Review: Lootera

Review: Lootera

It is a good one. Very well made. Yes, you should watch it because such films are not made again and again. It is a tale of charm, love, trust, betrayal and hope, all set in the faraway days of the 1950s.

With Lootera, Vikramaditya Motwane delivers a masterpiece - almost. The story is great. With all the yesteryears movies about sone-ki-moorti and laakhon-ke-heere, this one shows a lootera in a different light- as a lover shattered in life, yet clinging on to hope - someone else's hope. The social setting is one of phenomenal change, an India being born. Motwane has brilliantly captured the sentiment of those times, and brought it to us who know nothing about then.  Ranvir Singh plays Varun Srivastava with honesty and well, more honesty. It is a character come alive. Sonakshi Sinha plays the quintessential Bengali woman - she is beautiful, passionate and fiery. She is also heartbroken and dying. Sonakshi has delivered a performance very different from her previous glamorous roles - she deserves applause. The other characters are played very well too. However, actors like Divya Dutta appear unused. You don’t put an actress like her in your movie, and dole out a few pathetic one liners to her. Even in the tiny screen space provided to her, Dutta makes herself seen.

The music is amazing. Beautiful lyrics, compositions and extremely well sung. Bhattacharya and Trivedi have delivered a gift to the music industry, because this is quality work. It blends beautifully into the whole setting and story.

A couple of things however do take the charm away. Pakhi knows Varun is injured but acts as if she doesn’t. why? Then again, he kills his friend. That is an important part of the story, but isn't given much importance. The second part is definitely O.Henry's story. But it just doesn’t strike so well. For those who have read "The Last Leaf", it may appear overdone, for those who haven't, it may be too subtle. And the way she discovers the leaf, that certainly could have been better. That is where the movie slips - it builds up to that moment beautifully - and then, nothing. She knows she has got life, and he is probably dying. He gets shot, she looks at the leaf with laughter but in that defining moment of life and death, the are apart. Nothing seems to join them - there is no closure to all the love and sacrifice. There is the hint of redemption though. The ending is why the movie is "almost" a masterpiece, not quite there.
The locales are refreshing and beautiful. However, there is sloppy camera work at some points. When Varun returns to Pakhi's house and walks in the snow, the whole thing seems to be hodge-podge screen work. As if it really was shot in the fifties.  

To summarize, it’s a must watch. Skip it only if you can't stand slow paced romances.

Review- Those Pricey Thakur Girls.- Anuja Chauhan

Those Pricey Thakur Girls- Anuja Chauhan (Jan 2013)

Anuja Chauhan's new book comes across as breezy and entertaining.

The main plot is pretty predictable. An insanely handsome, flirtatious dude, and a beautiful posh lass. Of course, the reader knows that who is going to end up with who. But Chauhan succeeds at making it not boring. In fact, it is as much a page turner as it could be - you want to know how exactly are they going to end up together. The whats and the whys are not there, like they should not be for any self respecting rom-com.

But the real enjoyment lies in the vividly alive portrait of Delhi society in the late eighties as Chauhan paints it. The card-sessions, and teas are immaculately presented, as are the continuous conversations. The dialogues really add a lot of spunk and merriment to the novel. They are laced with pun and some detectable wit, not to mention the oh-so-dilli-waala style jo-to is present throughout. Her advertising career shows in her intelligently crafted dialogues.

She also has this unique style of writing. Conversations are essential but they don’t drive the narrative. The narrative makes small jumps in time and space that keep you at a fast pace. The pace aside, there are portions where you are distantly reminded of Jane Austen's innocent style and vivid social representation. (No, I am not implying a comparison!)

Chauhan does deserve credit for providing an extremely strong backdrop to the whole story. Behind all the niceties, and  embroidered table covers, Chauhan gives a glimpse into the very disturbing world of dirty politics, and the anti-Sikh pogrom of the eighties. She also brings in the powder coated face of state sponsored media. In case your frivolous rom-com spirits are getting a thumbs-down because of the serious stuff, don’t worry. She never lets it gets intense. Just when she could have gone further, and dived into messy waters, she swims back to Hailey Road, and engrosses you in the whirlwind romance of the beautiful Debjani and the D for Dylan.

The stubbly Dylan Singh Shekhawat is sure to get girls swooning. Who wouldn't for a tall, cowboy jawed,  half Christian-half Rajput fiery journalist from the eighties who owns a Mac. That may excuse him and Chauhan for the mathematically unexplained free fall with which he saves Chachiji. How do you jump off a building, and save another person falling below you by changing her trajectory of falling in the horizontal direction? But then he is the hero, and this is the land of Bollywood.
Being a Muslim  and a Kashmiri, I did not like the digs Chauhan took at both these attributes. She may be forgiven of course, because they weren't directed at me (!), there was no Muslim character in the novel, and the Kashmiri pandit boy whom her character calls a terrorist is not at all important for the story. And yes, why exactly the Thakur girls are pricey is something you'll have to figure out on your own as you go along.

Overall the book is a treat for its refreshing style, for its lead characters and yeah, the romance.

A Tale of Two Cities - Notes

That I associate with Sydney Carton was only one of several sorrows Dickens inflicted on me. The moment I turned the back cover of  "A Tale of Two Cities", I had this overwhelming guilt that I had been sinning against English literature all these years. I reckon many others must have felt the same way. Was this why it took me ten years to read that book? As a young girl of eleven, I had got bored with the first carriage journey and had shut the book up, only to open it again years later.
Any attempt to praise the book or comment on it will be stupid on my part, as I am well aware of my literary expertise. I would rather keep it more of a personal observation.
I saw the movie first, fell in love with that last dialogue of Carton's and read the book only to see how that line came about. If I love sketching characters, Dickens is the master of my love. Each character is complete and whole. One is left wondering at the deep analysis and synthesis of the human mind and emotions that Dickens displays. And yet the plot is so woven that the people in the story seem to be like leaves floating over a river in flood. The story blankets them all - be it the doctor looking at the moon beyond the bars, Darnay renouncing his blood, Carton crying with his face hidden, Lucy holding together a family or Jerry sitting on a stool - no one rises above the story. At one point I thought that such an amazing story and plot did not necessarily need such extremely well made characters. I was wrong. Only at the very end, all characters fit perfectly the way Dickens created them. They could not have existed in any other way. The Guillotine that separates Carton's head from his body seems to join every element in the pages, however small. The behavior of the character never slips. Each person is as complete as if Dickens himself had lived as that person.
The guillotine itself appears as a character throughout the novel. It is an active force, a living entity and a drive throughout the book. This powerful and purposeful rendition of an inanimate object gives the story that power over the reader, where he is compelled to obey the story and not let his imagination drive him in any other direction. It appears as that secret master who commands without being known. It rules over the hearts and minds of the men who feed it; and its hunger only becomes greater. It is the promise of freedom, as long as it is master. Somewhere in the subtext, I saw that there is no real freedom; there is a change of slavery. The guillotine is the new master, it kills the cruel royalty only to replace it. The guillotine was the mother of today's democracies, and look at them. They promised freedom too, and haven't they brought in new slavery.
Political discourse was not the object of this piece of writing; so let me come back. Apart from all the main people in the novel, one that particularly interested me was Jerry Cruncher. There is so much mystery around him, but he is at the same time such a small, simple person, that all mystery seems superfluous. Only till he opens his mouth about Roger Cly. And then he fits in. How does he live the way he does? How does he combine his days at the bank to his nightly grave digging? How does he feel when his son asks him about fishing? What does he think of his wife, and of her prayers? Jerry, where did Charles Dickens pick you from? Jerry was the reason I began to re-read the book as soon as I had finished it.
In those last pages, one gets that very rare feeling of completing a story, of continuity of time and conclusion of an event.

............................. conttd. ...........................

Aiyyaa

                      Review 1:  AIYYAA

For all the criticism it received, "Aiyyaa" is a great attempt. And a largely successful one too. Yes! I agree, very few people liked Rani going down the item song lane. But Bollywood is Bollywood. And for the record, it is greatly changing. The best part, arguably of course, of these changes is that they don't tend towards one direction. It looks like the Indian film industry is radiating in all 360 degrees, diverging from the stereotype.

Not surprisingly, Aiyyaa is one of these exploratory movies. Seemingly different and subtly similar to the cinema of the nineties. The center-stage of the whole venture is the role reversal. Recall the movies of the young Khan trio or Khiladi Kumar, where they wooed the ladies in every way humanly imaginable. While they sweated and died impressing the heroines, the leading ladies were the "sunder-susheel" kanyas, their virtue being their apparent resilience to the attempts of their admirers. And in the end, they confessed that they had been in love all along.

Come Aiyyaa, and Meenakshi (Rani) is the hero. It is upto her to win her love. While the object of her admiration is deep in his paints, she does all the stalking, talking and spying. She even makes her way into the Dream- saas's home and steals the Dream-boy's shirt. Remember those high tension scenes between the hero and the ladki ka daddy, and the ones when the herione-ka-dupatta would land on the hero's face. Meenakshi is a girl who has grown up seeing such movies. And rather than waiting for her sapnon-ka-rajkumar to rescue her (she lives with a mad family), she takes it upon herself to fulfill her dreams. She is not ashamed of it. She is not apologetic. She is bold and determined. Even though she is committed to Madhav, and because of her family can't break the commitment, she keeps trying till the very end, and not in vain.

Prithviraj does his job in great style. For a role where he has to do the talking more with his eyes than with his mouth, he has done great. And when he does propose in the end, we can't but agree to Meenakshi's  olfactory taste.

The mad family touch works very well to build all the irritation required to project Meenakshi as the lead. But it does get a bit too much towards the end, with  Meenakshi's  brother marrying her colleague Naina after having drunken sex. That part especially spoils the interest in Meenakshi and Surya's first proper conversation.  Somewhere along the line, we may get a feeling that it is a woman-centric movie only because everybody else is so stupid, but then this movie had to be all Rani.
And........ Ye Bollywood Hai...................