Weekend watch: Julie & Julia, All the Best

Just in case anyone ever accuses me of not having enough variety in my diet. Now, on with the reviews:

Julie & Julia

Imagine you’re a guy, and a vegetarian to boot. And someone told you that there’s this movie, about two hours long, featuring two women (and a couple of men by way of supporting cast) cooking for most of its running length. That there’s no plot to speak of really, and no major emotional upheavals. And that the climactic moment involves cutting open a duck and stuffing food in it. How likely is it that you’d drop everything to go watch this movie?

Let me sweeten the deal for you a bit. It stars Meryl Streep, who manages to keep her lead over Kate Winslet in the Oscar nominations race by the simple expedient of doing something brilliant enough to get nominated every year. It also stars Amy Adams, who seems to be closing in on Ms Winslet froom the other end. On top of which, it has Stanley Tucci, who is constitutionally incapable of disappointing.

Still, it’s a lot of cooking and very little plot to cram into two hours. Most people would give it a miss. Most did, if the box office receipts are any indication. I didn’t. And for reasons I don’t fully understand, I found myself engrossed in this simple tale of two women — one who blazed a trail by introducing French cuisine to servant-less Americans in the 1950s, and another who followed it half a century later by cooking her way through the former’s cookbook in a year.

Since I saw it on Sunday evening, I have been trying to figure out why I enjoyed this little movie so much. All I can come up with is this: the movie correctly identifies the secret to good food. It’s butter. Lots of it. Bon appetit!

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All the Best

All the Best takes the zany plot of Kaadhala Kaadhala (or Right Bed Wrong Husband, depending on who the makers want to give credit to), adds a bit, subtracts a bit and eventually comes up with a comedy with roughly the same hit rate. Much of it is due to the fact that the plot is madcap enough to cover a number of flaws.

The leads aren’t really in top form: Ajay Devgan (if he wants to stick that extra vowel where the sun don’t shine, that’s his business — I’m keeping it where it is) is just about okay, and needs to progress beyond the silly smile at some point if he wants to become a good comedian. Fardeen Khan seems, inexplicably enough, to survive in comedies despite the fact that he has the comic timing and voice modulation of the average dead bacterium. Bipasha Basu shows less cleavage than Ajay, but looks gorgeous nonetheless. Mughda Godse takes all the brownie points she earned for Fashion and blows them up here — if there is anything worse than how her role is written, it is how she plays it. Sanjay Butt looks like he ate a whole shark on the sets of Blue and hasn’t crapped it out yet.

But making up for all of this is a comedian who I confess I have never been a huge fan of: Johnny Lever. Playing a mute loan shark named Tobu, he brings the house down every time he appears on screen. How he communicates through his sidekicks is funny enough. But how one of them has trouble with “translating” what he “says” after having sustained an ear injury — that bit is almost Pythonesque in its mix of logic and wierdness. If the rest of the movie had managed to live up to that standard, I’d have been grabbing random strangers on the road and buying them tickets to this movie. As it stands, I can only suggest that you go watch it for Johnny Lever and forgive the rest.

ps: If you do watch it, look out for the reference to Slumdog Millionaire — it’s priceless!

 

Wake Up Sid

Wake Up Sid starts off more or less asleep for the first hour, stratches and groans a bit for the rest of its running time and manages barely a few moments of absolute clarity in between. And yet, you don’t come away disappointed. If it does wake you up to anything at all, it is this: Ranbir Kapoor is the real thing. And now, since I’ve played enough with the title, I’ll switch back to sanity and get on with the review.

The film tells the story of an aimless rich kid who gets a crash course in growing up when he walks out of his house after a tiff with his folks. His saviour, mentor and ass-kicker-in-chief turns out to be a woman he befriended on her first night in Mumbai and helped settle into the city. That she is probably 6-7 years older than him makes their relationship a little more interesting than the ones we usually encounter. It is almost a cardinal rule in movies of this nature that the girl comes across as more mature than the guy, but to actually make her older is uncommon.

Since the plot itself isn’t earth-shattering, the movie rests on the strength of the writing and the performances. The performances are easier to talk about: Ranbir is in top form, and seems to be in his comfort zone in both the serious and the light moments. Konkona seems strangely ill at ease in what must surely now be called “the Konkona Sensharma role” when scriptwriters create characters like this. The supporting cast is uniformly good and, in the case of Supriya Pathak, absolutely sublime. I’ll get to her in a minute — she deserves more than a single sentence.

The writing is a curious mix of good and bad news. Much of the dialogue falls in the spectrum between obvious and pedestrian. The background score even supplies a chorus that says “Wake Up!” during key moments, just in case the audience is comprised of lobotomized bacteria who don’t Get The Point. The Meet cute, which features an extended conversation between the leads, might as well have been written on autopilot.

And yet there are moments of uncommon brilliance, such as a reconciliation between two estranged friends after one of them has just been dumped by his girlfriend. And moments where you can see how the writer made a conscious and sensible choice with regard to some stock supporing characters –  a potential romantic interest and a sexpot neighbour, to name a couple. And a few absolutely sublime moments, almost all of them featuring Supriya Pathak, who plays Sid’s mom. There are scenes where she (and the writing) accomplishes with a simple look what lesser mortals would’ve taken pages of dialogue to describe.

One in particular, where she visits Konkona’s apartment where her son is currently staying, stood out for me. Right at the end of that meeting, Konkona feels compelled to explain the status of their relationship to Supriya. How that moment plays out is one of the reasons why cinema deserves its place as a creative art in its own right: there is no way a book or a play (with its inability to close in on an actor’s face) could’ve done it exactly right. For the first time in the entire movie, I was gobsmacked.

It is precisely this moment of beauty that makes me so exasperated with Wake Up Sid. The movie shows itself capable of greatness, and but decides to stay off that pedestal and become yet another genre exercise. (Oh yeah, it’s a genre now — it’s called Movies Involving Characters Who Think Andheri Is On Another Planet.)

 

Inglourious Basterds

On the way back from watching Inglourious Basterds yesterday, I had a conversation with my wife that made me realize something. There’s no way you can actually convert someone to the Church of Tarantino. His style of filmmaking doesn’t lend itself to persuasive argument.

Consider the opening scene of Basterds, for instance. Set somewhere in Nazi-occupied France, it involves a protracted conversation between an SS officer named Hans Landa who is tasked with the job of rounding up all the Jews in France, and a French farmer who happens to be harbouring some Jews. You know, even if you haven’t read a word about the movie, that this scene will end in violence. Tarantino knows that you know. So he stretches out the dialogue — Landa takes his time to make his point. By the time the action eventually comes, like an exclamation point at the end of the sentence, you are primed for it.

This, the best written scene in the movie, is as good an illustration of Tarantino’s method as any other. His killers enjoy talking while they hold a loaded gun; they enjoy it so much and are so good at it that you don’t really want them to pull the trigger until they’re done.

I wrote the two paragraphs above in second person. Now, if it has occurred to you while reading these paragraphs that you aren’t really the “you” that they refer to, then go no further. If, on the other hand, the opposite has occurred to you, then again, go no further and watch the movie instead of reading an unabashed Tarantino fan ramble on about the joys of watching yet another of his movies.

You still here? Okay. Instead of speaking of the movie itself, which I will leave for you to discover, let me talk about Christoph Waltz, who plays Landa. Prior to this movie, I hadn’t even heard of the man. A Jewish actor (oh, the irony!) of Austrian origin, he hasn’t appeared in too many movies — the only one I’ve seen is Ordinary Decent Criminal, but I don’t remember it or him too well. This is not surprising — I hadn’t heard of Pam Grier before Jackie Brown, nor of David Carradine before Kill Bill. What will also not be surprising is that, every time I come across the man in the future, my first and fondest recollection will be of him playing Hans Landa. Tarantino is reported to have said that, had he not gotten anyone like Waltz to play Landa, he might not have made the movie at all. This may be an exaggeration, but this much is true: had he not gotten anyone like Waltz to play Landa, he ought not to have made the movie at all.

Watch how he chews his food before speaking, as if to indicate that he has all the time in the world before getting his job done. How he slips from cheerful bonhomie to cold steel almost in the middle of a sentence. His interaction with Shoshanna, the heroine of this tale. She survives the massacre at the farmer’s house and grows to become the proprietor of a cinema in Paris. There is a moment where she encounters Landa again — watch how Landa plays that scene. You always get the feeling, when he is dealing with an adversary, that he knows exactly what cards his opponent is holding. He doesn’t play with them, he toys with them. Now think about what a suitable comeuppance for a man like this would be and watch how the movie ends with him getting exactly what he deserves.

Pitted against him is an array of actors — Melanie Laurent is perfect as Shoshanna, and Diane Kruger does pretty much her best work in this movie as Bridget von Hammersmark. But by far the most delicious supporting performance comes from Brad Pitt, who plays Lt. Aldo Raine, chief of the Basterds. Pitt has done a variety of roles in his career, but his chief talent seems to be  a flair for comedy. Eli Roth takes all the dementia he puts into his slasher movies and brings it to his character of the Bear Jew. Mike Myers pops in for a little cameo but doesn’t seem to accomplish much other than make us exclaim, “Wait a minute, Austin Powers is the British general?”

My wife commented, after the movie was over, that Tarantino’s style was way too look-at-me-I’m-making-a-big-movie for her taste. She is absolutely right. Tarantino’s movies are seldom about their subject — they are primarily about themselves, and about his love for the movies. However, to quote Hans Landa:

Where our conclusions differ, is I don’t consider the comparison an insult.

 

Three reviews, one post

I went on a spree recently and ended up watching three movies in more or less quick succession. Hey, people gorge on chocolate, I watch two movies back to back at a multiplex. So sue me. None of them really deserves a longish review (actually they do, but I’m a lazy bum), so here’s a paragraph or two about each of them.

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Quick Gun Murugun

After a minor tribute to Tarantino’s Kill Bill right at the beginning, the opening credits of Quick Gun Murugun show our hero being ferried to heaven by Yama on what seems like Thailand’s answer to the buffalo. Heaven turns out to be something like a large Government office, complete with an old watchman sleeping at the gate. When Murugun alights, Yama asks him, half-sheepishly, “Saar, meterukku mela konjam…” And when the former walks on without even responding, the latter mutters what must be the most appropriately worded insult in recorded human history: Saavu kirakki. (My apologies to those who do not understand Tamil — my translation skills aren’t quite sufficient to make this joke work in any other language.)

With such auspicious beginnings, one would expect QGM to be an absolute laugh riot. Sadly, this doesn’t turn out to be the case. Like Woody Allen’s Take the Money and Run, it all sounds amazingly funny until you actually sit down and watch it. It’s eminently chuckle-worthy all right, and one never really tires of all the sly references (lines like “Make my day, machchaan” abound), but by and large, the movie manages to be clever without really tipping over the edge into laugh-out-loud-funny.

I have watched both of Shashanka Ghosh’s movies now — Waisa Bhi Hota Hai and this one. Neither of them will rank as a work of comic brilliance, but maybe these will turn out to be the opening notes in a brilliant career. Who knows, the man might even give us our own Annie Hall sometime in the future.

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Dil Bole Hadippa

Dear Yash Raj Productions,

Despite my better judgement, I have watched most of the movies you have come out with in recent times. I do not need a refresher.

Sincerely,

Ramsu

The trouble with DBH, I suppose, is that while it isn’t really a bad movie per se, it doesn’t seem to be bothered much with being a good one. Then again, if all you have is the idea of an ambidextrous Punjabi kudi wanting to play cricket with the boys and masquerading as one in order to do so, just how good can it get? At least Twelfth Night added more complications (like the business of twins) to disguise the fact that it was basically just fluff.

Nobody really stands out. Rani Mukherjee tries gamely, but quite frankly, she just doesn’t have what it takes to elevate this material. The best you can expect from her is to do justice to a well-written part — this one isn’t. Shahid Kapoor moves his career up one square by playing an essentially likeable character yet again, except with a bigger banner paying him to do nothing this time around. Rakhi Sawant moves her career up one square by getting a more-or-less non-speaking 5 minute part in addition to her item song. Sherlyn Chopra turns up with seemingly one purpose — to increase the per capita exposure in the movie by a few dozen square inches. She does well at that. A non-speaking part would’ve been even better, but as it stands, it doesn’t really hurt the movie. The others convert O2 to CO2. On the whole, I’d have been better off doing the same at home.

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Wanted

I doubt I can say it any better than Amrita has in her absolutely wonderful review of this movie. The best I can do is say the following: Wanted is exactly what it claims to be, and it is very good at what it aims to do.

I was initially skeptical about the casting choices — I felt Salman was too old for the part, and that Prakash Raj’s performance might not work as well in Hindi as it did in Tamil and Telugu. I was wrong on both counts. Both of them seem to be having the time of their lives, and from what I could see in the multiplex, the public absolutely loved it. Ayesha Takia proves yet again that, were it not for the occasional little gem like Dor or Socha Na Tha, all we might end up remembering of her is how she fills out a t-shirt. (Very well, I might add.)

As for the supporting cast: Vinod Khanna has a nice little role doing nothing. Inder Kumar seems to be raking in millions in steroid endorsements. Mahesh Manjrekar is suitably sleazy while managing to be a mite less over-the-top than his counterparts in the Southie versions — which is saying very little and very much at the same time. And a bunch of interchangeable goons seem to growl and die in the background often enough to keep the story going. One even commits suicide instead of letting the hero kill him — I’m not sure how he sees this as a better option, but I’m disinclined to argue the point.

On the whole, this is an absolutely wonderful B-movie. And if you need any other reason to watch it, here’s one: as toothpaste ads go, it’s much better than Hum Aapke Hai Kaun.

 

Manjal Veyyil

There was a short-lived show on TV called Love Monkey starring Tom Cavanagh as an A&R rep for a record label. In the pilot episode, he starts off by saying that he’s a crime fighter, and his job is to ensure that criminally bad music doesn’t hit the music stores. If I were to be so deluded as to describe my blogging about the movies in such terms, then this movie would have to be The Joker. And I gotta admit, I got my ass handed to me by this particular clown.

Manjal Veyyil stars Prasanna and Sandhya as childhood friends, presumed to be lovers by the world and its grandmother-in-law. Not that they are lovers, but none of this matters until the bad guy comes into the picture. Said bad guy is betrothed to her elder sister but decides that he wants her instead. It so happens that the sister is a diabetic, so he messes with her medications and causes her to collapse during their engagement. His parents throw a hissy fit and her dad offers Sandhya’s hand in marriage instead. This, after the groom’s mom gets abusive enough to warrant calling off the match, diabetes or not. And not once does the dad ask his daughter if she is okay with this, or even apologize after the fact. She reacts by running away with Prasanna. I’ll give you a minute to try and work out which asshole she was running away from.

While everyone thinks that the two have eloped, we discover that he is actually helping her find her lover (who went missing sometime ago). When the lover eventually turns up, so does the villain. Cue a standard fight sequence, in which the bad guy does, but not before badly injuring Prasanna. The doc says he’ll live, but will need someone to care for him for the rest of his life. So Sandhya tells her lover that she has to sacrifice her love in order to take care of her friend. He is disappointed, but agrees with her reasoning and leaves. Now, since the two of them have this conversation within earshot of the critically ill but conscious Prasanna, he decides to simplify matters by taking the breathing mask off his face and committing suicide while no one’s looking.

Now you’re probably waiting for me to tell you all that is wrong with the movie, in the most vitriolic language I can summon up.

I ask you: After that plot summary, do I really need to?

 

The Reader

After having watched The Reader I realized something interesting: It is a movie about guilt and involves a former guard at Auswicz, but this description simultaneously tells you everything and nothing.

I will not spend much time on the plot, which is beautiful. Or on the writing, which feels like a punch to the gut. Or on the direction, which is unquestionably splendid.I will speak, instead, of the experience of watching Kate Winslet playing Hanna Schmitz.

When you first see her, she is a middle-aged woman, still beautiful, still vibrant, but possessed of demons that we can only guess at. She can be brusque, almost cruel, and yet is capable of tenderness and joy. You can understand the fifteen year-old Michael’s fascination with her. There is a scene in a church where she is moved to tears by the choir, and Michael observes her, smiling. Winslet is so radiant in that scene that you can understand what he feels like to bask in it.

When we see her next, she is on trial for being complicit in the murder of Jews at Auswicz. I cannot overstate how much heavy lifting Winslet does in this segment. The trial itself has some of the most interesting dialogue I have heard in the movies. Consider how difficult it might be to try and humanize someone like that. Oh, I don’t mean “humanize” in the sense of excusing her guilt with any kind of pop psychology. But think about how the only faces of the perpetrators of the Holocaust that we encounter in the history books and in fiction are the ones who are shown as obviously evil. Eight thousand people worked at Auswicz, yet only a handful were convicted of murder. Did the rest of them not know what they were involved in?

The third act shows Hanna as an old woman. It shows how a haggard, almost zombie-like prisoner suddenly finds herself rejuvenated when she begins to receive tapes of Michael reading out loud to her, as he used to during that summer years ago when they were lovers. From Hanna’s standpoint, she had two lives: one involving her job as an SS guard, and another involving her affair with the young Michael. It is in this segment that these two lives collide. It all culminates in a scene of surprising power between Hanna and Michael, where little is said but much is resolved. Watch Winslet’s eyes and body language in this scene. Watch how she tries to reach out from the world she lives in to the world she once had, and how she reacts to him as the scene progresses.

The counterpoint to her performance is provided by a pair of actors – David Kross playing the younger Michael and Ralph Fiennes playing the older one. While Kross has done an absolutely fabulous job, his role is more of a foil to Winslet’s character in the first two acts. It is Fiennes who really brings home how much these experiences have affected him. Watch how he struggles with his own guilt in the scene with a Holocaust survivor (played by Lena Olin) who testified against Hanna at the trial. It is amazing how much the man conveys while playing such an emotionally closed-off character.

As good as they both are, the movie belongs to Kate Winslet. The Oscars have had a dubious tradition of honouring the person rather than his/her work in a movie. What with Winslet being nominated so many times without winning anything, I always feared that she might finally end up winning for a decent performance in a weak year. The good news is, The Reader features her best performance to date — if she hadn’t won for this one, she might as well not have won at all. The even better news is, she’s still working.

 

Love Aaj Kal

Saif Ali Khan has two brilliant monologues. Both involve him starting off with a certain point of view and realizing that his heart has been running on a different track midway through it. He does this switch so naturally, makes this realization seem so unforced, that you really get a sense of how confused his character really is.

The girl who plays Harleen Kaur has a moment on her balcony in Kolkata when she realizes that Veer Singh (Saif again) has come all the way from Delhi to see her and is standing across the road. Watching her smile is a delight.

The structure is interesting: two love stories, one set in the past and one in the present, both differing in how the lead characters approach love. Hao Hsiao-Hsien did it in Three Times a few years ago, I believe — I haven’t seen it, so I’m not sure how much this structure owes to that one. But even if it was inspired, we can credit Imtiaz Ali for having picked a good inspiration.

That’s about it. The rest of the movie is a total loss.

You know the feeling you get when you’re in a groove while writing and it’s all you can do to write as fast as the voice in your head is telling the story to you? When the words start to tumble over one another in their hurry to get out? Contrast this with those moments when you want to write but really don’t feel like it, and have to force the sentences out word by word. If the first half of Jab We Met felt like the former experience, nearly all of Love Aaj Kal felt like the latter.

After two fantastic movies, Imtiaz Ali seems to have lost his way. Watching the movie unfold, I was left with the distinct impression that his heart wasn’t in it. It felt like he first wrote out what the screenplay should be, and mechanically filled in the scenes. We get precision when we need rhythm.

Central to the appeal of his earlier movies was the funny, sassy dialogue. Best of all, it felt natural. This time around, hardly any of the dialogue works. Worse still, the actors don’t seem to have fun with the material. The dialogue delivery is plagued with the split second delay that is fatal to comedy. The characters seem to smile not because they’re happy, but because they are in a movie made by the guy who made Jab We Met. Deepika, especially, spends much of the movie looking like she’s endorsing Orbit chewing gum. She even says “It works” at one point — if she had said “It really works”, I think the producers could’ve raked in a little sponsorship money. Then again, if they had spent the casting budget on a better actress, it might’ve worked a damn sight better for them on the whole.

When the leads don’t seem to have much fun, you look to the supporting cast. Trouble is, there really isn’t one. Friends and family, other girlfriends and boyfriends, none of them have anything to do. Even Rishi Kapoor, one of the most dependable character actors working today, starts off with a good scene and then simply fades back into the woodwork.

That’s it, I guess.

ps: When I write a review, I usually spend some time working on a good opening and closing paragraph. But when the filmmaker doesn’t work towards crafting a good ending, I figure, why should I go to all the effort?

 

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Beware! There be spoilers.

The sixth movie installment in the Harry Potter series is, to be honest, a bit of a disappointment.When I think about it, it seems like a Herculean task for it not to be. But I ask myself, should that really be my problem?

Writing the screenplay for the sixth movie in a series can hardly be a picnic. There is so much exposition that you simply do not have time to cover if you wish to keep the running length reasonable. With a series like this — so rich in detail, its conclusions built on so many little facts accumulated over multiple books…

The sixth book is especially tough because, fascinating as it is to followers of the series, its major driving force is an examination of Voldemort’s childhood and youth, and the clues it provides to his destruction. Not exactly the stuff gripping celluloid is made of, although it is fascinating to the reader.

In the interest of narrative economy, this plot strand has been condensed into two key memories — one where Dumbledore meets young Tom Riddle for the first time, and one where Riddle finds out about Horcruxes from Slughorn. If one had to condense the book into its plot essence, this would be about right — they tell you that Voldemort was a bad penny right from the start, and that he split his soul and stored it in some objects as a way of staying alive.

Not unlike those wonderful B&W fantasy movies we used to have where the evil magician put his life in a parrot or something equally vulnerable. I can almost imagine Ron doing a Dead Parrot sketch with Harry while Voldemort lay dead in the corner of a pet store. But I digress…

The rest of the running time is taken principally by the love lives of the principal characters, and the mysterious doings of Draco Malfoy. The result is a curious mixture. Half the time, you aren’t sure if Harry is more worried about what Voldemort will do to him or about what Ron will do to him if he kisses Ginny. But despite its two-faced nature, this is a uniformly sombre movie. It is dark, grey and moody, even when it deals with the hormonally addled life of Harry, Ron, Hermione and Ginny.

While all these people have slowly grown into their roles and are fairly comfortable with them, two people get to do more interesting things this time. First up is Horace Slughorn, played by Jim Broadbent with a lot more comic edge than the character seemed to have in the book. The other is Tom Felton — Draco Malfoy faces a test of character in this episode and… succeeds, after a fashion. Although Felton gets very little dialogue, he manages to convey a heck of a lot while just appearing to be skulking around and playing Scotty with a magical cabinet.

Trouble is, the movie never really takes off. Other than for one brief moment when Dumbledore and Harry stand on a rock in the sea while the waves crash all around them, there is never really a sense of exhilaration. Even the Quidditch matches seem obligatory. Maybe the series is just taking a breather before the final rush. I certainly hope so. It would be a pity if we had to poke ourselves with our wands to stay awake when Harry finally faced down Voldemort.

 

Little Terrorist

When we watch movies about people finding a way to live a normal life in the midst of an adverse socio-political environment, we marvel at their resilience and their will to live. But if any of these characters had a way to interact with their audience, would they turn to us and ask, “What would you rather have us do?”

I wondered about this in the opening scene of Little Terrorist where a little Pakistani boy crawls under a barbed wire fence into a minefield that represents the no-man’s land between India and Pakistan. He does this so that he could retrieve a cricket ball that has fallen there. We may sit here and wonder about his resilience, but think about this for a moment: How many of us have played gully cricket and found ourselves sneaking into that cranky old couple’s home to retrieve a ball that has fallen there? Aside from the little matter of the landmines, isn’t this probably how that kid views it?

Of course, real life has a way of busrting bubbles like these — the kid panicks as a result of some rifle fire from a distant sentry outpost, crawls past the first barbed wire fence he could see and finds himself on the other side of the border. While the border security forces search for what they presume is a terrorist who has slipped across the border, the boy takes refuge in the home of a kindly schoolteacher who can remember playing cricket at the very same withered tree before the barbed wire and the minefields came up.

At the man’s house, his neice makes them some roti for lunch. The boy, who is not given a plate to eat out of, unthinkingly tears off half the roti and drops it into the headmaster’s plate before anyone could prevent him. The man, of course, cannot eat something that a Muslim boy has touched. Even the plate is broken later so it cannot be eaten out of. The boy’s reaction is muted — it took me a minute to realize that, given the level of homogenization on the other side of the border, he probably doesn’t even understand what has just transpired. This may well be the first Hindu family he has encountered in his life.

His innocence and the family’s own awkward attempts to retain both their humanity and their religion are what make Little Terrorist such a pleasure to watch. The themes it tackles seem too heavy for its running time (well under half an hour), yet the movie skips lightly through them by simply focusing on the story and letting the subtext write itself.

It doesn’t seem like a normal life to us. But when it is the life you have, I guess you just get on with it.

ps: Some days ago, I was requested to review a couple of Ashvini Kumar’s short films on the blog. I agreed to do it on the condition that, if they sucked, I could say so. Thankfully, I haven’t had to do that. This one, incidentally, was nominated for the Oscar for Best Short Film in 2005.

 

Delhi 6

First things first. Amrita, you were right. This is the first real Rahman album in a while. I could obsess about each song in turn for a month. So I’m going to imagine that he actually won those two Oscars for this album and not for Slumdog Millionaire. Go Rahman! (To have spoken a line in Tamil and quoted Deewar up there — you rule, man.)

It is a measure of Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s success with Rang De Basanti that he could get pretty much any character actor he wanted for Delhi 6 and not have to worry about giving them enough screen time. It is also a measure of his ability to direct such a vast ensemble cast that they manage to pull the movie through some crucial moments where the script doesn’t quite give them the backup they need. Alas, even such a team can sustain it for only so long.

Delhi 6 tells the story of a second-generation Indian-American who comes home with his grandmother who has contracted a tumor and wishes to spend her last days in her ancestral home in Chandni Chowk (PIN code 110006, hence the film’s title). For the next hour and a half, you let yourself get surrounded by this neighbourhood, swayed by its rhythm, loved by its people and worried/amused by their little rivalries, while a “monkey-man” terrorizes the city and this neighbourhood with mostly-imagined nocturnal attacks.

You have no idea where the film is going, but it feels comforting to be welcomed into and ensconced in this world Mehra creates with such fondness. And when he decides to ratchet up the tension by bringing in the spectre of communal disharmony, this neighbourhood, with people jostling for every inch of space, begins to seem combustible. The way he brings this up doesn’t work too well and almost plays like comedy at times, but you care enough about the people that it doesn’t seem to matter.

Trouble is, he’s now created a situation that he cannot resolve in too many ways. And in trying to resolve it in an unexpected manner, he stretches credibility a bit too thin. And you walk out feeling… a bit let down, to be honest. These characters deserved better than an ending like this.

There are a few other glaring flaws. Like Amitabh Bachchan in an entirely unnecessary cameo that irritated me no end by its mere presence. Or Abhishek Bachchan’s now-you-hear-it-now-you-don’t accent, coupled with a performance that really isn’t on par with the rest of the cast. But what was really disheartening was how Mehra simply refused to be subtle when needed.

Consider the minor character who carries around a mirror and asks everyone to look into it. This mirror is referenced so beautifully in the end credits, it almost makes you forget the missteps he made right at the end. But instead of leaving it at that, he got one of the characters to speak at length about what the mirror really means. For heaven’s sake, man, we get it!

But despite all these flaws, when I wake up today I don’t remember its ending. And months from now, when I think of this movie, I know what will come to mind:

Om Puri and Pavan Malhotra indulging in a game of one-upmanship during a bhajan session.

The luminous Sonam Kapoor dancing in the Delhi metro. This is a girl worth watching out for. Anyone who is capable of dancing and smiling while running the risk of having a pigeon poop on her head at close range is a keeper.

Rishi Kapoor’s easy elegance. Why did this man ever have to be young if he could be so fantastic in old age?

Waheeda Rahman’s character making meticulous preparations for her own death. Lady, we see too little of you, but when we do, you make us thankful for it.

Atul Kulkarni, Vijay Raaz, Deepak Dobriyal, Divya Dutta, Supriya Pathak, Sheeba Chadha…

They are the only reason to watch Delhi 6. If that prospect doesn’t sound enticing, then this movie isn’t for you.