Indian filmmakers aim to cram something for everyone into every film and since the industry turns out more than 500 features a year, they have a lot of chances to get it right. They work so hard to entertain you that I find myself surrendering more often than I resist. And if there are no Bollywood pictures playing at a theater near you, trust me — that will change.
Munde U.K. De,
New York
(2007) Directed by: Anil Mehta. Written by: Jaideep Sahni. With: Madhuri Dixit, Darshan Zariwala, Felix D'Alviella, Akshaye Khanna, Raghubir Yadav, Irrfan Khan and Divya Dutta.
Madhuri Dixit, one of Indian cinema's biggest stars of the 1990s, returned to the screen after a five-year absence in Mehta's drama about a successful choreographer trying to go home again.
Dia (Dixit) left India to marry American photographer Steve (D'Alviella), severing ties with her disapproving family and friends. The marriage didn't last, but she went on to establish an international career as a dancer and choreographer. Dia is living in New York City with her young daughter, Radha (Dalai), when she receives word that Makarand (Zariwala), her dance instructor, is dying. Dia and Radha take the next flight out to Shamli, the town where Makarand established Ajanta, an academy dedicated to teaching and performing traditional Indian dance dramas in an ancient outdoor theater. She arrives too late to see her old teacher one last time, and is dismayed to learn that Ajanta is slated for demolition to make way for a shopping mall.
Dia makes the case for its preservation to local politician Saab, who responds with a challenge: If Ajanta is really the vital part of Shamli's cultural identity that she claims, then Dia should be able to mount a production using local talent and see significant community attendance. If she can't, then clearly Ajanta's time has passed. So Dia and Doctor (Yadav), Ajanta's aging caretaker, set about producing the traditional story of Laila and Majnun, who fall in love as youngsters but are separated by their families. Among the obstacles they must overcome are the lack of trained performers, the efforts of local politicians and businessmen — especially Ranooj Singh (Khan), who's married to one of Dia's best friends (Dutta) from their student days — and Dia's own past, which is still the subject of gossip. And then there's Dia's unorthodox choices for the leads: Tomboyish Anokhi (Sen Sharma) and Imran (Kapoor), the low-level thug she secretly loves. Will real-life chemistry kick-start the show and save Ajanta?
Dixit's star quality is undimished, but Jaideep Sahni's screenplay gives her little to work with beyond hoary "Hey kids, let's put on a show" cliches. That said, the show, which provides the film's climax, is exactly the kind of colorful, energetic spectacle for which Bollywood is famous.
Amu
(2005) Written and Directed by: Shonali Bose. With: Konkona Sen Sharma, Brinda Karat, Chaiti Ghosh and Ankur Khanna.
Indian-born, U.S.-based documentary filmmaker Shonali Bose's fiction debut wraps a history of the 1984 Delhi riots into the story of an American-raised college graduate who returns to her South Asian roots and is shocked by what she finds.
Kaju Roy (Sharma) was adopted and raised by her single mother, lawyer Keya (Bose's aunt, political activist Karat), in Los Angeles. But she's always been curious about her birth parents, and about India, so after graduation she pays an extended visit to her mother's family.
Video camera perpetually in hand, Kaju sets about documenting the sights and sounds of the land where she was born but of which she has no memories. Her grandmother indulges her and her slightly younger cousin, Tuki (Ghosh), by introducing Kaju to Tuki's college classmates. One of them, Kabir (Khanna), reluctantly agrees to escort her around Delhi — Kaju's overprotective family won't hear of her wandering around by herself — and though Kabir mocks her as a pampered tourist whose naive ideas about "the real India" were formed by movies and fashion magazines, he clearly has a little crush on the headstrong American.
Kaju goes to Delhi to see the university her mother attended, but she's drawn to its slums, and with Kabir's help quickly discovers that what little her mother revealed about her past is a lie: Kaju's parents didn't die during a malaria outbreak in a small rural settlement. Her roots lie deep in the Delhi slums, and it becomes increasingly apparent that her story is deeply connected to the riots that followed Indira Ghandi's 1984 assassination by her Sikh bodyguards. Over the course of three bloody days more than 5,000 Sikhs were murdered in retaliation, and Kaju begins to suspect that her father may have been one of the never-prosecuted killers.
Bose's intentions are impeccable and her film is clearly a labor of love: She was a college student in Delhi during the riots, and the brutality of the Hindus who turned on their Sikh neighbors — coupled with the involvement of government officials and the deliberate indifference of the police who allowed arsonists and murderers free rein — left a lasting impression. Bose's decision to make a fiction film rather than a documentary was fueled by the desire to reach a broad commercial audience, and while Kaju's voyage of horrified discovery is undermined by uneven performances, preachy digressions and a handful of clunky scenes, it's nonetheless compelling on a personal level.
Bachna Ae Haseeno
(2008) Directed by: Siddarth Annan. Written by: Devika Bhagat. With: Ranbir Kapoor, Minissha Lamba, Bipasha Basu and Deepika Padukone.
Annan's light romantic comedy takes an abrupt, 11th-hour turn for the melodramatic that imbues it with unexpected resonance without seeming completely contrived.
The story of feckless chick magnet Raj Sharma (Kapoor) unfolds in three segments. In the first, set in 1996, he's a callow 17-year-old whose goofy charm makes girls swoon. While touring Switzerland with his pals, Raj spots fresh-faced Punjabi beauty Mahi (Lamba) traveling with her family. Sheltered and more than a little naïve, Mahi falls for Raj when he impulsively comes to her rescue after she gets left behind during a station stop. But though Raj seems like the quintessential nice guy w ho inevitably loses the girl to someone smoother, he's actually a cad in the making and winds up breaking Mahi's heart.
By 2001, Raj is living in Mumbai and forging a career as a video-game designer. He falls for his next-door neighbor, ambitious aspiring model Radhika (Basu), and in no time flat they've combined their apartments and lives. Raj gets cold feet when it appears marriage is on the horizon, and thinks he's found the perfect out in a transfer to the firm's Australian offices. Radhika, unfortunately, assumes the imminent move means Raj will want to get married ASAP so they can start a new life together in Sydney; he lacks the nerve to tell her otherwise. Radhika too winds up bitterly disappointed.
In 2008, as he's nearing 30, Raj meets his match in Gayatri (Padukone), who's driving a cab while planning to attend business school. This time, she's the one for whom romantic commitment isn't a priority and he's crushed. Finally realizing that his love karma needs a thorough overhaul, Raj tries to make amends to Radhika and Mahi. But to his naive surprise, they're both still plenty mad and not at all interested in letting him off the hook.
The son of Indian movie stars Rishi Kapoor and Neetu Singh, Ranbir Kapoor made his debut in the lavish Saawariya (2007), whose Moulin Rouge (2001)/One from the Heart (1982)-like stylization flopped in India and abroad. But Kapoor's sophomore effort plays to his strengths — offbeat good looks and the ability to handle both broad comedy and drama — and wraps them in a glossy, standard-issue Bollywood coccoon of brightly costumed beauties, gorgeous locations, bouncy musical numbers and breathless romance. The result is slick, mainstream entertainment with just enough surprises that you don't have to feel like a fool for enjoying it.
Bhoot
(2003) Directed by: Ram Gopal Varma. Written by: Lalit Marathe and Sameer Sharma. With: Ajay Devgan, Urmila Matondkar, Victor Banerjee, Nana Patekar and Rekha.
Heavily influenced by The Exorcist (1973) on one hand and Japanese ghost movies of the '90s on the other, this Indian spookshow — "bhoot" means ghost in Hindi — involves a young couple who move into an apartment with a terrific view, plenty of closets and a surfeit of bad mojo.
Stock analyst Vishal (Devgan) falls in love with the duplex digs in a Bombay high-rise and thinks nothing of the fact that the previous tenant died in a fall from the terrace. "People die everywhere," he retorts when the realtor hesitantly reveals the apartment's history. "What does the poor house have to do with it?" Vishal and his perky wife, Swati (Matondkar), are soon happily ensconced in their new domicile, though Swati takes an instant dislike to the building's watchman — they even have words when he enters the apartment unannounced and speaks to her in an overly familiar manner. But the watchman is soon the least of their troubles: Swati begins seeing a girl lurking around the apartment, and is horrified when Vishal confesses that he knew someone had died violently there and didn't see fit to tell her. Within days she's sleepwalking and having vivid waking nightmares; after an especially disturbing episode, Vishal consults a psychiatrist. Then the watchman is found dead, his head twisted backwards; Vishal knows that Swati left the apartment in a trance the night before — could she be the killer?
Though at two hours this non-musical supernatural tale is considerably shorter than most mainstream Indian films, it's still slow going, padded with long shots of the troubled apartment building underscored by a soundtrack full of moans and screams. The number of times rational Dr. Rajan (Banerjee) insists that Swati suffers from multiple personality disorder and Vishal replies that his wife isn't crazy could easily be cut by half. Ditto the scenes in which laconic Inspector Liyacat (Patekar), who's convinced Swati is a murderess, pops up in the middle of some intense encounter and makes a droll and thoroughly inappropriate remark: The Exorcist's notoriously annoying Lieutenant Kinderman was less irritating. On the plus side, director Ramgopal Varma delivers a couple of effective jolts, and the witch doctor (veteran Bollywood star Rekha) to whom Vishal eventually turns in desperation is a witchy bombshell — it's hard to imagine the being, living or dead, who could resist the force of her will.
Bhoothnath
(2008) Written and Directed by: Vivek Sharma. With: Amitabh Bachchan, Juhi Chawla, Aman Siddiqui, Rajpal Yadav, Priyanshu Chatterjee, Satish Shah and Shahrukh Khan.
Writer-director Sharma's variation on Oscar Wilde's The Canterville Ghost is a kid-friendly supernatural tale in which a family unwittingly moves into a haunted house.
The Sharma family is often separated: Cruise ship engineer Aditya (Khan) spends months on end at sea, leaving his wife, Adjani (Chawla), to cope with their mischievous seven year old, Aman (Siddiqui), known to friends and family as "Banku." Aditya's employer rents them a spacious home in Goa, the Villa Nath, a handsome but neglected place locals believe is haunted. Adjani scoffs — she's sure the various odd sounds and goings-on can be laid at the feet of comic drunk Anthony (Yadav), who used to camp out in the empty house — and assures Banku there are no ghosts, just angels like his late grandpa. As it happens, she's dead wrong: Villa Nath is haunted, by the restless spirit of Kailash Nath (Bachchan), whose US-based son, Vijay (Chatterjee), now owns the house. Only Banku can see Nath, and Nath's efforts to frighten him fail dismally: Emboldened by his mother's reassuring words, Banku treats Nath like a naughty puppy. Banku's relentlessly bossy high spirits eventually wear Nath down, and he begins to find the child's antics charming. As Nath gradually assumes the role of Banku's guardian angel, his appearance and demeanor become less frightening than reassuringly patrician.
The film takes an abrupt turn for the melodramatic when Adjani finally realizes her son's chatter about the angel in the house is more than just childish make-believe. Once she learns why Nash is haunting his home, the stage is set for tragic revelations and tearful lessons about the importance of family.
Bhoothnath never finds a comfortable balance between broad comedy – most of which revolves around Adjani's lackadaisical housekeeping, Anthony's drunken antics and the buffoonish principal (Shah) of Banku's new school, who steals his students' lunches (Banku's are, of course, substandard) – and the bittersweet relationship between Nath and Banku, each of whom fills a void in the other's existence. The musical sequences are largely forgettable, with the exception of a schoolyard-standoff number in which Banku and his classmates imagine themselves as ghetto gangstas: The sign of little Indian girls dressed as ghetto hootchie mamas is nothing short of bizarre.
Black Friday
(2008)
Written and Directed by: Anurag Kashyap, based on the non-fiction book Black Friday: The True Story of the Bombay Bomb Blasts by S. Hussain Zaidi. With: Kay Kay Menon, Pavan Malhotra, Vijay Maurya.
Writer-director Anurag Kashyap dramatizes the aftermath of the Bombay bombings of March 12, 1993, in this nonmusical thriller that owes more to films like Steven Spielberg's Munich (2005) than to mainstream Indian commercial spectaculars. Adapted from crime reporter S. Hussain Zaidi's book about the investigation, it suggests that though the bombers were Muslim and claimed they were avenging the brutal violence of the 1992/1993 Bombay riots, calculating underworld crime lords were as much to blame as religious fervor.
March 9, 1993: Indian police interrogate a prisoner about recent riots triggered by the destruction of Babri mosque by a Hindu mob; the riots destroyed Muslim-owned businesses and left hundreds dead. The prisoner's warning about an imminent plot to bomb multiple locations in Bombay is ignored, and three days later 12 sequential bombs tear through the stock exchange, hotels, shopping malls, the passport office, a movie theater and other crowded targets.
The investigation, headed by Inspector Rakesh Maria (Menon), quickly leads to Muslim underworld figure "Tiger" Memon (Malhotra), who's already fled to Dubai and is holed up in luxury with fellow gangster Dawood Ibrahim (Maurya). The actual bombers, frustrated young Muslim men whose inchoate anger at anti-Muslim violence and discrimination was manipulated by Memon, have scattered, believing Memon will help them escape the country when things cool down. As the police gather information by whatever means necessary — the film's depiction of Indian police procedures vividly argues for avoiding arrest at all costs — the increasingly desperate conspirators shuttle from place to place, running out of money, worried for their families and increasingly afraid that Memon, a fellow Muslim, has callously thrown them to the wolves.
Screenwriter turned director Kashyap's second feature was suppressed in India as being prejudicial to defendants whose cases were still making their way through the courts more than a decade after the bombings, and his script closely follows the source material. Opening with the Mohandas Gandhi epigram "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind," it humanizes the bombers without excusing their actions, blaming Ibrahim and Memon for using them as pawns to settle their own festering grudges — especially Memon's fury at having lost property in the riots. The film assumes knowledge of the bombings (which took place shortly after the first terrorist attack on the World Trace Center) and familiarity with various Indian and Pakistani law-enforcement organizations that few Americans have at their fingertips. But in the aftermath of 9/11, its assertion that religious terrorism isn't just about relgion is food for thought.
Bride & Prejudice
(2004)
Directed by: Gurinda Chadha. Written by: Paul Mayeda Berges and Chadha based on the novel Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen. With: Namrita Shirokar, Aishwarya Rai, Naveen Andrews, Indira Varma, Nadira Babar, Meghna Kothari, Peeya Rai Choduri, Daniel Gilles and Nitrin Ganatra.
Director and co-writer Chadha puts a Monsoon Wedding (2001) spin on Jane Austen's much-adapted story of love and money, which opens with the trenchant observation, "[i]t is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife
Seeking suitable husbands for her four daughters, ambitious Amritsar matron Mrs. Bakshi (Babar) sets her sites on wealthy, eligible, London-based lawyer Balraj Bingley (Andrews) for her eldest, Jaya (Sirokar). Jaya and Balraj, who's in town for a wedding, accompanied by his snooty sister, Kiran (Varma), and his best friend, William Darcy (Martin Henderson), heir to an international hotel fortune, seem to hit it off. And Darcy and Jaya's feisty, formidably intelligent sister, Lalita (Rai), also seem to have a little chemistry bubbling until Darcy sticks foot firmly in mouth and convinces her he's an arrogant ignoramus who thinks the civilized world begins and ends in the United States. On a trip to Goa, Lalita meets handsome world traveler Johnny Wickham (Gilles), who grew up with Darcy and confirms her every suspicion and adds a few unsavory details she hadn't suspected.
Back home in Amritsar, Mrs. Bakshi is courting uncouth Mr. Kholi (Ganatra), who made a success of himself in American and wants a proper Indian bride, for Lalita. A lavish Bakshi-family dinner, whose guest list includes Balraj, Darcy, Wickham and Kholi, begins with high hopes and devolves into disaster. Balraj fails to propose, Lalita is awful to Kholi, next-to-youngest sister Maya (Kothari) performs an embarrassing cobra dance and baby sister Lakhi (Choduri) develops a massive crush on Wickham. Things all work out for the best, but not until tears have been shed, secrets revealed and the lavish musical numbers that define Indian mainstream filmmaking have set the screen awhirl with color and rhythm. The good news is that Austen's tale of heartbreak and social maneuvering continues to lend itself beautifully to contemporary adaptation: The rules of the game change, but the clash between what people want and what other people want for them is as vivid as it was almost 200 years ago. The bad news is that the much-ballyhooed Hollywood-Bollywood marriage is an awkward match: Gloriously seductive musical sequences seem suddenly hokey and self-conscious when they're staged in Western settings, and the songs' English-language lyrics are painfully banal.
Cash
(2007) Directed by: Anubhav Sinha. Written by: Yash-Vinay. With: Zayed Kahn, Shamita Shetty, Sunil Shetty, Ritesh Deshmukh, Dia Mirza, Esha Deol and Ajay Devgan.
"Cash in the front of me/Cash in the back of me/Money money on my mind/Making money all the time:" Vishal Dadlani and Shekhar Ravjiani's driving, hip-hop influenced title song sets the tone for this deeply stupid but hugely stylish Indian caper film in which a cross-section of police and thieves try to get their hands on a legendary diamond.
Slightly nerdy DJ (Kahn) strikes up an acquaintance with a pretty young woman aboard a flight to Italy and tells her a fabulous story that begins in 1836, when a poor peasant uncovers a stupendous, 200-carat diamond. The stone is eventually cut into three smaller gems that pass through many hands, leaving a trail of blood in their wake. Two of the three stones eventually wound up in a Belgian bank and were stolen; the third surfaced recently in Cape Town, South Africa, and was promptly acquired by the Chinese Mafia. Security specialist Shania (Shanita Shetty, younger sister of beleaguered star Shilpa Shetty, who survived both a racially-charged stint on the UK Celebrity Big Brother and a controversial public kiss with Richard Gere) has been charged with recovering the gem; she and her team plan to make the hot rock so hot that the only buyer willing to purchase it will be the fictitious "Hafeez," played by Shania herself and bankrolled to the tune of $4 million by the Indian government.
What Shania doesn't know is that embittered crook Adgan (action star Sunil Shetty), fresh off a five-year jail term courtesy of a bad old white gangster nicknamed "Uncle," is determined to steal the gem and use it to wreak his vengeance. Adgan renews his acquaintance with old partner/girlfriend Aditi (Dia Mirza), who in turn recruits veteran thief Doc (Devgan) for the job. Doc calls in specialists Lucky and Danny (Deshmukh, Khan again), the hitch being that the former best friends now hate each other. Doc must make sure they don't realize they're working on the same job, to which end he brings in Pooja (Deol), the top-notch getaway driver with whom both men were once in love, and charges her with keeping them apart. The biggest complication of all is that Doc is Shania's boyfriend, though she knows him only as mild-mannered writer "Karan." Under no circumstances does Doc want to involve Shania in the theft or have her discover his secret identity. And then the double crossing begins…
Director Sinha's glossy heist picture, dedicated to the proposition that no matter where you are, it's all about the Benjamins, makes little sense but features energetic stunts, some pretty sexy musical numbers and intermittent animated sequences in which the various characters suddenly become oddly-Caucasian cartoon versions of themselves. Ridiculous though it may be, it's never dull.
Chak De! India
(2007)
Directed by: Shimit Amin. Written by: Jaideep Sahni. With: Shahrukh Kahn, Shilpa Shukla, Chitrashi Rawat, Seema Azmi, Nisha Nair, Masochon V. Zimik, Kimi Laldawla, Vidya Mallavde and Sagarika Ghatge.
A rare mainstream Indian movie without musical numbers (though it features original songs), Amin and Sahni's inspirational sports drama shoulders an unusually heavy thematic load, including the quest for personal redemption of a disgraced athlete, second-rate treatment of women's teams and the need for modern India to set aside inter-state and -faith rivalries in favor of loyalty to a united nation.
At the conclusion of a heated game against Pakistan's national field-hockey team, pride drives Kabir Khan (Kahn), captain of the Indian team, to claim a critical penalty shot for himself. He flubs it, sparking heated rumors that he did it deliberately to fix the game. Disgraced and unemployable, Kabir vanishes. Seven years later he resurfaces in a most unlikely place: Old teammate Uttamaji offers him a coaching job with the national women's hockey team. The Indian Hockey Association has nothing but contempt for the women's team — they're not good enough to play a European high school team, sneers one association official. Kabir is up for the challenge, but even he's daunted by the squabbling pack of players recruited from states all over India and utterly unwilling to let go of generations worth of seething regional resentments.
The battle of wills starts on Day 1, when Kabir benches five disruptive players, including strong, experienced Bindia (Shukla), who expects the privileges that go with seniority, and prodigiously talented tomboy Koumal (Rawat), who must defy her old-fashioned father to play. Rani and Soimoi (Azmi, Nair), dark-skinned girls from rural Jharkhand — Soimoi speaks neither Hindi nor English — are ostracized by the more worldly players, and Asian-featured Molly and Mary (Zimik, Laldawla), who come from the region where India borders Nepal, are barely acknowledged as Indian. Vidya's (Mallavde) in-laws are pressuring her to come home and honor her family responsibilities, while Preeti's (Ghatge) fiance, an up-and-coming cricket player, ridicules her ambitions. Kabir gradually wins over most of the players, appealing to their self-respect as women and athletes and inspiring them with his vision of a team that plays for India, not personal glory or regional pride. But Bindia continues to undermine their blossoming camaraderie, while Preeti and Koumal are locked in a distracting personal rivalry. Will the team ever work well enough together to compete on an international playing field?
Like A League of Their Own (1992), Chak De! India uses sports-movie conventions to address larger cultural and political issues, and while it doesn't miss a cliche, it also invests every one with vigorous conviction. Chak De! India's release was scheduled to coincide with the 60th anniversary of Indian independence.
Chandni Chowk to China
(2009)
Directed by: Nikhil Advani. Written by: Shridhar Raghavan and Rajat Arora. With: Akshay Kumar, Deepika Padukone, Mithun Chakraborty, Ranvir Shorey, Gordon Liu and Roger Yuan.
A lowly Indian food-stall worker is mistaken for the reincarnation of a great Chinese warrior and wacky complications ensue in this energetic, if uneven, movie masala whose ingredients include broad comedy, fists of fury, dark family secrets and musical numbers.
Hard-luck sap Sidhu (Kumar) chops vegetables at his stern foster father Dada's (Chakraborty) food stall in Chandni Chowk, Delhi's bustling market neighborhood, and pines hopelessly for spokesmodel Miss TSM (Padukone), who pedals made-in-China gadgets on TV. He buys lottery tickets and charms, goes to fortune tellers and even discovers the face of elephant-headed god Ganesh on a potato, but nothing changes his luck until he crosses paths with two Chinese men who seem to want something of him. Could they be the agents of his destiny? Sidhu enlists the help of his putative friend, part-Chinese con man Chopstick (Shorey), who learns the strangers are looking for the reincarnation of legendary warrior Liu Sheng, whom they hope will deliver their village from the persecution of gangster Hojo (Liu). Sensing an opportunity, Chopstick gives Sidhu a carefully edited version of their story, leaving out the part where Sidhu will be expected to going to have to take on a stone cold killer who delights in decapitating people with his razor-rimmed bowler (yes, just like Goldfinger's iconic Oddjob). A reincarnated hero — it's like something out of a Bollywood movie! Sidhu even meets Miss TSM at the passport office, and she's going to China too, for a meeting with her employers. Unfortunately, rather than swooning for Sidha she swindles him out of his place on line.
Once in China, the complications come thick and fast: Sidhu spots a women he thinks is the treacherous Sakhi but is actually notorious thief and killer Meow Meow (also Padukone). The police, by contrast, mistake Sakhi for Meow Meow, forcing her to go on the run. And what do you know: Sakhi was actually born in China! Her Indian mother was married to decorated Chinese police officer Chiang (Yuan), but when their twin daughters, Sakhi and Suzy, were just infants, he and Suzy were apparently killed by Hojo while visiting the Great Wall. Hmmmm... twins. And who's that crazy old bum who lives in the shadow of the Wall and begs coins from tourists? Everything comes together in a martial arts smackdown so stupid it's clever, and surprisingly satisfying as well.
Like most Bollywood films, Chandni Chowk to China is a wild and often uneven mix of genres, and the opening segment is rough sledding if you don't care for broad slapstick. Even if you do, Sidhu gets kicked in the ass by Dada and sent flying over the rooftops one time too many. But once the action moves to China the comedy becomes less buffoonish (a banana-peel gag in the Curse of the Golden Flower-inspired musical number notwithstanding), the kung fu kicks in (including the inevitable Karate Kid-style training sequence that transforms Sidhu into a master of the martial arts) and the family melodrama goes into overdrive.
Like Sony's Sawaariya (2007), Warner Brothers' Chandni Chowk to China represents a major Hollywood investment in mainstream Indian cinema, as opposed to films like Slumdog Millionaire (2008), Bride & Prejudice (2004) and Marigold (2007), which are set in India and inflected by Bollywood style while remaining thoroughly Western movies. Warners opened it on 120 screens in 50 markets, with an eye to cutting themselves in on the immigrant/Desi market in the US and, presumably, perhaps picking up some whitebread moviegoers intrigued by the martial arts element.
Though admirably serious and ambitious, this fish-out-of-water comedy-drama about an American-born Desi rediscovering his Indian roots is a jumbled collection of moments that range from the touching to the tedious.
Half-muslim, half-hindu New Yorker Roshan, (Bachchan) agrees to accompany his seriously ill grandmother (Rahman) to India, where she still owns the house in which she was raised. It's located in the walled Chandni Chowk neighborhood (the same one that figures prominently the martial arts-musical-melodrama Chandni Chowk to China), the old section of Delhi that locals call "Delhi-6," after its postal code. Roshan may look Indian and speaks Hindi, but he sees Chandhi Chowk and, by extension, India as a whole through American eyes: Colorful, vibrant and seething with life, but also backward, corrupt and thoroughly infuriating. As long as he's ambling along the teeming sidestreets and snapping cell-phone pictures, he's just another tourist. But as soon as he begins to involve himself in day-to-day life, Roshan's cultural ignorance stirs up trouble, some petty, some of considerable consequence.
He stands up to a brutally corrupt police officer (Raaz) and gets himself thrown into jail, scandalizes the neighbors by treating a street sweeper/prostitute (Dutta) with simple human decency — doesn't he understand that she belongs to the most untouchable of untouchable casts? — and scoffs at reports that a mysterious black monkey spirit is lurking in the shadows wreaking havoc (such a rumor did in fact sweep Delhi in 2001). It's one thing for the media to make hay with credulous reports of black monkey mischief — they have air time to fill and there are only so many cute human-interest stories to go around, even in densely populated India — but the idea that people actually believe some folkloric simian spirit is real? He just can't wrap his mind around it, let alone that the stories could ignite ancient Hindu-Muslin hostilities. Roshan also befriends pretty Bittu (Kapoor) and encourages her to pursue her dream of entering an American Idol-style TV competion, even as her traditional father (Puri) is arranging her marriage, in part because he knows a restless daughter when he sees one. No child of his is going to disgrace the family by carrying on like some kind of Westernized hoyden.
Kudos to director and co-writer Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra for his commitment to tackling serious social issues — religious intolerance, police corruption, the plight of modern girls forced into arranged marriages and lower-caste citizens condemned to lives of hopeless misery — and to superstar Bachchan for wanting to be part of a film that defies the Bollywood formula for success. It doesn't even have musical numbers. But Delhi 6 never gels, largely because Bacchan's Roshan is such a shallowly drawn character: His gradual seduction by his homeland is never convincing, especially as he becomes increasing aware of its entrenched injustices. And while men and women have been known to uproot their lives for love — it's entirely possible that Roshan's own parents moved to America to escape the stigma of a mixed marriage — his chaste romance with Bittu founders on the absence of chemistry between Kapoor and Bachchan. Ironically, star chemistry is the thing Bollywood films usually get right: Maybe a few of those glitzy musical set pieces would have helped. (In Hindi and English)
Dostana
(2008)
Cross I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry with the all-but forgotten 1970s farce The Gay Deceivers, then dress it up with elaborate musical sequences: Et voila! You have Dostana ("Friendship" in Hindi), which is about 20 minutes too long and funnier than it has any right to be.
Waking after separate hook-ups in the same swank Miami apartment, perpetually horny nurse Sameer (Abhishek Bachchan, son of Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bacchan) — "Sam" to his U.S. pals — and hot-to-trot fashion photographer Kunal (one-time male model John Abraham) cross paths over breakfast and part ways imagining they'll never meet again. Wrong.
Both Sam and Kunal are in urgent need of an apartment and cross paths at a too-perfect-for-words condo, only to learn from Baby (Sushmita Mukherjee, the Rosie O'Donnell of India), the middle aged harpie showing the place, that the owner — who will be living there as well — will only rent to women. Kunal and Sam are disconsolate until inspiration strikes: What if they told Baby they were a gay couple?
Kunal and Sam get their dream digs, complete with dream girl: The pricey condo's overextended owner turns out to be stunning fashionista Neha (former Miss World Priyanka Chopra). One lie leads to another, and soon Kunal and Sam are applying for expedited immigration status as a couple; playing lovey-dovey for immigration inspector Javier, who drops by at a most inconvenient moment; fending off the advances of Neha's super-swishy boss, Verve magazine editor M (Boman Irani); and dealing with Sam's drama-queen mother (Kirron Kher), who falls into a dead faint at the thought that her precious, pampered man-child is — gasp! — light in his loafers.
Meanwhile, Sam, Kunal and Neha become close friends, sharing confidences, emotional support and Hallmark moments.... If only Sam and Kunal weren't both nursing crushes on Neha they can neither declare nor act upon without blowing their "we're here, we're queer, don't worry about us" facades, everything would be perfect. And then Neha embarks on a serious romance with her new boss, Abhimanyu Singh (Bobby Deol), a divorced single father with an unfortunate predilection for shiny silk suits. Kunal and Sam conspire together to derail the relationship, triggering a series of complications that eventually blow up in the worst possible way.
Make no mistake: Dostana trades in stereotypes about swishy queers, shallow horndogs, frustrated career girls, guilt-wielding (s)mothers and overbearing aunties who need to chill out and get laid. And you know what? It's pretty damned funny and oddly subversive. Yes, everyone learns a lesson about tolerance without actually embracing an alternative lifestyle, but any movie that can finagle two macho movie studs into a full-on smooch that doesn't devolve into slapstick gay panic is venturing into risky territory. And man oh man, is it chockablock with lingering shots of scrumptious flesh — just check out this clip of the opening musical number:
Remember: Dostana came out of India, the country where last year Richard Gere impulsively planted a chaste kiss on the cheek of actress Shilpa Shetty at an AIDS charity event and ignited a firestorm of public outrage.
I'm a big fan of Bollywood movies, and not in a snotty "aren't they just too camp" kind of way. I love that Indian filmmakers are willing to embrace the excesses of melodrama as a way to explore universal emotional truths. I love a musical number that lets characters sing the things they can't put into spoken words. And I love how hard Bollywood films work to give you your money's worth: They're like the weather in new England — if you don't like it, just wait ten minutes and it will change.
A lot of Western critics dismiss mainstream Indian films as naïve, but they're not. They're shaped by formulas and conventions, but good filmmakers use those strictures in exactly the same way Douglas Sirk used the clichés of Hollywood "women's pictures" to dissect the devastating consequences of acceding to rigid, hypocritical social mores. You can snicker at the glossy surface of Sirk's 1959 Imitation of Life all you want, but the funeral sequence at the end reduces me to tears every single time, even if I run across it while channel surfing.
I'm not saying that all the 800-900 films that come out of Bollywood every year are good: They're not. As sci-fi writer Theodore Sturgeon famously observed, 90% percent of everything is crap. I'm just proposing that to assume Bollywood movies are all dumb, lightweight, old-fashioned junk that panders to unsophisticated idiots is short sighted — there's gold amid the dross, and odds are that any Indian movie that makes it to the US is one of the better ones. So give it a go ... what do you have to lose? And that's my rant for today.
Indian actor Rahul Bose's writing/directing debut is a jaw-dropper, a dark, English-language melodrama about a hairdresser who reads minds — not in a manner of speaking, mind you, but literally.
As a child, Xen (Engineer) saw his parents die in a freak accident in a recording studio; the trauma somehow endowed him with the ability to hear other people's thoughts. The troublesome gift faded as he matured, but after opening a chic Mumbai haircutting salon he found that he could still listen in on the innermost workings of his clients' minds while he clipped their hair, as though their thoughts were leaking out through the freshly trimmed ends. Xen's clients, an idle cross section of the rich and restless, have no idea their lives are open books to the handsome, deferential young man who trims their locks. And many would be mortified if they did.
Xen knows, for example, that college students Tina and Bobby (Aguiar, Bharucha) are nursing mutual crushes but are too embarrassed to act. He also learns more disturbing things: businessman Mr. Mittal (Irani) is a sadistic misogynist; pampered housewife Tanya (Bhatt) has been cruelly abandoned by her husband and is living in near poverty; snobbish Misha (Oberoi) is a cocaine addict who deals on the side; and actor Rage (Bose) hides a deepening depression behind his manic facade. Where a less benevolent individual might consider blackmail, Xen simply does his best to help and then retreats into the hush of his upstairs apartment, where the windows are always closed and the television is perpetually muted. Then wild-child Nikita (Purie) blows into the shop and Xen is confronted by the sounds of silence... Perhaps Nikita is as empty-headed as her frivolous, attention-getting antics suggest, or perhaps her secrets are so terrible she can't even bear to think about them.
Though the film's fanciful premise seems more naturally suited to comedy, Bose exploits its more sinister implications surprisingly skillfully until the combined weight of narrative threads involving incest, suicide and murder eventually bog the story down. Unlike most commercial films made in India, Everybody Says I'm Fine! has no musical numbers and was shot almost entirely in English, the lingua franca of the privileged classes whom Bose skewers so mercilessly.
Guru
(2007) Written and directed by: Mani Ratnam. With: Mithun Chakraborty, Abhishek Bachchan, Aishwarya Rai, Mithun Chakraborty, Arya Babbar, R. Madhavan, Vidya Balan, Roshan Seth and Mallika Sherawat.
Inspired by the life of controversial entrepreneur Dhirubhai Ambani, Tamil filmmaker Ratnam's politically inflected Hindi-language melodrama examines three decades in the life of Gurukant "Guru" Desai (Bachchan) who rises from his modest rural origins to the top of the business world.
Idhar Village, Gujarat, 1951: Young Guru bitterly disappoints his father, headmaster of the local school, by failing his exams. But Guru is less interested in academics than business, and takes the opportunity to move to Istanbul, where an uncle teaches him the basics of trading. Though Guru's knack for commerce lands him a promising job offer from a British petroleum company, he doesn't want to live in Turkey and work for Europeans. So he returns to Idhar, where he and his childhood best friend, Jignesh Patel (Babbar), decide to go into business together: The only thing stopping them is money — though Jignesh's father used to be a moneylender, he's keeping all his spare funds as a dowry for his headstrong daughter, Sujatha (Rai, Bachchan's offscreen wife). So Guru marries Sujatha, and the three of them move to Bombay, only to find that a web of trade associations and government quotas conspire to keep newcomers from establishing themselves.
A fortuitous meeting with newspaper publisher Manikdas Gupta (Chakraborty) gives Guru the break he needs; Gupta, who's impressed by Guru's drive and energy, exposes favoritism within a local union, and Guru steps into the resulting breach. He becomes a successful yarn trader, then expands into fabric import and export. He sees an opportunity in polyester and opens a textile factory, later diversifying his interests to include chemical manufacturing. Guru's financial success erodes his integrity and he alienates old friends and supporters, including Gupta, who assigns hotshot reporter Shyam Saxena (Madhavan) to cover irregularities in Guru's Shakhti family of companies.
Guru embodies a number of trends that emerged in postcolonial India, and when he's called before a government commission he delivers an impassioned speech that emphasizes national pride — he and Sujatha even request that the proceedings be conducted in Hindi rather than in English — and the need for India to establish itself as a respected member of the international business community. Unlike most mainstream filmmakers, Ratnam doesn't try to include something for everyone, but he does deliver several handsome production numbers. The highlights are a sultry belly-dance sequence featuring Mallika Sherawat and a solo for Rai that emphasizes her rural roots while contriving to get her sari soaking wet.
The Hero: Love Story Of A Spy
(2003) Directed by: Anil Sharma
Written by: Shaktimaan. With: Sunny Deol, Preity Zinta, Deep Dhillon, Priyanka Chopra, Amrish Puri, Kabir Bedi, Parvin Dabas and Rajpal Yadav.
Mission: Impossible-style international spy thrills, with musical numbers.
Much-decorated Indian secret agent and master-of-disguise Arun Khanna (Deol, who bears a striking resemblance to Kevin Spacey) is given a vitally important mission. Power-mad Isaq Khan (Puri), head of Pakistan's secret service, has concocted a diabolical plan: He intends to allow religious fundamentalists operating in the name of Kashmiri independence to steal one of Pakistan's nuclear warheads ("our Islamic bomb"), which they will then use against India. But he's foiled by Khanna and imprisoned with his cohorts. Khanna subsequently assumes the guise of an army officer at a military outpost on the Kashmir/Pakistan border, the better to keep an eye on the doings of Pakistani colonel Hidayatulla (Dhillon), who's suspected of being in cahoots with the conspirators.
Khanna falls in love with studious shepherdess Reshma (Zinta), but puts duty first and places his beloved, who often crosses the border while tending her sheep, in harm's way. Hearing that Hidayatulla is looking for a servant girl, Khanna trains Reshma as a spy and sends her to Hidayatulla's house, where she gathers intelligence — including the vital information that Khan and his co-conspirators are out of jail and plotting again — until she's discovered. Khanna rescues her and proposes marriage, but Khan blows up the pavilion where the engagement party is held and Reshma is counted among the dead. As is always the case in epic melodramas, many more plots and counter-plots play themselves out before the lovers are reunited.
Since this is an Indian melodrama, the diversions include elaborate song-and-dance numbers, some of which arise naturally from the story — an elaborate village celebration, a floor show at a corporate gala event — while others are pure artifice. And since this is also an action thriller, there are shootouts, fights, high-tech spy craft and the climactic pursuit of a runaway train in the snowy Canadian wilderness. Over all, the film is no more preposterous or jingoistic than American big-budget action thrillers,and it pays lip service to ideals of international and interfaith brotherhood and love: Reshma is a Hindu orphan adopted by Muslim neighbors, Khanna refuses to defile the Pakistani flag (his quarrel is only with terrorists) and treats the Muslim villagers of Kashmir with kindness and respect, though that doesn't stop him reviling Pakistan at every opportunity.
Jaan-e-Mann
(2006) Written and directed by: Shirish Kunder. Written by:. With: Salman Khan, Akshay Kumar, Preity Zinta, Anupam Kher, Tom DiNardo and Soni Razdan.
Even by the genre-bending standards of Bollywood musicals, this bizarre, aggressively self-referential spectacle ("I am showing you a flashback," one character tells another as an expository scene begins to play on the wall) features a nutty mix of broad comedy, romance and maudlin melodrama.
It begins in outer space, as NASA astronaut Agastya Rao (Kumar) does a zero-gravity waltz (yes, the "Blue Danube Waltz") with his curvy copilot. As he's about to call his friend Suhaan (Salman Khan) with birthday greetings, she intervenes, pointing out that it's 5am in Mumbai. So Agastya kills time by telling her the story of his unlikely friendship with Suhaan.
Though they attended college together, handsome, arrogant Suhaan never noticed Agastya, a math geek with braces, frizzy hair and a dreadful fashion sense. Neither recognizes the other when they meet seven years later, when failed-actors Suhaan is broke and alone, having destroyed his marriage to the beautiful Piya (Zinta) for a shot at stardom. Piya moved to New York to be close to her wealthy family, and Suhaan, who hasn't paid his court-ordered alimony for a year, is faced with her lawyers' demand for a huge one-time lump payment he has no way of paying. As Suhaan bemoans his sorry lot with his lawyer, scheming dwarf Bonny Singh (Kher), the answer to his problems rings the doorbell. It's Agastya, who has worshipped Piya from afar ever since they were classmates, and has finally woeked up the courage to declare his love. This is the most recent address he was able to find for Piya, and he's dismayed that she's not there; fortunately, he has no idea that Piya and Suhaan are married.
The perpetually scheming Bonny takes Suhaan aside and points out that if Piya remarries, he'll be released from his financial responsibilities. So Suhaan gives Agastya Piya's New York address and tells him to follow his heart. Unfortunately, the mere thought of Piya reduces Agastya to the pitiful, stammering loser he used to be, so Suhaan comes along and, with the help of tiny electronic earpieces, coaches Agastya through his courtship. But the heart is unpredictable and Suhaan realizes he still loves Piya. Many complications arise before this triangle resolves itself, and along the way Suhaan learns not to be such a jerk and Agastya finds genuine self-confidence.
The film's transition from sight gags — most involving the outlandish getups Suhaan dons so he can stay close enough to Agastya to feed him lines without being spotted by Piya — to tear-stained family drama is especially abrupt, and most of the musical sequences are undistinguished. But there is a bizarre number for creepy midgets in elf costumes, and the tale's comic punch line is oddly memorable.
Jhoom Barabar Jhoom
(2007) Directed by:Shaad Ali.
Written by: Habib-Faisal. With: Abhishek Bachchan, Preity Zinta, Lara Dutta, Bobby Deol and Piyush Mishra.
A contemporary spin on A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM pairs attractive Bollywood stars Bachchan and Zinta as a couple who fall in love at a London train station while awaiting the arrival of their fabulous spouses-to-be.
As a puckish guitar slinger in a coat of many colors and a rakish feathered hat, Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan entices commuters to drop their bags and "Sway, Baby, Sway" (one translation of the film's title and its catchiest tune by far) on the platform, while jack-of-all-trades Rikki Thukral (Abhishek Bachchan, Amitabh's son) and respectable working woman Alvira Khan (Zinta) bump into each other, first at a newsstand and then at a crowded cafe, where they're forced to share a table. It's dislike at first sight. He accuses her of having a "typical Indian attitude" — stuck-up and status-conscious — while she pegs him as a crude, rude hustler and a relentless flirt. Nonsense, Rikki replies — he's engaged and waiting for his gorgeous, refined fiancee, Anaida (Dutta, Miss Universe 2000), a manager at the Hotel Ritz in Paris whom he met just before Princess Diana and Dodi Al Fayed left the premises and had their fatal accident. It was dislike at first sight with her, too: She caught him trying to run out on a very large bill. But true love found a way around her reservations, and now she's coming to London to marry him.
Alvira met her prince in legal briefs — handsome, fabulously wealthy Steve Singh (Deol) — when he rescued her from being crushed by a Superman figure at Madame Tussauds. As they finish their stories of true romance, the train pulls in, revealing that neither Alvira nor Rikki was telling the whole truth: She's meeting her aunt and cousin, while he's meeting his raffish business partner, Huffy Bhai (Mishra). And that's not the half of the dissembling: The real fun begins when Rikki and Alvira must try to keep their fictions alive. What fools these mortals be!
Shaad Ali Sahgal's colorful, glamorous romantic comedy is pretty racy for a mainstream Bollywood production (experienced Alvira even has a gay best friend) and filled with catchy numbers that culminate in a hip-shaking dance-off at a ballroom in Southall, London's Little India. The Paris locations are gorgeous, the comedy is snappy rather than goofy (as is often the case in Indian films), the leads are lavishly costumed, and there's even a tear-jerking, everlasting-love montage. Now that's entertainment.
Jodhaa Akbar
(2008)
Directed by: Ashutosh Gowariker.
Written by: Haidar Ali and Gowariker. With: Hrithik Roshan, Aishwarya Rai, Yuri, Ila Arun, Chetana Das, Shehzor Ali, Punam S. Sinha, Sonu Sood, Parth Dave, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Punam S. Sinha, Suhasini Mulay and Digvijay Purohit.
Ashutosh Gowariker, director of the Academy Award-nominated Lagaan (2001), wraps a plea for Muslim-Hindu unity in the kind of movie Hollywood just doesn't make anymore: An epic 16th-century romance awash in jewels, swordplay and elephants.
1555: Jalaluddin Mohammad becomes leader of the Mughal nation at age 13, but his guardian, General Bairam Khan (Yuri), holds the real power. The boy king's first act as ruler is meant to be the decapitation of defeated, half-dead Raja Hemu (Ali), but he refuses and Khan steps in instead. Jalaluddin (Roshan) takes the reins when he comes of age, and proves an unusual warrior king: Repulsed by wanton brutality and political corruption, tolerant of all religions and willing to strike alliances with local leaders rather than seize their kingdoms by force. Raja Bharmal (Kharbanda) of Amer — whose Rajput subjects are famed for battlefield courage and chivalry — brokers one such deal with Jalaluddin, sealed with the emperor's agreement to marry Bharmal's fiercely proud and independent-minded daughter, Jodhaa (Rai).
Jodhaa is obedient but cold to her new husband, even though he defies his own clerics to fulfill her prenuptial demand that she be allowed to maintain a shrine to the Hindu god Krishna in her quarters at the Mughal fort in Agra. With their marriage unconsummated — in addition to all his other fine qualities, Jalaluddin is a gentleman — Jodhaa is at a disadvantage in the snake pit of court politics. Though she finds a surprising ally in Jalaluddin's widowed mother, Mallika Hamida Banu (Sinha), she also has an implacable enemy: Maham Anga (Arun), the wet nurse who virtually raised Jalaluddin. She occupies a powerful position in his court and has used it to further the ambitions of her own cruel, dissolute son, Adham Khan (Choudhary). Maham isn't about to allow some Hindu upstart to erode her influence and steps up her efforts to undermine her when it becomes apparent that Jalaluddin and Jodhaa are beginning to warm to one another. Meanwhile, Jodhaa's brother, Sujamal (Sood), whom their father passed over as successor, is recruiting allies to help him seize his birthright, while nobleman Sharifuddin Hussain (Nikitin Dheer) is plotting to depose his king and TAKE control of the Mughal empire.
The pearls! The silks! The golden earrings and grape-sized gemstones… and that's just the men. Gowariker's three-and-a-half hour epic is sheer, sumptuous spectacle: Armies rush towards each other across desert sands, dervishes spin gracefully at Jodhaa and Jalaluddin's wedding, battle elephants stomp heads, velvet-tasseled horses kick up a spray of stinging dirt with their sharp hooves, white-clad Rajput warriors practice their swordsmanship, blades flashing in the sun. The film opened to controversy over its accuracy (never the strength of historical epics); there was a Hindu queen among Jalaluddin's many wives, but "Jodhaa" was actually the name of his daughter-in-law. Popular misappropriation of the name apparently dates back to an earlier historical romance, Mughal-e-Azam (1960), and in Rajastan — where the Mughal-Indian alliance brokered with the marriage of Raja Bharmal's daughter is a matter of considerable local pride — Jodhaa Akbar was met with such resistance that it never opened. It did, however, set a new record for Hindu-language releases in the US, playing more than 100 theaters.
Whatever its deficiencies as history, JODHAA AKBAR is the kind of grand historical epic Hollywood has lost the knack of making, filled with pomp, intrigue, swordplay, heartache and elephants — lots of elephants. While the lavish musical production numbers for which Bollywood is famous are absent, there are music-driven montages and a handful of dance sequences that arise logically from the action, including the dreamy dervish number and a series of large-scale celebratory routines feting Jalaluddin's decision to repeal an unpopular tax on religious pilgrims. As to leads Roshan (Koi… Mil Gaya) and Rai, they're the kind of stars who once glittered in the MGM heavens and look out of this world in rubies and ropes of pearls.
Koi... Mil Gaya
(2008) Directed by: Rakesh Roshan. Written by: Haidar Ali and Gowariker. With: Hrithik Roshan, Aishwarya Rai, Yuri, Ila Arun, Chetana Das, Shehzor Ali, Punam S. Sinha, Sonu Sood, Parth Dave, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Punam S. Sinha, Suhasini Mulay and Digvijay Purohit.
A loopy, musical science-fiction hodge-podge of story ideas borrowed from American films, notably E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) and Charly (1968), this lavish Indian feature (whose title translates as "I found someone") revolves around a mentally challenged young man and a little lost alien.
Rohit Mehra (Hrithik Roshan) was brain-damaged in utero during the car crash that killed his father (Rakesh Roshan, the film's director), a scientist obsessed with contacting alien life forms.
Under the watchful eye of his fiercely protective mother, Sonia (Rekha), Rohit has grown into a handsome young man with the mind of an impish child. His peers are embarking on their adult lives, but Rohit is still in grammar school. Rohit develops his first crush when he lays eyes on the vivacious Nisha (Priety Zinta), who's recently moved to town. On the advice of her father, who believes in being kind to the less fortunate, Nisha befriends Rohit and is charmed by his innate goodness. This enrages local bully and self-styled ladies man Raj (Rajat Bedi), who misses no opportunity to torment and humiliate Rohit. Determined to live up to the memory of his father, Rohit persuades his mother to dust off his father's old computers, and with Nisha's help inadvertently summons some aliens. They land briefly in the nearby hills but retreat into space when a herd of elephants spooks them; one little blue extraterrestrial gets left behind.
As police and local officials search furiously for the alien, which they plan to turn over to government scientists, Rohit and Nishi find the lost creature and dub him "Jadu" — the Hindi word for magic — because of the astonishing powers he wields. Rohit's friends, a lively band of neighborhood children, soon discover Jadu and join the conspiracy to keep him safe from harm. In return, the wide-eyed, fish-lipped Jadu gives Rohit normal intelligence and confers phenomenal basketball-playing skills on the delighted youngsters.
Like most mainstream Indian films, this epic entertainment aims to provide something for everyone: Low comedy, high pathos, cute kids, chaste romance, scowling bad guys, family drama and, of course, elaborate song and dance routines. Whether deliberate or accidental, the look of stunned perplexity on little Jadu's face when he finds himself in the middle of a hillside musical number is itself worth the price of admission.
Laaga Chunari Mein Daag: Journey Of A Woman
(2007) Written and Directed by: Pradeep Sarkar. With: Rani Mukherjee, Abhishek Bachchan, Jaya Bachchan, Konkona Sen Sharma, Jaya Bhaduri, Kunal Kapoor, Anupam Kher and Hema Malini.
Sarkar's lavish melodrama about a dutiful daughter and the sacrifices she makes for her family recalls both golden-age Hollywood tales of moral sacrifice and redemption and the highly regarded 1995 Marathi-language film Doghi.
Sisters Vibha (Mukherjee) and Chutki Sahay (Sharma) grow up in straightened circumstances in Varanasi, Benares — one of India's holiest cities — but their family is happy until a heartless uncle and cousin decide to repossess the house they've always lived in.
The shock nearly kills their father, Shivshankar (Kher) — who has always lamented that he has no sons — and their mother, Sabitri (Jaya Bachchan), can't support the family by sewing petticoats. So Vibha decides to become a "son" — she moves to Mumbai, claiming that Sophie, a low-level Bollywood employee who once came to Varanasi to scout movie locations, has promised her a job. Vibha fails dismally and quickly wears out her welcome with Sophie, but she can't go home empty-handed: There's no money for Shivshankar's medicine, studious Chutki's college tuition or a lawyer to keep them in the family home. When Vibha is at her lowest point, new friend Michelle gives her some no-nonsense advice: Beauty is a commodity and Vibha needs to start exploiting it.
So Vibha takes the shame-name Natasha and becomes a high-class call girl, supporting her family on her earnings as a corporate "event planner," and resigns herself to never being able to go home at all. When she meets handsome international lawyer Rohan (Abhishek Bachchan), who seems to love her, Vibha flees — what would he think if he knew what she really does for a living? Vibha's double life catches up to her when Chutki, now an MBA with a promising career at a swank Mumbai advertising agency, agrees to marry her boss, creative director Vivaan (Kapoor). How can Vibha return home for her sister's wedding without disgracing her family?
A slick, old-fashioned women's weeper in contemporary clothes, the film's song-and-dance component is relatively small; award-winning choreographer Howard Rosemeyer even stages Vibha's fall from grace as a dark psychological montage (albeit with fab op-art decor) rather than a full-blown musical number — but never fear, there's a wedding and all the spectacle that implies. Overall, Laaga Chunari Mein Daag breaks no new ground but is solidly entertaining.
Leela
(2002) Written and Directed by: Samath Sen. With: Dimple Kapadia, Amol Mhatre, Deepti Nava, Gulshan Grover, Brendan Hughes, Kelly Gunning, Garrett Devereux, Kyle Erby, Michelle Van Wagner.
Indian star Kapadia shines in this family melodrama that takes some surprising turns and addresses the issues of cultural assimilation and friction between immigrant parents and their American-born children more subtlety than less polished features like ABCD and American Desi (both 2001).
Shaken by her mother's death, Bombay University professor Leela (Kapadia) takes stock and finds her life wanting: Approaching 40, she's been married for two decades to Nashaad (Khanna), a famous poet and singer some years her senior, and is afraid she's accomplished nothing. She takes a job as a visiting professor of South Asian studies in California, where her students include sophomore Kris (Mhatre) — Krishna to his mother and no-one else — the thoroughly Americanized son of fellow-teacher Chaitali (Nava). Chaitali is divorced from Jai (Grover), who's now married to an American woman (MVan Wagner) and is a marginal influence in his son's life
The over-protective Chaitali has a boyfriend, Summer (Hughes), but keeps the relationship secret from Krisha, who's still a virgin and takes a lot of ribbing from hot-blooded American pals JC (Gunning), Chip (Devereux) and Jamal (Kyle Erby). Kris and his friends are all smitten with Leela's beauty, grace and calm air of spirituality, and though Kris accepts an American Pie-style bet that he can lose his virginity to Leela, he instead falls in love with her.
Leela in turn befriends Chaitali, and reveals that her marriage to Nashaad, a habitual womanizer who calls her his muse and declares his devotion in songs and poems, is a source of emotional turmoil. As Leela grows closer to Kris, his relationship with his mother deteriorates, and Leela begins questioning the compromises she's made for her marriage. Each must make life-changing decisions above love, loyalty and family.
Working primarily in English and on location in the U.S., but incorporating certain Indian stylistic conventions (notably musical numbers, here woven naturalistically into the story), first-time writer/director Samath Sen fashioned a modern version of the women's pictures that were once a Hollywood staple and are still hugely popular with Indian audiences. Though occasionally didactic (the supporting characters are especially prone to awkward exposition), the film's overall approach is deft, and Sen resists the urge to paint any of the major characters in broad strokes. Kapadia's intelligent, nuanced performance is the film's highlight, balanced by Khanna's portrayal of Nashaad, who could easily be a patronizing, chauvinist caricature. (In English and Hindi)
Love at Times Square
(2007) Directed by: Dev Anand. Written by: Dev Anand. With: Henee Kaushik, Dav Anand, Shoeb Khan, Chaitanya Chaudhary and Siya Rana.
Eighty-year-old actor-turned-filmmaker Dev Anand is a legend in the Indian film industry, but this sunny romance — which he wrote, produced, directed and stars in — is a crudely executed affair that doesn't play well to Western sensibilities.
Vivacious, beautiful Sweety (Kaushik), the pampered daughter of billionaire philanthropist Shaan (Anand), is pursuing a career as a journalist in New York. While covering the New Year's Eve 2000 festivities in Times Square, two young men — successful, California-based computer engineer Raj (Khan) and poor-but-determined Bobby (Chaudhary), who's recently come to New York to make his fortune — fall in love with Sweety.
Sweety likes both, but her first loyalty is to her widowed father, who's recently moved to California, which seems to give Raj an edge, until Bobby lands a job working for Shaan. Over the course of the year, Shaan is persuaded to nurture the musical ambitions of Angela (newcomer Rana), a neighbor's daughter, and Bobby brings his family over from India so his sister can pursue her music studies.
Raj and Bobby each declare their love for Sweety, who demurs because she dreams of a perfect match like that of her parents. Sweety is nearly kidnapped by gangsters, and Bobby takes a bullet in her defense. Shaan witnesses the destruction of the World Trade Center and writes a million-dollar check to the people of New York. Angela and her all-girl band make their debut at an Indian film-stars extravaganza; and everyone winds up back in Times Square for New Year's Eve 2001, where the various story strands get tied up neatly.
Leaving aside the story, which is no more cliched than the average Hollywood romance, the film is marred by bright, flat lighting (which makes the patently fake sets look even less convincing than they otherwise might) and the kind of exaggeratedly perky, eye-rolling performances favored by the hosts of children's television programs.
Kaushik is adorable but painfully over-animated. The scenes in which the lanky Rana (who bears a distinct resemblance to Liv Tyler) "plays" the cello and saxophone are simply ludicrous, though her legs look absolutely terrific wrapped around the former. The flashback to the plane crash that killed Sweety's mother is unintentionally hilarious, from Shaan's miraculous survival to his discovery of his beloved wife's severed hand in a bush. The film's production numbers are energetic but fairly artless, and the music is thoroughly generic pop.
Luck By Chance
(2009)
Written and Directed by: Zoya Akhtar. With: Farhan Akhtar, Konkona Sen Sharma, Hrithik Roshan, Rishi Kapoor, Isha Sharvani, Juhi Chawla, Dimple Kapadia, Alyy Khan, Sanjay Kapoor and Ashish Sahweny. Featuring, as themselves: Shabana Azmi, Javed Akhtar, Aamir Khan, Shahrukh Khan, Abhishek Bachchan, John Abraham, Rani Mukherjee, Kareena Kapoor, Dia Mirza, Karan Johar, Ranbir Kapoor, Akshaye Khanna, Vivek Oberoi, Boman Irani,
Anurag Kashyap and Rajkumar Hirani.
Poised somewhere between an outright art movie and a mainstream Indian feature, writer-director Zoya Akhtar's behind-the-scene look at the hopes and shattered dreams of aspiring Mumbai movie stars could as easily have been called "What Price Bollywood?" or "Run, Vikram, Run."
Small-town girl Sona Mishri (sen Kokona) comes to Mumbai with big dreams, which unscrupulous producer Satish Chowdhury (Alyy Khan) cynically encourages. Of course, they'll have to spend a lot of time together… getting to know one another as artists, of course.
Three years later, Sona is a little older and a lot wiser, but still clinging stubbornly to the hope that Chowdhury will make good on his promise of a starring role. In the meantime, she's made a couple of regional films and played dozens of bit parts on his advice. Meanwhile, Vikram Jaisingh (Farhan Akhtar, the director's brother), has graduated
from the Nand Kishore School of Acting and left his hometown, Delhi, to pursue his dream. Fortunately, he has a well-off father willing to indulge him, at least for a while. Vikram wants nothing less than to go home and work in his father's store, but so far he's gotten nowhere: Without connections, he can't even get into cattle-call auditions, so he spennds a lot of time hanging out with his friends Sameer, who aspires to direct while working as a prop man, and Abhi (Mathur), who pays the rent with TV gigs but "nourishes his soul" by doing theater. Abhi and Sameer live down the hall from Sona: Vikram, meet Sona. Sona, Vikram.
The ambitious youngsters fall in love, encouraging each other when things are bad, rejoicing together in every bit of luck. But the movie business is a tough one, built on nepotism, casting-couch favoritism, shrewd politicking and ungovernable luck; the one sure thing is that success — even a taste of it — has a way of revealing people's true faces.
The children of screenwriter Honey Irani and lyricist Javed Akhtar, Zoya and Farhan grew up in and around the movie business, but it still took Zoya seven years to get Luck By Chance made. She clearly spent them watching the Bollywood circus (a metaphor she employs with glee in one of the film's handful of musical numbers) and making mental notes. The clowns, acrobats and high-wire artists include veteran producer Rommy Rolly (Rishi Kapoor), whose buffonish exterior covers a razor-sharp instinct for the business; his wife, Minty (Chawla), who's way more influential than most people realize; pretty boy Zaffar Khan (Roshan), Rommy's in-house star, who gets an offer he can't refuse from another producer that just happens to conflict with Rommy's next picture; Rommy's idiot brother Ranjit (Sanjay Kapoor), a failed actor-turned-sirector who thinks he's India's answer to Quentin Tarantino; aging star Seena Walia (Kapadia), who's masterminding the career of her brainless, sheltered daughter, Nikki (Sharvani); and a host of bona fide Bollywood luminaries playing themselves, including Rani Mukherjee, Abhishek Bachchan and Shahrukh Khan, who gives some sage advice about the intoxicating but fleeting pleasures of stardom. He ought to know.
Written and Directed by: Manmohan Singh. With: Jimmy Shergill, Niru Bajwa, Gurpreet Ghuggi, Binnu Dhillon, Khushboo, Neeru Bajwa, Deep Dhillon, Amrinder Gill, Arun Bali and Rana Ranbir.
This fish-out -of-water comedy about two UK-raised young men of Punjabi descent summering in India with one youth's aging grandfather is overlong, painfully cliched but occasinally surprisingly sly and clever
Gurdit Singh (Bali) has never quite recovered from the fact that his son emigrated to the UK and never returned, so he's thrilled when his grandson, Roop (Shergill), decides to spend the summer with him, even if he is bringing along his hip-hop obsessed pal DJ (Ghuggi).
Though only one generation removed from Indian, Roop and DJ are almost as foreign to India as white-bread Midwesterners: Everything amazes them, from the sprawling houses staffed by masses of servants to the hostile hijra who tools through town on a tractor and threatens to rip anyone who gets in his/her way to pieces. Cultural differences notwithstanding, Roop soon falls in love with Reet Brar (Bajwa), who attends university with Roop's cousin, Deepi. Dropout slacker DJ in turn falls for the brainy Kulwant Kaur, another classmate, and quickly swaps his ghetto-fabulous duds for more conservative clothes and a traditional Sikh turban.
Roop asks for Reet's hand in marriage, but she capriciously refuses; by the time she's changed her mind her father — who adores his daughter but also clings stubbornly to tradition — has betrothed her to the naïve Jagjot Gill (singer Gill), and her only hope of escaping an arranged marriage of which she wants no part is to get her good-for-nothing, drug-addicted brother married off first. Roop and DJ think they have the answer: Bring over thoroughly assimilated good-time girl Candy (Pakistani actress Khushboo) — Dj's ex-girlfriend — and have her seduce Jaile by pretending to be a demure young woman. Once he proposes marriage and Mr. Brar has okayed Roop and Reet's union, Candy will reveal her hoydenish ways and Jaile will call off their wedding. But like so many perfect plans, Roop and DJ's scheme is filled with opportunities for everything to go very, very wrong.
By all traditional standards, Munde U.K. De (translated onscreen as "British by Right, Punjabi by Heart") is a pretty terrible movie: Sloppily written, indifferently photographed, costumed 20 years out of date (Roop always appears to be auditioning for an '80s music video) and crude on every level.
But for all its flaws, it has a certain ragged charm, and Bajwa (a Canadian raised model and actress ) has real charisma. The musical number in which the Westernized boys and the Punjabi girls face off a la West Side Story's "America" has some real snap, and any story of old-country elders and assimilated youngsters has the potential to resonate beyond its specific cultural mileu.
New York
(2009) Directed by: Kabir Khan. Written by: Sandeep Srivastava, from a stroy by Adit Chopra . With: John Abraham, Katrina Kaif, Neil Nitin Mukesh and Irrfan Khan.
An Indian immigrant is recruited by the FBI to infiltrate a New York-based terrorist cell in one-time documentary-filmmaker Kabir Khan's thriller with torn-from-today's-headlines underpinnings.
Taxi driver Omar (Mukesh) is caught in a well-coordinated FBI sting and accused of consorting with terrorists. The agents find guns in his trunk, and as Omar protests that they're not his, he doesn't know how they got into his cab and that there's been some terrible mistake he's whisked into custody. Denied a lawyer and questioned relentlessly by steely Agent Roshan (Kahn, Jamal's interrogator in Slumdog Millionaire), Omar gradually realizes that no one ever thought he was a terrorist: He was set up for the express purpose of coercing him into acting as a pawn in a very dangerous and morally compromising game.
Roshan wants to bring down Samir (Abraham) — "Sam" to his American friends — a successful entrepreneur who was Omar's best friend in college; the two men have been out of touch for several years. Both loved the same girl, Maya (Kaif), but she only had eyes for Sam; the humiliated Omar slunk off to Philadelphia and has only recently returned. Omar doesn't believe for a second that Sam has become a terrorist: The Sam he knew was an extroverted bon vivant, more interested in sports and girls than politics or religion and thoroughly Americanized to boot, having lived in the US since he was four. But weeks of Roshan's bullying eventually wears Omar down, and he agrees to spy on Sam and Maya — now Sam's wife — if only to prove that Roshan is dead wrong. Of course, if Roshan were wrong there wouldn't be much of a story, so the bulk of the film deals with Omar's gradual discovery of his old friend's dark side (including his reasons for embracing the path of covert violence), and his deeply conflicted feelings about living in Sam and Maya's home while reporting back to Roshan.
Like most of the American films that deal with the fallout from 9/11, Khan's picture, which was shot on location in New York and Philadelphia, uses thriller conventions to address such issues as the suspension of civil liberties and the government's ever-expanding power to harass, detain and deny due process on the flimsiest grounds. But its perspective is very different: Rather than focusing on the emotional turmoil of white Americans jolted from their pampered complacency by the realization that much of the world hates them, it foregrounds the experiences of South Asians, including longtime residents and native-born US citizens who suddenly found themselves branded terrorists or collaborators regardless of whether they had any connection, even the most tenuous, to groups or individuals with anti-American agendas. New York has its share of clumsy moments, but its intent is deeply serious: It deplores Bush-era tactics, including rendition, long-term custody and torture, while conceding that some South Asians are plotting acts of terrorism. And it acknowledges that Roshan's scheme did succeed without downplaying its cost, both to Omar and to other innocent parties. It also dispenses with the song-and-dance numbers that are an integral part of virtually all Bollywood movies, substituting a handful of montages with musical accompaniment. That's no small thing: Even movies like Lagaan (2002), about the Indian independence movement, and The Hero: Love Story of a Spy (2003), which deals with hostilities between India and Pakistan, have them. The absense of musical numbers suggests that New York is aimed more at international audiences — specifically American — than homegrown ones, as does the fact that it was shot largely in English. And that makes its closing sequence particularly bold: Roshan suggests that maybe it's time to get past 9/11 and start looking towards the future. That may not be a message many Americans look to embrace, but it's one worth considering.
A bubbly little romantic comedy that has more in common with Kissing Jessica Stein (2001) than grittier tales of being gay within a tight-knit ethnic community, Parmar's film is light and sweet, comfort food dressed up with a dash of exotic spice; for all the escalating complications, there's no crisis that can't be fixed by a cuppa and some bickies. Life is generally messier and more painful, which is why formulaic movies like this exist: They recast emotional ordeals as silly spots of bother that go down as easily as that comforting cup of tea. And sometimes that's exactly what you need.
(2008) Written and directed by Aditya Chopra. With: Shahrukh Khan, Anushka Sharma, Vinay Pathak, M.K. Raina and cameos by Bipasha Basu, Lara Dutta, Preity Zinta, Rani Mukherjee and Kajol Devgan.
Aditya Chopra's romantic comedy could teach Hollywood a thing or two about breathing life into hoary cliches.
As the vibrant Taani (Sharma) prepares to don her bridal gown, her beaming father, Professor Gupta (Raina), receives a terrible phone call: Taani's groom-to-be and his family have been killed in a bus accident en route to the wedding, and Professor Gupta must deliver the news that will break his daughter's heart. The aging professor's own heart is too weak to withstand such sorrow, but the prospect of dying can't compare to his dread of leaving the still-grieving Taani alone in the world. And then a solution presents itself. Surinder "Suri" Sahni (Shahrukh Khan, who's at least a decade too old for the part but acquits himself surprisingly well), Gupta's favorite ex-student, is unmarried, has no family to look out for his interests and has always nursed a secret crush on Taani.
Women ignore Suri because he's shy and geeky, but Gupta sees past the awkwardness and sad little mustache to the kind, responsible, loyal soul beneath. Gupta could entrust his precious daughter to such a man, and both Taani and Suri love and respect Gupta too much to refuse his dying wish.
From this inauspicious start, Taani and Suri construct a sad shell of a marriage: He hopes she'll grow to love him even after she says she won't, and her dutiful efforts to be a good wife — cleaning, cooking, playing the gracious hostess when Suri's boisterous friends from the office invite themselves over — only make him sad. When Taani mentions that "Dancing Jodi," a Mumbai-based variation on So You Think You Can Dance, is coming to Amritsar, Suri immediately offers to pay her entry fee: It's the first thing in which she's shown interest since they were married.
The quietly miserable Suri's only confidant is hairdresser Bobby Khosla (Pathak), his unlikely best friend. And the "Dancing Jodi" situation gives Bobby an idea. He'll give Suri a total makeover: sexy new clothes, stylish haircut, bad-boy sunglasses and no more pathetic mustache... "If she recognizes you, I'll close this salon," Bobby crows as he gives Suri a fake mustache so he can resume his nerd persona at will. All Suri has to do is attend the "Dancing Jodi" tryouts and wow Taani with his smooth moves. Once she's under his spell, Suri can reveal the truth and watch as Taani's defenses drop like cherry blossoms. Next stop: connubial bliss.
Anyone who's ever seen a romantic comedy will be able to call what happens next: Suri improvises a full-blown alter ego to go with his new look, Taani falls for the brash stranger who calls himself "Raj Kapoor," Taani and "Raj" keep advancing through the elimination rounds, Suri keeps up the masquerade and Taani finds herself torn between her promises and her dreams. What do you think: Does everything come to a head during the final, televised rounds of "Dancing Jodi"?
Rab ne Bana di Jodi has been dismissed in some quarters as self-conscious and artificial, a coyly self-referential reworking of outdated movie tropes a la Todd Haynes' Far From Heaven, but it works for me in a way that most contemporary Hollywood romcoms don't. In all fairness, Rab ne Bana has certain cultural mores in its corner, particularly the deference many thoroughly modern, successful, emotionally mature Indian men and women show their parents in marital matters. The average 21st-century American regards marriage as a completely personal matter, so parental considerations — positive or negative — don't cut it as relationship obstacles.
Hollywood writers have to come up with increasingly preposterous contrivances and behaviors to keep couples apart, and I have to say that it truly makes me cringe to see characters in their late 20s and early 30s forced to act like idiotic teenagers because if they were to behave like 21st-century American adults there would be no movie.
That's why I'm always thrilled to run across a movie like Kissing Jessica Stein (2002), in which a pair of Manhattan women stumble over the practical nuances of the term "bi-curious."
But I digress: The musical medley "Phir Milenge Chalte Chalte" ("We'll Meet Again as Time Goes By"), which begins as Taani and Suri are escaping their troubles at the movies and blossoms into a homage to Bollywood choreography of yesteryear, from Busby Berkeley-influenced numbers to a '70s disco number, is worth the price of admission all by itself.
Each section showcases a major star, from Kajol Devgan to Rani Mukherjee. It really is worth the price of admission all by itself, especially the swinging sixties pastiche that features Lara Dutta channeling the cult favorite Queen Helen — if you've seen Ghost World, you've seen her — albeit briefly — at her go-go booted best. If you haven't, this will have to do. She's the one in the black tights...:
The film opens with a terrific action sequence that culminates in a stunning car crash, then squanders the next 20 minutes on a series of flashbacks introducing the four leads, complete with a horribly miscalculated voice-over better suited to a light caper film than a complex tale of greed, deceit, jealousy, betrayal and revenge. But once the head games commence in earnest, Race settles into its sun-splashed neo-noir groove. It's sleek, glossy, utterly preposterous and surprisingly steamy for a mainstream Indian film: Ranvir and Sonia's roll in the hay (literally — they're in a stable) would be racy without Rajiv watching via closed-circuit camera, and Sophia's big musical number, "Zara Zara Touch Me" lives up to its insinuations. (In subtitled Hindi and English)
(2007) Directed by: Sanjay Leela Bhansali. Written by: Prakash Kapadia and Vibhu Puri, based on the story White Nights, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. With: Ranbir Kapoor, Rani Mukherjee, Zohra Sehgal, Sonam Kapoor and Salman Khan.
The first full-fledged Indian musical coproduced and distributed by a major Hollywood studio, this fanciful love story takes its unlikely inspiration from Dostoevsky's short story White Nights.
The story takes place over a period of four days, culminating in the first day of Eid, the Muslim festival that marks the end of Ramadan fasting. Naive musician Ranbir Raj (Ranbir Kapoor) arrives in a strange city — a fairy-tale melange of Venetian-style canals, giant Buddhas, and English-language bars and cabarets that recalls the exuberantly stylized Montmartre of Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge (2001) — with no money and no friends.
He quickly lands a job at the glamorous RK Bar, a swank nightclub in the middle of the red-light district, and glamorous pavement princess Gulab (Mukherjee) directs him to a local hotel run by Lilian (Sehgal), a cranky old Englishwoman who's won over by Raj's childlike playfulness and innocently loving nature. Soon after, Raj spots a beautiful young woman, Sakina (Sonam Kapoor), crying on a bridge. Smitten, he gradually draws out her story. Sakina lives with her overprotective grandmother (Begum Para) and an elderly servant, Jumari, and is waiting for the return of a mysterious lover named Imaan (Khan). It's been a year since they promised to reunite on the bridge, and she's torn between giddy elation at the thought of his return and the fear that he won't.
Sakina welcomes Raj's friendship, but he hopes to make her forget Imaan — who probably isn't coming back anyway — and return his love.
Saawariya ("beloved") marks Sony Pictures' pioneering effort to secure a piece of the lucrative Indian film market, where moviegoers flock to domestically made films and American movies have made few inroads. While the film features the traditional lavish musical numbers, modest romance and broad humor juxtaposed with unabashed melodrama that are typical of mainstream Indian films, the somber palate, dominated by blue, black and slashes of red, is unusual. Production designer Omung Kumar's enormous, elaborately art-directed sets are simply incredible and overall the film is breathtakingly beautiful, but the story is painfully dull and repetitive.
The songs are undistinguished, and while newcomers Sonam Kapoor and Ranbir Kapoor (who aren't related) both have impeccable Bollywood pedigrees, her performance is wildly uneven — she's good with crazy, but otherwise she's bland — and his strenuously madcap antics are grating rather than endearing. Established stars Mukherjee and Khan eclipse them effortlessly, and with far less screen time.
Directed by: Danny Boyle; Loveleen Tandan, co-director (India) Written by: Simon Beaufoy, based on the novel Q&A, by Vikas Swarup. With: Dev Patel, Tanay Hemant Chheda and Ayush Mahesh; Freida Pinto, Tanvi Ganesh Lonkar and Rubina Ali; Madhur Mittal, Ashutosh Lobo Gajiwala, Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail; Anil Kapoor, Ankur Vikal and Irrfan Khan.
No, Slumdog Millionaire isn't a mainstream Indian movie; frankly, so much of it is in English that I'm not sure it would qualify for an Oscar nomination in the foreign-language category. But it's a UK-India co-production, based on an Indian novel and informed by Bollywood conventions. It's also one of the best-reviewed films of 2008 and, as such, just might help persuade US viewers who've never seen an Indian film to test the waters. That's why I'm including it here. Oh... and the fact that it won eight Oscars doesn't hurt.
Adapted from first-time writer Vikras Swarup's 2005 novel, Q&A, UK filmmaker Danny Boyle's (28 Days Later, Trainspotting) picaresque tale follows its Candide-like hero from the gutter to the glittering heights of a TV game show that promises instant celebrity and riches. The story's contrivances wouldn't be out of place in a Bollywood musical, but they're wrapped in all-too convincing squalor and misery that make the feel-good ending seem righteously earned.
Against all odds, 18-year-old Jamal Malik (Patel), the spawn of Mumbai's grimmest slums, has made it to the final round of India's version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire, and host /producer Prem Kumar (Kapoor, in his first English-language role), a sleek huckster with a gleaming shark smile, wants to know how. Better men than Jamal — doctors, lawyers, university professors — have failed where this stubborn slumdog has succeeded, and to add insult to hubris, he keeps on playing. He must realize he's already won more than he could reasonably expect to earn in a lifetime of serving tea to call-center employees, and yet he won't take the money and disappear, even though he risks everything with each new round. Kumar is convinced he's cheating, which is why, less than 24 hours before his last shot at the big brass ring, Jamal finds himself being brutally interrogated by a corrupt Police Inspector (Khan). The answer is both straightforward and preposterous: Jamal may be ignorant of things a middle-class five year old would know, but the stars have aligned in his favor and the answer to question after question proves to be rooted the hardscrabble life Jamal relates to the inspector.
It begins in the fetid but vibrant shantytown where seven-tear-old Jamal (Khedekar) and his older brother, Salim (Ismail), lose their mother during the 1992 Bombay Riots, when Hindu mobs armed with clubs and torches turned on their Sikh and Muslim neighbors. Orphaned and alone, the boys learn to fend for themselves, and street life quickly lays bare their fundamental natures. Pragmatic Salim purges himself of softness and sentiment, while Jamal stubbornly looks for evidence of good amidst Dickensian squalor and casual cruelty.
It's Jamal who spots the bedraggled Latika (Ali) shivering in the rain and persuades Salim to let her share their makeshift shelter, and Jamal's childish crush intensifies after the children are separated. His determination to find and rescue Latika insulates Jamal against the dog-eat-dog nihilism that eventually claims Salim (Mittal), but his quest seems doomed. Jamal has already found and lost her twice, once as an adolescent (Lonkar) and once as an adult (Pinto); what are the odds that he'll get another chance?
Strip away the exotic details and Slumdog Millionaire's roots become clear: It's Oliver Twist for the global world, a pitiless portrait of life defined and deformed by abject poverty made palatable by the promise that virtue will be rewarded. The injustices visited upon Jamal and Latika are as cruel as than those Charles Dickens brought down on poor Oliver 170 years earlier; Slumdog's corrupt pied piper. Mamon (Vikal), who lures abandoned children into lives of crime and vice, is Fagin with a tan and virtue's vindication comes in the form of a windfall tailored to the times — Oliver comes into an unexpected inheritance, while Jamal hits the game show jackpot. Both are sophisticated fairy tales — anyone who thinks Dickens was a naïve sentimentalist hasn't read Great Expectations recently — and both are hugely satisfying. Who wouldn't like to believe, if only for two hours, that a steadfast heart and the power of love can transcend grinding poverty, violence, brutal exploitation and entrenched indifference? And I suspect cynics want to believe most of all.
(2008) Written and Directed by: Vijay Krishna Acharya's. With: Akshay Kumar, Saif Ali Khan, Kareena Kapoor, Anil Kapoor,
Sanjay Mishra, Manoj Pahwa and Yashpal Sharma.
Screenwriter Vijay Krishna Acharya's directing debut is a delirious crime romp that borrows its pop-savvy attitude from Quentin Tarantino, its stylized gun play from Sergio Leone and its stylized hand-to-hand combat moves from Hong Kong action films. The result is a nutty, ridiculously entertaining neo-noir pastiche with lavish musical numbers that did dismal business in India and the US while attracting a small but passionate coterie of admirers.
Mumbai call-center drone "Jimmy Cliff" (Ali Khan) teaches English on the side because it's a great way to meet babes. Then, much to his surprise, he finds himself falling for old-fashioned country girl Pooja (Kareena Kapoor), who works for flamboyant businessman Bhaiyyaji (Anil Kapoor, of Slumdog Millionaire), and agrees to give Pooja's boss English lessons in hopes of seeing more of her. He's so smitten that he ignores the warning signs — an innocent request to pull a couple of phone numbers from the call center's confidential database, the gigantic bag of money Pooja accidentally drops — and never questions her sob story about being indentured to Bhaiyyaji in payment of a debt incurred by her late father.
Determined to help his true love escape, Jimmy helps Pooja steal $250,000 from her employer, only to have her vanish with the cash just as he learns that Bhaiyyaji is actually the sociopathic Lakhan Singh, who murdered his way out of rural Uttar Pradesh to become a Mumbai crime lord, complete with his own fortified compound. Bhaiyyaji charges Bachchan Pande (Kumar), a none-too-bright thug from his hometown, with retrieving his property, and soon Bachchan, Jimmy and Pooja are at the center of a dizzying series of double-, triple- and quadruple-crosses.
"Tashan" means style or flair, and Acharya's film has it to burn: Dumb, rudely flamboyant, high-energy pulp style. The action sequences are so cartoonish it almost doesn't matter that the big car stunts are obviously computer generated: There's no pretense of realism to violate. The music and choreography are consistently strong, particularly Kareena Kapoor's bad-girl anthem "Chhalia" ("I Flirt, I Trick, I Cheat") , which The Plot magazine recently named one of the top ten songs from Bollywood flops.
For the full song, go here.
And let's not forget the "impromptu" number the fugitives impose on American art-house production "Holy Widows" after hijacking the director's trailer to get through a police roadblock. His meek protest that there are no songs in "Holy Widows" is met with the inevitable rejoinder: "Dude, this is India. There's a song for everything."
Try to argue with that. (in subtitled Hindi and English)
13B
(2009) Written and Directed by: Vikram K. Kumar. With: R. Madhavan, Neetu Chandra, Sachin Khedekar, Poonam Dhillon, Murli Sharma, Deepak Dobriyal, Dhritiman Chatterjee.
13B, a rare example of a flat-out Indian horror movie, borrows liberally from The Amityville Horror and familiar Asian horror tropes, but having a haunted soap opera is a new wrinkle.
Civil engineer Manu (Madhavan) and his older brother, Manoj, pool their resources to buy a modern, spacious, 13th-floor apartment for their extended family: Their mother, Sushma (Dhillon); college-age sister Divya; wives Priya (Chandra) and Riya; and Manoj's two young children. Everyone's thrilled, but Manu quickly notices odd things about the new place, starting with the elevator that works for everyone but him. Milk sours mysteriously, all efforts to hang holy pictures in the prayer room end disastrously (the building porter is nearly electrocuted, and Manu hits his thumb so hard it bleeds), photos of Manu come out weirdly distorted and the normally placid guide dog belonging to their blind neighbor, Kaamdar, refuses to set foot over the threshold. But since the down payment exhausted both brothers' financial reserves, Manu chooses to ignore the troubling signs.
Then there's that new soap opera, Sab Khairiyat("All's Well"), that airs on channel 13; the women watch it initially because the remote suddenly stops working, but are quickly hooked on the story of a family that bears an eerie resemblance to their own. Manu discovers Sab Khairiyat when he happens to be home on a weekday, tuning in as the family's daughter, an indifferent student, discovers she has unexpectedly passed all her classes — with honors, yet. Moments later, Divya bursts in to tell him she's done exactly that.
Weird and about to get weirder: Everything that happens on Sab Khairiyat transpires in real life, and while some plot developments, like the pregnancy of Priya's TV equivalent, are the normal stuff of daytime dramas, others are more disturbing. Manu confides his suspicions to a friend who scoffs until Manu persuades him to see for himself; they get to 13B just as Manu's onscreen surrogate arrives home with his friend. Thank goodness the family physician, Dr. Shinde (Khedekar), is also a specialist in the supernatural!
13B, which was shot simultaneously in Hindi and Tamil (leads Madhavan and Chandra are in both versions; the remaining casts are different), is technically rough around the edges, particularly the cinematography — it has the muddy, yellowish cast of ultra-low budget exploitation films of the 1970s (which, as it happens, is when the incident that precipitates all the trouble took place). The score is standard scary-movie stuff and the plot wears its influences rather too obviously. But the Sab Khairiyat twist is inspired, a perfect example of finding terror in the familiar, and it goes a long way to compensate for 13B's liabilities. The lavish musical sequences Bollywood audiences expect clearly have no place in a genre predicated on generating nerve-jangling tension, so Kumar worked out a compromise: two montages set to songs by the popular team of Shankar Mahadevan, Ehsaan Noorani and Loy Mendonsa. A third — the utterly incongruous "Oh Sexy Mama" — gets the full treatment and runs under the closing credits. It's extremely entertaining.
An art movie developed in the United States, writer-director Rajnesh Domalpalli's first feature tells the story of an impoverished country girl who tries to better herself through Indian classical dance. Simultaneously resigned, frustrated, cautiously hopeful, angry and ravishingly beautiful, it's a stunning debut.
The film opens with a folk-dance performance on a rural stage; 14-year-old Vanaja (Bhukya) and her best friend, Lacchi (Renukunta), are thrilled by elderly but still-graceful dancer Padma (Sadula), who genially predicts that Vanaja will herself one day be a great performer. But Vanaja's circumstances are constrained. Though a good student, she leaves school to help support her aging father, widowed fisherman Somayya (Marikanti), who's deep in debt to a local moneylender.
Vanaja inveigles a job at the home of wealthy landowner Rama Devi (Dammannagari), herself a fine musician and once a renowned dancer. Vanaja boldly badgers Devi to teach her, and the older woman eventually agrees. But things take an ugly turn when Devi's American-educated son, Shekhar (Singh), returns home to launch a career in local politics with his ambitious mother's guidance. The petulant Shekhar, accustomed to getting his way, takes a liking to Vanaja but is infuriated by her independence — she is, after all, a low-caste serving girl — and eventually rapes Vanaja. Pregnant and disgraced but determined to have her child, Vanaja abandons her lessons and returns to her father; the scandal derails Shekhar's campaign and Vanaja's already-circumscribed future looks bleaker than ever.
Developed at Columbia University's graduate school of the arts, filmed in Andhra Pradesh, southern India, with nonactors, and shot in super 16mm, Vanaja is a triumph of determination over obstacles. Bhukya is a remarkable screen presence, Milton Kam's cinematography is rich and vivid, and the lengthy sequences in which Vanaja begins to master the traditional discipline of Kuchipudi vividly convey the stylized beauty of India's classical dance traditions.
Veer-Zaara
(2004) Directed by: Yash Chopra. Written by: Aditya Chopra. With: Shahrukh Khan, Preity Zinta, Rani Mukherjee, Amitabh Bachchan, Kirron Kher, Boman Irani, Anupam Kher, Divya Dutta and Hema Malini.
Yash Chopra's thinly veiled plea for reconciliation between India and Pakistan is cloaked in a decades-spanning Romeo-and-Juliet romance.
In the present day, principled, Pakistani human-rights lawyer Saamiya Siddiqui (Mukherjee), who overcame entrenched prejudice against women in the legal profession to fulfill her late father's progressive ambitions, is about to try her first case. It's a tough one: Prisoner 786 (Kahn), an Indian national, has been imprisoned in a Lahore jail for 22 years and his case has just come up for review. But he hasn't spoken since he was imprisoned, so how will Saamiya even begin to build an argument for his release? Saamiya breaks through the silent prisoner's defenses simply by addressing him by his real name — Veer Pratap Singh — which is not the name under which he was convicted. Once he speaks that first word, Veer begins to pour out his heart to Saamiya in an extended flashback.
Raised by his forward-thinking uncle (Bachchan) and aunt, who devoted their lives to turning their small village into an oasis of educational opportunity and tolerance, the Veer joined the Indian Air Force rescue squad and met Zaara Hayaat Khan (Zinta) while helping victims of a bus accident. Though headstrong and adventurous by nature, Zaara, the pampered daughter of a wealthy Pakistani politician, is resigned to the fact that she'll never do anything more important with her life than be a dutiful spouse like her mother. Her last act of rebellion is to fulfill the dying wish of her beloved Sikh nanny. Zaara intends to immerse nanny's ashes in the river that runs past the temple in Kiratpur, reuniting nanny Bebe with the family she left behind in 1947, when her employer — Zaara's grandfather — took her to the newly created Muslim state of Pakistan. Veer and Zaara fall in love, but Zaara is already engaged to Raza, whose politically powerful family is the key to Zaara's father's political ambitions. Mindful of her family responsibilities, she returns home to her arranged marriage, but is so haunted by thoughts of Veer that her faithful maid, Shabbo, secretly calls him and begs him to rescue Zaara from the lifelong prison of a loveless marriage. "What century are these people living in?" Saamiya marvels as the full extent of what Zaara and Veer sacrificed is finally brought home to her. "Are they people trying to behave like gods or gods pretending to be human?"
Though Chopra's film is emotionally extravagant even by the standards of India's epically unrestrained cinema, the star-crossed lovers bear the weighty metaphorical significance of their travails surprisingly lightly, particularly Zinta's radiantly lovely Zaara.
Yuva
(2004)
Written and Directed by: Mani Ratnam. With: Abhishek Bachchan, Ajay Devgan, Vivek Oberoi, Rani Mukherjee, Esha Deol, Kareena Kapoor, Anant Nag, Vijay Raaz and Sonu Sood.
Chennai-born writer-director Mani Ratnam's sprawling story of modern Indian youth (yuva in Hindi) follows the intertwined destinies of three young men from dramatically different backgrounds.
The movie opens as ambitious thug Lallan (Bachchan), student activist Michael (Devgan) and yuppie Arjun (Oberoi) converge on Kolkata's traffic-clogged Howrah Bridge: Lallan shoots Michael, whose skidding motorbike nearly hits Arjun. Three lengthy flashbacks trace the circumstances that brought them to this dramatic juncture.
Lallan, a product of the Kolkata slums, is bailed out of prison by his older brother, Gopal (Sood). Gopal provides muscle for a crooked government minister (Puri), who's in the thick of a contentious local re-election campaign. Although Lallan's vague aspirations to go straight are encouraged by his pregnant wife, Sashi (Mukherjee), the lure of easy money and street credibility win out. Gopal recruits Lallan to discredit a student coalition dedicated to exposing the minister's corruption, and eventually orders him to kill their leader, second-generation political agitator Michael. Radhika (Deol), Michael's childhood sweetheart and a recent college graduate, joins the cause to be near him. Arjun, also newly graduated, just wants to have fun and make some money. His father (Nag), who holds a prestigious government job, hopes Arjun will follow in his footsteps. But Arjun has secretly applied for a visa to study in the U.S. Then he meets Mira (Kapoor) at a local discotheque: Smart, independent and practical, she's just agreed to an arranged marriage but welcomes one last flirtation. Love derails their tidy plans for the future, and Michael winds up on Howrah Bridge making a last-ditch bid for Mira's heart. He instead pulls the gravely wounded Michael from the Hoogly River and accompanies him to the hospital. The story then moves forward as the three couples decide what to do with their futures.
Ratnam, known for integrating controversial cultural and political themes into popular melodramas, bundles a multitude of coming-of-age traumas into the kind of juicy, overwrought narrative that was once a Hollywood staple. Yes, Devgan is too old to be a student and Bachchan — the son of Indian megastar Amitabh Bachchan — glowers like a storm cloud about to erupt. But the story is absorbing and the songs by A.R. Rahman and Mehboob are damnably catchy. Ratnam simultaneously shot a Tamil-language version of the film, Ayutha Ezhuthu, with an almost entirely different cast; only Deol appears in both.
