REVIEW 549: FIRANGI

Release date:	December 1, 2017
Director:	Rajiev Dhingra
Cast: Language:	Kapil Sharma, Edward Sonnenblick, Monica Gill, Ishita Dutta, Kumud Mishra, Rajesh Sharma, Inaamulhaq, Aanjjan Srivastav, Narrator: Amitabh Bachchan      Hindi

                                                                                                                     

In a small village in 1920s Punjab, a youth called Mangat Ram (Kapil Sharma) meets a pretty young woman called Sargi (Ishita Dutta), when he comes visiting for a friend’s wedding. Manga, as he is known to everyone in his own home village, is a good-hearted chap, hard-working but unemployed. The two, of course, fall in love. Manga’s search for a job finally ends when a British government official, Mark Daniels (Edward Sonnenblick), hires him as his Man Friday.

While Manga and Sargi negotiate the tricky terrain involved in a romance in a conservative society, elsewhere in the storyline the ruler of the region, Raja Indeevar Singh (Kumud Mishra), is plotting with Daniels to take over Sargi’s village to start a liquor factory. As it happens, Daniels has taken a shine to the king’s good-looking Oxford-educated daughter Shyamali (Monica Gill). India is in the grip of Gandhiji’s call to boycott British goods, and some of the local people led by the Gandhian village elder Lalaji (Aanjjan Srivastav) have thrown themselves into the movement. Manga, meanwhile, has become fond of Daniels, which has driven him to believe that not all Brits are bad. Will he be proved wrong? Will he save his lover’s village by bringing Daniels over to their side, or will his simplicity give way to wiliness in a battle with the powers that be?

The period setting and theme of Firangi bring to mind Ashutosh Gowariker’s Lagaan which again featured poor villagers taking on the might of the Empire through a clash with a single cog in its wheel. The similarities end there. Lagaan was not flawless, but it was brilliant in the way it etched out every single character on Bhuvan’s cricket team in delightful detail, making each of them memorable. Firangi’s uni-dimensional villagers merge one into the other and would have been indistinguishable from each other if it were not for the presence of several gifted and well-known character artistes among them, including Rajesh Sharma as Sargi’s father and Inaamulhaq as Manga’s buddy.

Besides, this is a film of broad brushstrokes and simplistic characterisations, as it ranges a bad rich man and a bad gora against sweet, golden-hearted, poor Indians. It was perhaps foolish to expect nuance from a cinematic venture that chose as its title a disparaging Hindi word for “foreigner”. The production quality of Firangi too is average. And at 160 minutes, it is also just too long for a film with such little depth.

This is not to say that it is a complete write-off. It is not. The cast is pleasant, it has a catchy soundtrack composed by Jatinder Shah, and even when it is indulging in clichés, it does not scream exaggerations at us. Daniels, for instance, is a one-tone villain, yet not of the snarling, fang-baring variety that 1970s-80s Bollywood favoured.

Kapil Sharma, whose claim to fame is his stupendous success as a Hindi television comedian, has been cast to break the mould here – Manga is not a comical character although he is occasionally funny. Sharma is the producer of Firangi, so going against type is obviously a calculated career decision on his part, and not an entirely unwise one at that. He has a naturally likeable personality and is fair enough in the role of a rural simpleton. Ishita Dutta is pretty, Monica Gill is strikingly attractive, and both leave an impression.

Gill’s Shyamali, in fact, is the only character in Firangi with some convention-defying heft in this otherwise paper-thin film.

Edward Sonnenblick playing the evil firangi of the title is the only one in the cast who seems not to even try to rise above the ordinary script. He hams his way through the entire film.

The closing passages of Firangi are completely predictable, except for one that throws up a surprise appearance by a person who contemporary India sorely needs as we are being torn apart by divisive forces. In that scene – naïve yet somehow appealing in its artlessness – writer-director Rajiev Dhingra pulls out the Bharat Mata Ki Jai slogan and reminds us that it was not always the disturbing weapon it has become in the hands of today’s nationalists.

Clearly Dhingra has his heart in the right place. What he also needed to have in place was substantive writing.

Rating (out of five stars): *

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	160 minutes

This review was also published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/firangi-movie-review-kapil-sharma-is-fair-enough-in-a-paper-thin-film-4237103.html

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

REVIEW 548: AJJI

Release date:	November 24, 2017
Director:	Devashish Makhija
Cast: Language:	Sushama Deshpande, Smita Tambe, Sharvani Suryavanshi, Sadiya Siddiqui, Rasika Agashe, Sudhir Pandey, Srikant Mohan Yadav, Vikas Kumar, Abhishek Banerjee    Hindi

                                                                                                                   

In one of this film’s most poignant scenes, the 10-year-old rape survivor Manda Kadam asks her grandmother if her bleeding means she has “grown up”. The old lady is momentarily thrown off by the question, then remembers that these are the terms in which she had discussed the onset of puberty with her granddaughter. “Is this how it starts for every girl?” the little one asks.

This exchange underlines the tragedy of the rape of one so young. It is possible that the girl might forever equate the pain of gruesome violation with womanhood and with the natural pain of menstruation. This disturbing realisation also underlines a larger point emerging from writer-director Devashish Makhija’s Ajji, co-written by Mirat Trivedi. As much as Ajji is about a woman out to punish the well-connected man who brutalised her grandchild, it is also about the everydayness of sexual assault in the grubby back alleys of an urban space, where women and girls are attacked with such confidence by men whose shield is the poverty of their victims, that such violence could well end up being viewed by them as an intrinsic part of being a woman.

The latter is a point well made, and one that ideally should have been the overriding theme of Ajji. Not that rape happens only in poorer quarters, but the vulnerabilities of women from different social groups differ. Unfortunately, building a full-length film around this idea and around how real rather than fictional women react in such situations would require a greater investment of thought and imagination than vengeance does.

Rape revenge sagas like Ajji mirror casual drawing-room conversations about how we must kill or castrate rapists without a trial, and silence feminists who disagree. Like such films, such conversations too are rarely about what real survivors do, want or need. They are usually about the people around these women (cases in point: Ajji, Mom, Kaabil), or about society’s fantasy of the rape victim, 1988’s Dimple Kapadia-starrer Zakhmi Aurat being a prime example.

Except in rare instances like last year’s Pink, Hindi cinema would rather not bother with credible portrayals of assault survivors, because women who weep at home but soldier on with life and/or go to court despite their fears are boring, I guess, in comparison with avenging Durgas or our collective illusion about the woman we now call Nirbhaya (The Fearless One).

Ajji, then, is a mixed bag of goods. The film begins with grandma/Ajji (played by Sushama Deshpande) and the sex worker Leela (Sadiya Siddiqui) searching for Manda (Sharvani Suryavanshi) in their squalid slum that is a stone’s throw from a red light area. They find her in a garbage heap and soon discover that her rapist is a local pervert called Dhavle (Abhishek Banerjee), the son of a senior politician. Not unexpectedly, the investigating policeman (Vikas Kumar) is on Dhavle Senior’s payrolls.

The story is moving and telling as it establishes the sense of helplessness in Manda’s family and Ajji’s relationship with Manda. The cop’s casual callousness, the disregard for due process because of the Kadams’ dire circumstances and the parents’ self-preservation instincts are believable and well done.

It is chilling, to say the least, to watch a male cop interrogate and physically examine a female rape victim, a minor to boot, and bring in a male doctor to do a vaginal exam. Those passages are designed to fill a viewer with disgust, anger and a shared pain. I could barely breath as I watched them. DoP Jishnu Bhattacharjee is careful not to be voyeuristic in his gaze on Manda’s body here, and Makhija handles the scenes with sensitivity.

The film goes down a well-worn, stereotypical path though when it acquaints us with Dhavle Junior and deals with Ajji’s quest for revenge. The rapist is not written with any depth, and Ajji’s plan is foolhardy to the point of being silly. Each time she is in her home, the film becomes relatable, each time she steps out to work towards her goal, Ajji acquires a slightly bizarre, noir-ish air. More than empathy with Manda, it gradually becomes about a fascination with this arthritic and aged woman who is as unlikely a vigilante as the sightless hero in Kaabil.

In any case, for a film that clearly aspires to be realistic, the stylised cinematography becomes a diversion after a while. Half the impact of a scene in which Ajji watches Dhavle Junior having sex with a mannequin, for instance, is lost because it becomes too much about how that scene has been shot rather than what is going on. This is not to say that the frames are unattractive, but that these particular framing choices may have worked in another kind of project, but here, in a film that desperately needed to focus on its soul, they are distracting. Equally distracting is the fact that no human beings are to be seen in the slum in which Ajji lives.

Besides, there is a weirdness to the manner in which Ajji stalks Dhavle. Clearly she is not merely tracking his schedule. Clearly staying on to see him achieve an orgasm on a dummy did not help her decide when and where to confront him. The point being made seems to be that she is trying to build up enough revulsion for him within herself, to give her the strength for that final act. Why? Was what he did to Manda not hateful and repulsive enough?

If the answer to that is a yes, then we have to consider whether these scenes were featured simply for effect.

Devashish Makhija, who earlier made the feature film Oonga, earned the spotlight just last year when Taandav, his interesting short featuring Manoj Bajpayee, went viral on Youtube. Ajji and Manda’s relationship, Sushama Deshpande’s striking face and screen presence, and young Sharvani Suryavanshi’s natural acting are no doubt worthy of a full-fledged film. Ajji, as it stands now though, is well begun but just half done.   

Rating (out of five stars): **1/4

CBFC Rating (India):	A
Running time:	103 minutes

This review was also published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/ajji-movie-review-moving-till-it-descends-into-the-cliches-of-the-rape-revenge-genre-4225821.html

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

REVIEW 547: KADVI HAWA

Release date:	November 24, 2017
Director:	Nila Madhab Panda
Cast: Language:	Sanjay Mishra, Ranvir Shorey, Tillottama Shome, Bhupesh Singh, Ekta Sawant Hindi

                                                                                                                   

How do you teach a child living in a drought-ridden region the meaning of the word monsoon? An amusing early classroom scene in Kadvi Hawa, in which a teacher asks his students to name the four seasons, encapsulates everything that this film sets out to do: give us reason to think, even while unexpectedly entertaining us in a grim setting.

There are no easy answers in Kadvi Hawa (Bitter Wind, though the filmmaker translates it as Dark Wind). In fact, there are no answers at all. Writer-director Nila Madhab Panda’s latest work, on a poor family in a drought-stricken north Indian village, is filled with questions that strike at the heart of our understanding of humanity.

It is a story of what climate change does – and will do – to our species. It is more than that too: a portrait of desperation, for one. If a victim of extreme poverty, government apathy, the criminal foolishness of generations of human beings and other back-breaking circumstances, were to harm others in his situation to save his own skin, would you condemn him or sympathise? Is there such a thing as a right reaction here?

It has been a few days since I watched this film and I am still grappling with that discussion in my head, as I have for years since I read Viktor E. Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, a troubling account of the author’s time in concentration camps during World War II – troubling not only for the staggering scale of Nazi cruelty described in its pages, but also because of Frankl’s frank narration of the survival tactics used by some inmates. 

In a different time and place, Kadvi Hawa examines the same harsh truths, in a world that feels more comfortable with itself if it can view victims of wrongdoing as repositories of unshakeable virtue.

Kadvi Hawa revolves around a blind old man called Hedu (played by Sanjay Mishra) who is worried that his son Mukund (Bhupesh Singh), an impoverished farmer, will commit suicide as he grapples with crop failure and an unrepaid loan. Mukund now sustains the family by doing odd jobs that bring in meagre earnings. His wife Parvati (Tillottama Shome) works from morning till night to keep the house running. They have two children: their schoolgoing daughter Kuhu (Ekta Sawant) and their baby Pihu.

Hedu’s fears are heightened by the arrival of the local bank’s loan recovery agent Gunu (Ranvir Shorey), who has a reputation for driving at least a couple of people to suicide at each of his postings.

Already, there are those in the vicinity who have taken their own lives. In this scenario, where nature’s wrath spares no one, unexpected alliances emerge.

When things go wrong, we all want someone – a person or two, an institution perhaps – to blame. Kadvi Hawa offers no easy scapegoats, no black-and-white rationalisations, but a challenging, absorbing realm of grays. This is an unrelenting film where even when humour rears its head, it does so to make a poignant point. Ramanuj Dutta’s cinematography underlines the starkness of the landscape, delivering Hedu’s land to us in all its blandness, as the dustbowl that it is.

The acting – by the primary cast and satellite artistes – is uniformly solid. And the two leads, Mishra and Shorey, deliver towering performances that might make you want to erase from memory some of the more high-profile commercial films they have worked on in Bollywood.

Although climate change is the overriding theme, writer Nitin Dixit (who is credited for the story, screenplay and dialogues, with Panda himself named as a co-writer of the story) finds space here to explore relationships that blossom in misery. There is such sweetness to Hedu’s bond with Pihu, for instance. And in their home, where tension runs high but fights are few and low-key, we sense a numbness camouflaging the despair the adults feel.

Kadvi Hawa could perhaps be seen as a morality tale, but it does not overtly preach. Although its climax walks a fine line on the subject of natural retribution that could be questionable in this superstitious nation, the film’s victory lies in the fact that as the credits roll, we are forced to introspect because the storyteller give us no one in particular to hate.

Nila Madhab Panda’s calling card so far has been his multiple-award-winning 2011 venture I Am Kalam, a sunny tale of a bright kid who is desperate for an education. Kadvi Hawa is a complete break from that film’s tone, but equally compelling.

Reciting a poem he has written on pollution for this one, Gulzar’s voiceover runs over the titles in the end. “…ye zameen darti hai ab insaanon se,” he tells us. This land now fears humans. Not governments, not politicians or industrialists alone, but humans as a whole. Kadvi Hawa is a bitter pill to swallow, and one that is designed to compel us to look within.

Rating (out of five stars): ***1/2

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	95 minutes

This review was also published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/bollywood/kadvi-hawa-movie-review-sanjay-mishra-ranvir-shorey-excel-in-this-nuanced-take-on-climate-change-4225365.html

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