Prisoners of the Mind

My Mumbai Mirror column yesterday:

The jail as a space holds an abiding interest for Badlapur's director Sriram Raghavan, serving as an instrument to analyse power relationships between the characters in his films.

Sriram Raghavan was a movie buff much before he became a director, and it's something he's always worn on his sleeve. In 2007's Johnny Gaddaar, his best-received film till date, Raghavan paid cinematic tribute to Vijay Anand's thriller Johnny Mera Naam, Stanley Kubrick's noir The Killing, and the celebrated murder sequence from the Amitabh Bachchan starrer Parwana - among many classics. His last outing, the rollicking (and unfairly panned) Agent Vinod, was a spy thriller: a James Bond homage served with an Indian flavour and a twinkle in the eye. In his latest, Badlapur, when the heist-and-murder-accused Laik arrives in jail for what is going to be a long stretch in captivity, the prisoners gather round a television on which Sholay is playing. "Bees baras jail mein rehne ke baad sab kucch bhool jaoge, Gabbar," announces Sanjeev's Kumar's Thakur to Amjad Khan's iconic dacoit. 

Unlike Gabbar, Nawazuddin Siddiqui's Laik completes most of his 15-year jail sentence. But as Raghavan makes clear, in Badlapur and in his gripping first feature, Ek Hasina Thi (2004), time in jail needn't wipe out memories of one's past. 

Badlapur comes a decade after Ek Hasina Thi, but the two films have much in common: The hardening of innocents, and the passage of time in expectation of revenge. In EHT, it was the trusting Sarika (Urmila Matondkar), jailed on a trumped-up charge of being the mistress of an underworld don, who went from wide-eyed child-woman to steely avenger. In Badlapur, it is Varun Dhawan's youthful family man Raghu who makes the transition to a man solely possessed by the idea of vengeance. Female revenge sagas seem to necessarily involve a physical transformation - think Khoon Bhari Maang for a classic Hindi movie example - and EHT was no exception. Matondkar's Sarika went from long crinkly locks, bell sleeves and ultra-feminine gathered skirts to a more practical crop and fitted trousers. Raghu, too, goes from wholesome and clean-shaven to stubbly and then bearded in his grief-stricken avatar. 

But Raghavan's journey from EHT to Badlapur involves much more than a simple change in the gender of his protagonist. He's playing with the same concerns - tragedy, revenge, innocence, evil - but the game feels quite different. For one, unlike in EHT, it isn't the clean-cut middle class young person (Dhawan) who is thrown into prison. It is the bad apple, the petty thief who's never done anything right, the guy who we've just seen shooting two innocents for no fault of their own. 

So, logically we ought to spend the film feeling glad: The bad guy's in prison, isn't he? But Raghavan pushes the knife in, and then turns it slowly -- Siddiqui's unforgettable portrayal of Laik makes him powerfully, unmistakeably human. He may lie in court and ogle girls on the street, but he is also a man who truly loves -- and is loved back by -- at least one woman. What is truly appealing is his zest for life. His longing for chicken korma and Thai massage remains undimmed by years in the wilderness of jail. 

Jail itself is clearly of interest to Raghavan. In EHT, it was a women's prison, a place of madness and misery, as places of female incarceration have been in films from Bimal Roy's Bandini to Bruno Dumont's affecting Camille (2013), about the real-life sculptress Camille Claudel. For the gentle Sarika, the cruel truth of her lover's betrayal only sinks in alongside the horror of what she must endure because of it. The rats in her prison cell and the terrible food are not the worst of it. It is the casual humiliations, the mindless fights, the power games and the bullying that come to make jail seem, in her mind and ours, a microcosm of the world outside. If you learn to survive this, Raghavan seems to suggest, you're equipped for anything the outside world can throw at you. 

And yet there are also those for whom jail is a refuge of sorts: The half-crazed Dolly, with whom Sarika shares her cell, declares quite seriously that prison food is delicious, while Pratima Kazmi's impressive Pramila, playing the widow of a mafia don, stays in prison voluntarily because it is a safe haven, away from both the police and gangs. 

The depiction of jail in Badlapur is quite different from that in EHT. There is the occasional bout of violence here, too. But unlike the wild, unsupervised cat-fights and the free-for-all sense of the women's prison he created in 2007, Raghavan paints Badlapur's jail as a Foucauldian space: beds in straight lines, a place of discipline and punishment. Laiq even inhabits it as a space of labour: he learns to make chairs, which will earn him money. And eventually it is the medicalisation of jail as a space, its recognition of his diseased body, which allows him to gain a few months of physical freedom. 

Meanwhile we have Raghu, who immerses himself in his grief, churning it deeper and deeper until it curdles into violence. He is physically free, but mentally incarcerated. If the relentless passage of the years, without being able to move on with one's life, is prison's real punishment, then Raghu has done as the film says: imprisoned himself in his own jail. He has made time stand still. 

Badlapur's eventual take on revenge seems to me more ambitious than film noir in the traditional sense. It reverses our ideas about what justice might mean, but also our idea of who is deserving of it.

Film Review: Ek Tha Romance

My review of Ek Tha Tiger, on Firstpost:

First, the good things: Ek Tha Tiger is the least annoying Salman Khan movie in ages. Coming after the ceaseless assaults on the senses that were Bodyguard and Ready, Salman’s performance in Ek Tha Tiger feels almost subtle. There are no bordering-on-obscene dance moves, no grotesque family members, and – believe it or not – only a single scene where he takes his shirt off.

Salman plays a RAW agent, which in the Ek Tha Tiger universe means that fans can have the pleasure of watching him perform stunts in various exciting locations, from Afghanistan to Dublin to Havana. Some of these action sequences are rather fun. The film opens, for instance, with a slow-mo Salman ridding the earth of a traitorous colleague, followed by a rather enjoyable chase through cobbled Afghan streets – director Kabir Khan, who made several documentaries in Afghanistan before making his feature debut with Kabul Express, knows how to exploit this locale.

After much catapulting from rooftops and tobogganing backwards down a flight of stone steps with a gun in each hand, Salman does a noton ki baarish with the late colleague’s ill-gotten gains, creating a nicely choreographed quasi-riot through which he can then escape.

We get the bare bones of Tiger’s home life, but it’s nicely done. The introductory scene placing him in his Delhi neighbourhood is most enjoyable: women of all ages failing to tear their eyes away from the mysterious bachelor who reappears after long absences to stand at his front door in his banian and take milk from the doodhwala. The scene with his boss Shenoy (Girish Karnad) is also a fine one, even if it hinges on some predictable farz-versus-mohabbat lines. Karnad at least has not gone the sleepwalking way of Naseeruddin Shah (Maximum) and manages to bring a bit of spark to his scenes.

The real surprise of this film is that Salman actually has a romance track that isn’t played as broad comedy or tacky trophy-wife acquisition. It may be slightly silly (witness bad jokes about Zee and Doordarshan), but it has moments of real tenderness that one would have thought Salman had forgotten how to deliver. If this return to romance has something to do with the fact that the object of his affection is played by real-life ex Katrina Kaif – well, more power to her.

Katrina is an asset to the film – as British Asian student Zoya, she not only achieves the gigantic feat of making Salman Khan appear ‘in love’, she manages to look absolutely glorious without looking synthetic. She is also about a hundred times better at action than the last desi heroine I watched try her hand at a spy thriller – Kareena Kapoor in Agent Vinod.

That brings me to the inevitable comparison between the two films, and here Ek Tha Tiger comes off rather badly. As a spy thriller, Agent Vinod was infinitely cleverer. Sriram Raghavan, too, used an implausible spy story to take us on an unapologetically colourful ride around the world – but every exotic set piece had a place in the plot. If Raghavan took us to St. Petersburg, there was an actual Russian villain and the heroine performing a dance number to distract him; if the Moroccan sequence began with Prem Chopra killing off his pet camel, there was a reason why we saw him do it; and conversely, if the director felt like giving us an old-style double mujra, we found ourselves at a glittering Karachi wedding.

In contrast, Ek Tha Tiger, though not badly shot, saunters through its locations like a contented tourist, rarely making any effort to create plotlines or characters specific to place. Even when it does – like casting Roshan Seth as a crabby old Indian scientist who lives and works in Dublin – the script gives him almost nothing to do. Ranveer Shorey, as Tiger’s colleague Gopi, is yet another instance of a marvelous actor given fairly little to chew on.

If Ek Tha Tiger is meant to be a spy thriller, it’s a disappointingly soft-boiled one. There is precisely one twist – one involving Katrina Kaif that you can see coming from a mile away – after which the film becomes an increasingly soppy, ever more unbelievable romantic saga, occasionally punctuated by fights in foreign locales.

Perhaps this should not surprise us, for this is an Aditya Chopra story, and romance must rule. And perhaps — as the box office failure of Agent Vinod and the record-breaking success of Ek Tha Tiger forces us to conclude – even when making spy thrillers, we just prefer soppy Indo-Pak romances to cleverly plotted scripts with a twinkle in their eye.

Film review: Agent Vinod

Agent Vinod is the sort of swashbuckling thriller that Hindi cinema used to do a lot of in the James-Bond-inspired 60s and 70s, but simply doesn’t do any more: a ridiculously flamboyant hero, a toothsome femme fatale (or three) and a whole galaxy of fiendish villains, all moving through a series of exotic locales in pursuit of some deliberately over-the-top Macguffin, like a “secret faarmula” that could save or sabotage the nation.

The original Agent Vinod (1977) featured Mahendra Sandhu as a government spy who stopped India’s defence secrets from falling into foreign hands. In this 2012 outing, Saif Ali Khan is a RAW agent who must save the Indian subcontinent – and the world – from a nasty nuclear bomb that comes in a suitcase.

But there any similarity ends. What Sriram Raghavan sets out to create is far more than a self-conscious, cheesy homage to the lost Indian espionage movie. As he said in one interview, he wanted to make a spy thriller that would “balance the real with the hyper-real, as well as make a film in the Indian idiom.” He’s succeeded, and how.

Right from the very first couple of frames, when Agent Vinod makes his first appearance in the dark dungeon of an Afghan camp, complete with stone-hewn walls and Osama bin Laden murals, we know we’re in a film that takes its sets and its action as seriously as the best of Hollywood. By the time we’re halfway through, the film has managed to traverse foreign locations as stunningly diverse as a Moscow cemetery in a snowstorm, the interiors of the Trans-Siberian Express, the luxurious mansions and pavement cafes of a sunny Tangiers and the squares and streets of Riga, Latvia.

Raghavan’s use of his locations is absolutely terrific, managing to consistently place the action in them while also evoking mood by the dollopful. I particularly loved the Charlie Chaplin film playing on an outdoor screen in Riga, and the smokey blue interiors of the love hotel in which he shoots the marvelously affecting ‘Raabta’ song. It’s an inspired sequence involving couples fighting, kissing and making up while a tender love song and a shootout unfold simultaneously around them.

The screenplay by Raghavan and co-writer Arijit Biswas moves at a fast clip, from one location to another, from one wonderfully satisfying set-piece to the next. Among the smaller (but no less important) pleasures of Agent Vinod is the fact that everyone on screen – the steward on the plane, the man in the square in Tangiers who is asked to take a photograph, the bespectacled man reading a newspaper at the back of the restaurant – is potentially a part of its gigantic jigsaw puzzle of a plot.


And scattered across this world is a superb array of devilish villains: an almost unrecognisable and splendid Ram Kapoor in a St. Petersburg world of cavernous nightclubs that look like they used to be churches; a more familiar Prem Chopra in white and gold robes in a Moroccan mansion; the wonderful Shahbaz Khan as a one-eyed renegade ISI general; the somewhat wasted Gulshan Grover at a glorious Karachi wedding; and the superb Adil Hussain (until now best known as Vidya Balan’s ‘husband’ from Ishqiya, but that is set to change) as the threateningly urbane ‘Colonel’.

And how can one forget to mention Dhritiman Chatterjee, a marvellous actor who proved his mettle in Bengali cinema years ago, but is only now being discovered by Hindi filmmakers. His role in Kahaani and now in Agent Vinod ought to make him indispensable to Bollywood, though one hopes, without being typecast.

What distinguishes Agent Vinod from a straight-up James Bond movie or a gritty copy of the dead-serious Bourne films is the twinkle in its eye. One instance is the use of the O meri jaan maine kaha number in a sequence where Kareena must dance to distract a loathsome fat man for a good cause (evoking Padma Khanna’s energetic faux-seduction of Prem Nath in Johnny Mera Naam). There’s the supremely enjoyable double mujra in Karachi of the kind we haven’t seen in years — where Kareena joins the adept Maryam Zakaria in the wonderful Dil mera muft ka. The greying Moroccan men singing Pyaar Pyaar na raha at a rather opportune moment are wonderful, as are the absolutely stellar Delhi ladies who insist on going to Kinari Bazar in an auto that they don’t realise has been commandeered for quite another purpose. Raghavan makes it abundantly clear that he takes humour and naach-gaana as seriously as anything else.

The man who made Ek Hasina Thi — a chilling Delhi-set thriller which also gave Saif his first bad guy role – now gives us a superbly shot Delhi action climax, involving not just autos and the Kinari Bazaar ladies, but also HoHo buses and rooms full of Godrej almirahs.

The only times the tone of the film wavers is when Kareena – playing a Pakistani woman called Iram Parveen Billal – has her confessional moments, mouthing such unnecessary lines as “Tumne meri jaan bachayi” with a teary-eyed deliberateness that annoyed me. But this is mere quibbling about a thoroughly enjoyable film which displays ambition and style in a measure that we rarely see in Bollywood, especially not in a genre film. Agent Vinod makes not just Players but Don 2 look ridiculous. More, please.

Published on Firstpost.com on 23 Mar 2012