REVIEW 224: PHATA POSTER NIKHLA HERO

Release date:	September 20, 2013
Director:	Rajkumar Santoshi
Cast: Language:	Shahid Kapoor, Ileana D’Cruz, Padmini Kolhapure, Zakir Hussain, Darshan Zariwala, Saurabh Shukla, Sanjay Mishra, Mukesh Tiwari Hindi

No one farts in this film. There’s not a single joke about faeces or other bodily excretions or secretions. The volume remains relatively low. The characters are not all wearing red pants, purple shirts, green shoes, mustard-framed goggles and pink scarves with yellow polka dots or similar colour combinations. Nor do they rhyme their sentences. But whaddyaknow, Phata Poster Nikhla Hero is still good for a bunch of laughs. Writer-director Rajkumar Santoshi’s latest comedy is not consistently crackling like his 1994 Aamir Khan-Salman Khan-Karisma Kapoor-Raveena Tandon-starrer Andaz Apna Apna. It also holds out a rather muddled message in the end: should children not follow their dreams but do their parents bidding instead?! Yet, in this era of ‘humour’ dominated by loud crudeness, it’s still a breath of fresh air.

PPNH is the story of Vishwas Rao (Shahid Kapoor) who pretends to be a policeman to please his mother Savitri Rao (Padmini Kolhapure), while surreptitiously working towards an acting career. Misunderstandings and melodrama ensue. Along the way they encounter a social worker who is so vigilant about crime that the police nickname her ‘Complaint’ Kajal (Ileana D’Cruz); a failed film writer (Sanjay Mishra); an honest senior cop, Shivanand Khare (Darshan Jariwala); the corrupt Inspector Ghorpade (Zakir Hussain); an evil don, Gundappa Das (Saurabh Shukla); and a faceless international gangster who goes by the name Napoleon.

Santoshi’s screenplay is clever for the most part, extracting laughs without under-estimating the viewer’s IQ. When the film’s pace occasionally dips – and this happens only in the second half – it’s more to do with the direction than the writing. The bow to Deewar’s iconic “mere paas Maa hai” dialogue, for instance, is unforgivably poorly paced. There are also a couple of low-energy scenes post interval, especially that one in which the good people have blinded the bad people in their den and must escape, but run around in confused circles instead.

Pritam’s best tunes for this film (Main rang sharbaton ka and Tu mere agal bagal hai) are well picturised but elsewhere there are too many abruptly inserted songs including the very ordinary Dhating naach featuring Nargis Fakhri in a guest appearance and Mere bina tu, the picturisation of which is too reminiscent of Tu jaane na from the director’s earlier film Ajab Prem ki Ghazab Kahani. One song may seem mild in comparison with the onslaught of sexual harassment in Raanjhanaa, but in a country where so many crimes against women take place because patriarchy believes men can demand sex as a matter of right from women, we could do without these lyrics from Tu mere agal bagal hai: “Khali peeli khali peeli rokne ka nahin / tera peecchha karoon toh tokne ka nahin / Hai tujh pe right mera / tu hai delight mera…”  

These lines are particularly incongruous because of the dialogue preceding the song: when Vishwas Rao’s friend notices that the boy is smitten by Kajal, he warns him, “Yeh Mumbai ki ladki hai. Hehe karke baat karegi par line maarne jaaoge toh tumhare upar doggy chhod degi.” Meaning: Just because a girl is friendly does not mean she’s romantically interested in you. Now that’s a pleasant change from Hindi filmdom’s old message of: when a girl says no, she actually means maybe or yes. Equally important is the fact that the women in this film are not side shows or show pieces or pushovers. Kajal may seem ditsy but she has a mind of her own. And Maa is an autorickshaw driver, which is unusual enough as a choice of profession for Indian women but is particularly noteworthy in a film industry which prefers stay-at-home, full-time roti-serving, bartan-washing, bhagwan-se-bintee-karo-ing moms. Equally uncommon for a Bollywood mother is the way Savitri tells her irresponsible husband that his child cannot be deemed his child merely by virtue of the blood tie.

Some mixed messages there then, but let not this review leave you in any doubt: I had fun watching Phata Poster Nikhla Hero. Shahid is a chameleon in this film, switching from deliberately exaggerated humour to emotional intensity to a spot of mimickry at the drop of a hat. He even gets a scene in which the villains generously pull off his shirt, leaving him in a black vest that gives us a nice view of that trim torso and well-muscled arms. For the record, may I add that if he ever decides to leave Bollywood, I suspect he’d be a helluva pole dancer. In her second Bollywood film, Ileana reveals what Telugu audiences know well already: that she is a versatile actress. Is she the slightly melancholic Shruti of Barfi! or the slightly nutty Kajal of PPNH? Besides, she’s a delicate little beauty, in possession of possibly the largest eyes to haunt the Hindi film screen in decades. To borrow Laurent the Frenchman’s description of Sridevi’s saucer-like eyes in English Vinglish: “like two drops of coffee on a cloud of milk.” The rest of the excellent cast provide able support to these two.

The film’s production design is interesting, more often than not opting for a set-like, stagey look that brings back memories of Ajab Prem... There are, in fact, several nods here to Ajab Prem… and Andaz Apna Apna, the best of them coming in the form of a cleverly crafted guest appearance by Salman Khan who plays himself brilliantly in those couple of minutes. That scene alone is worth the price of a ticket. Despite its weaknesses, so is the rest of Phata Poster Nikhla Hero. It’s funny and goofy, sweet even when it's being silly, a good ol’ clean comedy from Bollywood after a long time.

Rating (out of five): ***

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	2 hours 32 minutes (courtesy pvrcinemas.com)

Photograph courtesy: bollywoodtrade.com

REVIEW 223: GRAND MASTI

Release date:	September 13, 2013
Director:	Indra Kumar
Cast: Language:	Riteish Deshmukh, Vivek Oberoi, Aftab Shivdasani & 6 women whose names I’ve not bothered to find out Hindi

WARNING #1: THIS REVIEW IS FOR ADULTS ONLY:

WARNING #2: LOTS OF SPOILERS AHEAD:

A for arses, B for boobs, C for chooths … That’s the English alphabet according to the three heroes of Grand Masti, except that they don’t even have the guts to say those three words, so “A for” uttered by one of them is followed by shots of an array of female bottoms, “B for” is followed by an array of female chests in skimpy clothing displaying lavish cleavage, and “C for” is followed, not by visuals, but by a hurried add-on comment: “guess you’ve already got the picture.” Okay, so they draw the line at vaginas?

Yeah yeah, I’m uttering the words. Improper, did you say? Then you’ve missed the point I’m trying to make. Here’s the thing: methinks there’s no better indication of our Great Indian Hypocrisy than that a film like Grand Masti, replete with the most unsubtle double entendre I’ve seen and heard in a recent mainstream Hindi film, doesn’t have the guts to actually spell things out in black and white; and though the constant allusion throughout is to the body parts and sexual frustrations of the heroes and heroines, not once is anyone shown actually having sex. Oh no no no, that would be so non-kosher, now wouldn’t it? So completely against Indian culture, no? In The Gospel According To Director Indra Kumar, calling a busty woman “sthan-ing”, not stunning, is okay (FYI non-Hindi-speaking readers, “sthan” is a Hindi word for breasts); constant discussions about milk in her presence are okay; but god forbid that we should be shown anything but bodies covered by bedsheets and quilts to indicate the act of human copulation. See, I said a bad word again! C-o-p-u-l-a-t-i-o-n! Hawww!

As we all know by now, male marital infidelity is a constant source of humour for Hindi films. If a heroine sleeps around, we get a gritty, ‘thinking’, socially conscious film like BA Pass, because of course female promiscuity is no laughing matter for the male-dominated audience. When men sleep around though, what we get are No Entry and Grand Masti. So this is a story of three husbands who decide to get some action when they go off to a college reunion without their wives. There they meet three horny, half-clad women called Rose, Mary and Marlo. Their efforts to get into bed with these three and later to escape the man in their lives in addition to the suspicion of their own wives is what the film is all about.

Subtlety is clearly not Grand Masti’s strength so if it arrives at a joke, then the point is repeated again and again and again and again and again and again until even the densest member of the audience gets it. For instance, it doesn’t take much to guess that the three ladies’ names will be said out loud in precisely that order without the use of “and”. Which Indian parent names their daughter Marlo? No one I’ve ever heard of, but what does it matter when Amar (Riteish Deshmukh), Meet (Viveik Oberoi) and Prem (Aftab Shivdasani) get to say Rose Mary Marlo, Rose Mary Marlo, Rose Mary Marlo ad nauseam through the film. Arrey stupid, you didn’t get it? They mean roz meri maar lo and if you don’t understand what that means then you have an even lower IQ than Indra Kumar expects his audience to have!

Let’s be clear here: I’m not against irreverence. I’m not against being offensive either. Point is, crudeness comes easy, offensiveness for the heck of it comes easy; irreverence, on the other hand, requires imagination and intelligence. One of my favourite American serials running on Indian television right now is Two Broke Girls which is offensive to men, offensive to women, offensive to blacks, whites and Asians, tall people and short people, gay and straight people, fat and thin people, and pretty much every majority or minority group I can think of. The show’s creators Michael Patrick King and Whitney Cummings are constantly pushing the envelope with their humour, but that humour never descends to kindergarten level. Grand Masti never rises above KG though.

And so, while there are a handful of scenes that did make me laugh in spite of myself (I counted five such in 135 minutes), for the most part what the film delivers is a complete lack of IQ: A college boy is castrated by his principal, but later surfaces with a massive bump in the crotch area that we soon discover is filled with air. That part is marked out by a big golden patch on his small, tight shorts. Why? Who knows? A statue gets erections when it sees hot women. Okay, funny. But then it happens a second time. And then one more time. And then another time. Oh, c’mon! Prem’s idea of kinky sex with his wife is to wear something that looks like a rat’s head appended to his penis area. Why? No idea. As it happens, right at that moment there’s a cat in the bedroom who sees red and attacks the rat. Now that cat belongs to Amar’s bhabhi and is called Pussy which – of course! – gives people an excuse to say “bhabhi ki Pussy” several times. In another extended scene involving shadow play, a woman reaching into a large bag and pulling out various things is positioned to look like she’s pulling out all those items from Amar’s “nether yeyya” (pardon the spelling), to borrow a term I picked up when Amy Farrah Fowler in The Big Bang Theory quoted Chaucer’s A Miller’s Tale.

Now let’s come to the film’s rape joke, for after all how can you have a Bollywood comedy without a rape joke? Rape is so funny, na? If the mighty 3 Idiots could have that lengthy balaatkaar speech, if Jab We Met could get Kareena Kapoor and Shahid Kapoor to chuckle about rape, how can we expect anything less of Grand Masti? At least these guys don’t stretch the joke beyond a sentence. At one point in this film, in the exact tone in which he has cracked all the stupid jokes until then, one of the men says: “Balaatkaar se yaad aaya, meri biwi kaha hai?” Why? Because it is okay to speak of rape in jest, I guess? Yes I heard you loud and clear, those of you who think I’m a humourless feminist. Here’s my answer: I love irreverence, I enjoy equitable sexism, I’m not one of the people demanding an end to item songs, all I ask is many more such numbers with shirtless and pantless John Abrahams, Hrithik Roshans and SRKs. Jokes about rape, however, I will never understand. What’s amusing about one of the vilest crimes a human being can commit? Those of you who condone rape jokes, would you also condone jokes about the Jews in Hitler’s concentration camps or the Hindus killed in the Godhra train burning or Sikhs burnt with tyres placed around their necks in the 1984 riots or Muslims hacked to death in Gujarat in 2002? If these acts of cruelty don’t amuse you, could you please explain what’s so amusing about a man forcing his penis into an unwilling woman’s vagina?

Gentlemen who think rape jokes are funny, I’d request you to read this article titled “The Rape Of Men” in the UK’s The Guardian newspaper and then tell me honestly if you will ever again make wisecracks about sexual assault. It’s not so amusing, is it, when it’s not happening to “the other”? As for ladies who are tickled by rape jokes: in the name of your absent self-respect, I’d urge you to find other ways of scoring brownie points with your gentlemen friends and being “one of the boys”. Yes, I’m being judgemental. No apologies.

The difference between Grand Masti and most other sleazy Hindi films of this genre is that this one dehumanises not just its heroines, but its heroes too. The women of GM are never more than a sum of their breasts and buttocks. The men here have their entire beings centred around their penises. Watching this film, I wanted to take a moment to mourn the loss of Indra Kumar, Vivek Oberoi, Riteish Deshmukh and Aftab Shivdasani. Indra Kumar is the man whose film Raja is eternal proof of what a live wire Madhuri Dixit can be in an over-the-top, out-and-out comedy. Given the right material, Riteish is capable of being inexorably funny. Remember Vivek from the pre-Salman-Khan-press-conference days? Remember the buzz around that young actor brimming with potential in Ram Gopal Varma’s Company? And Aftab… my god he was once a Farex baby! Look what life and Bollywood have reduced them to. Grand Masti is a Grand Embarrassment.

Rating (out of five): -10 stars 

CBFC Rating (India):	A
Running time:	2 hours 15 minutes

Photograph courtesy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Masti