Delhi Belly

Delhi Belly - A Review (* * * 1/2)

Abhinay Deo’s ‘Delhi Belly’ is a brash, irreverent comedy that is so hilariously indecent, it must have set some sort of standard for bad taste in Bollywood. Say what you will about the film’s affection for all things gross, it all fits rather smoothly into the scheme of a caper. There’s a scene where a jar of turd provides the pivotal twist. If the very sound of that puts you off, you’re not the intended audience for ‘Delhi Belly’. To others, I say watch the scene and try telling me that wasn’t even mildly funny.

The plot: Our heroes Tashi, Arup and Nitin are regular 20-something blokes who share a dingy flat somewhere in Delhi. Their bachelor pad is a victory of production design, evoking a cross between a dumpster and a Railway washroom. Tashi (Imran Khan) is a reporter who aspires to strike gold covering some good breaking news story, but is stuck on the bottom rung interviewing starlets and the likes. Nitin (Kunaal Roy Kapur) is the far more content photographer assigned to him and the sleaze of the trio. Arup (Vir Das) is a cartoonist who works for, I think, an advertising firm and we see a dartboard with his Boss’ face on it to indicate his job satisfaction.

Things suddenly take a turn for the worse. Arup gets dumped, Tashi runs afoul of his beautiful colleague’s roughneck of an ex-husband and Nitin, well, comes down with a horrible case of Delhi Belly. The fact that the trio’s flat is always without water provides some of the loudest laughs in the film.

More sinister events are put into motion when Tashi’s girlfriend Sonia (Shenaz Treasurywala), an air hostess, hands him a mysterious package she picked at the airport at the request of a friend, to be delivered to its intended recipient. Fans of Guy Ritchie & Quentin Tarantino films would be quick to realize that the package is the McGuffin and thus it’s sorta crucial that there is some mix up delivering it for the film to work. A series of unpleasant developments sets our boys up against a gangster, played to perfection by Vijay Raaz. By this time the plot has sucked in Tashi’s colleague Menaka (Poorna Jagannathan), the trio’s landlord and a slimy jeweller played by that brilliant character actor Rajendra Sethi (remember him as the ‘Sansani’ reporter in ‘Oye Lucky, Lucky Oye’?).

The screenplay by Akshat Verma is clearly inspired by Guy Ritchie films and perhaps the biggest leaf it picks is to introduce conversational chemistry between the lead characters. Tashi, Arup and Nitin speak that peculiar Delhi lingo that’s random, zippy and (ahem) robustly profane. It’s not exactly Hinglish but, as the certificate says, mostly English with a bit of Hindi. Acoustically speaking, the dialogue evokes our own desi version of the cockney sound in Ritchie films.

Watching ‘Delhi Belly’, I was reminded of Krishna DK & Raj Nidimoru’s excellent ‘99’, a superior crime caper because it was quieter, had better stakes and featured more fleshed out characters. But as far as capers go, I suppose audiences prefer quirks over depth and a capacity for going over the top. And that kinda says something about Aamir Khan’s knack of helming successful productions. You have to hand it to that guy. If this film doesn’t work for you, wait till you see him slip into his disco shoes and butt pads & try telling me that wasn’t even mildly funny.

Waltz with Bashir

How deeply does war scar a soldier? ‘Waltz with Bashir’ opens with a stunning & eerie evocation of a war veteran’s nightmare. He sees a pack of feral dogs charging down the streets in pursuit of him. Soon, we cut to his wartime experience that explains the context of the dream so specifically, we see clearly the strongest emotion he must have towards having gone to war-Guilt.

This film from Israel has been called an animated war docudrama, which, right there, is a genre of its own. It was made by Ari Folman, a filmmaker who also fought for Israel in her invasion of Lebanon in 1982. A night of drinks with a fellow veteran leads Folman to the confounding realization that he has no memories of the war, but the conversation triggers a flashback where he sees himself entering war ravaged Beirut on a night lit up by flares. Everything that happens next is a build up to explain this vision as Folman retraces his role in the invasion through interviews with fellow soldiers. This may be the most productive work of art attributable to memory lapse.

Folman chose animation because of the girth of what he intended to show. His subjects share candid details about their experiences & visions during the war, and animation helps in depicting them through surreal, haunting visuals, set to a brooding electronic score by composer Max Richter. One scene evokes a scared soldier’s vision of a giant amazon carrying him away from the ship that ferries his regiment to a surprise attack. Shooting this scene in a regular film could be possible with CGI but it wouldn’t be nearly as beautiful as it is here. Then there’s a fascinating recreation of a soldier escaping towards the seashore after his commander has been shot down and his tank blown up. He hides behind a rock, hoping that his regiment would stand their ground and rescue him, but they retreat. Seeing his forces abandon him to imminent death, he instinctively recollects the overwhelming security he felt in his mother’s arms as a child. Folman cuts to show mother & child locked in embrace in the middle of the crossfire. The interlude captures the trapped soldier’s trauma with rare poignance. The soldier slips into the sea in the dark and lives to tell the tale.

Folman’s own troubling memories resurface during the course of the interviews and the film shows them correspondingly. They include a bizarre trip to the Beirut Airport, where he wanders through his hallucination of a swanky airport complete with duty free shops lining the hallway. We see Folman snapping out of it to find the airport wrecked & the segue between illusion and reality is kinda awesome in underlining the devastation. The context of his flashback is revealed in the final interviews recounting the massacre of Palestinian refugees in the Sabra & Shatila refugee camps at the hands of the Lebanese Phalangists, out to avenge the assassination of their leader Bashir Gemayel.

Keeping with the phantasmagoric mood of the film, the title is derived from a scene where a soldier literally breaks into a waltz while shooting at Palestinian radicals, in the backdrop of a huge poster of Bashir Gemayel. At one level perhaps, Folman may have chosen the name as a sublime allusion to Israel’s complicity in allowing Bashir’s partymen (largely Maronite Christians) to enter Palestinian refugee camps and commit genocide. Yet this is a film that’s less about Bashir or the politics behind the Israeli invasion than it is about the waltz, the mad futility of going to war and the consequent spiritual toll.

‘Waltz with Bashir’ is one of the most significant, extraordinarily profound & oddly beautiful film of our times. We’ve seen war films projecting soldiers who are stirred purely by patriotism. Folman seems to be hinting that this may not be true, at least not for his subjects anyway. They were just boys who may not have had a full grasp of what they were doing and why. One of the interviewee shares that he became a soldier to escape being branded a nerd. Consider that Folman himself was obsessed, not with ideology, but his own death so it riddles his ex-girlfriend with guilt for breaking up with him. Lives were lost in service to these motives. This is not the coming of age they’d hoped for. I think the filmmaker regards this with sadness.

The supreme point of this work, I suspect, is to come to terms with the scars that Folman & his brothers carry & must live on with. It was perhaps Bertrand Russell who once said that war doesn’t determine who’s right, just who’s left. Yes, and it’s the soldier who pays the biggest price.

Back with a Bang!

Ah freedom. After being continually flustered by domain name providers and their complex e-registration processes, I've set aside the dream of owning my custom domain name for now. I need to care for the ramblings more than a customized access to them. And so I am back with blogspot and this time i intend to post on topics other than films...so help me God. For my previous movie reviews click here.

The Dark Knight - A Review (* * * * *)

Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Dark Knight’ is so phenomenally good, it makes other films on superheroes look like also-rans. This film is cutting-edge and has the kind of compelling drama rarely seen in blockbusters. It defies expectations of its genre and sets new (read difficult) ones, be it in terms of performances, writing & technical finesse.

While ‘Batman Begins’ finally tapped the mystique of the caped crusader, ‘The Dark Knight’ takes us deeper into the realms of moral conflicts that are endemic to the Batman Series. So deep, in fact, that the film looks & functions more like a thriller than a comic book flick. Principal to this effect is the film’s villain, the Joker played by Heath Ledger in a performance that channels loud hints of the acting legend he could have been. When Mr. Ledger’s Joker is on, you can’t take your eyes off him. It is such a creepy, magnetic portrayal that it justifies the film’s strange infatuation with the character. His method involves trapping his adversaries in ‘games’ that pits their morals against instinct. The film’s rendition of the Joker is so twisted, that he easily upstages the bustling pantheon of comic book villains seen on screen so far.

Picking up from where the last film left, the plot introduces the character of Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), the new district attorney, bent on seeing the mob off the streets of Gotham. Feeling cornered by the collective efforts of Dent, Batman (Christian Bale) & Lieutenant Gordon (Gary Oldman), the mob turns to the Joker. Using the links of the mob with the Gotham Police department, the Joker sets about executing sensational crimes, holding Batman responsible for not coming out in the open & revealing his true identity. Rachel Dawes, now played by Maggie Gyllenhaal, returns as the Assistant DA and as Dent’s girlfriend. So do the redoubtable veterans, Michael Caine as Alfred and Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox.

The film continues the vein of developing Batman’s wardrobe. The Batsuit is now more compact, more futuristic with a cowl that enables Batman to move his head more freely. Other details include the introduction of Bat sonar and the Batpod, a behemoth of a bike that neatly breaks free from the Batmobile.

One of the truly marvellous things about ‘The Dark Night’ is how well it develops parallel story threads to create a dense atmosphere. As one scene plays out, you can still sense what is happening in the background elsewhere. Nolan is helped by David S. Goyer and brother Jonathan in carving a canvas that is broad & engaging. Consider for example the opening heist scene or even the spectacular car chase. The pounding soundtrack composed by Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard serves to create the queer effect of quickly jumping from one frame to the next, much like in a comic book.

Indeed, the whole production is so intricate and polished that ‘The Dark Knight’ justifies the tag of the best superhero movie ever made. But curiously, it delivers more resoundingly as a complex moral drama, one that thrives on tension and clash of personalities rather than pervasive action sequences. And all of the film’s virtues stack up around Heath Ledger’s final performance, the one thing that most truly exemplifies how far ‘The Dark Knight’ has gone to conjure an extraordinary experience. On being asked why he cast Heath Ledger as the Joker, Nolan reportedly said it was because Mr. Ledger was fearless. I had anticipated this film & Mr. Ledger’s performance since last year and the news of his passing before the film released seemed unfair and tragic. After having seen this film the only solace is that he went out on top.

Taare Zameen Par - A Review (* * * *)

‘Taare Zameen Par’ is possibly the definitive moviegoing experience of this year. Given that a banal offering like ‘Om Shanti Om’ has emerged as the year’s top draw, its refreshing to see a film weaved around ideas instead of six packs. Working on a script by Amole Gupta, Aamir Khan’s directorial debut is a victory of spirit. Few stories this year have been told so fearlessly, with conviction and with the kind of imagination that even rubs onto the credits. Fewer still have managed the task of being instructive yet warmly familiar at the same time.

Haven’t we all come across a Ishaan Awasthi (Darsheel Safary)? A third grader who’s forever lost in the world outside the classroom window, hoping that the walls would collapse to let it in. I knew him. Heck, I was him. And I grew up hearing the same things Ishaan hears. But Ishaan is also dyslexic. If you don’t know what dyslexia ‘really’ means, don’t google it yet. Let this film show you. It’s good at it. Suffice it to say that Ishaan finds it difficult to have a favourable relationship with his textbooks, preferring to stay in the colourful worlds that find their way into his drawings.

I suspect the real reason why Khan & Gupta use dyslexia is to show how our expectations of our children are without regard for their individual capacities or interests. It isn’t that Ishaan’s parents don’t care. It’s just that they, like many other parents, have been oriented to accept a straitjacket approach to education. And if Ishaan can’t perform in it, it has to be an attitude problem. Maybe, in today’s age of information, its too incredible to believe that dyslexia in a child could go unnoticed. But the film presents this possibility with such elan & subtlety that we buy it. Khan even fits in a clever song that parodies the numbing effect of being part of the rat race. When you’re obsessed with the thought of keeping your child ahead of the competition, his/her problems become that much harder to notice.

And so Ishaan is packed off to a boarding school and here too the film makes a wonderful observation. Sending your child to boarding school is one thing, but to send him with the impression that he needs to be straightened out is murder. Ishaan quickly falls out of favour with his teachers and shuts himself in a shell, hurtling towards certain doom. Enter Ram Shankar Nikumbh (Aamir Khan), a substitute Art teacher so cool, he could pass off as a VJ. He quickly discovers that Ishaan needs help and we see him become the proverbial ray of hope.

Has there been another film this year with as many perfect scenes? Consider, for example, the meeting between Nikumbh and Ishaan’s parents. The exchange of dialogue is laden with meaning and gently conveys where parents go wrong when it comes to their children. When Ishaan’s father (Vipin Sharma) confronts Nikumbh again, notice the delicacy with which Nikumbh illustrates what it means to be a better father. There is that slightest hint that Nikumbh is expressing what he may have expected to hear from his own father. Notice how Khan chooses to end that scene. Or consider how Nikumbh, faced with the daunting task of rebuilding Ishaan’s confidence, cleverly involves the entire class into a discussion about dyslexia which features, not Ishaan, but Einstein, Edison & Abhishek Bachchan. Last, but not the least, here’s a film that uses its songs with innovation, not as interludes but as dramatic ways of making points. Special praise must be set aside for ‘Kholo Kholo’ not only for its music and lyrics but also for how beautifully it accompanies a scene where children and teachers come together for an art competition. Towards the end of the song, when Ishaan and Nikumbh regard each other, we get a payoff like none other.

I admire Amole Gupta’s writing for steering clear of making extreme caricatures. Even as Ishaan’s parents grow frustrated with him, we’re still able to see their good intentions. His mother (Tisca Chopra) is that balance of sweetness & austerity we relate to. Ishaan’s brother (Sachet Engineer ), who’s a brilliant student, never lets the gap in their grades undermine their relationship. He’s kind-hearted and encourages his brother’s imagination. The principal of the boarding school, who’s uncertain at first towards Nikhumb’s strategy for helping Ishaan, finally shows the courage we expect of a good educator. And there’s Rajan (Tanay Cheda), a friend who shows care and affection when it’s needed the most.

I celebrate ‘Taare Zameen Par’ for telling a simple story with immense feeling, and in such a way that it becomes something more. It encourages a certain depth in our perception of children. It also reminded me that good teachers invariably happen to be those who are able to draw on their own childhood experiences while instructing children. It is a celebration of childhood & tells us that education, more than anything, is a nurturing process. Watching it, I discovered that when I fell in love with English, my fifth grade teacher Mrs. Lalitha Krishnan had a lot to do with it. Mrs. Krishnan, wherever she is, would find a million reasons to cheer this film.