Piku

Spoilers (mild) ahead:
Piku is the reason why some sane people still find it in them to cheer for Bollywood.

The movie is named after the lead character, Deepika Padukone, who is a single woman living with her annoying, cantankerous and hypochondriac father.

The father is Amitabh Bachchan, who has shown, once again, why he is the lord of the silver screen.  

Director Shoojit Sircar is obviously as Bengali as the double oo-s in his name, and knows his subject like the back of his hand. 
His story telling devices are clever and pithy—he has to use Bachchan and Padukone for main leads, which could lead to accent issues notwithstanding the actors’  exemplary efforts to not sound fake.  So, Piku and her father are Delhi-based Bengalis. There, now the slight slips in accent are not as misplaced at all. The broad swaths are taken care of by the actors and the director, who, I presume, made sure no one says “rasugulla” and “kolkotta” and gets away with it.

Bengalis and Kolkata have been done justice, with their badminton and rolls, alpona and bindis and that inherent pride that is so hard to shake off.

There, important basics fixed and out of the way, Piku goes on to tell a story about an everyday, common working woman of today. The story is about how there are little things in her, as are there in her father and her friend, that make their (and by extension, our) ordinary lives not so ordinary.

Bachchan’s Bhashkor (emphasis on “o”) Banerjee is an annoying man. He is a nag and a hypochondriac of the first order, who likes to talk about his bowel movements with all and sundry. Sircar’s choice of ailment for Bachchan is apt—the food loving Bengali constantly suffers from digestive trouble.

But he also surprises the younger and more modern Irrfan Khan with his views on marriage and why he would rather his daughter first lived her life and then tied the knot, if at all.

Bhashkor Banerjee is a classic example of the old man who can use age as an excuse to spell out bitter truths to the family and get away with it. Things he would not, or did not talk about when he was younger.  His heart is in the right place, but he has reached a point in life where he does not and need to put up with nosy neighbours, annoying relatives or social mores.  So, he won’t.

Irrfan Khan is the able third wheel in the father-daughter equation, the helping hand who can sometimes fight for Piku when her father crosses the line, the outsider who can out-yell the family  into silence.

Don’t be misled by my calling him the third wheel—he is that only in the equation of the movie, because the movie is about Piku and her father. Khan more than holds his own in the quirky triangle that this movie is.

Top marks to Padukone for playing the part of Piku to the hilt. It is heartening to see what she can do when she decides not to run around SRK in tiny clothes.

So Piku is Everywoman, and every woman will relate to her in bits and pieces. She is the heroine, but she works hard at an often demanding job,  has to look after the house, has baai issues to resolve, has a father to look after, goes out with friends for a drink and worries about finding the right man for herself. She also admits to being about 30, without batting an eyelid.

Piku admits to having sex, terrorizes taxi drivers, yells at her father a lot, but mothers him as well.

In that relationship lies the quiet calm of the movie, the underlying sense of warmth that transcends what could have easily been a supremely bitter family experience.

 Piku says, at one point, “we can’t judge our parents.”  In Sircar’s movie, both father and daughter act with that basic understanding in place—he knows she is around to take care of him no matter how much he embarrasses her, she knows he will love her the most no matter how much she screams her head off at him.

With that foundation in place, the movie uses various devices to make it an interesting journey, often surprising the jaded Bollywood audience.

When Piku, Father and Third Wheel start on a journey, you could be forgiven for thinking that travel is how they will resolve all their issues and find inner peace. But, try again. 
They travel, but there are no emotional upheavals that make father and daughter weep their anxieties away. They keep doing their own things and drive the third person nuts in the process, but without loss of love.

Because, if every road trip turned out to be a life changing experience, the world would be a very different place, no?

There is a scene where a drunk Bachchan comes home and starts twisting to a popular Bengali number. You almost expect the daughter, who had stormed off the same party because she was annoyed with the father, to get up and join him, thus resolving differences. She doesn't, and there is no sappy “beta, but I love you”s.

Seeing her father dance, Piku gets up and shuts her door, albeit smiling to herself. That is how Sircar strikes a chord.

The setting of a Bengali family with no mother makes the movie believable:

 Where else would you find a woman of thirty not being hammered daily with marriage proposals? The mother’s place is taken over by Moushumi Chatterjee as the maashi, who diligently tries to push the wedding agenda, but is thwarted by the dad.

There is love, but in the very Indian style where there is not much physical manifestation of it. Like I said, there are no “I love you beta” moments, but an unshakable understanding that love exists between father and daughter. 

When Piku cries after her dad is taken ill, you could feel squeamish, remembering the many times your parent or a loved one might have complained about a problem and you've not paid attention.

In that, and other things, Piku is not a film that can assure you all’s well with the world. But then again, maybe in just that, it does.

NH10

                                                                       

Spoilers ahead.

With NH10, Anushka Sharma has clearly stolen a march over all her contemporaries, who will now have to spend months and months to catch up.

Here’s what happened: while Deepika Padukone was busy being fighting on Twitter for her rights to dress as she liked and Parineeti Chopra was teaching ignorant journalists what periods are all about, Sharma was nowhere in the news. She didn’t create a storm with her opinion on the AIB roast, no one used her as an idol to fight against skinniness and most critics (including me, initially), were ready to write her off as the one who can only do the Dilli ki ladki routine.

That is, until now.  So while all her contemporaries were busy championing modern womanhood while constantly playing props to heroes in extremely bad quality movies (Padukone’s Happy New Year, anything Sonakshi Sinha has acted in except for Lootera, and the younger Chopra’s Dawat e Ishq), Sharma took up Jaggu in PK, with cropped hair and no affectations.

 Parineeti Chopra tried that a bit in Hasee Toh Phasee but since that was more misuse of the look than use, PK’s Jaggu won hands down. 

Then came NH10, in which she joined hands with a bunch of people including Anurag Kashyap and gave us a movie that has zero Bollywood clichés. OK, near-zero Bollywood clichés.

Dear Anushka Sharma, I doubt you can resist all along, but please don’t go back to being  arm candy instantly.

There is no happy ending in NH10. There is no deus ex machina that can save the day. There is a lot of darkness, no mincing of words and no effort to soften the blows for the audience. And the best part? There are no jarring item numbers to ensure the audience goes home happy, or slyly weaved in sexy shots of women’s bodies to “cut the tension”. 

NH10 is a story of the two Indias that economists, politicians and social reformers are at a loss of how to reconcile.  It is the story of what happens when through accident and foolhardiness, residents of the democratic India run into people from Khap Panchayat lands.

Sharma’s Meera is the person you and I and most people we know are —she has a well paying job, can look after herself, can take on misogynistic colleagues as needed and is married to a person who makes her happy, to whom she complains about having to attend parties.

One night on her way to work, she is believably (because it is Gurgaon) accosted by goons, after which her husband, Arjun (played by Neil Bhoopalam) buys her a gun for protection.

And that’s that, until they are on a road trip that goes terribly awry. The young couple is placed square in the middle of the kind of situation we all pray never to be faced with and only read about in newspapers. In the hinterland of Haryana, there’s an honour killing. Arjun’s bravado makes them targets of crazed goons who want them dead.

Director Navdeep Singh obviously knows the Jatland extremely well. And those who remember Manorama Six Feet Under will remember he can do thrillers well too.

Join the two together and you will get the picture.  Singh’s characters are well rounded, right from the village sarpanch to the police officer to the leader of the goon pack, who thinks nothing of hacking his sister to death but wails like a child on losing his brother.

NH10 also does not treat the audience like they are stupid—there are no long dialogues/monologues to spell out what is happening or will happen. The show, don’t tell, works fantastically in the sequence where we see the Haryanvi, writhing with pain, still bristling on seeing a woman smoking.  Or in the final sequence, where despite the horror of it all, you’ll still appreciate the absolute lack of high drama from Sharma.

There’s one tiny problem I see with the movie, and it’s nothing to do with the cast and crew, but with storytelling.

 NH10 could not have picked a better time for its release, what with all the angst against the banning of the BBC documentary.  While I absolutely love that this movie was made, to my mind, it would have been a perfect 10 if the makers could have found a way to unequivocally put across the thought, that there’s no greatness or pride in following the demonic tenets of the Khap-ruled hinterlands, even if those are centuries old rules.

Like the policeman in the movie, there’re a lot of people out there who believe “Gurgaon mein jahaan yeh aakhri mall khatam hote hain na, wahin aapki democracy aur constitution bhi khatam ho jaata hain.” In varying degrees, at least. 

My fear is of those people. That there could be a chance smart dialogues like these turn into some sort of validation for those real-life policemen who truly roam the lands, making the perpetrators into heroes, the same way SRK’s dysfunctional  Rahul in Darr (or any similar movie) stoked the imagination of many street side stalkers.  All women who grew up in the 90s will have some idea of what I’m talking about, no?

                                                                         

Roy.

                                                                       

If you haven’t watched, don’t read, for the makers of Roy have tried to bill it as a romantic mystery. 

You know what I think my biggest beef with Roy is? That they cheated the audience by advertising it as a Ranbir Kapoor movie, when in fact it is an Arjun Rampal movie. Kapoor is in it in a “dynamic role”, whatever that is supposed to mean.

Now, I understand why they would do that. Who in their right minds would want to pay multiplex ticket rates for Rampal and Jacqueline Fernandez? But I’m still bristling from the blatant cheating.

If you've read enough mystery novels or watched similar movies, it is going to take you 10 minutes to get to the bottom of the so called plot. If you've not, but are a reasonably attentive and logical person, it should still take you no more than 20 minutes to correctly predict what the Big Twist in the movie is.

 And that’s the thing with thrillers, you see. If you can tell whodunnit, what is the point?  There could have still been a point if there was enough Kapoor, or a well told story in the entire exercise.  But no.  I don’t know what director Vikramjit Singh was aiming for, but someone should tell him “high art” is only possible when there is some actual substance to it.

Roy looks mature—it is a quiet film, which is a welcome change from Bollywood’s melodrama and garish colours. But that’s about it. The entire film feels fake—the characters talk like some of Deepak Chopra’s tweets, a string of heavy or deep sounding words that lie next to each other without really meaning much.  Sometimes they even sound like Salman Khan’s tweets.

The protagonist is a super successful movie director, who has built his empire on the success of the franchise of a movie called Guns. There’s Guns 1, then Guns 2, and now he is writing Guns 3, over which he is breaking major sweat. Guns is, as you can imagine, about guns, heists and the like.

Besides being the director, he is also obviously the screenwriter, or the movie won’t be.

I can’t remember if they mention that important difference, but since I might have drifted in and out of sleep because the movie was so boring, I’m letting that slide.  

Now for more important questions.  You’re writing a story called Guns 3, which is about robberies, for Bollywood. Do you really need to go to Malaysia to seek inspiration for this? 

Deep breath. He’s a rich guy, and rich guys can afford to do such things. So let that slide too.

I’m not sure what time period Roy’s set in, but Rampal the director/writer uses a typewriter and wears a Fedora, even indoors.  There is a scene where he puts the thinking Fedora on just before he starts typing away. I am laughing even as I write about it, same as I did in the theatre and I don't think Singh was trying to be funny in that scene.

Anyway, because Roy is no Mad Men, said Fedora fails to add to style and sophistication. Ok, there are moments where Rampal does look handsome in the hat, but then he is a handsome man with or without. And even Don Draper wouldn't wear those indoors, because you know, manners.

While Rampal nee Kabir Grewal is struggling to write his story about a robbery, he runs into filmmaker  Ayesha Amir, who is Fernandez in a pair of glasses, which I am thinking is an attempt to make her look like the creative type. 

There is a romance. Set in picturesque Malaysia, there is another romance. Roy is the name of the protagonist of Guns 3. So when they say Ranbir Kapoor is in a “dynamic role”, it could have meant that he isn’t a real character. He’s fiction within fiction. So fictitious Roy’s love interest is Fernandez again, this time dressed in expensive, sophisticated clothes, portraying Tia.

They are careful not to show the neck tattoos that the director Fernandez sports, on Tia. Tia is rich and has a painting that Roy steals and then is miserable because he loves her and cheated her.

Ayesha reads books. Kabir sends him one and buys her drinks. Tia rides horses, Roy … well I can’t remember. I think he just stares at her. This is all meant to be very intellectual, by the way, because these sequences are peppered with lines like "Hum insaan hamesha kisi aur ki zindagi churake jeena chahtey hain", or the infitinely more conundrum like "Kya tum woh ho jo log kehte hain ya jo log kehtey hain woh banne ki koshish kar rahe ho."

 Then, when reel and real romance meet, you are meant to gasp. Only, I can't fathom why the movie makers thought it would be gasp worthy at all, because they have already told us Rampal is writing a story and have introduced Kapoor right as he talks about the protagonist, in true Bollywood cliche style, lest you miss the correlation.

Speaking of, Singh has crammed so many of these cliches, or symbolism if you will, into the movie I think it's a miracle my head did not explode.  Examples?

Rampal and Kapoor are both sad (since the author makes his protagonist go through the exact same feelings he is experiencing) and don't know what lies ahead. Hence, Roy is on a boat, adrift. I've already told you about the thinking hat bit. Rampal talks about the trials of fame and has a goldfish in a bowl for a pet.

If they were honest and made a low-brow masala potboiler, these tropes could have passed on as an attempt to lift the movie up. At best, no one would care. 
But Singh is trying to make this into a highly intellectual movie and is so caught up in making the packaging look good, he forgets to put anything in the box.

So we have to live with the fact that a very rich guy wants to make Guns 3 and needs inspiration for it. He can afford to spend a lot of money and go to Malaysia, so he does. The rich guy is either schizophrenic or the director is just enacting Guns 3 in a parallel setting, but there are so many bits that don't make sense. We are expected to let it all slide in the name of director's/poetic licence, I suppose.

But you will have realised, that is "letting slide" all of the movie.

I really want to know what made Ranbir Kapoor sign this project. Maybe it was the "dynamic role" and maybe once we decipher what that really means, it will all become as clear as daylight and everyone will understand what the point of this movie was.