Movie Review: As Gentle as A Hammer Blow : Judgmental Hai Kya?

 Judgementall Hai Kya? is bit of a jack of all trades kinda movie. It is a whodunit and a thriller and it loves to show off its psychedelic inspired takes on mental health. Unfortunately director Prakash Kovelmudi is unable to pull off most of what he set out to do, even though the two protagonists played by Kangana Ranaut and Rajkumar Rao do put in credible performances. 


The legend of Sita, in a modern interpretation of the Ramayan is used in the second half of this movie to staggering visual effect, as extravagantly costumed creatures from the myth walk around the streets of London. A surfeit of rainbow-hued graffiti in eye popping colours serves as a backdrop, making for a psychedelic effect and the word that springs to mind is "unhinged". Bobby's (the protagonist played by Kangana Ranaut) lucidity, already straining thin, now comes undone, in a grotesque culmination. 

Judgementall Hai Kya dazzles in bits, it has a kind of splendour. But by the time we get to the unraveling of the climax, it gets wearying, delivered like hammer blows to your eyes and ear drums. The innovative use of sound and the imaginative visuals get tiresome as the script falls flat. The narrative does not hold. Intricately linking pretty threads together does not always produce a beautiful tissue. The threads hang limp, scattered all over the place. 

These threads used to illustrate the "insanity" of the protagonist are good enough by themselves. 

Right at the outset Bobby is set up as a narrator who cannot be relied upon. Indeed the red herrings strewn all over the storyline are obvious to an adept thriller watcher, and Bobby's unrelaibility is put to good use here. Manipulation most fine. 

What is "normal" and who do we we accept as "people like us"? How far are we willing to go to accept differences are questions raised by this movie. In India and in Bollywood, there has been talk of how mental illness has become more acceptable, with Deepika Padukone, the biggest woman actor of her generation having disclosed her struggles with depression. In the west, and the US a motley crew of therapists on instagram have gone mainstream. Whilst the culture of awareness grows, real acceptance still seems way beyond the horizon. 

 The protagonist does end up being a "hero", but her idiosyncrasies are such that it's difficult to imagine transferring this acceptance to the everyday for us, the viewers. 

Perhaps you would say that this is only art or that it is not the job of commercial cinema to educate. That conversation is for another day, yet we would all agree that representation matters. Intersectionality is all about giving a voice and a face to the under represented. And as the acceptance of mental illness expands to an extent, we are also faced with the question, what is reality, and what is normal? Even when we know we ought to seek help, our fear of being judged keeps us from it. As in life so at the movies.

The alert viewer and the whodunit connoisseur would be aware of the use of mental illness as a prop. It is evident where the script and even the screen play have been totally "inspired" by British crime dramas and of course Hollywood, which continues to "inspire" our cinema. 

Some of the twists are totally inexplicable. How does Bobby suddenly turn up at her cousin's place in London and how does she fund the trip? How is a dubbing artist suddenly get accepted by a theatre company and lands a plum role?

That said, Kangana Rant is in her element. Her performance shines through in most of the scenes. Her hysteria feels credible, though the diagnosis and its manifestations seemed too glib. 

The childhood trauma that Bobby suffers has an indelible impression on her. The theatrical, almost unreal enactment of the scene of the trauma felt jarring. It seemed to minimize the horror of the assault. I imagine it is a deliberate ploy, to make it all look unreal, to depict her craziness as merely fanciful.

Imperceptible erasure of reality and the gas lighting is something women are so used to experiencing. We are told again and again, we are "too sensitive" that we "can't take a joke" when the joke is at our expense. When we try to talk about abusive husbands, partners, we are told 'but he's a good guy' as if our own lived experiences don't matter. The adage add women and stir is not a recipe for bringing gender sensitivity to a script, is well illustrated by this movie. Script writer Kanika Dhillon chooses to undermine the narrative of a woman with such a trauma, so that fair representation remains remote. concession, mercy 

Any woman's rights activist will tell you that far more women die at the hands of their husbands and partners, yet Bobby's fascination with domestic violence is depicted as almost quirky. She is shown making origami with scraps cut out of newspapers, all of them reports of violent attacks by men. 
The relative tenderness of the narration towards Bobby is just about balanced by the mystery of Raghav, played by Rajkumar Rao. 
On the one hand the narrative seeks to undermine Bobby the narrator, yet it is also indulgent. But as the narrative turns out why isn't the trauma the other characters honored similarly? 

(Tumhara trauma trauma hai, mera trauma gaya tel lene)


Disjointed and patchy, and overly too long even at its short running time of just about 2 hours, I would still recommend Judgementall Hai Kya as a one time watch. While we make do with what we have, we keep demanding for better. 

Movie Review: Tumhari Sulu: In Which Sulu Must Step Back

Let me state right away that I'm a fan of Vidya Balan's and I try not to miss any of her movies. I went to watch Tumhari Sulu with very little expectations, as the trailer promised it to be a light hearted comedy and I expected to come away with a few laughs. And a poster with Vidya playing dress up super hero? Yes please! 

The film turned out to be a good comedy specially in the first half, as happens with most Bollywood fare. The eponymous Sulu is played by Vidya. Manav Kaul, playing Sulu's husband, fits the bill of an average middle class man who slogs it out for a pittance of a salary, but by all appearances theirs is a happy family. (As an aside, who lives in that big a house in Mumbai, on that salary, with only one earning person in the family? A house with a balcony and that too with a swing in it!) Sulu and husband are happy, and there is a lot of affectionate banter between the couple. Vidya Balan is good with the funny and delivers her comic lines to perfection. 


Enter the weird extended family of Sulu, comprising her super achiever twin sisters and their father. This troika of father and sisters is out to humiliate Sulu, reminding her of her academic failures and bringing up her multiple misadventures in trying to launch various unsuccessful money-making schemes. This family takes being dysfunctional very seriously, with classism thrown in for good measure. 

Vidya taps into the cheerful housewife character well and we lap up the eternal optimist Sulu who charms her way into our hearts, with her pride in winning numerous small competitions. She pulls off just right pitch so that the cheerfulness doesn't get cloying neither does the humor turn cheesy.  

Sulu soon manages to land a job as a radio jockey with her "main kar sakti hai" spirit. Neha Dhupia as her employer and Vijay Maurya as her colleague, competitor-turned-friend put in efficient performances. However, it's a late night slot and Sulu is required and encouraged to tap into her sexuality as she talks to men in a sexy voice. Sulu anchors a talk show and is soon catering to men's fantasies. Her callers are often working class men who turn to the radio for a bit of easily available mush, and it's all fun and games, till it's not. Was the hint of sexuality in the role play the problem? We are never sure. 

With her new well-paying and satisfying job Sulu ends up neglecting her household chores and more importantly her duties as wife and mother. She tries hard to juggle both household chores and motherhood, but fails. The movie crash lands face down into pure melodrama territory, so out of character for it's protagonists. A loving, caring husband turns into a nasty monster just to satisfy the movie's need to create friction. 

It's not just the chores that she's required to do but also that she must care for her child and provide emotional support to her husband. Sulu ends up walking away from the job, because her family needs her. Even though she's earning the same salary as her husband, and he's almost on the verge of losing his job, yet it's important that the Indian woman be the mother and homemaker first. Why could she not hire a care giver or a creche for her child? Even more important, why did her workplace not help her on the home front so she could retain her job? 

Sulu joins the ranks of millions of Indian women leaving the workforce. Not only is there a decline in female work participation, but the total number of women in the workforce has shrunk. 67% of  women graduates in rural areas and 68.3% of urban women graduates don't have a paid job even as education levels among women are rising. Sociologists are figuring out it's partly due to lack of support with housework, partly a sense of lost honor if a daughter/wife works outside the home. Patriarchal attitudes more than anything else keep women away from paid work. What does it say about our culture when a medium as popular and accessible as cinema, supports this stigmatization of women joining the workforce? 

As many men happily pointed out, Sulu does launch yet another scheme. That portrayal is more a nod to the mandatory happy ending cos the film is comedy, methinks. It plays into the trope that Sulu is a fickle person. Her stint as a professional where she would stride into her office with confidence, is over. We go back to the non-threatening, bumbling good-for-a-few-laughs Sulu. 

The woman is back in the kitchen. You're safe, guys. Go home. 

Movie Review : Two Cheers For Baar Baar Dekho

                                           

If you live in urban India and manage to avoid the media saturation of an upcoming Bollywood movie, you probably live under a rock. Said rock is my roof. I went to watch Baar Baar Dekho oblivious to the fact that  it has a reprise of the 90s hit number kaala chashma.

 I did hope for some semblance of sanity only because I discovered that the director is Nitya Mehra whose bio says she had been the assistant director of movies like Life of Pi and the Don reprise.

To be sure, this is no gritty drama. It has its share of cheesy comedy and cheesier romance at the outset, helped along by typical romantic numbers. And come on! Dharma Productions and fluff go together like bheegi saree me hot nari under barsaat ka pani! 

Between the pretty faces and the beaches and bikinis, you're thrown the mandatory band, baaja and shaadi- obviously! The leads characters are Diya and Jai played by Katrina Kaif and Siddhartha Malhotra, so there's plenty of gorgeousness to gawk at.

A movie about inter-personal relationships, which doesn't let your attention flag, has got to be a winner in my book. It portrays the angst of the woman who alone must do the emotional and caregiving labour to hold her family together, while her husband is busy chasing his career. His singular contribution to family building seems to be donation of sperm. No surprises there! 

While she moves countries and continents so he may pursue his dream career, he couldn't be bothered to make the time to be at the opening of her art exhibition - so real, so predictable! I only wish they hadn't chosen such stereotypical professions for the two protagonists- he's a mathematician and she's a painter. 

There are jarring bits. Hugely uncomfortable making is the sequence when a person with an apparent mental disability is mocked and used as a prop for producing some staged laughs: so unfunny! And when the female protagonist Diya asks her boyfriend/ husband Jai why he loves her, his answers made me cringe each time. Stuff along the lines of "you're my wife" or "you're the mother of my children".   
Way to define a partner in strictly selfish, self-centered terms! I inserted a reminder to self: this is Bollywood and they can deliver only so much with one movie, let's not get ahead of ourselves in the hopes department, please!

 It does dawn upon Jai that relationships have to be built with loving attention and care and that nurturing one's loved ones leads to a more fulfilling existence. The soft, gentle man who is a nurturer, is upheld as the ideal us and it gladdened every pore of my feminist heart! When Jai picks up his daughter and swirls her around while she looks adoringly at him, in a scene crafted to pull at your heartstrings, it manages to do just that.

The movie has a clutch of creditable performances, from the actors playing the smaller roles, like Sarika, who plays Jai's mom and the guy who plays the art gallery owner (whose name I couldn't locate)  Ram Kapoor as Diya's dad tends to ham just the tad bit. Rajit Kapoor as the pandit with the mysterious link to Jai's future seems wasted.

The biggest surprise of the movie: Katrina Kaif has finally learnt to emote in front of the camera-to an extent. Siddharth Malhotra manages to hold his own, though at times the lack of depth in his performance shows.

With all the modern tech available and presumably a big budget, the make-up for aging is surprisingly tacky. The portrayal of the future is meh; it shows absolutely no imagination at all. A little effort in that department would have gone a long way in making this a memorable movie. 

Does the movie pass the bechdel test? Probably not. Yet, even though it's far from perfect I sent up two cheers for this movie's attempts at a feminist tone. It looks to a world centred on loving, fulfilling relationships, where jobs and careers-including men's- take a backseat and nurturance is given primacy. All hail Nitya Mehra!  Hope to see more feminism friendly cinema from her in future!

A version of this film review appeared on the Feminism In India website here here                                                                   

Movie Review : Udta Punjab : One More Blow for Misogyny

                                                        

As I endured the torture that was the vast expanse of Udta Punjab, I was left bewildered by the fact that its director is Abhishek Chaubey. That the guy who directed the twin little gems of Ishqiya and Dedh Ishqiya both of which portrayed women as independent characters, with a capacity to think for themselves, should come up with the misogynist fare that is Udta Punjab, boggles the mind.

 

A movie with a surfeit of men and awash with patriarchy is hard enough to digest. To top it, it makes things more difficult for itself by debasing women, dehumanising them and leaving them voiceless.

The movie tries to weave together four different narratives in the backdrop of drug trafficking and addiction in Punjab. However, it fails to bring together the various threads into a coherent narrative. The choppy feel makes the movie seem a dissatisfying experience. Towards the end, the random co-incidences where all characters come together for a resolution, seems awfully contrived.

The two performances that stand out are those of the cop played by  Diljit Dosanjh and Prabhjyot Singh, who plays his younger brother. Prabhjyot, specially, puts in an absolutely stunning performance as a drug addict who gets into all sorts of trouble. He has few scenes but leaves a lasting impression.

Shahid Kapoor plays Tommy, a so called rock/pop/rap star. Surprisingly, all the terms are used interchangeably in the film. Tommy is on a downward spiral, and has one meltdown after another. As he struggles to perform, the character himself attributes his earlier success to drug fuelled chance. Shahid as Tommy is a pain to watch on screen. He is unable to pull off the troubled musician.

Similarly, playing a doctor running a de-addiction centre, Kareena Kapoor does a hatchet job at best. I was gripped with a sense of sense of deja vu to see her reprise the same role she's played multiple times. She leaves no impact whatsoever. Does her character have a name? I seem to have missed it.

The police- politician nexus and the way it is unraveled is so simplistic and comes across as more like watching a scene from Enid Blyton's the five find outers projected on screen. The juvenile attempts at crime busting apart, one small consolation was the romantic pairing of the much older Kareena with the young Daljit. Though I'm not sure of the age of either actor, my guess is there's at least half a decade separating the two, a reversal which is heartening indeed. Yes, we must grasp at straws and be grateful for them.

Then again, the setting up of a drug-induced loosening of tongue for a declaration of love made me very uncomfortable. But that's me.

Shockingly, for a movie with claims to realism, in her final scene, Kareena's character, indulges in actions that defy logic. She seems to forget her training and years of work at a de-addiction centre, and goes on to confront, single-handedly, an addict who is clearly violent and out of control.

Yet again there's a sequence where Alia's character ties a cloth to her stomach and stuffs a rag in her mouth to deal with her withdrawal symptoms, reinforcing the stereotype that overcoming addiction is just a matter of putting your mind to it. As anyone who has worked in the field will tell you this is simplistic and dangerous myth building.

The sequences portraying Alia's character who is forced into addiction as well as the opening sequences with Shahid's character Tommy, both portray the impact of hallucinogens as glamorous and aspirational.

The gore in the movie is enough to want you to throw up. Needless, gratuitous violence which serves no purpose in leading the movie forward or furthering insight into any of the characters.

Which brings me to the biggest problem I have with the movie. The way Alia Bhat's character is etched left me whimpering in my seat, and not in the manner the makers of the movie intended.

This is yet another in the long list of movies which use women's bodies as vehicles to deliver violence, women portrayed as a victims, unable to overcome their circumstances. The movie reinforces the hapless damsel in distress trope. To top it all, Alia's character remains unnamed right till the very end. Erasure of women's identities continues. One more blow for misogyny.

                      

Feminist Movies, Anyone?

I happened to watch two awesome woman-centric movies on two consecutive days, in the midst of trying to figure out Hindi movies which pass the Bechdel Test- an enterprise probably doomed to failure from the start. Right? I will write about one here and maybe a second post on the other one, later.

 The first movie is A Thousand Times Good Night.  Starring  Juliette Binoche , it portrays a woman who works as a photojournalist in conflict regions of the world. She's "driven" and often risks her life - both "male" traits. Visiting these areas of strife and violence, she repeatedly puts her life in danger, in search of the perfect shot. As a friend chides her in a later scene, its the adrenaline rush which keeps her motivated to do the job she does.

As an Indian, I'm used to seeing women as the primary caregivers to their children even when they have full time jobs outside the home - whether paid or unpaid. What struck me most in this movie was the gender role reversal and the ease with which the movie handles it. It seems the most natural thing in the world that one parent  should take care of the kids when the other parent is away - as this movie depicts. It's simply a coincident that the primary care giver parent here happens to be the father.

And ooh, what  a hot dad ! The hunk who plays dad is Nikolaj Coster-Waldu  I haven't come across him earlier but I believe Game of Thrones fanatics will recognize him.

As the movie unfolds we are drawn to its central theme - how Gretta ( the character played by Juliette) going away repeatedly to these conflict zones and coming back wounded, having been in situations where she's come close to losing her life- is a huge drain on her family.

When she returns, there's an emotional distance,specially between Gretta and her husband and with her older daughter.They are wary of becoming close again,  because she will be gone once more. As her husband tells her "you smell of death". He tells her, each time she's gone, they prepare for the worst.

All of which made me think of the awesome role reversal the movie offers. Almost all such movies where the person putting his life in danger is a man, and the person left holding the home front, is almost always a woman. I for one can't recall any other movie with such a role reversal. Can you?

Needless to say Julitte Binoche is ethereal and luminous as is the ocean, the most gorgeous backdrop of the movie where a lot of the movie is set.

There were parts of the movie which I found uncomfortable. Scenes such as Gretta shoving her camera into refugees' faces without their permission, because "the world needs to know" or the whole sequence ( suggestive of Afghanistan ) though it doesn't explicitly say so, of the woman suicide bomber. being a Muslim - tried and tested tropes all, very much part of the white saviour complex. Where would we be without the "civilizing" impact of white people? Sigh.

Yet, all this didn't dilute my thorough enjoyment of the movie. Go watch it if you can. If you already have, tell me about it.

Movie Review: Highway, cinema for our times

Having watched the much-maligned "Highway" which I liked a lot, and having gone through most reviews which ranged from tepid to hostile, I decided to write this piece. Hopefully the handful (or less) of you who will read this, will at least consider watching it instead of an outright dismissal. 

Finally, we have a Hindi movie in which the central character is that of a woman and the focus of the entire movie is her growth and evolution as a person. Hats off to Imtiaz Ali for pulling off a stunning piece and extracting out of of Alia Bhatt, a performance which is probably going to remain one of her finest.

I'm not very sure if Imtiaz Ali set out to make a feminist movie, but this coming-of-age drama, wrapped around a road trip is just that : a rare Hindi movie that displays in full measure a true growing-up of Hindi cinema. (Since I'm not familiar with multi hued regional language cinema of our nation, I refrain from using the term "Indian cinema" for obvious reasons.)

Empathy is a quality fast receding from our collective conscience, as a society and this is but a reflection of the values held by its members at large. This movie yet again proves my point, you don't have to be a woman to be a feminist; having heartfelt empathy for fellow humans is enough.

Veera (Alia's character) is really every middle/ upper class Indian girl. She comes from a rich family. She is kidnapped, and forced on a road trip. 

The point to be noted is that she herself is not rich, rather it's her family which is rich. She seems to have no control over what goes on around her, which is not atypical of such situations. 

Her kidnapper, played with great aplomb by Randeep Hooda takes her on a journey which parallels the one of self-discovery and assertion of her own identity. 

The circumscribed existence of Veera, constantly being kept in check by her family, is suffocating her, and she is reluctant to return to it even after having been set free. 

At one point her character says, she knows she neither wants to go back to the proscribed world of her parents, nor does she particularly want to "settle down" with her former kidnapper. 

Also, dealt with great sensitivity is the growing relationship between her and her former kidnapper, a kind of love story, given a very different treatment from the run-of-mill Bollywood fare.

 

The assertion of her character, that she wants to be her own person, rings true, and that, I think, is the biggest strength of the movie.The little touch at the very end where she's depicted holding a copy of "Women Who Run With The Wolves" has it's own tale to tell. Perhaps it was too easy a prop to fall back upon, but truth be told, it warmed the cockles of my heart to see it up there. 

For the serene, soulful music of the incomparable A. R. Rahman, for the glorious shots of the prettiest places, for still, silent characters with pared down dialogues and faces which speak loudly but in silence, go watch "HIGHWAY". It's a different kind of ride !