Thoughts on some recent releases.
Shuddh Desi Romance.
In many ways, Maneesh Sharma’s Shuddh Desi Romance is the sort of love story I had been waiting for Bollywood to provide for a long time. To elucidate, what I had wanted, all these years, was a romantic saga that goes against the monolithic trend of depicting marriage as the final destination for any couple, for no matter what the temperament and ambitions of the couple in question might be, and what misgivings they harbour about wedlock, our films do not permit them any conclusion but that which ratifies their love with saat phere and ek chutki sindoor. But apparently, I was asking for too much, because no Bollywood romance, not even the “modern” ones—from Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge to Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani—have bothered to buck that trend. The hero in each of these films starts out by mouthing uber-smart lines about marriage and monogamy being overrated and the need to follow your heart as opposed to the societal pressures to toe the line, only to trot off dutifully towards the altar at the end, ready to settle down with the one woman “meant” for him. Depressingly heteronormative and illiberal, this, and it’s difficult not to grow tired of it after a point.
Imagine my delight, then, when Shuddh Desi Romance begins with Raghu, the hero, ranting against this nationwide obsession with settling down, observing, hilariously (and correctly, in my opinion), that it’s ludicrous that a nation that hasn’t reached a settlement with its neighbours in the sixty years since independence should be so obsessed with seeing its citizens settle down. And imagine how my delight increased in leaps and bounds when the film starts, and continues, to treat the institution of marriage with determined irreverence. Grooms kiss girls they have only recently met on their way to marriage. Grooms and brides alike have a propensity to bolt from the marriage venue at the last moment. The news of the bolting is greeted by the jilted person with a request for a cold drink (it’s not that she isn’t hurt; she simply refuses to regard what has befallen her as the end of the world). Another bride elopes with an electrician on the night of her wedding. A marriage proposal is accepted in a state of utter drunkenness, and, culminates, of course, in the acceptor’s flight on the day of tying the knot. At one point, a pandit who has come to preside over a marriage is reduced to a befuddled cartoon. More significantly, the baarat accompanying our weddings is described as an excuse to show off one’s fineries, and the baarati crowd itself consists of fake relatives and friends, mostly the English-speaking youth, hired to improve the groom’s standing in the eyes of his in-laws. Gayatri, the Spunk Personified female lead of the film, calls these big fat Indian weddings a case study in the hypocrisy and double standards of our country, and in the final scene, marriage is compared to a room one is allowed to enter but forbidden to leave. In comparison, the relative freedom enjoyed in live-in relationships is constantly held up as a viable alternative. Yeah, they bring their own insecurities and uncertainties (not to mention neighbourhood gossip and prying), but these relationships allow for more space to breathe, place more importance on the people involved in it than on their parents and relatives, do not care for rituals and ceremonies to gain credence, and still provide the pleasures, physical and emotional, that two people can enjoy together. (Speaking of physical pleasures, few desi films in recent times have been this candid in the depiction of sex in a relationship and the role often played by the stirrings in the loins in kick-starting a romance. The refrain ‘Sharam na aaye re’ in the title track may well be a reference to this. Indeed, why be ashamed of the desires that animate the best of us?) That Sharma sticks to his guns, refusing to turn his film into yet another ode to marriage by the final reels, and explores the other options available today to the young people in love, thrills me to the core. He has no hang-ups, either, in suggesting that it's okay if a person has been in multiple relationships or has gotten an abortion, and the matter-of-fact manner in which these statements are made make them doubly effective as taboo-breakers. The film has a lot else going for it. Sushant Singh Rajput and Parineeti Chopra are wonderful as Raghu and Gayatri. Rajput elegantly switches between goofiness, charm, hesitance, wit and romantic ardour to create a character whom we love despite his myriad faults as a human being. Parineeti, meanwhile, sizzles with the feisty effervescence that has become her trademark: I have reached that stage where any film that has her even in the briefest cameo is going to be on my viewing schedule. Vaani Kapoor, who portrays Tara, the third wheel in this romantic saga, is good too, and Rishi Kapoor, playing a wedding planner baffled by the ways of the twenty-somethings around him, does well in the sort of part he seems to have become the go-to actor for (as in Hum Tum and Love Aaj Kaal, here too he is a member of an older generation who acts both as foil and father figure to the younger protagonists). The peppy soundtrack (I can’t have enough of ‘Tere mere beech mein kya hain’), the visual flair, a handful of awesome one-liners, the free-flowing dialogues that come across as genuine everyday conversations, and the appropriately circuitous nature of the proceedings—the events and exchanges at one stage are mirrored in later stages, indicating the constant vascillations the people in the film go through—further score for Shuddh Desi Romance. Individual scenes are so well-written they stay with you for long: the way Raghu, in a foul mood, quarrels with a bus conductor, only to smile and apologize moments later when his spirits are lifted by an unexpected development, is one such gem, as is his argument and reconciliation with Gayatri following an awkward, ill-advised inquiry by him about her former boyfriend. These moments are made possible, in turn, by the fact that these characters are well fleshed-out, interesting ones: the two women are surer of themselves than the guy is, but all of them are far from perfect, admirably lifelike. But, really, it’s those ideas about marriage being less-than-holy that made my day, and it says something about the sense of humour of the people behind the film that they decided upon a title that is the exact antithesis of what the film actually is. I can’t control my guffaws as I think of the people who shall come to watch it expecting sanskari entertainment, only to keep shifting uncomfortably in the seats at the thought of their kids following in the footsteps of Raghu and Gayatri.
If only, alas, the film had a better script to showcase its welcome ideas. Some of the contrivances used to unite or separate the characters are unconvincing, and the device of them speaking directly to the camera is downright ill-advised: why resort to such short cut, I wonder, rather than convey the thoughts of the characters through their actions? Coming from Jaideep Sahni, who wrote Company, Khosla Ka Ghosla, Chak De India and Rocket Singh: Salesman of the Year, these dips in quality hurt, all the more because they exist amidst a good deal of excellence. Still, I shall raise all my toasts for the coming week to this lovely little film. It has paved the way for others to tread, to bring out of the shadows not only more chronicles of live-in couples but such taboos as homosexuality, ménage a trios, incest, polygamy, even BDSM. We sure need it all to counter a century of tributes to the non-existent virtues of matrimony.
Zanjeer (remake).
There’s a scene in Apoorva Lakhia’s remake of Zanjeer where Inspector Vijay Khanna and his friend Sher Khan play video games. I kid you not: Vijay, the hot-headed onscreen cop, the first of the now-legendary Angry Young Man personas of Amitabh Bachchan, and Sher Khan, the suave, intimidating Pathan who is the most memorable character to have been played by Pran, are shown here as fooling around with PlayStations. This scene provides good hint of what to expect from this remake. Video games are often hyper-stylized imitations of real-life activities that one cannot take seriously, and they provide short-term pleasures by letting people do stuff they wouldn’t be capable of in their actual lives—a person who would break his arm trying to lift a machine gun, for instance, can polish off legions of foes with his “weapon”, and somebody who has never been within a few square miles of a Formula One race can experience the adrenaline rush of motor-racing by twisting a handle or pressing a button. Lakhia’s take on Prakash Mehra’s 1973 film is like that. The original film is the real deal, a gritty but entertaining fusion of action, romance, suspense and morality play about a wronged, quasi-vigilante youth, a zeitgeist-defining work that tapped into the anger and bitterness of an entire nation at a particular juncture in its history. The remake is, like video games, a dreary, inept facsimile, an ostensible reinterpretation that adds nothing to Mehra’s film, and detracts tons from it. The stylization of individual sequences push it further down the drain; when people in a fight are hurled in slow-motion across the air, it’s terrible Tamil B-movies that come to mind, not Zanjeer, and the killing of an honest person is such a sad occurrence in itself that it hardly needs any of the fancy flourishes with which Lakhia ruins that scene. But of course, it must have provided him, as it does to video game enthusiasts, the pleasure of doing something in actuality—in this case, making an actual film—while having to do it. You could argue that films themselves are providers of vicarious experiences, but in the good films, you are drawn in by the enchanting onscreen world and its intriguing inhabitants, who make you feel what they do, who leave you moved, terrified, excited, elated, heartbroken or pensive with their words and deeds. That you do not find in a video game, and that you do not find in this remake of the Bachchan classic. How can you, when the fiery brooding of Bachchan is replaced with Ram Charan Teja’s staggering inability to emote or enunciate? It doesn’t help, either, that like Hrithik Roshan in the terrible remake of Agneepath, Teja is so impossibly gym-toned, so flawlessly groomed, that there’s no way we can accept him in an avatar like this. Bachchan’s angry youths were distinguished not by their muscles but by the fights they waged against the injustices of the world at large and against their own selves to get rid of demons gnawing away at their conscience or peace of mind. They didn’t care about having a bad hair day or looking less than striking, because they relied not on looks but on the ability to project the turbulence of their emotions to entice the audience. You see none of that in Teja. You don’t see anything worth a mention, either, in Priyanka Chopra, who plays the supremely annoying love interest (Jaya Bachchan’s knife-sharpening firecracker deserved a much better counterpart) and Sanjay Dutt, who has all the grace of an obese zombie. And could we please have an embargo to prevent the further casting of Prakash Raj as the serio-comic baddie whose spoofy demeanour precludes any menace? Nothing works in this film. The dialogues, including the iconic ones from the earlier Zanjeer, don’t register, because they are delivered by the aforementioned actors, and the touching subplot about a father whose sons died due to cobsumption of poisonous liquor doesn’t, either, because it has been jettisoned altogether. In fact, all the human dimensions of Salim-Javed’s brilliant script—a father who wants to reform himself but isn’t allowed to, a son tormented by the loss of his parents, a woman who, like the cop hero, is a lonely soul and is drawn to him and he to her because they fill the voids in each other’s lives, a criminal whose sense of honour and capacity for affection are sufficiently stoked by a newfound match and friend to make him mend his ways—are abandoned, and the screen time is instead devoted to item songs, including one where Chopra, whose part is that of a girl who has flown all the way from New York to Mumbai to attend the wedding of a (believe it or not) Facebook friend, dances to lyrics that go, “Na Mumbai na Delhi walon ki/ Pinky hain paise walon ki.” (In other words, lyrics befitting the lingo of a desi, professional dancer-for-hire, such as Bipasha Basu’s Billo Chamanbahar in Omkara, roll off the lips of a posh NRI girl). Add to this sleazy jokes that would make Shakti Kapoor blush, some blabber about the modus operandi of the oil mafia that goes nowhere, and the talented Mahie Gill in a role one shouldn’t wish upon his worst enemy, and you have every reason to invade the ticket counter to retrieve the currency you cannot bear parting with in the light of what you have undergone. Why this tendency to trample upon the golden oldies? Is it hubris, a wrongheaded belief that one can better the original? Is it a dearth of respect for the work of yesteryear artists coupled with a desire to use them as a means to make easy money? Or is, it, simply, an inability to understand the irreplaceable nature of Amitabh Bachchan (given the multiple remakes of his films in recent years), an actor who has no peer to this day, whether in terms of screen presence, acting chops, charisma, or vocal inflections? I wish I knew. But make no mistake, this remade Zanjeer, for all its awfulness, has one line of dialogue that rings completely true. It goes thus, “That was work, this is a hangover.” Bingo! What a succinct encapsulation of what separates the original from the copy.
Satyanweshi.
Saradindu Bandopadhyay’s Chorabali is a detective story, where his immortal creation, the sleuth Byomkesh Bakshi, unmasks a murderer, a veritable wolf in sheep’s clothing, on his trip to the estate of a zamindar. Satyanweshi, Rituparno Ghosh’s adaptation of the tale, looks at Byomkesh’s case through a feminist lens, thereby couching the crime-solving in observations about the suppression of women and the gender dynamics in pre-independence India. And therein lies the undoing of the film.
Please don’t leap to the conclusion that I am miffed with Ghosh for his departure from the novel. God knows I am not one of those purists who think that the worthiness of an adaptation lies in its fidelity to the source material. The transition from page to screen necessitates changes. And of course, any director worth his salt, who has such a thing as imagination, shall find it almost imperative to incorporate his own vision alongwith that of the author whose work he is filming, leading to more alterations, additions and omissions. My only demand is that the liberties the film takes with the original text make sense, and add something of narrative or thematic value to the film. But Satyanweshi, in trying to be a lot of things, ends up being very little. The investigation by Byomkesh into the disappearance of Harinath, an employee of the local rajah who has invited the detective and his friend Ajit on a hunting trip on his property, is apparently the main storyline here, but it fights for space with several other concerns. There is a saga of marital discord, which in turn is rooted in a woman’s grudge at being forced to give up her artistic aspirations and enter a life of drudgery; there is envy aimed at the supposed unfaithfulness of a spouse; frustrations over an unconsummated marriage; complications arising from the will of a deceased person and the perpetuation of a regal lineage; and subtexts about the clash between older forms of entertainment (such as hunting) and newer, more modern ones, such as cinema and theatre, and how this is symbolic of the clash between old and new world orders. Such density wouldn’t have mattered if all of it were held together like a well-woven rug, but the film is more akin to a patchy quilt in desperate need of sewing. The detective work is pallid; it’s almost comical how little we see Byomkesh actually do in the film. There’s barely any interrogation of potential suspects and witnesses, or locating and piecing together of clues, or deducing anything from them. The element of gripping suspense, of constant guessing as to who the culprit is that we find in Bandopadhyay’s works (and indeed, in any good mystery fiction) is conspicuous by its absence. This is largely because the time needed to show a proper investigation is eaten into by scenes aimed at showing how women suffer in a male-dominated world, but these chronicles of sufferings are similarly ineffective, because the characters and situations are half-baked. Aloka, a character barely present in the book and developed into a major presence here, is the mouthpiece for Ghosh’s reflections on the condition of women, and the problem is precisely that she is a mouthpiece and doesn’t register all that well as an individual. Why does she bare her heart to Ajit, a complete stranger? What has he done to earn that confidence? Aloka speaks of her friendship with Harinath, but you know of this friendship because you hear her say it, not because it has been established through the scenes between the two of them: those couple of occasions where she listens to him singing simply aren’t enough to hint at strong feelings, and consequently, her sorrow over Harinath going missing doesn’t appear convincing either. The strand involving Leela, the daughter of the kabiraj Kaligati, has more potential to move us, but she is a peripheral presence throughout, and the final revelation about her has little effect as a result. As if such underwhelming, convoluted plotting wasn’t enough, Ghosh errs fatally in his choice of cast too. Sujoy Ghosh makes for the most catatonic detective in the history of films: with a voice and demeanour that suggests he is trying to shake off the after-effects of a slumber, and devoid, completely, of the panache and edge we expect in a sleuth, he makes things twice as lethargic. As Ajit, Chatterjee fares even worse. It’s one of the stiffest performances I have seen. With leads like this, the camaraderie between Byomkesh and Ajit never shines through (even Anjan Dutta’s otherwise drab adaptations of the Byomkesh stories aren’t guilty of this). In the midst of it all, the best bits in the novel are completely ruined—the moment when Byomkesh and Ajit discover the titular quicksand, and the captivating climax, barely pack a punch in Satyanweshi. Instead, Ghosh attempts to pump up the excitement through a limp “twist” regarding the name of the principality where the story is set, and an instance of Byomkesh being at the receiving end of a pointed gun that’s so over-the-top that you wonder if it was meant to be some sort of grotesque comedy. The dialogue-writing makes things worse. The setting is that of a period when even the most educated of Bengalis didn’t garnish their speech with such a liberal sprinkling of English. At least with Himanshu, the zamindar friend of Byomkesh, such language is somewhat understandable, given that he is shown as having returned from England recently after completing his studies. Why are the rest speaking in 21st century Bong-lish?
Ghosh was certainly an ambitious filmmaker, and what he attempts here—making a detective film that’s also a take on social realities of its time—is, as such, admirable. In fact, the Byomkesh stories do reflect the Raj-era Bengal and the post-independence turbulence rather well. What's crucial, though, is that these themes are part of a larger narrative structure that works, first and foremost, as engaging yarns of pursuing criminals. Bandopadhyay, in other words, wrote literature, not pamphlets. In making the story take a back seat to the issues, Ghosh has turned the literature into pamphlet, crackling crime fiction into gender studies thesis, and the quick-witted fox into a glum hedgehog.
In many ways, Maneesh Sharma’s Shuddh Desi Romance is the sort of love story I had been waiting for Bollywood to provide for a long time. To elucidate, what I had wanted, all these years, was a romantic saga that goes against the monolithic trend of depicting marriage as the final destination for any couple, for no matter what the temperament and ambitions of the couple in question might be, and what misgivings they harbour about wedlock, our films do not permit them any conclusion but that which ratifies their love with saat phere and ek chutki sindoor. But apparently, I was asking for too much, because no Bollywood romance, not even the “modern” ones—from Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge to Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani—have bothered to buck that trend. The hero in each of these films starts out by mouthing uber-smart lines about marriage and monogamy being overrated and the need to follow your heart as opposed to the societal pressures to toe the line, only to trot off dutifully towards the altar at the end, ready to settle down with the one woman “meant” for him. Depressingly heteronormative and illiberal, this, and it’s difficult not to grow tired of it after a point.
Imagine my delight, then, when Shuddh Desi Romance begins with Raghu, the hero, ranting against this nationwide obsession with settling down, observing, hilariously (and correctly, in my opinion), that it’s ludicrous that a nation that hasn’t reached a settlement with its neighbours in the sixty years since independence should be so obsessed with seeing its citizens settle down. And imagine how my delight increased in leaps and bounds when the film starts, and continues, to treat the institution of marriage with determined irreverence. Grooms kiss girls they have only recently met on their way to marriage. Grooms and brides alike have a propensity to bolt from the marriage venue at the last moment. The news of the bolting is greeted by the jilted person with a request for a cold drink (it’s not that she isn’t hurt; she simply refuses to regard what has befallen her as the end of the world). Another bride elopes with an electrician on the night of her wedding. A marriage proposal is accepted in a state of utter drunkenness, and, culminates, of course, in the acceptor’s flight on the day of tying the knot. At one point, a pandit who has come to preside over a marriage is reduced to a befuddled cartoon. More significantly, the baarat accompanying our weddings is described as an excuse to show off one’s fineries, and the baarati crowd itself consists of fake relatives and friends, mostly the English-speaking youth, hired to improve the groom’s standing in the eyes of his in-laws. Gayatri, the Spunk Personified female lead of the film, calls these big fat Indian weddings a case study in the hypocrisy and double standards of our country, and in the final scene, marriage is compared to a room one is allowed to enter but forbidden to leave. In comparison, the relative freedom enjoyed in live-in relationships is constantly held up as a viable alternative. Yeah, they bring their own insecurities and uncertainties (not to mention neighbourhood gossip and prying), but these relationships allow for more space to breathe, place more importance on the people involved in it than on their parents and relatives, do not care for rituals and ceremonies to gain credence, and still provide the pleasures, physical and emotional, that two people can enjoy together. (Speaking of physical pleasures, few desi films in recent times have been this candid in the depiction of sex in a relationship and the role often played by the stirrings in the loins in kick-starting a romance. The refrain ‘Sharam na aaye re’ in the title track may well be a reference to this. Indeed, why be ashamed of the desires that animate the best of us?) That Sharma sticks to his guns, refusing to turn his film into yet another ode to marriage by the final reels, and explores the other options available today to the young people in love, thrills me to the core. He has no hang-ups, either, in suggesting that it's okay if a person has been in multiple relationships or has gotten an abortion, and the matter-of-fact manner in which these statements are made make them doubly effective as taboo-breakers. The film has a lot else going for it. Sushant Singh Rajput and Parineeti Chopra are wonderful as Raghu and Gayatri. Rajput elegantly switches between goofiness, charm, hesitance, wit and romantic ardour to create a character whom we love despite his myriad faults as a human being. Parineeti, meanwhile, sizzles with the feisty effervescence that has become her trademark: I have reached that stage where any film that has her even in the briefest cameo is going to be on my viewing schedule. Vaani Kapoor, who portrays Tara, the third wheel in this romantic saga, is good too, and Rishi Kapoor, playing a wedding planner baffled by the ways of the twenty-somethings around him, does well in the sort of part he seems to have become the go-to actor for (as in Hum Tum and Love Aaj Kaal, here too he is a member of an older generation who acts both as foil and father figure to the younger protagonists). The peppy soundtrack (I can’t have enough of ‘Tere mere beech mein kya hain’), the visual flair, a handful of awesome one-liners, the free-flowing dialogues that come across as genuine everyday conversations, and the appropriately circuitous nature of the proceedings—the events and exchanges at one stage are mirrored in later stages, indicating the constant vascillations the people in the film go through—further score for Shuddh Desi Romance. Individual scenes are so well-written they stay with you for long: the way Raghu, in a foul mood, quarrels with a bus conductor, only to smile and apologize moments later when his spirits are lifted by an unexpected development, is one such gem, as is his argument and reconciliation with Gayatri following an awkward, ill-advised inquiry by him about her former boyfriend. These moments are made possible, in turn, by the fact that these characters are well fleshed-out, interesting ones: the two women are surer of themselves than the guy is, but all of them are far from perfect, admirably lifelike. But, really, it’s those ideas about marriage being less-than-holy that made my day, and it says something about the sense of humour of the people behind the film that they decided upon a title that is the exact antithesis of what the film actually is. I can’t control my guffaws as I think of the people who shall come to watch it expecting sanskari entertainment, only to keep shifting uncomfortably in the seats at the thought of their kids following in the footsteps of Raghu and Gayatri.
If only, alas, the film had a better script to showcase its welcome ideas. Some of the contrivances used to unite or separate the characters are unconvincing, and the device of them speaking directly to the camera is downright ill-advised: why resort to such short cut, I wonder, rather than convey the thoughts of the characters through their actions? Coming from Jaideep Sahni, who wrote Company, Khosla Ka Ghosla, Chak De India and Rocket Singh: Salesman of the Year, these dips in quality hurt, all the more because they exist amidst a good deal of excellence. Still, I shall raise all my toasts for the coming week to this lovely little film. It has paved the way for others to tread, to bring out of the shadows not only more chronicles of live-in couples but such taboos as homosexuality, ménage a trios, incest, polygamy, even BDSM. We sure need it all to counter a century of tributes to the non-existent virtues of matrimony.
Zanjeer (remake).
There’s a scene in Apoorva Lakhia’s remake of Zanjeer where Inspector Vijay Khanna and his friend Sher Khan play video games. I kid you not: Vijay, the hot-headed onscreen cop, the first of the now-legendary Angry Young Man personas of Amitabh Bachchan, and Sher Khan, the suave, intimidating Pathan who is the most memorable character to have been played by Pran, are shown here as fooling around with PlayStations. This scene provides good hint of what to expect from this remake. Video games are often hyper-stylized imitations of real-life activities that one cannot take seriously, and they provide short-term pleasures by letting people do stuff they wouldn’t be capable of in their actual lives—a person who would break his arm trying to lift a machine gun, for instance, can polish off legions of foes with his “weapon”, and somebody who has never been within a few square miles of a Formula One race can experience the adrenaline rush of motor-racing by twisting a handle or pressing a button. Lakhia’s take on Prakash Mehra’s 1973 film is like that. The original film is the real deal, a gritty but entertaining fusion of action, romance, suspense and morality play about a wronged, quasi-vigilante youth, a zeitgeist-defining work that tapped into the anger and bitterness of an entire nation at a particular juncture in its history. The remake is, like video games, a dreary, inept facsimile, an ostensible reinterpretation that adds nothing to Mehra’s film, and detracts tons from it. The stylization of individual sequences push it further down the drain; when people in a fight are hurled in slow-motion across the air, it’s terrible Tamil B-movies that come to mind, not Zanjeer, and the killing of an honest person is such a sad occurrence in itself that it hardly needs any of the fancy flourishes with which Lakhia ruins that scene. But of course, it must have provided him, as it does to video game enthusiasts, the pleasure of doing something in actuality—in this case, making an actual film—while having to do it. You could argue that films themselves are providers of vicarious experiences, but in the good films, you are drawn in by the enchanting onscreen world and its intriguing inhabitants, who make you feel what they do, who leave you moved, terrified, excited, elated, heartbroken or pensive with their words and deeds. That you do not find in a video game, and that you do not find in this remake of the Bachchan classic. How can you, when the fiery brooding of Bachchan is replaced with Ram Charan Teja’s staggering inability to emote or enunciate? It doesn’t help, either, that like Hrithik Roshan in the terrible remake of Agneepath, Teja is so impossibly gym-toned, so flawlessly groomed, that there’s no way we can accept him in an avatar like this. Bachchan’s angry youths were distinguished not by their muscles but by the fights they waged against the injustices of the world at large and against their own selves to get rid of demons gnawing away at their conscience or peace of mind. They didn’t care about having a bad hair day or looking less than striking, because they relied not on looks but on the ability to project the turbulence of their emotions to entice the audience. You see none of that in Teja. You don’t see anything worth a mention, either, in Priyanka Chopra, who plays the supremely annoying love interest (Jaya Bachchan’s knife-sharpening firecracker deserved a much better counterpart) and Sanjay Dutt, who has all the grace of an obese zombie. And could we please have an embargo to prevent the further casting of Prakash Raj as the serio-comic baddie whose spoofy demeanour precludes any menace? Nothing works in this film. The dialogues, including the iconic ones from the earlier Zanjeer, don’t register, because they are delivered by the aforementioned actors, and the touching subplot about a father whose sons died due to cobsumption of poisonous liquor doesn’t, either, because it has been jettisoned altogether. In fact, all the human dimensions of Salim-Javed’s brilliant script—a father who wants to reform himself but isn’t allowed to, a son tormented by the loss of his parents, a woman who, like the cop hero, is a lonely soul and is drawn to him and he to her because they fill the voids in each other’s lives, a criminal whose sense of honour and capacity for affection are sufficiently stoked by a newfound match and friend to make him mend his ways—are abandoned, and the screen time is instead devoted to item songs, including one where Chopra, whose part is that of a girl who has flown all the way from New York to Mumbai to attend the wedding of a (believe it or not) Facebook friend, dances to lyrics that go, “Na Mumbai na Delhi walon ki/ Pinky hain paise walon ki.” (In other words, lyrics befitting the lingo of a desi, professional dancer-for-hire, such as Bipasha Basu’s Billo Chamanbahar in Omkara, roll off the lips of a posh NRI girl). Add to this sleazy jokes that would make Shakti Kapoor blush, some blabber about the modus operandi of the oil mafia that goes nowhere, and the talented Mahie Gill in a role one shouldn’t wish upon his worst enemy, and you have every reason to invade the ticket counter to retrieve the currency you cannot bear parting with in the light of what you have undergone. Why this tendency to trample upon the golden oldies? Is it hubris, a wrongheaded belief that one can better the original? Is it a dearth of respect for the work of yesteryear artists coupled with a desire to use them as a means to make easy money? Or is, it, simply, an inability to understand the irreplaceable nature of Amitabh Bachchan (given the multiple remakes of his films in recent years), an actor who has no peer to this day, whether in terms of screen presence, acting chops, charisma, or vocal inflections? I wish I knew. But make no mistake, this remade Zanjeer, for all its awfulness, has one line of dialogue that rings completely true. It goes thus, “That was work, this is a hangover.” Bingo! What a succinct encapsulation of what separates the original from the copy.
Satyanweshi.
Saradindu Bandopadhyay’s Chorabali is a detective story, where his immortal creation, the sleuth Byomkesh Bakshi, unmasks a murderer, a veritable wolf in sheep’s clothing, on his trip to the estate of a zamindar. Satyanweshi, Rituparno Ghosh’s adaptation of the tale, looks at Byomkesh’s case through a feminist lens, thereby couching the crime-solving in observations about the suppression of women and the gender dynamics in pre-independence India. And therein lies the undoing of the film.
Please don’t leap to the conclusion that I am miffed with Ghosh for his departure from the novel. God knows I am not one of those purists who think that the worthiness of an adaptation lies in its fidelity to the source material. The transition from page to screen necessitates changes. And of course, any director worth his salt, who has such a thing as imagination, shall find it almost imperative to incorporate his own vision alongwith that of the author whose work he is filming, leading to more alterations, additions and omissions. My only demand is that the liberties the film takes with the original text make sense, and add something of narrative or thematic value to the film. But Satyanweshi, in trying to be a lot of things, ends up being very little. The investigation by Byomkesh into the disappearance of Harinath, an employee of the local rajah who has invited the detective and his friend Ajit on a hunting trip on his property, is apparently the main storyline here, but it fights for space with several other concerns. There is a saga of marital discord, which in turn is rooted in a woman’s grudge at being forced to give up her artistic aspirations and enter a life of drudgery; there is envy aimed at the supposed unfaithfulness of a spouse; frustrations over an unconsummated marriage; complications arising from the will of a deceased person and the perpetuation of a regal lineage; and subtexts about the clash between older forms of entertainment (such as hunting) and newer, more modern ones, such as cinema and theatre, and how this is symbolic of the clash between old and new world orders. Such density wouldn’t have mattered if all of it were held together like a well-woven rug, but the film is more akin to a patchy quilt in desperate need of sewing. The detective work is pallid; it’s almost comical how little we see Byomkesh actually do in the film. There’s barely any interrogation of potential suspects and witnesses, or locating and piecing together of clues, or deducing anything from them. The element of gripping suspense, of constant guessing as to who the culprit is that we find in Bandopadhyay’s works (and indeed, in any good mystery fiction) is conspicuous by its absence. This is largely because the time needed to show a proper investigation is eaten into by scenes aimed at showing how women suffer in a male-dominated world, but these chronicles of sufferings are similarly ineffective, because the characters and situations are half-baked. Aloka, a character barely present in the book and developed into a major presence here, is the mouthpiece for Ghosh’s reflections on the condition of women, and the problem is precisely that she is a mouthpiece and doesn’t register all that well as an individual. Why does she bare her heart to Ajit, a complete stranger? What has he done to earn that confidence? Aloka speaks of her friendship with Harinath, but you know of this friendship because you hear her say it, not because it has been established through the scenes between the two of them: those couple of occasions where she listens to him singing simply aren’t enough to hint at strong feelings, and consequently, her sorrow over Harinath going missing doesn’t appear convincing either. The strand involving Leela, the daughter of the kabiraj Kaligati, has more potential to move us, but she is a peripheral presence throughout, and the final revelation about her has little effect as a result. As if such underwhelming, convoluted plotting wasn’t enough, Ghosh errs fatally in his choice of cast too. Sujoy Ghosh makes for the most catatonic detective in the history of films: with a voice and demeanour that suggests he is trying to shake off the after-effects of a slumber, and devoid, completely, of the panache and edge we expect in a sleuth, he makes things twice as lethargic. As Ajit, Chatterjee fares even worse. It’s one of the stiffest performances I have seen. With leads like this, the camaraderie between Byomkesh and Ajit never shines through (even Anjan Dutta’s otherwise drab adaptations of the Byomkesh stories aren’t guilty of this). In the midst of it all, the best bits in the novel are completely ruined—the moment when Byomkesh and Ajit discover the titular quicksand, and the captivating climax, barely pack a punch in Satyanweshi. Instead, Ghosh attempts to pump up the excitement through a limp “twist” regarding the name of the principality where the story is set, and an instance of Byomkesh being at the receiving end of a pointed gun that’s so over-the-top that you wonder if it was meant to be some sort of grotesque comedy. The dialogue-writing makes things worse. The setting is that of a period when even the most educated of Bengalis didn’t garnish their speech with such a liberal sprinkling of English. At least with Himanshu, the zamindar friend of Byomkesh, such language is somewhat understandable, given that he is shown as having returned from England recently after completing his studies. Why are the rest speaking in 21st century Bong-lish?
Ghosh was certainly an ambitious filmmaker, and what he attempts here—making a detective film that’s also a take on social realities of its time—is, as such, admirable. In fact, the Byomkesh stories do reflect the Raj-era Bengal and the post-independence turbulence rather well. What's crucial, though, is that these themes are part of a larger narrative structure that works, first and foremost, as engaging yarns of pursuing criminals. Bandopadhyay, in other words, wrote literature, not pamphlets. In making the story take a back seat to the issues, Ghosh has turned the literature into pamphlet, crackling crime fiction into gender studies thesis, and the quick-witted fox into a glum hedgehog.
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