Monthly Archives: March 2011

Do Dooni Chaar (2010)

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I was pleased to see this as part of the Indian Film Festival as Do Dooni Chaar didn’t get a cinema release here, despite starring legendary couple Rishi and Neetu Kapoor. It only attracted a very small audience at this showing—maybe 20 people —which really surprised me. Half of that number ran for the door when the subtitles failed to materialise, in search of someone in charge. But all was OK. The film was restarted (the Indian audience members complained loudly and jokingly about having to watch the titles again), the subs kicked in and we all settled down. Well, I hadn’t moved. I was going to watch it regardless so it was more fun to listen to all the huffing and grumbling!

The film was picked up for distribution by Disney and that tells you almost everything you need to know. It’s a nice film with message about decency and family, all wrapped up in a sweet sentimental shell. There’s nothing to object to, but I didn’t feel there was much to get excited about either. It was just… nice. And sometimes a nice film is just what you want.

Rishi Kapoor plays Santosh Duggal, a maths teacher and father of two. His wife Kusum (Neetu Kapoor) runs the household on his very limited income and maintains the cramped apartment to the best of her ability.

 

The kids, Payal (Aditi Vasudev) and Deepu (Archit Krishna), are typical teenagers and want all the latest things and best brands. They don’t have a lot of respect for their father, and see his poverty and lowly job rather than his values and intelligence.

The film opens to an argument about how Santosh’s INR7700 tax refund would be spent. The Duggals are a noisy, argumentative family, and the scene is punctuated by doors slamming and lots of shouting as people careen around the tiny flat. Kusum wants a fridge while the kids want everything from an iPod to dish TV. Payal, depressed by her lack of cash and stylish clothes, is a moody teen who bosses her weedy boyfriend around.  Deepu, or as he prefers to be called, Sandy is cruising by on charm. Until he comes unstuck, Sandy is a slick character with an eye for the girls and an unusual fried chicken based romantic style.

 

The central issue of the film is the pressure on Santosh to buy a car to replace his antique scooter. The car represents so many things to the Duggal family; success, status, independence, pride. But they can’t afford it. They have to budget carefully to have chicken for dinner so a car is a huge deal. The stress of this situation almost drives Santosh to make some extremely dubious decisions and accept money for giving a bad student a passing grade. He seems to embody the nice guy who finishes last, held back by his honesty and simplicity. He refuses to allow Payal to take a call centre job, ostensibly because it will delay her education, but as Kusum points out he also forced her to leave work on their marriage. She is at her wit’s end trying to keep up with the needs of her family when outgoings always exceed their income. The clash of old school and new world thinking is played really well and the arguments have the authentic ring of conversations that have been had over and over.

Rishi is so effective in the quieter, more soulful, moments when he drops some of his actorly mannerisms and he really looks and sounds like a tired dad.  He has a lovely conversation with Deepu/Sandy where they talk about why Santosh didn’t fly into a rage over a discovery and ends with him quietly asking the boy to make the right choices. Santosh’s relationship with Payal is more challenging and those scenes are more vocal and aggressive. But Payal discovers a new admiration when she sees how much he meant to his old students, and how highly they thought of him for his work ethic and standards. I have to say, Rishi didn’t look at all at home in the tiny apartment and I wonder if he went to boot camp to learn to handle an iron. Neetu plays Kusum as the driving force inside the family home, channelling her energy into alternately cajoling and threatening her husband and kids.  She is charming and energetic, refusing to let the exhaustion of her routine slow her down. Santosh and Kusum have a very delicately played scene where they try not to discuss the potential bribe, and Kusum is all for taking it although she doesn’t want to do anything seriously wrong. In a scene at a family wedding, Neetu drags Rishi out to dance and they prove the old sparkle is still there, even if his moves are suspect. There would be something a bit amiss if they didn’t have great chemistry!

I wish I hadn’t read some interviews with the Kapoors about the making of the film. They both went on a bit too much about how their costumes were just average off the rack shop bought clothes and how they didn’t mind wearing something so common to make the film work (I’m paraphrasing). So every time Rishi pulled on another of his knitted vests, I felt an eyeroll coming on. But Rishi IS synonymous with knitwear so it was also quite pleasing.

The supporting cast were all good. I especially liked Aditi Vasudev’s performance. She was bratty and whiny but also had Kusum’s strength of will. She wasn’t at all glamorous, and looked like a typical student. Akhilendra Mishra was also fun as the neighbour Farooqui. He and Rishi had some lovely scenes as the men tried to avoid their warring wives.

I really enjoyed the family scenes, and thought the dialogue was excellent in those episodes. I was less taken in by the scenes with the neighbours, and the final ‘I just make sweets but a good teacher makes great human beings’ speech was just too much for my taste. The message had been coming through loud and clear so being hit over the head with it for the final fifteen minutes or so was overkill.

I also loved the neighbourhood locations and the glimpses of shops, houses, schools and other settings. I always like a film that gives me a strong sense of place and Habib Faisal did an excellent job in making the locations seem so real. The soundtrack is punchy and matched the inner city feel perfectly.

It was a pleasant enough way to spend a couple of hours, and always nice to see old favourites show they still have form. It’s an almost old-fashioned film, and it promotes values of decency and honesty. It is very sentimental, but not too syrupy. I give Do Dooni Chaar 3 stars.

Aaranya Kaandam

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Aaranya Kaandam should come with a warning – an excess of fake violence, actual real life violence against chickens and naked Jackie Shroff. Yes really! Jackie Shroff takes his clothes off in this film.  We have no idea why the organisers of the Indian Film Festival decided to choose this film over many other excellent Tamil releases this year. Perhaps they wanted to see Jackie with his kit off, but why we all had to suffer is a mystery!

The film is a long (too long) tale of double crosses by Pasupathy (Sampath Raj) when he is caught between two rival factions of gangsters. One gang is led by the aging Ayya (Jackie Shroff) and Pasupathy starts out as his more adventurous and able lieutenant. Ayya resents his younger henchman and when Pasupathy organises a drug deal through a corrupt cop to steal cocaine from a rival gang we know it’s all going to turn out badly. Adding to the mix are Ayya’s mistress Subbu who wants to escape, Kaalayan who manages to stumble across the drugs, his competent little son Kodukkapuli, and the other gang leaders Gajapathy (who has an impressive pair of ears) and his brother Gajendran.

Although the overall story is interesting there is too much time spent setting the scene and explaining exactly who is who.  First time writer and director Thiagarajan Kumararaja seems to have been heavily influenced by films such as Traffic and Pulp Fiction where there are a number of apparently unrelated threads which come together to form the climax of the film. But while he manages to  bring the various storylines to a more or less satisfactory conclusion, they don’t all work as well as each other. In addition to the pacing problems, there is a heavy reliance on gimmicky edits and lighting effects that lose their impact through over use. The actual cinematography was excellent, and the street and interior scenes were saturated with colour. Again, we suspect some of the highly stylised angles and use of colour filters was influenced by films like Traffic but it lacked structure so it looked a bit too try-hard.

The soundtrack is a mish mash of musical styles and sounds. We think this might have been meant to create an art house feel, but really it sounds more like someone bought a world music CD and used that instead of going to the trouble of composing anything special. Like the gimmicky editing the music became intrusive and sometimes detracted from the scenes, often simply because it was too loud.

The story of Kaalayan and his son is rather laboured and the inclusion of some rather nasty cock-fighting scenes with lots of lingering slow motion shots and buckets of gore was quite unnecessary. A lot of this could have been cut without losing any of the backstory in our opinion.  The child actor was fairly effective, and the audience certainly responded to his performance.

Sampath Raj puts in an impressive performance as the man trying to work his way out of a difficult situation. He has a good hero run, and puts it to use frequently throughout the film.

We know that traditionally anyone who is Jackie’s friend in a film seems to be marked for a horrible death or at least significant misfortune so we were expecting the wheels to fall off for Pasupathy. Jackie Shroff grunts his way through a series of inexplicable grimaces and as we mentioned decides to bare all. Thankfully there is pixilation but just not enough of it. Jackie Shroff himself may have preferred a larger area of pixilation as frankly it appears there was not all that much to be covered up! It’s not surprising that Subbu wants to escape from his early morning coughs and gurgles as well as the obvious horror of naked Jackie. Ravi Krishna is the gullible Loser who gets caught up in her plans for flight. Both he and Yasmin Ponnappa in her debut role turn in good performances despite a hackneyed plotline.

What does work is the dialogue, which seems snappy and funny despite the overuse of swearing in the subtitles. According to our Tamil language expert the characters weren’t actually swearing most of the time, so it seems strange that the subtitles decided to include as much profanity as they did. Especially when it seemed that every second word out of the kid’s mouth was something that our parents would still disapprove of. Maybe they knew there wasn’t enough plot to last the distance?

Temple says: This was a bore and a disappointment. The entertaining moments were few and far between, and the direction wasn’t focussed enough to make the incident heavy plot stay on track. I quite like Sampath Raj and if the story had been better balanced, this might have been a good gangland thriller. As it is, it’s a mess. I give it 2 stars – for Sampath Raj and so the torture of the poor roosters wasn’t in vain.

Heather says: While I didn’t find this film boring, it really wasn’t pleasant to sit through. There was a lot of really unnecessary violence of the gruesome and graphic kind, and the rooster fight scenes were totally unwarranted. Jackie Shroff was a real disappointment, although I didn’t have high expectations from him anyway. I can think of many actors who would have played this role much more convincingly – although all preferably without the nude scene! There were some good moments hidden amongst the carnage, some reasonable performances from a number of the actors, and even some good comedy. But not enough to save this film from collapsing under the weight of all the various plot threads. 2 stars from me.

Tere Bin Laden

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I have to admit the title of this film put me off for a while. I mean, Bin Laden and comedy? And I frequently find comedy in Indian films to be not very funny at all. But I’m glad I ignored the DVD shop guy’s bad review (‘too shouty’) and my initial reservations as this is one of the smartest and funniest films I’ve seen in ages.  I was so pleased to see it in the line up of this year’s Indian Film Festival and with the added attraction of a Q&A with the star, Ali Zafar.

Ali Zafar is a Pakistani pop star, and this is such an interesting choice of role for someone associated with romance and melody. What possessed a successful singer to tackle a comedy that might have fallen horribly flat? Sadly I didn’t get the chance to ask as the promised Q&A was dominated by a boy who wanted Ali to sign his guitar, sing for his girlfriend and probably pop around to his house after the film and wash the dishes. I admired Ali’s polite and respectful manner, his humour and his shimmery silver jacket –  and he did indeed sing for the lady in question.

Ali Hassan (Ali Zafar) desperately wants to go to America. His plans are thwarted by the heightened sense of fear post the World Trade Centre attacks and he resorts to working for a dodgy news channel in Karachi. Apart from making fun of the whole search for Bin Laden, the film also has some interesting things to say about the post September 11 world and, in Ali Zafar’s words, the explosion of Islamophobia. This could have been a tasteless exercise in other, less skillful, hands but I think this is some of the best comedy writing to make it onto a screen.

The premise is simple enough – ambitious Ali sets up hapless chicken farmer Noora (Pradhuman Singh) as a fake Bin Laden and then things spiral out of control as the world media and the CIA try to find the elusive character, stock markets plunge and the US bombs the crap out of Afghanistan in Operation Kickass. Ali and his friends then decide that as their video caused the war, another video can set things right. Meanwhile the US government is closing in, and the stakes become much more real and personal.

The cast of wannabes who use the Bin Laden hoax to parlay their way into successful lives are all great fun. Sugandha Garg is Zoya, a talented make up artist who transforms Noora to Bin Laden. She wants to set up her own business, and the money from this sting is all she needs. Rahul Singh is the charismatic communist Qureshi, a talented radio voice artist. He wants to shove it up the establishment and liberate the oppressed masses and the proceeds will keep his Freedom radio running. Nikhil Ratnaparkhi plays the sidekick, cameraman Gul, a simple man, who follows Ali’s lead in everything. Lateef (Chirag Vorha) is the news station scapegoat, whose talent for speechwriting in Arabic helps create the authentic flavour of the faked news tape. He is a quiet, frequently overlooked, man who meekly accepts his lot in life until given the chance to escape his routine. The pivotal role of Noora/Bin Laden is played to the hilt by Pradhuman Singh. He has a great line in slapstick and naïveté, and manages to give the ridiculous character a touch of sweetness that made me care about his plight (and that of his chickens). Ali Zafar is the star and he is a delight to watch which is good as he is on screen for almost all of the film. His facial expressions are brilliant and he has excellent eyebrow skills for those more cynical moments in the script. His rapport with the character of Gul seems really natural, and the actors bounce lines off each other with great timing and tongue in cheek style. This ensemble is so entertaining to watch – this is a film where lots of little interactions and gags are happening in the background or periphery of shots so it pays to keep your eyes peeled.

They play for laughs but not to the point that they become heartless caricatures. This group of characters learn from their mistakes and are aware of the price their fraud is exacting so the comedy isn’t without conscience.  And the humour is very even handed – Abhishek Sharma (writer/director) takes potshots at absolutely everyone and yet allows even the craziest characters a modicum of humanity and respect. Piyush Mishra and his wig play Majeed bhai, the horrible boss of the news channel, but even he gets some sympathetic moments (especially once his wife appears!). Barry John is great fun as Ted ji, the stereotypical American secret service guy with his entourage of men in black. I particularly enjoyed the physical comedy of local agent Usmaan, played heroically by Chinmay Mandlekar. There was a distinct ‘Get Smart’ kind of bumbling fool style to Usmaan and I just loved him.

What really made Tere Bin Laden for me was the fantastic ensemble cast, the snappy writing and the taut editing and direction. The dialogue is full of sly puns and is often juxtaposed with really funny sight gags, and I loved Abhishek Sharma’s attention to those details and great timing. It’s a fairly short film, but doesn’t skimp on the entertainment factor and manages to contain some nice satirical writing in a couple of the songs. Who says song and dance has to be meaningless fluff? Shankar Ehsan Loy have provided some fun songs and Jaideep Sahni’s lyrics are pointed and very clever. Here’s what the Melbourne audience missed thanks to the projectionist deciding to stop a bit early:

It’s thought provoking and it made me laugh out loud, even after repeated viewings. I give Tere Bin Laden 4 and ½ stars!