REVIEW 352: SHAANDAAR

Release date:	October 22, 2015
Director:	Vikas Bahl
Cast: Language:	Alia Bhatt, Shahid Kapoor, Pankaj Kapur, Sushma Seth, Sanah Kapoor, Sanjay Kapoor, Vikas Verma Hindi

The road to cinematic boredom is paved with grand intentions.

There are  moments in Shaandaar when you can almost imagine what writer-director Vikas Bahl was hoping to achieve during the conceptualisation of this project. Like those scenes in which Jagjinder Joginder (Shahid Kapoor) and Alia Arora (Alia Bhatt) read each other’s dreams. Or when Shahid, Alia, Pankaj Kapur, Vikas Verma and debutant Sanah Kapoor join forces for an argument via the song Senti wali mental – the sets are delicious, the choreography is imaginative, the music is fun and the lyrics sparkle with each character’s convictions.

This then is what the film could have been: an unusual blend of Wes Anderson’s whimsy, Baz Luhrmann’s over-the-top, luxurious fantasia and Manmohan Desai’s emotion, zest and verve.

Sadly, Shaandaar works only in bits and pieces. It has its heart in the right place as is evident from the messages it tries to convey – about stereotypical definitions of beauty, adoption (some well-intentioned misfiring there), children making their own life choices, the superficiality of the happiness money can buy, and the pursuit of both happiness and wealth. It is also sporadically funny. The rest seems lost somewhere in the recesses of Vikas and his co-writers Anvita Dutt and Chaitally Parmar’s minds, like an inside joke floating around perhaps among those clouds that inhabit Alia’s and Jagjinder’s dreams in the story.

It breaks the heart to say this since Vikas directed last year’s best Bollywood film, Queen, which he co-wrote with Anvita, Chaitally, Parveez Shaikh and actress Kangna Ranaut herself. Queen was brilliant. Shaandaar, on the other hand, struggles from the word go.

The story is set in a castle in the English countryside where two wealthy Indian families gather for a destination wedding. The Punjabi Aroras’ overweight daughter Isha (Sanah) is set to marry the Sindhi body-flaunting gym enthusiast Robin Fandwani (Vikas). She is a nice girl who loves her dad (Pankaj), her adopted sister Alia and good food. He is an egotistical, protein-shake-swilling twit who loves himself. Their union is being pushed primarily by the Arora family’s matriarch, Isha’s grandmother (Sushma Seth), to save her clan from bankruptcy. In the run-up to D-day, Alia gets romantically involved with Jagjinder who is their wedding planner.

Going by standard practice in mainstream Bollywood, you might assume that the film revolves mainly around Alia and Shahid’s characters. It does not. There are many sub-stories within this story, and that’s the first step at which Shaandaar falters. Ensemble scripts require a great deal of directorial and writing skill to keep us equally involved with all the characters even as the spotlight continuously shifts from one to the other. Shaandaar cannot  pull that off. Each time it focuses on Alia and Jagjinder, Isha recedes into the background; each time it moves to Isha and Robin, the other two seem to fade away; and so on. The result is an erratic, bumpy narrative.

The occasional, genuinely comedic portions are pulled down by laboured efforts to be cool and humourous elsewhere. The Sindhis in the film for instance – gold-swathed, money-obsessed loud mouths – are caricatures, yet not unabashedly over-done enough to be funny. Karan Johar’s cameo is contrived (KJo leering at a male star is a tired joke that really really needs to be retired). And what were those panties doing on Alia’s plate? No one tells us so it’s fair to assume that that lingerie’s only purpose was to contribute an intriguing element to the film’s trailer.

In such a scenario, it’s hard to analyse the acting. The cast is talented, but there are no stand-out performances. Since Shahid delivered a career best in Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider just last year, this is proof – if any was needed – that no actor is better than the written material at hand. At a couple of places, it even seems as though Alia – usually a sparkler – loses interest in the film.

Still, let it be placed on the record that Sushma Seth looks regal, and Vikas Verma and Sanah are promising. I enjoyed Vikas’ dancing in Senti wali mental and his willingness to make a fool of himself on screen because that was a requirement of the role. Sanah – Shahid’s half sister – has a warm, likeable personality and she holds her own in the presence of established stars.

Let it also be placed on the record that everything and everyone in Shaandaar looks pretty.

That’s it. Team Shaandaar is clearly aiming at a certain quirkiness that it fails to achieve for the most part. In fact, the animated sequences grow tiresome once it becomes clear that the film has more style than substance. The basic plot and other-worldly look suggest a nod to old European fairytales, but Shaandaar doesn’t go all out in that direction either. And the strand about the plus-sized Isha’s self-esteem, well meaning though it is, is put in the shade by Sharat Katariya’s consistently heart-warming film Dum Laga Ke Haisha that was released early this year.

There was a smoothness to Queen that indicated great teamwork. Shaandaar, on the other hand, feels like patchwork. Take that scene in which a gay man comes out of the closet before his relatives. It leads to a sweetly amusing response from the family that is promptly followed by a moment of stereotyping in which he aims a gun at someone with the limpest wrist ever seen in Bollywood. It’s as though two separate mindsets were operating within that idea.

Well, never mind. I loved Queen so much that I plan to pretend to myself that Shaandaar never happened. Until your next film then, Vikas…

Rating (out of five): *1/2

CBFC Rating (India):	U/A
Running time:	144 minutes

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

PRIYANKA CHOPRA IN QUANTICO, COURT AT THE OSCARS / COLUMN PUBLISHED IN THE HINDU BUSINESSLINE

IT MATTERS, NASEERSAAB

“I don’t know why we hanker after this Oscar business,” says Naseeruddin Shah. Yes, let us not “hanker”, but let us not be dismissive of a global stage either

By Anna MM Vetticad

Two important — seemingly unrelated — events occurred on the Indian entertainment scene in the past month. First, the National Award-winning Marathi film Court was selected as India’s entry for the race to the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar next year. And Quantico — the American serial that marks Bollywood superstar Priyanka Chopra’s international TV debut — finally premiered in the US and then India, following a several-months-long publicity blitzkrieg in both countries.

One involves a cinematic work, the other a teleshow. One an annual occurrence, the other on an unprecedented scale.

What is the connection, you ask?

There is one. It is the question that surfaces each year around the time India, like most other countries, chooses its Oscar entry. And that question is: why do we care?

This year it came from one of India’s most respected actors. When asked about Court’s chances at the Oscars, Naseeruddin Shah reportedly said: “I don’t really care about the Oscars. Court is one of the finest films and in fact the best film to have released in recent times. I don’t know why we hanker after this Oscar business… I think it should be enough for makers of Court that the film has been liked and much appreciated in our own country and that is what matters.”

As Uriah Heep might have said, I would like to ’umbly disagree with Naseersaab.

Acceptance from your primary audience is obviously important, but unless an artiste chooses to limit herself, why should anything be “enough”? Wider reach matters. A global stage matters. It matters not just to individuals, but also to societies as a whole, not just because a larger audience means more money, but because it translates into several long-term benefits.

Film artistes are influential due to the reach of cinema. And so, every time an Indian film artiste speaks on a platform in another country, she has the opportunity to demystify India just that little bit abroad. Every time an Indian star performs in an overseas production that is worthy of her stature at home, she could endear India just that little bit more to people of other nations.

“Worthy” is crucial here. The idea is not to be a token brown-skinned prop in an inconsequential role or to play a part in pigeonholing an entire race. I remember Anil Kapoor telling me that between Slumdog Millionaire and the TV series 24, he turned down several scripts requiring him to play a stereotypical, caricaturish Indian. Last year, Chopra told me she absolutely would not accept a role abroad that would “cater to the stereotype of what Indians are like”.

Over the years, Team Slumdog, Anil on 24, Shashi Kapoor and Irrfan Khan in their multiple ventures abroad (not counting Khan’s embarrassingly marginal appearance in The Amazing Spider-man 2, Om Puri in East Is East and Nimrat Kaur in Homeland, among others — sometimes playing Indians, sometimes not — have served to unobtrusively remind some of the most powerful countries and moneyed audiences that Indians are not ETs. You know, like Apu from The Simpsons?

Complementing these artistes’ work on the global stage are those whose internationally acclaimed home-grown creations have taken Indian culture abroad, from Satyajit Ray, Adoor Gopalakrishnan and Mira Nair to youngsters like director Neeraj Ghaywan, whose Masaan won two awards at 2015’s Cannes Film Festival, and Chaitanya Tamhane, whose Court earned two trophies at Venice 2014. India needs more of them, familiarising foreigners with who we are in ways that a career diplomat would find hard to achieve.

The obvious pay-offs are enhanced bank balances and exposure for Indian artistes. Less obvious is another effect: the potential of a country’s cinema to make the culture of that country attractive to the world. US embassies and businesses — from clothing chains to pizza joints and fried chicken — owe much to Hollywood, which has been America’s most effective brand ambassador across the globe.

This is why it is important for India’s film industries not to have a frog-in-the-well attitude, but to work hard towards improving their international distribution and marketing. As long as it is done with dignity, there is no shame in promoting a beautiful film like Court at the Oscars. After all, a win at the world’s most-watched film awards function is every film-marketing professional’s dream.

Besides, you can’t put a price tag on soft diplomacy.

Could there be a more effective effort at de-exoticising India in American minds than Aishwarya Rai responding to this question from talk-show host David Letterman in 2005: “Do you live with your parents? … Is that common in India for older children to live with their parents?” Sweetly, yet with a knife-like thrust, Rai replied: “It’s fine to live with your parents, because it’s also common in India that we don’t have to take appointments with our parents to meet for dinner.”

Today, as sections of the Western media use India’s remarkable anti-rape movement to tar the entire country with one brush, there are few better illustrations of our social complexities than an Indian woman — Chopra — telling CNN.com in the run-up to Quantico: “My Dad always told me, ‘As a girl, you should not be someone who tries to fit into a glass slipper. You should shatter the glass ceiling,’ and that’s what I’m trying to do.”

So please, let us not “hanker” after global recognition, but in the global village that we inhabit, why “should” any space be considered “enough”?

(Anna MM Vetticad is the author of The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic. Twitter: @annavetticad)

(This column was first published in The Hindu Businessline newspaper on October 10, 2015)

Original link: 

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/watch/it-matters-naseersaab/article7742604.ece

Photo caption: (From top) Priyanka Chopra in Quantico; and a poster of Court

Photographs courtesy: 

(1) Quantico: https://www.facebook.com/QuanticoABC/ 

(2) Court: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Court_(film)

Note: These photographs were not sourced from The Hindu Businessline 

Previous instalment of Film Fatale: “Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics”

http://annavetticadgoes2themovies.blogspot.in/2015/09/govt-propaganda-against-ftii-students.html

REVIEW 351: PYAAR KA PUNCHNAMA 2

Release date:	October 16, 2015
Director:	Luv Ranjan
Cast: Language:	Kartik Aaryan, Nushrat Bharucha, Sonalli Sehgall, Ishita Sharma, Omkar Kapoor, Sunny Nijjar Hindi

If it wasn’t trying to cash in on the success of the first film, Pyaar Ka Punchnama 2 could have been called All Women Are Bitches, All Men Think With Their Penises.

The template is exactly the same as PKP1: three young men who are flatmates and best buddies get romantically involved with women who are manipulative witches from the word go. The men are unhappy almost from the start of these relationships but are too stupid to see it (actually, the film portrays it as innocence and natural goodness, not stupidity). Their lives go downhill as the women get meaner by the day, until the men finally finally put them in their place and escape.

So determined is director Luv Ranjan to stick to the prototype that gave him a sleeper hit in 2011, that he retains four out of the six members of PKP1’s lead cast. The tall strapping curly-haired model Raayo S. Bakhirta has been replaced with another tall strapping curly-haired model type (Sunny Nijjar). The song Bandh gaya patta, dekho bann gaya kutta (The leash has been tied / Look, he’s become a dog) is also repeated here. And actor Kartik Aaryan, who delivered a many-minutes-long woman-bashing monologue in Part 1, is given a similar tirade of a similar length in Part 2 too. This is unapologetically repetitive and unoriginal fare.

Like PKP1, PKP2 too is an all-out anti-women hate fest pretending to be a comedy. It also unwittingly degrades men – so subtly that the fellows laughing their guts out in the hall where I watched the film did not seem to get it. It’s possible the writers and director haven’t got it either.

As with PKP1, the women in PKP2 too are all nasty, rotten creatures. If they’re not nagging and lying, acting spoilt or downright unpleasant, they are cheating on their boyfriends or mooching off them, and a male character actually explains that the men still tolerate them because of that one thing they have to offer. Err, will someone tell him he could get that one thing with no strings attached by paying for the services of a sex worker? He seems to know nothing of this.

PKP2’s three male leads are in relationships bereft of a single redeeming feature – no warmth, no understanding, no friendship, yet they persist in permitting their girlfriends to treat them like turds. It appears to be this film’s contention that men are so lacking in self-respect, so foolish and so enslaved by their crotches that they will swallow insults, infidelity and lack of integrity, just so long as there is sex at the end of the tunnel.

The film’s unrealistic screenplay lacks balance, as was the case with PKP1. It is telling that between these two films, Luv Ranjan went all-out feminist with Akaash Vani, a film on a subject that’s anathema to most people: marital rape. While dealing with a women’s rights issue, he gave us a ton of good guys as a counterpoint to one bad man. He claimed in a recent interview to The Indian Express that PKP1 happened because “I wanted to do a film against love…I wanted to show how in love the whole concept of relationship can become troublesome”. How come a film that’s supposedly “against love” turned out to be against women only?

Tut tut, the director thinks those who call him a misogynist are too touchy. “Our metropolitan societies have become hypersensitive and we can’t take a joke,” he says. Oh puhlease, Mr Ranjan, at least be honest about the fact that these two films are a transparent bid to cash in on the prevailing misogyny among Hindi cinema’s male-dominated audience. If that were not the case, what are the chances that you will make PKP3 with gender roles swapped, an equal measure of unbridled male-bashing and not even one halfway decent man anywhere in the picture? For the record, such a concept is equally contemptible.

Since PKP2 is almost a carbon copy of PKP1, what’s right with it is exactly what was right with the first film: the cast has potential and the production values are slick. Since the team has rolled out pretty much the same film again, I’m not bothering to repeat all the points I made in 2011: do read the review I wrote back then (link).

Here’s an additional point: women often turn on their own to earn brownie points with men in this patriarchal world, but guys, in a world where you hold all the aces, can you be so foolish as to celebrate a film that unwittingly portrays you too so poorly? Do you agree with PKP2’s contention that your lives revolve entirely around the demands of your nether regions?

Your call.

Rating (out of five): 1/2

CBFC Rating (India):	U/A
Running time:	136 minutes

Photograph courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/PKP2Official