Ekk Deewana Tha: Why didn’t we fall in love with Amy
Genre: Romance
Director: Gautham Vasudev Menon
Cast: Prateik, Amy Jackson, Manu Rishi
Storyline: An aspiring filmmaker’s on and off turbulent relationship with a confused girl is headed for… two endings. A popular one and a director’s cut.
Bottomline: This miscast remake is surprisingly more emotional and may work for those who haven’t seen the Tamil/Telugu versions
From the moment he decided to cast Amy Jackson as Jessie, one of the most complex women characters ever written in Tamil cinema, Gautham Vasudev Menon’s second outing was never going to be easy.
Menon reasoned that he wanted a fresh face for the role, someone who walks into their lives just like she did into the boy’s. Unfortunately, with those foreign looks, Amy Jackson has been made up so much… just to look simple and native. A role Trisha simply turned into a career best.
And the boy, Prateik, looks too much of a kid and the fact that he wears lipstick… ok, lip colour, doesn’t make it any easy for us to relate to his childish obsession, however, endearing and less aggressive than Simbu.
But there is a certain honesty about characters that Menon creates. Traits that make these characters one of a kind. Flawed and human. Which is why I prefer a badly made up film like Ekk Deewana Tha for giving us real characters with modern Indian middle class issues – age, religion, race, career, etc. than a good looking Hollywood-derived elite film like Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu with shallow characters (standing up for himself against his own family is the greatest personal triumph for the hero).
Though Ekk Deewana Tha discusses them, it was never about age, religion, race or career. It was always just about the girl. A girl as crazy as Jessie. “Of all the people in the world, why did I have to fall in love with Jessie,” as the opening lines of the film go. This is a “Why the hell did I fall in love with this girl” story, one that 500 Days of Summer milked for angst, one that’s effectively justified with the original Tamil ending. A film about this angst JUST. CANNOT. MUST NOT have a popular ending. It ruins the whole point of the film.
The Telugu crowd-pleaser was a commercial cop-out and the need to retain both endings for different theatres is an even greater one. It makes the makers seem as confused as the girl in the story.
But then, even the Tamil ending was a little contrived. Why would a girl who didn’t walk eight steps towards him when she sees him in the US, travel 8000 miles to come and watch his film, especially if she’s not into films and more importantly, if she’s not into him any more? How does a boy be friends with the girl he still loves? Is that the tragedy of his existence? That he has been friend-zoned? Interestingly, just last week, we Ek Main… ended on a similarly messy note. How does this resolve or give the story its closure?
What works for this film is its ability to capture Jessie’s mood-swings from ‘Yes, I want this relationship’ to ‘No, it’s too difficult’ and in many ways, this is our definitive modern middle class Indian girl of today. She can stand up for herself when she has to. She’s free-spirited when she wants to. She decides if she wants the relationship or not. She wears the pants. And she’s comfortable in her salwar suit.
This emotional tug of war between boy and girl is what makes the film slowly grow on you, the director choosing to play things out in a less contrived fashion. No more US trips. Just a chance encounter at a place that serves as the metaphor for what he was making – that symbol of love.
The fresh parts of Rahman’s score really work in these portions in the second half while the old ones used in the first half only underline the sensibility disconnect between the cinemas of the North and the South.
You are sucked into the turmoil of this turbulent romance by the end with solid support from Manu Rishi’s lines (He also chips in with a fine performance). Prateik finally seems to be comfortable and it is Chinmayi’s voice that bails out Amy Jackson in that heavy-duty Taj Mahal scene.
It’s a frustrating watch because of what it achieves despite this casting. We know she’s not who she’s supposed to be, this Amy Jackson.
Why did WE fall in love with Jessie?
Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu: A little less inspiration, please?
Genre: Coming of age/ Romantic Comedy
Director: Shakun Batra
Cast: Imran Khan, Kareena Kapoor, Boman Irani, Ratna Pathak Shah
Storyline: A 25-year-old architect marries a 27-year-old hairstylist in Vegas after a night of revelry and must spend 2 weeks with her & her family to find himself & annul the wedding
Bottomline: A new beginning for Hindi cinema except that every other scene is inspired from another film.
Before scripting, I suspect the writers (Shakun Batra and Ayesha DeVitre) put together an edit of their favourite movie moments and then came up with a story to string it all together. Like the glum workaholic Orlando Bloom-ish failed protagonist fired from his job at the beginning of Elizabethtown. Or strangers hooking up in Vegas, getting married after a night of drunken revelry (What Happens in Vegas). Or when Harry spat out gum out of the closed car window to Sally’s disgust (When Harry Met Sally, of course, except that here, Imran is Sally). Or meeting her politically incorrect parents (2 Days in Paris) or standing up to his own (Bommarillu/ Santosh Subramaniam)… Pretty much everything in the film unfolds with a sense of déjà vu.
But it’s to the director’s credit that he’s managed to make it seem fresh, thanks to framing (debutant cinematographer David MacDonald), music (Amit Trivedi) and performances of its two leads Imran Khan and Kareena Kapoor who play characters well within their comfort zones. It helps that they have both played similar roles before and have excelled in playing these types.
Massively derived from Hollywood, Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu too is plagued with the same problems you would find in their romantic comedies. While the guy is the typical lost yuppie, the girl is the Manic Pixie Dream Girl whose only purpose in the film is to help the lost hero find himself.
On one hand, it wants the lost hero to get rid of that corporate noose (signified by the tie), and find his peace and on the other, it finds itself trapping its hero in an intensely messy love story that remains largely unresolved (unless a stalemate counts for a resolution) simply because we don’t know enough about the girl other than the fact that she’s the Manic Pixie Dream Girl type, the angel who helps the lost soul find his way outside home.
What happens when you borrow from many films is that somewhere you lose track of what your film is about. And that’s the problem with this romantic comedy that never really comes of age. Nor does this coming of age film work as a romantic comedy.
Standing up to your parents to tell them what you want to do is just Chapter 1 of growing up. This is where Wake Up Sid scores and Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu fails because this is more about the Ek (specifically him) than the two. Also, it ends rather prematurely leaving you with more questions than answers.
Structurally, this would make a great pilot for a TV show about one searching for love in a friend and another searching for friendship in love and the tug of war between the two. Or maybe this was planned as a prequel to a series of many films in a franchise. But as a stand alone film, this is at best an ‘average’ film. As Riana shows Rahul the bright side of being average, that is not bad at all. In fact, it’s so nicely put together that you wish it went beyond just the first chapter despite any issues you may have with the bastardisation of plot, characters and situations heavily derived from Hollywood.
Director Shakun Batra shows promise and with a little less inspiration from his DVD collection, this may just turn into a fun franchise. Very rarely do we get a Hindi film that is frustratingly short of good, one that merits discussion and debate. One that has the spunk and cheek to stop in the middle of a story and bring up The Beginning. Go watch it just for that sprightly young confidence.
Players: The perfect robbery
Genre: Comedy
Director: Abbas-Mustan
Cast: Abhishek Bachchan, Sonam Kapoor, Bipasha Basu, Neil Nitin Mukesh, Bobby Deol, Sikander Kher, Omi Vaidya
Storyline: A heist goes wrong and the team leader must rob the betrayer.
Bottomline: A spoof is one way to remake The Italian Job.
Critics seem to underestimate the genius of Abbas-Mustan or even Farhan Akhtar who came out with a similar film a fortnight ago. Decades from now, they will be hailed as the founding fathers of the Bollywood New Wave and be spoken in the same breath as Orson Welles or Godard. *Ahem Ahem* *Chokes*
Don 2 and Players mark the birth and perfection of a form that has been in the making over the past decade with unpolished gems like Race, Prince or Mission Istaanbul getting most of these elements right.
Bollywood’s New Wave is not just modern or postmodern cinema, it is a meta-psychological gratification of the inner subconscious of today’s generation of viewers. A generation for whom the most important aspect of pop-culture is entertainment that is reactive and borne out of an existential need to let out steam by one driving desire: to make fun of people.
To put it simply, the viewer gets maximum entertainment when he is able to participate in manufacturing it. So if he can make snide remarks or tweet about how bad it was, he feels happy and entertained. Director duo Abbas-Mustan and Farhan Akhar have broken the wall that has separated the creators and the consumers of cinema by letting the audience in on the joke they are telling us.
Here’s how Abbas-Mustan pulled it off.
1. The Usual Suspects: Who are the guys the audience makes fun of the most? Star kids. Line them up. Abhishek Bachchan is made fun of for his rapstar image, for having a Bluetooth set stuck up his ear and showing up in his Dhoom costume no matter what film he is in. Make him do all of that. Sign up Sikander Kher for the acting powerhouse that he is, Sonam Kapoor for her fashion sense (you can always make her wear leopard print leggings), Bobby Deol… Just put him in, we will figure out the joke later. And one more actor who needs to be a mole but with a huge mole on his face so that the audience can identify him right from the start… Maybe that Johnny Gaddar boy. Gee, what’s he going to do in this movie?
2. The Originality Debate: Every time we make a movie, the audience and the critics make a big deal about plagiarism. Abeyaar, what it is to you? Ok, fine, we bought the rights, happy? But for the money we paid, we will remake both Italian Jobs in the same movie even if we just paid for one and set it everywhere but Italy. We will do unmentionable things to it right in front of your eyes and you can’t complain we stole a film. Players becomes that rare film with near identical first and second halves because you are watching the exact same film twice.
3. The Predictablity Predicament: The idea is to turn everything meta. The actors are part of the joke (they are not going to complain even if you call one of them Spider) and then make him stay in a Bat, no… Spider-Cave. To mess with the audience’s perception of the predictable, you make the characters so inconsistent – one minute they are in the good team and the other they are bad. Every time you make them change teams, you bring about a twist. Since this is a meta-movie, make the hero spell it out before unraveling it: “The final twist always belongs to the hero”.
4. Sex and Sexuality: A good meta-movie raises the right questions through the right players. Like a Russian military officer tells Bipasha when she wants to break into a song instead of getting straight to the action, “Why do Indians always sing when you feel horny?”
5. Movies as heist: The structure of storytelling of this post-postmodern form is simply this: We, the creators, will come up with the first line and you, the audience, will complete the joke. You are happy because you get to make a joke and we are happy because you paid for the ticket. You laugh your way by trending on Twitter and we laugh our way to the bank. A perfect robbery.
Okay, before they print this on their DVD to con more people, here’s the disclaimer: The movie entertains a lot but not the way it wants to. Go only if you want to make fun of it. Else, go for Gold or at least cash. But make sure you get one of the two.
(This review originally appeared here.)
