t take away from the fact that it’s a major  step forward in an otherwise dreary children’s film scenario in Bollywood. 2011 has been a relatively good year for children in Hindi films. Disney’s Zokkomon may have been too juvenile for its own good, but it was still a pleasant reminder that Darsheel Safary is a talent to reckon with. Before that, Bheja Fry director Sagar Ballary served us Kaccha Limboo that was filled with achingly natural performances. And now comes Stanley, a beautiful little boy who will, I suspect, touch your hearts like he did mine despite the incompleteness of his story.

Gupte’s revolutionary approach to making a film with children should make our exploitative, un-vigilant system sit up and take notice: he says he conducted his workshop every Saturday, in four-hour sessions in the morning with two recesses; that the children didn’t miss a single day of school for the film. Clearly, he’s also brilliant in the art of just letting children be. The adult actors are perfect for their parts: Gupte himself as the callous teacher, Divya Dutta as the compassionate one that Stanley has a crush on, Divya Jagdale as the unimaginative science Miss, Rahul Singh who looks distractingly handsome as the kind principal in the priestly black cassock ... As for the child actors: Numaan Sheikh and Abhishek Reddy, you are utterly lovely! All the kids who I am not naming in this review, yes every single one of you: you are lovely too!

And what do I say about Gupte’s son, 10-year-old Partho’s screen presence? Watch out Ranveer Singh! Eight years from now, this guy could well be your competition!

Rating (out of five): ***

CBFC Rating:                       U without cuts

Running time:                       92 Minutes

Language:                             Hindi and English

REVIEW 33: ZOKKOMON

Release date:	April 22, 2011
Director:	Satyajit Bhatkal
Cast:	Darsheel Safary, Anupam Kher, Manjari Phadnis

I think I’d like to start by saying that from this day forward, I’ve got my fingers and toes crossed for Darsheel Safary. He is such a natural in front of the camera – no over-acting, no irritating precociousness, just being. I do hope he makes the transition from cute kid to handsome man, and gives us one of those rare instances of a child star growing up to be a significant adult star too. We haven’t had one of those in Hindi films since Urmila Matondkar, have we?

This, of course, is precisely why young Safary – star of Aamir Khan’s Taare Zameen Par – deserves so much better than Zokkomon. The film starts off seeming like a relative of Harry Potter, then takes off in an interesting and unexpected direction as the antithesis of a superhero film, but ultimately sags under the weight of its lacklustre script and lackadaisical direction.

The story goes like this. Safary plays Kunal, an orphan who is plucked out of a boarding school he loves and transported to the town of Jhunjhun Makadstrama where his rich and corrupt uncle Deshraj (Anupam Kher) runs a school in exploitative Dickensian style. Deshraj keeps the local people under his thumb by encouraging their superstitions and blind faith with the help of a dishonest baba. One day Deshraj stages Kunal’s death so that he can inherit the money left to the boy by his late parents. Kunal returns of course, but I won’t say how.

The film is unusual in the sense that Zokkomon is not literally a superhero, but the product of a brilliant scientist’s association with a regular human child. The aim is to show the people of Jhunjhun Makadstrama how science can perform seeming miracles through logical means. A plus point there in favour of the story by Satyajit Bhatkal, Lancy Fernandes and Svati Chakravarty Bhatkal. The casting director of Zokkomon too needs to be complimented for picking a bunch of child actors who are completely not self-conscious before the camera. Their innocence and charm carry the film through although time is spent on developing only one character among them – Kunal.

It’s this slack scripting that pulls the film down, in addition to repeated insertions of dull songs and glaring plot loopholes. At one point, Kunal tells his friend Kittu didi that because of Zokkomon’s appearance in Jhunjhun Makadstrama, the people have begun to shed their “andh vishwaas”; this scene comes just minutes after Kittu shows a painting of Kunal to townsfolk who scurry off in fear after telling her that the kid is now a ghost. Contradiction, no?

The scientist who turns Kunal into Zokkomon is also played by Anupam Kher. The make-up is good but his back story seems fuzzy to me. And though Kher is a fine actor, I couldn’t understand the purpose of casting him  in a double role instead of getting two actors to play those parts. If there was a profound point being made here that good and evil are two sides of the same coin, I’m afraid it was lost on me.

In any case, such profundities and the moral of the story are more likely to be grasped by tweenagers, yet the bulk of the film seems targeted at a much younger audience. The teeny tots in the hall where I watched Zokkomon let out whoops of delight every time Zokkomon went zipping around in the air, and at scenes like the one in which a small-town English teacher writes “teacher goes fartee” on a blackboard when he means “teacher goes for tea”.

So I suppose I’d recommend Zokkomon to children of eight years and below who are likely to be undemanding about the haziness in the film’s plot developments, while enjoying its special effects which are better than what we see in most Indian films. I must, however, state for the record that the caped hero’s exploits in Rakesh Roshan’s Krishh were head and shoulders above Zokkomon although Roshan didn’t have the backing of a global major like Walt Disney Pictures which has produced Zokkomon.

Note for parents: I met a tiny fellow at the multiplex’s coffee counter during the interval. “Are you enjoying Zokkomon?” I asked. He hid his face behind a huge popcorn case and replied, “Mela favoulit film hai.” The kid’s dad rolled his eyes and said: “He’s enjoying himself but I’m not. It’s just the halfway mark and he’s already calling it his favourite. We’ll have to bring him for it again, but I’m certainly not coming a second time. For the next show, his mother can come.” Vishal Bhardwaj showed us with Makdee that it’s possible for Bollywood to make a children’s film that knows its target audience but doesn’t underestimate their intelligence. With animation classics like The Lion King and Aladdin back home in the US, Disney have shown that it’s possible to make a children’s film that kids and parents alike can love. Zokkomon should and could have been much more than a film for just under-eights.

Rating (out of five): **

CBFC Rating:                       U without cuts

Running time:                        109 Minutes

Language:                              Hindi