Stanley Ka Dabba: The food of love
Genre: Drama
Director: Amole Gupte
Cast: Partho, Numaan Sheikh, Abhishek Reddy, Divya Dutta, Amole Gupte, Raj Zutshi
Storyline: A boy who never brings his lunch box to school needs to figure out a way to cope with the increasing pressure of academics and a teacher who wants his lunch.
Bottomline: A heartwarming take on the pangs of childhood that chokes you in small doses all through.
The Dabba is a metaphor really. And food is what makes their world goes round. Every day, during lunch hour, children open up their dabbas to each other and share a bit of that homemade love. Lunch hour at school could be a defining social leveller, a melting pot in a country of different tastes, cultures and social backgrounds.
Stanley, the spirited protagonist, has a bunch of great buddies as his support system, a caring English teacher who he has a crush on, a never-say-die drive to learn and oodles of talent. When it comes to intelligence, he’s the anti-thesis to the dyslexic Ishaan (Darsheel Safari) in Amole Gupte’s first script, ‘Taare Zameen Par’ (He was also the director of that film before Aamir Khan took over the project and Gupte was credited as Creative Director). Stanley is tougher than Ishaan. And smarter. In his own way though, not always conforming to the system.
The film is our window to his world and to many like him. And we watch him closely from a distance as the camera lingers on the children at their most candid behaviour. Never has innocence between captured like this before and Amole Gupte hits the bull’s eye in getting a pitch-perfect natural and realistic performance from his entire ensemble cast that is filled with fresh young faces, led by Partho (Gupte’s son who plays the titular Stanley).
It’s refreshing to see a film that employs love or food as the currency for every day life. Kids are sent to school with food, rewarded with chocolates and even taxed by a teacher in denominations of food. Because, that’s how it used to be. No money? No problem. Your friend would have it. No lunch? No problem. Eat from your friend’s dabba. But guess who wants a share of that love? The Despicable Me-Hindi teacher, nicknamed Khadoos by the kids, wants to eat their lunch. Devoid of love in his life, hated by all, the miserly and greedy teacher (played by Gupte himself) makes life difficult for Stanley because the boy does not bring his own lunch. His parents are away.
The English teacher, Rosy Miss, on the other hand, rewards the kids with chocolates every time she’s impressed with their home-work. Stanley always manages to impress her. The Science teacher, Ms. Iyer, likes her students to conform to the syllabus while the Math teacher approaches arithmetic with anecdotes to make the learning more fun for children.
The school is the world the film inhabits, so we don’t get a glimpse of their homes. A clever conceit. And Gupte captures the routine of school without ever letting the monotony get repetitive for the audience.
Stanley Ka Dabba is about the role of the teacher-as-parent. It’s about how every action of theirs shapes young minds. It could encourage them or make them withdraw into a shell. It chokes you in small doses all through (easily moved Mommies will shed buckets of tears), and the drama is done so subtly and elegantly and never for manipulation… until the very end when a slap jolts you out of the rhythm of understatement.
While the dramatic revelation is crucial to the film and makes us revisit everything we’ve seen in fresh light, it seems slapped on us as afterthought.
Yet, this is a great companion piece to Taare Zameen Par, even outdoing the former in sensitivity and freshness. If you are not put off by message movies (I am), you would, like Rosy Miss, give the director a pat on the back and a Five Star chocolate.
Shor In The City: Go make some noise. Clap, whistle.
Genre: Thriller
Director: Krishna DK-Raj Nidimoru
Cast: Sendhil Ramamurthy, Tusshar, Sundeep Kishan, Nikhil Dwivedi, Mitobash, Radhika Apte, Preeti Desai
Storyline: Three petty crooks find explosives, a NRI gets a threat from the local mafia and an upcoming cricketer needs money to get into the U-22 team and need to do what’s right as the Shor in the city makes the choices simpler for them
Bottomline: A complete, satisfying, explosive cinematic experience about karma and chaos.
It maybe a little too early to give away the best film of the year award to Shor In The City with eight months to go but it will take one hell of a film to beat this.
From the moment the opening credits roll to Sachin-Jigar’s catchy ‘Karma is a bitch’ and Tushar Kanti Ray’s zippy camera takes you on the wrong side of a one-way street, directors Raj Nidimoru and Krishna DK are in complete control of the chaos they want to unleash. Shor In The City is a tribute to the deafening din and the disruptive disorder that defines India.
It’s Bollywood’s upbeat answer to Babel with its theme of interconnectedness, karma, gun-culture, redemption, chaos and the overbearing force of the universe that overrides every decision we make.
The film starts with the text: “The city is just an excuse for you to be good or bad. Mostly bad.” And we see the bad emerge right away in three parallel narratives – petty crooks kidnap an author to boost their book piracy business, a non resident Indian with a dark past has to deal with a fresh set of troubles on homecoming and a young cricketer considers bribing his way into the U-22 team.
This is where we are introduced to the protagonist or antagonist, depending on whose perspective you view it from: A bag of explosives that will rock their world.
Like the Morocco segment of the Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu film, this is the story of man as a child discovering what guns/arms do. If Babel derived its unifying theme from the religious subtext of its title that binds humanity, Shor borrows from the social significance of the most celebrated festival that unites us. People from different backgrounds and races, irrespective of their differences, get together to celebrate Ganesha’s birthday and send him off in style with the rains cleansing the city and the noise drowning it.
Shor In The City is about fresh starts. It’s as much about the noise as it is about the lull. The moments of calm and quiet are nicely tossed in after every round of deafening action. There’s a lovely track involving the slow, budding romance between Tilak (Tusshar) and his newly wed wife (Radhika Apte), a woman he barely knows. Tusshar in his best role till date is absolutely endearing as the book pirate trying to get read The Alchemist.
The laughs come in regularly thanks to the antics of Tilak’s buddies – Manduk (an incredibly funny Mitobash) and Ramesh (Nikhil Dwivedi) and their adventures in trying to blast the bomb. What’s commendable is the flair with which the directors shift mood from the light to the dark, without ever compromising the emotional core.
The ensemble does a fantastic job. Be it Sendhil Ramamurthy who plays the fish-out-of-the-water NRI Abhay or Sundeep Kishan who plays the cricketer-looking-for-a-shortcut Sawan, the characters gives us enough depth to care about them. So what if you don’t know too much about their backstories beyond a scar or a newspaper clipping. We get just enough insight on a need-to-know basis.
The masterstroke is that the film does not stop to make moral judgments despite its exploration of morality. No moral instructions. Or answers. Just a gripping climax to bring an end to a riveting cinematic experience.
As derived or inspired it may be from Inarritu’s school of filmmaking, Shor In The City is as desi as it gets because it’s so full of hope and smiles, no matter what they have been through. It happens only in India. It’s a country you know and love, despite the chaos. Which is why you leave the hall with a satisfied smile on your face. And you realise why you love the noise.
This review originally appeared here.
I am Afia Megha Abhimanyu Omar: Stories no one told you before
Genre: Drama
Director: Onir
Cast: Nandita Das, Purab Kohli, Juhi Chawla, Manisha Koirala, Sanjay Suri, Rahul Bose, Arjun Mathur, Anurag Basu, Anurag Kashyap
Storyline: A divorcee meets with her sperm donor to have a baby, a Kashmiri Pandit returns home to Srinagar after 20 years, a filmmaker is haunted by child abuse and a gay man is humiliated
Bottomline: A daring indie film about identity, boundaries, sexuality and societal norms
Got an open mind? Make sure you take that with you when you enter the hall to watch Onir’s most honest and powerful film till date.
Because, when you hear a man still haunted by child abuse confess that he felt the love of his step-father strangely comforting that after a point he used to manipulate their incestual relationship for personal gain, you will need empathy to soak in the complexity of this intricately woven tales of people and identity.
Because, when you watch a family of a reformed mujahideen living in Srinagar refer to Delhi as India, you will need the compassion to dig into their tense, military-supervised everyday lives, understand and accept that ideologies have caused irreparable damage between friends.
Because, when you see a divorced woman waver around about wanting to know more about her sperm donor but not wanting him around after the delivery, you need to see it as a fleeting moment of confusion, a perfectly normal thing for an anxious mother.
Because, when you see a powerful man blackmail a struggler into going on a dinner date with him for purely sexual reasons, you need the perspective to understand that there are very few avenues left for gay men to openly flirt with other men.
And because, people are complex.
This anthology of short stories – I am Afia, I am Megha, I am Abhimanyu and I am Omar – is a mixed bag. There are loads of issues packed together into every short story apart from the broad common thread of identity and the role of the system in defining boundaries, so much that each story is complicated in its own unique way.
If the system prevents a mother from meeting a sperm donor in I am Afia (Nandita Das), the system has caused a permanent rift between best friends in I am Megha (Juhi Chawla), the system is in denial about child abuse in I am Abhimanyu (Sanjay Suri) and the system is the two-faced hypocritical oppressor in I am Omar (Arjun Mathur). The last story is more about Jai (Rahul Bose) than Omar though.
Each story, irrespective of the intensity of drama, is treated refreshingly low-key that the dramatic background score actually jars in a couple of places. Despite the extreme nature of the issues explored, nothing is done to shock and awe. With I am, Onir has really come of age as a filmmaker with an original voice. And it’s a voice that needs to be heard.
Dongala Muta: The Curious Case of Ram Gopal Varma
Genre: Action
Director: Ram Gopal Varma
Cast: Ravi Teja, Charmi, Lakshmi Manchu, Prakash Raj
Storyline: A couple check-in at a suspicious resort that seems to have been taken over by thieves and now, they can’t leave.
Bottomline: Shot in just five days, this is RGV’s silliest and most amateur film till date.
Like Benjamin Button, Ram Gopal Varma seems to be aging in reverse as a filmmaker. The proof lies in the fact that his most polished and refined films are the ones he made at the beginning of his career and the most amateur, the ones he has made over the last few years.
From the reinvention of the angry young man (the nice guy in college who graduated in inhumanities, as the posters of Shiva told us back then) to staging action-set-pieces (Kshana Kshanam and similar films) to effortlessly shifting gear to musicals and romance (with Rangeela and Naach) and then to gangsters (Satya, Company and Sarkar) and ghosts (Bhooth) to low-brow exploitation films (Phoonk, Agyaat and now, Dongala Muta), RGV sure has straddled many worlds but what’s alarming is the depletion of his filmmaking aesthetic over the years. You know how young filmmakers would go to any extent to just make that debut film?
Even if it means keeping the entire story to a single location, asking friends to help out, being unable to afford quality technicians, resorting to digital hand-held cameras and hurrying up the shoot because every single day of shoot means extra money.
Dongala Muta, shot in five days, with five Canon 5D cameras and no director of photography, begins looking unbelievably homemade with goons in bright costumes looking absolutely silly, thanks to the handycam feel that instantly disconnects you from the larger than life proceedings. That kidnapping sequence looks like it’s from a low budget ‘sweded’ film someone shot as an April Fool prank to make fun of his friends for their acting ambitions, after watching Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind.
Thanks to the silly dialogue, the exaggerated close-ups, the lack of a plot, the space constraints and the video-feel, the entire film looks like a spoof shot today for tomorrow’s cultural fest, especially if you really don’t know who the actors are. The lack of a cinematographer hurts the film further as unflattering voyeuristic close-ups of the leading ladies from the ground level assault your senses every few minutes and make you wonder if those jeans have something to do with the mystery or the resolution.
Reminiscent of RGV’s Daud in its inanely silly sensibility and of Kaun with its space limitations (if Kaun was entirely indoors and just three characters, this one works with the entire resort), this experiment does not prove anything apart from convincing producers that they cannot possibly make a movie with no money and in five days. If they do, it would look like this. Bad. Even if it has Ravi Teja in it and a Brahmanandam comedy track.
It does not inspire and convince film students either that they can make a movie with just a camera because they know that the reason people went to watch the film is because it’s an RGV film with a star-studded cast. Which student will ever be able to convince Ravi Teja to do a film?
But yes, it does prove one thing. If a filmmaker as talented as RGV comes up with a film like this, they surely can do better. If the idea of a film is to entertain, irrespective of merit, then the film works as one big inside joke. It’s so bad that it’s good.
Rumour has it that RGV is shooting his next film using a mobile phone. It may just be a short. Maybe it is good news that RGV is reverse-aging like Benjamin Button. For he may soon enroll in a film school. At least, he’ll learn the basics.
The burden of baggage
Two master filmmakers – both have an ear for music, an eye for detail, a fierce commitment to character and a love for literature – attempted to break the mould with films about serial killers in search of love. Or was it really sex? Both films were largely hailed as disappointing, thanks to the burden of baggage.
Auteurs bear the burden of their previous work and are compared against it, irrespective of genre. But, the fact that you expect only the best from a certain actor or director is, in itself, a compliment and acknowledgment of genius.
Vishal Bhardwaj disappointed me with Saat Khoon Maaf. To me, it seemed like the work of a distracted director who did not fully execute his vision of a macabre dark comedy that Tim Burton would have sunk his teeth into, given the bloody subject. I came out let down with all these questions? Why didn’t he just set this story in the 16th century so that we didn’t have to worry about divorce and a civil society? Why was this film devoid of a credible local ethos – the trademark of a Vishal Bhardwaj film that always sounded and smelt of the place it was set in? It doesn’t get more contrived than a whip-fight between a midget fighting a one-legged soldier unless VB just wanted to stage a politically incorrect duel between disabilities? The narrative here conveniently jumps places and spaces restlessly like its protagonist, who caked with bad make-up, never comes across as a real person thirsting for love? OR WAS IT ALL ABOUT SEX?
Usually, filmmakers make up for the lack of depth with broad strokes of humour, larger than life quirks or even inanely random twists just so that they don’t lose the audience halfway. Surprisingly, 7KM has nothing to keep you hooked throughout. Vishal Bhardwaj gives us his version of a teleserial, like Ashutosh Gowariker recently did with What’s Your Rashee, only that he does not find even seven dynamically different types to play with.
Like a man out of ideas to come up with seven different kinds of love (represented by gun, guitar, bust of a poet, err… out of ideas, forget the statues halfway), VB resorts to different kinds of sexual deviance or the absolute lack of mojo to tell the men apart – One is impotent, another is a cross-dresser, the third one is sadistic pleasure seeker, the fourth a promiscuous cheater, the Viagra popping fifth and the shroom-obsessed sixth – implying that she was only sexually incompatible with most of them. And how exactly does that explain the choice of the seventh husband – the resolution of her quest?
The other film of the week, Gautham Menon’s much-awaited Nadunisi Naaygal, was termed a disappointment too by many of his fans. But this time around, I find myself on the filmmaker’s side. He set out to make a genre film and stayed faithful to that, without really giving a rat’s ass about what his fans drunk on love would feel about a psychotic serial-kidnapper who was thirsting for love too?
Menon’s film, but for the last five minutes when he underestimates your intelligence (he gets a doctor to explain the entire story) and tries hard to sound politically correct (the doc kindly clarifies that not all mentally ill are violent killers and some might be victims of child abuse) and then goes on to give us spiel and stats about child abuse. Come on! Screw the activists, Gautham. A psycho-thriller is not the place to be politically correct. Maybe it was that burden of past work that would bring the masses in that forced him to act all responsible towards society and give us gyaan about schizophrenia and child abuse. Seriously, it makes the film a little dishonest and pretentious. If the idea was to make a film about child abuse and schizophrenia, it required a very different story and treatment from that of a serial killer on the prowl template.
Nadunisi Naaygal, ironically now, has been criticised of being the film it is not. Child abuse shouldn’t have been treated so callously and linked to serial killing, the critics of the film say. Maybe they are right. IF it were truly intended to be one about child abuse. In a recent interview with Times of India, Gautham insists it was what prompted him to make the film.
But it is not.
Gautham obviously just wanted to break the mould and prove he can make a film without music since music and love have been the hallmark of his films.
The film titled ‘Nadunisi Naaygal’ isn’t about child abuse as it is about man’s dog-like behaviour under territorial threat display, the basic instinct to chase and conquer and the dark side of desire.
It’s a standard psycho-serial-killer-thriller that packs an interesting twist (one I did not see coming), one that redeems the entire film and reduces his protagonist to a obsessed schizophrenic victim rather than a meticulous cold-blooded killer who has been hoodwinking the law. It’s all done with swift pace that leaves you no time to think or miss the music and to that extent, the film is commendable as an experiment that will pave the way for independent filmmakers. It’s refreshing to see an established filmmaker go back to the basics and embrace an indie approach usually born because you have no choice, no stars, no budget and just the passion to do something different.
Gautham always has stars who want to act for him, he has producers willing to give him the budget, music directors ranging from Harris Jeyaraj to A.R.Rahman associated with his projects. Yet, he chose to make a film like he had nothing else but passion.
Hats off to that. A director is reborn. He launches an actor in Veera. And they both make a decent debut.
So I’ll forget the last five minutes because of the burden of baggage he brings from his past life.
