REVIEW 783: BULBBUL

Release date:	June 24, 2020
Director:	Anvita Dutt
Cast:	Tripti Dimri, Avinash Tiwary, Paoli Dam, Parambrata Chattopadhyay, Rahul Bose, Ruchi Mahajan, Varun Paras Buddhadev, Vishwanath Chatterjee
Language:	Hindi

I really enjoy the way Anushka Sharma’s mind works. 

I am not referring to this film alone for which of course writer-director Anvita Dutt must first be cited. The mention of Sharma right at the start of this review comes because of a pattern emerging from the choices this talented actor has made in her avatar as a producer in the past half decade. Her debut production, NH10 in 2015, was a feminist crime thriller. Then followed two supernatural flicks, one a romance (Phillauri, 2017), the other a horror movie (Pari, 2018). Just as she is reaping accolades and fending off outraged conservatives for her socio-political crime series Paatal Lok on Amazon Prime, here comes her first feature film to be released directly on a streaming platform. 

Bulbbul combines what appear to be Sharma’s two primary interests – feminism and the paranormal – that earlier came together in the terrifying Pari. Her courageous, non-conformist filmography as a producer is at odds with her off-screen image in recent years of being a supporter of the current right-wing regime.

In Bulbbul, the viewer is transported to the Bengal Presidency in 1881, where child marriages were a norm, and women born or married into aristocratic families were expected – no differently from today – to stay silent about the injustices meted out to them by patriarchy, their caste privilege notwithstanding. 

A sense of foreboding descends on the screen from the very first frame on the wedding day of a little girl (Ruchi Mahajan), and in the palanquin on the way to her marital home, as a kind older boy tells her the story of a murderous, bloodthirsty chudail (female demon). 

Twenty years later, the girl is now a gorgeous but oddly detached young woman (Tripti Dimri) presiding over her mansion while her husband (Rahul Bose) and his twin brother are nowhere to be seen, her elder sister-in-law (Paoli Dam) has been relegated to insignificance and her attractive brother-in-law (Avinash Tiwary) returns after a long absence. 

Director Amar Kaushik had blended humour and the other-world in his Stree in 2018 to turn the tables on men who suppress women in the guise of concern. In a completely different genre, in Bulbbul the conceptualisation of the spirit cocks a snook at anti-feminist propaganda and stereotypes of the man-hating woman. At a very basic level, to me Bulbbul is what Devdas might have been if in a paranormal revisitation of that classic, Paro had turned round and landed a tight slap on the eponymous loser hero’s face.

Dutt is an accomplished lyricist, screenplay and dialogue writer for Hindi films. With Bulbbul she makes her debut as a director. Her writing for this film combines superstition, mythology and history, fantasy, folktale, feminism and fable, to deliver a story drenched in a deep sadness and the blood of women across centuries who have suffered and fought battles so that some of us may today enjoy freedoms that they could not, giving us the strength to fight newer battles against the cruelty that still survives.

The fabulous atmospherics in Bulbbul are a product of Amit Trivedi’s music in collaboration with DoP Siddharth Diwan’s low-lit colour-saturated frames and the production design by Meenal Agarwal in the leading lady’s resplendent house and neighbouring areas. 

Bulbbul does not often venture into bright daylight. Using a palette reminiscent of the lovely Tumbbad (2018), it bathes the screen in shades of red with flashes of gold – the red of the Hindu bride’s clothing and sindoor symbolising the red of a virgin’s blood flowing on her wedding night and onward into a river of silent suffering or rebellion or both. 

The chudail in Bulbbul fits the physical description of the furious female spook of Indian folklore – beautiful, with long hair and feet twisted backwards. Dutt however gives even that convention a neat – and heartbreaking – twist. This mystery woman is not summoned up here to startle the audience in the way traditional horror films do, but instead to set us thinking. (Note: please read this paragraph after watching the film) She is a personification of the rage of the marginalised, and a stark portrait of what the world might be if the oppressed – in this case, women – were to unleash their rage on the oppressor. She reminded me of a conversation I had aeons back with a senior friend who said she hoped I would not become one of “those angry feminists”, to which I remember replying, “But considering all that we are subjected to, should you not be asking why we women are so calm, and why we are not angrier?” (Cautionary note ends) 

For a film that is so thoughtful in its take on gender politics, it is surprising that  Bulbbul  uses a mentally challenged character as one of its metaphors for patriarchy in an India that remains largely ignorant about disabilities of the mind. I also wish the woman-as-goddess trope had not been thrown into the mix, especially since it is articulated by a man in the film. After all, pedestalisation has long been used by patriarchy to deceive women into thinking they are valued, when in fact they are being set up to be pulled down when the system pleases. The film might also have been better served if the character of Bulbbul’s brother-in-law Satya had more detail. 

Of the men in the storyline, the one given most heft by the writing is the doctor (Parambrata Chattopadhyay) who becomes the heroine’s friend. And of her many relationships, the one I found most complex was with her sister-in-law, Binodini – two women united in mutual despair yet playing games with each other for survival. 

Dutt has assembled a solid cast for Bulbbul. Tripti Dimri as the title character lives up to the promise she showed in Laila-Majnu. Her Bulbbul is in a state of constant internal turmoil camouflaged by an enigmatic demeanour, which the young actor conveys almost imperceptibly with the lightest of touches.   

Dimri’s co-star from Laila-Majnu, Avinash Tiwary gets a role here that is not flashy like the one he had in that film or the delightful but underrated Tu Hai Mera Sunday. He too is a picture of understatement. Ruchi Mahajan who plays the child Bulbbul is a dear. My pick of the supporting cast though is the unfailingly good Chattopadhyay. 

Since the film is set in Bengal, it requires a suspension of disbelief to accept characters who are all speaking Hindi. Dutt wisely does not ask her non-Bengali actors to do exaggerated Bengali accents to convince us of their characters’ ethnicity – the milieu is right, the look and styling are on point, thus making it possible for the viewer’s imagination to do the rest of the work. 

Among other joys that it offers then is the fact that Bulbbul is one of those rare contemporary Hindi films to travel beyond the Hindi belt and Punjab to a culture and place that Bollywood does not often visit these days. With its eerie air and mythical, mystical tone, Dutt’s film brings alive a spectre that is not scary in the way the average Hindi film bhoot or daayin is – what is scary are the circumstances that brought this creature to such a pass. 

Rating (out of 5 stars): 3

Gulabo Sitabo is streaming on Netflix.

Running time:

94 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/bulbbul-movie-review-anushka-sharmas-continuing-interest-in-the-paranormal-yields-compelling-results-8519781.html

Poster courtesy: IMDB

REVIEW 782: GULABO SITABO

Release date:	June 12, 2020
Director:	Shoojit Sircar
Cast:	Farrukh Jafar, Amitabh Bachchan, Ayushmann Khurrana, Srishti Shrivastava, Ujali Raj, Ananya Dwivedi, Brijendra Kala, Vijay Raaz, Naushad (the puppeteer)
Language:	Hindi

In the Gulabo-Sitabo tradition of theatre in Uttar Pradesh, my arts encyclopedia tells me, these two ladies’ names are bestowed on glove puppets: Sitabo is a man’s exhausted and overworked spouse, Gulabo is his fresh-as-dew lover. 

In director Shoojit Sircar’s Gulabo Sitabo, written by Juhi Chaturvedi, the duo can be viewed either as a metaphor for Lucknow in which the story is set, or as an allusion to its warring leading men. 

Amitabh Bachchan plays Mirza here, a cantankerous, greedy septuagenarian landlord who is constantly at odds with the tenants residing in his haveli. Ayushmann Khurrana is Baankey, the wily leader of the pack who not only refuses to pay more than a pittance as rent but also ropes his fellow tenants into plotting against Mirza. Bickering is a fixture in their daily routine. 

The haveli is the inherited wealth of Mirza’s Begum (Farrukh Jafar), who also lives there. Baankey shares a room in it with his widowed mother and three younger sisters. 

In the past nine years, Sircar and Chaturvedi have collaborated on a bouquet of critically acclaimed, commercially successful projects that have played a pivotal role in redefining what mainstream means in Hindi cinema in the 2010s. Their subjects have been as off the beaten track as they can get – a sperm donor who keeps his ‘profession’ a secret from the woman he loves (Vicky Donor), the stormy equation between a difficult ageing man and his equally difficult, feisty daughter (Piku), a youngster mourning a former colleague with whom he did not have any significant relationship before an accident that sent her into a coma (October). Each of these films has been completely rooted in the respective cultures and communities in which they have been set. 

Gulabo Sitabo is arguably more overtly entrenched in local traditions than its predecessors in the Sircar-Chaturvedi filmography, yet is also, if you choose to read it that way, the most politically current of the lot. 

On the face of it, Gulabo Sitabo is about a bunch of people fighting over a mansion. The storytelling has a fable-like quality to it, its folksy feel underlined by Shantanu Moitra’s delightfully impish-and-ruminative-by-turns background score and Bachchan’s styling – for his role as Mirza, the actor has been given the look of a wizened old man who fits as perfectly into the ancient city of Lucknow in the 21st century as he might have in a tale of an unspecified yore. 

Mirza and Baankey’s battle is remarkable, because neither of them genuinely loves the haveli or understands its value and neither feels an iota of love for its original inhabitant among them, its rightful owner, Begum. Like India and Pakistan fighting over Kashmir, treating it as a coveted piece of land rather than a home to its present and former inhabitants, ultimately, neither the Gulabo nor the Sitabo of this tale has any actual affection for the individual, i.e. the haveli, they wrangle over – he/it is a practical compulsion for one and a useful object for the other, nothing more. And they fight and they fight until the person to whom it truly belongs serves them a life lesson they were not expecting. 

Irrespective of the interpretation, Gulabo Sitabo is one of the quirkiest, cheekiest, quaintest films to emerge from Bollywood this past decade.  

Among its many lovely impertinences is the fact that though it features two of Bollywood’s biggest male stars in its cast, it does not seem overly preoccupied with showing off their presence – they play characters in a story, like everyone else. 

That Gulabo Sitabo is not an unthinking follower of convention is exemplified by the way it gives Jafar pride of place over Bachchan and Khurrana in the opening credits, not as a patronising symbolic gesture, not even solely because her stature merits it, but because she is indeed the leading lady of the proceedings. 

Jafar, who is in her late 80s, is best-known to Bollywood watchers as Amma from Peepli Live. She is adorable as Gulabo Sitabo’s clever Begum, her eyes sparkling with a light and her speech brimming with an energy that defy her age.

Bachchan’s facial expressions are occasionally hard to detect behind all that prosthetic make-up, but his voice and body do more speaking than you can imagine. Mirza, a role that might have been lazily caricatured, is thankfully not. Over and above all this is the pleasure to be had from watching this legendary star merrily experimenting with such an unorthodox role just months away from his 78th birthday. 

Playing what is perhaps his least showy character till date, Khurrana imbues Baankey with an air of hesitation and helplessness and effectively erases his naturally strong presence. I loved the way he summons up awkwardness, guilt and trepidation on his face and in his demeanour in that shot in which Baankey peers through a hole he kicked into a crumbling wall in the haveli complex, thus kicking off another round of quarrelling with his elderly bete noir.

This is my favourite of his performances till date. 

In this constellation of talents, Srishti Shrivastava playing Baankey’s sister Guddo is my pick of the cast. She is a firebrand as an actor and, as it happens, gets to play an incredible firebrand in Gulabo Sitabo. 

In a small but crucial role, Brijendra Kala is a hoot. Watch his face in the scene in which Guddo confronts him – that look of reluctant admiration for a woman who has just insulted him. 

Gulabo Sitabo could not possibly have been what it is without Avik Mukhopadhayay’s sweeping cinematography, Mansi Dhruv Mehta’s production design that makes the haveli, Fatima Mahal, a character in its own right, and the eclectic music by Moitra, Anuj Garg and Abhishek Arora.

What Mukhopadhayay did for Delhi’s trees in October he does for Lucknow and Fatima Mahal in Gulabo Sitabo. The atmospherics he conjures up in the city gives us a Lucknow rarely seen before in Hindi cinema. And the way he captures the grandeur of the haveli without erasing the grime reminded me of the gorgeous Maithili film Gamak Ghar that was recently available on MUBI India and Anjali Menon’s Manjadikkuru (Malayalam) that, sadly, is not streaming anywhere right now. The lingering shots of the haveli towards the end are painterly compositions that ought to be freeze-framed for museum viewing. 

There is so much more in this unusual Hindi film to discuss and dissect in the coming days. Such as the thread of caregiving running through Sircar’s films from Piku to Pink (which he produced but did not direct), October and now this one; the non-stereotypical treatment of the elderly in Chaturvedi’s scripts, from Vicky Donor’s daadi (the only genuinely modern entity in Delhi along with the Metro, according to her grandson) to the irritating dad in Piku, the scoundrel Mirza and no-babe-in-the-woods Begum in Gulabo Sitabo; or even why the manner of use of the problematic, patriarchal term “ghar jamai” made me uncomfortable.

Gulabo Sitabo’s soundtrack is as thoughtful and amusing as the film. (I would strongly recommend the jukebox which is available on YouTube.) 

Quite appropriately, the beautiful Do Din Ka Yeh Mela Hai (with music by Garg, sung by Indian Ocean’s frontman Rahul Ram) runs with the closing credits, its lyrics by Dinesh Pant celebrating the blend of pooja and azaan in the innocent, naughty stories blowing in the wind. 

Gulabo Sitabo is not zippy in the way Vicky Donor and Piku were, nor over-emphatic with any point it makes. It is a slow burn – like October – despite its sense of humour, mischievous characters and the tongue firmly placed in its cheek. The film’s unobtrusive politics, including its quiet feminism, are blowing in the wind – there for us to hear if we wish as the unusual, entertaining narrative silently flows by. 

Rating (out of 5 stars): 3.5

Gulabo Sitabo is streaming on Amazon Prime Video India.

Running time:

125 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/gulabo-sitabo-movie-review-kooky-cheeky-quaint-and-utterly-delightful-8475961.html

Poster courtesy: IMDB

REVIEW 781: CHOKED

Release date:	June 5, 2020
Director:	Anurag Kashyap
Cast:	Saiyami Kher, Roshan Mathew, Parthveer Shukla, Amruta Subhash, Rajshri Deshpande, Upendra Limaye
Language:	Hindi

Sarita Pillai nee Sahastrabuddhe’s life mirrors the humdrum lives of millions of middle-class Indian women. She wakes up every morning, cooks, prepares her kid for school, sends him off before heading to her own office in teeming Mumbai where she spends her day in mechanical, emotionless toil as a bank teller before returning home to cook, serve her kid and husband Sushant, admonish the latter for being a layabout, clean up and sleep. 

Forward to the next day. Wake up. Repeat. Sleep. And the next. And the next. Wake up. Repeat. Sleep. Wake up. Repeat. Sleep. 

Her listless existence and her evident disinterest in Sushant are punctuated occasionally by lively kitty parties with women in the neighbourhood who revel in gossip, including about members of their own group. 

We know from the start that there is and will be more to Sarita, heroine of director Anurag Kashyap’s Choked: Paisa Bolta Hai (Money Talks) that is streaming on Netflix from today. We know we can expect more than that surface mundaneness for two reasons: first, the film’s smartly executed prologue indicates some hanky-panky with money; and second, hints are dropped early on about an event in the past from where her marriage went downhill. 

Sushant for his part has more spark and appears to have more going for him than she does although he does nothing. He hangs around contributing zilch to the housework, casually plays his guitar at home and plays carrom with friends in the building. Sarita’s tetchiness towards him inexplicably does little to dampen his affection for her or dull the twinkle in his eyes, but it also does not enthuse him enough to lift a finger to share her burden around the house. 

Then one day, as the trailer has already revealed, Sarita unexpectedly comes across a stash of cash and for the first time in the film we see her face come alive. 

Choked is about what she does with that secret horde, and through that adventure it tells the story of a life stuck in a rut, a relationship at the edge of an abyss, greed and corruption in the era of demonetisation. 

At first Choked is intriguing. The manner in which Kashyap portrays Sarita’s boredom and sense of hopelessness in her role as wife and home manager is striking. Her act of latching a door and switching off a light night after night after night before going to bed is used to remarkable effect to underline the repetitiveness of her routine and the monotony that domesticity can bring. 

Sarita’s empty eyes and irritability when contrasted with Sushant’s easygoing nature and their son’s charm allude to a background that must have been far more interesting than her current busy yet godawfully drowsy routine. 

Besides the lead trio of Choked are a good fit. Sarita is played by Saiyami Kher who had the misfortune of making her Bollywood debut with Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s worst film till date, Mirzya (2016), but managed to reveal her innate charisma even in that dismal enterprise. The young actor has an impressive personality and speaking eyes. In the role of Sushant is the attractive stage and Mollywood artist Roshan Mathew whose brief filmography includes an aching portrayal of a man in love with a man in a conservative society in Geetu Mohandas’s otherwise middling Moothon. And Parthveer Shukla who plays their son is a little fireball of darlingness without the irritating precociousness that so many directors seem to demand of their child actors. 

Once the nuts and bolts of their relationship and the neighbourhood dynamics are established though, despite a series of twists and turns right till the end, the narrative is curiously lacking in energy. 

Sarita and Sushant’s back story, from which the title Choked is drawn, is not quite as fascinating as it is made out to be. His subsequent irresponsible behaviour and the progression of their equation are unconvincing. 

Kashyap and writer Nihit Bhave appear to be making a point about Narendra Modi’s decision in 2016 to demonetise select Indian currency notes – the point being that the corrupt and the powerful found their way around it, while ordinary citizens suffered. However, they seem to have internalised it so much, they say what they seem to want to say so hesitantly and in such a roundabout, meandering manner, that Choked almost comes across as praise for demonetisation, a measure that has had a  disastrous impact on the Indian economy. There is even a song and dance featuring the hero celebrating demonetisation that is placed prominently in the narrative. The collective effect of these elements sadly dilutes the impact of the cheeky song that plays with the rolling credits in the end. If Choked is intended as a sarcastic critique, it depends too heavily on the viewer being indulgent towards the director, being aware of his politics and off-screen stances and having studied the country’s reaction to the present prime minister.

And no ya, the play on “choked” does not work either. 

What does work is the constant flow of dialogues between languages in the way they naturally might in the Mumbai home of a couple in a mixed marriage. although Mathew swallows some of his lines as a result of which I often could not make out what Sushant was saying in his mother tongue. Of course a lot can be forgiven because he is cute. Ironically, his Hindi diction is excellent, and comes as a package with a delightful trace of a Malayalam accent. The precise way in which he says “contracts” and pronounces “L” or the way she pronounces “D” are fun to hear because their accents are not being caricatured. 

The usually reliable Amruta Subhash is inconsistent though – warm and hilarious in parts, but in one passage, surprisingly hammy.

There are a couple of standout scenes such as the one in which Sarita and Sushant fight in bed with their kid lying asleep between them and another involving the couple, a kitchen drain and top-notch sound design by Gautam Nair. The construction of both scenes is vintage Kashyap, as is the mischievous closing song.

What is not vintage Kashyap is the lack of clarity and sharpness in what he seems to be saying about demonetisation and achhe din. 

And exactly what is the point in showing us a lazy jerk of a husband who never does any work at home, is inconsiderate to his wife but is somehow presented as a sweetheart, is made to sound at one point as though he is willing to do anything for her but oh how unfair is she, and in the end gets to save the day? 

Kashyap’s last two breathtakingly good films were Mukkabaaz and Raman Raghav 2.0. Choked wants to say a lot, but is not even as hard-hitting or entertaining as his tweets.

Rating (out of 5 stars): 2

Running time:

114 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/choked-movie-review-anurag-kashyaps-demonetisation-saga-is-curiously-hesitant-and-dull-8450691.html

Poster courtesy: IMDB