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lifeisacinemahall
It’s all about movies, music, the madness that is life. In other words, movies, music, and cinematic impressions. All in writing, not rating.
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Jalsa (2022)
'Jalsa': a noirish question for morality
When we choose to donate to charity, what's the real driving force behind the magnanimity? Coat it with whatever luxurious emulsion you want ('gratitude,' 'giving back,' 'goodness of my heart,' 'God is great,' and other G-forces), the fact is that it's the other 'G'-factor looming over, like a hooded serpent, threatening to darken our pleasurable existence, that propels us into filling the pits on our personal wall that scream out to our discomfiture: guilt. It's this guilt that, sharpened with the blade of hypocrisy, scythes through the noirish Jalsa (Celebration). Directed by Suresh Triveni (Tumhari Sulu), who wrote this feature with Prajwal Chandrashekhar, the movie works to multi-layer impact, as it looks the life of TV journo Maya Menon (Vidya Balan, brilliantly unmasking her character with the ease of one shedding an artificial shell, and then dodging their reflection), a single mother (Manav Kaul breezing through as the attendant father) of Ayush who has cerebral palsy: Surya Kasibhatla playing him has the same challenge in real life, a beautiful stroke of inclusivity in Indian cinema. Maya's work-life imbalance is balanced by her mother Rukmini (Rohini Hattangadi, effortless, marvelous, and, like her character, propping the story and the family as only a mother and grandmother can) and Woman Friday Ruksana Mohammad (Shefali Shah), who cooks, eases the buffets that rock the Menon household, and is someone who Maya can depend on, as she ruffles feathers on her show, deflating egos by pricking consciences of the high and mighty, even as she dances a flirtatious waltz with her boss Amar (Mohammad Iqbal Khan, very good). All of that righteous stance and pose goes to test on acid-boil with a hit-and-run case involving a teenager (Kashish Rizwan).
Using stillness, troubling cuts, and ominous frames, director Triveni questions the questioning of women's independence and the shouldering of their safety on their own shoulders. He cocks a snook at the undercurrent of charity that we wear on our superior sleeves and then mark in our registers as we dole food and controlled independence to our house helps, so long as it suits us. But most of all, he looks at the judgemental gavel being turned into a hammer to cover up uncomfortable, semi-murderous truths. Adding another subplot that involves two cops-Shrikant Yadav as More and Ghanshyam Lalsa as Pradeep as terrific-and a local politico (the redoubtable Vijay Nikam throws in a punch in a cameo), the movie falters only because an unquestionably high-profile case gets a questionably low-bandwidth coverage in today's day of frenzy-feeding and high-barometric reporting. Speaking of which, Vidhatri Bandi playing a hedging, hesitant beat-scribe is outstanding. But it is Shefali Shah who swallows the movie in a stunning final act, her infrastructure steely and gritty, yet wobbled by the truth. In a game of conscience-conscience, her character parlays guilt and loyalty to deliver the message subtly, and yet with a knock-out performance by the actor. Guilt and charity may coat the reality of the giver, making it all water under the Metro overbridge. But for those at the receiving end, that water's bloodied.
Don't Look Up (2021)
Almost gets there, doesn't, and yet an important movie
Director Adam McKay, co-writing with David Sirota, delivers a few punches that actually land in his prestige-cast science satire, Don't Look Up. Comparisons with his nifty 2015 financial thriller The Big Short may be an exercise in unfairness-every creative work needs to be looked at in its stand-alone entirety, no?-but the director may have subliminally invoked the diff in using credit fonts that grab you as attractive candy stalls with colorful display might, at a local fair. And in that comparison chart, his latest outing falls short, not bigly (presidential term intended), but in a way that leaves behind a trace of what could be classified as a disappointment.
And yet, this is an important movie, especially in these times where a raging pandemic battles stupidity, science battles naysayers, and truth battles social media theories. (The score seems to be keeling over toward the sides that are shooing the truth away.) When Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence, wonderfully snappy and edgy), a Ph. D. student in astronomy from the Michigan State University, discovers a new comet while working with the Subaru telescope, the joyous whoop is led by her professor, Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), who immediately stutters into shock-as it turns out, that's the motif of DiCaprio's terrific performance, Xanax-led timid confidence that later turns into self-serving invidiousness-when his calculations show that the mass, matching Mt. Everest's dimensions, is hurtling towards Earth with a velocity that'll take six months to crash into and destroy life on it. Joined by the head of the Planetary Defense Coordination Office, Dr. Teddy Oglethorpe (Rob Morgan, superbly wry and dry), they're whisked off by government agents to debrief POTUS, Janie Orlean (Meryl Streep, marvelously taking off on the U. S. president she openly took on in public).
The scenes at the White House crackle with the battle of urgency that you and the scientists wear like a frown and the placid, and the far-removed-from-reality red tape, irony hanging in the air like the smell of a burger eaten in the Oval Office, only to be replaced by the belching of a carbonated beverage. The humor is nervous and plays well. When the meeting does eventually happen-but not before they're conned-the scientists also have Orlean's son-Jason (Jonah Hill, simply fantastic), the chief of staff (another Trumpian reference), he of obnoxious behavior, his education from the University of Nepotism and Boorishness-to deal with.
The movie's real strength derives from this tug-of-war between the imminent disaster and the lackadaisical political and media response to this apocalyptic discovery. There's chuckles to be thrown amidst nodding in been-there-seen-that surrender: the politics of survival isn't about saving the Earth; it's about winning the next elections. The meteor is, of course, a metaphor for Covid. It also stands for climate change. Each one of these threats to our very existence-these wearisome days both strut hand-in-hand, gleefully-is often offset by drama and flippant reporting. As the T. V. show, The Daily Rip (McKay's bleak humor at play, I'd like to think: the Rip an ominous acronym associated with all the death and devastation we're seeing around us) proudly claims, they want to keep it light. The show hosts Jack Bremmer, and Brie Evantee are played with perfect nonchalance and made-up cheeriness by Tyler Perry and Cate Blanchett; the latter has a bigger role in Dr. Mindy's devastation.
The director throws in the CEO of a major tech company for complete contemporary measure: Mark Rylance as Peter Isherwell shifts in uneasy brilliance as a socially incompetent but dazzling mind, manipulating data and algorithms to control his company's ever-willing customers. But what struck me hard was Isherwell's plan to deal with the comet: it was a punch that took my breath away, for his seemingly peachy plan reminded me of how some CEOs, having invested billions of dollars in the idea, are pushing for mining the planet's sea beds to vacuum out polymetallic nodules, created over millions of eco-enriching years, to feed the demand for clean energy: viz., batteries for laptops, phones, and E. Vs. Worryingly, the International Seabed Authority, a U. N. body, is actually considering how to permit this rampage: one more final plundering of the Earth's resources before the oceans rise in pain and anger.
That's the contemporaneousness of Don't Look Up that's smart and stinging. And when director McKay inexplicably and suddenly descends from snarky, sharp observations to treacly trajectories (including Ariana Grande's timely but ill-timed number) and stays there until the end, the movie feels like a let-down. Much like Timothée Chalamet's puzzling role that seems to have been written to fill in a starry void and not much else. From the fun of composer Nicholas Britell taking off on Hans Zimmer's Interstellar style during a rocket launch and politicos propping up a national hero (Ron Perlman, superb) to pin it all on to the maudlin plotting is a big comedown indeed.
But then, as in real life, is there any clean and effective solution for the mess the movie's cast-and we on this planet-find ourselves in? Was an end that was a cop (or should that be COP 26?) out all but inevitable? In a world where the battle for our minds is being fought-and won-not through peer-reviewed scientific papers or informed, mature, dignified debates, but through WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook, and other social media elves, what hope do we have? Which is why, as you finish reading this review on your smartphone, don't look up.
Rojo (2018)
A frightening look at the societal reaction to dictatorship
There's a reason why in a layered structure of any kind, the mid-section is the weightiest. Be it the myocardium of the human heart, the mantle inside the earth's surface, or the middle class in societies, this thick layer forms the core of functions, paying its debt in the overall scheme of functioning. Minus the middle layer, any structure faces imminent collapse because it's a designed assumption that this stratum will go on regardless of what upheaval the top and bottom parts face or cause. In societies, the middle class goes to work, is law-abiding, pays taxes that oil the troposphere and powerful, and enable subsidization and relief for the lower rungs. What runs this routine-driven societal waist is what comes from the top in terms of belief, thought-freedom, and individual liberty. That's the symbiotic structure on paper, at least. But what happens when the top layer is chopped off and surgically replaced with a dictatorship that feeds vials of vitiating fluids that serve to control, divide, and enforce compliance?
Writer-director Benjamín Naishtat, in his 2018 outing, faces this troubling scenario with Rojo (Red) against the backdrop of pre-coup days in Argentina-when the army junta took over the President and dissidents began disappearing mysteriously, but not surprisingly-when the middle class, sensing the seismic shifts above them, sets into motion what it does best: self-preservation and hoarding for the long haul. In a quiet, foot-steps-powered extended opening sequence opening (the sound by Fernando Ribero stands out, no pun intended), the camera's facing the façade of a home. The front door opens and closes with all manner of folks trooping out. You'd think it's a regular day at the household. It's only later that you realize that the rot's already set in, and those people aren't going through their existential drill. It's the hovering cloud of a regime that dictates this regimen. That quiet scene cuts into the clatter of cutlery at a restaurant where you meet the face of the middle class: small-town lawyer Claudio (a superb, troubled, profoundly stirring performance by Dario Grandinetti) who's waiting for his wife Susana (Andrea Frigerio in a dazzlingly understated act of middle-class haughtiness and entitlement). Before the lady arrives, the lawyer has a run-in with an aggressive, menacing man (Diego Cremonesi) who seems to begrudge the middle class their fortunes. As things spiral out of control and with a shocking splatter of face-offs, Claudio is torn between doing the right thing and not getting involved.
It's here that the desert plays a role in making people disappear. It's also here that the movie title zooms in, red and angry, festering and bloody, hapless and helpless. Director Naishtat creates a portrait of allegorical beauty all through Rojo via situational stand-ups referring to disappearances, Claudio's own role in adding to the Missing list, and his folding into a fraudulent scheme with family acquaintance Vivas (Claudio Martínez Bel). There's a reference to societal stressors taking their toll on families and individuals' mental health in a scene where Vivas' wife, Mabel (Mara Bestelli), has a meltdown. Plus, there's Claudio and Susana's daughter Paula (Laura Grandinetti), whose dance teacher at school, prepping her class for a grand performance, instructs her students to feel and convey intentions. She may well have been urging us, a medium for her director's metaphorical intent throughout the movie. All raging hormones, Paula's boyfriend, Santiago (Rafael Federman), epitomizes the patriarchal entitlement that invidiously seeps into every generation. Santiago plays his part in a savage disappearing act as well, and Naishtat's stunning commentary hits hard: how a purging force that's spewed from the top begins to find validation and enforcement in the middle class. WhatsApp forwards, anyone? Redemption for Claudio arrives in the form of Detective Sinclair (Alfredo Castro in a superbly funny and satirical turn). Still, it's clear that the law-enforcer is battling devils of his own, possibly of what he's already seen in Buenos Aires, and how the poison's spreading its inevitable compounds across the country.
Naishtat also uses a brilliantly shot eclipse scene to capture a society in transit towards destruction. Employing bloody-red filters to create engulfing menace, he captures the fear and helplessness in the face of an overpowering force, life coming to stand still as everyone stares at the bloodied sun with special goggles: to survive such a consuming force, you need to have filters-and blinkers-on. The cinematography by Pedro Sotero is stunning, a mix of still violence and beauty, all 70s in its look and yet disturbingly contemporary and relevant in its execution, much like the script. Adding to the chilling atmosphere is composer Vincent van Warmerdam's ominous score, a worrisome thrum that courses its way through the movie's runtime.
And it is Claudio who is the middle class. Who is us. Ensconced in the security of a blanketed living, rattled by the presence of Sinclair who threatens that existence, unnerved not by the impending coup that'll shake the nation but by the fear of the rattling of the innards of his life, he does what we all do instinctively as society's mantle and as human beings. Cover up the baldness of our morals by the façade and charade of artificial sanctimony.
Munich (2005)
Still gripping, still relevant
No matter how its political stance has morphed in a world that's gotten more polarized and acidic over the years, the parallax view now more intense and distorted from every which side, 'Munich' still grips and enthralls. Based on the book Vengeance by George Jonas, director Steven Spielberg with writers Tony Roth and Eric Roth recreates (and at times reimagines) a searing account of the under-wraps Operation Wrath of God that the Israeli government launched against individuals involved in the assassination of 11 Israeli athletes during the 1972 Munich Olympics.
Following the ragged journey of the five men tasked to travel, track, and kill members of the Black September and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Munich's strength lies in its director's firm and tight grip across its running time, waxing between a pulse-pounding, blood-chilling suspense format and waning to a steady, claustrophobic implosion of its protagonists. The acting is top-notch-Eric Bana plays Avner Kaufman, who heads the operation, a mix-veneer performance of patriotic toughness that's increasingly darkened with the exploding stain of innocent blood and an ROI that's without redemption. His team's four volunteers from across the world: Steve (Daniel Craig, his act wired up and packed with gunpowder), a driver from South Africa, Belgian explosives expert Robert (Mathieu Kassovitz, in a warm performance and, under the circs, as likable as possible), Israeli 'cleaner' Carl (Ciarán Hinds, terrific and a scintillating highlight), and the Dutch document forger Hans (Hanns Zischler in a bow-tied paternal touch).
As the five keep trailing their targets with the help of French dobber Louis (Mathieu Amalric, so good as the dodgy, back-of-the-car slinker), Spielberg follows them using marvellous, tensile cinematography by Janusz Kaminski and an atmospheric score by John Williams, alternating between breath-taking countdowns to assassinations to troubling debates, using his five men to speak on our behalves. No one, least of Kaufman, can be as circumspect about the bloody mission as his handler Ephraim (the superb Geoffrey Rush in a gravelly, and well, circumspect performance). As the body count goes up parallel to the team's closing in on prime suspect Salameh (Mehdi Nebbou), Kaufman is forced to calculate the price the mission's extracted from his team and his persona. 'Munich' doesn't provide answers. To some, it doesn't even ask all the questions or even asks the right ones. But what it showcases is a world that's fuelled by money, sparked by religion, and torched by politics. Where peace is but a papier-mache. No matter which part of the globe you're reading this in, that's a frighteningly familiar scenario.
The Disciple (2020)
A poignant quest for the perfect 'khayal'
Perfection is a template created of a zenith standard that's seemingly unachievable for anyone who sets out in its pursuit, by the people who claim to have achieved it, for the people who strain virtuously to achieve it. That standard is almost usually set and defined in the past, and rarely anyone seems to have seen it. But the myth of perfection perpetuates like a subterranean seismic spark, making its presence felt in mysterious, intangible ways, never definable, yet set as a benchmark. It is this vicious cycle of myth and its hopeless pursuit that keeps that gold standard of perfection out of reach for those who want to touch it the most.
Sharad Nerulkar (Aditya Modak) is one such musical pursuer in writer-editor-director Chaitanya Tamhane's Marathi movie, The Disciple. Opening in the year 2006, Sharad, along with Tejas (Abhishek Kale) and Sneha (Deepika Bhide Bhagwat) forms the triumvirate who accompany senior Hindustani classical vocalist and their Guruji, Pandit Vinayak Pradhan (Dr. Arun Dravid) on his stage shows, while steeping themselves into his music classes at his chawl-attached room in Dadar, modulating, breathing, and training to maneuver the treacherous tonal ravines to touch the improvised note that'll deliver multiple peaks of a perfect khayal-a word that means 'imagination' in an etymological sense, but in Hindustani music, encompasses every nuance and Raag (a free-flowing yet defined framework for melodic improvisation) that this vast universe holds beneath its seemingly incomprehensible bosom. While Sneha and Tejas seem to be doing just fine, soaking in Guruji's notes and treading those unknown and unlit paths, Sharad seems to struggle, unable to find his improvisational technique, unable to rise above his set boundaries.
Director Tamhane explores this unrelenting, seemingly unending journey that Sharad's taken upon himself that begins to feel as if an act of quixotry, one that demands nothing short of renouncing the life that modern times have to offer. In exploring this vacuum-state of living that the pursuit of attaining vocal excellence demands, Sharad's strung on a tight, steel-wire of life conflicts as everything and everyone around him seems to be moving on and ahead, while he sticks to the seemingly anachronistic guru-disciple format of musical learning, where the student devotes their youth and life to serving their guru, all the while training and picking up nuances and notes to embellish their singing. Is that tradition even feasible now? Sharad's north star so far has been the lectures of Sindhubai or Maai (the late and great Sumitra Bhave lending a quasi-mysterious layer to her voice-over)- his guruji's mentor and music teacher. The raspy, quavering voice exhorts an ascetic-like living, sacrificing all physical and worldly attachments to achieve that seeming chimera of a perfect rendition. But when Sharad and his colleague at the modest recording company he works- Kishore (Makarand Mukund)-meet up with famous music critic Rajan Joshi (Vanarese Prasad in a terrific cameo), is when Sharad-and you-face discomfiting questions. Is the legend of the mythical Maai, who never performed publicly, just a larger-than-life cut-out that her students have made of her? Is that how legends are made and their stories spun to spray them with a godly halo? What of Sharad's guruji? Did he truly believe in Maai, the perennial price of which is a life in penury? How do such stories evolve and morph into Frankenstein proportions as they spread across generations and secluded meetings until they become gospels of truth? Who profits from these embellishments?
Those aren't the only questions that Tamhane throws at you. He strings his disciple's life into another life-hook with reality musical show Fame India screening on the TV and Sharad watches haplessly as a contestant begins to ascend the glitzy stairway to the jackpot of fame, while his life and talent seem stuck in a groove. Ironically, while Sharad wears longer clothing for his onstage performances, the Fame India finalist Shaswati (Kristy Banerjee) sheds hers for jazzy outfits, sings even lesser, and performs more. All this while, Sharad's contemporaries strike gold as well and the struggling disciple is left with notations of doubt and despair. Is the path of the purist a pyretic Fool's Gold? Don't all artists now concede to concert and commercial demands and throw in a medley of sorts that keeps the audience coming in? Don't music students nurse an ambition of the commercial rather than doing riyaaz (practicing) in the shadows of a future that has "What could have been" as its umbra? As the movie harks back to his father (Kiran Yadnopavit), a Hindustani music aficionado, but perhaps not measuring up as much in talent, you begin wondering: is Sharad's deep-rooted, self-flagellating, self-evaluated failure almost genetic in nature?
The director doesn't answer anything for you, making his movie as much a heuristic experience as must be learning Hindustani classical. Using Michal Sobocinski's soft, pause-filled cinematographic frames, Tamhane uses the camera to slowly zoom into Sharad every time another mini-disaster strikes his purist world. The scenes where he's listening to Maai's lectures are a beauty in slow-motion, his bike almost as if floating in meditation while Anita Kushwaha and Naren Chandavarkar's impeccable sound design fills up your senses with the soft crackle and hiss of the stylus-itself in a sacrificial mode for every time it's used-giving a bit of itself to the revolving vinyl. Composer Aneesh Pradhan's score adds a layer of story-telling of its own, as every song captures Sharad's journey of rigor and self-scouting for flawless rendition.
The cast is superb, their act more credible because each of them (who sing in the movie) are trained singers; Dr. Arun Dravid, a well-known music exponent (and himself the first ever disciple of the great Kishori Amonkar) in particular, lends an air of someone who's faced an onslaught of a commercial stampede and is now the last person standing. And Aditya Modak is outstanding as the disciple. His act is a complex feature-map of angst, struggle, and questions. In his listening to Maai's recordings, attempts to give up the sensual and turn meditatively inward, and constant trudge towards the perfect khayal, do you realize the futility of trying to achieve perfection-especially one that's been defined elsewhere by someone else. You need to get off the turntable to fathom it has no absolutes, that it exists in a place and person you'd least expect to find it in.
Nomadland (2020)
A stirring portrayal about the road to self-discovery
Based on Jessica Bruder's non-fiction book on vandwellers in the US, Nomadland is, at first, a bleak landscape of white, mournful snow as Fern (Frances McDormand) loses her husband and job at the US Gypsum plant as the 2011 economic recession comes uprooting livelihoods, lives, and towns in its wake. In one fell sweep, she's lost all she'd accumulated so far, all the material possessions that, in their familiarity, breed security. It's a funny thing about how we construct our physical and emotional cocoons around the things we possess. It's a deep, stirring construct that transcends the cold business transaction behind it all. We pay for our houses, fill them up with things we need and more often, with what we don't. We construct our memories and nostalgic albums around these physical paraphernalia. And when we lose our loved ones and our loved possessions, that sense of security is upended, as we're sucked into the tornado of helplessness and directionlessness. Where and how we land is incumbent upon what we do when we're up there in the ruthless spin-and-tumble of uncertainty, no bearings or support to guide us any longer.
Fern lands as hard as anyone would. All she knows is Empire, Nevada, is no longer economically viable, and what guides her is the compass of the next meal and of survival. Stashing away those physical belongings, including her late husband's clothes in a storage unit, selling most those emotional-security bonds off which she buys a van, she drives toward a that's one of self-discovery and for us, an eye-opening treatise on the concept of homelessness and the accompaniment heartbreak and hope. Writer-director Chloé Zhao creates a ruminating docu-style drama as Fern enters the world of vandwellers. It's a world inhabited by run-down folks who've lost all the sheen that life once had to offer and are now covered with the scrag and dust of the road that's both a lifeline and an unending tarmac of struggle and self-reliant living. Using real-life dwellers as the cast (including Linda May, Charlene Swankie, and Bob Wells) to color the initial snowed-in canvas, director Zhao shifts to warmer climes and tones, even as the hand-held camera work offers hand-holding hope in the kinetic lives of itinerants, a world where everyone retires into their own van-homes at night, retiring after slogging away as temps and contributing to the cycle of economic recovery. And there's the bitter irony. Cogs in the capitalist machine, Zhao's houseless (not homeless) get by, as they build those emotional blankets for others, every online click-to-order an emotional catharsis for all of us who stress-shop to distract ourselves.
And yet amidst it all, Nomadland offers fire-camp sparks of hope. There's a community out there, a well-knit family that's made pretty much the same choices off a list of hopeless ones. Where do you spend your next tranche of money? The mortgage or fuel for your van? Your insurance or the next supply of canned food? And Frances McDormand channelizes all these questions, their uneasy answers, and the grit and grind of such a life across her face. Her mouth can set to a firm fight, droop just that bit, the lines that she can move with a twitch or cast in tragic despair. Her Fern is on an expedition self-discovery and affirmation, one that she probably began much before her current world unravelled. Of what she wants from life and what she wants to get from it. Does she settle into another willow of security that fellow-vandweller Dave (a fantastic as usual David Strathairn) offers so tantalizingly? A glimpse that she gets into what life could be again. Familiarity, as she knows by now, is a seductive and heartbreaking devil.
Fern's journey is almost spiritual at one level, that of self-discovery, and director Zhao stirs you with her take along with composer Ludovico Einaudi's solo, poignant piano pieces. And as all transcendent roads go, her path involves deterging as she embarks on this peripatetic venture that's as much physical as it is of the soul. At various stages in the movie, McDormand bravely goes through three allegorical stages of cleansing onscreen. She urinates the first time, in a furtive, embarrassed way, by the road, having just begun her travels, anxious and uncertain of what and who lie ahead. Later, inside the van, she takes a dump, cringing the next moment at what's been stewing inside her. And finally, stark naked, much like an enlightened and lightened spirit, takes a dip in clean, flowing water. She knows what it means to be bound down by emotional plugs and holes. She's also calculated the price of being alone.
Joji (2021)
A sly look at a Shakespearean blunder
Day-dreamers are natural self-isolationists. Give them a room, a bed, and food to survive while their imagination and fantasies provide aviation fuel for unfettered flights of pinnacle-touching feats. In the echo chambers of their minds do the perfectly laid plans for life play out like a finely tuned symphony. Trouble arrives swiftly when they cross the threshold into reality and expect the symphonic arrangement to follow automatically. Much like most of us who, in our minds sound exactly like our favorite singers, the problem arising when we open our mouths to actually sing-and create a petrified melodic disaster-these dreamers are quite simply, miserable in real-life execution.
You may call Joji (Fahadh Faasil) one such daydreamer minus John Lennon's lofty goals. For, he imagines a life of sweetness and harmony, but only within a demarcated boundary of his own existence. The youngest son of a plantation owner, burly Panachel Kuttappan (Sunny PN), he's not the only one who has some wayward designs in mind. For, the wealthy, brusque Kuttappan rules his business and family with an iron fist and hand. The family includes Kuttappan's son, the divorced, tending-toward-dipso-behavior Jomon (a superb Baburaj), whose teenage son Popy (Alistair Alex) has figured out how to use his grandfathers' credit card to shop online, but not what to do when the bill hits home. Kuttappan's other son, handling business in town, Jaison (Joji Mundakayam) whose wife, Bincy (Unnimaya Prasad) is forever in the kitchen cooking for the family, and as it turns out, also food for her husband's thought.
Writer Syam Pushkaran and director Dileesh Pothan take this oppressive patriarchal setup and layers of discontent and mini-revolutions within it, all dark and mildly comic in the first act. Of the lot, Joji, with his sleeveless business ventures, is target practice for his father's hyperactive hackles, having to be content confined to his room that he's named "Joji's Palace". And the final bullet in the target board is lodged when Popy's online shopping adventures come to roost in the form of a bill for the airgun-that haunts the entire family later-he'd ordered, and Kuttappan naturally suspects Joji. By now Joji's had it, the servile and hopeless existence almost unbearable. Fate swiftly arrives in what seems like a stroke of luck when Kuttapan, lending a helping in the pond-digging operation on the estate, does a Gadar and pulls out a heavyweight valve stuck in the mud and is felled by it. The stroke, that is. Pothan tacitly shows the undercurrent of hope that begins to swim for Joji and Bincy, she throwing the first stone in the repressed pond by telling him that it's his house too.
Dr. Felix (Shammi Thilakan), the family doctor and friend, has no hope of Kuttappan recovering, and his family begins to exhale, waiting for their home dictator to inhale his last. But there's no such luck, for Kuttapan's doughtier than medical science and the local priest- Father Kevin (Basil Joseph)-and his wise pronouncements. Joji's had it now and decides to manipulate the fate of his father's health with his own dire plans. The director's subtle look at the shift of power or the lack of it and its consequences yields fine scenes that view Kuttapan's room and bed as a throne, the estate and home as a fiefdom, and the people within its subjects. With traces of Shakespeare's Macbeth, there's murder as a coup to dethrone that place, there's dark emotions that come to the fore, but there's also the stupidity of the daydreamer that comes to the fore as the story progresses.
Based in the current pandemic times, director Pothan gets the mood just right, the masks an optional prop for people around, almost unfailingly to be pulled down while transmitting sound and aerosols. But in a telling scene, when the mood's funereal and Joji's in his room, Bincy, internally thrilled at new-found liberation and looking-the-other-way to allow for this path to be paved, stands at his door and tells him to come out. And then, noticing the play of triumph on his lips tells him to wear a mask. When it's time to show their emotions, folks lower their masks. In Joji's case, his emotions call for masking up. Unnimaya Prasad as Bincy is as still as a dark, deep water body in a fine act. Her manipulations run wide and are far-reaching, way beyond the comprehension of the family and possibly even the bound script. Joji is also made the moody winner it is by Justin Varghese's background score, borrowing from Bach's sorrowful movements here, plucking ominous strings there.
But it is Fahadh Faasil in the title role who hypnotizes. Donning on a puny frame, his act is part-Chaplinesque as he frustratedly pummels the air after every move gone wrong, part-dark force. His triumphs are as transparent as his failures, and his swagger as put-on as his uncertainties honest and hard-hitting. It is in Faasil's fine performance do you get an insight into a daydreamer's Shakespearean plotting that, via director Pothan's sly machinations, becomes a blundering epic. It may be okay to daydream about murdering folks but when you actually live out those dreams, you just may find yourself trapped in a palace that's not to your liking, but indubitably of your own making.
Lahore Confidential (2021)
'Lahore Confidential' review: no poetry can salvage this amateurish outing
If director Kunal Kohli and writers Vibha Singh and Hussain Zaidi are to be believed, the world of espionage is all about calling dibs on choosing an agent to infiltrate the enemy camp and using skulduggery to initiate said unsuspecting agent into a tedious process of extracting information.
Lahore Confidential is a startling 68-minute demonstration of how movies take their audience's intelligence for granted. And for a movie that's ostensibly about capturing the maneuvers of Indian intelligence, it displays none. So we see Ananya (Richa Chadha) bundled off to Pakistan-much to the chagrin of her mother-played by the superb Nikhat Khan-whose sole aim in life is to ensure her daughter gets married. "Isn't there anybody nice in your office?" she queries. "They're all nice," ripostes the harried daughter. This inane conversation is preceded by an equally laughable scene between RD (Khalid Siddiqui) in RAW and his (supposedly) fiery agent in Pakistan, Yukti (Karishma Tanna) where they're discussing the pros and cons of sending the unsuspecting Ananya to Lahore, Pakistan:
"She's done a desk job in a media company all her life."
"Exactly! None'll suspect she's our agent."
"RD, She's very emotional."
At the end of this exchange, overlaying another scene featuring Ananya's introduction, there's no response from RD, who's presumably scooted off to book the tickets.
Anyhoos, the reason Ananya's the chosen one is that she knows her poetry from Faiz, even if she's fazed by the prospect of relocating from India. In a completely comic scene, she tells RD, "When I told you I wanted a foreign posting, I meant Dubai or Singapore!" All of the chuckle-inducement is unintentional of course. There's more to come as Ananya's sole job in Lahore is to attend poetry-filled parties hosted by Rauf Ahmed Kazmi (Arunoday Singh ranging from likable to abruptly losing interest) whose sole job is to organize them. And because all high-profile officials throng these soirees-we don't meet a soul all through the movie who fits this bill, though-Ananya's to distill information from her host while mouthing obfuscating dialogues that have no apparent projectile. I won't give away anything when I say that in a mansion as big as the Queen's, they choose to end up in a water-body that they barely (no pun intended) fit in.
There are other Delphic signals that are thrown at you as way of friendly warnings to salvage your evening OTT time. The editing by Nikhil Parihar is cut-throat, and not in an effective way. Abrupt scenes abut each other with the grace of a dirt-road that rumbles and tumbles its peripatetic users without warning. Plus, the supporting performances are reminiscent of local TV shows whose budgets call for the apprehension of studio trespassers to act as extras-note Yukti's scenes with her team, as they fill in each other with dialogues that are rank amateurish.
And that's how Lahore Confidential rolls. With mind-bogglingly bad characterizations-Karishma Tanna's Yukti has only one way to squeeze information out: sex-the awkwardness spills into the usually terrific Richa Chadha's act as well. Every scene she's in looks like it's culled from auditions for the movie. At one point, she goes stiff all over, delivering her dialogue with a stunned epiphany, almost as if horrified by the prospect of this movie being ever streamed. (Spoiler for her: too late.) Director Kohli ends up creating a product that can be described in one word whose acronymic usage was supposed to be its high point. Raw.
All my reviews at lifeisacinemahall dotcom.
Chappaquiddick (2017)
'Chappaquiddick' review: a spellbinding spin on real-life spin doctoring
As you climb up the mountain that houses power in ascending proportion to its height, there comes a point when there's something that becomes lesser and lesser in abundance and easily dispensable: integrity. Beyond the base camp of an established name and delirious following, this trait is an optional monkey on your back - you can choose to carry it, listen to its incessant guiding chatter and act accordingly, or simply chuck it down a precipitous, irredeemable ravine and do what you want to.
Directed by John Curran and written by Taylor Allen and Andrew Logan, 'Chappaquiddick' recounts a week in the life of Senator Ted Kennedy (Jason Clarke) when he's forced to carry that same burden, and what he does with it. Based on real-life incidents, the movie carries the ominous tone of a thriller, and yet also serves as a time-bubble to traverse how, 50 years after that incident and its handling, our political leaders seem to have gotten better. In ridding themselves of the responsibility to be accountable for the manner of wielding their authority. Director Curran superimposes the breathless events leading to the successful American lunar landing onto the Chappaquiddick case, as both play out in parallel, one soft-landing to hoist the JFK legacy, the other hard-landing to almost hoist the Kennedy name on its own petard. On the night of July 18, 1969, a party's on at Chappaquiddick island to honor the Boiler Room girls - a six-woman group that drove the strategy for Bobby Kennedy's presidential campaign that was mortally cut by his assassination in 1968 - and Ted, the only surviving Kennedy offspring, is struggling with the loss, unsure of his own political credentials and presidential bid in 1972. It's a given that the Boiler Room girls will step in to shill for Ted as well, and he has the indomitable family troubleshooter and cousin Joe Gargan (Ed Helms) and the United States Attorney for the District of Massachusetts Paul Markham (Jim Gaffigan) to steer him through the ups and downs to achieve that Kennedy dream and reclaim their White House legacy. That night, things change forever for Ted, but not as drastically as for one of the Boiler Room girls, Mary Jo Kopechne (Kate Mara) and her family. Late that night, Ted and Mary leave the party, and Ted, in an agitated state, drives the car off the Dike Bridge into a pond.
What happened between the drive, during, a place where Ted and Mary parked and conversed, and what they spoke about is in the realms of speculation, and director Curran keeps that bit of the story foggy and steeped in mystery, cutting to that conversation right until the very end. Why Ted acted the way he did that flipped the car into the water that night isn't what the movie aims to answer. It's how he acted post the accident and Mary Jo's death is what it stuns you with. As legal complications loom their inevitable shadow on Ted, he turns to his paralytic father Joseph (Bruce Dern, fantastic) for advice. That that guidance comes dripping with such a rasp of self-preservation is what's horrifying, but for the seemingly compunctious Ted, it's a quick and convenient pivot to weasel his way out of a sticky situation. Even as Joe tries hard to be Ted's moral compass, Paul swivels on the fence, and an army of Kennedy supporters and manipulators, including Ted Sorensen and Robert McNamara (Taylor Nichols and Clancy Brown, both very good) steamroll the by-the-now-obviously at sea Ted to salvage the situation and the Kennedy name.
Aided by John Goldsmith's evocative production design (note the curtain design in Ted's room that prints to his passion), Maryse Alberti's time-machine like cinematography, Keith Fraase's spatially melting editing, and Garth Stevenson's atmospheric score, the movie's uplifted by its cast. Ed Helms superbly gets in his conflicted act across, as does Jim Gaffigan his character's survival instincts. Kate Mara, in her small, ill-fated role, conveys a humane and kind empathy, that touches and yet mystifies. And Jason Clarke is tops as Ted Kennedy. His act (including an accent that's completely alien for the Australian actor) is the highlight, a fleeting puzzle of right and wrong, the struggle for validation becoming the means to a thin-iced moral plug.
'Chappaquiddick' works as a moral-and-legal-tussle thriller, but what's unsettling about it is what it crystallizes about our present news-and-political cycles for every death, suicide, rape, and blood-curdling tragedy that evaporates the personal trauma and grief of the victims and their families, leaving behind a residue of dark manipulation and chicanery. That less-connected victims don't get a second chance, while their perpetrators flourish and earn sobriquets for themselves cuts like a knife - deep and painful. Neil Armstrong's step may have been a small one for him and a giant one for mankind, but Ted Kennedy, close to the top of that power peak, took giant steps that left Mary Jo's family in a state of permanent eclipse.
Serious Men (2020)
'Serious Men' review: A Satire That Bites and Leaves (Marks)
Reality TV shows in India figured out their way to an audience and emotional jackpot along the way. Their contestants, when it all began, came from the 'burbs and upper-middle class. Be it a dance or singing competition, or a mega quiz show, the spectrum of participants was limited to our view of plurality: PLU (people like us). But somewhere along the line, some smart TV exec cracked the code: reserve a quota for that cleaved societal lower base whose raison d'être is to struggle to make it through the end of the day to garner sustenance on the family plate and haul their weary bones to begin again the next day. Suddenly our screens - and eyes - were flooded with the vision of what lay beneath our comfy, insulated lives. Sacrifices, shattered dreams, and tragedy, all rolled into before or after a song as judges sniffled, hitting the buzzer to open the gates for these talented, hitherto unseen strugglers into the next round. The TV channels grabbed eyeballs which in turn grabbed hankies, and we sobbed as the channels sprinted their way to the bank.
That such reality shows, albeit in an inverted avatar, play out in everyday lives is brought to the fore like a tight, smart, and smarting slap in director Sudhir Mishra's 'Serious Men'. Based on Manu Joseph's novel and written by Abhijeet Khuman, Bhavesh Mandalia, Nikhil Nair, and Niren Bhatt, the movie opens to Ayyan Mani (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) conceiving, with his wife Oja (Indira Tiwari), of the next-gen, even as his voice-over sets the context for what'll be its encompassing arch: the exploitation, discrimination, and deep-rooted systemic structure and politics of caste. Ayyan's a personal assistant to arrogant scientist and director Arvind Acharya at the National Institute of Fundamental Research (NIFR, and a snook at the hierarchies in TIFR and other such hallowed research institutes ?) -Nassar, superb, bringing the upper caste superiority to his act and demeanor, his character's knowledge as deep as his shallow understanding and treatment of his assistant and anyone else who's below him: in rank and caste. For him, that's a spin to his own demarcated caste system.
Full of smarts and blink-and-you-miss satire: Ayyan tampering with a quote on reservation attributed to Arivunambi Ghatak - melding a Tamilian name with that of a famous Bengali filmmaker - replacing that fusion noun with a famous economist, it's a sly dig at manipulating the narration. And that's precisely what Ayyan is good at. Controlling the narrative. And it is this street-smart talent that Ayyan brings into play for his own son Adi Mani (Aakshath Das) to beat the system that's jailed him in a slum dwelling all his life, which he wants to break free from for Adi's sake.
It is this manipulative streak that's a terrific spotlight on the very nature of our societal system and parenting choices. Aspirational parents create their own reality shows, pushing their children into a circus that's a hamster on the wheel cable TV. Plus, if you're born into a lower caste section - Dalit, in Ayyan and his family's instance - the die's loaded with equipollent and opposite force. There's reservation that'll get you a job as the one Ayyan has, but Ayyan wants more out of life for his family and himself. And helping him achieve that is his half-crust of phrases that he's acquired from being a fly-on-the-wall in NIFR, listening to Acharya's rants and ravings about gravity, space, and alien microbes. In a delicious touch of irony, anything that Ayyan says that's closely related to science is dipped in arrogance and disdain for his listeners - be it his colleagues, wife, son, or us. That's thanks to the pejorative boss he reports to. In another satirical bite that leaves its marks on Ayyan and his family is that in his warped system, chucking away humility and carrying the bag of brashness is the way to survive and beat back the naysayers. And that high-handed tone exactly what Adi picks on.
In forwarding his dispersed quotes and knowledge to the unknowing and wanting, Ayyan props Adi as a prodigy that quickly grabs the attention of the local Dalit politician Keshav Dhavre and his educated-abroad daughter Anuja (Sanjay Navrekar and Shweta Basu Prasad, both terrific) who set in spin their own system-within-system game. That Anuja has her own past trauma gives her the strength to wield a stick with brute force is another insight into director Mishra's character spin.
As the politics at the NIFR (Acharya's run-in with his bête noire, Namboodari, played by Uday Mahesh, is the tipping point for all), the slum, and between Ayyan and Adi and the politicos begin to get intertwined, Manu Joseph's sparkling clarity that's evident in his columns bubbles like good champagne, rising to meet you and then delivering a swimmingly spritzy experience. That India's brightest and mature minds aren't insulated from deceit and shenanigans (Vidhi Chitalia as Oparna Sengupta the smart, younger shoulder for Nassar's Acharya, playing her role in another discriminatory gender system that runs parallel or superimposed on the caste track - and that's not the only time the movie looks at women's stories; the other one involves money, greed, and exploited women), and that who they inspire awe and hate in equal measure in, follow the same path, points to director Mishra's never-ending mirrors within mirrors structure.
'Serious Men' cloaks itself in quick-footed dialogues with doses of cynicism, Karel Antonín's thoughtful score, and Alexander Surkala's quietly framed cinematography; and then, come the tipping point, breaks your heart as its machinations rip asunder tender minds and hearts, and the rot of rote and educational fraud spills out of its guts. Aakshath Das as Adi is top-notch, the actor carrying the burden of his character with all the strength of an overloaded, tearing-at-the-seams schoolbag. And when he breaks, he opens a flood of anxiety and concern inside of you. Indira Tiwari as Oja is beautifully raw and uninhibited in her act, making her character an integral part of the story, even if she isn't part of the mainframe.
The cast is superb all around (casting director Mukesh Chhabra gets it pin-point accurate), but Nawazuddin Siddiqui shows why he is, in such projects, the last man standing after Irrfan Khan's untimely exit. Absolutely natural, dry like gunpowder, and exploding when the last straw is lit - his scene confronting Adi's classmate's father in the slum is powerful and moving, his voice breaking and yet trying to retain control - he's the driver and the teacher for this tell-tale of a movie. What he teaches and learns is this: that no matter howsoever much you're in control of a narrative that involves the system, the immutable latter's gotten something extra hidden in its sleeve that covers its upper hand. And that when it comes to funds for survival, your chances are much better as an alien microbe in outer space than as an earthling dweller in a crammed slum.
The Wife (2017)
An intriguing marital drama that's as complex as all of us
What do forty years of living together as a married couple entail? Do the still waters of marital bliss run deep, or as everything stagnant, there's fetid secrets deep beneath? Based on Meg Wolitzer's novel and written for the screen by Jane Anderson, 'The Wife' takes a devastating look at what it takes for one such marriage to hold up, even if it's springing leaks in places that were hidden for the longest time.
Opening in 1992 in Connecticut, US, cerebral and celebrated author Joe Castleman (Jonathan Pryce) is on the edge, expecting a call from the Nobel Prize committee any moment, and his nerves don't let him sleep. What he does next is a sneak peek into the couple dynamics, as he turns to his fast-asleep wife Joan (Glenn Close), wakes her because he's jittery, and proceeds, using guilt and helplessness as weapons, to have sex with her, despite her initial protestations. Why she gives in and why he has his way is marinated in the forty-year long relationship, which director Björn Runge explores in this tight drama piece, observing without flinching the upper hand that the man wields and the stiff upper lip that the woman purses.
As the Nobel Prize is announced and Joe is the winner, a celebratory party thrown by Joan is the opening salvo by the director that gets in the Castleman family together - daughter Susannah (Alix Wilton Regan) expecting and glowing in the warmth of her future light and troubled, intense son David (Max Irons) who's a struggling writer. But his biggest struggles are in getting approval from his famous father, who's border-disdainful of his son's writing efforts.
As the couple and their son travel to Stockholm for the ceremony, tailed by a nosy biographer, Nathaniel Bone (Christian Slater), the story whirs and spins into the past, into the young couple's relational genesis - the cocky, married professor Joe (Harry Lloyd) and the infatuated, in-awe student Joan (Annie Starke, Close's daughter in real life), and how the love of words and writing expands its desirous wings to encompass what seems like a life-long shared passion between them. But as the movie cuts between the present and the past, it cuts open multiple veins of secrets, compromises, and sacrifices. And yet, it also discomfits with just how complex relationships are; even if one of the partners holds a paintbrush dripping in black, no relationship is stark in its color: it's always complicated shades of grey.
Director Runge adds layers of intrigue and tense palpitating paths to the drama, unfolding what it takes for opposites to attract, and then, as one of the poles overpowers and controls, to keep the stickiness going. Composer Jocelyn Pook adds classical and opera-like power to the proceedings, even as her cell pieces explore the depths of loneliness and poignant corners in the relationship.
'The Wife' is elevated to high-res punch by its cast. Christian Slater, true to his role and character's name, turns up an act that leaves no bone un-chased, and his scene with Close in a bar is a highlight, undercurrents of spark, cool seduction, and newsgathering, all rolled into one. Jonathan Pryce is magnificent, his performance dripping with narcissism and grating double-standards, forever manipulating till the end, taking on a role that's got mostly downsides.
But 'The Wife' belongs to the superb Glenn Close. In the titular role, her performance is subdued, troubled, and yet keeping it all in, letting only a throbbing-vein-like hint surface. If the movie looks at how an all-male management subdued a woman's fine skills and perforated her confidence, her act in the movie's present is a troubling and troubled portrait of all the years that a woman absorbs, making the poison a part of her bloodstream, every swallow a bitter experience. The actor's façade for her character is terrific, her eyes and stares - that pump out bullets of long-suppressed secrets - maneuvering the movie to its shattering yet liberating end. After the movie ends, you want to go back and watch her to fully appreciate how beautifully nuanced her act was, reading all that her expressions were actually telling you. Her loudest message? "Till death do us part" could be the best part of a wedding vow.
Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare (2019)
The director has loads to tell, and she does
Right at the offset at a local funfair in Noida, a satellite city of New Delhi, you realize that life's neither fun nor fair for cousin sisters Dolly (Konkona Sen Sharma) and Kaajal (Bhumi Pednekar). Dolly's stuck in a marriage that was successful during the procreation phase (she's got two children) but now is largely loveless and sexless. Husband Amit (Aamir Bashir, superb in a matter-of-fact patriarchic upper hand act) has a roving tendency, addicted to porn on the cell, but blames it all on his frigid wife. Amit's roving hand sends unsubtle messages to Kaajal - who's come from Darbhanga in Bihar - who, in a terrific scene laden with irony, spills the discomfiting beans about Amit to Dolly in a house of horrors ride; Dolly's expression changes a tad before dismissing her sister's misgivings. But deep down inside both women, there's emotional forces at play. And nothing prepares them - or you - for the true horror of a roller coaster ride that awaits them ahead. That horror's also called women struggling to eke out their identities and traverse unknown paths to discover that sexual tick that'll make them tock.
Writer-director Alankrita Shrivastava (Lipstick Under My Burkha, co-writer and director, Made In Heaven) has loads to tell in Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare (Dolly, Kitty, and Those Twinkling Stars), and each of her characters gets their slow-drip empathetic due in the arc, even as it navigates its leads' desires, dreams, failures, and triumphs via an effective cinematographic and production design - John Jacob Payyapalli and Tiya Tejpal capturing a city's pulsing nightlife as effectively its night-shift offices, lighting up the frames, even as a middle-class apartment lies still, struggling to fall asleep. That nightlife is what Kaajal discovers, as she moves out of her sister's home - ostensibly to escape Mr. Limited Range Rover's attention - and her exploitative job at a shoe factory. That she lands up at dubious alternatives for both - her living quarters and livelihood - is ironic and disturbing. But that's for Kaajal - who turns into Kitty, working on the phone to romance lonely men's planet - to discover. Dolly, meanwhile, puts up with as much, but under a more 'respectable' garb; she dreams big too, pawning jewels and flicking money from her office to propel her dreams and shopping outings. Part of that dream is an apartment whose hand-over's interminably locked by its builder: that's not the only newspaper story that Shrivastava adds to her story; there's many more clippings that she inserts: the culture brigade and a communal coat of derision that she ties to a violent spill-over later. And her lead actors burn their way through the movie: Konkona Sen Sharma keeps it all tucked in with such ease and yet offers a keyhole into her self-doubts with just fleeting glimpses, it's a masterful act; Bhumi Pednekar gets in a raw innocence that she combines with fragile grit to pull off a terrific performance.
Director Shrivastava ties up exploring sexuality via the innocent fascination of Dolly's younger son, Pappu (Kalp Shah) while she begins to break free of her office's sexist mold (when the boss, Ghanashyam Pandey played with a terrific natural beat by Shahnawaz Pradhan says, "Mrs. Yadav? Tea?", it's not an invitation, it's a regressive clue for her to brew the stuff for him). This, as she discovers an interesting - and interested - delivery boy, Osmaan Ansari (played with a likable sincerity by Amol Parashar), while Kitty begins to explore her feelings with regular caller Pradeep (Vikrant Massey, slipping with chameleon-like ease into his ambivalent character). Partly what catalyzes Kitty is one of the residents of the shady lodging that she's put up in. The place is called Twinkle House that's been supposedly blessed by Virgin Mary - there's some more irony there for you, as you discover what actually happens there - and offers "healthy facilities for lodging and food (for women only)." Her friend there is Shazia (Kubra Sait) who keeps DJ Teja (Karan Kundra), smitten by her, dangerously dangling like a smoldering cigarette in their relationship.
Add to this Dolly's mother's turning up - Neelima Azeem in a subtly powerful cameo - and the stage is set for an intricate tying up of Dolly and Kitty's paths. Their paths may seem parallel in their similarity, but their struggles are paved on the same road. Somewhere along the movie, I couldn't help wondering how this movie would have panned out as a mini-series because there's so much packed in here. And that's also where the movie falters, as the denouement seems a bit too pat and convenient, as if wanting to get a clean shot of resolution. And does a long-awaited shattering orgasm (tellingly, for both women, not in the classic missionary wham-bam routine) open up the gates of libertarian paths for middle-class women or does it offer a peek into what could've been but can never be? Director Shrivastava quickly - and conveniently - chooses the former option, abandoning any echoes of ache and longing.
That quibble apart, the movie's also a LED-screen light to the sign of our times. Once, not too long ago, our dreams and lovelorn songs were made of promises to go get those stars for the ones we loved. Those star-struck promises remain. But they're now the stars that you tap on your mobile phone apps to rate them.
Varane Avashyamund (2020)
A feel-good movie that feels so good, you can't stop smiling
We didn't realize it before 2020 unfurled its true intent and poison. But we need people around us. We need the stickiness of nose-poking neighbors. The thrust in the door for a bowl of sugar. The coming together for a special occasion. The sudden, unexpected arrival of the trial version of a dish just before repast time. The gossip-mongers who hang around an unexpected corner to spew the last cycle of a tid and collect the next version of a bit. The building up of relations that may last a month or a lifetime. An eventide of directionless jabber. Yes, need people we do.
In this masked version of our fearful existence, all of what was a zig-zag of interaction and symbiotic and irritatingly necessary interaction is replaced with darkness that's unknown and seemingly unending. In normal years, I don't know if I'd have liked debut director Anoop Sathyan's Varane Avashyamund (Groom Wanted) as much as I did now, but I'm a sucker for feel-good slice-of-life cinema. So probably, yes I would. And that's what the movie is. A light, shining sunbeam on our screens. There's no heinous villains, no serial-killers, and no scheming in-laws. Except for Aakashavani, played with delightful over-the-top zest by KPAC Lalitha. The stolid matriarch isn't like this in reel life, but plays one in a Tamil TV series where she's a runaway hit, and her character's been planning on murdering her son for the last one month. Aakashavani's shifted to AKS Residency, an apartment in a Chennai upper middle-class neighborhood, and it's this apartment that's the confluence of a bunch of characters that include the finding-her-foot-in-Chennai, single mother Neena (Shobana in a graceful, expressive flight of act) who's also shifted to Chennai a couple of months of ago with her doughty, independent, groom-hunting daughter Nikitha (a breezy and superb Kalyani Priyadarshan making her debut). Aakshavani has, in tow, her relatives, the two constantly at punches-and-scratches brothers Karthik (Sarvajith Santosh Sivan, like Kalyani, of a strong movie lineage, debuting with a delightful act with his pet-in-real life, aptly named KFC) and 'Fraud' (Dulquer Salmaan, also producing the movie and in an understated, tightly-timed act).
There's other folks in the apartment dynamics, that include Major Unnikrishnan who has anger management issues, played by the superbly cast Gopi Sunder who rages and fumes, until he finds his anger management doctor Dr. Bose (a glib, rapid-mouth-fire and comic act by Johnny Antony), who has no role to play in the army veteran's finding peace. Unless you count his office premises that becomes a fertile ground for a sunset romance. Then of course, there's the couple who own the apartment block (K. Gopal and Meera Krishnan) who have differing views on everything including eating beef and one of them agrees to disagree on the sly. Add to these characters Neena's brother Manuel (Lalu Alex) who's come to Chennai on a business trip and comes visiting, the apartment cook (Sreeja), Fraud's ambitious girlfriend at work, and a suitor for Nikitha whose dentist mother drills more sense than cavities (Urvashi in a beautifully crafted act).
Director Sathyan, who also wrote the story, keeps his movie clipping along episodically, cutting through the lives of his characters, and if you're wondering if there's any big story moment here, there isn't, and thank God for that. It's precisely the point of this likable movie. It's a fly-on-the-apartment-wall, watching its people fight, celebrate, and fall in love. Aided by a top-of-the-melodic chart score by Alphons Joseph that uses the sitar, nadaswaram, veena, and woodwind to soar and elevate the movie and your senses - the Muthunne Kannukalil number such a beautiful ode to the city of Chennai that you want to go visiting right away - and crackling, high-velocity dialogues that pun on the Malayalam language and a noun (Manuel) with the same punch, this movie is big smiles, pure and simple.
And when he's done goof-balling, director Sathyan lands some soft emotional punches too. Neena is a woman who knows her mind and her body, isn't averse to compliments and admiring looks, and isn't afraid of falling in love, never mind the imminent judgement by a bench comprising the society and her daughter. All the characters have a past to their wacky present, and by the time the movie credits roll, you realize you're moved even as you can't stop smiling, because, unbeknownst to you, you've begun caring for them. As Gopi Sunder's army officer discovers, true love isn't saying "I love you". It's mouthing the first inane thing that comes to your mind. Because it's the eyes that suddenly twinkle and blurt out the truth.
Ram Singh Charlie (2020)
A quiet, moving look at the circus of life
As the virus slithers and floats around the world and all around us, it devastates livelihoods that at one point seemed integral to our societal fabrics and chains. And as those who come under its invisible yet destructive steamrolling force and know only one skill to survive, what are they to do?
Director Nitin Kakkar had no way of knowing that two years after its making, Ramsingh Charlie would release in a year that'd see many professions hear the loud and clear clanging of their death-knell. Even if it seems slightly anachronistic in its theme - the circus has been on a gasping-for-breath mode for some years now - the movie touches and cuts with its take on migrant workers and their struggle to eke out a living and space in sprawling metropoles. Here, the city is Kolkata and the unwilling straggler is Ramsingh (Kumud Mishra), pulling his rickshaw to transport passengers to their destination, even as his personal port of arrival seems oh so distant and hopeless. (That's shades of Bimal Roy's classic Do Bigha Zamin.) And when he deposits school children back to their homes is also when he displays a dexterous knack to perform tricks and make them - and their parent - laugh.
Director Kakkar, writing with Sharib Hashmi, cuts in with the parent's remark when he hears that Ramsingh used to be with a circus earlier, to the past of glory and his family - a pregnant wife Kajri (Divya Dutta) and son Chintu ( a superb Rohit Rokhade) - and extended family that used to be Jango Circus. And overnight, Masterji, the circus owner - played with a quiet shine by Salima Raza - is forced to close it down by her son (Akarsh Khurana). The waves of this decision hit each and every one of the employees and the director zooms into Ramsingh who lives the role of the global tramp icon, who carries within him a weight that'd crush the world and yet flits about in life with a lightness that makes comedy poignant: Charlie Chaplin. For Singh, Charlie is him, and he's Charlie. It's what makes him tick and survive. But that act isn't sufficient for his family's survival anymore.
Ramsingh Charlie is a quiet, moving tribute to the circus, its descent into extinction, and a horrific struggle that's all too pervasive in these times. It also unwaveringly looks at those jobs which that are designed to provide joy to a privileged set of children, but those smiles ride on the back of claustrophobic costumes and physical agony. The movie, even if it gets a wee bit incredulous towards the end, gently removes the sanguinary mask that people like Ramsingh adorn, and the ones who're employed for their differently-built physical structure (veteran Lilliput stirs a pang in your heart) and how that's cause for insensitive mirth.
Not maudlin, not over the top, director Kakkar especially scores beautifully in familial scenes, as when he subtly captures the changes wife Kajri notices on her postpartum return in her dream Charlie. Divya Dutta is outstanding, especially when she lets her heartbreak and the only sound you hear is a pained frequency in her eyes. And as Ramsingh Charlie, Kumud Mishra is terrific. He's aided by an able supporting cast - Farrukh Seyer as the ebullient and street-smart Shah Jahan is top notch - but it is he who, as the everyday man and Chaplin, makes the show and the movie go on. There's a highlight scene where Ramsingh speaks to his inner Chaplin, who's perched next to him. As Singh confesses his utter dependence on Chaplin, the latter's fluid facial movements convey impish coyness and gratitude. And as that scene ends, both of them are swept by the same wave of roiling emotions. The show must go on, but once in a while, it's okay to pause and swallow that lump in your throat.
C U Soon (2020)
A tight thriller that breaks your heart
In the pre-pandemic era, Searching, directed by Aneesh Chaganty, unknowingly set a tight, harrowing template for a thriller set in the online, digital world. Now, with our living, working, and private worlds upended as far as the vax can see, it's not just a pre-adult demographic that's exposed to the incessant stream of digipacks, but all of us as well. And that includes bank client officer Jimmy Kurian (Roshan Mathew), who, in the Malayalam movie C U Soon - which uses the same template, but takes it into a superbly distinctive journey of its own - based out of an apartment in Sharjah, swipes right on Tinder and falls for Anu Sebastian (Darshana Rajendran) swiftly and surely.
Writer-editor director Mahesh Narayan (Take Off), also the virtual cinematographer for this project - a credit we'll be seeing more of, I suspect - having shot the entire movie on iPhones in apartments in Kochi during the pandemic - keeps his script tight and economical. Using all the icons that apps deploy - three blinking dots, to show, for example, if someone's typing - and online chatting techniques - typing, only to tap the clear option to rescind and rethink one's thoughts - the director radiates warmth and yearning in the budding romance between Anu and Jimmy. Those same icons and popping sounds ratchet up the tension later on in the movie. That Jimmy's impetuous and thinks from his bleating heart is established as he quickly sets up a video call with Anu, his mother in the US (Maala Parvathi), and cousin sister for them to meet Anu, also living in Sharjah. Under normal circs., all would have been okay. The catch here is that the couple hasn't met face-to-face, and Jimmy pops the nuptial proposal on said call. That something's amiss about Anu is apparent, but love is blind, and virtual love blind to any muted, worrisome signals pulsing across the network. It's a telling portrait of our times. As all of us slip in wearisome work and home routines and the only time we're stirred is while prepping for stir-fry veggies, we're all craving that long-forgotten touch, a dash of excitement, a breeze of adventure, and a surfeit of scenery change. Which is what makes us all vulnerable to online missteps and stumbles.
Meanwhile, Jimmy's mother, Mary, wary of her son's sudden online handfasting, ropes in her nephew, maverick, and moody night-shift IT dredger in Kochi, Kevin (Fahad Faasil) to hack out more information about the girl. Kevin, struggling with his own relationship with team lead and lover Sanjana (Amalda Liz), scoffs at his cousin brother's latest amour. What he thinks of women and affairs of the heart is established as he and Sanjana spar over work and his ego. This angle, perhaps, is the only one in the movie that limps a little, but director Narayan moves the video calls and chats along at a snappy pace, so there's no time to ruminate as Jimmy gets into trouble, mysterious events circle around Anu, and it's up to Kevin to unravel and disentangle his cousin - and the family - from a rapidly disintegrating situation.
Wound up tightly, C U Soon uncoils swiftly and effectively with director Narayan wearing his experienced and ace editor's hat, and in the process of expending its fraught energy, exposes a gutting and heartbreaking side of what so many women and job seekers from Kerala undergo in the Gulf countries even in these hyper-connected times of Facebook and Hangouts. And as Faasil's Kevin discovers the truth, his demeanor and façade changes and melts, the unspeakable horror that unfolds on his screen crushing his superbious shell. The actor - also co-producing the movie - plays Kevin with a studied and effective intensity that segues from disdain to genuine concern, his phiz a portmanteau of bubbling emotions. Fahadh Faasil is a joy and a treasure to behold and cherish at the cinema, and C U Soon cements his place at the thinking actor's marquee. Aided by Gopi Sundar's background score that swells and rouses in the romantic scenes a la Ilaiyaraaja and taps nervously elsewhere, the movie also has a very effective and sincere Roshan Mathew and a heartrending act by Darshana Rajendran raise their scenes to more than a digi-slick-and-click.
Even if director Narayan ends the movie with a prayer for all of us to congregate at cinema halls soon, he wouldn't want you to, in the meantime, carelessly swipe and chat indiscreetly online. And even if you do, the movie's biggest hope is that you do what's right by the other person in the chat window.
Cargo (2019)
'Cargo' review: an inventive premise with a stumbling plot
The spaceship breathes much like a living being, a ventilator-like diaphragm that contracts and expands, its breathing action driving its forward journey around the earth. In a science fiction movie set in the future and that looks at the inevitability of death and the eventual dispatch, this animistic design is just one of the facets to relish in debutante director Arati Kadav's stumbling but inventive Cargo.
Kadav, who also wrote the script, melds Indian mythology and philosophy with the drudgery of everyday living and loneliness in a newfangled concept piece. The rakshasa (demon) species have entered a peace détente with the human race, and rule the social media did-packs: there's a pop star called Surpanakha who comes up with foot-tapping numbers (composer Shezan Shaikh's score a Kraftwerk-meets-Rahul Dev Burman pulser, including a catchy ditty that goes You're My Forget Me Not); plus there are the dispatchers hovering in spaceships working for the (Interplanetary Space Organization, whose acronym IPSO is a clever philosophical twist for the Latin word which means 'itself', the phrase ipso facto here the action of our karmas) who receive dead people - pragmatically called cargo - who heal them, cleanse their memories, and then zap them into whatever gets them back to reincarnate and repeat their doomed life cycle - and who have a huge fan following. This is the Post-Death Transitional Services (PDTS) that director Hansal Mehta chips in to explain with a cameo.
One amongst such dispatchers is demon Prahastha - ironically saddled with a faulty healing equipment - who's the sole inhabitant of Pushpak 634A spaceship (an effective minimalistic design by Mayur Sharma), who prefers not to have assistant, even as he's incessantly prodded by his supervisor-on-earth, Nitigya (Nandu Madhav, superbly adding a dimension to his small-screen act), to have one. Prahastha, played with a steady, unflinching sincerity by actor Vikrant Massey, propels the movie forward, even as the only other interaction he has is with the perennially sleepless Chaitanya (Surender Thakur, also on an anachronistic solid-state TV screen). This is also where the movie's strength lies: in shining light on the loneliness that today's futuristic world has brought about. Loners slip into a process-oriented disciplined life that gives a humdrum meaning to their existence. And however dreary this eternal demonic life sounds, the arrival of assistant Yuvik (Shweta Tripathi) upends Prahastha's clockwork engineered routine. And when there's a huge generational gap (don't ask how much) between the firmly docked senior and the new arriviste, there's some delightful organizational behavior laced with gentle humor that's at play that director Kadav captures via tensile forces between the two in processes, approaches, and even ethics.
The problem with Cargo is its orbital plot that, while drawing from all the philosophy and metaphors that work for a while, and then seem to go nowhere. The dull routine of PDTS is repeated to drive in all that's already been said, and cargo cameos by Ritwick Bhowmick and Umesh Jagtap don't do much to change its course. What stumped me was Konkona Sen Sharma's appearance that brings in a subplot with no consequence except to add ten minutes to the movie. Much like co-producer Anurag Kashyap's Choked earlier this year, the innovative premise is too much for the story arc to keep up with, leaving with you a dull after-feeling.
Actor Shweta Tripathi, in yet another winning performance, is pitch-perfect in her act. And pretty much early on after her appearance, her character captures the essence of existentialism: what is our purpose if it all comes to end thus? The movie floats the same question about itself in a promissory orbit but hops on to a middling trajectory instead.
The Family Man (2019)
'The Family Man' review: Lyin' Eyes
"I can't eat this cake! Is it eggless?" protests his mother. Poker-faced, one eye-brow raised, he puts the plate in her hands and tells her too eat, looking elsewhere as if he wishes he was there (elsewhere), nodding vaguely and answering her question about the non-existence of the dairy wonder. He being Srikant Tiwari, senior analyst in the Threat Analysis and Surveillance Cell (T.A.S.C.), an under-the-radar agency that predicts, intercepts, and thwarts threats that impinge on the vast impossibility that is India. The office is housed in one of those old buildings in South Mumbai. And to drive home the point about its financial funding or painful attempt to stay out of sight-or both-the office can't be reached via the lift carriage; the button for the fourth floor is marked "Out of order". Which means Tiwari, his buddy agent Talpade (Sharib Hashmi, superb and underplayed) and other employees trudge their way upwards from the third floor. It could also be T.A.S.C.'s management's (played nicely by Pawan Chopra and Dalip Tahil) way of keeping its employees fit. But financially fit Tiwari isn't, and as the series unspools, even 'family man' seems a misnomer to describe him. It's precisely this struggle between work and home that's absolute fun in The Family Man that's streaming on Amazon Prime. Writer Suman Kumar and directors Raj Nidimoru and Krishna D.K. have a ball when it comes to drawing out familial bouts to strike a been-there-said-that déjà vu chord in you. And Manoj Bajpayee as Tiwari is the scintillating highlight of their enterprise. He's rip-roaringly good, almost as if flummoxed by why his wife, Suchitra (Priyamani) would expect him to do all the things expected of a father and a husband. Suchi's fed up, and his children-Atharv and Dhriti, played with superb acuity by Vedant Sinha and Mehak Thakur-are either looking to hand off pearls of wisdom and look the other way for ice cream, or just roll their eyes in knowing wisdom. They're the Insta-gen, and nothing-not even the threat of withdrawing the already obsolete iPod from their lives-will put the fear of God in them. They're perceptive, they're impossible. The trouble is, they're right.
Priyamani's role, on the other hand, follows a more difficult arc of a green-grass widow. Suchi is frustrated that Sri doesn't handle things in the family, and as a quasi-protest, takes up a job in a start-up with long-time teaching colleague Arvind (Sharad Kelkar, smooth and effective). As this sub-plot begins to unfold, there's a superb scene between Bajpayee and Priyamani, a drunk husband trying to invert his responsibilities into guilt, and then refracting it back to the wife, hoping she'll absorb some of it. (Spoiler: fat chance.) Overarching all of this is a terrorist plot that opens right in the beginning and is a zinger for the first six episodes. There's some tight cat-and-mouse at play here and there's Kashmir, Pakistan, an ISI man Sameer (Darshan Kumaar, looking surprisingly as stiff as the Pakistani army chief's drink in a scene where they discuss an upcoming deadly mission), a suspected terrorist in Mumbai and his girlfriend who doesn't know what he's up to; and to top it all, there's two captured terrorists in a hospital in Mumbai, one of who-Moosa (Neeraj Madhav, simply terrific)-is caught between all of this when all he wants to do is simply be with his mother. So long as its story stays in Mumbai, The Family Man is sheer joy. It's as its canvas spreads bigger and wider, to Balochistan, Pakistan, and Kashmir, that the plot becomes diluted, the characters more tropes than menacing, and it seems a little drawn out. Surprisingly, even Gul Panag's role as Tiwari's CO in Kashmir is underdone, almost as if an afterthought. Which is just the daunting task that looms ahead of writer Suman Kumar and the directors Raj-DK. Much like their character struggling to find a balance, they'll need to figure out how to find an equilibrium between the terror angle and the complex family dynamics that's more morphing trigonometry than equations. Which is why, even though the season end is a terrific cliff-hanger, I'd have loved it if the pressure gasket had blown off some of the roiling relationships instead, even though the bad guys get a bloody Coen Brothers'-ish treatment that's grippingly done.
Because The Family Man is a delight in its minutiae. It's the sly glances and gestures. It's in the scene where Hashmi's Talpade comes with two cups of tea, and hands one over to the new recruit, Zoya (a very effective Shreya Dhanwanthary), unmindful of Bajpayee's Tiwari reflexively reaching out for one cup, and then realizing he's being ignored. It's in the dent in Tiwari's car. And it is Manoj Bajpayee who strings it all together, much like his character-strung out, wracked by pangs of guilt and shots of duty calls. His eyes are furtive, body language never relaxed (except for once, when he puts his head on Gul Panag's shoulder and lets out a laugh). His performance is a massively deceptive one. It helps that unlike other spy thrillers, his directors don't bother with what's on his screen. They're interested in what's going on inside his mind. And what's going on there is subterranean, his lying eyes a furtive mask to hide matters of national security and interests. It's also why you can't tell if there's egg in that cake.
Dream Girl (2019)
'Dream Girl' review: My Chérie a Moan
Ayushmann Khurrana does a sterling job of enacting his chat sobriquet Pooja, and in dealing with all the consequences that inevitably-and predictably-follow. (But as he's strolling through his career's purple patch, this could be as good a time as any to evaluate the danger of falling into the template of the small-town-hero-aspiring-for-gold.) As his father Jagjeet Singh, Annu Kapoor is terrific in a performance that's subdued, even as his character plots a graph of emotional ups and downs, all tinged with fun. But it's the fun that's forced and heavy-footed, making Dream Girl more a faded shadow of what it aspires to be. And that's exactly what is perplexing and disappointing-despite a cast that's high on acting chops, the movie falls flat and then painfully drags to its finish line. Painful despite director Raaj Shaandilyaa-co-writing with Nirmaan D. Singh and Niket Pandey-pulling out all stops and tricks from the hat of comedy-including the line-up of callers falling for Pooja, each one trying to revive their emasculated or non-existent love lives, and then getting all crossed up and mixed up. Where this could have been reason for guffaws galore, all the movie can muster is a chuckle here and a titter there. And that's because the gags are in carousel mode and the director and his writers don't quite know when to get off. Which means that after a while, they run out of gas leaving Dream Girl to sputter and spit, and finally sign off with a messaging that's mentioned in passing earlier. As a climactic fodder for thought, Karam's lecture on loneliness in these superficially connected times sounds gauche and forced, as if that's the only reason why the callers call in. There's something that's to be said and shown for sexual gratification in anonymity and that ought to have been one of the layers in the story, for isn't that one pf the drivers for such an arrangement?
But the director chooses to play it safe, making the calls a comic prop and making you moan for Pooja chérie, accompanied not with passion but an eye-roll. The movie also misses another high point in its narrative: while Khurrana's turn as Radha, Draupadi, and other female mythological characters onstage is revered, praised, and looked up to, the crowd seeks surreptitious pleasure in his Pooja; that irony is lost on the director and his writers. If Dream Girl still reaches muster, but barely, it's because of the actors circling the plot. Abhishek Banerjee as Mahinder Rajput gets in a touch of innocent goofiness, while Manjot Singh as Karam's BFF is superb, his timing swift and slick. Nidhi Bisht as the hard-nosed, misandric, lesbian editor rises above her cliched role and Rajesh Sharma is good as the profit-seeking, greedy Mauji. But it is Vijay Raaz as Rajpal Kirar, the wannabe-poet-but-in-reality-cop-on-the-beat who levitates the screen with his presence. He's part-slapstick, part-riot as he moves inside the frame with a zesty punch. In this hit-and-miss enterprise, you fish for scenes that stand out-in terms of comic lightness or drama ponderance-and you mostly come up with crumbs of hope. But there's a drinking scene between Ayushmann Khurrana and Manjot Singh on the rooftop at night, and then they glance down to see Annu Kapoor sleeping peacefully on the cot. Khurrana's Karam looks at his father lovingly and ruminates about all the sacrifices he's made, quietly and unhesitatingly, and all alone. In that movingly wakeful scene do you realize that watching your loved ones as they traverse dreamland makes them look so vulnerable-never mind howsoever irritating they otherwise may be-you want to go give them a protective hug. The rest of Dream Girl, however, sleepwalks around 865/1 Gokul.
Batla House (2019)
'Batla House' review: Trauma Drama
Batla House never reaches the cinematic perch of solid, tight, slightly hazy story-telling it purports to aim for, after a two-minute long disclaimer in the opening. Right from the opening of real-life, horrifyingly bloody headlines segueing to an out-of-focus screechy outburst from Nandita Kumar (Mrunal Thakur) seemingly ramming into her stoic husband-ACP Sanjay Kumar (John Abraham)-you're not left in any doubt that this is a POV project and there's not going to be two-sides-to-the-story progression, which in itself isn't a bad thing either. When she threatens to leave him-he has no time for this relationship-he tells her in a pained voice that there's nothing here for her; she must. It is this stoic act that also makes John Abraham the highlight of the movie. For, director Nikhil Advani ensures that the actor's emotional bandwidth isn't strained across the spectrum. Employing a limited repertoire of expressions, the actor powers through the scenes with an intensity that's simmering and part-rousing.
During the encounter scenes and the retelling of them-the director, editor Maahir Zaveri and cinematographer Soumik Mukherjee-construct heart-stopping sequences that are carried out deftly and with solid panache. This is also where you meet the scene-chewer of Batla House in a role that's much too small-Ravi Kishan playing Kishen Kumar Verma aka KK with punch and a disdainful humor that's the other highlight of the movie. The ACP's tense and tacit play-offs with his boss and Police Commissioner Jaivir (played superbly by Manish Chaudhary) are smartly done, but their interactions with the politicos are bogged down by tepidity. The chase between Abraham and Sahidur Rahman (playing Dilshad Ahmad, the fugitive suspect and also the key link to the encounter) in Nizampur is superb, Where the movie could have upped its on-the-fence, neutral narrative-and added layers of suspense and uncertainty-could have been via a Rashomon-style unspooling; and director Nikhil Advani does employ it a bit in the courtroom scene, but that's too late and much too less. Plus, there's a huge plot-hole that leaves you gawking: the cop team's defense counsel has no insight into their side of the story and investigation until after the first hearing. Order, order, please.
Batla House also throws in an angle of the guilt and horror that cops must live through as they relive their most harrowing moments on-field. But it's the cracking post-traumatic stress leitmotif that, even if a bit overdone, hits you the hardest. The first time, when ACP Kumar charges into Batla House, and is shot-John Abraham nails that stunned, horrified expression as he's thrown, the camera flying with him, to the floor. His hands reflexively go to his chest and you can almost hear his heart hammering. Many scenes later, as he hurtles down the road for a chase, his hands reach out again in an act of human reflex to his chest pocket for his mobile phone. Which isn't there. That's one trauma most of us won't ever recover from.