PK: Con again

*Note: When I refer to Raj Kumar Hirani (RKH), I equally refer to his partner in crime Abhijat Joshi.

Rather than the obvious disappointment or anger I have towards a bad movie, I was rather disgusted by PK. It is that movie whose every beat serves a purpose, a purpose of proving a point so obvious, a point so dumbed down, a point already proved last year at the cinemas. It doesn’t have a single moment, which is just out there without any ulterior motive.

Few years back, Roger Ebert introduced me to a word ‘frisson’. It is a french word, whose literal English translation is ‘thrill’, but more aptly it means the small brief ‘kick’ that we seek in daily life, like, someone liking your FB post, enjoying a joke on whatsapp, getting to know some gossip about your colleague at office, and so on. These frissons don’t result to much in retrospect, it is just that fleeting kick we get and keep on seeking on a daily basis. If we were to translate this in movie terms, it would be the beats in the movie, those small comic punches, those small story twists etc. Our most esteemed director, who is loved equally by a rickshawalla and Anurag Kashyap, is a director of frissons. Each moment in his films, delivers a frisson. These are either quick fire jokes, quick trigger sentimentality or contrived story twists. Each dialogue, each moment serves this purpose, give the audience a frisson.  Mind you, it is not an easy job; he has a reasonable mastery over the craft of filmmaking. But he uses this craft to create highly manipulative stories and manufactures emotions for fast food consumption, and he does acknowledge this when he shows us the inserts of side-characters crying and being overwhelmed by the emotions of the scenes through radio (in Lage Raho Munnabhai) or TV (in PK). It is exactly what you see, manufactured sentimentality for consumption of social media.

‘3 idiots’ was equally manipulative, but still had some genuine moments between friends, lovers. But here you get a love story, which has couple of genuine beats, one of them when Anushka withdraws from a conversation with Sushant, when he is revealed to be a Pakistani. A very important point to note here is that she withdraws not when he tells that his name is Sarfaraz, but soon after when he tells he works for Pakistani embassy. That moment really stuck with me, because it was not about the religion, just a kind of jolt we receive when we realize we just interacted with someone from our neighboring country. But this very love story of a indian girl with a pakistani dude is milked for religious purposes, and used as the defining moment in the movie’s climax. This disgusted me out completely. And this might be lesser offender when compared to a train bomb blast, which kills a bogey full of people, just to add some weight, some sort of emotional buildup to the film’s climax. It serves no other purpose at all except proving the agnostic world-view. It plays the evergreen ‘Aasman pe hai khuda..’ from Raj Kappor’s Phir Subah Hogi on the images of the aftermath of the blast. It extracts the agnostic vibe from the song and uses it as an earnest cry out to god. But in the context of the film it is far from earnest. From an alien’s desperation of seeking god, it abruptly cuts to a horrific human tragedy and projects the tragedy via the alien, a quickfire way to add weight to the waferthin premise. The entire film is made up of moments, which provide quickfire frissons.

Enough of disgust. The difference between PK and earlier RKH film is that this is a really bad script. If you take out the central idea, “An alien comes to earth and we see the stupidity, duality and hypocrisy of humans through the alien’s eyes”, there is no scene with any real situational humor or strong drama. Every line of the script stems from the central idea of the film. It sounds like great film-making integrity on display, but when your central idea (which at the most deserves a 1 hour film) is as thin as this, there is a strong need of situations resulting in comedy or drama. There is none to be found here. And it is never really good news when a key plot device can be replaced without affecting the theme of the film. Cannot we achieve “uncover human hypocrisy from a outsiders pov” via an autistic character (My Name Is Khan tried it to a similar “criticize religion based politics” effect), or an overgrown child (like Koi Mil Gaya). Paa had similar problems when it tried to use Progeria as a fatal disease, where any fatal diseases like cancer, or the Anand one could have resulted into the same movie. Just that AB wouldn’t have been part of the film. It was a marketing ploy, nothing else.

Anyways coming back to PK. One more RKH observation. The antagonist in his movies is slowly becoming more an dmore caricatured and one-dimensional. Dr. Asthana was cartoonish, but he still had well-rounded character moments with Sanju, his daughter and colleagues. There were few scenes where I empathized with him. Lage Raho Munnabhai’s Lucky Singh was shrewd and cunning Sardar. He was not as well rounded as Asthana, but still was a character in its own. The real caricature started with Virus. He was a unique caricature, but a complete one dimensional cartoonish character, with no real personality. And now we have a completely generic caricature of a character in Saurabh Shukla’s Hindu preaching baba. It is a character well suited in Singham Returns (Come to think of it, Amol Gupte added more spunk than Saurabh Shukla was allowed to). It is RKH’s complete lack of conviction in this character that resulted in this.

I really don’t care to delve any deeper into the endless machinations RKH applies to illicit a laugh and a tear. It is an exhaustive exercise to uncover his manipulations, which are slowly rising up to the surface. With more people noticing them in PK, a part of me is happy to be not alone (like I was during 3 idiots). I was conned twice (MMBBS, LRM), but Sanju still manages to put some soul to the contrivances, Aamir exposes them further.  I think I’m done with Aamir-RKH combo. I feel next would be Ranbir-RKH, which I would still give a try hoping Ranbir can work some miracle like Sanju.

Action Jackson: Action Below The Belt

I really believe Prabhu Deva brings a very unique sense of humor into Bollywood, which is very refreshing. It is bizarre, outlandish and many times loaded with double innuendo but mostly much less crude and perverse than Milap Zaveri.  He started his Bollywood innings with remakes (Wanted and Rowdy Rathore) and now he is into originals (R..Rajkumar and Action Jackson). It becomes very evident now, that beyond couple of comic situations he is plain mediocre, who is just churning movies on auto-pilot mode. He kind of goes all out in Action Jackson going beyond double innuendos and hitting right below the belt. The movie is surely outlandish and might serve as amusement, but it is lazy, sloppy and grating, which makes a mess of even something as basic as a double role.

There is nothing in the plot worth getting into, but I would like to get into a scene, which I believe is a very unique scene in terms gender role-reversals. It starts of as a regular misogynist scene from those countless 90s B-movies. A girl is kidnapped, tied to a chair, and soon drenched in water to exploit the see-through property of white shirts when wet. The villain soon starts feeling the girl up, unbuttons her revealing a well shaped cleavage throwing the mass centers in raptures (and the multiplex audience into a uncomfortable territory). We thought we were over all this exploitation in the 90s , but here is Prabhu Deva bringing all those  memories back. And this is the point in such a scene, where to balance the perverseness, a hero needs to be ushered in to save the day and rest of the already exploited girl’s ‘izzat’. Till now it is like any other of those scenes, but at this point Mr. Prabhu Deva turns the scene around its head, and the attention shifts from the girl’s cleavage to Ajay Devgan’s ripped abs and from the villain’s Ranjeetesque looks to the girl biting lips and going all ooh-aah about AJ’s well-sculpted body. The victim of male desire suddenly becomes the one desiring a male (which later in the movie turns into a predator like instinct). Sure, the girl is later conveniently put into the Vamp’s role like all other movies, but in that 3-4 minutes sequence, the way a victim is empowered and set free from the hindi movie shackles of female sexuality repression is absolutely refreshing. And in this moment, as Raja Sen notes in his review, AJ is just a prop and Manasvi Mamgai is the one with the reins in her hands. This feminist turn is strictly limited to this moment and it soon defuses and settles down in familiar territory.  Manasvi Mamgai the predator soon turns into the ‘psycho bitch’.

The role of the 3 females in the movie is as follows

Female 1 – A harebrained girl who believes her luck changes for the good whenever she sees Ajay Devgan’s private parts.

Female 2 – A mute spectator of a wife who gets thrashed twice in the movie. A placeholder of a character to get AJ angry with revenge.

Female 3 – Constantly on horomonal rush. She fantasizes AJ more than we did Alicia Silverstone in the 90’s. Her primary reason of existence is to provide fantastic visuals of cleavage and a bare back.

Despite of this, our esteemed critic Raja Sen considers this movie a ‘benchmark in feminist cinema’.  I agree with Shubhra Gupta when she says, “Action Jackson treats its women as dumb dodos or doped-out vixens…” Her review spells the awfulness of the film very bluntly.
If filmmakers argue that they make mainstream movies with stars to give people a personality they love to watch without any trappings of serious story or drama, then at least give us something junta loves. I don’t think anyone wants to watch Ajay kick ass like this with awkward swordplay, superhuman punches and kicks. We don’t want him doing tomfoolery like Akshay Kumar or Salman Khan. If I may speak on behalf of the moviegoers, I would say we all want to see Ajay Devgan as a cool, calm, calculated and a laidback fellow who could just kill someone with a stare. We want to see more Malik and more Sultan Mirza. Rohit Shetty claims he knows how to get the best of Ajay on screen. I think he absolutely doesn’t and nor does anyone else currently working in the mainstream space. It is rare we get a Sultan Mirza, which made me go ecstatic.
As we herald all the wonderful small budget films that we’ve started getting post 2000, my heart also bleeds for the absolute degrading of the hindi mainstream film. I still believe 90s and the early 2000’s was the best time for the quintessential ‘hindi-pickchur’.  If we are reaIly done with it, so be it, but at least this generation deserves their own Ram Gopal Verma, to challenge norms and churn out an alternative to this maar-dhaad-kapda-faad variety of cinema.

Finding Fantasy

Finding Fanny is an English language film, and I am always suspicious and wary of such endeavors where characters speak ‘well-written’ English dialogue.  The dialogues always try to be natural, but unless actors are adept enough, the movie becomes a tedious watch. I am sure more than half the scripts of Bollywood are written originally in English, and then translated to Hindi. Few of them like Delhi Belly and now Finding Fanny manage to come out in their original intended form, but still I always prefer the Hindi.

The reason of my prologue is that the enjoyment of this film depends highly on how much of an ear and liking you have for these ‘natural’ English conversations. Fortunately we have actors like Pankaj Kapoor and Dimple Kapadia who just knock it out of the park, language not-withstanding. But on the other side we have Deepika Padukone, who feels like is reading rehearsed lines. Of course, her physical presence alone in a scene can have you rapt in attention, but hearing her talk was one of the most tedious part of the film.

Enough of the surface, lets get into what this film is trying to be and where it ends up. The story is set in Goa and has a bunch of oddball characters, which are grappling with reality and pursuing an elusive fantasy. Ferdi(NS) receives a undelivered letter that he had sent to his lover proposing her for marriage 46 years back. Feeling frustrated and excited at the same time thinking that he was not really rejected - as the letter never reached Fanny, he sets the story in motion when he shares this with Angie(DP) .She coaxes him to finally go looking out for Fanny and telling her what remained unsaid for so many years.  This leads to a road trip that turns into a melting pot where raw emotions surface, tempers rise and finally couple of outbursts later everybody gets a reality check.

The structure of the film is quite standard. But there are couple of threads which are delightful. Especially the artist-muse relationship between Don Pedro(PK) and Rosie(DK). It starts as a very comic and awkward dynamic, progressing into something very cynical and unusual. The muse, for the most of the part, is very nonchalant towards the artist’s advances, but she is left zonked and almost devastated at the end. Ferdi’s pursuit of a romantic fantasy is apparently a contrast to the Don Pedro’s pursuit of physical beauty, but eventually it melts down to the same superficial nature of a fantasy, where nothing can really trump physical beauty. And this climactic moment is handled very lovingly. The harsh reality check is delivered with such dry humor, that Ferdi is left devastated and at the same time freed of his flights of fantasy. Mr. Adajania displays a genuine good-heartedness in handling this, because its never easy to squash your character’s fantasy and at the same time empathize with him.

Mr. Adajania himself displays pursuit of physical beauty when he more often than not punctuates scenes with a shot of Angie’s back.  This male-gaze never really adds to the bigger picture, and so does the whole Savio(AK)-Angie love angle. It becomes a very jarring and confused (maybe that’s the point) side thread. It does give a wonderful gender role reversal scene where Angie after making love to Savio, just lays there staring at the sky reveling in the moment not wanting to be disturbed by Savio. It has that traditional male trait of finding nothing more than self-fulfillment in sex. But the heightened self-awareness displayed there by Angie’s character almost robs the moment of its potency.

This whole gender role-reversal (or maybe the new urban gender role structure) is a continuing theme carried by Deepika Padukone (or the directors who have always viewed DP as the new-age urban woman in control) right from her Karthik Calling Karthik days.  She is kinda typecast but she emanates a very genuine vibe which gives a distinct personality to all her characters, always different but still always the same. Come to think of it, the Savio-Angie love story is nothing but a more pleasing playing out of Ferdi’s incomplete love story. But it is mostly ineffective due to sketchy characterizations and a generic back-story.

The music of the film deserves special mention, and I’m not talking about the hindi language songs, but the wonderful English-Spanish (whatever that was) songs which fill Ferdi’s fantasies. They do more justice to the milieu than the hindi songs. 

Finding Fanny, finally is a middling effort, but still has quite a few memorable comedic moments that stay with you maybe not for its humor, but its darkness. 

PS: Cocktail should be moved from Mr. Adajania’s to Mr. Ali’s fimography. Finding Fanny sits as a more apt follow up to Being Cyrus rather than Cocktail.